Pogo Café

http://www.pogocafe.co.uk/

A great big vegan fry up

Sunday Brunch at Pogo

I’ve been to Pogo a few times now, one of the most recent visits on an invitation by a friend to try the Sunday Brunch. Given the choice between the healthy option and a huge (and I mean absolutely stacked) plate of fried breakfastness, well, it was an obviously choice. ‘Sides, It took me more than two hours to get there! I earned it! The plate included vegan sausages and facon, mushrooms, tofu scramble (one of the best I’ve had), fried potatoes as well as a hash brown, beans, and tomato.

All in all, it was a trip well worth my time. I just wish we had somewhere in Crawley where I could roll out of bed and pop to a local café for a fry up.

Dessert

Knickerbocker Glory Sundae at Pogo Café

From another visit to Pogo, but worth a mention anyway, this Sundae is a heavenly (and dairy free) interpretation of the British classic. Swedish Glace ice cream packed into a tall ice cream glass, layered with fruits sauces and nuts, this alone makes Pogo worth a visit.

Final Thoughts

Okay, so Hackey may be a pain in a typical Londoner’s arse (those not in the East of the city, at least) to get to, but make the effort. The café has all sorts of evening events too, so keep an eye out for something that interests you and enjoy an evening at one of East London’s best vegan eateries.

I’ve been the last two weeks pretty much playing non-stop with my new Vitamix, a gadget for which I’ve long yearned and have finally acquired. One of the biggest pros about the machine, from these peepers at least, is its ability to quickly and easily make nut butters. With great masses of peanut, cashew, and almond butters stacking up in my limited kitchen space, however, I needed something to actually do with it all.

Vaguely reminiscent of the popular Indian sweet Badam Pak, this vegan fudge uses an almond butter base for both texture and flavour. Almond butter is a smooth and creamy paste with a mild enough flavour to take on the stronger essences of coffee and chocolate, thus making the perfect foundation for a flavoured non-dairy fudge.

Vegan fudge recipe notes

Getting the consistency of the sugar syrup right is fairly important, but the worst that will happen if you don’t is your fudge won’t be as solid. You’ve got a couple of options at this point, the easiest being to roll tablespoonfuls into balls (which you can then coat with sugar, chopped nuts, or paperclips. Except possibly not the latter).

The second option is to remove some of the moisture by cooking the mixture further. If you opt for this choice, make sure the heat isn’t too high and that you stir constantly.

In my dairy days I would fry a soft cheese such a brie or camembert in a similar manner, and it was a real treat. This isn’t a firm replacement for the latter concept, but it’s still tasty and it looks fancy (so it’s a good dish to impress).

Recipe Notes

An easy starter, yes, but one which takes some planning ahead. You’ll need to start with a batch of vegan labneh, so it’s best to plan for this salad with a day or so worth of notice. You can make the dressing in advance, too. Add some pizazz by throwing in some thyme or other herbs if you’d like, to the dressing I mean, but for this I personally prefer an extremely basic, tangy vinaigrette. Raspberries and vinegar, with sugar to adjust the tartness.

Don’t skimp on the mint and basil chiffonade, either. And if you can’t pronounce that word, let alone be arsed to do it, just chop stuff up small and you’ll be good to go.

Well, my little ginger bambinos, meet your new sibling: Ms Spinning Teeth, known by most people as a Vitamix* (the name? My mother’s idea).

Luckily everyone seems to get along fine. D&D are more than happy to eat Ms Teeth’s concoctions, and I’m more than happy to facilitate this bonding exercise. After all, I want everyone in my family to just get along.

* that’s tofurkey on the box, right? Right.

Labneh, or strained yoghurt cheese, is a traditional Middle Eastern condiment used to prepare a number of both sweet and savoury foods. Also eaten on its own or with bread, this easy to make cheese is achieved by leaving full fat yogurt to hang in a muslin or cheesecloth sack for several hours or overnight. In my pre-vegan days, this was a favourite addition to one of my favourite meals: a gigantic mezze spread.

Ah, but how to achieve labneh without dairy?

I knew I could do this, somehow, even if not an exact replication, but how?

Miyoko Schinner’s Vegan Yoghurt

I didn’t want to simply strain soy yogurt for two major reasons: plain soy yogurt is too sweet (and is much more akin to flavourless American style “Greek” yogurts, in my opinion, than the real thing), and it’s usually far too thin.

It was this video, a cooking tutorial by Miyoko Schinner, that inspired my own endeavour. The addition of cashews thickens the yoghurt and the minimal use of store sweetened soygurts allows the bacterial to multiply and coagulate to milk sans all the other crap. It’s a fuller soy yoghurt that can be strained easily.

Recipe notes and applications

Please note that all of my suggestions and yield sizes are based on the use of homemade soy milk. That’s not to say you can’t make it with store bought milk, but if you try it I suggest buying the one with the most basic of ingredient lists. No sweeteners or artificial flavourings, por favor.

In the process of straining, you can add salt if you’d like. I usually add it after, but that’s usually out of forgetfulness rather than by preference of method. A splash of lemon juice added post-production will also add an extra tang that’s a bit more reminiscent of the original dish this is trying to mimic.

As far as other flavours go, be creative! You can add all sorts of goodies, even mixes of other non dairy cheeses, to create delicious spreads and cheeseballs. One of my favourite ways to eat this, as directed below, is with some garlic and lemon, topped with quality extra virgin olive oil and za’atar.

Stay tuned for more recipes in which to use this strained yoghurt!

Recipe Notes

I’ve included a diagram of how to cut the filo pastry, but don’t get too bent out of shape on perfection here. So long as you cover some filo with fat and bake it, you’ll end up with something edible!

You can fill these tartlets with all sorts of goodies, and they can be served either as Hors d’œuvres or as part of a main. I love them with some marrowfat peas and new potatoes!

Originally published August 30, 2006. Recipe updated to be vegan.

Unsure whether these should be called vegan au gratin potatoes or scalloped potatoes, I hit the googlenets to get down and dirty with some serious research to ascertain the difference between au gratin and scalloped. All the Yahoo! Answers responses and Wikipedia entries in the world would not prepare me for the number of serious queries about boxed and freeze dried potatoes out there.

Yes, millions of answers out there, laying latent in the hope that a functional half-wit will click through. It breaks my heart to realise what people consider to be food and that half an hour is considered an unreasonable amount of time for meal preparation. Okay, shutting up. I’ll judge the world more later.

Digging around surfaced the general concensus that the difference is vaguely semantic but commonly acknowledged as follows: potatoes au gratin are generally layered with cheese, topped with breadcrumbs, and oven-baked to obtain a crispy top layer. Scalloped potatoes, on the other hand, are cooked in a milk based white sauce.

So what happens if you combine the methods? Do I have vegan au gratin potatoes or vegan scalloped potatoes here?

Recipe Notes

Whether you call it a gratin or scalloped potatoes, this veganised version relies on a slightly atypical cooking method. Calling all folk who want a 30 minute scalloped potato dish: using the hob speeds the potato cooking up marginally and a final few minutes under the grill melts the cheese topping.

If your soy milk and yogurt mixture doesn’t cover all of the potatoes completely, don’t fret. The lid on the pan will help uncovered potatoes to steam, and if you use a good waxy new potato then they’ll cook fairly quickly anyway. If, after simmering for the instructed 15 minutes, your potatoes aren’t close to being done then try adding some more soy milk and yogurt and continue cooking for a little longer.

For the cheese topping, I used a mixture of Daiya cheddar style shreds, smoked Sheese, and grated toffuti mozzarella, but feel free to use whichever vegan cheese you prefer. Come to think of it, any creamy sauce would most likely work as well.

Mushroom and ale pie, ale and mushroom pie. Doesn’t it sound so, I don’t know, rustic? I mean I know I’ve been living in the UK for nine years now, but I still have these overstated fantasies of provincial England. You know, homemade bread, pie, jam tarts. Romantic, overstated and embellished non-existant England. Unless you live in my head, in which case all English people are buddies with rainbow coloured ponies who have hearts for eyes and frolic under always blue skies and sunshine day in and day out whilst I bake. PIES.

Yeah, I know, that sunshine and blue skies thing sort of takes it over the top. And everybody knows ponies only come in a maximum of five colours so Roy G. Biv just isn’t possible in this scenario.

Recipe notes

This vegetarian mushroom and ale pie recipe makes enough to serve four, provided you’ve got some veggies on the side. Think typical here: peas (mushy or not) and potatoes. My preference? Roasted spuds and minted peas, topped with either a mushroom or red wine gravy. I love me a heap of puff pastry with a Sunday roast, the way the gravy soggifies (yes, that’s not officially a word*) part of the pastry while the rest stays cripsy and golden.

*in my head, anyway. I spend a lot of time there. Can you tell?

Reason number one, however, has nothing to do with perceived value in a brand; it’s all about flavour and control, consistency and general all-around mind-blowing awesomeness. Yes, because homemade tofu kicks the arse of anything you’ll purchase off the shelf.

Tofu used to disgust me. Then something happened to change my mind: I went to China. Cliché or not, my venture into bean curd as a food occured at at Gong de Lin restaurant in Beijing, and it’s one of my most treasured memories to date. But here’s a tip, folks: if you don’t know how to use chopsticks, I highly recommend you don’t begin your education with a steaming pot silken tofu. My wrists swollen and aggrieved by what I’d put them through, I still went on to try every tofu dish I could find, and returned home determined to devour as much bean curd as I could find.

Alas, I was disappointed. Nothing was the same as the tofu in Asia. One more trip to the Southeast a year or two later saw me return home once more with a new goal in mind. I would make my own tofu, and experiment ’til blue in the face to obtain a good, firm tofu that didn’t taste like the culinary equivalent of meh. Here’s one of my basic tofu recipes, using a Soy Quick, for a good, solid firm cake.

The tofu making arsenal

Tofu is really easy to make. Granted the supplies you need look like a lot, but I’d be willing to bet you have most of what you need already. The two things you’re not likely to have are a tofu mould/press and coagulant, perhaps soybeans too.

• Dried soy beans can be purchased pretty easily these days. I buy in bulk, up to 25 kilograms at a time, and store them in a supersized tupperware box under the sofa.
• A blender or soy milk maker is necessary to make the soy milk, which you need prior to curdling it to obtain the curds for tofu. I use a Soy Quick machine, but a blender should work fine too as the process is essentially one of blending soaked beans with hot water and straining to acquire soymilk.
• Straining tools are hence useful, since it helps you skim loose bits of soy pulp out of the milk and aids in separating the curds from the whey in the final stages.
• A large pot with a lid doubles as a receptacle for the fresh soy milk as well as a holding pen for the curdled milk before it’s strained.
• Some sort of coagulant, such as nigari or gypsum (calcium sulfate), is a must to turn your milk into curd.
• Plenty of thin muslin fabric or thick cheesecloth will help form the tofu as well as allow liquid to escape while holding the curds inside.
• A tofu mould lets you press the curd, once drained from the whey, into what you’d recognise as tofu. This is one piece of kit you probably don’t have and won’t find easily, but you can ghetto craft it out of old tupperware (drill some holes), find a cheap plastic one online, or go all out and find a nice wooden crafted one (my dad made mine because he’s awesome). You could even use a colander lined with muslin (you just don’t have a uniform block of tofu is all). Needless to say, you have many options.

Making the Fresh Soy Milk

Soak about 350g of soy beans (that’s 4 of the cups Soy Quick provides worth of dried beans) overnight. When you’re ready to make your soy milk, drain the water and rinse the beans. The soaked and drained weight of the beans will be in the 875g ball park.

Place 220 grams (approximately 25%) of the soya beans into the basket of your Soy Quick machine and fill the jug to somewhere close to the higher mark (about 1.5 litres of water). Run the machine on a single cycle, remove the basket, discard the pulp, and add another 220g soy beans to the basket. Run the machine again with these beans in the original batch of soy milk.

You’ll notice a layer of foam and random pulp on the milk when it’s done, which you can strain away if you want a smoother tofu.

So once the second cycle is finished, skim the foam away from the top of the milk, but don’t worry too much about getting everything out (you could be there for days). You just want to move the majority of the visible stuff away.

Keep it warm, buddy!

Pour the first batch of milk into a large dutch oven or pot and place a lid on to keep the heat in.

Repeat the soy milk making process above with the remaining two lots of soy beans to make a second batch of milk.

Coagulate that soy milk, kiddo!

Mix 3 teaspoons of flaked nigari with 200ml of boiling water, and set aside.

Once the second batch of soy milk is made, skim it and pour it into the pot too. The soy milk needs to be pretty hot here, so just to be on the safe side pop the hob on for a few minutes to get some heat through the fresh milk. Just be sure to stir the whole time.

When the milk comes close to a boil, remove from the heat and stir it very rapidly so you get something like a whirlpool effect going on in there.

Remove the spoon with which you’re stirring and slowly pour the nigari mixture across the spinning milk. Pop the lid back on and leave it for about ten minutes.

When you remove the lid, you should see something like this. Basically, any liquid left should be clear, a yellowish green colour. That’s the whey, and the white stuff is what’s going to become your tofu very soon. If any liquid is still cloudy, try mixing the pot’s contents a bit by shaking it about (though try avoiding my trick of just dumping it all over the stovetop). If that isn’t enough, add a little more coagulant and leave for another few minutes with the lid on.

Give yourself some space for error here. It takes a bit of experimentation to find what works best for you. Sometimes I mix nigari with gypsum to coagulate, and other times I use just gypsum. There are endless combinations to achieve a consistency you like best. Worst case scenario: you waste a little soy milk because it hasn’t all coagulated, or you over-coagulate the milk and end up with smaller curds and less yield. Not the end of the world.

Other coagulants include sea water, lemon juice, liquid nigari, and vinegar. My recommendation is to use nigari and/or gypsum (calcium sulfate) to make your own tofu. Lemon juice and vinegar won’t yield as much and the flavour won’t be quite the same. I order nigari online, and I’ve found gypsum in kitchen shops (in the beer making section).

Straining a-whey (har har)

Wow, that was bad.

At this point it’s best to move everything you’re about to do close to the sink, just for convenience.

I’ve found the easiest way to separate the soy curds and whey is with your basic mesh strainer and a tea cup. Pop the mesh into the pot, and use the cup to collect and discard the liquid.

You should be able to remove the majority of the whey with this method, but a little will still remain. That’s okay.

Alternatively, you can line a colander with your muslin or cheesecloth and strain the whole lot by pouring it in there. I personally just find my method quicker and easier.

Moulding the soy curd into tofu

Place your tofu mould into the sink and line it with muslin. Spoon the curds in (I use a smaller straining spoon to do this in order to drain away any remaining whey). You can just dump the whole lot in if you’re not a slob like me who’s likely to chuck the whole thing over the side of the sink.

Put the lid on/in the box and press with your desired weight. It won’t come as a surprise to most folks that the harder you press the tofu, the more firm it will be. If you want a really soft tofu, use little weight and little time.

To make a very firm tofu, I usually press the bean curd in the box for twenty minutes or so with a cutting board and a pot of water on top. Then I wrap the cake in a tea towel and further press it for at least ten minutes. Again, this will take some experimenting to achieve what’s the perfect consistency and texture to you for your chosen use of the end product.

Fresh homemade tofu

And there is is, folks! It seems more complicated than it is, but it’s really fast, economical, and easy. If you don’t have a Soya Milk maker, don’t fret. A blender and hot water is an acceptable alternative!

Refrigerate the tofu to store (it’ll keep on its own for a few days, but you can stick it in some liquid too). Be sure to try some while it’s still warm and freshly made though, because that’s when it’s at its best and I think you’ll certainly be able to taste a big difference. I know I can.

If you’re really interested in making your own soy products, I highly recommend purchasing a copy of The Big Book of Tofu, by William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi. It’s how I got started making my own tofu, and it’s full of interesting and useful facts about our friend the soy bean.

My partner hates tomatoes, despite my argument that they’re different in the summer. I go on about it a lot, I know, but I always hated them too. I mean hated them with a passion unless they were boiled and blended into a smooth sauce. It was Britain that changed my attitude. While I still don’t love them raw as much as I’d love to love a raw tomato, one of the greatest culinary treats to me has become lightly roasted baby plum toms.

Crap, I had a point to all of this.

I was never a fan of broad beans until recent years. Known as fava beans in the US, I don’t remember ever knowingly consuming one (though I can’t quite believe I’d never had them before). Anyhow, I’d certainly never consumed a fresh broad bean. Here in the UK they’re all over the greengrocers’ shelves right now, and I’m learning to enjoy them in a multitude of ways: fried, boiled, and only ever with mild flavours to accompany this bean.

Oh, the point: my partner the tomato hater thoroughly enjoyed this pasta salad so, you know, you should give a try too if you self-label as anti-tomato.

Recipe Notes

As with many of my recipes, there’s room here for more or less of most ingredients. Love the tomatoes? Throw some more in the oven! Can’t get enough of the sweet basil taste? Chuck in another tablespoon. I’m sure this would also be good with some lightly roasted nuts (like cashews or smoked almonds)!

I mentioned in the directions you could pound the garlic, oil, and lemon juice with a pestle and mortar for a more raw garlic taste, but I’d be weary of serving this to any guests you don’t know well unless you leave it overnight to chill in strength a bit. Raw garlic can be quite overpowering!

Terre a Terre (Great Growers Menu)

http://www.terreaterre.co.uk/

Starter

Pulborough’s Asparagus Army at Terre a Terre

I was excited for this because after trying samphire for the first time ever this year, I was looking forward to some more. Unfortunately my plate came with only a mere sprinkling of this marshy vegetable, but my friend had plenty so graciously shared. I should have complained, really, but I was so taken aback by the soup that I sort of forgot about the rest of the dish. Creamy, perfectly salted, and delicious, this soup makes broad beans even more heavenly than they already are.

