Flicking the Vs

More flax egg experiments - a date with date and hazelnut loaf

2013-05-20T00:26:00.000-07:00

A little bit back, I wrote a little bit about my experiments with flax eggs and how they worked out with cooking a coconut loaf and some simnel muffins (hint: gooooooood). The coconut loaf was from a recipe by Aussie cook Bill Granger, so I thought I'd hit him up for a fresh venture into flax.

The next recipe was a date and hazelnut loaf, which is meant to be a low GI recipe, whatever that means. I just assumed it meant it gives you super powers or something like that. I'm waiting for it to kick in, and keeping my fingers crossed I get invisibility.

The original recipe has been whisked off The Independent's website, more's the pity, but there's a fairly similar one here. The one I cooked had no honey, as you'd expect, and the egg turned into a mix of 1tbsp of flax and 3tbsp of water.

It didn't rise much but with only one egg, flax or otherwise, you'd not expect to.

It was a little bit on the damp side, but it still tasted pretty darn fine - big and chunky, and desperate for a cup of tea to make friends with.

Before cooking with flax, Alpro pudding were my favourite egg replacer but I'm kind of learning to love flax.

More experiments are clearly needed. What's that? You're suggesting that I'm using my interest in cooking chemistry as a way of hiding the fact I just want to make more cake? I'm outraged...

Cauliflower with pine nuts and parsley

2013-05-13T13:47:00.002-07:00

This here Guardian article is what happens when Yottam Ottolenghi cooks something.

This here photo is what happens when I attempt to do the same:

The recipe is a mezze dish, so the Guardian tells me, and it involves cauliflower, chilli, pine nuts, and a parsley and caper sauce on top. These two dishes, you will rightly notice, are not the same.

The difference I think is in the deep frying (what, and the fact the photo for his recipe was taken by a food stylist and mine was taken in a tiny South London kitchen? You're too kind.)

The original recipe calls for some deep frying and then pouring on a few tablespoons of oil for good oily measure, and I'm a little bit shy of all that, not too mention far too lazy to clean out all that oil after the deep frying's done.

Instead of deep frying the cauliflower, I roasted it for 20 minutes or so and then shallow fried it for a couple more for a bit of colour. (By bit of colour, I mean slightly burnt. You got that, right?) Rather than deep fry the chilli and pine nuts as the original recipe calls for, I gave them a couple of minutes in the shallow fry too (read: burnt them a bit as well). Hardly any oil in the parsley and caper sauce either - just a teaspoon or so - with the difference made up with water.

Oh yeah, it was gooood. The oil-water swap made it nice and juicy, and not at all greasy. I'd call that a win.

It reinforces my opinion that cauliflower is one of the superior veggies to grace the earth. I will be opening a shrine to it before too long, where I will leave gifts of parsley and capers to appease it. All hail cauli!

A freak Waldorf experiment

2013-05-06T12:07:00.002-07:00

This is not the best thing in the world I cook - it's not even the fingernail on the hand of best thing I cook. But it's the thing I can't get enough of right now - it's a guilty pleasure, like the culinary equivalent of those weird satellite reality TV shows like When Good Pets Go Bad.

What is it? It's some sort of Waldorf caught in a freak nuclear accident sort of thing. Like The Fly, but with a salad. And no flies.

Like Waldorf, there apple, celery and walnuts in there, all mayonnaised up. But there's also a bit of carrot, some dry-fried pumpkin seeds and some chick peas, roasted in the oven for 20 minutes til they begin to crisp up and go a little more chewy, and with umeboshi seasoning poured over for the last few minutes.

There's even some shiso rice seasoning on top, which doesn't (as far as I can tell) add much to the party apart from a rather fun purpleness. Hey, sometimes, that's all you need to get the nod for inclusion into a recipe - it's why purple sprouting broccoli always seems that bit better than the non-purple kind.

Either way, I can't get enough of this at the moment. I make double batches so I always know there's a little in the fridge if I start getting a bit twitchy for it.

In order to justify my obsession with eating this, I tried to make it into some Japanese style arrangement - swapping the apple for nashi pear, adding a bit of soy to the pumpkin seeds as they roasted. It didn't work - the pear was too wet, the soy too salty.

So this salad had to stay as it is - just plain, just tasty, just one more bowl...

Manna restaurant review, or pudding from heaven

2013-04-30T14:07:00.000-07:00

It was my birthday a few weeks back. And I know what I'd like you to give me as a present: your forgiveness for the general low-rent quality of the snaps I took at Manna.

My gran bunged me a few quid at Christmas and told me to take my other half out for a nice meal somewhere. I waited a few weeks, then happily obeyed: I'd been wanting to go to Manna for ages, but it had always seemed a bit on the expensive side. Granted, it is in London's upmarket Primrose Hill area, but still, it grates hard on a South London pocket.

After a long, boozy lunch with a friend and a few drinks with another friend (I mention that to both account for my well-disposed nature towards Manna and to explain my somewhat hazy memory of the meal), I picked up my boyfriend and headed to Manna.

One waiter described the specials with all the sweet concentration and memory lapses of a young child in a particularly taxing spelling bee, while another explained the difference between the mezze as a sharing dish and as a main course for one person: "If it's for two, we put in the centre of the table, if it's for one, we'll push it more towards you. It's the same size." Rii-iight.

We started with a bit of hummus. Hummus is like the benchmark for a vegan restaurant - the one vegan dish even omnis will be familiar with, and which is ubiquitous in its chick pea glory. Was it good? I think so. I remember the bread being tasty and the hummus being good. I don't remember much more (I blame that boozy lunch, and those drinks.)

For a main, there was a mezze platter for two: three of the starters to share (or not, if you ask them to push the plate towards you). I chose the slider, basil and (cashew) cheese croquettes, and vegetable croquettes as the threesome, with some onion rings thrown in for good measure.

