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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is a veganised version of a recipe from Claudia Roden’s Arabesque, one of my favourite cookbooks, full of delicious recipes which are both simple and easily veganised.

People ask me why I want books with so many non-veggie recipes inside and my response is that it simply inspires more creativity in the kitchen! What can I use to replace the chicken? Can I find a gluten-based substitute for the pork? What mock-meat products on the market might make a good replacement?

…and even if you are fussy about your stench, set aside your stink-paranoia to try this delicious and incredibly simple dish! I first tried this dish in Armenia’s capital city of Yerevan, in a cozy Syrian restaurant. The great thing about this recipe is that it’s really tough to mess up, and is equally tough to make a mess while making it!

This vegan version uses lemon juice to add that tangy punch missing from most dairy-free yoghurts.