White Bean Burgers:
Ingredients
400g of white beans (tinned – I used a mixture of cannelini and black eyed pinto beans)
1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic
1 cup flour
chopped rosemary
chopped parsley
Tamari soy sauce (or season to your own liking!)

Method:
1. Mash the beans or do as I do and blitz them in a blender!
2. Mix in with the other ingredients in a bowl.
3. Shape into patties – I have a fab burger press which compresses them and therefore means they hold together better in the pan.
4. Fry a few minutes on each side in a little oil and serve with garnish.
Easy as that.  And the good thing about burgers is once you get the hang of them you can put in whatever you fancy – different grated veg, chilli, different herbs – the world is your oyster!

Roasted Beetroot Salad (based on a recipe from the Ottolenghi cookbook)

Ingredients:
1 Large or several small fresh beetroots, trimmed and washed (leave skin on)
3 smallish carrots
mixed salad leaves
herbs of your choice (book recommends dill)
For the dressing:
maple syrup
mild olive oil (or vegetable oil/corn oil)
1 clove of garlic, crushed
sherry vinegar
seasoning

Method
1. Preheat oven to 200 C, and meanwhile wash and prepare the roots.
2. If the beetroot is large quarter it and wrap each quarter in a small amount of foil so that it is sealed.  Place on baking sheet in oven for approx 30mins (keep testing with a knife until you’re satisfied they’re tender.
3. Slice the carrots lengthways and lay in a small oven dish and drizzle with a little oil and season.  Place in oven and roast until tender and a little brown and crispy at the edges.
4. When your veg is cooked remove from the oven and allow to cool, before attempting to peel the skin off the beetroots.  Then cut the beets and carrots into bite size chunks.
5. Make the salad dressing by mixing roughly equal parts oil to maple syrup, add the garlic and add the sherry vinegar until you like the balance of sweet/sour.  Season to taste.
6. Mix salad leaves with roasted veg and dress salad just before serving.

Enjoy!

Anyway, the filling I put in was based on an Aloo Masala for Dosa (Potato masala) found on Manjula’s kitchen website: The only difference was that I added onion for more flavour and cut down on the green chilli (as I’m a bit of a spice coward!). Oh and I pre-cooked the potatoes so it wouldn’t take so long.

The curry was a simply paste-and-veg jobbie (usually best when you’ve spent time on something else and are suddenly very hungry!).  Ingredients as follows:

Simple veggie curry: (use what you have in the fridge!)
1 onion,
1 Yellow pepper, chopped into largeish chunks
1 Red pepper, chopped into largeish chunks
A few mushrooms, sliced
Rogan Josh curry paste (Patak’s – but whatever flavour takes your fancy)
Tin of Chickpeas
Tin of chopped tomatoes
Chopped fresh coriander
Squeeze of lemon

Method:
1. Fry your onion in a little oil.
2. When softened, add curry paste (according to pack instructions) and fry for a short while.
3. Add the veg (start with the one that needs most cooking, like the peppers, and gradually add the others allowing each to cook a little before you add the next.
4. Add the chickpeas and tinned tomatoes
5. Cook until all veg is tender.
6. Squeeze over and stir in a little fresh lemon juice (optional, but gives it a lift) and garnish with coriander, unless your husband doesn’t like it!!

My lunches at work are a lot more salady and interesting.  For example I had a veggie samosa with a salad of lettuce, avocado, beetroot, chick peas, tomato and a vegan tahini salad dressing myam myam….!

I shall start a new post to share the first few recipes I have discovered/created…

Chef Chloe's Harvest Stuffed mushrooms and maple roasted brussel sprouts served with Jacket Potato.

My hubby and I both love the nutty texture of the mushrooms and the sprouts were awesome!  I’ve never roasted them before, and this way made them soooo tasty! My sprouts were quite small, so I think 30 mins would have been just enough, but I did them for 45.  Still the ‘burnt bits’ added a smoky taste that actually went very well with the syrup! The addition of the hazelnuts at the end really took the biscuit! I’m going to try maple roasting other things now I’ve invested in a nice bottle of maple syrup (I love the stuff – reminds me of our honeymoon to Nova Scotia, when we visited the sugarbush farm near our holiday home and where everything was made of maple syrup!).