The onion rings were perfectly crispy if a wee bit oily, but at £4 a dish - or £1 per onion ring - I was expecting some perfection. The Primrose Hill vegans clearly have a few quid to burn.

Luckily, the mezze had it in spades. Though my cameraphone happy snaps won't really prove it, two out of the three starters were glorious. The basil and cheese croquettes were a masterclass in vegan cheese - thick, creamy, soft - and the cannelinni bean slider not only convinced me that veggie burgers are worth ordering, it was so good one bit would be enough to talk a jumper down from a ledge. There was all the goodness you'd hope for in a top notch burger: the best vegan mayo I've ever had, pickles, salad and a reassuring chunky and flavourful burger.

The tempura was solid and the accompanying soy-based sauce compelling moreish, but were firmly in the shade of the slider and croquettes' sterling work.

At the risk of refusing to change the record, at £8 for three croquettes smaller than walnuts, I couldn't help feeling that the volume of the food was in inverse proportion to its cost (no complaints on the quality though.)

Manna does provide one money-saving option to diners by offering carafes as well as bottles of wine, but given the carafes cost around as much as bottles do elsewhere, it's a bit of a wasted effort.

Anyway, this is where I stop my carping. Behold this pudding:

It cost £8. I would have happily paid double, it was that good. Caramel sauce, pecan ice cream and a sticky toffee pudding you want to take home to meet your parents. It was pretty as a picture, insanely rich and comforting on a grim winter night, and the manna from heaven the restaurant's name suggests. So good was it, my boyfriends' 'no, no, you have it' and 'I'm really not hungry' became 'just one more spoonful...'

At these prices, I'll not be coming back often, but next time there's a special occasion, you can bet I'll be straight up to Primrose Hill. And next time, I'm not sharing!

Manna
4 Erskine Road
Primrose Hill
London
NW3 3AJ
020 7722 8028

First attempts at using flax eggs - simnel muffins and coconut bread

2013-04-23T14:19:00.001-07:00

For some reason, I have of late, and whereof I know not, become particularly keen to cook with flax eggs. I have no idea what's inspired this interest in all things flax (though if you were to guess it's because I have a bag of flax seed in the cupboard in need of using, you may not be entirely wrong.)

I've not used flax in anything before, but for a first attempt I decided that cake might be in order, and a simnel cake at that.

Do you have simnel cake where you're from? It's a British cake, but I'm not sure if it's slipped the moorings and taken off for stardom and popularity abroad.

For those simnel-unfamiliar among you, it's a fruity, spicy cake traditionally made at Easter (yes, it's taken me that long to get around to posting this) and it's normally covered with marzipan. There are 11 marzipan balls on top, a nod to the 12 apostles minus Judas, who's forever been bumped from his shot at cake glory. The Wikipedia link to simnel cake is here if you're interested. (And it's still there if you're not.)

That all sounded like too much hard work though, so I wrapped all the usual simnel ingredients - sultanas, mixed peel, cinnamon, nutmeg and the requisite marzipan - into a few muffins.

Flax got in on the act as an egg replacer, and here's what happened next:

Taste and texture wise, not bad, not bad at all. There wasn't a whole lot of rising, and the top was a bit crusty from being left in the oven too long, but you can't have everything. (Well, OK, you can, but you have to be a better cook than I am.)

After that Easter-themed rush of blood to the head, I had to cook MOAR FLAX CAKE. And for that, I turned to a recipe from Bill Granger that had been in The Independent a while back. (For some reason I can't find it on the Indy's website, but this appears to be the same one.)

It's not a vegan recipe, but the substitutions aren't hard - almond milk for milk, vegan margarine for butter, and those all important flax eggs for the eggs.

This turned out much better - a load of rising, and a delicious soft cake. It even convinced the other half that coconut could be good, after many years of confirmed coconut hating. Score!

More flax experiments are definitely on the way...

Butternut squash soup - it's good, who knew?

2013-04-18T13:37:00.000-07:00

Here's a recipe that does it exactly what it says on the tin. Or in this case, the mug.

Yes, it's a recipe for hot soup:

Last time I went to see my brother in Manchester, he cooked up an amazing butternut squash soup. It was soup with the sort of lovely soft velvety-ness that made me want to just climb in like it was a huge bath of soup and spend a few hours there. Maybe take in a magazine. That sort of thing.

What made my love of this fine, fine soup even greater was that I'm a card-carrying butternut squash sceptic. As veggies go, squash is Conference rather than Premier League in my book. It's the veggie equivalent of something like Birmingham or support stockings or something - you're glad they're there, but you kind of hope your paths don't have to cross too often.

But after eating that soup, I was ready to become a convert, and went out and got me some and tried to recreate the recipe at home.

I didn't succeed. Pah. Defeated by the butternut squash! *shakes fist*

In order to crack the secret of how to make butternut squash into a food friend rather than a food foe, I emailed by brother. Here's what he emailed back: "OK, you have to realise I don't really *do* recipes." Gah!

Luckily, he sent me what he thought the recipe was anyway. Hoorah! Here's what you do, at least as far as he can remember...

Ingredients
6 large carrots
2 medium potatoes
1 large butternut squash
2 large onions
about a litre of vegetable stock
1/2 tsp chilli powder
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp cumin
black pepper to taste

What you do
Halve the squash lengthways. Scoop out seeds. Peel and half one of the onions and put into recesses left by seeds. Roast in preheated oven flat-side-up at 180C for about an hour, or until the surface of the squash starts to caramelise.

While that roasts, peel and roughly chop the other onion and sweat it down in a large pan with a little oil. Add the stock when that's done. Peel and roughly chop the carrots and potatoes and add to the stock. Gently simmer on a medium heat until the carrots and potatoes are soft. Add the spices. Stir and leave on a very low heat until the squash is roasted. Add the flesh of the squash and the steamed onions from the squashs' recess to the soup. Blend to thick smooth consistency.
Serve with crusty bread.