Broad bean lemon thyme espresso with samphire, linseed flowery leaf relish and fried asparagus soldiers.

Main

Lettuce and Lovage at Terre a Terre

This was so good I licked the plate. Well, almost, but my lunch buddy did say something along the lines of “I wondered how long it’d be before you did something ridiculous.” Okay, so table etiquette may not be my forté, but I know a good meal when I have one, and this was sublime.

British pea and parsley pikelets with St Germain sauce, a warm salad of seared lettuce, shallots and baby potatoes, finished with lovage salt and mint oil.

Dessert

Raspberry Rumble at Terre a Terre

I’d heard good reviews of this pudding, and they were certainly accurate at the very least. This. Dessert. Was. Outstanding. I don’t care who you are and where you live, get your arse on a plane/in a car/on a train/in the hold of a boat, and come eat this. Now.

Raspberry frangipane tartine served with raspberry sorbet.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve never had a meal at Terre a Terre, for whatever reason, set aside a few quid from your next pay day and treat yourself. It remains one of my favourite restaurants for a number of reasons. While their vegan options may be limited, the menu changes often enough and there’s always something to entice my appetite.

It never ceases to amaze me how few okara recipes there are available. That was a bit of an overstatement, but I mean I always just see things like “oh, I throw it in muffins” rather than concrete recipes. There are a few good recipes out there, like Fat Free Vegan’s “Crab” Cakes and the repository at Ellen’s Kitchen, but in general the pickings are slim.

So here’s a dead simple recipe with tasty results, a thick burger made from okara. I really want to get some more okara recipes out there since it’s such a nutritious thing to waste (for those who make their own soy milk, you can probably relate with the guilt felt when throwing yet another batch in the bin). If you have any suggestions, please, by all means share them!

Recipe Notes

These okara burgers are more like the beefier of the frozen veggie dealios you pick up at your supermarket. No vegetables here, I’m afraid (but technically wine contains fruit, so it totally counts as healthy). Experiment with the spices all you want, but I recommend sticking with the yeast extract because it really imparts a beefy flavour. Finally, for a less firm burger try using a little more liquid in the mix.

For years I’ve read about this seasonal goodie, the edible flower of the summer squash which we know as courgette (or zucchini, depending on where you’re from). It’s a vegetable which takes over supermarket shelves in late summer, but sadly the blossoms rarely come attached to their counterpart. For the first time in, well, ever, I found some at a farm shop last weekend. My initial reaction was to greedily purchase the entire basket, but I settled with a mere half dozen.

I should have gone with the whole basket.

Recipe notes

What to do? Make stuffed courgette flowers? Yes. Deep fried in beer batter? Most definitely.

For the beer batter I used a moderately light lager, Becks if I remember correctly. I’d stick with light, even so much as something like Corona. If you don’t consume alcohol, try soda water instead.

And yes, I realise Daiya cheese isn’t available here in the UK. I hoard it like my mother hoards cereal on sale (sorry mom, it was the best analogy I could think of), using it sparingly for a treat (I go to the US a couple of times a year). Try any melty vegan cheese here, a cheddar or mozzarella style preferably, and it’ll be good.

Apple sauce is one of those things, much like peanut butter, that doesn’t seem to have entered into the British repetoire of foods until recently. Even still I face raised eyebrows and averted eyes when I mention my love of apple sauce. “You… you eat it plain?” they say, like it’s a crime. Yes, yes, yes, and so should you! I figured with traditional Pimm’s, probably the nation’s second drink (next to tea, naturally), maybe someone would give it a go. This is an easy recipe, perfect for a warm summer’s evening, an easy vegan applesauce with strawberries and spices.

Recipe Notes

A few weeks ago, I picked up some Saigon cinnamon and have since been keen to try it out. It’s the strongest and sweetest cinnamon you can buy, so a little goes a long way. You may have correctly deduced this means to use more cinnamon if you’ve only got the standard variety on hand, but I highly recommend seeking the Vietnamese stuff out.

Popular in the U.K., Pimm’s is a gin-based alcoholic drink with spicy citrus undertones, often consumed with fizzy lemonade mixed with fruits and mint. Here it’s used as the main base in cooking down the apples, and complements the final flavour well. If you don’t have any Pimm’s on hand, try a mix of gin and orange juice, or wholly the latter. You may want to cut down on sugar if you use all juice.

If you want a real treat, layer strawberry apple sauce with vanilla soy yoghurt, topped with ginger cookie crumbs!

Manna Vegetarian

http://www.mannav.com/

Starters

Crispy marinated tofu (top right) and Manna mezze platter, including, from left to right: spring rolls, smoky tofu & potato roulade, and living pad thai.

For starters we ordered the Manna Mezze platter, which offered a choice of 3 appetisers on one plate. The Living Pad Thai was one of my favourites, and not just because it was everyone else’s least favourite (hence I pretty much got to eat it all). It’s a tangy raw salad with mild chili undertone with a great balance of flavours. I’d order it again.

raw carrots, courgettes, red cabbage, chinese leaves, mung bean sprouts, basil, mint and cashews in a white almond chilli sauce.

A good complement to the pad thai, the similar ingredients are well suited to these Vietnamese style spring rolls. Plus I got all the sweet chili sauce all to myself. Bring it on!

rice paper wrap, julienned carrots, red pepper, mange tout, shitake mushrooms, chinese leaves, thai basil & mint with a peanut sesame dip & chilli sauce.

I think it’s safe to say the smoky tofu & potato roulade was everyone’s favourite. Smooth, smoky, and delicious, if you’ve got to chose only one starter then this should be it.

a light potato roll with an oyster mushroom & herbed tofu filling.

“It smells like deep fry!” was one friend’s comment as soon as the crispy tofu hit the table. Naturally that’s probably in the top 5 of her compliment repetoire, so I’m pretty sure it was a hit. I tried a small piece and what can I say? You can’t knock the effects of hot oil.

Mains

Organic Spaghetti & Meatfree Balls at Manna

Two friends ordered the Organic Spaghetti & Meatfree Balls, a dish which Manna’s evidently fairly well known for in the veg community. I stole a taste of the sauce when no one was looking (okay she was looking, but I think she was finished) and it was pretty tasty. No complaints from their end, anyway!

Basil & Cashew Pesto Tortiglioni from Manna

A plate of the organic pasta of the day also landed on our table, and as it was next to me the sampling was less tricky. When I go out to eat, I generally avoid pasta dishes as I want to order something that wouldn’t be so easy to make at home. That doesn’t mean I don’t drool over them because, let’s face it, pasta is pretty much one of the most gnarly (goal of the night: use gnarly more often) things ever, and the pesto sauce here was pretty damned good.

green bean, cherry tomato, courgette tortiglioni with a basil & cashew pesto.

Pea & potato smokey bean curd chimichanga at Manna

And my main, the chef’s special, which just happened to tickle my fancy (I’d just picked up a load of  goodies from the Taqueria, so Latin American food was on the brain). The avocado was a bit less than ripe, but it’s also ridiculously hard to find a good one in this country. Otherwise the dish was delicious, and the black bean and mango salsa was perfect. I’m also always happy when I eat out and the rice I’m served is minimal (far too often restaurants go the cheap route and serve more rice than anything, presumably as a filler). The chimichanga filling was thick and smooth, a creamy smokey portion of vegetables and tofu that would fill anyone’s belly substantially. If you like Latin food but no spice, this is perfect.

pea potato smokey bean curd chimichanga with lime basmati rice, red pepper chipotle sauce, mango black bean salsa, and guacamole.

Desserts

manna fruit crumble

Manna banoffe trifle

Clearly we went all out with the puddings, and the petit fours were a “trweat,” a complimentary extra from following Manna on Twitter. The banofee trifle and the chocolate mousse were the winners of the day in my opinion, so when you’re next there and staring that desert menu down, here’s a tip: just go ahead and order them both. The mousse is the best I’ve had; vegan chocolate mousse is both easy to make and make taste good, but this was simply divine. And the trifle, it was massive, and amazing, and gone before I could reach my spoon back into my friend’s quickly empty dish.

chocolate & green tea mousse

chocolate brownie and ice cream

manna petits fours

The other puddings were good as well (though I wasn’t expecting biscuits when the petit fours were announced). So sweetly, the kitchen added a happy birthday message to the plate of my friend’s crumble, a really nice touch. One thing I do wish, however, is that vegan restaurants would consider something more than Swedish Glace for ice cream. I know the commercial options are limited, but there must be an ice cream shop or gelateria out there who’d be up for the job?

Final Thoughts

Manna is a lovely restaurant in a choice location, complete with good food and more than amiable staff (something with which more British establishments could do). It’s not cheap, but then again I don’t think food should be. I’m of the opinion that a meal out should be a treat, and that’s precisely what you’ll get when (not if) you visit Manna. We’ll definitely be returning.

When it comes to snacks and dinner party appetisers, sometimes the simplest things are best; this gourmet vegan cheese ball (hey, it looks gourmet, even if it’s easy) is no exception. I feel like I’ve said that about something else recently. I get paranoid about repeating myself too much. Four gold stars to the person who can find where I’ve already said that. Metaphorical stars. Invisible ones. Use your imagination, okay?

You remember those containers of plastic cheese (yes, the adjective “plastic” refers to the cheese as well as its receptacle) your mother would pick up from Sam’s Club or Costco, or whatever your local cash and carry megagluttony store might have been? Specifically, do you remember the port wine ones? Yeah, that stuff was pretty much one of the best tasting things ever. I mean, I don’t even know how I didn’t have a heart attack at age 11 based on how much of that I consumed.

Recipe Notes

Okay, so point being this non-dairy cheese ball is reminiscent of the port wine spread. I used sherry here, but feel free to use a port wine too for a stronger flavour (but don’t expect that red and orange streaked nonsense without astronomical rations of dye).

This makes a great vegan cheese pasta sauce too! Just mix it with a bit of margarine and/or pseudo cream cheese to bulk it up and add an extra creamy texture (if that’s your thing). Perfect with a side of garlic bread, but then again what isn’t?

There is nothing better than a British tomato in season. That is, until I consume the next batch of national seasonal illustriousness, in which case that will likely be the best thing ever. What can I say? I’m fickle.

Have I mentioned 10,001 times yet how much I love this time of year for seasonal produce?

But there’s one unfortunate aspect of life in the UK (and I mean aside from that harebrained pile of nonsense that is the study guide to becoming a UK citizen), and that’s the distinct lack of one of my other favourite provisions: the velvety avocado. Oh you can get them here, sure, but to find the perfectly ripened fruit is rare. I’ll stand in the produce aisles poking and prodding each specimen of each variety, closely inspecting the stem, often leaving empty handed. Every once in awhile, however, I’ll find a gem.

A sweet and tangy tomato pairs well with the lovely avocado, so give this puff pastry tart a try! It’s certainly the right time of year to be enjoying this sort of thing, even if the weather has been crap. Just throw a salad alongside and call it summer. That’ll make it so, right?

Is it wrong of me to compose two posts in a row which use potatoes as the principle constituent of the dish in question? It’s the Jersey Royal season, so it’s hard for me to not eat them constantly. Embrace seasonality and fill your belly with as many of these velvety spuds as you can, I tell you!

You know those indecisive days, the ones where you crave a selection of foods for dinner? Yesterday was one of those days. A bag of creamy jerseys sat on my countertop and sacks of leafy spinach were hidden away in my fridge, plus I was determined to use some of the Daiya I smuggled back from the states. Oh, and there had to be cumin involved, but curry wasn’t going to fit the bill. I quite fancied some corn too.

I had to let my itch for ice cream go. No one’s that good.

Recipe Notes

Perfect if you’re having guests around, try making these in individual oven proof dishes to maintain the layers when serving. If you can find some then I recommend topping them with a mix of Daiya cheeses, not just for visual effect, but for taste. Sadly Daiya isn’t yet available in the UK, but any meltable mozzarella substitute should work. I imagine a mix of that and the orange tofutti slices, despite sounding a bit naff, would be pretty awesome (they taste somewhat similar to the Daiya cheddar style shreds and melt well).

Anyhow, if you’re looking for recipes with new potatoes and spinach, you’re in the right place.

Okay, so it’s just potato salad for eff’s sake. Does the world need yet another potato salad recipe, dairy free or not?

This is where I come up with a tremendously prodigious response along the lines of “OMFG one potato salad to rule them all, with stars, hearts, lots of exclamation points and stuff! YEAH!”

No.

It’s just potato salad, but it’s really good, and vegan yoghurt makes a way better sour cream substitue than any commercially available substitute I’ve tried. Give it a try. In fact, I need to make some more since the dude out there ate it all.

Recipe Notes

Branston pickle, for those who’ve never heard of it, is a sweet and tangy pickled relish containing a whole melody of uniformly diced veggies (which you can’t pick out individually). A brand suffering from low-key genericide, Branston Pickle is often used to refer to any sort of sweet brown pickle relish, and any such variety will do for the purpose of this recipe. If you don’t have any approximation then don’t stress because it’ll still taste good; you could even try dicing up some jarred pickles instead.

This vegan potato salad recipe makes a fair amount of dressing (hey, I like creamy stuff), so consider cutting back on some of the yoghurt if that’s going to be an issue for your digestive bits. That’s also why I gave a range in the quantity of potatoes to use, if you must know.

Darbster

http://darbster.com

So we, the “we” being the dude I married and I, just returned from a holiday to Florida. “Florida?!” you say? Yes, Florida. Not my ideal destination as my idea of fun isn’t spending $80 to wait in epic queues with pushy folk and their greedy offspring, but here’s the thing: Florida has some cool stuff. Science stuff. Space stuff.

I got to go to India for my 30th and this was Paul’s birthday trip. See, he got to see the first moon landings on telly; this made it just a little bit of a big deal to actually visit Kennedy. Plus we got to see a shuttle launch, to boot!

But all that’s just me gushing and being all “woo science” and all. What you want is to hear about a cool vegan restaurant, yes? Allow me to introduce Darbster.

Starter

Trees Wings

There’s no denying these are nothing more than Gardein buffalo wings, but I’m thankful we ordered them because it introduced us to yet another gorgeous Gardein product.

Buffalo style wings with ranch and celery.

Mains

Darbster Enchiladas

Paul’s dinner choice, the enchilada dish rated high in his books. Not spicy and with an authentic Southwest flavour, this is the sort of food Britain is missing from its menus. Served with rice and beans, this was an excellent and wholly acceptable meal!

Authentic cheez & onion with beans and rice.

Chille Relleno at Darbster

While I enjoyed my choice of entrée, despite it being served on the cool side, I must admit it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. Before ordering I’d been advised it wasn’t very spicy, but the correct answer would have been “not at all,” since it was in fact a bell pepper rather than the traditional poblano. This didn’t stop me from stuffing the whole thing into my face though, and boy would I like Darbster’s batter recipe. I ordered the chille releno with a side of mac and cheese and coleslaw, both of which were very nice.

Fried, stuffed with veggies and cheeze served with sauce.

Final Thoughts

By the time we found Darbster we hadn’t really consumed a proper meal in a few days, so believe me when I say this restaurant put the greatest smile on this vegan’s face. Should I find myself in the area ever again, I will most certainly return. The mac and cheese side absolutely made my day.

Strawberries are one of the many foods which are only worth my while fresh when they’re in season and local. Call me a snob, but these a fruit that do not ripen properly when picked early; this means those which come from a distance rarely make the cut when it comes to flavour. I’ll take a local British strawberry any day, even if it means the supplies are limited to just a couple of months of the year. These cookies were made from some of my first strawberry purchases of the season.

I often like to over-complicate my food. When it comes to strawberries, however, I’m firmly of the opinion that some things deserve to be simple. These strawberry and chocolate cookies are far from complicated and are dead easy. Try serving them with a dollop of soy whipped cream!

Not that I’m complaining, mind. I’m rather pleased to have such non fussy eaters in my life.

You know how much of a sucker I am for any food that’s even remotely arabic. I mean, come on, how could you go wrong with a cuisine which can use so few ingredients, often the same ones again and again, to achieve such a bountiful display of flavour and general awesomeness? If you’re in any way as big a fan as I am then I have a feeling you’ll enjoy this vegan spinach börek recipe.

A term to cover multiple definitions

The concept of börek is more a method than a dish in itself as there are tens of ways you can prepare these pastries. Originally Turkish, it’s a dish now popular all over the Middle East and also in Eastern Europe. The most basic components of börek are simple: pastry, filled and baked or fried. Wrapped, rolled, or layered, this classic concept covers a broad range of recipes. The recipe below is based on the idea of sigara börek, or cigar filo pastries.

Recipe Notes

This doesn’t have to be a precise recipe. Use chard (silverbeet) if you want, or vary the quantities. Add nuts or TVP. Go crazy! Culinary crazy, not tinfoil hat crazy; ice-cream and string do not make good börek filling.

These spinach cigar börek pastries are meant as a main meal, so they’re bulky and dinner plate friendly. If you’re looking for a party treat, use more pastry (in smaller pieces) and less spinach to create smaller cigars. The bonus of serving these as a main meal is there’s no harm done if they explode a bit and the spinach oozes out of the filo.

If you want to bulk the meal up a bit, serve the sigara börek on a bed of steamed couscous or a freshly made toubouleh salad.

222 Veggie Vegan

http://www.222veggievegan.com

This restaurant works extremely well with its allocated space, a small dining area and kitchen, but don’t be surprised with some repeats on the menu as a result. My partner once had a mushroom soup which was gorgeous, but was effectively the same sauce that came with his main (the stroganoff). Luckily, lover of mushrooms that he is, this wasn’t a problem.

Anyhow there are greater issues at stake, bigger soyfish to fry, like the fact that their avocado pomodoro starter is to die for and if you don’t try it immediately you will likely die.

Starter

Avocado Pomodoro at 222 Veggie Vegan

If for nothing else, this appetiser makes the trip worth it. Baked avocado is a real treat, and this creamy lovefest of joy on my plate definitely got my droolers going.

