Roll up! Roll up! Get your free vegan sausages here! Well not here exactly but over at Green Bay Vegan Supermarket. Their new range of plant based braised sausages, quinoa and tofu sausages and salami slices is totally free with any order of £10 or more.
Vegan moussaka. Rich and delicious and good for you!
The most basic of recipes: layer up four roasted aubergines (thinly sliced length-ways prior to rubbing with olive oil and roasting until soft, about 30 mins) with green lentil ragu (simple pasta sauce recipe here, just add two small diced sweet potatoes and a chopped red pepper to it along with cooked green lentils, either two tins or 250g dried then cooked) and top with a thick white sauce (recipe here, leave out the vegetables).
Our quantities served six, or three eating it cold for lunch the next day too, which was very very good.
FIREFLIES AND CHOCOLATE, inspired by the kidnapped children of Aberdeen, and featuring a historical vegan character (see post here), is out now. The story follows the adventures of Elizabeth Manteith and her determined efforts to get back home. There’s love. There’s derring-dos on the high seas… and there’s chocolate!
Vegan lentil loaf is not the most photogenic of dishes. Its brown whole-foody visage summons vegetarian magazines from the 1980s to mind, with their equally brown grainy photos.
But it’s delicious. And good for you. And pretty easy to make.
Ingredients, quantities serve six, adjust as required:
250g of green lentils (other types will work too)
2 carrots, diced
2 sticks of celery, diced
1 onion, finely chopped
1 bay leaf
a teaspoon of dried rosemary or sage
water for cooking
3 slices of wholemeal bread
a handful of porridge oats
salt and black pepper to taste (it really doesn’t need much salt)
sliced tomatoes for topping
Place the lentils in a large saucepan, cover with water and bring to the boil. Turn down to simmer for about 15 minutes then add the carrots, celery, onion, bay leaf and herbs. Cook until the lentils and vegetables are all tender, adding more water to keep covered if needed. Once the veg and lentils are ready, discard any excess water. You want it wet but not swimming in liquid else the loaf will be soggy. Transfer half the mixture (including the bay leaf) to a blender and give a quick blitz. It does not need to be smooth. Tip it back into the pan with the rest of the mix. Crumble the bread into it. Add the oats. Season and stir thoroughly.
Place it all in a greased baking dish. Top with sliced tomatoes and bake in an oven pre-heated to 200C/400F for half an hour.
Great in a roast dinner, or paired with macaroni cheese, or as part of a lighter meal with a baked potato, this lentil loaf also slices really well when cold for sandwiches and salads.
The book is a satisfyingly chunky hardback with lots of beautiful full page colour photos that reminded me of when my son was a toddler and used to like to look at recipe books. He would point at each picture and say ‘Nums!’ Well, there’s lots to say ‘nums’ about in this book… See our whole review here
Ingredients for the cream of tomato soup: 2 tins of plum tomatoes about a cup of water (rinse out tins with it) 1 onion 5 cloves of garlic 2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and chopped 1 or 2 handfuls of cashew nuts a few fresh sage leaves seasalt to taste
Place the tomatoes and water in a pan and bring to the boil, adding the onion, sweet potato, sage and garlic as it heats. Once it boils, turn down to a simmer for 10-15 minutes, until potatoes are soft. Place soup in a blender and add the cashew nuts. Blend and taste for seasoning, add salt as desired.
If your blender is not very strong, try soaking the cashews in water overnight to soften them before using.
We had the cream of tomato soup with a cheese and onion pasty made in a similar manner to the basic pasties on frugal but using Kamut flour in the pastry and filled with chopped red onion, cubed potatoes and vegan cheese all cooked in a little soya milk first, also very good 🙂
FIREFLIES AND CHOCOLATE, inspired by the kidnapped children of Aberdeen, is out on April 1st, just in time for Easter weekend, in paperback and on kindle.
Gorgeous Choc Hotlate, a recipe for hot chocolate topped with ice cream, from the equally gorgeous book The Contented Vegan. What could be better on a snowy day?
