Meal Planning: Week 2

Look at me: back at work for less than a month and I've already fallen off the regular-blogging wagon. Obviously I'm no good at multi-tasking, so you can see why I need at least a semi-structured meal plan!

Our second week of meal-planning began with the best of intentions. We would go to the market, get whatever produce looked good and was cheap, and then plan a week's worth of meals. But on Sunday morning we woke to find Tika in a bit of discomfort and sporting a huge belly. The night before, I left the dog food bag open, and she helped herself. So we skipped the market, instead staying home to keep an eye on her (also, it was hot).

So I thought about what we had on hand, and started flicking through some cookbooks, but I only got through two before I had so many ideas. Week 2's meal plan became our Week of Urban Vegan. Her cookbooks tend to be my faves anyways, so I wasn't surprised to find a big list of possibilities. Here is the plan that I wrote, based on some input (and some resistance) from Andy:

• Esther's Baked Falafel (Celebrate Vegan p.107), or Chickpea Chilli Burgers (Urban Vegan, p.48) - early in the week, so Andy could have leftovers on his lunch-time sandwiches
• Black Bean and Bulgur Tacos (UV, p.83) - on Tuesday or Wednesday, so the lettuce was still fresh.
• Pumpkin risotto with sage and sundried tomatoes (UV, p.152)
• Spicy Seitan 'Wings' (Celebrate, p.165)
• Spaghetti alle Melanzane (UV, p.91)
• Pumpkin-Daal Soup (UV, p.54)

There were others I could have chosen, but there are only so many days in a week! At this point, Andy got a little nervous that my meal-planning would become inflexible, so we agreed that this was just a guide - a list of recipes that we could use if we didn't know what to make, but if we felt inspired to do something else that was cool too.

Here is how it turned out.

On Sunday, while soaking beans for the week, I decided to turn some overripe bananas into muffins. I used the recipe for Blueberry-Banana Bread (UV, p.24) as a guide, but changed it up heaps, so I will post the new recipe another time. These were high in protein, and super yummy, the perfect morning tea snack for a week without fruit (on account of not going to the markets).

Sunday night's dinner was a mash-up of the two chickpea patty recipes. I couldn't decide, and then I did, but then I changed my mind. So the flavouring is falafel, but I added oats as per the burger recipe to bulk the patties up. They were a little dry, so not very well suited to BBQing, but they were delicious with BBQ potatoes, beetroot and corn.

Monday night we had eggplant pasta, basically following the recipe for "alle Melanzane" but adding a jar of pesto (because our freezer is so full of it!), and using penne pasta.

Up until now, our meals for Week 2 looked strikingly similar to Week 1, with a few minor variations. Andy would have preferred to keep this up, but Tuesday is where I took a more serious detour. Instead of our normal tomatoey Mexican meals, I made Dynise's Black Bean and Bulgur filling, with the addition of some corn, which we ate burrito-style. I thought they were delicious, and a great change. Andy likes what he likes, and thought these were just okay.

On Wednesday, we got a break from the sticky, hot weather - instead, it was 25 degrees and we got 200mm of rain. I felt like something warm and snuggly, so flicked through the two cookbooks and decided to make an afternoon snack of Milk Pudding (Halvaye Shir), a Persian sweet (Celebrate, p.10). Except I didn't follow the recipe well - I used different spices, vanilla instead of rosewater, and walnuts instead of pistachios. It was very yummy, anyways.

Then for dinner, we went off-plan in favour of something hearty and warm - Mesir Wat with Chappatis.

Thursday was still a little on the cool side, so rather than BBQ-ising Dynise's seitan wing recipe, we followed the original recipe and baked them in the oven. I think of them as nuggets, more so than wings, but whatever you call them they are fantastic (with oven-baked potatoes).

On Friday, we fell into old habits (not necessarily bad habits...) and threw some gnocchi and jarred tomato sauce together and called it dinner. It did the job, got us through the week, and made a dent in the big pile of gnocchi taking up space in our freezer. So Week 2 was a little similar to Week 1, a little creative, and still flexible. A success, even if not a resounding one!

