Storming the Freezer

Last night a cyclone crossed the coast. For the first part of the week, it looked like it was coming pretty much straight at Townsville. I have lived here for nearly 7 years, and while I'm not a local nor a meteorologist, I have seen several cyclones heading straight for Townsville that end up going elsewhere when push comes to shove. So we got prepared by cleaning up the back yard but didn't get too worked up. Good thing, too, because it ended up heading 200kms south of us, and we saw less than 40mm of rain at our house.

One of the things we figured out during Cyclone Yasi, which is rarely given out in official advice, is to eat anything precious from the freezer, so that if the power goes out for a few days you don't have to throw it away. So this week we had a few freezer based dinners. We still have rather a lot in there, but now there is plenty of space for a new batch of ice cream...

We tried some Fry's vegan burgers, which were good but not worth full price. They were delicious with some cherry tomatoes, cooked down with olive oil and garlic.

Here we have tofu (from the freezer) marinated with teriyaki and chilli sauce, spring rolls (from the freezer), BBQ pineapple, and fried rice with capsicum (from the freezer) and eggplant, green beans, cherry tomatoes, sweet potato shoots and baby kale (all from the garden).

When our mulberry tree gets ripe fruit on it, we pick them and stick them in a container in the freezer, till we have enough for something yummy. This container spent an overnight with some oats to become a yummy breakfast.

And for lunch I brought a chickpea naan roll to work, inspired by Joey's link to Dan Lepard's recipe - but with a slightly different filling.

None of this made a massive dent in the freezer stash - we still have about 15 naan rolls, a few boxes of Fry's, a bag of frozen capsicum, 6 blocks of tofu, and other random things. But if any more cyclones form in the coming months, at least we've made a start!

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.

Self-Catering

On our recent trip to Tasmania (post 1, 2 and 3) we stayed in an apartment we found on AirBnB with a full kitchen. Or - mostly full. There was no chopping board, nor was there a colander. But there was a gravy boat, so... It came with a big container of tea bags, instant coffee (blech) and sugar satchets, and we found a pepper grinder (but no salt). Otherwise, the cupboards were bare.

I thought I should do a blog post on self-catering holidays, since it is our favourite way to travel. I enjoy eating out quite a lot, and Andy likes it less, but we both don't love to do it for the entire holiday. Since we flew to Tasmania, we couldn't bring our own food, so we got a bit creative. The week's meals costed more than a week of eating at home would, but much less than eating out all the time. They were a bit carb heavy, but we did so much walking we needed all the fuel. I was going to go all detailed about what we bought and how we did it, but I kind of can't remember now, and it would get boring, so I'll just list the meals instead!

Our first meal was mushroom pasta - reduced-to-clear mushrooms sauteed in Nuttelex, mixed with a jar of sauce, and that's that. I didn't take a photo, because it was nothing special.

The next morning for breakfast we had porridge, made with little packets of sugar from the tea canister, and flavoured with peanut butter. It wasn't great! We bought raisins to make the porridge more tasty the rest of the trip.

At the Salamanca Markets on Saturday, we bought some dukkah, a lemon, and a big cauliflower. For dinner that night, we sauteed half the cauliflower in lemon juice and butter, and then mixed it with pasta and dukkah. It looked like beige mush but was really quite tasty.

On Sunday we went to the Farm Gate markets and got some more fresh produce - another small cauliflower, some baby bok choy, purple carrots, fresh garlic, broad beans and potatoes.

Purple carrots with a yellow middle.

Broad beans take time to prepare, but they're worth it.

Our veggies needed some pepping up after the day at the brewery.

So we had a Sunday Roast - potatoes, cauliflower, garlic and carrot, with some fresh broad beans, gently blanched, and reduced-to-clear vegan aioli.

For breakfast one morning, we had the remaining mushrooms with a block of tofu and some garlic, perfect with toast.

One night we had chilli beans on toast - a tin of kidney beans, a tin of tomatoes, come cauliflower and garlic mixed with one of those instant-sauce packets for "chilli con carne".

Another day we had sloppy peanut noodles with tofu, garlic, cauliflower and bok choy. For this we used a bottle of "singapore satay sauce" from the "ethnic foods" aisle, topped up with extra peanut butter, obviously. I ate so much and it was so good.

And one night we had reduced-to-clear kale sauteed up with some garlic, a jar of chickpeas, and the rest of the aioli as a sauce.

 With some yummy bread on the side.

