Fragments of a tropical vegan

Hi! I am hopelessly overworked this semester! And trying to do things to keep my stress levels down, which also take time. Things like striking, to prevent some of the overworking in future years, maybe. Things like starting yoga classes again, for relaxation and adaptability. Things like gardening and running with Tika and reading novels and crocheting and spending time with Andy. Blogging isn't my top priority at the moment, but I do have some things to share. Rather than taking the mental effort to make some narrative sense out of them, I present to you some fragments.

Creamy Pumpkin Soup with Kale. We grew the pumpkin, the kale, and the coriander. We added garlic, white wine, and coconut cream, and ate with store-bought chappatis for an easy, quick dinner. 

A few weeks ago I saw Joey post about this vegan tuna salad recipe. I tried it out that weekend but used nori and wakame for the seaweeds. It was yummy, but didn't taste at all like tuna, in my opinion. Chickpea-based tuna salads are still the real winner! 

We have been eating PILES of passionfruit because our vine is ridiculous. We've also given stacks away. This cup-and-a-half went into the freezer to be enjoyed during the summer months. 

We eat flowers. It's a shame salad vegetables grow better here in winter, than in summer, but we are really starting to appreciate a good salad in the winter. This one has mizuna and rocket, a radish, nasturtiums, and cherry tomatoes from the garden, plus cucumber and capsicum from the markets. For dressing, I used Dreena Burton's recipe for hummus salad dressing, with a big handful of parsley from the garden. 

I've gotten a few new cookbooks recently, because they make me happy. This is a variation on a recipe from The Sexy Vegan's Happy Hour at Home. They are roasted green capsicums (because that is what we had most of) rolled up with hummus and rocket. Yummy and nice to have some little bites instead of a huge bowl of food every night.

Tika, Defender of Kale and Spring Onions.

Nacho, Disrupter of Academic Work.

Meyer Lemon Sherbet

In Australia, sherbet is (correct me if I'm wrong) a fizzy powdered candy which I have never tried. In America, sherbet is pronounced like "sherbert" and means a fruity sorbet-style ice cream with a bit of milk in it. It's sort of halfway between ice cream and sorbet. Why it was given the name "sherbe[r]t" is beyond me.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine gave us a big bag of Meyer lemons from her tree. We used them to make lemon & sage burgers, added them to dal, and they appeared in other dishes, too, but we still had a bunch left to use. Andy suggested that we make sorbet. I decided to make it a sherbet, because hey, why not?

I googled some recipes, and then just ended up making my own recipe up as I went, tasting and making sense of things along the way. The end result was really extraordinarily delicious, if I can say that without sounding arrogant - tangy, sweet-tart, creamy, zesty, and refreshing.

Meyer Lemon Sherbet

4 meyer lemons (meyer are sweeter than other lemon varieties; if you don't have these, you may need to add more sugar to taste)
1 c. sugar
400 ml coconut cream
100 ml water
2 Tbsp. corn flour
2 Tbsp. water
1/4 tsp. tumeric (optional)

Carefully zest the lemons, avoiding the white pith. If you have a fancy zester, lucky you! Skip to the next step. If, like me, you use a peeler to get the zest, chop it up as finely as you can get it. Juice the lemons. I had 1 1/2 cups of lemon juice. If your lemons are smaller, maybe use another one, or else try it with less and see if you like the taste. You can always add more later.

In a saucepan, combine the coconut cream, 100ml of water, lemon zest and sugar. Heat over medium until the sugar dissolves. Add the lemon juice. Bring it up to just bubbling, taste it and add more sugar if it is too tart for your liking. Mix the corn flour with 2 Tbsp. of water and pour this into the sherbet mix. Stir it in very well, turn off the heat, and if you want your sherbet to be OMGSOYELLOW add some tumeric. Just a little bit won't make it taste like anything but lemons. Let the mixture cool to room temperature, and then chill it in the fridge until it is very cold.

Churn it in an ice cream maker until it has set. If you have no ice cream maker, try these instructions.

World Kitchen

Andy and I are planning an exciting international trip later in the year.  We haven't booked flights yet, so I don't want to make any pronouncements here - because as soon as I do, something is bound to change.  But we did get some travel books out of the library to give us an idea of what we have to look forward to...

While we were there, I grabbed a few cookbooks.  The Townsville Library has a surprising range of vegetarian and vegan cookbooks, but it has even more non-vegan cookbooks covering a range of cuisines.  I don't mind getting meaty cookbooks from the library.  I wouldn't buy them, but I'm happy to copy down recipes, subbing 'tofu' or 'seitan' for animal parts as I go.

When I saw How it all Vegan I was really excited.  When I was in uni, my advisor and friend, Bob Torres, said that me and my vegan friend Nicole were like Sarah Kramer and Tanya Barnard, and told us about their cookbook while eating some vegan cheese cake and cookies we had made.  But the cookbook didn't really live up to the hype.  Andy was annoyed with the title (I think it's clever), but I was just underwhelmed by a lot of the recipes.  I did like the Pumpkin and Tomato Soup, which I spiced up with some stovetop croutons & crunchy pumpkin seeds.