The book is a satisfyingly chunky hardback with lots of beautiful full page colour photos that reminded me of when my son was a toddler and used to like to look at recipe books. He would point at each picture and say ‘Nums!’ Well, there’s lots to say ‘nums’ about in this book.
Written by a chef who has been vegan for over 30 years, the pages are bursting with great advice for people starting off on the vegan journey and those who’ve been on it a while.
I enjoyed the section on raising vegan children and it also brought back memories. The author advises trying to make the food to be eaten with other children as ‘normal’ as possible. I recall planning such a meal and getting my daughter to check that her friend liked spaghetti, thinking a nice Bolognese style sauce would go down well. Indeed, the initial report came back positive. But I will never forget the look of sheer horror on the child’s face when presented with a bowl of spaghetti and sauce.
‘What is this?’ she asked.
‘Spaghetti,’ said I.
‘But spaghetti comes in orange juice.’
Luckily I did have a tin at the back of a cupboard, so all was well!
Recipe sections include breakfast, snacks, lunch, suppers, family dinners and feasts and celebrations. We’ll be trying the Winter Solstice Pie and the Fennel and Pepper Presto has caught the eye too. In fact I can tell it’s a book of nums that will be dipped into often over many years.
It’s snowing again, may have to make more Choc Hotlate!
This Red Dragon Pie recipe originated in Sarah Brown’s Vegetarian Kitchen (BBC cookery series). Topped with mash, the base is a rich mix of aduki beans – said to give you the strength of the dragon, this is where the dish gets its name – and brown rice in gravy.
Here’s how we do it:
Soak beans overnight if using dried ones. For the mammoth pie above which did dinner and lunch next day for four, we used 250g of dried beans. Place in a large pan, cover well with water, bring to the boil and let simmer for a long time… (should be instructions on the bag). Throw in the rice (200g) about half way through cooking. Add more water if needed. Once it’s all nearly cooked add the vegetables. In this pie there were four carrots and one head of celery, all chopped. Onion is good too.
As that cooks up a bit, add a teaspoon of mixed herbs, a good squidge of tomato puree and a teaspoon of yeast extract. Taste and add salt if needed. Stir well. Top with mashed potatoes – especially easy if using cookware that does hob and oven like our favourite Le Creuset Cast Iron Round Casserole – and bake in a hot oven until nicely browned.
THE MERMAID AND THE BEAR (a historical novel by Lucy, written under her pen name), has six whole chapters of medieval Christmas, romance, witches, and a Scottish castle and stone circle…
Teabread Ingredients: 250g of Doves Farm Gluten free Self Raising flour 1/4 teaspoon of xanthan gum (flour already contains some) 1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda 4 mashed bananas 2 generous tablespoons of coconut oil (melted) 300g of raisins juice of one lemon 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract unsweetened soya milk to mix (quite a lot, flour is very absorbent)
Mix dry ingredients and then beat in the wet ones and fruit. Bake at 200C/400F for at least half an hour or until a skewer comes out clean.
Lovely with Booja Booja Vanilla ice cream or just with a bit of marg and a cup of tea.
Chocolate variation!! Add 50g of cocoa powder to the flour and liquidise 100g of pitted dates into some soya milk instead of raisins… delish 🙂
Escape to 1596 with THE MERMAID AND THE BEAR! Exchange lockdowns for
witchcraft accusations! Live in a castle, visit the stone circle and
taste the Twelfth Night Cake…
We’ve reached that Christmas frazzle time when, regardless of how simple your planned festivities are, everything becomes really hectic. So: frazzle style crisps on a plate. It is a festive plate though. And people are happily gobbling up their Tesco salt and vinegar twists as happily as they gobbled down the fancier snacks 🙂 Moral of the crisps on a plate? Don’t try too hard, don’t tire yourself out: enjoy Christmas.
Take a little walk on the beach. Breathe. Eat some crisps.
Escape Christmas 2020 with THE MERMAID AND THE BEAR! Exchange lockdowns for witchcraft accusations! Live in a castle, visit the stone circle and taste the Twelfth Night Cake…