 My main advice for self-catering holidays is to plan ahead a bit, but not too far - if you buy food for every meal at the start of the trip, you might waste a lot if you decide to eat out, or you have a late lunch and don't feel all that hungry for a big dinner. Choose things that can do multiple tasks, like peanut butter for satay, and for porridge, and for toast. Rely more on convenience foods, but pair them with gorgeous local produce whenever you can!

Do you like to self-cater on holidays? What are your tips?

The Vegg

Just before Christmas, we received a wonderful surprise in the mail: a free sample of the Vegg, courtesy of Rocky. The Vegg is a powdered egg yolk replacer. It has a very small ingredients list, which possibly puts it at risk of people reverse-engineering the recipe, but which is a good reminder that vegan replacements of omin favourites don't need to be scary franken-foods.

To use the Vegg, you must first blend up the packet with a litre of water. So note that you will need a blender, or at least a stick blender, to use this product. On opening the packet, I was hit with a strong fart smell, which I suppose is an indication of how authentically egg-like it is! You can blend up smaller amounts, but since it is supposed to keep in the fridge for a few weeks and in the freezer for even longer, I decided to just do it all in one go. We put a small-ish jar in the freezer, used a bit straightaway, and put the rest in the fridge for the next few weeks. We found shaking the jar was enough to re-mix the Vegg before we used it. Just be prepared for that farty smell every time you open the jar.

So what did I do with the Vegg? 

Instead of starting small, to get a taste of it and see how it is, I decided to go the whole hog and attempt to make a poached Vegg. I watched this veggietorial, and despite the very clear statement that an agar-style white would be the best, I went with cornflour. I blended some silken tofu with a little water, some cider vinegar, and salt and pepper, and then cooked it up with some cornflour to thicken it. I put this into 4 silicon cupcake moulds to set up.

The next morning I scooped out a bit of the middle, filled the gap with the Vegg, and then put the scooped-out white stuff back on top. 

I verrrry carefully transferred these to a pan of boiling water, in their silicon moulds, which I guess makes them more "coddled Vegg" than poached. Anywhoo, getting them out of the hot water ended badly only once, but of course (since I didn't use agar) they didn't really set up into anything, so when I flipped it out onto the toast it went a bit mushy.

It was sort of like eating really thick gravy on toast, but that is my fault, not the Vegg's! Andy wasn't too keen on my egg whites - who can blame him? - but he did say that he thought the Vegg part was really very eggy. 

Andy loves poached eggs, but he eats them just about never because I'm so very unhappy when he does, so I am keen to try again with some agar and maybe a better game plan. He doesn't think it is worth the effort, but where's his sense of adventure?! 

Andy sprinkled bac-o's on his poached vegg.

After that failed experiment, we decided the Vegg's strength was more in the dipping arena, so on Christmas morning I poured Vegg into two ramekins and heated them up in a hot water bath, which we had along with our mushrooms, spinach, and toast. Here, the Vegg really shone. Andy poured his over his brekky, while I preferred to daintily dip mine, but we both really enjoyed it.

The next morning Andy heated the Vegg straight up in a saucepan, then threw spinach into it, and finally pouring all of that on top of mushrooms on toast. Again, it was really good here, adding that special something-something to breakfast, and providing something for that last dry corner of toast to mop up at the end of the meal.

Last night I tried putting the Vegg into a chickpea flour quiche, in place of the black salt my normal recipe calls for. I didn't cook the quiche batter long enough, meaning it was sloppy instead of set, meaning I didn't take a photo because it looked a bit like throw-up. It was tasty, but I wouldn't use Vegg in this sort of recipe again. The Vegg quiche tasted almost identical to the usual black salt variety, which is a bit unsurprising given that the Vegg is made of black salt. Although I would like to try some things like french toast, and maybe custard, with the Vegg, I suspect that the majority of our Vegg-use will be poured over mushrooms, or perhaps mixed through tofu scramble. 

At $9 or $10 a packet, the Vegg seems a bit spendy at first, but now that I've seen how far it goes, I think it's actually good value. Andy, a lover of runny egg yolks, really enjoys it. It is the sort of product that would go really well with a microwave, but even without one we have found it an easy and yummy addition to our breakfasts. What I would like to see from the Vegg in the future is the option to buy larger quantities, in a jar or a tub, for example. Either way, I'm looking forward to trying more things with it! Thanks, Rocky!

Sheese Louise

A few months ago, I tried some Kingland Soy Cheese, which was just horrible. My post about it prompted Susan, in Brisbane, to very kindly offer to send me up some Sheese, which is shelf-stable so post-able. I was getting ready to go overseas, so I asked for a rain check, and eventually Susan and I engaged in some package swappering shortly before Christmas.