And the Scrambled Eggless Eggs were really good with some bubble & squeak.

The cookbook Arabesque gave me lots of ideas for Turkish, Moroccan, and Lebanese recipes.  It inspired me to grab a bottle of orange-blossom water from the Asian grocery store, but so far the only recipe we've made from this cookbook was Spinach with Caramelised Onions.  It wasn't very good - kind of mushy, and pretty flavourless.  Probably our fault, for some minor substitutions we made, but I've copied down lots of recipes for mezze that I'll definitely try out soon.

Jamaican Cooking was full of delicious sounding recipes using all kinds of tropical ingredients.  It made me long for a big, lush, tropical garden full of pawpaws, sweet potatoes, chokoes, and pineapples.  But since we live in a unit with a tiny courtyard, I'll have to settle for buying these things from the market.  I haven't actually made any direct recipes from this cookbook, but was so inspired by a recipe for stuffed chokoes (chayotes, mirlitons, etc) that I improvised one of my own.

While the chokoes lightly steamed on the stove, I made stuffing out of celery leaves, celery seed, grated carrot, wakame and nori seaweed, bread crumbs, and when it was ready, the insides of the chokoes.  I stuffed that all into the shells and baked for 25 minutes.

The result was really yummy - the chokoes had the texture of a cucumber, and the stuffing was a great complement to the flavours.

While we wait impatiently for our actual travel plans to come to fruition, I'm happy to let our kitchen wander the globe for us.

The cure of my ancestors.

I mentioned in my last post about my trip to PNG that I came back and caught a cold.  This was an almost immediate thing - I travelled home on Wednesday (alllllll day, leaving at 6.10 am and getting home at 10pm, all in the same time zone), and somewhere in the epic day of travel I started getting a headache.  The next morning I woke up with a sore throat, which soon turned into a sniffly-snuffly nose.  Only, I had to come in to uni on that Thursday and Friday, because I promised my students I would be available before their essays were due, that Friday night.  Would you believe that, despite the frantic emails I received the whole time I was away, not one of them came to my office?

I suspect that my illness may have stemmed from a 6 hour hike up a volcano in the rain, whereby I got completely drenched.  It was probably not helped by 16 hours spent in planes and airports.  Whatever caused it, I felt shitty.  I grew up using the middle class white cure for everything:

Red Man's Greed
Tags: SOUTH
PARKmore...

And, despite not having eaten Campbell's chicken noodle soup in something like 7 years, and despite being grossed about by it even when I did eat it, that is what I felt like on the worst day of this cold.  So, I came home from uni ridiculously early and set about making some soup which approximated the salty, yellow-ish stuff.

I made stock out of Massel chicken-style stock, some dijon mustard, oil (I remember Campbell's being pretty fatty), a bit of miso, and some turmeric for that bright yellow quality that sticks in my head.  I mixed 1/4 c. of gluten with 1/4 c. of water and broke off tiny chunks to replicate the icky-chewy chicken-ish bits.  I also added some chilli, and whole cloves of garlic, which is by no means authentic to the tinned stuff but sure is good for a cold.  Then I let the whole thing simmer away for about an hour, while I read a magazine.  Then I broke up some noodles from the asian grocery store, so they were about 1inch long, and put those in and let it cook till they were quite soft.  The result was surprisingly delicious.  I don't know how closely it resembles its inspiration, but it sure did make me feel better.

I made a lot, so when Andy came home a few days later and proceeded to catch the cold from me, I was able to heat up some soup and serve with freshly baked corn muffins.  I don't think he had the same memories attached to the tinned condensed soup, but he liked it anyways.

Between seasons.

April is usually my favourite month in Townsville.  After several months of humid, 34 degree days, the April average of 30-ish feels wonderful; the rainy season has ended but the landscape is still lush and green.  Basically, it is what earns Townsville its status, in my opinion, as a freaking great place to live.

This year April hasn't been so great, though.  I don't know why, but the rain hasn't quite let go.  We've gotten a few heavy washes, and a few days of stupid drizzly weather.  Monday it was 22 degrees, which felt practically frigid.  But we have had some nice days, the kind of days I associate with April.  As a result of this funny back-and-forth weather, our meals have been shifting back and forth as well.

Wintry:

Sunday Roast Drumsticks from Vegan (see my review of this cookbook here).  These weren't super accurate, as we didn't know what tinned chestnuts are like so had trouble guessing on a substitution, but they were good anyways.  On the side, roasted brussels sprouts & green beans; just-wilted Ceylon spinach; and porcupine potatoes.

Summery:

Veggie Burgers with chips!  Andy picked up a pack of EatWell lentil burgers reduced-to-clear so we made bread rolls to have a proper burger-bar dinner.

I used my new pottery (more on this to come) to lay out a spread of beetroot-carrot slaw, guacamole, and salad.

