We’ve spotted some lovely vegan goodies around for Easter this year, see our page for listings.
Something else new and lovely: The Vegan Lifestyle Association. A not-for-profit organisation, it is 100% committed to saving lives and saving our planet. Achieved through proactive education on the multiple benefits of a Vegan lifestyle and supporting all those who wish to try it. It’s also free to join with many member benefits, discounts etc. Go see!
Weather-blasted oak trees in Argyll last week:
As the sun set on 2014 we went all retro with a VBites Gammon Style Roast and some pineapple fritters. The fritters were juicy and delicious!
Ingredients: one tin of pineapple rings in pineapple juice and half a cup (approx.) of Doves Farm Gluten free flour. Method: beat the flour and juice together to form a batter; dip/spread the rings with the mixture and shallow fry for a few minutes each side. Enjoy…
Doesn’t look a very space age treat, but it is because it was cooked in this:
…and that looks like a robot, little eyes and everything, though it’s actually a VonShef Halogen Oven Cooker
So on with the recipes…
Gluten Free Mini Chocolate Yule Logs:
125g of vegetable maragarine
125g caster sugar
250g Doves Farm Gluten Free Self Raising Flour
2 heaped tablespoons of cocoa
a good squirt of golden syrup (makes it ‘fudgey’)
a teaspoon of vanilla extract
soya milk to mix
decoration: marzipan, 200g melted chocolate and a sprinkle of icing sugar
Cream the marg. and sugar together and then gradually mix in the other ingredients like so: a little flour, a little soya milk, stir; add cocoa and some soya milk, stir. Once it’s all well mixed, pour into a greased cake tin and set the oven temperature to 175C and the timer to 45 minutes. Place the cake in there, close the lid and go for a walk to watch the sunrise (optional/replace with activity of choice):
Check for readiness with a skewer, cook for a few more minutes if still wet in the middle. Once the cake is totally cool, remove from the tin and cut into bite-size pieces. Top with thinly sliced marzipan and melted chocolate. It’s ideal to let the chocolate cool a little before spreading on the cakes (go and pick holly) as you can then pull a fork through it for a nice wood-like effect. Let the chocolate set and then sprinkle with icing sugar.
We also made Creamy Sage and Onion Potatoes in the Halogen oven:
8 medium potatoes, sliced very thin and par-boiled for a few minutes, we left the skins on
2 red onions, chopped
5 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
a small handful of fresh sage, chopped
1 tablespoon of marg.
1 tablespoon of flour
250ml of soya milk
salt to taste
Grease an oven proof dish. Melt the marg. and cook the onions and garlic in it until softened. Add the sage. Add the flour. Mix well. Gradually stir in the soya milk and continue stirring over a low heat until the sauce thickens. Season with salt. Layer this up with the potatoes in your greased dish, leaving plenty for the top as it just looks nice. Set the timer to 50 minutes and the temperature to 250C and light up the kitchen. Ta-da:
We were sent some coconut milk by Rhythm. It’s a chilled product, comes in sachets as opposed to tins, and contains no added ingredients, no sweeteners, no de-coagulants, no rubbish. Just coconut. It’s also cold pressed, so suitable for raw food recipes, and is the best coconut milk we have ever tasted.
We made the tropical fruit smoothie pictured above (4 pints, adjust quantities as desired).
Into it went:
1 bag of frozen organic tropical fruit
4 bananas
100g of Rhythm’s thick creamy coconut milk
a few brazil nuts
1 litre of orange juice
Whizz it all up in a blender. The Vitamix had no problem with the fruit straight from frozen, you might have to defrost with a lower powered machine. It was gorgeous: sweet but not too sweet, rich but not sickening, perfect.
This next recipe we are calling ‘Thai-Style Bubble and Squeak’. If you actually have left over cooked potatoes and cabbage it would be super quick to prepare. This is the method from scratch:
In 1 tsp of coconut oil, fry up a red chilli, 5 cloves of garlic and a thumb of ginger, all finely chopped. Stir in 300g of Rhythm’s coconut milk with a little water to make a creamy bubbling sauce.