Thanks Chloe!

Gado Gado - an indonesian staple

This meal was tasty and interesting although a little time-consuming to prepare, so I enlisted Rich’s help to expedite things… Taken from ‘The Asian Vegan Kitchen’ by Hema Parekh, I used my own (family) Satay recipe instead as this didn’t involve deep frying peanuts….!

Basically, the main work is preparing all the veg/carbs: This is what is on the plate and how I prepared it:

Potatoes – cubed and deep fried until cooked
Tofu – silken tofu, cubed, dipped in cornflour and deep fried until golden
1 carrot, julienned, then blanched*
some cabbage, cut into ‘squares’, then blanched
2 handfuls beansprouts, blanched
cucumber sliced thinly

*to blanche, just add prepared veg to boiling water for abut 1 min, remove and refresh in iced water. (I ran out of ice, so just ran fresh cold from the tap, which was fine).

Tamarind Dal with Rice

Why has it taken me sooo long to make a dal? Especially when they are so simple? And sooo tasty!

Inspired by the dal I had eaten at the Coco Diner (see post “Coco Delights“) I wanted to recreate it as closely as I could.  Though in the menu it said there was cream in the dal, I chose not to do this, wanting to avoid unnecessary dairy… Knowing the recipe had curry leaves, mustard seeds lentils and was a South Indian dish, I did some searches online, found some recipes and modified them to make my own.  Here’s what I did:

Ingredients:
1 cup red split lentils
2 1/2 cups water
1/2 cup tamarind water *
a few curry leaves (I used dried)
1 tsp turmeric
chilli powder (to your preference – I had just a sprinkle for a mild dal)
1 onion, finely chopped
1 tsp brown mustard seeds
good pinch of hing (asafoetida)
2 medium sized ripe tomatoes, chopped

Method:
1. Put the lentils in a pan with the water/tamarind water, turmeric, chilli powder and curry leaves.  Cook until lentils are soft (approx 30 mins, but may vary).  You may need to add more water if the lentils get dry, but don’t let them get too watery, as red lentils go all mushy, so it’d be hard to drain, off: you’d probably have to cook down.
2. Whilst the lentils are cooking, chop the onion very finely.  Heat some oil in a non-stick pan and fry the onion along with the hing and mustard seeds until the onion is thorougly softened, starting to go a little brown.  When nearly done, add the chopped tomatoes and cook these down until soft.
3. Once the lentils and the onion mixture is cooked, add everything in the frying pan into the lentils, stir, taste, season if necessary, then serve.

*Tamarind water: It can be hard to get real tamarind pods but you can find tamarind paste in quite a lot of supermarkets now. Because I work for them, Blue Dragon tamarind paste was on hand.  You just mix a teaspoon of paste with hot water to get 100ml of tamarind water. Easy as pie!

Deep fried Panko coated veggies with Katsu curry

Slightly labour-intensive, but GORGEOUS veggie treat.  Hands up: I used two products – the Panko breadcrumbs were bought, as was the Katsu Curry (Blue Dragon).

It’s quite simple to do, just a little time-consuming as you need to prepare the veg, dip in egg and breadcrumbs, then deep fry.  I only have a small pan so fry them in several batches.

I used:

1 packet of Panko Breadcrumbs
1 jar Katsu curry

Cooking oil (for deep frying) – rapeseed/vegetable
1 egg
Mushrooms
Butternut Squash rounds (Sweet Potato also good)
Courgette slices (Aubergine also works well)

Method:
1. Simply cut your veg into slices about 7mm thick (except mushrooms, which you can leave whole, stalk removed).
2. Dip veg into bowl of egg, piece by piece, then into breadcrumb mixture until well coated.
3. Fry in oil (making sure it is hot enough!) until cooked through. note: be careful not to burn the butternut/sweet potato, as it’s sugar content can cause it to catch)
4. Meanwhile, have your rice cooking (you can use sushi rice, thai fragrant rice, or basmati).
5. Empty the curry into a pan and heat through, but don’t boil.