Andy made Cajun-Spiced Chips from Vegan with a Vengeance which were amazing.

The result was a decidedly summery meal.

Wintry: 

Pumpkin Soup.  Actually, this is Pumpkin-Daal Soup from Urban Vegan and it was delicious.  Rich and creamy and amazingly flavoured, this warmed us up one cool evening.

On the side we had some sauteed brussels sprouts with rocket and balsamic.

Summery:

Morroccan Millet Bulgur Timbales, from Urban Vegan.  Topped with Easy Tahini Dressing from Urban Vegan.  Light and room temperature, with cold seitan roast on the side.

Wintry:

Pumpkin baked goods.  Following the recipe for The Best Pumpkin Muffins from Vegan with a Vengeance, I made muffins as well as bread.

Summery:

Coconut-Crusted Tofu with peanut satay sauce, based on a conglomeration of Urban Vegan recipes.  Although this was oven-baked, it was very tropical and felt light and summery.

Wintry:

Porridge.  

I kind of don't mind that the weather has been so variable, because it gives us a lot of variety with our meals!

Vegan.

I've mentioned this cookbook before, particularly noting its reasonably non-descript name. What it lacks in title, however, this cookbook more than makes up for with the quality of the recipes. And it has pictures!

I've posted plenty of recipes from the book already (typically with lots of adaptations). There was the totally amazing potato and sea vegetable soup.

Of course, we quickly fell in love with the corn fritters.

At Christmas, just after getting the book, Andy and I made a big brekky cook-up featuring the Creamy Breakfast Mushrooms.

And I wowed all the non-vegans with the beautiful and delicious Black Forest Chocolate Cake (topped with Urban Vegan's Macho Fudge Sauce).

Andy had a go at the croissants, and was frustrated with the lack of direction provided but the end result was delicious anyways.

Our results from this cookbook haven't been perfect, but I expect that has as much to do with our cooking as the recipes. For instance, we had a go at the Egg-Free Omelette, using far more tofu than was called for, but less (and different) veggies. When it came time to flip the omelette, Andy tried to slide/shake the omelette onto a plate, as the recipe suggested, and we ended up with an epic fail.

The scramble that resulted, while not pretty, was really yummy and something we'll try again in future.

We also tried the ravioli (from Tapenade and Yogurt Ravioli with Calaloo Sauce) which was good but not great.

One of our most desired recipes from the book, based on the photo, was the Wild Rice and Lentil Quenelles in Tomato Sauce. We used all brown rice instead of while rice, but otherwise kept to the recipe and found they tasted a bit healthy. They were also far less beautiful than the cookbook photo. (With salad, potatoes and risotto balls.)

There are still heaps of recipes I want to try, like the Crispy, Stuffed Peppadew Peppers (baked, not fried!), Savoury Cookie Swirls, Inca Parcels (leaves stuffed with amaranth filling), Haggis, Sunday Roast Drumsticks, and Banoffee & Quinoa Custard Pie.

In all, we kind of love this cookbook.

Food round-up.

In an effort to keep posting things, as well as to clear out a folder of food photos from a while ago, I present you with a random mish-mash of meals with minimal wordage from me.

Pizza.  Herby crust, tomato sauce, topped with spinach, sauteed onions, seitan, fresh tomatoes and shaved sweet potato.

Fritter-tata cake.  Using the concept of our favourite fritters, we attempted a giant, frittata-like cake.  A base of corn, spring onions and tofetta was topped with a spinach-laden batter and baked before being flipped over to serve.  Kind of like a corn upside-down cake.  This didn't work as well as we had hoped -- the batter was too thick to run down into the veggies -- but it was still yummy.

Smashed potatoes (boiled whole, then smashed and baked) with some kind of fried rice.  I have a vague memory that this is Thai-Style Pineapple Fried Rice from The Tropical Vegan, made with a fresh, beautiful pineapple.  This reminded me of my trip to Thailand and we both loved it.

This is our variation on "Potato, Leek and Sea Vegetable Soup" from Vegan.  We didn't have a leek, so it's potato, onion and sea vegetable.  Also, we swapped Atlantic sea weed for a combination of nori and wakame, because that's what we had.  This was absolutely amazing.  Something in it combined to create this fantastically morish soup that we both thought was the bomb diggity.  Andy loved it, and he usually hates soup.

Upon finding bean sprouts and noodles reduced to clear, and capsicums and snow peas on special, we obviously had to make som Pad Thai.  We love "Brooklyn Pad Thai" from Vegan with a Vengeance with double the sauce and the addition of tomatoes (Vegan Planet style).

The best lentil loaf we've ever made.  Actually, Andy made this so I shouldn't take credit.  He roughly followed a recipe from Wild Morsels but mostly just winged it.  This had red lentils, brown rice, oats, a tin of baked beans, grated carrot, and some other things.  It held together beautifully, it was flavourful and the topping of tomato paste reminds me of my mum's cooking.

I shall return with more sporadic and disjointed posts soon...