Feel the food fear and do it anyway episode 4: Poached pears

2013-04-11T12:12:00.001-07:00

Poached pears have always scared me a bit. I remember my mum having a recipe book when I was a kid and telling me how generally disgusting they were and how they were second only to a pile of veruccas on the list of things you generally wouldn't want to put in your mouth. (I'm paraphrasing here, but that's the general gist of her anti-pear sentiments.)

So, for a good few years after that - alright, a good couple of decades - I generally ignored the poached pear. But eventually it wore down my resistance, and I gave in and started eating them.

But I didn't get round to making them til this week, when I went out and bought a huge truckload of pears just for the purpose of poaching the life out of them. I used a bottle of dessert wine, some water, a point of star anise, cloves, a little cinnamon stick, some clementine zest, and some sugar. (And some pears, of course!)

You boil it all up for a couple of minutes, then turn the heat down and let it simmer for a while. Here's what you get at the end:

And yes, like all of my food fear experiments, I really liked it. Even though the idea of cooking off the alcohol in my wine goes against everything I believe in, the end result was pretty much worth it. (And I topped up the booze content by adding a load of the clemencello I made a couple of months back.)

I'll be cooking up poached pears again, only next time, I'll be making sure there's a huge load of ice cream to go with it.

Artisan Vegan Cheese part two - pub cheddar and peppercorn chèvre

2013-04-07T13:00:00.000-07:00

I had a first go at making cheeses from Artisan Vegan Cheese recently, and so impressed was I (not to mention so replete with rejuvelac in need of using up) I thought I'd give it another go.

One recipe that had been whispering my name since I got the book was pub cheddar. Cheddar was pretty much the king of cheese for me in the pregan days, and adding the prefix 'pub' was only going to make it better. What makes it 'pub' cheddar, I hear you ask? Because it has beer in it. Oh yes.

You already know this is going to turn out well, don't you? The beer for this experiment was Black Sheep Ale, and there was pretty much a whole bottle left over once I'd contributed enough for a half-recipe of the cheese - what better to help me relax after a very stressful cheese making session.

Alright, it wasn't that stressful at all. With the rejuvelac already made, it was just a case of blending up some cashews and other bits and pieces - nooch, beer, chives, that sort of stuff - and leaving it all to culture.

It wasn't a very firm cheese, but it was hugely tasty. It didn't bear a huge resemblance to cheddar though, but it had the smooth spreading consistency and sharp tanginess that made it more than satisfying.

The other cheese was the pink peppercorn and lemon chevre. It was no pub cheddar, but it had such an interesting flavour - pink peppercorns are now on my 'use more often' pile - that I was blow away. It's a nice, smooth spreadable cheese - just the sort of thing that will get you over that bored-of-bagles hump.

Two definite winners, and both convinced me that I'll be digging out Artisan Vegan Cheese once again. Now I've mastered the art of rejuvelac, as well as the art of eating my own body weight in cheese, there's no stopping me.

Dan Lepard goes vegan - fig mocha muffins

2013-04-01T14:04:00.004-07:00

You've got to hand it to Dan Lepard. He's not normally shy of using eggs and dairy, but a while back, he used his baking column in The Guardian to make some vegan goodies.

And not only did he dip his toe in vegan baking, he published articles on it for a month, and did it without the usual 'hey, I love butter, but if you're one of those stupid hippy freaks that doesn't, this one's for you...' style of writing that occasionally dogs non-vegans cooks doing a spot of vegan cooking. (For US readers unware of Dan Lepard, he's the dude that would have taken the gold home at last year's Olympics if there was a medal for baking.)

The one recipe that caught my eye most out of his month of vegan recipes was this one: mocha fig muffins.

The first thing I really like about this recipe is that it's so easy to make - I managed to fix up the batter in about 10 minutes or so. The second thing I really like about it was that it tasted really, really good!

The batter's a mix of figs, oil, flour, sugar and flavourings like coffee and cocoa (I left out the almonds as Mr Flicking the Vs is pathologically averse to them), the wet ingredients are blended, then the dry added then it all goes into muffin tins while you wait and wish the oven would hurry up.

25 minutes later, this is what you get:

The crumb is perfect and the muffins were so moist. And, given the figs are by far the biggest ingredient in the muffin, I reckon you'd look the other way if I counted it as one of my five a day! (Oh alright, more like three of my five a day...)

Dan Lepard, when you want to go vegan, you do it with style. Next stop, Mr Lepard's chocolate passion cake and walnut black cherry cookies...

Pickled okra - a month well spent

2013-03-24T09:33:00.003-07:00

It looks like a science experiment. It's not meant to be that colour. It comes in a jar bigger than your head. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you pickled okra.

This was one of the first recipes I cooked up from the Jams, Pickles and Preserves my ma and pa gave me for Christmas. It's taken me this long to post about it because you have to let the okra sit for a month before you get to actually eat it.

The only downside for pickled okra is that month-long wait - the actual making of it is devilishly simple: boil up some vinegar, okra, coriander, chilli and fried onions, bottle it, and you're away. Easy.

If you're not an okra lover, this isn't the dish to convince you of its redeeming features. Most okra-phobes fear it on the basis of its sliminess and if that sounds like you, you're not going to like this recipe okra one tiny wee bit. If you are an okra fan though, you might just love it even more once it's been left in the cupboard for a few weeks to keep improving. Serious.

After staring up at the bottled okra for a month like a Dickensian orphan outside a baker's shop at Christmas time, I finally got to crack into it.

It was a wonder - a nice toothsome resistance to the okra itself, light spice from the coriander seeds, and a nice sharp tang that meant I could happily use it as a side dish, on oatcakes, or just out of the jar with a spoon when I thought no-one was looking.

I was quietly impressed. Alright, not so quietly - I think I ate the whole jar in a matter of days.

