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.

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.

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.

The following “recipe” is an idea that came to fruition in less than two weeks, nothing short of miraculous for me. I genereally opt for la-la land, an imaginary place where my creations are wholly unique, often produced, and loved by all. They just never enter the realm of reality.

Speaking of which, reality sort of sucks. I work long hours, sometimes 12 hour days, and find myself uninspired to cook and mainly just ready for bed. I need to create a cooking schedule for myself so I know to make time ahead of time. I need a stunt double, only one who limits themselves on the stunts and excels in the kitchen. I mean we have limited space you know.

Comfort food without the guilt, on a pizza

I’m not a super health nut. I eat my fair share of fat and sugar. I don’t feel guilty about this.

This recipe was conceived of before I became vegan, in the final year where I was slowly realising cheese shouldn’t play such a primary role in my meals. I was keeping my animal fats to a minimum. Cancer, diabetes, and heart disease run in my family so while I still consumed dairy, I was still careful.

The idea of a full-fat cheese pizza even then made my stomach feel week, making pizza a once-in-a-blue-moon treat because I knew it would only leave me feeling weighed down for the rest of the day. But then I started thinking “ah, but why should a pizza be tomatoes and cheese?!” And this sos and mash pizza was born out of these thoughts.

A great way to deal with leftovers

I don’t know about you, but root vegetables always seem to accumulate in my pile of stuff to use up. They sit around in quantities not quite large enough to feed two people, so they continue to sit around a little longer. Then there’s the packages of things, like veggie sausages, that come in three or five (yes, I cheated and got these at the store. Usually I like to make my own), so there’s always one or two left over.

Never mind. This vegan sos and mash “pizza” is a great way to use up any leftover root veg. Boil ‘em and mash ‘em and there’s your base for a unique pizza.

The components of a sos and mash pizza

There’s no need for a recipe for this. If you need a recipe, find your favourite pizza recipe and use it as a guide! There are 3 basic components to this pizza:

• Pizza base, bought or home-made
• A thick gravy (think the consistency of a tomato sauce for pizza)
• Mashed potato (give it some flavour by mashing it with some soy milk plus garlic, chives, butter, and/or other favourite mash ingredients…)
• Veg sausages, sliced and lightly fried

I’m confident you can work out how to put it together, but just for reference the stack goes base + gravy + mash + sausage. Bake following the directions for your pizza base.

I know this isn’t particularly exciting, but it’s a fun and unique take on the traditional British sausage and mash dinner. It’s fun to eat, filling, and very tasty. I definitely plan to make this again, but next time I might add a little sweet potato to the mix!

Sage is one of my favourite herbs. It’s beautiful to look at on my windowsill (and believe me, it’s plentiful; my awesome mother-in-law buys me loads!) and it’s fantastic to eat. One of the best ways to enjoy it, in my opinion, is simply fried in a little margarine or oil until it’s just nice and crispy. Here I’ve just made a simply gnocchi recipe (you can use your own if you’d like) with a simple crispy sage vegan butter sauce. I served it with roasted baby plum tomatoes (I actually meant to include them in the salad before the main, but completely forgot… luckily they went well with the gnocchi) which are of course optional.

I’ll be honest with you; Gnocchi is not yet a mastered skill of mine. That’s why I say you can of course use your own recipe. This tastes good, but to any gnocchi snobs out there I’m sure it’s not considered gnocchi-tastic! I’d be happy at any rate to toss out the whole lot and just munch on the crispy sage… mmm…