Complementary baking

Some of my favourite foods come from the oven—cookies, cakes, pies, roasted veggies.... But using the oven to bake just one thing isn’t very efficient. Preheating and maintaining the temperature in a fairly big airspace just for one pan of food uses a lot of electricity and isn’t good for the environment or the wallet. Not to mention, it makes the house all kinds of hot—this is a good thing in the winter, but not so much in the hotter months. And even though autumn officially started in Australia on Saturday, it’s still pretty warm here.

None of this is enough to stop us from using the oven. We just try to be a bit smarter when we do heat it up. In our house, the oven is stuffed full whenever it is turned on. This usually takes some major strategery—which pans will we use that can fit together; which dish needs to be on which shelf; how long and at what temperature does each dish need to bake; when should batters be mixed and poured into pans...

Sunday, after eating pancakes and reading the paper, Andy and I had a long, drawn-out baking-fest. He was bored (I was doing the crossword) so I suggested he bake some cookies. He flipped through our newest cookbook acquisition, Joy of Vegan Baking, and decided to make both Lemon Bars and Jam-Filled Oat Bran Muffins. And since we had the oven on anyways, he declared, we should have something baked for dinner; his choice was the potato pizza from the latest issue of Vegan Voice magazine (which I didn’t get photos of). And then he requested that I be in charge of the Lemon Bars.

Andy started on the muffins in the early afternoon. Instead of oat bran, he ground up some rolled oats. He kept the wet ingredients separate, in the fridge, waiting for the oven to be preheated before mixing (since the baking powder activates as soon as it hits moisture).

After he had finished with the muffins, he boiled and mashed some potatoes and mixed up the pizza crust.

When he was done in the kitchen, I put together the shortbread crust of the Lemon Bars, pressed it into a slice pan, and put it in the fridge. Then I blended up the topping in a bowl, using mango flavoured silken tofu (not noticeable over the lemony-ness) and custard powder in place of corn flour.

When it came time for dinner, we put our carefully worked-out strategies into action. Andy mixed his batter while the oven heated, then filled muffin cups with batter and jam. We topped the pizza crust, and baked the shortbread. The muffins came out looking delicious, the pizza was rolled out a little thin and fell apart while we ate, and the Lemon Bars took much longer to set than the recipe called for. But everything was really tasty, and now we’ve got treats to last us all week.

Lemon Bars

Jam-filled Oat Muffin and a Lemon Bar

We had another oven meal last night to use up a few leftovers and old veggies. Last week I made an Ethiopian-spiced tofu and vegetable stew. We blended it up and stirred through some leftover barley. This was poured into a crust. The whole lot was topped off with a mixture of mashed potato, sweet potato, garlic, miso and sunflower butter (for a cheesy flavour). I called it Ethiopian Goatherd’s Pie—because it’s not quite shepherd’s pie.

At the same time, Andy made some gourmet-style stuffed sweet potatoes. He steamed a few big chunks of sweet potato, and the hollowed out the insides. They were stuffed with a bread and corn mix flavoured with cranberry jelly and orange marmalade. This was a very yummy, Thanksgiving-flavoured side dish, and that stuffing is likely to make more appearances in our house.

And finally, because Vaala asked after my last post, I’ll share with you my recipe for pastry crust. It’s a mix of recipes and techniques from Hot Damn and Hell Yeah, Wild Morsels, and my mum. This is enough to make one standard sized crust, or six topless mini-crusts. If you need a top, double the recipe.

¾ c. sifted flour
¼ c. ice cold margarine (leave it in the freezer for 20 minutes)
1/8 tsp. salt
2 T. ice water

--Combine flour and salt in a medium bowl. Cut in margarine with a pastry cutter or your fingers, until the mixture resembles bread crumbs. Add ice water and mix well, kneading slightly to incorporate all the flour. Form into a ball (or six small balls, for cupcake-sized pies) and chill for 30 minutes. Roll out between two sheets of cling wrap to desired size. The cling wrap keeps it from drying out the way a floured surface does. When you transfer the crust to your pan, peel off the top piece of cling wrap and flip the crust into your pan, and use the other cling wrap to press it in to place. Fill with something yummy, bake and enjoy.

Cyclone food

I got home from Canberra on Saturday afternoon, just a few hours after Cyclone Ellie formed off the coast (she had previously just been a tropical low). It started raining on Sunday and they were predicting that Ellie would cross the coast at Cardwell, about 90 minutes north of Townsville, at midday on Monday. There were lots of warnings on the radio to "ready yourselves for the cyclone", so Andy and I took stock of what we had--a camp stove we bought last cyclone season and have yet to use; batteries; two little battery powered radios that tune into the ABC with ease; lots of tinned tomatoes and spaghetti; and a few packs of gnocchi, which are quick to cook if the power goes out. We don't have much in the way of veggies, because the markets have been cancelled for weeks, and the grocery stores are unable to get new orders because the highway is flooded north, south and west of Townsville. What we did have was about three kilos of carrots.

A rainy day and cool weather (it's all relative--29 degrees feels cool in summer), plus the threat of power failure sounds, to me, like an invitation to bake. It was the perfect time, in fact, to try a few recipes from my newest cookbook, The Joy of Vegan Baking.
I made banana muffins, with crystallised ginger instead of chocolate chips. We threw a loaf of multi-grain bread into the bread maker in case of future power failure. And, to use some of the many carrots, I made a carrot cake. In place of the oil in this recipe I used mango puree, which made for a really moist, sweet carrot cake. We froze half the cake and the muffins, because 90+% humidity means things go mouldy fairly quickly here.

We haven't been eating only sweets, though, as good as that may be. We've been filling up on lots of cold weather comfort foods. This lentil loaf from Wild Morsels was the best bean-loaf recipe I've made. It was very tasty, and it actually held together in loaf shape. Instead of grated sweet potato, we used carrot and it worked just fine.

The only silly thing I did was to put a layer of tomato paste on the top, like my mum used to do with meatloaf. The baking paper I used to line the pan got soggy, so we had to flip the loaf over to slice it--and the tomato ended up on the bottom, instead of the top.

One night for dinner we had gnocchi, tossed with a hearty tomato-aniseed-roasted garlic sauce. A quick salad of our meagre vegetables filled the plate and added some variety to our diets.

This stick-to-your-ribs meal is cannellini beans, peas and carrots in a vegemite gravy, served with brown rice, cucumber and tomato.
And most recently, Andy requested that I make Urban Vegan's chickpea paprikash again. This time I put in grated carrot instead of capsicum, and served it over spaghetti instead of spaetze. The homemade noodles are definitely better, but this was still tasty and filling and just what we needed. On the side, we had leftover lentil loaf, some sourdough baguette, and a bit of fresh tomato.
Although the rain has slowed up a bit, and the wind has died down, there are still lots of flooded roads and, more importantly, flooded bike paths. We've had to drive to uni every day, which is leaving us both feeling a bit antsy. And there are two lows in the Coral Sea that are predicted to turn into cyclones in the near future, so it looks like we'll be eating too much and exercising too little for at least a bit longer...