So, you're thinking, 'but why's it black?' Yeah, that's my bad. Turns out that using Swedish black salt may not have been the sharpest idea...

Cookies and Scream makes me very happy

2013-03-19T01:07:00.000-07:00

London's Camden area is a pretty vegan-friendly place. There's a Loving Hut up there, and InSpiral, a cafe whose breakfast I've enjoyed before, along with a few omni places that serve up vegan food. There's one vegan place up there that I've been meaning to try for a while: Cookies and Scream.

Cookies and Scream is a little vegan and gluten free bakery tucked away in Camden Market, which sells cookies (the name was a giveaway, right?), cakes, milkshakes, coffee and all that jazz.

It's open til 6ish, but when we passed through a couple of days ago a couple of hours before closing time, it looked like people had been panic-buying vegan baked goods.

And who could blame them? These bad boys are freaking delicious.

Check this one out:

It's called a Donnie Darko, and it's a great big fat chocolate cookie with mint chocolate on top. It came as a bit of a surprise when I uploaded the picture about that Cookies and Scream is gluten free. I wouldn't have known from the Donnie Darko, with all its cakey goodness.

But, for love at first sight, feast your eyes on this gorgeous hunk of baked goods:

This is the Chewy Wookee - a brownie-like base covered in a slab-like topping of chocolate and hazelnuts. It was also large enough to be found on Google Maps, which meant that I got to whittle away at it for three days until I gave it and ate the last large hunk in one go with a bucket-sized cup of tea, thereby giving me a chocolate high that cut through a hangover of epic proportions.

I'm already planning another visit to Cookies and Scream in the very near future. Next time, I'm going to get up early and beat the other panic buyers to those sweet, sweet cookies.

Cookies and Scream
http://cookiesandscream.com/
Unit L1
Dingwalls Gallery
Camden Lock Place
London
NW1 8AF
0208 444 9944

Feel the food fear and do it anyway, episode 3: Kale chips

2013-03-15T00:56:00.000-07:00

If veganism were Girl Scouts, I'm pretty sure that making kale chips would be one of those badges that everyone has - like the one for tying your shoelaces successfully and the one they give you just for turning up.

Until the other week, I had a big hole on my vegan uniform where that prized kale chip badge would go. I tried making them once before, and got a few sorry-looking, half-arsed, wilty leaves back in return. They were so grim I thought I was going to get kicked out of the vegan union. No badge for me!

But in the spirit of feeling the food fear and cooking it anyway, I thought it was time to have another go. (Or, to look it another way, I had a load of cavolo nero I didn't know what to do with leering at me from the fridge. Take that, Italian kale!)

I'd also bookmarked a recipe for pizza kale chips that I'd seen on Cadry's Kitchen, and decided to go earn my kale stripes forthwith. Like all good things, it starts with a cheesy, cashewy base. I didn't follow the recipe to the letter but went as close as I could with the ingredients I had (yeah, I got all the cavolo nero I need, tonnes of that shiz, but when I look for hempseeds? Nada!)

Here's the end result:

I loved them. I now get the whole kale chip thing, and why so many blogs so crazy for them. Turns out, it's mainly because they are fantastic. Not just finding-£10-on-the-street good, but remember-where-you-were-when-you-first-ate-them-so-you-can-tell-the-grandkids good.

I'll be making these ones again. Again, and again, and again. Next stop: the Advanced Kale Chip Makers badge!

Aloo gobi: my favourite curry?

2013-03-11T01:21:00.005-07:00

Aloo gobi is one of my favourite curries. If it's on the menu at a restaurant, it's on my plate as soon as humanly possible. I normally pick it straight up, maybe after a bit of a deathmatch between channa masala in the mixed martial ring of my dinner choices.

I've had a recipe from The Times for aloo gobi since forever and, with a stinking cold that only a curry can chase away, I dug it out this week and decided to get cooking.

Aloo gobi is a type of curry made with cauliflower and potatoes. I decided to chuck in some spinach for good measure (which would technically make it gobi aloo saag, but I won't tell if you don't).

The Times' recipe (all Times content is behind a paywall so I can't give you a link to find it) was a pretty simple one: the eponymous spinach and cauliflower, along with some ginger, spices, a chopped tomato and a bit of water.

Maybe because I'm so used to the divine wonders of Indian restaurant and takeaway aloo gobi, this version was a bit of a letdown - the curry was a bit wet, rather than the thick stew-y glory that I'm used to, and the flavour was a bit two-dimensional. (Although in the recipe's defence, I have a stinking cold, so I don't have the full range of tastes available to me at the moment).

Still, at least it was one more recipe I've cooked from my stash (in keeping with my New Year's resolution to cook all the long-ignored recipes haunting my kitchen), and while it's not one I'll be cooking again, I can never complain about sticking cauliflower and spinach down my neck.

Food for Friends, Brighton - restaurant review

2013-03-06T13:30:00.000-08:00

Brighton must be one of the most veggie and vegan-friendly places in England, I reckon. Like all good Londoners, I like to head down in Brighton as often as I can, have a stroll along the seafront, play some crap arcade games, and generally get in the locals' way.

My other half is a former Brighton resident, having spent a few years studying in the city. That was a long, long time ago, but even then he used to eat at Food for Friends. Back then, it was a veggie restaurant turning out baked potatoes and other simple veggie meals to hungry, scruffy students. Now it turns out slightly more upmarket vegetarian dishes to shoppers taking a break from hitting the high streets. Now, like then, it's packed.

The past few times I've been in have been hit and miss. That said, even their misses are pretty good, it's just that when they have hits, they have Hits so it's kind of disappointing when you just have a decent, rather than a-MAH-zing meal.

I don't know why, but nothing called out to me from the menu. When I saw you could get the halloumi salad as vegan option (crispy tofu subbed for the cheese), I knew I had found my dinner.