Sliced avocado with tomato sauce and vegan cream, straight from the oven. An ideal way to sharpen your taste buds before the main course.

Main

Broccolini Di Parma at 222 Veggie Vegan

Nothing extraordinary, but still highly palatable and definitely delicious, I’ve ordered this twice. It’s cute, fun, and very filling, and I’d definitely recommend anyone try it.

Fresh pancakes stuffed with tofu cottage cheese, broccoli, and pimento sauce, re-baked drawing out the fine flavour. Served with sautéed baby potatoes.

Dessert

222 Pancake at 222 Veggie Vegan

Remember what I said about the avocado starter? Scratch that because this is where it’s really at. The sauces are like a creamy pudding both in flavour and texture, something I’ve missed for years as a veggie. Go and get it. Now.

Vanilla ice cream wrapped in a wholemeal pancake, topped with warm vanilla and chocolate sauce.

Final Thoughts

I’d definitely return to 222 and would recommend anyone try it. While it’s not my favourite vegan restaurant, nor the best at which I’ve eaten, it’s a lovely spot with nice staff and good food.

A popular topic amongst families of mixed dietery needs is the highly esteemed Sunday lunch. For many families in Britain, this is the most dependable meal of the week, a beacon at the end of the tunnel of Monday to Friday madness. It’s a time for the family to sit down together, to enjoy a meal, to warm up on a freezing spring Sunday (since apparently it’s winter here in Southeast England).

Ah, but what if nan’s just taken on vegetarianism or your daughter’s vegan boyfriend is coming around to disrupt your valued family time enjoy a meal? There’s always the reliable Fry’s chicken burgers (these do go well with roast spuds, I must admit) or Redwoods roasts, but if you’re looking for something that’s les prep-prepared then there are still options.

Recipe Notes

I personally love a pastry based component of a roast, the way the top stays lovely and crisp while the bottom soaks in the gravy and goes slightly soggy. Gross? Not at all; a good gravy should flavour everything on that heaped Sunday plate!

These pies are delicate but wholesome and filling, with a creamy centre containing the considerably underestimated (at least in the UK) sweet potato. They’re also good cold, so make a good addition to any picnic. Likewise, these pies are an ideal part of any underachiever’s breakfast (hello? Open fridge. Shove something in face. The end).

Try making a great big pie or swapping ingredients around. This is more of a suggestion of method rather than content, though I’m of the opinion that this filling is good as it is. Obviously. Plus it doesn’t require any special pans to achieve a clever pie shaped pie.

It’s hard to avoid beginning too many posts with “I love <insert name of recipe I’m blogging about here>…” because, well, why would I cook stuff I don’t like and then tell you to eat it? The thing is, I really, really love noodles. Noodles are not only my homeboy, but they are also a biological requirement for my diet. That is, if I don’t have them often, I will cry. Udon, a thick wheat noodle popular in Japan, are one of my favourite types, and they go perfectly with a simple vegan dashi broth like in the recipe below.

Recipe Notes

Not surprisingly, this isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about an udon noodle recipe. This is similar in basic ingredients, but packs a little more flavour in with the additional vegetables and toasted sesame seeds.

If you don’t have toasted sesame seeds and don’t know how to make them, it’s easy! Just heat a large pan over medium heat and dry fry sesame seeds for a few minutes, shaking the pan often to ensure they toast evenly.

I sure do use the word “awesome” a lot, don’t I?

Happy Cinco de Mayo!

This month marks the release of Terry Hope Romero’s much anticipated Viva Vegan! I am just dying for this book. An American expat misses Latin American food more than, well, more than a great analogy I can’t think of (suggestions are welcome). The thought of getting my grubby mits on what rumour is saying is quite the fabulous book has left me desperate for something South of the border in flavour, and these vegan taquitos are the result.

I’ve been sitting on this for a week or two, but seeing as it’s the 5th of May it seems an appropriate time to share.

It’s good. Really good. I ate them for breakfast the day I made them.

Mexican Food in the UK

Londoners searching for corn tortillas (and other goodies like corn husks) should look no further than the Cool Chile Company for authentic Mexican ingredients. And no, those Old El Paso yellow things don’t count.

Taquito making, by picture

Softening the corn tortillas

Wrapping and pinning the tortillas

Frying the taquitos

Every month or two, some of my vegan pals and I like to get together for a meal out or a pot luck (translation: food coma event). Last Saturday held our most recent event, hosted by the lovely Jojo at the home of her and her partner in Brighton.

I have this theory, one that dictates vegans must photograph every single thing they intend to consume. Is it a defensive method of cataloguing proof that we eat more than rice and lentils, or are we just a product of a new trend? Either way, do a search for vegan on Flickr and I promise you’ll be drooling in no time.

Among this event’s spread were a selection of brownies and cookies, nut cheeses and crackers, sausage rolls, an awesome pasta and rocket salad, potato wedges, spinach borek, rice salad, and more. My contributions included vegan fortune cookies, sun dried tomato bread and pesto cream “cheese,” plus a carrot and rosemary tart.

Vegan Jaffa Cakes

Mini Fruit Pies

The cutest food award officially goes to Sal!

I would lie if I said I didn’t eat much pasta. Whether it’s in the form of noodles, gyoza, or macaroni, I’m a sucker for boiled pieces of dough. At least I try to maintain variety (were it up to my partner, we’d eat pasta every night of the week).

One of the family staples during my time at university (an era which is sadly retreating further and further into the past) was a tomato and mascarpone cheese pasta bake, a straight-out-of-the-jar meal which satisfied two teenage boys and had the additional benefit of taking minimal effort to prepare. These were in the days before I got really into cooking (thank goodness I didn’t continue on to grad school, right?)

Needless to say, I don’t consume that sauce now I’m vegan, but it’s still possibly to obtain a creamy texture and taste without dairy, butternut squash being a fine ingredient to accomplish such a consistency.

Plus I just needed to use up some leftover butternut squash.

Very simple to make and tasty to eat, this recipe for marsh samphire is perfect for a warm spring or summer evening.

A brief look at samphire

This is a plant of which I’d not heard until very recently. Having never seen it for sale before, I quickly forgot about the existance of this somewhat rare plant, but upon spotting it at London’s Borough Market a couple of weeks ago I quickly grabbed a few handfuls.

Marsh samphire, also known sometimes as glasswort or sea asparagus, is a plant which thrives in saline environments (a halophyte, if you’re into that sort of knowledge). The cactus-like plant can be found along salty marshes and coastal areas in Britain and the USA, and is worth seeking out if you can.

Recipe notes

Astute readers of this blog will have likely noted minimal quantities of salt in the majority of my recipes. When I prepared this marsh samphire dish, I omitted all but a small pinch of salt because samphire is naturally salty. Hence, if you cook with it, I recommend erring on the side of less salt until you first try the end result.

The recipe below prepares enough for two, but as more of a light meal than a substantial plateful. If you want to bulk it up then I suggest upping the quinoa and samphire quantities, and adding a bit more lemon and dill.

This is a simple and wholesome banana cookie bar, a perfect on the go morning snack (as much as I hate the concept of food on the go). These dairy free banana bars are thin and light, with minimal fat (especially if you avoid the peanut butter icing) and have a texture which is chewy but still fairly light.

A sideline: Bananas were always one of those fruits which were very neutral in my mind; a take them or leave them sort of attitude prevailed. That is, until I visited Southeast Asia for the first time. This had two opposing effects on me: I realised how divine a banana could be and I came to understand I’d never again appreciate a banana at home the way I could in a native environment. So I pretty much gave up eating bananas, saving them for cooking and the occasional smoothie.

Nothing beats the nutty, creamy taste of a ripe avocado, and this oven baked avocado recipe really shows off the characteristics of the decadent fruit. The avocado is baked lightly and served warm with a tangy tomato sauce and sweet cashew coulis, the entire stack resting on a bed of lightly fried vegetables.

This baked avocado recipe was inspired by one served at London’s 222 Veggie Vegan restaurant. Similar but not quite the same, I promise this avocado recipe won’t disappoint.

If you’re a bit weary of baking avocado, just go ahead and give it a try. It sounds odd, but the only difference is the fruit is a) warmer and b) creamier. The former adjective, I realise, would appear to be a given seeing as this is a baked avocado recipe, but sometimes common sense comes at a premium. I may be talking about myself.

Layering the avostack

Avostack. What an excellent word.

Look, you’re not going to screw up how it tastes so long as you have the four basic components: the tomato sauce, the baked avocado slices, the fried vegetables, and the cream sauce. Still, think of it in terms of two basic chunks of layering. First the fried julienned vegetables go down with a bit of yoghurt sauce and basil.

After that you simply want to layer the avocado slices with tomato sauce and top with a bit of both sauces and the remaining basil. Really, I promise, this baked avocado recipe looks a whole lot fancier than it actually is to put together.

A blessing in disguise or a fierce curse?

Just where does such a severe disruption in air travel leave us with regard to our imported goodies, and could it be a good thing to encourage us to eat local? It’s been nearly a week since flights were cancelled in much of Northern Europe’s air space, and it’s easy to see how our food imports are ready to be hard hit, but how does it affect the actual chain?

Farmers in producing countries are left with epic quantities of waste, food which can’t make money sitting still. Hence events such as this threaten the livelihoods of both farmers and their employed staff. They are directed impacted by our economy, which, combined with the many other puzzle pieces of these events, bring home a valid and terrifying point: food security as we understand it today rides a very fine line.

Before over-reacting, try something new

And, to think, our worry is whether or not we can ensure we’re able to consume our packaged pineapple chunks. So what if you’re left facing an empty shelf when you seek your weekly asparagus purchase? No one starved when snow kept deliveries away for a week and no one is going to starve as a result of Eyjafjallajökull. Think of it as a chance to try something new off the shelves, enjoy a new recipe!

I think I’ll wait another few weeks before I begin to worry too much.

Let’s just be grateful the British asparagus season is right around the corner. And Jersey Royals. And strawberries. I’m drooling.

As a vegetarian I used to make a similar dish using a soft brie or camembert and, as with most things, I refuse to let my change in diet limit my food opportunities. This is one of my alternative solutions to the dairy version, a healthier and happier vegan non-dairy cheese. And it involves deep frying, which means it must be good. Okay, so mostly healthy (frying really isn’t that bad for you so long as you use decent oil and don’t overheat it. I tell myself this).

Recipe Notes

My recommendation is to serve this simply on a bed of rocket (arugula) leaves with a dollop of blackcurrant or lingonberry (yes, I’ve been to Ikea recently) jam. Cranberry works too. Pretty much any leafy greens will complement this vegan side and it makes a lovely light lunch on a spring afternoon.

If you want a more tart flavour in this vegan cream cheese recipe, try adding some vegan yoghurt or lemon juice and upping the nut content to compensate for the additional moisture.

Recipe Notes

I’m a big fan of getting creative in the kitchen, whether it’s with a recipe of my own or an already composed winner from a favourite cook book. The same rule applies to this bonbon recipe, so I encourage you to use your imagination with these cute cookies, to go crazy with colour combinations, fillings, and toppings. Dried fruits, candied ginger, chocolate chunks, anything you think would make an agreeable centre. And who said there was anything wrong with an electric blue cookie with hot pink icing? Topped with almond slivers and chocolate chips?

Achieve a marbled effect with the dough by waiting until everything is mixed before adding the colouring, mixing it in last until your dough acquires the desire look. Heck, why not try multiple colours?

Yes, these cookies would be great for children. This I know, because I am one. A children, that is. Not a cookie.

Sesame and miso get along famously, complementing each other in a way that makes a perfect base for soups, stir fry sauces, and salad dressings. This basic miso salad dressing recipe uses tahini for thickness and creaminess, but a nice sesame oil is just as delicious. The best part? It’s probably the easiest salad dressing you’ll ever have to make.

And this stuff really does go well with the ol’ stir fry. Today’s lunch involved broccoli and red onion stir fried in groundnut oil with some garlic, a splash of soy and chili sauces, a few tablespoons of coconut milk, and a splodge of this dressing. But miso enthusiasts, beware: the high heat will kill off all the healthful bacteria in that soy paste.

I’ve been meaning to make an Italian vegetarian meatball alternative for ages, but life caught up with me and time took me past my kitchen at light speed. Exhausted, walking barefoot through 8 feet of snow, uphill both ways to school, I’ve managed to get this done once and for all. Sigh of relief ensues. Feelings of self-pity evaporate.

Translation: I had to go out of town on a last minute emergency and I’m back home in my own kitchen now.

Recipe notes

This veggie meatball uses nutritious okara, the soy pulp left over in the soy milk making process, but feel free to use a pressed extra firm tofu if you don’t have okara on hand.

The recipe for these meatless balls is for a basic Italian style, but get playful with the herbs and spices to obtain the flavour you crave. If you like your food salty, add some more in the dry mix (I always go light on salt).

Pizza, pizza, pizza! A few weekends ago I invited my in laws over for lunch, determined to feed them something they’d never otherwise eat. I realise it seems crazy to think there are people in this world who don’t consume pizza on at least a semi-regular basis, but there you go.

The more time I spend in a kitchen, the more confident I get serving first time experiments to guests (I’ll let you know about the upcoming disaster regarding this scenario, because I’ve surely jinxed myself now). This, a thin crust pizza without a tomato in sight, was luckily a real hit.

Fry’s chicken burgers sliced, plus a creamy blue sheese base, sprinkled with a handful of walnuts, makes for a father in law who pretty much leaves no leftovers behind. Is there no better feeling in the world than a certified omnivore boldly enjoying your weeegan food so much?

I’m still ironing out some wrinkles in the recipe, but it’s essentially a thinner version of my blue cheese spread (only made with a yoghurt and cashew base with extra herbs and spices added) on this beer pizza crust base.

Oh, and it’s worth mentioning the rate at which aforementioned father in law downed the homemade vegan cookies and cream ice cream we had for afters. The speed at which he consumed it was approaching that of light.

Basic, filling, awesome and, well, awesome, everyone needs a basic recipe for miso soup. This vegan version swaps the traditional bonito dashi for a shiitake broth alternative, with the added bonus of soft tofu clumps stirred in (think extra soft eggy flavoured spaetzel in soup). If you’d rather, omit the tofu cream and simply add a few cubes of bean curd. Feel free to throw some big, thick udon noodles in there too!

Anyhow, below is a quick run down of my main uses for the prolific soya bean, complete with numbered pictures (hey, I love pictures).

1. Firm tofu coagulated with nigari and gypsum

Nigari coagulated tofu has by far the best flavour, but gypsum bulks it up a bit, so I tend to use a combination of the two in the process. I use a homemade tofu press crafted by my father, draining and lightly pressing the curd for up to an hour before removing the block, wrapping it in a tea towel, and popping it in the fridge.

If I want a more firm tofu, I press it further using the usual techniques. I use fresh tofu fairly quickly, so I tend to skip the step of storing it in water in a closed container (but I will store it this way if it’s going to be around for a few days).

2. Silken tofu coagulated with nigari

This is tofu which hasn’t been pressed, and the nigari imparts a lovely sweet taste which makes it ideal for simple pudding dishes and in light soups.

3. Soy milk

I make my soy milk with approximately 1.5 litres (6 cups) of water per 190g (1 cup) of soy beans (dried weight), or a water to bean ratio of 6:1. This makes a very thick and creamy soy milk which yields more tofu with less liquid (for those who use a soyquick machine, that’s two lots of bean per one lot of water).

4. Dried soy beans

This is the base product, dried and waiting to be transformed into soy milk. Pre-soaked they’re quite small, but increase in size by about a third or half when soaked overnight. Once soaked, they are ground with water and strained. What comes out of the stainer is soy milk.

5. Fresh okara

What’s left behind in the straining process is okara, or soy pulp, a highly nutritious source of fibre which can be used in a whole range of dishes. If you look closely, you’ll see some whole soy beans in there, to give an idea of what they look like once soaked.

6. Dried okara

And finally I’m often left with heaping quantities of okara, hence I dry it in the oven so it keeps. It can be reconstituted later and/or added to baked goods.

For years I had no idea what a pot sticker dumpling was, assuming it was some sort of hip kids’ terminology for the reefer. Hell, it wasn’t until I found myself in Beijing one autumn day that I was made aware of the existence of a non British style dumpling or gyoza. In fact, I’d go as far as saying those few days in China’s capital city were the basis of what blossomed into a love affair with my disaster area laboratory kitchen.

This vegan potsticker filling is both simple and delicious, meat free and an ideal party food. The ingredients can be easily juggled to suit your own tastes (don’t like broccoli? Try celery and carrot).

Please note Defensive Omnivore Bingo is originally by Brian VanderVeen, and he should be given credit where credit’s due!

1. The classic: “but where do you get your protein?”

A classic joke to start (is my sense of humour bad or is my sense of humour bad?): How many vegetarians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? I don’t know, but where do you get your protein?

Seriously? This one always amazes me, not because people are curious, but because they don’t seem to gear the grey matter up before the question departs their mouthbits.  Who taught you meat is the only source of protein? Some of the best sources of protein in the world are vegan, and they don’t contain the nasty saturated fat quantities associated with what people tend to consider one of the best sources of protein: red meat.

In fact many people actually get too much protein. I’m gobsmacked that someone who eats a fry up for breakfast (eggs + bacon + sausage), a burger for lunch, and a steak for dinner, has the nerve to say anything to me about my protein intake (a frequently encountered vision I witness on family visits to the states). Slow down, buddy, because Atkins generally forgot to mention all that fat in fact leads to heart disease. So, in short, meat is not your only protein source, period.

2. But cows need to be milked…

You’re right. An engorged breast isn’t a nice thing, so it’s a good thing those little baby cows are there to ease the mother’s burden.

Oh, wait.

