Vegan Carbonara

As I promised at the very end of last year, I have made another batch of Carbonara so I can post the recipe here.

Carbonara is one of those dishes that a lot of people seem to love, but I had never even heard of before I went vegan. So I have no reference point to compare it to. But somewhere along the way I picked up the key ingredients - egg yolks, bacon, cream and pasta. Not super vegan friendly? Think again.

We had some Vegg in the freezer (we blend up the whole packet and freeze in smaller jars), and some imitation bacon bits (fully vegan) that my mum sent over as a birthday present. So the food miles for this are not small! It's not an every week kind of meal, but it is easy, and fast, filling, and really delicious. And unlike chicken's eggs, the Vegg won't "scramble" if you leave it on the heat for too long, so there is less multi-tasking with the vegan version of Carbonara.

Vegan Carbonara

1 Tbsp. olive or coconut oil
3 cloves of garlic, minced
300 grams of mushrooms, thickly sliced
1 Tbsp. vegan bacon bits
1/2 c. prepared Vegg
100 mL coconut cream, soy milk or other non-dairy substitute
400 grams of pasta
parsley, salt and pepper, nutritional yeast, and more bacon bits for sprinkling

Heat the oil in a frying pan over pretty high (not quite the highest) heat. Saute the mushrooms until they are soft and the liquid has evaporated from them. The high heat helps evaporation to happen faster, so your mushrooms brown instead of boiling in their weird mushroom water. Stir in the garlic and bacon bits and mix it all around for a minute. Add Vegg and soy milk and turn the heat to low and leave it, stirring every now and then, while your pasta cooks. Boil water (boiling in the kettle is more efficient than the stove, I hear), cook spaghetti or other pasta until it is al dente, or mushy if that's your thing. Drain, dump it into the pan with the sauce, and stir it all up. If it's a bit claggy, throw in some more soy milk. It should be creamy and saucy and good. Season with salt and pepper to taste, and serve with parsley, nutritional yeast, and moar bacon bits.

It's worthing getting some Vegg for this - which reminds me, I need to order some more. I honestly will probably never attempt a vegan poached egg again, but Vegg makes a rocking carbonara.

Baby Cooking

Not cooking babies - cooking for someone with a baby.

My gorgeous friend S gave birth to a beautiful boy 5 weeks ago. But she is moving overseas with her partner and baby in April - so they have been getting rid of stuff, rather than accumulating it. Rather than giving them baby-related gifts, I read on Offbeat Families that one of the best things you can do is bring food, so the new parents don't have to worry about cooking.

After googling what foods to avoid while breastfeeding, thinking about transportability, and taking into account reheating options (no microwave, too hot for oven), I came up with these two good meals and a dessert - all of which I made double of, so we could eat, too.

A quinoa pilaf type thingie, with green peas, grated carrot, green beans and toasted almonds is full of protein, fibre and flavour. Some quickly sauteed mushrooms were served on the side, because I remembered (luckily) my friend's partner doesn't like them. And a braised lentil thingie added Andy's most important virtue of a meal: sauciness. I had planned to do this with puy lentils, but I made this when the flooding was on south of us, and apparently there was a run on green lentils at the supermarket. So I used brown. They were good and gravy-ey.

I put this into an aluminium foil tray, which they could heat in the oven if they wanted to, but this food was good cold. Andy and I ate it at room temperature the night we made it - with our mushrooms mixed in, and with broccoli added (apparently broccoli-flavoured breast milk can give babies wind. The things I'm learning!).

For dessert, I made sweet rice with mango. I only realised after soaking my rice that it was sushi rice, rather than sticky rice, but I forged ahead. The result was less than excellent, but better than good. For my friend, I packed the rice into a container, the coconut sauce in a jar, and the mangoes whole, so they could construct the dessert when they wanted it.

The other meal was more casseroley. I called it "eggplant thing with polenta" ... it had eggplant (obvi), grated sweet potato, white beans, some green olives, tomato, and spices like cumin and coriander. For my friends, I put this into a loaf tin and topped with polenta, casserole style. Again, they could reheat in the oven or eat cold. (We also gave them a chocolate cake to go with it, because - chocolate cake).

For our own dinner, we put the polenta into bowls and topped with the eggplant.

This was yummy - a nice change from our usual food, a good way to use up some of the million eggplants coming from the garden, and nicely portable.

I will probably do this a few more times before my friends move overseas, so give me ideas - what are your favourite meals to cook and give?

Mushrooms on Toast

I know mushrooms (much like olives) tend to polarise people. Some people hate them, but Andy and I love them. We don't buy them very often, because they are usually about $10 a kilo - which isn't very much when you consider how light they are, but is a mental hurdle we struggle to jump. But when we do see them for a little bit cheaper, we tend to get a lot of them. And, in the interests of using them when they're nice, rather than letting them go slimy in the fridge, we tend to use them as feature ingredients.

One of our favourite uses for mushrooms is breakfast-style, on toast (sometimes for dinner, or lunch, but breakfast-style, anyways). Breakfast mushrooms are quick to make, filling and tasty, and take very little in the way of actual cooking skills. Basically, perfect for a weekend morning. They are also easy to vary. Our favourite way to have them is in the form of Creamy Breakfast Mushrooms, which I'll post a recipe for below, but sometimes we saute them with olive oil and balsamic, or with lime and soy, or just with butter (nuttelex, obvi) and salt & pepper.

So here, step by step, is how I put together a cafe-style breakfast in less than 15 minutes.

Creamy Breakfast Mushrooms

Put a skillet on medium-high heat. Take 4 slices of bread out of the freezer (unless you don't freeze your bread, of course!) to thaw. Peel and thinly slice a clove or two of garlic. Put the garlic, along with 2 tablespoons of olive oil and/or butter in the frying pan.

Grab your mushrooms, wipe any obvious dirt off with a tea towel (don't wash mushrooms - they absorb the water, or something, and it makes them go a bit yuck), and slice them thickly. If you can find them on special, or don't mind paying for them, pre-sliced mushrooms make this SO QUICK.

Put them in the pan with the garlic, and stir them around. The hotter you cook them, the better, because they brown quickly without losing all their liquid and kind of... stewing.

While the mushrooms cook, put 3 tablespoons of corn flour in a jug. Mix in the juice from half a lime, 1 tablespoon of soy sauce, and about 1/3 of a cup of coconut cream. Whisk this together until it's smooth. While you're doing this, stir the mushies every now and then.

If you have some, dash outside really quickly and grab some parsley, and give it a quick chop.

When the mushrooms just start to soften, put your bread in the toaster.

Re-mix up your corn flour mixture and then immediately pour it into the pan with the mushies, and give it a good stir. It should thicken pretty much straightaway. Let it cook for about a minute, and then turn off the heat. Stir in the parsley, and taste to see if it needs salt or pepper.

When the toast is done, you can put on some butter if you're feeling indulgent, or just put it on the plate and scoop some mushrooms on top.

Enjoy!