Here's what I got:

The halloumi-less salad promised crispy tofu, avocado, mango, wasabi cashews and a mango dressing. Oddly enough, the last two ingredients had gone AWOL. The mango dressing morphed into plain old olive oil, and the wasabi cashews had morphed into thin air.

Shame, that. Still, for some reason, I kind of enjoyed it - the tofu was light and fluffy in the middle, crisp on the outside, and I was jonesing for some leaves after a week of eating food that can only be described as utter crap. (Not quite toast sandwiches, but not far off.)

For reasons that seemed good at the time, I shunned the curry. Himself made a better decision, and here's what he got:

Looks nice, right? And it was. The cauliflower pakoras were a little shy of the deep fat fryer (a bit on the raw side, rather than the yielding cruciferous pillows they should be) but the curry was nice and mellow - gentle spices in a smooth tomato-based sauce.

But you don't want to see that. You want to see this:

That little beauty was banana fritters with rum-soaked raisins and vanilla ice cream, and it was worth the trip to Food for Friends on its own. The light snap of batter gave way to a soft banana on the inside, all brought to a beautiful place with those very distinctly rummy raisins.

I pretended to share the pudding with himself. I didn't want to, but I did. I felt like a better person for it, but I would have been happy to have been a little bit worse of a person with a bit more of that wonderful dessert.

Food for Friends

www.foodforfriends.com/
17-18 Prince Albert Street
Brighton
East Sussex
BN1 1HF
01273 202310

Winter vegetable gratin

2013-03-03T13:57:00.003-08:00

Yep, I'm kicking it 2008 style once again. Cast your mind back to those heady days. Katy Perry kissed a girl and liked it, Dmitry Medvedev became president of Russia, and the QEII was retired.

And somewhere in amongst all that, I tore a few recipes out of the Observer Food Monthly for Christmas recipes, and promptly didn't cook them until now.

But having made a New Year's resolution to leave no recipe behind, I've been going through them and cooking up what looked appealing. First up, winter vegetable gratin.

The original recipe is no longer online - after six years, I guess it's not surprising - so I've written it up here. It wasn't vegan, but didn't take much effort to become so: cream became Alpro soya cream, butter became Pure dairy-free margarine.

Dumbass that I am, it didn't occur to me that maybe 'Christmas feast recipes' are probably meant to serve a few people. I made a full recipe's-worth of the gratin, and was promptly wondering where to find a football team to eat the leftovers.

No football team being forthcoming, I froze the gratin, and used it to make cobbler the next week.

You know that axiom about food tasting better if you leave it for a bit? Whoever told you that was a big fat liar. Turns out if you leave gratin for a bit, it not only does not get better, it gets weird and damp and makes you think a bit of sick with a scone topping. It also looks a bit like sick. Sorry.

And, while you'd be forgiven for thinking most things taste better with a scone topping, I'm not sure this one comes recommended from the Flicking the Vs' Cookbook of Fun. Still, there's the recipe for the gratin below if you want to try it yourself.

I wouldn't recommend it...

Ingredients
200g celeriac, peeled and cut into 3cm pieces
1 carrot, peeled and cut into rounds
1 parsnip, peeled and cut into semi-circles
1 small swede, peeled and cut into chunks
2 potatoes, cut into 3cm pieces
250ml single cream
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 tsp mustard poweder
50g rye or brown breadcrumbs
2tsb fresh majoram leaves
salt and pepper

How you do it
Preheat the oven to 180C and lightly grease a medium ovenproof dish.
Bring a large saucepan of lightly salted water to the boil and add the celeriac, carrot, parsnip swede and potatoes. Cook for ten minutes, drain, then transfer the veggies to a large bowl.
Put the cream, garlic and mustard powder, in a small saucepan set over medium heat.
Cook, stirring constantly, for about 10 minutes until the mixture is thick and coats the back of a spoon.
Season to taste and our over the vegetables. Toss to combine and spoon the mixture into the greased baking dish.
Put the marjoram leaves and breadcrumbs over the vegetables. Cook in the oven for 40 minutes until golden.

Double dipping: Spiced carrot and creamy parsnip dips

2013-02-26T08:42:00.000-08:00

After making a recipe recently from Observer Food Monthly from 2008 and being quite chuffed with the results, I decided too do it again. Hopefully, these recipes are like a fine wine, and they get better with age.

The couple of pages I tore out of the OFM about five years ago were apparently for a Christmas feast, including some canapes and all that stuff - including three dips, which I made two of this week.

The first was a spiced carrot one with chilli and fenugreek; the second was creamy roasted parsnip and garlic.

As well as the self high-fiving that I do when I test another of the recipes I've stashed - recipes I've had so long I might as well start choosing who to leave them to in my will - I was chuffed to get rid of the waxy build up of root veggies that had been colonising my fridge. Take that, winter veggies!

I'd give both dips a return invite to casa Flicking the Vs: the garlic and parsnip was warm and creamy, and slightly sweet; the carrot a tad too wet (yeah, I should have let more of the stock boil off, so I can't blame the recipe.)

As mentioned before, the original recipes are no longer online, so I've reproduced them here with added veganisation.

Roasted parsnip and garlic dip
Serves 6-8

Ingredients
500g parsnips, peeled and slice
90mls vegan cream
1/2 tsp sea salt
1/4tsp white pepper
1 garlic bulb, cut in half

How you do it
Preheat the oven to 180C, and lightly grease a small baking dish.
Put the cream in a small bowl and stir in the salt and pepper.
Put the parsnips into the baking dish with the garlic. Pour cream over the top, cover with foil, and cook for 45 minutes.
Remove the garlic and let cool.
When it's cool enough to handle, squeeze the soft baked garlic directly into the bowl of a food processor or blender and discard the skin.
Add the remaining ingredients and process until smooth.