The package I received from Susan had way more than just Sheese in it. It also had some vegan gummy sour snakes, some Primal Strips soy jerky, and a Go Max Go Joker bar. All things were massively appreciated - gummy candies have always been my favourite, and were one thing I was very sad to give up upon adopting vegetarianism. Candy bars - hello, who doesn't want a vegan snickers? But I love a good savoury snack, and vegan jerky made Andy and I think seriously about how we can make some in our dehydrator.

But the Sheese was really the star, and for a few weeks was the gift that kept giving. I was pretty happy to see that it is grate-able.

For our first try of it, we put it on pizza, along with some BBQ sauce, grilled onions, and vegan bacon bits (which we souvenired from the US). The Sheese didn't melt, as such, but since it was grated and we didn't layer it on too thick, it didn't matter much. It did add a really nice layer of flavour that our normal cheeseless pizzas don't have.

The smoked cheddar flavour is exceedingly good on crackers.

And it made a tasty, if not melty-gooey, toasted cheese sandwich.

The plain cheddar found homes atop nachos, more pizzas, mixed into our Christmas breakfast hash browns, and in a wrap with some BBQ "Pulled" Jack fruit.

Susan - thanks so much for all of this! Vegan bloggers really are the best :-)

Eating the Big Apple

New York City is kind of it when it comes to vegan eating. Sure, there are lots of great cities for vegan food, but from all the blogs and magazines and other things I read and here, NYC has a vegan version of ANYTHING you could possibly want. For reference, we used Super Vegan's restaurant finder.

We could have eaten in restaurants/street carts/takeaway shops for breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks in between and still not even come close to sampling the variety that New York offers, but we had just come from Scotland and Ireland, where we had no kitchen. So we (mainly Andy) were getting a bit restauranted out. So we did eat out, but we also took advantage of the other thing NYC offers that we are not used to -- good, vegan-friendly grocery stores.  So, how did we do?

This is the fat cat who lived in the apartment we rented. 

Her name is She-Ra and she makes Nacho look puny.

We went to Whole Foods on our very first day in NY, because we saw it and I couldn't resist. And I'm glad I didn't! It is pretty incredible - so many things, like regular grocery stores, but mainly organic, and/or local, and/or hippy-ish versions of regular groceries.  So fun! Like this Road's End Mac & Chreese which we ate with mushrooms on our first evening in NYC, and which I posted about earlier.

In Central Park, we sought out the Good to Go Organics food truck for vegan hot dogs. They serve Smart Dogs brand, with a variety of toppings. We ordered the Two Dog Deal, one with saurkraut & mustard, and one with vegan chilli, for $14 including chips & a drink.  These were okay, but not the best ever.

In the East Village area we went to Viva Herbal Pizzeria. There were so many choices to make - crust, toppings, cheese, size... we opted for the October Special, because there was a 15% (I think?) discount. The Vegan Picante, plus Daiya cheese. Large, please. (Because an Australian large pizza is usually enough to feed Andy, just.) With a whole wheat crust. We should have picked up on the fact that most people ordered one slice only, sometimes two. Not a whole pizza, not even for two people.  Because, here's the thing: a large pizza is massive! And the toppings weren't light - soy meatballs, capsicum, and red onion, all mixed up together into tomato sauce, and topped with so much cheese. Our first experience with Daiya, and our first soy cheese in a long time, this was a bit rich, and a lot of food. But that didn't stop us (mainly Andy) eating the whole pizza! Which was a little disappointing, because it meant no room for the vegan desserts they had on offer, like whoopie pies, tiramisu, and cannoli.  What was I thinking!

In Greenwich Village we queued up at Murray's Bagels - I got multigrain with tofu cream cheese, and Andy, for some reason, ordered one with jam. I had enough cream cheese on my bagel to share, lucky for him.

In the East Village (again) we caught up with a friend from high school at Curly's Vegetarian Lunch.  I forgot to snap photos, but this was what I think of as classic greasy spoon food. There were loads of choices, but I went for a nostalgic cheese burger with curly fries, and a root beer float. Andy had, I think, the Avocado & Jack burger. Both came with Daiya, at our request. Again, too much food. This time I couldn't finish mine, probably because I basically had dessert before and during dinner, in the form of my root beer float. This meal is where it started to sink in that American portion sizes are SO MUCH bigger than my belly has gotten used to in the past 6 years of living in Australia.

In the Upper West Side, we had some delicious Ethiopian food at Awash Restaurant. We went for combo 3, the veggie platter, which was everything veggie they have, served with injera. The photo is shockingly bad, but the food was shockingly good. Ethiopian food is seriously the best, especially when it's served with proper injera.