Wash and thinly slice a small bag of new potatoes and half a Savoy cabbage. Pop them into the pan, stirring frequently until soft and cooked, increasing the water if needed. Add sea salt to taste. Nice served with rice and salad after a blustery Autumn walk.
A very nice roast, the sweet spiciness of the chestnuts making it quite different in flavour to our cashew and walnut ones. Serves four generously.
Fry off 2 large red onions and 4 sticks of celery, both roughly chopped. Add in seven cloves (or less, up to you) of finely chopped garlic and a good bunch of fresh rosemary, scissored in.
Once the above has softened add a jar or tin of chestnut puree
Place in an oiled loaf tin and bake at 200C for at least half an hour or until firm. Yum. Slices well cold the next day for sandwiches or salads too.
For more roast recipes, see Vegan Christmas or Yule
The tree picture is dark and creepy today, but still brighter than the weather.
Delicious and fresh after the rich food of Yule, the courgette bases are juicy and flavoursome. Nice as canapés or a starter.
Brush a baking tray with olive oil . We used three courgettes, sliced to just under a cm thick, to cover a full size oven tray. Top with pizza sauce of your choice: ours consisted of passata mixed with a little olive oil, finely chopped onion, dried oregano and seasalt. We topped off with some Redwood’s melting cheese, but half an olive would be nice too. Bake for about 20 minutes at 200C/400F.
See Vegan Supermarket GreenBay for lots of vegan cheeses!
And as we seem to have developed a food/tree rhythm in recent posts, here is a woodpecker hole in a Scots Pine, which happens to be roughly the same shape and size as a mini pizza bite 🙂
A simple supper or a filling breakfast using up leftover mashed potato. We had one very heaped soup bowl of mash, but the recipe is versatile 🙂
Fry off 2 red onions and a couple of good sprigs of sage (chopped or scissored in). Mix into the potatoes with a block of grated cheezly and a tablespoon of flour. Squishing it all up with your hands is best. Press into fairly thin pancakes and dip each side in crumbs of some sort, we used Orgran Rice Crumbs
Was very nice with Brussels sprouts and salad.
The wild garlic seems to be early this year 😀
recipes: creamy carrot and wild garlic soup and wild garlic pesto
1 square cake tin, greased
2 100g bars of good chocolate
1 tablespoon of margarine
1 tablespoon of golden syrup
1 200g pack of bourbon biscuits (other biscuits will do), bashed up
and here’s the Christmassy part… a crumbled slice of Christmas cake including bits of marzipan and icing
a handful of raisins
Method:
Melt 1 bar of chocolate in a Bain Marie (bowl over pan of hot water) along with the marg and syrup. Once nice and smooth, stir in your other ingredients and press mixture into tin. Melt the other bar and spread on top. We topped with sugar stars… chill in fridge until set and cut into squares.
It’s gorgeous… quite different with the Christmas cake but very, very good and dangerously moreish 🙂
What a bumper year it’s been for the currants – were having berried up green smoothies daily, there are lots in freezer which will extend the berry smoothie season and it’s looking to be a very abundant bramble year too. Last year we gathered quite a lot for the freezer as well as smoothie-ing them fresh. At least I thought we’d gathered a lot until I met a man in the woods with 3 huge bucket loads of them. He must have spent all day picking. Maybe for jam? I really want to try preserving in different ways this year so we can eat the home grown stuff in winter too. So we made strawberry jam as mentioned, and then moved onto redcurrant and rosemary jelly for savoury things. Inspired by the home baked blog, this mixing of flavours is beautiful! I used Delia’s redcurrant jelly recipe with quite a few rosemary sprigs thrown in.
Cooking on the stove this morning is Apple and Ginger Chutney from the Cranks recipe book with the apples from the bike ride heavily supplemented with ones from our trees and our own onions in there too 🙂 Adapted recipe on the sauces page.