Have you ever seen a cow nursing her young in a natural environment? The udders are nowhere near as bloated. The fact is, we force pregnancy upon the females and then take her young so we can drink her breast milk (what happens to the calves is a whole different story of course).  Cows do need to be milked, and it’s the process of breast feeding her young which is the answer.

3. Some sort of passive aggressive statement implying how vegans are such a nuissance and do nothing but argue their cause.

I do recall my 14 year old vegetarian self so I know this can be the case, but here’s the thing: most veg*ns don’t bring it up unless they have to.

In fact I’d go as far as saying most such conversations arise from a passing statement by the veggie which is then blown into a big bang style issue by the resident omnivore. I make a real effort to not boast about my ethical choices outside of my own home, but I can’t tell you the number of snarky comments and accusations I’ve encountered from people the second they find what what I don’t eat.

Who’s being the passive aggressive nuissance?

4. But what do you eat?!

I’ll admit that when I became vegetarian at the age of 12, my diet was ridiculous. But let’s think about this a step deeper: was my diet really any healthier before that change? If you want to argue this question in health terms, I think it’s fair to say if you don’t eat healthy as an omnivore it’s not surprising if you follow poor eating habits as a veggie too.

If you want to argue this question on flavour and variety, that’s a different story. It goes without saying that when you remove an item from an array of others then you have fewer options. Technically.

If you do question what we eat, however, please consider how often do you evaluate your own food choices. A lot of people don’t believe me when I say I can go a couple of months without repeating a meal. The reason I do this is because I choose to see doors opening in the face of change; most vegans I know eat a greater variety of foods and are more open to trying new dishes than anyone I’ve met who genuinely can’t fathom what I eat.

So if you’re really asking this question then I’d like to set you a challenge to cook a new meal once a week, and a vegan one to boot. It doesn’t have to be fancy, nor does it have to be epic in preparation. Broaden your horizons. I promise it won’t hurt much.

5. So that’s why you’re so skinny

Dude, don’t say this out loud. Think it and look up the possibilities because they’re there, but don’t say it out loud. Just think about it.

If you do, be prepared for, well, stuff. Real insert foot in mouth moments are a possibility. Right at that moment an overweight vegan partner will step out from behind the wall you hadn’t noticed was there until now. Or you will die a death of too much vegan cake because said vegan will need to prove to you that vegan junk food is beyond possible (I can’t tell you how many vegans I know who gained weight after ditching dairy, and they put it all down to learning to bake).

To the thin veggies this sort of statement can often come across as a cloaked “huh, no wonder you’re so waifish and pale” and to those who are dealing with weight issues it’s downright insulting. Don’t get me started on that PETA ad, either (and yes, I’m one of those vegans who doesn’t like PETA much).

As a child I was often exposed to the horror that is microwaved “baked” potatoes, a travesty which, in my opinion, is one to compete with that of the most audacious crimes in this world (like using apostrophe’s incorrectly- hello mister greengrocer). Har har.

It wasn’t until I moved to Britain that I realised it was possible to achieve restaurant style potatoes at home, baked spuds with crispy skins and a smooth and creamy centre. Microwaves may save time, but they make a potato taste like… err a microwaved potato to be precise. I’m a snob. I also don’t own a microwave.

So anyway, as a child I also loved to consume boxed twice baked potatoes. Layer the fact that I didn’t know real baked potatoes were possible on top of this tragic aspect of my youth and it makes sense why I didn’t realise until recent years that not only could you make your own oven baked potato, but that it’s also possible to make homemade twice baked potatoes! Life is miraculous and, yes, I’m American.

Recipe Notes

If you’re looking for an easy comfort food then twice baked potatoes should be an obvious maybe on your list of potential meals. Try this vegan version served with a nice salad or on their own (my general rule is one whole baked potato is an adequate meal). The yoghurt adds a creamy richness to the potatoes while the miso and sherry impart a very mild Eastern influence. Should you omit the latter ingredients, some extra salt may be worth chucking in (and maybe some extra yoghurt too).

Don’t feel limited to the ingredients I’ve chosen for this recipe. Try vegan yoghurt and fresh chives (for a mock sour cream and chives flavour), or your favourite fake cheddar with facon bits.

But how do you get creaminess without the cream?

You’d be surprised what cashews can do, baby! This isn’t an original concept as many a dairy free souls have discovered the value of nuts as an ice cream base, but I’m all about spreading the love. This is a great vegan ice cream to fool dairy fans, and it’s divine with a dollop of peanut butter on top.

Psst, if you’re curious about the stuff that looks like marshmallow fluff stuff, that’s Bryanna Clark Grogan’s marshie fluff (thanks, Bryanna). Talk about fun to make. Talk about sugar high. Talk about… well, I think vegans could talk about marshmallow fluff quite a lot, come to think of it.

Recipe Notes

Okay, so I’ve got one of those annoying frozen drink blenders and the base is pretty much permanently sealed on. This means there’s always a whole load of liquid I can’t get out, especially if it’s a thick blend like this is. Here’s a tip: reserve 60ml (1/4 cup) of the soy milk and after you’ve poured the ice cream base out, chuck the remaining liquid in and swish around to help get the rest of the mix out.

Oh, and if you’ve got a blender which errs on the side of shite and you hate lumpy bits then you can strain the base to filter out any potential cashew hanger-onners.

One of my favourite meals, this delightfully rich stew combines two middle eastern staples to create a mouthwatering stew of aubergine (eggplant) and chickpeas. A full-bodied tomato sauce complemented by tangy pomegranate molasses, zesty lemon and the indespensable garlic (and ingredient of which, in my opinion, you can never have too much), is what makes this dish so unique. It’s simple to make, delicious to eat, and filling to boot!

The Captain (my partner’s newly chosen nickname, a preference over being called “dad” in relation to our four legged children) isn’t so keen on this dish, but I think that’s because I’m really only 50% devoted to him. The other half of my love is pretty much wholly directed toward chickpeas and I think el capitán is just a little jealous and defensive is all.

But honestly, isn’t there room for both a man and a legume in a woman’s life? Sheesh.

Enjoy your weekend!

It’s time for a killer vegan breakfast treat.

I’ve been feeling a bit of a cold the past week, not to mention the fact that I’ve hit the inevitable monthly mark on the calendar where my stomach views the world as an all you can eat pig out. These things combined are treacherous (ask my partner, whose finger I nearly bit off on Saturday whilst trying to devour food between his fingers) because they both make me feel the need to eat. Okay, not just eat, but eat a whole lot of everything. Specifically this is a time when I crave a good vegan breakfast, but I also had some samosa skins I needed to use.

And I mean, come on, who hates a fry up? And who hates deep fried? Now imagine combining the two. For realz. Vegan breakfast in a deep fried parcel!

I’ve taken all the best bits of a vegan fry up (my favourite parts of a vegan breakfast anyway): mushrooms, scrambled tofu and facon, and mashed them together into a filling for a samosa. If you have different breakfast favourites, by all means use them instead. Vegan sausages crumbled, tempeh, spinach, you name it and I bet it’d be kick-arse in these samosas. The samosa skins in this recipe were bought, but you can also make your own samosa pastry if buying them pre-packaged isn’t an option.

Mushrooms are a vegetable I never enjoyed until I was an adult. In fact it wasn’t until a few years of my partner obsessing over them that I decided they may be worth trying. Now I’m truly converted and, while they aren’t in my top ten, I won’t ever turn my nose up at the thought of a mushroom centric meal.

A few weeks ago we had a meal out and he had the vegan mushroom soup, a deliciously creamy blend of rich mushrooms with a genuinely creamy texture. This is my take on the concept, and I’m pretty sure I can promise it’ll win the heart of any mushroom lover.

Perfect for party snacks and easy enough for even the most unskilled amateur kitchenista, these vegan crackers are perfect with drinks and light food. Guests will be impressed you made crackers from scratch (hey, you don’t have to tell them the ridiculous simplicity factor). Try sprinkling with toasted sesame seeds for added flair.

I made a variation of these for a vegan cheese and wine party I attended a few weeks ago (along with this blue cheese dip, both of which seemed to go down fairly well.

I generally place the okara in muslin and press as much liquid out as possible before storing the pulp in the refrigerator, sealed. I’ve never had any issues cooking with okara based on this initial prep, but I realise it’s difficult to follow a recipe when the liquid content of your okara may be slightly different than mine.

For that reason, I’ve decided to begin using dried okara in any recipes I write; below is the method for drying.

How to dry okara

1. Preheat your oven to around 100 C (210 F). The exact temperature isn’t important; you just want a low heat.
2. Place a mesh colander over a large bowl and line the colander with thin muslin. If you’re not worried about saving the soy milk you squeeze out then you can eliminate the use of the bowl (but it’s good to save for cooking).
3. Place your okara in the muslin, bundling the fabric up around the pulp. Squeeze as hard as is humanly possible in order to extract as much liquid is possible.
4. Turn the now somewhat dried pulp out into an oven pan and spread as thinly and evenly as you can. Place in the oven, mixing every 15-20 minutes until the okara has dried out. This could take an hour or 4 hours depending on how much okara is on your baking sheet. For this reason I recommend re-reading the bit about spreading as thinly as possible. Use a second tray if need be.
5. Once it’s dry, remove the okara from the oven and allow to cool. Place the crumbs in a blender or food processor to break up and store in an air tight container.

It’s oyster, not meat!

Anyone who knows me can attest to my obsession with Southeast Asia, my own personal respite from the never-warm-enough climate of Greatish Britain. I’ve yet to visit the country as a practising vegan, but even the vegetarian diet seemed tricky during my travels. Very little dairy is used, so it wasn’t so much the typical “is there rennet in the cheese” issue as it was the argument that fish is not, in fact, vegetarian (which reminds me, there’s a word for that: pescetarian. Yes, that’s right. Vegetarians don’t eat fish).

I could only take so many arguments regarding the “fact” that oysters don’t count as meat, so I’d settle for simple pasta to avoid conflict and chance. My most recent visit, however, introduced me to some vegetarian-friendly establishments I’d yet to try previously. Thus began my love affair with the region’s cuisine, my constant attempt to get it right in my own kitchen. And honestly, making vegan Thai food isn’t difficult at all.

A sexist meal?

You wouldn’t be the first to question the title of this Thai dish, pondering the whereabouts of its female counterpart. “Down with this patriarchal snack,” you might say, but the seemingly most frequently told story speaks quite loudly for feminism (albeit slightly on the passive aggressive side if you ask me, which you probably didn’t). It goes something like this: A mother is disgusted with her son in law’s arsey behaviour and serves him these eggs as a metaphorical representation of what’s going to happen to his man vegetables if he doesn’t snap to it.

And with that, here’s the recipe.

I’m on a constant quest to find things to do with leftover okara as it’s something in which I’m usually swimming (so if you live near Crawley and ever want some, just give a shout). Here’s an easy and tasty recipe using okara for a vegan style omelette, a filling way to start off any day! Or end it. I’m all about the midnight snacks, you know.

Recipe Notes

I use okara which is left as a byproduct of making soy milk in my Soy Quick maker. First I allow the okara to cool and then I bundle it in thin muslin and squeeze and much milk out as possible, leaving me with a clump of broken down soybeans which is still just wet enough to stick together. I’m telling you this just so you have an idea of the liquid content of the okara before you set out making this yummy vegan omelette!

Try any filling ingredients that take your fancy, but the cheez and onion is a good combination. If you’ve got a cast iron skillet, I high recommend cooking the onions on that for nom factor.

Half of my recent batch of this vegan macaroni dish got packaged up and sent to a friend who’s recently moved on campus to do her PhD. The other half was devoured by my hubs and I for lunch one afternoon. Thumbs up all around and it catered to my craving for broccoli cheese sauce, so next time this sauce is going on some jacket spuds. Nom nom nom.

Recipe Notes

I’m of the opinion that the best milk to use in a vegan cheese recipe that calls for a creamy sauce is a very thick soy milk (none of this watery vanilla flavoured nonsense), but I’ve used oat milk successfully too.

If you like your broccoli to be soft, I suggest steaming it for a few minutes first. I like it to be a bit crunchy though, so I just chop it up and bung it in as it is.

I’m a sucker for salads. It’s a genetic flaw, or I think my husband would see it as a flaw anyway (“there’s a piece of green stuff on my plate”), one which has been passed down from mother to daughter. My cravings come in waves, where one month I’m satiated by heavy stews and steaming piles of potatoes and the next all I crave are light bites and simple salads. Clearly the latter is suggestive of the basis of my current diet.

Last weekend I went to a vegan cheese and wine party in Brighton, hosted by the author behind Vegan in Brighton and this vegan cheese dip was one of my contributions. Slated by my mind as a fairly plain dish, the aforementioned blogger requested the recipe to pass on to her wedding caterers. Flattered beyond all means of course, I can’t take all the credit as the end result wouldn’t be what it is without the lovely folk at Bute Island Foods (i.e. the makers of the vegan blue cheese in the recipe).

Recipe Notes

In the recipe I call for the use of vegan cream cheese. I used Tofutti brand cream cheese but have heard from others that it’s not as easy to find where they are in the UK (I know it’s easily available in the US). First check your local Holland and Barratt but if that fails you can sub another cream cheese. One brand I’d not recommend, however, is the Pure brand cream cheese because it tastes like nasty things. Bute Island also makes a vegan cream cheese.

Oh, and I swear the company’s reformed their blue sheese recipe. If you tried it a couple of years ago and weren’t so impressed I’d recommend giving it another go. It really does mimic a mild blue cheese flavour.

Some days I wake up, look out the window, and know before I even set foot out of the bedroom it’s going to be one of those kind of days. Those kind. You know exactly what I mean.

What inevitably follows is a morning of attempted work, one which can be more appropriately summarised as moping. By the time lunch rolls around I give up; all the desire in the world won’t make this British winter metamorphose into a Thai autumn. The best I can do at this point is scoff something warming, something comforting. From then on in my day I can look forward to an afternoon which will, at the very least, progress from the aforementioned mope-fest into slightly more upbeat brooding.

Sike. I’m a happy bunny after I eat awesomeness.

Recipe Notes

What can I say about this? It’s ridiculous easy and tantalisingly good (well I think so anyway). If you’re making this in the summer and are using succulent in-season tomatoes, you could perhaps get away with losing the sugar (especially if using a Roma-esque variety).

This is perfect with or without pasta. Without pasta it’s a nice snack; with it’s a filling meal.

Crown prince squash comes highly recommended from this messy amateur cook. It’s a tough one to peel, however, so roasting is an ideal way to enjoy this delectable winter vegetable.

Recipe Notes

This is a very rich and dense squash, one of the best I’ve tasted, and it makes for a lovely soup. Its density, however, means you may have to add more liqiud than you would normally to a squash based soup. In this recipe I’ve suggested 2-3 cups, but that will still leave you with a very thick end result. If you prefer a more liquefied soup, consider adding more water or stock.

A lot of people don’t understand how it’s the case that eggs were and are still my greatest craving during the process of giving up all animal products. Cheese? No, not really (and believe you me I was the biggest cheese fan on this dear planet). The flavour and texture I miss are bog standard hard boiled eggs, the main ingredient in the favourite finger food that is the deviled egg.

At family gatherings I would, as a child, scarf the deviled eggs like they were my only sustenance in weeks. It’s a party snack I’ve always loved, but in adulthood my increasingly underachieving social life has prevented me from an encounter. Only last week did I suddenly recall this food memory, and behold the result.

Recipe Notes

I used a batch of fresh, firm nigari tofu which I made myself, but firm-ish bean curd should do. As far as quantities are concerned, the ingredients and amounts listed below are to be viewed as more of a suggestion. Maybe you don’t have that much tofu or you want smaller pieces, or perhaps you just want to eat a chunk of curd with a squirt of the deviled filling.

Make a huge tray for vegan party food!

When I discussed making anatomically correct cookies last week, anise cutouts were truly the base of the inspiration. Another annual mother-daughter(s) event, decorating these cookies was one of the highlights of my year and, despite no longer celebrating Christmas, I cannot help but continue this seasonal tradition on my own. Unfortunately with age the patience to make body part cookies has worn ever so slightly thin. Must regress again to childhood.

Recipe Notes

Based on a classic family recipe, everyone in mine seems to have a preference for how these cookies are made. Some like them burnt, some don’t like sugar sprinkles and others express size preferences. Here are a few tips to get what you want out of your cookie:

• To obtain a crisp and slightly burnt cookie roll the dough out very thinly and/or use smaller cookie cutters and/or increase baking time by a minute or three.
• If you prefer a softer end result, don’t go thinner than 1/8 inch and err on the side lesser cooking.
• To piss off your uncle, put a tonne of coloured sugar on as decoration. Of course I don’t know this out of experience or anything.
• For evenness in cooking, try to make sure all the cookies in the oven at one time are of uniform size and thickness.

Recipe Notes

The concept for these mini tarts is one which lends itself to a variety of fillings, so if you’ve got oodles of frozen fruit from the summer and autumn in your freezer like I do, then go crazy!

If you’d rather make slightly large snack pies, simply use a normal sized cupcake or muffin tin and make slightly larger pastry circles with which to fill them. If you’re feeling extra decadent, try topping these large tarts with Angel Food’s vegan merginue cookies. Similarly, you can upside to a full scale 9 inch pie.

I have a lot of sickly sweet memories from childhood, ones which, when recalled in my mind, are glamour shot affected images complete with a cheesy vignette frame. Baking Christmas cookies with my mother can’t be excluded from these precious recollections of my childhood, despite the fact that the older I got the fainter the sugary vignette effect became. That is, my cookies began to resemble male anatomy as opposed to cheerful holiday snowmen and stars.

But one thing remained the same: the terra cotta cookie presses which had a pre-design in mind. No willies would come out of these all too cute shapes, which ranged from kittens and owls to snowflakes and holly. When I was visiting my parents earlier this month I went shopping in the basement and rediscovered these lovelies and, with my mother’s permission, relocated them to England.