Meal Planning: Week 1

Despite saying in my page on spending less money that meal planning isn't really for us, I made it a resolution to be a bit more organised about dinner. But I didn't want to adopt the kind of meal plan that requires choosing recipes, buying specific ingredients, and following a plan very strictly. We need flexibility, and also Andy gets a little grouchy about buying things full price when there are on-special alternatives, so specific ingredients are rarely purchased in our place.

Our first week of meal planning didn't come about as much through planning as through indecision. Scene: Sunday morning, after breakfast, on the couch. Me: Do you want to go to the market? Andy: We probably don't need to. Me: But the only veggies we have are corn and lettuce... Andy: Well, let's have... dhal, nacho salad, burgers, gnocchi with pesto, and pumpkin risotto. Me: Wait, let me write this down.

So we had a vague plan. Then I realised I wanted fruit so we went to the market anyways, and came home with some more things: potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes and beetroots (plus bananas, a bucket of mangoes and three pineapples). Add to that our eggplant bushes heavily laden with quickly-growing fruits. So I amended our meal plan.

Monday and Tuesday I was home still, not yet finished with my holidays. So I did a lot of prep stuff for the coming week - cooking beans, making chappati breads, and roasting eggplant. And then we enacted our meal plan: no set schedule, just a pretty good idea of what we could make given the ingredients on hand, and no real thinking required (for those nights after work where thinking is very undesirable). Here's how it shaped up.

Monday: Nacho salad. Chips and lettuce on the bottom, a mix of kidney beans, sweet potato, tomato, corn and rice in the middle, and a fresh mango-pineapple-cucumber salsa on top.

Tuesday: red lentil dhal with wholemeal chappatis. I didn't snap a photo of this, because it was just dhal.

Wednesday: kidney bean burgers, with grilled pineapple (under the patty), potatoes, and corn on the cob.

Thursday: gnocchi with eggplant balls and a pesto-y, tomato-y sauce.

Friday: Andy went off script, and crafted a semi-delicious curry of eggplant, tofu and jackfruit.

Since this seemed to work reasonably well for us last week, I tried again on Sunday, this time going a little more adventurous and looking for recipes that we could use. I'll give week 2 a post of its own when we've finished it, but so far meal planning seems to be going well. As long as it doesn't require buying special things, and we have the flexibility to cook what we feel like on a given night, it seems to work for us.I guess I should update the part about not meal planning soon...

The three days of Christmas

This year, Andy and I continued some of our earlier Townsville Christmas traditions, which are beginning to cement themselves into place as proper traditions. Basically, we spread things out across Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

We have Christmas dinner on Christmas eve. We had, of course, a stuffed seitan roast with yuba skin. I had planned to cook this on the BBQ, so as to avoid heating up the house, but then Christmas eve was rainy and by dinner time it was a chilly 25 degrees, so into the oven it went! 

Christmas dinner, waiting to go in the oven.

The yuba didn't crisp up as much as usual, for some reason, but it was still good.

Along with the seitan roast, we had okra-corn bread stuffing (based on Susan V's recipe), mushrooms baked with garlic-parsley-butter, some (bought) cranberry jelly, and spinach. We topped the seitan with mango chutney, made that morning (which will get its own post soon). 

Tika got a veggie pig's ear, and Nacho had some pumpkin, one of her favourite treats. 

For dessert we had mango-fruit mince ice cream, made with the tropical fruit mince I also used for tarts.

Served up with little pastry bits, the baked scraps from when I made my tarts.

Christmas morning, Andy woke with the beginnings of a sinus infection or summer flu or something, so I cooked him up a nice breakfast and a hot lemon. For breakfast we had creamy mushrooms, spinach, and Vegg (another thing which will get its own post soon) with toast and tea. 

After brekky, we took Tika to the beach, where she chased plenty of sticks, ran around with a few other dogs, and ate too much salt water, making herself a bit sick as a result. 

Then it was back home for a cup of tea (for Andy), a mango-ginger-rum smoothie (for me), and some chocolate and white chocolate spiders, as we opened the gift(s) Andy's parents sent us. 

It was in pieces when we opened it, but a phone call cleared things up - it's a seedling tray, and a little thing for making seedling pots out of old newspaper.