Spiced carrot dip
Serves 6-8

Ingredients
250ml vegetable stock
4 medium carrots, chopped
2tbs light olive oil
1 small red onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, chopped
1 large red chilli, chopped
1 tsp fenugreek seeds
1 tsp ground cumin
sea salt and white pepper

How you do it
Put the stock in a saucepan and add the carrots, oil, onion, and garlic.
Bring it to the boil, then reduce the heat to low and simmer for 15-20 minutes until almost all the liquid has evaporated and the carrots are soft.
Add the chilli, fenugreek, and cumin, and stir fry for 2-3 minutes.
Transfer the mixture to a food processor or blender and whizz until blended but still with a rough texture.
Season to taste.

Artisan Vegan Cheese - a first go with gouda

2013-02-22T12:16:00.000-08:00

Like the authors of Andrea's Easy Vegan Cooking, Urban Vegan and Cadry's Kitchen, I've been experimenting with Artisan Vegan Cheese of late.

I'd been wanting to make vegan cheese since I tried it at Saf a few years back. When I tracked down the recipe and found it needed rejuvelac, I promptly put it to one side on my 'list of things I will do one day', a little bit behind learn to crochet and grow three inches in height.

Still, I had to get other ideas and sharpish once I opened my copy of Artisan Vegan Cheese. It persuaded me good things come to those who make wait a bit, and none of them would come without a bit of rejuvelac.

So that's what I did. Three times.

First I tried making it with quinoa. No joy - I didn't get the crisp-smelling liquid I was promised, I got a weird funky smelling white gunk. Think something you'd see on Embarassing Bodies and you're halfway there.

Then I tried it with brown rice. Same deal. Those little tails they tell you to look for coming out of the grain? No dice. The grains remained stubbornly tail-less.

For a last ditch attempt, I tried wheat and then leaving it on the radiator (it's mid-winter in England, so chilly in my flat, which might have stopped the sprouting). Success! In your face, grains!

After a few days, it was ready, and time for it to go to work helping me make some air-dried gouda.

When I popped it out of the mold, I feared the worst. It stunk. And not stunk in a pleasant, mature cheese way, more stunk in the sense of woah, that stinks.

Every day, I gave it a tentative sniff for good measure to see if it had changed from frog to prince. It didn't, and worse still, it was developing the kind of cracked surface usually reserved for the floor of a drought-striken wadi.

But after a few days, some weird alchemy happened and it become magically cheesy, all squidgy and creamy and spreadable.

Like everyone else who's made all these dairy-defying wonders, I put a load of it on a load of crackers, got some chutney involved and then mowed my way through it.

It was goooood. Did it taste like gouda? Not like I remember, no. But when it was that good, I didn't hold that against it.

More cheese must be made! I took the rest of the rejuvelac I'd made (I made a litre or so - having taken so long to get it to work I wasn't taking any chances) and started on some more cashew-packed wonders.

Watch this space for more cheeses coming up...

Quinoa (or bulghur wheat) with parsley and pine nuts - it's a classic, apparently

2013-02-19T13:07:00.000-08:00

"Serve this hot or cold – it's a take on the classic pasta dish with the same ingredients," writes Mark Hix in the Independent describing one of his recipes I cooked up this week.

Ahhh, that classic pasta dish. So classic, I've never heard of it. Anyway, I assume it's a pasta dish with raisins and pine nuts, because that's what this is. Except there's no pasta; the pasta has magically become quinoa. With me so far?

Anyway, you know the drill: I had the recipe for a while (since August last year in this case), it was taking up room in my recipes-to-make folder, and it handily featured store cupboard ingredients, allowing me to make progress on two New Year's resolutions in one go.

The recipe's a pretty easy one - boil up some quinoa, add onion and broccoli while it's cooking, then raisins, oil, parsley, chives and pine nuts once it's cooked. The recipe's here if you want to give it a go.

So that's just what I did. Except I used mainly bulghur wheat with some quinoa mixed in, as that's what I had in my store cupboard.

The results looked a little something like this:

I think I should get bonus points for preserving a Mark Hix vegan recipe for posterity. The geezer almost never cooks vegetarian stuff, let alone vegan recipes. He's the type of chef that would put steak in a fruit salad if he thought he could get away with it.

Still, the dish was perfectly edible (which is handy given it makes a metric truckload, and so I'll be taking this to work for lunch) but it didn't rock my world. It was a bit one-dimensional - it tasted like it was lacking something.

Pasta, maybe?

Feeling the Valentine's food fear with a bit of pizza

2013-02-16T00:37:00.002-08:00

OK, so I'm a bit late to the whole Valentine's posting thing. Still love is universal, and you don't need a special day to remember that you like someone.

Which is just a long-winded, romantic way of saying I was too busy to put this up earlier.

When me and my other half were just getting together, it was a good few years ago and we were a lot younger and a lot more poorly paid than we are now. He'd turn up at my door with a margharita pizza (he ate meat then, and I was yet to go vegan. Yeah, it was that long ago) and the cheapest, nastiest bottle of soave wine he could find. Why always soave? A puzzle whose answer is lost to the mists of time. I can only assume it was on special offer at the local supermarket. A lot.

Anyway, this Valentine's we decided to give the whole pizza and soave thing a go again.

Only, as I've mentioned before, I don't really like pizza. But maybe, just maybe, I thought, if I made it myself, it would actually be alright - there'd be vegan cheese and all the vegetably toppings I'd need to forgive pizza its past sins. I'd never made pizza before - it always seemed a bit too involved, and with too many moving parts to go wrong in the hands of cackhanded baker. Also, I really, really didn't like pizza. Did I mention that? Really didn't like it. Like, Jeremy Clarkson covered in spiders and meat didn't like it.

But, it was Valentine's day - more food fear to be dealt with. We made the dough together (he under duress) and cooked up the pizza sauce with tinned tomatoes, oregano, thyme, sugar, bay leaves and some fried onions and garlic.

The toppings were more caramelised onions, jarred roasted peppers, and some Japanese aubergines from dinner the other day. (Pretty sure that make this dinner some fancy-assed Fusion food right there. Or just a bit of a culinary car crash. You decide.)