Recipe Notes

If you don’t have any cookie stamps, never fear! You can roll and cut these into rounds or squares if you prefer, or even use a proper shortcake mould.

You can get creative with flavours too. For instance if you’d like to add a seasonal touch, throw in some cinnamon and mixed spice with the dry mix and substitute brown sugar.

Each Christmas Eve we partake in a family gathering at Mr MessyCook’s parents’ house, a meat-saturated event. To be honest my mother-in-law is very good about making sure I have absolutely tonnes to eat, and one year she even used soya mince in the main chili pot. Everyone ate it without complaint; the whining came only afterward when she announced it was veggie. Get your eyes rolling.

At any rate this is my first vegan Christmas and the MiL who’s spent the past eight years learning how to cater to a vegetarian is now left with most of those recipes unavailable to me, her daughter-in-law.  Consequently I’ve volunteered to bring my own food (plus I’m bringing a vegan friend along for the ride) and my partner’s kindly requested lasagna. My cashew-based smoky spinach lasagne has gone down well in the past and, besides, who doesn’t like lasagna?

If you’ve never tried a vegan lasagna, give it a try. It’s a much healthier alternative and, despite it sounding like a difficult task to achieve if you’re used to a dairy-filled diet, it’s well worth giving it a go. And I don’t care what anyone says about lasagna being hard to make. It’s not. Here’s a selection of vegan lasagne recipes from around the interwebs, some which I’ve made and others over which I’m still drooling prior to trying.

Spinach is king (plus other greens and veggies)

• Mushroom, Sausage and Spinach Lasagna
• Lasagne Love Potion
• Fat Free Vegan’s favourite lasagna recipe (spinach and mushroom)
• Presto Manifesto Pesto Lasagna
• Method’s Vegan Lasagna

Bean based lasagna recipes

• Lentil Lasagne (lots of yummy veggies in here)
• Dairy Free Chickpea Lasagne (uses chickpeas/garbanzo beans as a ricotta substitute)
• Lasagna Deliciousa

Mexican inspired alternative lasagnas

• Mexican Lasagna (or Enchilada Casserole)
• Fiesta Lasagna

Tips on veganising lasagna

• Creamy vegan sauces abound, and many of them make a great replacement for traditional cheese in lasagna.
• Try replacing mince (ground beef) with vegan mince or TVP, mushrooms, and/or other chopped vegetables.
• Some crumbled tofu adds to a good consistency, too!
• Instead of using butter to pre-cook any ingredients, use olive oil or a good vegan margarine spread.

Sesame Port Cookies

Isa and Terry have done it again. Made my life complete, I mean. If you’ve never bought one of their vegan cookbooks, it’s never too late to try, and I promise you won’t be disappointed. For anyone new to veganism, considering the lifestyle, or who simply wants junk food with less of the saturated junk inside, look no further than Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar (shelf sister to Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World).

The only problem I have with this book is that I’m so busy in the kitchen that I’m not getting any actual work done.

I’ve been really into pies and tarts lately (my mother-in-law gave me boat loads of frozen fruit), and the perfect pie has to have an even more perfect crust. After experimenting with a few different methods, this is the recipe on which I’ve settled.

Luckily, the company answered my request in a way to give me hope.

We’re glad to hear you’ve discovered Daiya and are enjoying it while in the U.S.  We are in talks with several groups who are interested in supplying the European market so please keep an eye on our website over the coming year for updates.

Great, right?

In other news, my childhood home was the land of crazier. The kitchen was gutted and being refitted and all available cooking facilities had been relocated to the garage (read: mostly ineffective electric hob, microwave, and toaster oven). The bathtub became the kitchen sink and any available surface the counter space.

It’s nice to be home (but I can’t wait to see and use their finished kitchen).

Averaging about $15 for a main, $9-10 for a starter, and $6-7 for a dessert, the cost to me is not astronomical (even without converting it back to pounds). I’m quite happy to pay for skill and quality in both ingredients and kitchen hand.

And the food? Very, very good.

Grilled Vegetable Terrine

Truffled Polenta

Bacon Cheddar Burger

At any rate, my mother paid for dinner. Thanks, Mom!

The veggie offender here generally comes in the form of the fining agent, but can sometimes be directly related to the ingredient list (e.g campari is made with cochineal. See above).  It’s also possible that anti foaming agents used in alcohols may be un-veggie.

Non vegan fining agents include things like isinglass (from the swim bladders of fish), gelatin (extracted from the collagin of animal skin and bones… mmm cow hoof!),  casein (from milk), egg (whites or albumen), ox blood (rarely used these days), bone charcoal, or chitin (from lobster and/or crab shells). Alcohols, in order from least to most likely to be vegan friendly, are as follows: beer and fortified wines, cider, wine and sherry, and spirits. Beers and ales which have been cask conditioned are incredibly rarely vegan, let alone vegetarian, and the same goes for fortified port wines.

The question that follows is why these agents are used in the first place. The description that follows is vague and not at all detailed, provided as nothing more than a basic explanation. Essentially, when you produce alcohol (especially yeasty dark ales) you are left with of sediment which floats suspended in the brew. The fining agent helps to capture the sediment and pull it to the bottom, therefore improving the clarity. The sediment will settle naturally, but fining agents simply speed up the process.

A few tips:

• Legal purity law requirements mean alcohol produced in Germany and Belgium are vegan.
• Most US produced beers are vegan too.
• Actually, there are loads and loads of veg-friendly alcohols and an excellent resource for this information is available from Barnivore.
• If you’re in the UK, stores like Co op are very good about marking vegan products, including alcohol. Sainsbury’s too.

Cochineal (E120 or red #4), also labeled as carmine, carminic acid, is a red dye derived from the cochineal beetle. I’ve seen it in everything from candy sprinkles (hundreds and thousands) to savoury pre-packaged meal options. It’s a common ingredient, but other options are available. Products which use this may include, but aren’t limited to:

• Candies and sweets
• Commercial juices (e.g. Tropicana) and fruit bases (e.g. strawberry yoghurt, McDonalds’ strawberry shakes)
• Makeup (how do you think they got those lips so red)
• Lots of junk food (and I don’t just mean sweet stuff)

As a side, another vegan offender is shellac, which comes from the secretion of the lac insect (a relative of  the cochineal beetle). This is generally considered to be a vegetarian product as the secretion is a by-product. Common uses include, but are not limited to:

• Coating fruit in your local supermarket
• Varnish and polishes
• Lip salves
• Glazing agents for confectionary goods

On the day I first made this, my husband arrived home for lunch to my question: would he eat a sandwich if I made it? I informed him it would be good but that I didn’t want to say what it was until he took a bite. I wanted to know if he’d be able to guess what I was mimicking without me having to say.

And upon that bite he was as impressed as I, asking “where’s my other sandwich?”

Picnic fodder, baby!

Recipe Notes

Welcome to the world of not too many ingredients. For that reason, I take the opinion that there’s not so much room to take away with this vegan egg mayo. The turmeric adds colour, the black salt an eggy flavour, the mustard a bit of a tang (okay if you must you could probably live without this ingredient). The tofu subs for the egg and the vegan mayo plays its usual role. By the way, I use Plamil vegan mayonnaise. It’s the best, at least here in the UK.

By all means, add things, just like I added chopped up dill pickle (about a tablespoon).

This tofu egg salad recipe makes only enough for a single sandwich, so get out your maths brain to calculate just how much you’ll need.

Is Sugar vegan?

Sugar itself comes from a plant source, but the refining process for cane sugar may involve the use of animal bone char as whitening and purification filters.

There are two type of sugar, beet and cane, the former always being vegan and the latter about half of the time. Thus the ever-popular and common US based shelf brand, Domino, is not vegan.

Beet sugar = vegan

Cane sugar = sometimes vegan, sometimes not

This is always a tricky one because so many foods off the shelf contains sugar, and most vegans I know will go out of their way to purchase vegan sugar but realise the futility of double checking the source of all products containing this ingredient. Still, it’s nice to support a company which doesn’t use bone char if you can.

I was just finishing a batch of this as P, the husband, came in the door for lunch. “It’s good,” I said, “but it’s not going to interest you because it’s salad dressing.”

“I like salad dressing. I just don’t like the salad,” was his reply.

Before you go judging him for being saladist, you must understand the English concept of salad has come leaps and bounds in the past 8-10 years. This is not as complimentary a statement as it seems. Instead of quizzical looks from restaurant staff and the concept of salad as a piece of lettuce with a slice of tomato and cucumber, a decorative side to your main meal, you might now get 3 pieces of lettuce and perhaps even some oil and vinegar. If you’re lucky, an onion and a slice of pepper or two might be thrown in.

This is not as salad-friendly a country as the United States.

Recipe Notes

This is reminiscent of a thick creamy Italian dressing, the sort made with hard fat cheese (think Olive Garden), only there’s no cheese and it’s completely cruelty free.

It can be consumed straight away, but like with many dressings and sauces the flavour develops if left for a little while before use. It’s tasty on pasta dishes, too!

I used okara in this because I like the added grainy texture, but that’s not an obligatory ingredient. In fact it’s a perfectly good dressing without any of the cheesy components either, but it does add a nice bonus if you can include them. If you don’t use okara, you can leave the tablespoon of water out if you’d like. Nobody will suffer either way, I promise.

Finally, I apologise for my vagueness in how much this recipe makes. What I got out of it was around 110ml, but I also lost a whole lot to the counter, floor, and my body due to unexpected flinging issues. Thus I suspect it’s possible to produce more if you can manage to keep it all in one place.

Which I am not. I just like egg(less)nog.

And coffee.

Recipe Notes

Depending on the desired consistency of the end result, you can use between 1/4 and 1/3 a cup of water. Obviously the former will produce a thicker syrup and, in my case, so will the latter. This is because I would have spilled all of the extra water down myself.

If you feel the need, you can strain the spices, but I personally like the texture.

Not a coffee fan? Don’t worry; this recipe is good for lots of other things too. Have a few suggestions:

• Pancake syrup
• Hot cocoa enhancer
• Top your favourite ice-cream(less)
• With hot rum (okay I’m making this up, but it does sound good
• Flavour cakes
• An easy gift in a pretty bottle!

Cannellini beans are a Tuscan white kidney bean, smooth and nutty in taste, also known as fazolia beans. Perfect for a cold summer salad, comforting as a relaxing winter warmer, this simple vegan recipe is suitable year-round.

Sweet white miso paste adds a creamy texture and combined with white wine creates a hearty salty-sweet flavour which is sure to go down well with just about anyone (anyone who isn’t a crazy cretin anyway).

Recipe Notes

The use of rosemary isn’t set in stone. Think bold herbs which roast well- rosemary, thyme, sage, and the like. The incorporation of a bay leaf into the cooking process may also yield good results!

Serve either as a side, with salad, or on toast (this is a great alternative beans on toast recipe, seriously). Come to think of it, eat it however you bloody well like.

Soup’s On (and a salad too)

Who doesn’t love a winter warmer on a cool day, even if it’s technically autumn (“autumn warmer” just doesn’t have the same ring, sorry)? Soup is a year-round favourite of mine, a meal in itself which encourages any amateur cook to improvise with what’s currently in season. And in case you didn’t know, pumpkins are all the rage right now.

Speaking of warmth, a bit of chili is always welcome in that department and Eat.Run.Do Yoga combines that with our beloved pumpkin in this recipe for Thai pumpkin soup. Pumpkin milk and pumpkin and/or squash are complementary, so I can only imagine this being a delicious fall treat! And shallots are in season, to boot!

Add an extra ‘l’ to chili and we’re left with a recipe offered by Method, where Ashley’s provided an easy guideline for pumpkin chilli. So now I face a dilemma: do I make chilli with pumpkin or this Rustic Tomato Pumpkin Bisque first? I’m a real sucker for a good tomato soup… but then again chilli’s an old school favourite. Life is hard.

If soup isn’t your cup of tea (people have insisted on calling stranger things ‘tea’) but you still crave smooth and liquidy goodness, then try this pumpkin pie smoothie on for size. I say that literally because I often chose, being the fashion expert that I am, to share that which is going into my mouth with any clothing I might be wearing at the time.

Oh, pssst, you should always eat salad with soup. Why? Because then you have an excuse to try this scrumptious autumn salad which uses pumpkin seeds and butternut squash. If you don’t have any butternut squash on hand, sub with pumpkin and you’ll be all set to go!

Spooktacular Sugar Coma

These Pumpkiningeradamia cupcakes are not only fun to pronounce (or try to pronounce); they sound good too! At any rate, how could anything involving candied ginger be bad? I’m also quite drawn to this tofu ricotta pumpkin cheesecake, a veganised version of a ricotta based dish. I love the idea of using light miso in a dessert! Q: why didn’t I think of that? A: because someone’s who’s a little more clever beat you to the punch. BOOYAH.

Janet, a 40-year vegetarian turned long term vegan, provides a recipe for delicious looking pumpkin spice cinnamon rolls. Cinnamon and pumpkin marry so well, and who doesn’t love the gooey sweetness that’s a cinnamon bun?

Halloween Treats

Zombie Eyeball Crispies (photo by Janet Hudson)

Zombie Eyeball Crispies. I haven’t had a rice krispy styled treat in many, many years, but as soon as I get my hands on some vegan marshmallows I’m going to have a go!

Rolled Sugar Cookie Eyeballs. Allyson, of Manifest Vegan, never ceases to impress with her high contrast photographs. The thing is, I suspect everything’s just as good as the photos imply, these totally cute cookies included.

Homemade Candy Corn: an old favourite, only veganised!

Pumpkin Pie Infused Vodka. The verdict is still out on this one, but what a concept! I’m excited to hear about how the end result tastes.

I’m an autumn moper. There, I said it. This is the time of year where I have to face the fact that it’s getting too dark too quickly. It’s the time of year where I have to come to terms with the fact that my feet will be frozen for the next six or seven months. But then I suddenly look up and face a mindboggling array of various squash and pumpkin -esque shapes, and remind myself that there are some positives about this time of year, too.

Pumpkin, or “punkin” as my mother so adorably calls it, is a delicious vegetable which is overshadowed by pre-processing and all too often goes to waste. As an American I only ever knew pumpkin to be one of two things: something edible out of a can or something carved for Halloween. How tragic is that? My recollection of pumpkin was either from a factory or a vision of perfectly good food gone to waste (!!!), so I’ve been making an effort over the past couple of years to, you know, actually cook with the real live vegetable. Since it’s food and all.

Recipe Notes

If you’ve never cooked with pumpkin before, this is it. Seriously, this is it. It’s one of the most delicious things I’ve had in a long while, and I’m so happy there were enough left to freeze for one or two more meals.

Don’t listen to anyone who tried to tell you that making your own pumpkin purée is difficult or “not worth it.” Dude, really, all you do is cut the thing into a few wedges and stick it in the oven. You don’t even need to purée it properly for this recipe (a light mashing will do). Anyone who tells you this process is hard is either a canned pumpkin lobbyist or a terrorist, clearly.

I suspect not many people make their own soymilk and tofu, and I’ve never really seen it marketed widely in food retail, so I know okara seems an inconvenient ingredient. If you can’t get ahold of it, don’t worry. I use okara because it’s coming out my ears and because I like the slightly grainy texture (reminiscent of store-bought ricotta), but you should be able to use a crumbled extra firm tofu with no problem.

I used a small amount of vegan mozzarella cheese in this recipe, but if you don’t have that on hand then feel free to use a basic cheddar substitute or simply omit the ingredient altogether. The ravioli will survive and you’ll still enjoy your dinner.

The sauce, if you could call it that, I used was a simple hazelnut and garlic mix in vegan butter and extra virgin olive oil. You could also try lightly frying some whole sage leaves in garlic and oil/non-dairy butter also. I would advise against a sauce which is too heavy with flavour because the flavour of the ravioli is so good on its own. Try not to top it with anything too overpowering.

Chili is just one of those foods which is, you know, well it’s just one of those foods. It’s always there, in the back of my mind, waiting for the weather to change or for leftovers to need using. It’s a meal I don’t exactly crave, yet it needs to be had on a somewhat regular basis during the cooler months. Everyone has their own recipe and no one (save my mother in law) is opposed to a steaming bowl of chili. It’s delicious fresh and only gets better over time.

So it’s my turn to share my own version, my own secret ingredients to make the perfect chili to soothe you on those cold winter nights.

It helps that it’s also ridiculously easy to make.

Recipe Notes

Regarding my use of espresso and chocolate, note that the measurements are vague. You could add up to a tablespoon of espresso and up to the same of cocoa, though I would advise not getting too liberal. Also know that when I say espresso I mean a finely ground dark roast coffee, so anything from a Turkish to espresso grind will be appropriate.

If you’re using fresh tomatoes, something I rarely use in chili because tomatoes aren’t in season during the months in which I enjoy this dish, you could might get away with omitting the sugar.

Chili is a dish which, no matter who’s cooking it, how many times they’ve made it, and how confident a cook they are, should be tasted constantly throughout the cooking process. This opinion stems from more than an excuse to snack before dinner hits the table; a good chili holds a bold and robust flavour and a pinch of chili or a dash more salt can make or break a good turn out. That’s what I think anyway. Experiment until you find your own perfect spice blend!

The last time I visited my family in the U.S. my mother passed along an old German baking manual and I recently got around to taking a look at its inspiring if somewhat dated recipes. A German book printed in the early 1970s at a guess, there’s no such thing as a vegan recipe in its contents. It’s a good thing veganising most (imagine me sighing in memory of macarons) cookies is pretty straightforward!

When I bake cookies, I have all sorts of good intentions. I tell myself things like “just have 2 or 3 a day and they will last” or “maybe if you only make a dozen you’ll be more likely to savour them so they last until the weekend.” Sometimes I even tell myself I should save some for my hard-working husband.

I generally eat all the cookies by myself, quickly. Paul, if he’s lucky, might manage to scavenge a couple.