$24 for both of us, plus extra for some St George, the beer I drank way too much of when I visited Ethiopia in 2005.

Saturday morning saw us head back downtown, really near Washington Square Park, where we met up with VKO for brunch at Sacred Chow. Again, so many choices! I opted for Banana French Toast, described as "A thick slice of our banana pound cake grilled up warm and crisp, with blueberry sauce." Really, though, this was basically a piece of cake. For lunch. It was awesome.

I couldn't finish it all, but Andy came to my aid. Even after finishing all of his Peppersteak Hero (which VKO had as well): "Grilled seitan strips, peppers, onions, w/bean cheese sauce, served on toasted whole wheat baguette. Served w/a side of home fries". As good as the food was, though, it wasn't the best part of the morning - the best part was meeting VKO, whose blog I've read for years and who is such a lovely person.

In the Upper West Side, we went to Trader Joe's, which was kind of the yin to Whole Foods' yang. It was crowded, and small, and it felt like they didn't have much of anything besides junk food and organic dead animals. We were overwhelmed, and quickly grabbed some Tofurkey Italian sausages for dinner, along with some mushrooms and pitta bread. The sausages were a lot like homemade seitan sausages, even with the chewy-stringy seitan texture to them. But for some reason (possibly all the food we'd already eaten), I could only eat half my dinner before I started to feel a bit bleh.

So. That was how we ate in NYC. I'm seriously disappointed in our lack of dessert, ice cream, and so on. But, we did pretty well, I think.  Plus, it gives us plenty of excuses to go back and eat more. Though next time, we will have to stay closer to the downtown area, since all of the awesome-est food was there.

Sweet Chilli Tofu

A few weeks ago, Andy and I were perusing the shelves at our local grocery store when we happened upon an intense mark-down. Singapore sweet chili-marinated tofu steaks. Normally more expensive than we are willing to spend. Reduced to 20 flipping cents.

We couldn't resist, as we can't whenever we see something reduced to 20 cents, and we bought the whole lot.

Now we have a freezer full of tofu which is pretty tasty, and makes an easy addition to a meal.  It just needs to be heated up quickly in a frying pan, and it goes wonderfully with veggies.

It's a good add-in to a stir fry.

 And if you cook it on hot enough heat, it sort of caramelizes, making the perfect accompaniment to pan-fried potatoes and mushrooms.

Now, we just have 15 or so more to get through!

Soy Cheese

Andy was recently away for two weeks, diving for money in cold water.  Since I was home alone, I decided to splurge a little and impulsively bought some Kingland Soy Cheese.  We've bought this before and didn't hate it, but it isn't often for sale in our local shop, and in any case we're fairly unwilling to spend money on luxuries like soy cheese.  But, for whatever reason, I thought this would be a good idea.

I thought about the best way to make use of it, and settled on eggplant parma.  This was lazy-style -- I cooked the eggplant slices in a bit of oil in the frying pan until they were nice and soft.  Then I topped with a bit of jar sauce and a slice of soy cheese, and put it under the griller. 

As I was eating it, I congratulated myself on a super easypants dinner that was also yummy.  Except, every now and then I got a flash that wasn't so yummy.  So I tried a little nibble of the soy cheese on its own and ... it kind of tasted like puke.  Not good.

Later in the week, I tried making nachos, and came to the same conclusion.  With avocado, the cheese was tolerable.  But as a dominant flavour, it was totally vom-y.  After Andy came home, we tried it on pizza - I couldn't even finish it without picking off the cheese. 

Kingland Soy Cheese Fail.

alle Melanzane

My carbon footprint is not doing so well these days.  Of course we still ride our bikes to uni most days (I'm up to more than 1500km for the year so far!), and barely drive anywhere, and don't buy much stuff.  But, since the start of July, I have flown to Perth and Melbourne, and been a passenger on a drive to Cairns and back.  Andy has been a passenger in a road trip down to Keppel Island, about 10-12 hours of highway driving.  And we're in the final planning stages for a Round The World trip which will put all kinds of nasty emissions out there on our behalf.  So I'm feeling a little guilty.

So when a friend (hi James!) offered me some garden-fresh produce, of course I said yes.  In terms of 'food miles', I'm going to go ahead and assume these eggplants (and some yummy cucumbers) had a grand total of zero -- because they were transported by bicycle.

And they were super yummy, cooked down for half an hour or so, then mixed with tomatoes and herbs, following the recipe for Spaghetti alle Melanzane from Urban Vegan.  Except, instead of spaghetti, I served with gnocchi.

Because the other thing that suffers with all of this going places is spare time, so quick easy meals like this one are a necessity!