For the cheese, I roped in the ever-reliable, ever-amazing cashew queso from PPK.

Here's the end result:

Excuse the bad lighting and bad photography, but that was the only bad part of this.

Doctor, I'm cured! No more pizza phobia in this corner. It was fluffy dough, creamy cheese, and vegetables. If that's wrong, I'm not being right.

And then there was some garlic bread slices from Jus-Rol which were none too shabby either. (Jus-Rol do a lot of accidentally vegan stuff, and more power to their elbow for it.

It was a good pizza and soave dinner all around. You can't see soave there, you say? You may have a point. After turning pizza from frog to prince in my mind, I didn't want to chance my arm to find out if soave had become less rancid over the last few years. There's only so many unexpected transformations you can expect on one day...

Roast vegetables and chickpeas: A vintage recipe

2013-02-11T13:42:00.003-08:00

I can only presume there's a secret newsletter that goes out to omni restaurants every year or so entitled 'the token veg*n option for the next couple of years' or 'what the unimaginative restaurants will be giving the flesh dodgers for the foreseeable future'.

Once they've got the newsletter, they all start punting out that one dish, whatever it may be, and pat themselves on the back for having done their duty towards those veg*ns. A few years back, there was a craze for veggie lasagne (often served with chips for maximum hot carb-on-carb action). These days, it's the tasteless risotto, often bothered by butternut squash.

Sometime between the lasagne and risotto periods, there was a bit of a thing for roast veggies and cous cous.

Maybe that's why I've had a recipe for something similar in my recipe stash for 2008. Yep, I've had a recipe for roasted vegetables with chickpeas for over five years. Five years, and I've never made it. I blame the ubiquity of the dish in the pubs and cafes of England for the delay. Still, five years hanging on to a recipe and not making it? What a doofus.

Anyway, after I'd made the recipe, then cooked up some giant cous cous (the funnest texture evuh) to go with it, I could see what made it such a popular meal.

It doesn't take a lot of effort to make, it ticks a lot of nutrition boxes, and it's pretty darn tasty. One more ticked off my unmade recipes list - high five all round!

The original recipe was from the Observer Food Monthly. After five years, the recipe's no longer online, so I've reproduced it here.

Ingredients
12 small mushrooms
2 ripe tomatoes, halved
1 red pepper, cut up into strips
1 yellow pepper, cut up into strips
1 red onion, cut up into wedges
1 small fennel bulb, cut into thin wedges
1 garlic bulb, broken into indiviudal cloves but not peeled
2tsp sea salt
2 tbsp olive oil
400g tin of chick peas, drained and rinsed
2 sprigs of thyme or rosemary

How you do it
Preheat the oven to 180C.
Put the mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers, onion, fennel, and garlic in a large roating tray. Sprinkle evenly with salt and drizzle with olive oil.
Roast for around 1 hour.
Remove the tray from the oven and turn the vegetables.
Add the chick peas and thyme sprigs.
Return the tray to the oven, and roast for a further 30 minutes until the edges of the vegetables are just starting to blacken and char.

Making chocolate-tahini timbales

2013-02-07T13:00:00.004-08:00

OK, so I've got the New Year's resolutions down pat - now I just need to work on keeping them.

Luckily enough, making chocolate cake can still count as doing just that - and keeping two resolutions into the bargain.

Back in May, I printed out a recipe for chocolate tahini timbales (here) from The Guardian and it's been sitting in my recipe folder since then. A few months ago, I bought some coffee liqueur because it was on special offer at the supermarket and it's been hanging around my kitchen since then. (What's that? You know a great way to get rid of booze, and it's called drinking it? Dude, I like your style.)

So, this week, when I finally got around to making the timbales - whose ingredients include coffee liqueur - I got to pat myself on the back. Yep, I got to trough away on a big chocolate dessert and feel smug about it. If it carries on like this, 2013 is going to be awesome.

I've made a few chocolate cakes in my time (yeah, me and everyone else on the planet) but I was mightily impressed with this one nonetheless. The fat comes from tahini rather than vegan margarine or something similar, so you can feel all virtuous, and all the chocolate's that posh high cocoa stuff, so more self high-fiving is in order.

The recipe also scaled down well - I only made a quarter of the recipe, and got two big ramekins of cake out of it - and was happy to be abused. It said to pipe the mix into the timbales, I decided not to bother, and still was proper chuffed with the result.

Consequently, I'm thinking of buying the cookbook the chocolate tahini timbales came from. Maybe I should add an extra New Year's resolution to the list: don't buy any more vegan cookbooks...

Feel the food fear and do it anyway, episode 2: Rum baba

2013-02-03T12:37:00.003-08:00

Rum baba! Rum baba! Rum baba!

Just saying the name of this dish makes me happy. Eating it obviously makes me even happier.

Rum babas were big the 1980s. My dad used to get one every Friday from the supermarket when I was little, and I seem to remember they looked like orangey-beige snowmen, with a bit of cream for decoration.

I didn't much like them. To my infant tastebuds, they had a weird tang that was a bit like chemicals. I subsequently realised that that tang was not some weird nail varnish remover variant, but the lovely nectar that is known as rum.

I've written before about my love for The Vegan Boulangerie, and how it just generates excellent baked goods like magic. The last recipe in the book is for a rum baba, which I've always fancied making, but thought it all seemed like too much effort. But, with my newfound commitment to making things that I thought were a bit too tricky, I decided to bust out the baba.

I followed the recipe faithfully. It was a bit like making a simple sponge but with yeast in it. It requires a bit of patience - you have to let it prove for two hours - but other than that it wasn't half as difficult as I thought.

I ended up making a baba loaf, rather than using the ring tin or savarin moulds that rum babas traditionally come in.