Recipe Notes

Raise your hand if you’ve already thought, “but wait a minutes! Those aren’t black and white cookies!” What you might traditionally think of as black and white cookies are coated with split black and white fondant frosting, apparently quite a favourite in New York. These cookies, however, resemble a shortbread with a mild cocoa rum twist.

I use a couple of teaspoons of rum in the recipe. Its impact on the overall flavour isn’t huge, but it does add a mellow extra something. If you don’t have any though, I don’t think the world will end if you leave it out.

Get creative with the dough! You’ve got two different colours on your hands, so twist and twirl it to your heart’s content and make some cool designs! The easiest is to make two small balls of dough and press together. Other options include mixing the dough together a bit so you get a swirled effect. You can also roll the dough into thin snakes for spiral effects.

German cookies tend to use far less sugar than American and British counterparts. This of course means they are less sweet, but it doesn’t mean they’re less good! Besides, it means it’s more acceptable that I eat virtually the entire batch by myself.

Right?

Like most other veggie lovers in this dear world, I am capable of consuming hummus at a rate to surpass even your granny’s incessant tirades about kids today.

Okay, I know, I know. As if the four billion alternative preparations out there aren’t enough, this is just what the world needs: another hummus recipe. Variation upon variation of this chickpea paste exists, but this one contains delicious caramelised onion as an added ingredient. Make this by the truckload and share it with everyone you know; even the aforementioned grandma will be impressed.

Recipe Notes

The reason onions caramelise is because they contain some sugar. Perhaps this is a common sense fact, but for most people sugar isn’t what comes to mind when they think of an onion. Try to use onion with a fairly high sugar content, like sweet onions or vidalia, but the standard yellow variety works too. If you’re using a really strong onion, feel free to add a bit of sugar a few minutes into the cooking process in order to aid in caramelisation.

I always use dried chickpeas and soak them overnight, but that’s not to say you can’t cheat and use a can of ‘em. But if you’ve never followed the soaking method I suggest you try it because, in my opinion anyway, it produces a superior taste. It really doesn’t take much extra time (especially if you have a pressure cooker), and it’s also a lot cheaper than buying tins! If you’re using chickpeas from a can then you may not need to add any extra salt to the recipe (depending on whether the beans are in brine), so just be mindful of what’s in the tin.

So there.

It’s all fair and good to check the air miles on your organic roma tomatoes, but the animal industry is probably the worst food-related offender of the environment and the standards we all claim to want upheld. If you’re veggie for the environment, these shirts are for you!

Love the Planet Go Veg Shirts

Love the Planet Go Vegan T-Shirt

Healthy and Kind T-Shirt

Please keep in mind I haven’t personally tried all of these recipes, but they’re on my immediate to-do list (meaning ingredients will be purchase on my next shopping trip).

Singled Out

Ah.Mah.Gahd! Are these cupcakes fer realz?! These cardamom chocolate cupcakes with chocolate dipped pear have totally caught my eye, and I would like them to insert themselves into my belly right this instant. Seriously, lady, you’re my hero. These are gorgeous and they look like an explosion of delicious. If you are ever in South East England, I beg of you to come bake cupcakes for me.

Cardamom Chocolate Cupcakes with Chocolate Dipped Pear (photo by Janet Hudson)

Vegan Pasta Roundup

Who doesn’t love pasta? The whole world’s a fan, or so far as I can tell anyway, and there’s just no need to use dairy when there are hip and hot dishes like these.

• Vegan Manicotti: not too tricky but very impressive. I’ve been craving this since I first saw it, and I can’t wait to get some of that vegan goodness in me tum!
• Broccoli Miso Pasta Sauce: perfect if you’re craving some greens with your carbohydrates.
• Daiya Macaroni Cheese: one of many delicious looking vegan macaroni cheese variations on a theme available on the ol’ interwebs (gah, I am dying to try Daiya cheese. Just dying).

Snacks and Sweets

• Lavender Chocolate Chip Ice Cream: not new, but seriously yumtastic. I’m secretly (as secret as public blog posts go) happy my husband doesn’t like lavender because it means the whole tub (what’s left of it) in the freezer is mine.
• Peach-Strawberry Dessert Soup with Vanilla Tapioca Sauce: does this not look like heaven? My husband also hates tapioca, so I’m sensing another selfish dessert endeavour.
• Maple Glazed Cranberry Walnut Cookie Bars: if the stunning picture is anything to go by then these cookies, once made, aren’t going to last long around here!

Soy Delights!

• Besan Tofu: while not in fact bean curd (and not in fact a new post, but recently brought up again on the ppk forums), who’d have thought of making a mock tofu out of chickpea flour?
• Crispy Tofu with Citrus Soy: also not a new recipe, but new to me, this delicious looking fried tofu can be veganised by omitting the egg (try corn flour and water instead).
• Vegan Okonomiyaki: this sounds so good it almost makes me want to cry.  These are savoury Japanese pancakes generally made with egg, but Ian’s managed to veganise the concept. I’m totally going to combine this with my current obsession with saurkraut.

I’d planned on posting this recipe anyway, but Michelle over at My Zoetrope has named ginger and lemon as this week’s vegan mofo iron chef challenge. Call it a cop out entry (really, this is a stupidly easy thing to make), but you’ll be grateful once you try it. So simple it’s hardly worth posting yet so good it’s worth sharing, this incredibly simple tea consists of just a few key ingredients and is the perfect wintertime drink.

I discovered this simple tea a couple of weeks ago in Rishikesh, a city in Northern India famous for yoga and hippies. A young man at our hotel restaurant pushed it on me, claiming it would cure my cough. While we insisted the lifetime of my cough goes back to 1990 or so, he continued to proclaim the tea’s natural cough-curing qualities.  Finally I took him up on his offer, and now I’m hooked.

The cough remains.

Recipe Notes

The local recipes used honey, but any sweetener will do. I’ve tried it with sugar and agave both, and it’s just fab either way! I’ve also sampled this drink both with and without the addition of a tea bag and both are acceptable. In fact the only reason I’m talking so much about the tea is because it’s the first time in my life I’ve ever voluntarily consumed anything with a breakfast tea involved. Yes, I think I have conquered my English tea phobia. Miracles do happen.

Of course the quantities I suggest are based purely on my personal tastes. I love lemon and like a bit of a bite, so you may want to cut back on the citrus if you want a lighter flavour.

Inspired by a cute little Japanese snackhouse in Brighton called Pompoko, the idea for these easy veggie treats are completely down to a menu suggestion by Vegan in Brighton.

Maki doesn’t refer to a dish’s content but rather to the method of rolling, hence yubamaki is a yuba roll. Wait, but what’s a yuba!? While you may believe it sounds disctinctly like a Star Wars character, be relieved to know it’s nothing more than soya milk skin. Similar to the skin you find on top of boiled milk, yuba is the soya equivalent; it’s delicately removed from the top of hot soya milk and enjoyed in a variety of different dishes.

So yuba maki. Think spring rolls, only made with soy milk skin.

Recipe Notes

As an experiment, I used two different types of bean curd skin: fresh and dried. Both were delicious, but my suggestion is not to use the frozen variety unless you plan on serving these straight away. Both varieties are best if served immediately after coming out of the the oil, but those using the fresh skin re-heat better in the oven later (they tend remain very crisp without burning). Just for reference, the image at the beginning of the post uses the fresh and the image below uses the frozen variety.

This is less of a recipe than a suggestion. Only you know your favourite vegetables, so go crazy with your favourites. My choice was simple, and I recommend retaining that simplicity, with spring onions, carrots, and ginger as the base flavour. I also added some miso paste for more depth.

Variations: Vegan Pizzas are nothing to frown upon

A lot of people tend to frown upon the concept of a pizza without real cheese, but remember the most important part of a pizza is never the topping. If you have a good crust and a good sauce, you can only move forward.

For a quality pizza make sure you’re using some seriously high quality tomatoes. In fact, a marinara pizza with nothing more than a superb tomato base with some garlic and olive oil is a good place for any pizza fan to start.

Once you realise how amazing a pizza can be with so little on top, you’ll understand why it’s perfectly possible to have a delicious vegan pizza. Cheese is only one of 12,733,028 possible pizza toppings, so really it’s a bit limiting to insist on the same thing over and over. Try something new!

The trick to any pizza, beyond the sauce, is to choose simple toppings. Avoid the heaps and heaps of veggies and instead opt for just two or 3. Try things you’d never consider on pizza. Courgette/zucchini, for instance, is a fantastic pizza topping. How about thinly sliced aubergine/eggplant with a few drops of liquid smoke? Corn and pepper? Why not? You could also try thinking way outside the box and try a mashed potato and sausage pizza.

I like to add vegan cheeses to pizzas, but again that’s not always necessary. If you’ve got that base right, the possibilities are endless, and suddenly the cheese (whether dairy or vegan) becomes a possibility rather than a necessity.

What are your favourite vegan pizza toppings?

Who doesn’t love pizza? Since adopting a more vegan-friendly lifestyle, I’ve been experimenting a lot with pizzas. Fairly straightforward and 100% delicious, the standard tomato based pie is where we all start, but a childhood memory suddenly struck as I prepared to make yet another round of dough.

My best friend from my youth, Lynn, had a mother by whom I always felt incredibly spoiled when it came to food. She didn’t seem to have qualms about prices for meals and would take me to places I otherwise wouldn’t have thought to visit. One such meal was at a local bar/restaurant close to my US home, and that was when I was introduced to the concept of a white pizza. I just had to try to veganise it.

Recipe Notes

I got the idea of a beer based pizza crust from Cute and Delicious, only I used a modified version of a Linda Majzlik recipe instead. The beer adds quite a unique flavour to the dough and I’d highly recommend giving it a try, but feel free to use your own favourite pizza crust.

You’ll notice a slightly rotund crust in the above imagine. That’s because I had a go at a mushroom and cheddar Scheese stuffed crust. This is of course optional, but it’s fun to play around with!

This pizza may be vegan, but it’s seriously rich. I could barely finish 3 slices, and the same goes for my husband. I had to wait at least 7 minutes before eating the entire rest of the pizza.

I once battled meal worms and moths in my kitchen for well over a year. In the end I threw away many grocery bags full of food, much as I hated to do so. My cupboards, from that point on, became storage receptacles for storage receptacles. Tupperware-style containers were the solution, and any remaining foods with eggs were contained in air tight plastic, making it easy for me to eliminate any further pests without them contaminating more food stuffs.

The point I’m getting at is I have a lot of plastic tubs. A whole lot. So many, in fact, that there’s just not room. This means that when a certain grain is running low, I try to use it up in order to make space for another which is waiting for its new sealed home. I discovered the chana dal in the way back of the stack, and decided it was time to make space for some Israeli couscous, so this recipe was hence born. So as promised, here’s a recipe for chana dal cutlets!

Recipe Notes

Burgers versus cutlets? I intended this recipe to be for cutlets, but as an experiment I tried burgers as well. My preference is still for the latter, but that’s just me. The cutlets are good served with a nice rice dish, like a veggie biryani or pilau.

Don’t use hot broth and don’t over knead the dough. Both of these things will change the texture of the dough, specifically interacting with the gluten to create a more stringy and chewy texture. Of course if you want it to be chewier then knead for longer, but the hot water will make the dough tough from the start.

By the way, a pressure cooker is great for dals!

Vegan MoFo Survey

1. Favorite non-dairy milk?

Bonsoy, hands down. It’s the best soy milk for coffee and most similar to milk if steamed for milky espresso beverages. For cooking I use homemade soy milk.

2. What are the top 3 dishes/recipes you are planning to cook?

From Vegan MoFo? So far I’m looking at loads (I just got home from a holiday to India, so I’m behind), but these Tsukimi are looking pretty awesome. I love sticky rice sweets. This vegan toffee is going to have to happen at some point, too. As that special time of the month is approaching and I’ll enter into a few days of consuming things like pizza for breakfast, this beer crust pizza is definitely on the to-do list.

3. Topping of choice for popcorn?

I’m not a big popcorn eater, but it’s got to be sickly and sweet if I do… toffee I suppose.

4. Most disastrous recipe/meal failure?

What do you mean? Everything I do comes out perfect!

I suppose my most recent failure would have been a complete experiment in stuff in a ramekin baked with more stuff. Its end flavour was like salty cake. To be fair it was a bit of a science experiment in how baking soda and powder worked.

5. Favorite pickled item?

I’m a big fan of quality dill pickles, but also love most other pickled things!

6. How do you organize your recipes?

Organise? People organise things? My method is to pretend I know what I’m doing and smile lots in the hopes that whatever I’ve dished up will be received as tolerable based on my faux confidence.

7. Compost, trash, or garbage disposal?

Whatever can be recycled goes down that road, but otherwise it’s the rubbish bin I’m afraid. Flats aren’t incredibly great places for compost bins.

8. If you were stranded on an island and could only bring 3 foods…what would they be (don’t worry about how you’ll cook them)?

This question is going to ruin my life. Seriously, three foods? How about three crates of foods? Okay, maybe aubergine, spinach, and bread (I’m ignoring the fact there are lots of ingredients in there). Wait, I need tofu too. I’m going to go ahead and steal space from MoFoers who don’t fill out this survey. Coffee, chickpeas, and vodka to drown out the sorrow we will all feel upon hearing me bitch all day about not having my entire spice cabinet.

9. Fondest food memory from your childhood?

I liked when, as a toddler, my mother would go outside to garden and I could climb up on the cabinets and eat all the Flinstones vitamins while watching out the window out of the corner of my eye to be sure she wouldn’t see. Then there was the time my sister babysat me while my parents went out for their anniversary. Hungry, I asked for something to eat, and the meal presented was Triscuits with wet cat food (and a small side of the dried variety). While I wouldn’t call it fond in the sense that I enjoy cat food, it’s a memory that still makes me laugh in a sick way.

10. Favorite vegan ice cream?

For brands, Purely Decadent chocolate peanut butter (when I’m in the US) and Booja Booja in the UK. I think I make a pretty decent ice cream myself though.

11. Most loved kitchen appliance?

Rancilio Rocky and Silvia. It’s not possible to pick just one because an espresso machine is useless without a grinder.

12. Spice/herb you would die without?

I go through phases with things like this, but I’m a huge fan of basil; Sage and rosemary in the winter months.

13. Cookbook you have owned for the longest time?

You expect my lazy arse to get up and check?

14. Favorite flavor of jam/jelly?

Damson, blackcurrent.

15. Favorite vegan recipe to serve to an omni friend?

This question assumes I have friends.

Honestly though, I don’t have people over for meals very often. But in general, I think cakes are a great introduction to the awesomeness that is veganism.

16. Seitan, tofu, or tempeh?

What a choice! The answer totally depends on what’s being cooked, but if we’re talking about what I could eat plain and unaided by any additional flavours then it’d be tofu hands down.

17. Favorite meal to cook (or time of day to cook)?

In an ideal world, I’d have all my big meals at lunch time. My best time of day in terms of ability to think is the morning, so preparing for lunch means I’m working on recipes during my most focused time of day. Unfortunately there’s this thing called work which I must make myself also do.

18. What is sitting on top of your refrigerator?

A tofu press and some cat food (not to be combined in any way). Also a pressure cooker.

19. Name 3 items in your freezer without looking.

Chili, yuba, ice cream maker

20. What’s on your grocery list?

I just went shopping today. On the list were some fruit and veg, flours, fresh yeast, tempeh, vegan cheeses, and lots of goodies for Vegan MoFo recipe ideas. Still on the list: a magical flying carpet.

21. Favorite grocery store?

Impossible to answer. I love different places for different reasons, but I love Riverford’s veg boxes. I also love little organic food shops like Seasons in Forest Row and Infinity in Brighton. I’m also a fan of the Co-operative.

22. Name a recipe you’d love to veganize, but haven’t yet.

French Macarons (that’s macaron, not the familiar coconut macaroon). I don’t even know how one would go about this as the eggs are so necessary and the texture, even using eggs, is dependent on so many factors. They are probably one of the most difficult recipes to get right even with the eggs! Two seconds too long or short in the oven and that’s it.

23. Food blog you read the most (besides Isa’s because I know you check it everyday). Or maybe the top 3?

I’m bad about reading food blogs.  I mainly skim my RSS feeds and select based on catchy titles. Some which tend to grab my attention more than others are Fat Free Vegan Kitchen, Limes and Lycopene, and photo roundup sites like Tastespotting.

24. Favorite vegan candy/chocolate?

Montezuma’s chocolate is very good, and I love me some Newman-Os.

25. Most extravagant food item purchased lately?

Saffron, perhaps. It’s one of the 3 most expensive spices in the world (vanilla and cardamom being the other two).

26. Why is it so hard to come up with questions and things to say?

Probably because I’m still recovering from being awake for 40+ hours before arriving back home from India yesterday.

Cuuuuuutttteeee, right? These vegan recipe cards feature a series of flowers in the corner, with each blossom represented by letters which spell “vegan.” Made especially for Vegan MoFo (vegan month of food), these cards are perfect for vegan kitchens (and for vegan recipes to include with those yummy cupcakes you bring to the office to make Mondays a little less hateable)!

The cards are available in pdf format below, in 3 different colour schemes. You can either type on the cards in your pdf reader or print and handwrite recipes (in which case be sure to delete the text already there). The text size in the pdf looks huge, but will adjust itself accordingly depending on how much you slap on the card.

Download Vegan Fleur 4×6 Recipe Cards

Download Vegan Fleur 3×5 Recipe Cards

Do you have an idea for an awesome vegan shirt or sticker slogan? Leave a comment and let me know!

The Vegan Shirts

Vegan Rocker Brown and Red by Veganista
Design custom tee shirts at Zazzle

Rocker Pink Vegan by Veganista
Make customized tee shirts at Zazzle

Buttons, Keychains, and More!