For lunch, Andy cooked up some mushroom burgers with spinach and bacon bits and cranberry jelly.

Which we ate with salt and vinegar potato chips, another of our solidifying christmas traditions.

We spent the rest of the day doing not much - reading books, watching a movie, pulling some weeds in the garden, and drinking rosella cordial.

Our first harvest of rosellas was a small batch, so I only made a little cordial.

Then we ate leftovers for dinner, adding some more mushrooms and spinach to our leftovers, because Andy got a lot of both on Christmas Eve, reduced to clear!

Now all that's left is one piece of seitan, and some sweets. 

Our Boxing Day was pretty similar. For breakfast, we had mushrooms on toast, with spinach and Vegg.

And we spent the rest of the day eating fruit, chocolate spiders, and panadol (for poor sickly Andy). It wasn't the christmassiest christmas - in fact, it didn't really feel terribly christmassy at all. But it suits us - a christmas full of mushrooms, spinach and mangoes is a success, as far as we're concerned. 

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrated it!

Work Trip

Although travelling for work is not always the most fun ever, there are worse things. Especially when work trips bring opportunities to eat exciting vegan food with exciting vegan (and non-vegan) people. I spent the past week away from Townsville doing a few different things.

On Sunday I arrived in frigid Melbourne, ahead of two days of executive committee meeting for a professional association. Not that fun. But, made bearable by the really lovely dinner I had with Mel, from Veganise This! Mel not only responded to my "please, will someone have dinner with me?" request, she also picked me up from the airport and then dropped me off at my hotel after dinner. Did I mention how lovely she is?! When Mel suggested we visit the Gasometer pub in Collingwood, I did a quick blog search and found both she and Cindy & Michael had posted about the wondrous vegan pastrami burger, so I couldn't say no. And when we arrived at the pub, I looked at the options but just couldn't get past the idea of that pastrami burger. And it was everything it promised. The vegan goat cheese was really incredible, the cole slaw was a good foil to the rich seitan and cheesy toppings, and the chips were just perfect. The whole thing tasted like caraway and dill, which somehow matched the dark and somewhat gloomy (in a good way!) interior. The apple hot toddy, for just $5, was a good way to beat the chill that I always feel when it's below 25 degrees! The pub was pretty dark so this is the best photo I managed.

Mel blogged about dinner here, and you can see the photo of her meal there. You can also see, at the bottom of the post, the really delicious lemon slice she gifted me. It was such a good snack at the end of two long days of meetings! Thanks, Mel!

Tuesday afternoon I flew from Melbourne on to Sydney for a workshop I had co-organised. I had a free half-day in Sydney, so on Wednesday morning I wandered to Glebe and paid a visit to the Cruelty Free Shop. I got a few things to eat immediately, but most of my purchases made it home to share with Andy.

TVP beef slices, vegan gummy bears, sweet & sara coconut marshmallows, a pie, and a choc-mint truffle ball which I ate straight away!

For lunch, I took advantage of the oven in my apartment and cooked up the Funky Pie.

Funky Chunky flavour, with big chunks of something beef-ish and mashed potatoes, inside of the flakiest puff pastry ever.

Dinner that night was at Mother Chu's, with Andy's brother. I didn't take any photos, mainly because I was too busy stuffing my face with really delicious food. The catering at the workshop was pretty ordinary, vegan-wise, and for dinner on Thursday we all went to Thai Pothong in Glebe where the (slightly modified to suit my vegan-ness) vegetarian banquet was way too much food, all of it delicious. Again, no photos, because I was at a work function, across the table from a sociology rock star (making googly eyes at him, probably).

Since I don't have any more food photos, I will finish off with this bag I bought at Salvo's in Glebe, to carry my (borrowed from work) laptop in style.

Comfort Food

One day a little while ago, Andy had to spend a full day at uni - he had an experiment that took 10 hours to run, and needed things to be done every hour. Knowing he would be exhausted, I thought a slightly junky dinner would be a good way to welcome him home.

I smashed up some corn flakes in the mortal&pestle, mixed them with coconut, polenta, and spices. I coated some seitan strips in flour, then dipped them in soy milk, then coated them in the crumbs.