Serve all together! (easier said than done due to the frying – but get most of this done before you cook anything else).  I served with a side salad for extra textures…  I think it needs something clean & green to offset the richness of the other ingredients.  Or pickles like the Japanese would eat!

Stuffed courgettes with breadcrumb topping

Breakfast this morning was a delicious way to use up leftovers: we had 2 “sausages” and 4 strips of “bacon” from yesterday, so I cooked it up with the following: tomatoes, portabello mushrooms, steamed spinach, scotch pancakes and fried onions/peppers.  Really interesting and satisfying breakfast. It is Bank Holiday Monday, after all!

For dinner tonight, I had 5 courgettes in the fridge I hadn’t used and the veg box is due to arrive tomorrow, so I needed to find something to do with courgettes!  So I grabbed 4 of them and stuffed them! A kind of made-up recipe inspired by a combination of ideas on the internet and using what I had in the cupboards…

Ingredients:
1 tbsp olive oil (medium for cooking)
4 courgettes
2  cloves garlic, crushed
1 onion, chopped finely
2 portabello mushrooms chopped finely
either 1 tin of tomatoes or chopped fresh tomatoes (I used mixture of vine and vine cherry)
basil leaves
seasoning
(for the topping)
1 1/2 slices of bread
A sprinkle of Parmezano dairy free ‘hard italian cheese’

Method:
1. Preheat oven to about 200C
2. Top and tail the courgettes, wash them, then boil them whole, gently for about 10 mins (for medium sized ones – check with a fork to see if tender).
3. Remove from water – refresh with cold water to stop cooking, then slice in half lengthways and scoop flesh from middle. Arrange in a dish then prepare the stuffing.
4. Heat oil, then add onion and garlic. Fry until soft.
5. Add mushrooms, fry for a couple of minutes, then add the chopped tomatoes and cook down for 10mins.
6. Add seasoning, then spoon the stuffing mix into the courgettes.  Then make the topping:
7. In a food processor blitz the bread into crumbs, mix in the Parmezano.  Spoon this onto the courgettes, and drizzle with olive oil to make the breadcrumbs crisp up in the oven.
8. Bake in the oven for approx 20 mins.

Suggested variations

• Mix in some cooked rice or quinoa or cous cous into the stuffing mix.
• Try adding some spice (chilli and or paprika) to the mix.
• Put this stuffing mix in other veg like peppers, onions, even maybe jacket potatoes?
• Add chopped herbs to your breadcrumb (not basil but other italian herbs like sage, oregano, thyme).

veggie sausages, bacon, egg, scotch pancakes, toms, mushroom & beans

I’m really grateful that I have found vegetarianism much easier than I first thought it would be.  I really don’t miss meat nearly as much as I thought I would: and it’s more about the memory of having enjoyed meat in the past than actually wanting to eat it right now.  I saw a raw duck breast on Something for the Weekend this morning and felt rather nauseous looking at it! The thought of eating meat now is unpleasant, not just because of what it is and what it means to me, but also the thought of the heaviness of it sitting in my stomach and only very slowly making it through my digestive system!

And I don’t even miss the traditional English fried breakfast, because what we had this morning was better: no icky greasy bacon and sausages to sit heavy in your stomach, just tasty substitutes (ok the veggie bacon looks grim and doesn’t taste quite there, but it gives a bacony taste which is pleasant when combined on a fork with other items).  But the veggie sausages I really recommend:Cauldron Lincolnshire sausages: these taste great and you know you won’t get a horrible piece of gristle to gag on at any point!

This is not vegan, not just because of the obvious inclusion of eggs, but the veggie bacon and sausage also contain egg/dairy – which is a bit annoying, because I’d rather avoid dairy where I can… So next step will be to shop around for vegan alternatives.  If anyone has any recommendations, please let me know!

Caramelised onion-butternut roast with chestnuts

It has beans in it which makes it nice and satisfying – good to have as your ‘meat’ for a roast dinner (in case mum and dad invite me round! – it’s always good to have a nice recipe to use).