Red and Blue 1980s Rocker Vegan by Veganista
Design custom buttons on zazzle

Pink and Green Vegan by Veganista
See other Vegan Keychains

Rocker Blue Vegan by Veganista
Browse more Vegan Bags

Vegan Rocker Blue by Veganista
Browse more Vegan Mugs

So here I am, 30, sharing a birthday with one of history’s most famous political leaders in his home country. Well, not literally, because Ghandi’s dead, but India’s still a pretty cool place.

Some Vegan Mofo 2009 posts have been scheduled ahead of time, but most recipes will come further into the second half of the month. Stay tuned for some goodies though! Here’s a preview of recipes to come this month:

Channa Dhal Okara Cutlets

Yubamaki (bean curd skin rolls)

Vegan Pizza Ideas

Stay tuned

Be sure to check back for these and other new recipes to celebrate the vegan month of food. India is a dream for food inspiration, so I’ll be cooking up a storm when I’m back in my own kitchen!

What’s the point? Your point?

Over time I began to realise all the reasons I preached to myself and to inquisitive others about my vegetarian diet were in fact reasons for being vegan. I don’t believe in animal cruelty, I’m a big supporter of human rights, and I support environmental awareness and reductions of factors contributing to global warming. These are issues which negatively correspond to our industry of animals for food.

I won’t lie and pretend I’m going to be little miss vegan princess (or little miss anything which involves princesses, come to think of it). I know I won’t be as strict as many others and I know I’m not going to waste food. Should I ingest milk or eggs I won’t heave like if I found out I’d accidentally eaten meat, and I’m going to try my hardest not to be as controlling and judgemental of others.

It’s hard not to be controlling. Also hard not to be judgemental.

Vegan Month of Food

I’m taking the opportunity to announce my not-so-dirty secret because October is the vegan month of food, or VeganMoFo for short, and I’ve decided to participate.

The idea of Vegan MoFo is to blog as much as possible about vegan food for the month of October. That means posts around here will be more frequent and varied; a mix of recipes, ideas, pictures, and thoughts. I’d also like to invite anyone to ask questions or make suggestions for what you’d like to see on the site. Is there a particular recipe out there which you’d like to see veganised? Do you have a suggestion for a recipe I’ve already posted? Are you battling an insufferable case of kittens on the mind?

Drop me a note!

Here’s the problem: I love baking

Why is that a problem, you say?

Baking, despite what people think, is not easy. I gawp at those who claim to be incapable of cooking yet can create never-fail cakes, cookies with perfectly moist centres and crisp edges, breads which were exquisitely crafted. I try to craft my own baking recipes but success is intermittant. Yes, baking is a science I’m afraid, and I’m still learning. Alas here is a recipe that worked, and worked well to boot.

Let’s not mention the excessive sugar content in most baked goods, an ingredient for which my brain and heart cry out. The chompers and my dentist, however, are in cahoots and believe it’s better to stick to other munchables.

A garden overflow

I’m late on this post, I know. The summer months leave gardeners awash with heaps of this delicious vegetable, and by the end of these days everyone’s desperate to finish the crop and move on. Courgette bread (that’s zucchini bread to Americans) is a perfect way to use some of the overflow, and it’s an easy bread which most everyone enjoys. Using about 1 courgette (zucchini) per loaf, you could easily bake a dozen on a lazy Sunday and hand them out at the office on Monday morning! These zucchini bread loaves are also ideal for those summer bake sales.

Recipe Notes

Something I’ve noticed since moving to the UK eight and a half years ago is the difference in cake consistency, and it became clear the reason American cakes just taste so much better is because of their use of ridiculous amounts of oil in recipes. Great for taste, but not so great for the gut, I opted to replace some of the oil content here with apple sauce. This makes a good substitution for oil, but I’m afraid some is still necessary to keep that moist texture (don’t worry, this zucchini bread recipe still yields a loaf which has the soft, almost gooey, texture you’d associate with zucchini bread).

The banana and arrowroot work as a non-egg binder, and work really well flavour-wise in here. The use of banana also, coupled with the apple sauce, merits using a little less sugar overall. If you browse a lot of other recipes you’ll see this one uses, on average, 25% less processed sugar.

I went crazy at Wing Yip a few weeks ago, and completely forgot until now that I’d picked up a packet of abura age, a Japanese method of deep frying tofu to create puffy pouches of yumminess. In my recent vegan attempts, I’ve also gone a bit crazy purchasing mock cheese products, and as a result have quite possibly paid the wages of the entire Cheezly company in the weeks since.

Recipe Notes

Age is not particularly difficult to make, and I have done so in the past (it’s been years), but it’s very cheap and easy to obtain at an Oriental-Asian supermarket. Look for it in rectangular form for this recipe. If you want to make your own, then search the Googlenets and you’ll find plenty of advice on the subject.

The sauce combination is one I’ve played around with as a base for curry sauces. The combination of garlic, chili, coriander, turmeric, salt, sugar, and tomato has a lovely summer vibe and a refreshing flavour which isn’t too far beyond that of your standard quality tomato-based sauce. My choice for using it over another sauce in this recipe is because I wanted it to be the prominent flavour, with the cheese as an undertone. You can then guess I didn’t add a great deal of the latter, but that was my choice; feel free to stuff these suckers full to bursting point with your own favourite sauce and vegan cheese!

I’ve tried this with a selection of different Cheezly cheeses, with my preference being the Greek Style chunks sliced up.

The portion I made is tiny, a snack sized portion, but could easily be expanded to make an excellent addition to any hors d’oeuvre platter. These would also make awesome vegan picnic treats!

Oh, and what you see in the picture alongside are mild wasabi cashews.

Who’s in need of a lesson in veganism? And just how do you convince them it’s all rainbows and happiness as opposed to bitter closed doors?

Think about your audience

Let’s face it: we want the world to give up meat. We want people to see the reality of an industry which promotes all the things most everyone in the West claims to hate, like animal abuse, world hunger and poverty, plus the excessive rise in greenhouse gases and its environmental impact. We want people to face up and be responsible.

I think the problem is often, and I’ve definitely been guilty of this, that we can be pushy as hell. Copping an attitude puts people on the defensive, however, so it’s not such a great way to get people to see your side. A little bit of patience all around has surprising results when it comes to explaining veggie reasoning to a non-veg (or even a transitioning veg).

The thing is, we all have different backgrounds, different experiences, different levels of tolerance and acceptance. We all have individual comfort zones and varying resistances to change, creature comforts and hard-set lifestyles. It’s sometimes hard to see or even acknowledge the barriers, so I figured I’d posit what I’ve observed as stereotypical populations involved and the opposing views of which I’ve made mental note over the years.

The vegetarian / vegan

• Who: This is the group with the strongest sets of beliefs, those who follow a specific set of dietary guidelines and are not likely to budge.
• Obstacles include omnivore responses like “you make everything difficult”, “well I’m not the one who’s picky”, “can’t you just pick the meat off?”, “but I like flavour in my food”, and “what could you possible eat? How am I to cook for you?”
• Advice: Try to set aside the feelings of frustration and remember the anti-veg flavour enthusiast is not educated about your foodstyle, and their own diet is likely to be quite limited if they truly cannot contemplate a veggie way of life. Suggest cooking familiar meals, like a vegan pasta dish or pie, before introducing them to scrambled tofu. Bake them some vegan brownies before offering them a glass of soy milk. Build them up slowly and then ask if they’d be willing to trust your judgement (then wow them with a tofu chocolate pie and vegan icecream). Be patient.

The recently converted

• Who: This is the group whose choice to eat veg is a new one and they may (or may not!) still be living off of dishes presented in cardboard with Quorn or Amy’s branding. At this stage you still remember the flavour meat imparts to its accompanying vegetables and you’re still learning about this new lifestyle, so you’re probably seeking simple transition foods.
• Obstacles involve pressure from friends and family who think you will die of malnutrition and think they can lure you back to the meat side. It’s also a very anxious time for a lot of people because they’re making a big decision, often alone, and have a whole new lifestyle to grasp and old habits to overcome.
• Advice: Be patient and do your research. While you can live a perfectly healthy veg life on a veg diet, it is a big change and your body will appreciate being treated well. If being hounded is a huge concern to you, show them proof from a nutritionist that your choice is in fact a very healthy and sustainable one. For meals ask friends and family to use vegan alternatives. I’ve heard many an omnivore praise a vegan meat alternative (the basics like sausages and pies especially).

The anxious but willing omnivore

• Who: Perhaps you are that person who feels veg food is dull and flavourless but you’re genuinely interested in how to feed your newly vegan daughter/friend/colleague. Your mind is open to trying something new if you’re given room to understand and learn.
• Obstacles generally revolve around accepting someone else’s choice and the potential impact on your own lifestyle.
• Advice: Please be patient. Buy a veggie cookbook and ask questions. If you’re hosting or planning anything which involves food, ask people about their dietary requirements and any specific requests. Ensure there’s no such worry as being a pain in the arse and that you want to know. If there’s only one vegetarian at a meal, think about a whole veggie-friendly meal rather than a meat-based meal with a veggie option for the one person (this can be uncomfortable for everyone). It can’t be put into words how much this means to a any veggie.

The Meat and Potatoes Dad

• Who: Arguably a veggie’s most difficult, this is the population who have made up their minds that it’s not a meal if there isn’t meat. Meals often consist of meat and two veg with often no more than butter or maybe gravy.
• Obstacles are often very difficult to overcome by both sides in these scenarios. On one hand you have someone with a value-driven lifestyle with which they will not make compromises and on the other you have an individual who’s very intent on eating what they’ve been happy to eat their entire lives.
• Advice: Remember the person with the veggie diet is more than likely doing it for moral reasons. Try thinking of it in terms of a cause that’s important to you; would you be comfortable if someone asked you to accompany them to the clinic for termination of a pregnancy? Would you feel uneasy if someone opened a packet of hazelnuts around you, the sufferer of an extreme allergy? What if your religious creed forbade a certain food or preparation and someone who knew your background brought an offending dish along to a potluck you’re hosting? Think of situations which may be uncomfortable for you but you know aren’t an issue for others and imagine the vegetarian/vegan being in that position. It’s also important to remember no one’s doing this to spite you. Try to keep an open line of communication and explain your difficulties, and request simple dishes like shephards pie, spaghetti bolognaise, and other dishes which are familiar but easily veganised.

Opinions?

Are you an omnivore currently trying to work with a vegetarian or vegan? A vegetarian or vegan sharing a kitchen with an omnivore? Do you have any additional suggestions on how to cope with the differences and difficulties presented by these situations? Leave a comment below!

Raise your hand if you’re familiar with, whether as something you’ve said or heard, a variant of “…but doesn’t it all taste the same? I could never give up meat because I like flavour.”

Whether you’re an omnivore cooking for a vegan, a long-time veggie, or somewhere in between, here are a few ingredients see as key in adding that extra little bit of oomph to a dish.

A splash of this and a pinch of that

1. Anywhere you need that little bit of extra depth, whether in gravy, pies, stews, wherever, then Marmite is your friend. Obviously you realise it’s a must-have staple for anything revolving around your typical Sunday roast. The GVC loves Marmite and wants you to love it too, so check out their “tips to help any nervous Marmite virgins earn their brown wings.” Vegemite is another option, but not my personal preference.
2. I dismissed soy sauce for many years because I hadn’t had anything other than cheap darkened soy juice. Find yourself a quality soy sauce. In fact, find yourself many. There’s light soy sauce and dark soy sauce (milder but richer in colour), tamari, and a number of other options. Vegetables and stocks will come to life with a generous splash.
3. Nutritional yeast, also know as “nooch” in some circles, is a staple in any vegan’s store cupboard. It’s a deactivated yeast with a nutty flavour which complements salads, potatoes, sauces and dressings, stir-fries, and more.
4. Dark Miso pastes are another excellent method of adding a deep and rich flavour to a dish. Light miso is good too, but the sugar content is higher so be careful when using to “beef” up a meal!
5. A personal favourite is red wine vinegar, a condiment I use in gravy for a roast dinner. A little bit goes a long way and it adds a full and zingy taste to stocks and pies.
6. That said, I suppose it’s a little unfair to discount the all important red wine and white wine, both capable of lifting any dish from the depths of dullness to the height of flavour. If you’re cooking for a vegan or vegetarian, make sure they’re suitable though because lots of alcohol isn’t.
7. Dried shiitake mushrooms make a fabulous addition to any stock. Seriously. If these aren’t in your storecupboard, get yourself to an Asian Oriental (and yes I’ve been informed this isn’t a politically correct term in the US, but “Asian” here refers to a different part of the world. I use the term purely as a regional reference) grocer and get some.
8. The darkest of dark chocolate has the capability of adding some serious depth to a dish. Sound odd? It’s been used in Central and South American cooking for many many years.

What do you think?

What staple flavour enhancers do you use? If you had to re-write my list, what would you leave out? Include?

Okay, okay, so my main point of this post is to encourage everyone (omnivores, vegetarians, and vegans alike) to purchase Isa Chandra Moscowicz’s latest book, Vegan Brunch. It just happens this very simple but also delicious recipe for a fruity chocolate smoothie goes great with brunch.

See the muffin in the smoothie picture? That’s a blueberry ginger spelt muffin from the book, and it’s good too. They aren’t too sweet like muffins often are, and the texture is both gooey and nutty with a sweet grainy mouthfeel (what a word, what a word…). Key ingredients include blueberries and crystalised ginger (though I’ll admit I added a bunch of powdered as an alternative). It’s a good one for anyone who likes some sugar in the morning but not in epic proportions.

More Vegan Brunch Recipe Photos

…but if you do want some seriously sweet heaven in the A.M. hours then the banana flapjacks (a form of pancake in the US as opposed to the rolled oat bar in the UK) are the treat for you. Served here with some non dairy butter and fresh blueberries, these babies are pretty fab.

And here we have the Vegan Vidalia (sweet) Onion Quiche, a tofu dish for even the most devout of quiche fans.

I’m pretty sure if this was thrown in with a random pool of food pictures, “this looks vegan” isn’t the first thing a random browser would think. Probably two of the greatest recipes in the collection (based on the fact that I’ve cooked maybe ten), the vegan omelette and the vegan sausages are pure genius.

Does the omelette pretend to be an egg? No, not really. It’s heavier and smoother, but the general taste isn’t that far off. Methinks this will be the foundation for some amazing vegan “egg” dishes in future. I’ve already got my imagination cells set on a few, so watch this space.

Do the “sausages” pretend to be sausages? Well, this one can be argued. Sausages come in a variety of shapes and textures, with a gazillion recipes for herb and spice mixes to flavour. In fact, it seems most of the flavour of sausage tends to come from what’s included with the meat as opposed to the meat itself. With that thought in mind it’s really the texture you’re after, and gluten is the vegetarian/vegan answer. Shown above are the cherry sage sausages from Vegan Brunch, in which a main ingredient is gluten flour (and almond okara- my own addition). I’m already planning a Cumberland version!

Oh, and the smoothie recipe.

Everyone has something without which they simply cannot function. Everyone’s got a food obsession, a weakness. The chosen treat of many readers is likely a dish that’s been bastardised from the Italians (in the form of chemically enhaced dough slathered with the lowest quality ingredients imaginable and finally topped with a fatty, oily sediment which one might loosely call “mozzarella”). Or burgers. Or cardboard sandwiches.

Mine is bastardised Arabic food, just in case I haven’t mentioned that already ten billion times. Chickpeas are my BFF. Aubergine (that’s eggplant to you) is my homeboy. I want to marry a pomegranite. My closet lover is a spice shelf stacked with goodies like sumac and cinnamon. You get the idea. I live for this stuff.

I just returned home from a two week surprise visit to see my family in Maryland, 3500 miles on the other side of the Atlantic (it’s a good setup, really), and through that whole time the only Middle Eastern fayre to end up in my stomach tubes was some babaganouj from Whole Foods. By the time my plane landed at Gatwick my body was ready to shrivel up and die.

But you know how it is when you’ve been away: you return home to a ghetto-stocked fridge full of half-eaten leftovers. Thankfully one of those was a tub of hummus I’d made before I left. My husband had already been instructed to greet me with an aubergine, and the freezer held a few old sheets of Phyllo pastry which called out to be defrosted. Provided below is the resulting tale.

Recipe Notes and howto

I know people get frustrated with recipes which don’t include exact amounts and I know I should take better care to measure so I can pass things on properly. But here’s the thing: I suck. Oh, and another thing: your worst case scenario is going to be gooey pastry and aubergine. It’s still going to taste good if you’re into these sorts of flavours.

I used Iranian Advieh in the mix, but consider this optional (here’s a recipe for advieh if you want to try it yourself). I personally like the warmth induced by the cinnamon and hummus combination, but my husband was slightly more skeptical.

If you’re not sure about my instructions below, or are confused, I’ve included some pictures of whole who wrapping up process.

Quinoa is seriously under-valued by so many, and it’s a real shame because it’s a truly divine grain. Fortunately it’s seen for its value in its land of origin, the South American Andes region, where it has been cultivated for some 6,000 years.

Technically a seed rather than a grain, this star food is one of the most complete proteins out there, containing all the amino acids about which those uneducated doctors-cum-[wannabe] nutritionists chide veggies (I’ve been vegetarian for 17 years and I’m still waiting to be hospitalised for malnutrition, as promised by so many).

Recipe Notes

In my pictures you’ll notice I used this recipe as a stuffing for baked peppers. While this was good I suggest using this as a side dish instead. The reason lies with the dill, a mild herb with a flavour easily lost with too much heat. If you intend to oven-bake this quinoa recipe then I suggest serving it with some fresh dill after the baking process is complete.

Why Arabic inspired? The Arabic world’s contribution to the food fusion scene is one which has offered uncomplicated yet inspired results. One reason I adore this region’s food is because its cuisine uses simplicity and general know-how to engineer heaven on a plate. Combine this with a little creativity and your imagination can stretch the basics for miles and miles. For instance pine nuts, dill, and Middle Eastern spices combined with a seed of the gods, an Incan grain fit for kings.