To go along side the seitan fingers, I whipped up some baked sweet potato fries, and some roasted brussels sprouts.

Perfect end to a long day.

Hempy Campers

Life has been a bit hectic lately, for various reasons, and on top of that our home internet has been a bit wonky - blogs are slow to load, and the comment pages almost always "Cannot Be Displayed", so my presence in the blog-o-sphere has been limited. But, I will hopefully make up for it with a giveaway post!

Hemp Foods Australia recently sent me a sample of their hulled hemp seeds, and have offered to give another pack to one of you, readers (if you live in Australia, that is. If you live elsewhere, stick around for a recipe).

Prior to this, we had only tried hemp as food once (though we both have a few items of hemp clothing) - as hemp milk, purchased in Toronto and consumed for breakfast in Upstate NY (which also reminds me that I still haven't posted about the last few weeks of our round the world trip...). For the last few weeks, though, we have tried hemp in various other forms.

For breakfast, I have added a spoonful of hemp seeds to smoothies, or to a bowl of granola.

I mixed some in to soy burgers, which we served with fried potatoes and sauteed pumpkin.

Hemp seeds are meant to be really good for you, and a good source of omega-3. I won't pretend to be a nutritionist here, because I am not one, but I was pretty happy with these hemp seeds. I felt healthy when I added them to food, and they add a nicely nutty flavour to things.

Toasted hemp seeds sprinkled on seitan & black bean stir fry.

My only complaint is that, although these were 'unhulled' seeds, there were a lot of hulls still in the mix. They were like tiny little egg shell pieces - you can eat them with no real trouble, but they aren't that nice.

When I was toasting seeds for baking which I would share with friends, I tried to get as many as I could out of the pan.

Hemp seeds, toasting.

 My favourite thing to do with them was, unsurprisingly, adding them to baked goods. Conveniently, a friend turned 30 and I offered to bring cake. Except, instead of cake, I made Maple-Banana Cinnamon Rolls with Hemp Seed filling.

These were sweet, and fruity, and soft, and chewy, and nutty, and delicious. They seemed to go down pretty well at the party, so I would call these a success. These are definitely dessert buns, and should probably not be considered breakfast by any but those with the sweetest of sweet teeth.

I will post the recipe below, but first, the rules of the giveaway:

• You have to live in Australia.
• Post a comment on this blog post for an entry.
• Only one entry per person, for ultimate fairness.
• Contest open until 10.00am on Friday, 23rd March (that's QLD time).
• I will choose one commenter at random after then and let you know the winner.
• Get commenting!

Maple-Banana Cinnamon Rolls with Hemp Seed filling
 
2 smallish (mediumish?) bananas
1/2 c. maple syrup
1/4 c. soy milk
1/2 c. hot water
2 T. vegan butter
2 T. dry yeast
3 1/4 c. plain flour
3 T. gluten flour
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. salt

Filling:
1/3 c. hulled hemp seeds, toasted
1 banana
3 T. maple syrup
1 T. vegan butter
4 tsp. cinnamon

Glaze: 1 c. icing sugar, 1 T. maple syrup, 1 tsp. soy milk

Blend 2 bananas, maple syrup and milk together until smooth. In a large mixing bowl, combine hot water and butter, stir until butter is melted. Add blended mixture and yeast, and set aside for 5 minutes. Mix in flour,gluten, cinnamon and salt and knead until well mixed, stretchy and smooth. Place in an oiled bowl, cover, and let rest until doubled in size, about 90 minutes. Punch down the dough, knead for a few minutes, the let the dough rest for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, generously oil a baking tray. Also, prepare the filling: blend together the banana, maple syrup, butter, and cinnamon and then stir in the hemp seeds.

Roll the dough into a long, thin rectangle. Try to make it even, and as thin as you can get it. Mine was about 20cm wide by maybe 40cm long.  Spread filling over the dough, leaving 5cm along the long edge filling-free. Roll the dough into a pinwheel, along its long edge (starting with the side where the filling comes right up to the edge).  Squeeze it to seal the end and make it cylindrical, then slice into 3cm pieces and place onto the oiled baking tray. They should be near each other, but not too close, since they rise. Cover, and let rise for another 30 minutes. In the meantime, heat your oven to 190 (375F). Bake the rolls for 25 minutes until they are golden and sound hollow when tapped.