And I think that's why it didn't taste quite like I thought it would - I remember the baba being moist all the way through, rather than just around the outside, and if the baba was a bit smaller, then the rum and sugar liquor could have got further into the cake.

That said, it did still taste great. It was light, and sweet, and fluffy, and delicious.

According to something read a few weeks ago, rum babas are set to be big this year. Well, they're definitely big in my little corner of south London. This is one eighties trend that definitely deserves to be revived.

Using (up) my loaf

2013-01-30T14:29:00.003-08:00

More store cupboard cleaning out - this time my unwilling victim was a packet of granary flour. Yep, that one had to go. I think I may have bought it last winter, and it had been glaring out at me every time I went for the baking powder or the vanilla.

Like my pierogi experiment, it took two goes to take this one down, and you don't get to see the first one because it was a travesty of baking - the sort of thing a toddler might bring home from school, and its adoring parent would still have to smuggle it into the bin because it was fricking inedible.

For my first baking misstep, I used a Delia Smith variation on my good friend, the Doris Grant loaf recipe. It came out damp, hard, heavy and unrisen. All the things you don't want in a loaf, it was those. (Oddly enough, the other half really liked it. No accounting for taste, I guess.)

Turns out, yeast can go off and lose its magical powers. Yep, if you leave it too long past its sell-by date and open to the air, it goes on strike and won't lift your bread. Did you know that? Me neither. I do now, unfortunately.

Still, that left me half a bag of granary flour needing to be taken care of. A second attempt then.

I didn't have far to look for inspiration: there was a recipe on the back of the bag. Unlike the no-knead Doris Grant, I had to put my back into this one - kneading it for 10 minutes, leaving it to rise for an hour or something.

The second time around, this happened:

It looks like a proper loaf and everything. Turns out, if you do all that proving and kneading and all that, you get a decent loaf out of it. (Or, more importantly, if you use yeast that isn't old enough to have a driving licence, then you get a decent loaf out of it. High five!

However, I was still enjoying the smug glow of clearing out something from my cupboard when the snow fell. The immediate reaction was a spot of panic buying, and I'm now the proud owner of a 1.5 kilo bag of granary flour again. Back to the drawing (chopping?) board...

Dad's quick frankfurter casserole

2013-01-27T08:34:00.002-08:00

When I told my parents that I was becoming vegan, my mum cried. Seriously.

It wasn't quite the reaction I was expecting, but apart from the initial few tears, my parents have been oddly enthusiastic about my plant-based diet, and they're always coming up with new things to feed me when I go and see them.

This is something my dad made, which was a stroke of genius - hummus in a stew? Get out of town, you'd think. But it's really good. Give it a go. No, really - it tastes so much better than it looks.

Dad’s Quick Frankfurter Casserole
Serves 4

Ingredients
Pack Taifun Frankfurters (cut sausages into 2cm/¾in pieces)
200g pot of houmous
Pinto or cannellini beans: one 400g can, drained or 250g of cooked beans
One red pepper and one orange pepper, deseeded and chopped into thin strips
Two medium carrots, halved and thinly sliced
Two medium leeks, thinly sliced
Half a dozen closed-cap mushrooms
Three garlic cloves, peeled, made into paste – or large blob of ready-made garlic paste or mix of both
2 tbsp Dijon mustard
Vegetable stock
Salt (depending on saltiness of stock cube if using) and black pepper

How you do it
1. Slowly sweat mushrooms in frying pan. Add in garlic after a few minutes. Continue till mushrooms reduced by half.

2. Place pepper strips in saucepan cover with hot stock, cook for two mins. Add carrots to pan and cook for further two minutes, add leek to pan and cook for further three minutes. (Adding more stock or hot water as necessary.) Adjust timings depending on desired crunchiness of vegetables.)

3. Remove veg from saucepan and heat frankfurter pieces and beans in stock for a few minutes.

4. Then add mustard – and pepper (and salt if necessary) to taste. When seasoning mixed in, add houmous to seasoned stock till desired thickness achieved (if necessary more hot water).

5. Add mushrooms, pepper, carrot and leek back in and heat through.

Version two

The recipe above is my dad's way. The version I made above is basically the same thing, but with a few tweaks. I added an onion, sweated it off til caramelised, then added the garlic and carrots, cooked for a few minutes, then added in the peppers, beans (I used butter beans rather than pinto or cannelini), hotdog pieces and stock, then cooked til the veg was tender crisp. Then I stirred in the hummus - I used piri piri hummus, so I didn't use the mustard.

This is now one of my favourite standby meals - it takes 20 minutes or so, and it's great (not to mention a handy way of using up all that hummus that's almost going off and the hotdogs that are lying around.

Chocolate snowballs in the snow

2013-01-23T11:19:00.001-08:00

From the end of last week to the start of this one, there's been snow in England. Even in London, a few inches of white stuff was clinging to the streets.

So icy and grim outside was it that we got a snow day from work. What do you do with a bit of spare time away from the office? Cook, of course.

I turned to my recipe folder for some inspiration. Given the weather, I decided it was high time to make some chocolate snowballs, the recipe for which has been lingering unmade in my house for a frankly daft amount of time. Here's the little blighters in their natural environment:

It's not vegan, but I veganised it by using soy milk for the milk, Pure vegan margarine for the butter, and Alpro vanilla dessert as a replacement for the egg. If you fancy making some of your own, the recipe's over at Delicious, here.

According to the recipe online, a full measure would make 50 biscuits - I only made half measures, and it still churned out a huge barrel-load of biscuits. The biscuits were so good, with a crisp crust and a squidy middle - like a chocolately macaroon.

One disclaimer: the dough needs to sit overnight, so you can't whip up a batch in minutes. But, when there's snow coming down and there's no hope of getting outside for days, it's quite easy to make up the dough and wait for it to do its thing for a few hours.

According to the recipe online, these biscuits will last a week if you keep them in a tin for a week. A little ambitious I feel - I think I ate about six in the first hour after I made them...