As with many (most?) of my recipes, the ingredient quantities can take some guesswork in measurements, and most certainly have room for experimentation.

Perfect to serve with some new potatoes doused in olive oil or butter, this quinoa is also filling on its own (though you may want to increase the recipe a bit).

Apparently we starve him so much that he has to resort to gnawing on vegetable carnage not quite captured inside the heavy lid of the rubbish bin.

“Could I please have a grande, sugar-free, soy, extra hot, caramel mocha with whipped cream and an extra shot?”

It’s understandable how and why an espresso virgin might feel confused upon his or her first encounter with a modern coffee shop. Just when you think you’ve got the local chain’s menu down, you hear what sounds like a foreign language from the bloke in front of you.

I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here; there are plenty of coffee resources out there which document just what every espresso drink is and what they contain. My intention is merely to simplify those lists a little, breaking them down into the basic drink components: straight espresso, milk based, and drinks which often straddle the two (enhanced). This is by no means an extensive list.

Espresso drinks, simplified: a classification guide

I like it strong! Straight espresso drinks with no milk.

Often claimed to be “too much” or bitter to taste, these drinks are for the true espresso lover. These are the drinks which involve ground espresso beans and water, with no other ingredient aside from the loving care and expertise of the barista who serves your drink.

• Single Shot: equal to about 30ml (1 ounce) of espresso
  
• Double Shot: equal to about 60ml (2 ounces) of espresso
  
• Ristretto (short): espresso equal to about 75% of a normal shot (above), using the same amount of coffee but brewed in the same amount of time as a regular shot. The water flow is restricted in order to achieve this.
• Lungo (long): the opposite of a ristretto, if you will, with around a minimum of 50% more volume in the espresso (using the same amount of coffee). More water is let through in order to achieve this.
• Americano: Perfect for the filter coffee enthusiast who wants to give espresso a shot (ha, ha pun intended), an americano is simply espresso with hot water added.

I like it milky smooth! Milk based espresso drinks.

These are the drinks about which everyone outside of Italy and parts of Europe talk. In fact, many in North America and the UK often seem to think of espresso as being synonymous with these drinks.

• Cappuccino: A beverage of thirds made with 1/3 espresso, 1/3 steamed milk, and 1/3 milk foam.
• Café Latte: made outside of Italy with approximately (this can be argued) 1/3 espresso and 2/3 steamed milk (with a fraction of the steamed milk a creamy foam on top). The extra milk makes this drink milder in taste than the cappuccino. In Italy a latte is generally a drink which is far more mild and perhaps not even made with espresso.
• Flat White: Very similar to the above latte, but with little or no foamed milk on top.
• Mocha: Also very similar to a latte, but with added chocolate syrup or powder.
• Breve: Essentially a latte made with half and half (light cream) rather than milk. Very rich and quite American.

Enhanced espresso.

Think of these as espresso with something a little extra. It’s still a straight shot, with dairy or other ingredients to tone and/or complement the coffee.

• Espresso con Panna: espresso with a dollop of whipped cream on top.
• Macchiato: translates as “stained,” so is simply espresso lightly topped with very little milk foam or milk.
• Corretto: espresso “corrected” (spiked!) with a shot of liquor.

Clearing up Confused Terms and a primer on extras

Macchiato vs Macchiato: In Starbucks and many chains the machiato is a giant milky drink crafted for people who desire diabetes. Order a macchiato in a more specialised coffee house, however, and you’ll be most likely served a completely different beverage. What starbucks serves is a version of the Latte Macchiato, which is essentially a latte with a twist: instead of pouring the milk into a cup with espresso, the espresso is poured into a cup with milk (version emphasised because I don’t know if Starbucks actually makes their drink this way). The Café Macchiato, on the other hand, is simply neat espresso with a dollop of milk or milk foam.

Flavours: hazelnut, caramel, peppermint, and a thousand others. Good or bad? This is a choice down to the mind of the individual consuming the coffee, but in my opinion flavourings often exist to mask bad espresso. Why would you need all the flavours, super-sizes, and extras if you simply had a barista who could make a sublime cup of coffee? Find good coffee and suddenly those extras become unnecessary.

Milk variety: the less fat the easier it is to foam the milk, but full fat milk is completely doable and honestly better. Soy milk is also an option, but can be tricky to foam. Bonsoy brand, however, can be worked in a manner very similar to whole milk (if you’ve ever had a soy latte and hated it, try Bonsoy next time).

Variety doesn’t have to be difficult

I believe a lot of people don’t try espresso simply because it’s easier to drink a cup of “normal coffee” than battle with a new language. If/when you decide to give espresso a go, think of the drinks in terms of their ingredients. Don’t like milk? Ignore lattes and cappuccinos. Can’t handle it black? Then you’ll want to try those milky drinks. Want to try espresso but afraid it might be too much on its own? Try con panna!

Whatever you do, just find a good barista. Try some good espresso. Please?

All posts in this series

1. There’s No “X” in “Espresso” and Other Tales of Coffee Woe
2. What Espresso Isn’t: A Primer on Ghettopresso and more
3. Ingredients For Successful Espresso
4. The Coffee Shop Menu, Simplified

5 Factors contributing to successful espresso

In Italy there is a set of four basic elements which comprise the path to perfect espresso, commonly referred to as the “4 m’s”. Others tack on a fifth m, this one referring to maintenance. While I believe maintenance to be important I propose my own fifth element for the purpose of this post (related to the 4th, but in my opinion important enough to merit standing on its own). So the 4 m’s and a p.

1. Miscela: the espresso blend, the beans.
2. Macinadosatore: the dosing grinder and the grind.
3. Macchina: the machine.
4. Mano dell’operatore: the hand of the operator, including the tamp and that which is under the control of the barista.
5. Patience

1. The Beans / Miscela

Coffee beans are grown around the world and fans will argue their preferences until blue in the face. Origin can play an important role and it’s worth tasting a variety of coffees from around the world. The most accepted view is that Arabica beans are best, but most espresso is extracted from a blend of different coffees. Often these blends will include a small amount of the less favoured Robusta in order to ensure a good crema.

There are four different coffee roasts: light, medium, dark, and very dark, the latter two being what we generally conceive as best for espresso. It could be argued that the flavours of origin and bean are easier distinguished in a medium roast, the preferred espresso beans used by many Italians.

2. The Grind / Macinadosatore

It’s funny to me how most people would agree fresh is always better but many let this concept slide when it comes to coffee. Fresh is important if you want a good shot and, coupled with an even grind, you’ll really spot the difference between a shot made with pre-packaged or badly ground coffee versus a shot from a fresh and even grind.

There are two primary types of coffee grinders: the burr grinder and the more common blade grinder. The latter are what you’ll mainly see at the local shops and are not in any way suitable for grinding espresso. A burr grinder costs more, but if you are serious about coffee then this should arguably be your greatest investment. A good burr grinder can be adjusted to produce a variety of consistent grain sizes, an important factor when you consider your end goal, which is to produce a shot of good espresso.

To better explain that point, it’s important to note just what espresso is. It’s a drink made from 5-10 grams of finely ground coffee which, under 9 bar of brewing pressure and with water between 194-204 degrees Fahrenheit, produces a 30ml (approx) shot when extracted between 20-30 seconds.

This drink cannot be easily achieved with an uneven or too large grind no matter how hard you pack it down, and that’s the sort of grind you will get with a cheap blade grinder.

Buy a classy £1,000 home espresso machine without a good burr grinder and you’ll still only pull mediocre shots at best.

3. The Equipment / Macchina

I’ve already discussed the espresso machine to some extent (see point 3 in that post), but want to explain further why it’s important to buy a pump machine and also why the machine won’t ever be the solo star in your dream shot.

The definition of espresso I provided above is actually quite a basic one. You’re probably thinking “how is that basic?”

That’s my point. It’s not. While many espresso machines will come with just 3 basic switches: power, pump, and steam, espresso is a beverage which demands some seriously precise conditions. You need a machine capable of producing 9 bar of pressure, but that’s not enough on its own because the machine also needs to be able to maintain accurate temperatures on multiple levels (the boiler will reach different temperatures for espresso brewing and milk frothing, for instance).

And now, after demanding you find and pay for quality, I tell you the machine isn’t the most important aspect of the process. Consider a chef who is attempting the creation of a stunning meal using only mediocre kitchen tools. Sure, the style may be lost and it may be a more cumbersome task, but the end result still streams from two more important factors: quality ingredients and an experienced chef. The same applies for coffee, only the ingredients are the freshly burr-ground coffee and the barista becomes the chef.

4. Barista Skills / Mano dell’operatore

This element, combined with the grinder, are in my opinion the most important factors to consider in the espresso process. You don’t need to have a rack of barista championship trophies in order to make a good shot, but you do need some know-how.

The tamp (packing the coffee into a tight puck in the basket) is crucial in the espresso brewing process. People underestimate the importance of this step, one which ensures the water flow to extract your espresso shot under ideal conditions. Properly tamped coffee ensures the water is forced evenly through all of the coffee rather than through some of it, which is what happens when the tamp is uneven.

Think of it this way: you’ve got a powerful machine producing a whole lot of pressure and the water is trying to find its way down the path of lesser pressure (which in this case is out through the coffee). An even and solid tamp creates a resistance of sorts to the initial pressure, so instead of the water finding the path of least resistance (that is, the path of less densely packed coffee) it has to push evenly through the grind. The end result? You get a quality shot rather than just a measure of strong coffee.

The tamp really can make or break that shot.

5. Patience

There are always several parts to one whole, and this is perhaps one of the most overlooked. Unless you have a super automatic machine which does it all, you’re going to spend some serious time getting the hang of this. And after you get the hang of it you’ll spend yet more time making your shot better. That still won’t be good enough, so after that you’ll spend the rest of your days seeking absolute espresso perfection.

Don’t be afraid to mess up, because that’s how we best learn to do it better the next time. In fact I’d even recommend purposely going against all the recommended methods just to see how coffee shouldn’t be. Consume shots from the chains, local establishments, and other wannabe home baristas. Try everything you can and learn to tell right from wrong when you taste a shot so can apply better techniques to your own efforts.

Oh, and don’t do this for no reason other than to impress your partner’s boss or your upper middle class neighbours. Do it because you want to learn how, a must if you want to pull a better shot (see above about time dedication). A machine which sits on the counter to be used as a declaration of your bank balance when the mom of your kid’s friend collects them simply won’t do; you have to learn how to use the sucker regularly to get anywhere.

Stay Tuned: What’s behind the names: an espresso beverage guide

Espresso is complicated business, one which merits a constant education and never-ending practice. To further the confusion are the plethora of espresso based and other coffee drinks on the market, many of which are misrepresented by coffee shops. Stay tuned for the next post on coffee drinks and why Starbucks’ ballsup of a macchiato is actually just a bad latte.

All posts in this series

1. There’s No “X” in “Espresso” and Other Tales of Coffee Woe
2. What Espresso Isn’t: A Primer on Ghettopresso and more
3. Ingredients For Successful Espresso
4. The Coffee Shop Menu, Simplified

In my previous post about Espresso myths and tales of coffee woe I discussed a few myths about espresso and its process. Here are a few more morsels of information about what espresso isn’t and how to spot a cup of what I call “ghettopresso”.

1. Nescafe is not a Barista

Much like a cup of strong coffee cannot be equated to an espresso, those sugary packets of instant cappuccino mix you keep at the office also don’t fit the bill. That’s like comparing spray cheese with vintage cheddar or bringing Manischewitz to a wine tasting party.

Also consider the coffee you buy. You’ll notice on many pre-ground coffee packs an image or statement that the blend is appropriate for everything from a cafetiere (French press) to an espresso machine. This simply isn’t true; you use a different grind of coffee for an espresso machine than for a drip machine, another grind again for a cafetiere, and still another for Turkish coffee. And so forth.

Yes, this means the espresso blend you used in your French press isn’t in fact espresso. It’s just as it sounds: finely ground coffee beans in hot water. It’s a cup of coffee, a cup of inefficiently brewed coffee.

2. Some things were never made to be super-sized

…and good coffee is one of them. Sure we all like to indulge from time to time, but with most things in life I find I will both remember and savour something more if the portion is sufficient and the product is divine.

My personal thought is that you lose out by super-sizing espresso drinks because the proper ratios are thrown out the door. A cappuccino, for instance, should be 1/3 espresso, 1/3 steamed milk, and 1/3 milk froth. Using double espresso shots, that’s 2 ounces (60 ml) each of espresso, milk, and froth. With those proportions in mind, Starbucks should use 6.6 shots/ounces of espresso in their 20 ounce drink. They use two.

And I don’t think I would want to drink nearly 200ml of espresso in one sitting anyway.

Do yourself a favour and find something more authentic, just to give it a try. With good coffee, less genuinely is more.

3. When an espresso machine is not an espresso machine

There are several types of espresso machine, but for the purpose of this post I’m breaking them into two basic categories: those which make real espresso and those which don’t, my focus being on the latter.

My first gripe is with the stove top moka pot. Sure they may have roots in the original process behind the drink, but don’t expect its end product to mimic the shot your local [skilled] barista pulls. It’s another producer of strong coffee and nothing more. I have a feeling most people realise this.

Then there’s the steam powered espresso machines. These operate on the basic principle of boiling water (and espresso is not in fact made with boiling water) and using the steam to push out the coffee. Keeping that process in mind, the drink produced by steam powered machines will be closer to one from a stovetop espresso maker than to a modern day shot. True espresso is crafted using a pump process, one which doesn’t boil the water first and one which uses a minimum of 9 bar pressure.

While it’s maybe a bit snobbish to say the steam powered machines cannot produce espresso, it’s certainly reasonable to say you simply cannot obtain professional results using one.

But don’t despair. If you love your venti caramel latte and what comes out of your Delonghi ghettopresso machine then that’s what really matters, right?.

I am by no means a professional, so I’ve only touched on the very outskirts of machines. If you’re interested in reading more, the topic of machines is explained in detail elsewhere by people who really know what they’re talking about and with good espresso machine advice to offer.

Stay Tuned: Ingredients for successful espresso

It’s clear to most people that espresso involves the use of a coffee bean (no, there is not an espresso plant) coupled with equipment of some sort. Stay tuned for the next part in the series to learn why the espresso machine is arguably one of the least important tools in the process.

All posts in this series

1. There’s No “X” in “Espresso” and Other Tales of Coffee Woe
2. What Espresso Isn’t: A Primer on Ghettopresso and more
3. Ingredients For Successful Espresso
4. The Coffee Shop Menu, Simplified

Three Espresso Myths

1. Espresso has more caffeine than “regular” coffee.

Many people are surprised to learn espresso generally has a much lower caffeine content than a cup of filter coffee. One possible (read this Roast Magazine article for a differing point of view) reason is most espresso consumed is brewed from dark-roasted beans. Very generally speaking it’s thought the darker the roast the less the caffeine.

A more plausible reason surfaces when you note the water content and time in preparing a cup of filter coffee. Filter coffee uses more water and this combined with a longer brewing time often means more caffeine in your cup. In the end you’re looking at about half or two-thirds the content of caffeine in a latte versus a cup of drip coffee of the same size.

2. Where’d they get that “x” from, anyway?

That letter has never been, nor ever will be, a feature in espresso. There’s nothing “express” about the process of espresso; it’s an incredibly refined and skilled technique. Good baristas spend years of their lives acquiring and furthering this complicated skill.

On a side note I can think of a few coffee chains who’d do well to hire less 17 year olds and more dedicated career baristas. In Italy this is a respected profession with an average age seemingly double that of Starbucks’ equivalent. This is for good reason.

3. Espresso is just really strong coffee

No, no, no! By all means enjoy your cafetierre, but you will never ever make an espresso by simply adding a dark roast in extreme quantities with less water than you would normally add for a standard cup.

Think of it like this: cheese and butter are both made from the same base ingredient, milk, as espresso and filter coffee are both children of the humble coffee bean. Each takes a completely different process down two separate paths in order it get to the final product, however. You don’t make cheese by churning milk in a butter churn just as as you don’t make espresso by coupling excessive amounts of coffee grains with a few millilitres of water.

Espresso is made from a very specific grind of coffee combined with an equally specific method. Coffeegeek.com sumarises it appropriately below.

The coffee beverage produced by a pump or lever espresso machine. This Italian word describes a beverage made from 7 grams (+/- 2 grams) of finely ground coffee, producing 1-1.5 ounces (30-45ml) of extracted beverage under 9 bar (135psi) of brewing pressure at brewing temperatures of between 194 and 204 degrees Fahrenheit, over a period of 25 seconds (+/- 5 seconds) of brew time.

Stay Tuned: What Espresso Isn’t

There are all sorts of arguments for what makes the best shot, from blend and grind to machine and individual barista skills. Nevertheless one thing is certain, and that’s the fact that there are solid facts behind the highly skilled process that ends in that shot in your cappuccino.

I always find it useful to think of what something isn’t in order to understand what it is. Stay tuned for the next part of this series to find out more of what espresso isn’t, plus why that £50/$75 Krups machine Granny bought you for Christmas can’t really make true espresso.

All posts in this series

1. There’s No “X” in “Espresso” and Other Tales of Coffee Woe
2. What Espresso Isn’t: A Primer on Ghettopresso and more
3. Ingredients For Successful Espresso
4. The Coffee Shop Menu, Simplified

Without a doubt I am a summer-loving individual. I loathe the achy cold and bloom into a somewhat pleasant human being when the sun’s shining and, most important, the season’s offerings come to fruit. Jersey Royals, spinach, broad beans, the beginnings of tomatoes, asparagus, and more. Food-wise this is my favourite time of year to be alive, and feeling alive is just what I need after a long and dark English winter.

As a child my par