As soon as you take the rolls out of the oven, mix together the glaze ingredients and pour over the rolls. Let them cool for 15 minutes and then remove from the pan. Cool completely, then store in an airtight container.

 Enjoy...

Vegan Christmas

It seems appropriate to end 2011 with a summary of our Christmas, because if I leave it until 2012 I will feel slack (even though I'm still posting about our travels which happened in OCTOBER, but whatevs).

Our Christmas promised little in the way of either excitement or decoration - it was just Andy and I hanging out in Townsville, and we had a stack of novels to keep us company, and the limit of my cheer was this little display on the table (which is a major step up from most years).

For dinner, which Andy and I have on Christmas eve, we decided to be modest so we could save room for dessert.

There was a yuba-wrapped seitan roast, made as per last year's recipe, except this year stuffed with a fig & pecan stuffing, which was wonderful. There were some oven-roasted potatoes, which Andy declared "tates awesome" (get it?). There was a crunchy noodle cole slaw - you know the recipe on the back of the crunchy noodle pack, with a sesame-soy dressing. And there was cranberry jelly, from a jar, which I resisted buying because the homemade version is much better, but it was on special and Andy can't resist a bargain.

As per our plan, there was room for dessert, in the form of tropical trifle, but which I forgot to photograph. Here is a photo of my first go, but the Christmas version was made in a rectangular baking dish - partially because that's how Andy's mum does it, but mainly because our usual trifle bowl was under a friend's house and we'd been too slack to pick it up.

On Christmas morning, I woke to put on some bread - cranberry fig bread, a dried fruit combination which, to me, seems more festive than dried mixed fruit, which we always have on hand. I found a recipe for vegan panettone, but decided to just make it like a regular loaf in the breadmaker. Only, when the beep signalled our bread finished, the result was flat in the pan (despite loads of yeast), it was reluctant to come out, and when it did, it collapsed into a heap:

The reason was because it was still pretty doughy in the centre. We ate it anyways, in chunks, though my lofty goal of having cranberry fig french toast on Boxing Day was dashed.

The rest of Christmas Breakfast centred on mango mimosas - champagne with melty mango sorbet.

And on food, too. Hash browns with smoked cheddar sheese and (vegan) bacon bits. More cranberry jelly. Creamy breakfast mushrooms. And see the chunk of bread? Also, Vegan Dad's breakfast sausages. I made a half batch of this lightly sweet but mainly savoury recipe, but made the mistake of steaming them wrapped in baking paper, rather than foil - to me aluminium foil seems wasteful, and the whole thing about aluminium and health... But the baking paper wasn't tight enough so they were a bit flat, and not as dense as they should have been. But still good.

The rest of the day involved cocktails, potato chips, more trifle, novels, It's a Wonderful Life, and leftovers.

Boxing Day saw Nacho throwing up all day, and not eating. One of the throw-ups involved a 20cm piece of shoe lace. She perked up a bit after that, but then got sick again, so when she was still sick on Tuesday morning, we took her to the Emergency Vet - because it was the Christmas Day public holiday, you see, and the regular vet was closed.

While we worried about Nacho, we occupied ourselves by making some mango-beetroot spring rolls. I originally planned to have these for Christmas, but the Christmas Day public holiday is close enough, no?  In rice paper I put 20cent sweet chilli tofu...

And mango...

And a big pile of grated beetroot, grated carrot, and rice vermicelli.

Then I rolled them up.

And after we heard that Nacho's surgery went just fine, and they removed a 60cm piece of shoe lace from her guts, we ate our spring rolls for dinner.

Nacho came home the next night, full of her last dose of pain meds, and with a shaved arm where the IV had been, which I think makes it look like she has her sleeve rolled up.

And with a shaved pink belly.

She's done a lot of laying around since Wednesday night, which is good, but she's also back to eating lots, licking herself, and purring adorably.

 Happy end of 2011 to everyone, and see you next year!