These vegetables are about to go bad. Challenge accepted.

Chopped up some eggplant, zucchini and cabbage and fried off with onions, garlic and chilli that I chopped up finely and wilted down with some cumin. The oil I used was coconut oil with lends a really different flavour to the olive oil I normally use to cook.

Roasted these top cut carrots just with salt and coconut oil for about 30 minutes at 200C turning halfway through.

Soaked these glass noodles for about 5 minutes in boiling water and tossed with wilted spinach and some sliced chillies and seasoned with salt.

Sliced cos lettuce, red cabbage and tossed with hummus and olive oil.

USED THEM ALL UP AND ATE THEM FOR DINNER.

Challenge complete.

Satay Curry with Sesame Noodles and Tofu

For the satay curry I wanted to keep it simple and based on just coconut milk and peanut butter (literally, the only ingredient should be “peanuts”). I started off by frying off some onions, garlic, ginger, chillies, lemongrass and then added the coconut milk and peanut butter then I added my veggies. Now here is where you just add whatever you have in your fridge. So I added zucchini, pumpkin, carrot, cooked those down for a bit. At this point, you may be tempted to add water, but you have to remember that the vegetables will relinquish their liquid as they cook down and you don’t want the sauce to be too runny, so that’s just something you have to gauge. When those things have softened a little add the other ingredients that take less time to cook like mushrooms, capsicums, spinach and snow peas. It’s good to leave some things a little less cooked than others, it keeps the dish tasting fresh and and interesting texture.

I can’t stress the importance of improvising with this. Use the sauce as a base and then add whatever it is that you have lying around the house.

For the noodles I cooked some soba noodles for a couple minutes and then tossed with sesame oil and toasted sesame seeds.

I just pan fried the tofu and then tossed with parsley and Sriracha sauce. I used silken tofu for this and it was okay, but I don’t think I’ll use it again for this type of dish.

Vegan Layer Cake

For the Cake:
360 ml almond milk
2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
230 grams brown sugar granulated sugar
110 ml canola oil
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
250g wholewheat flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
For the icing:
340g nuttelex
440 grams powdered sugar
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste
pinch of salt (don’t forget this, it’s actually important)
60ml coconut milk

Separate the batter into thirds and I wanted to have different flavours for each, so my bottom layer I just added 2 tablespoons of raw cacao powder, the middle layer I added some acai powder and the top layer I left being vanilla.

Pop into a cake tin that you’ve oiled and lined with some baking paper for 25 minutes or it leaves a toothpick clean. When they’re all cooked and have been chillin’ for a while so they’re all cool what you do is basically make cake sandwiches with the icing. So you put the bottom layer down and spread the icing around with a palette knife and then add the next layer and repeat, then the last layer you bring the icing down over the sides and smooth out until the whole cake is covered.

To finish, I sprinkled with some toasted desiccated coconut and cacao powder.

Vegan Chocolate Cake

1 1/4 cups wholewheat flour

1/3 cup cacao powder

1 cup raw sugar

1 tsp baking soda

1 cup warm water

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 tsp apple cider vinegar

1/2 tsp salt

Mix everything together and bake in a greased and lined cake tin at 175C for 40 minutes. When cooled I dusted with some cacao powder and toasted coconut.

Quinoa Involtini

This recipe is based heavily on one that I found in “Nigella Bites” and I took creative license on to make vegan. They’re pretty much just balls of quinoa wrapped in eggplant and baked in a tomato sauce, but this is so much more than the sum of its parts.

So there are three component parts to this dish; the eggplant, the quinoa stuffing and the tomato sauce.

Eggplant:

4 x eggplants

Olive oil

The eggplant is excruciatingly simple – you just slice 4 eggplants lengthways and then you can either grill them in the oven or shallow fry them. I shallow fried, but I think next time I might just go with the grill as it’s probably a bit faster and uses less oil.

The sauce is what I did next:

1 onion

3 cloves garlic

1 tsp fennel seeds

2 tbsp olive oil

3x400g tins tomatoes

2 tsp sugar

Salt to taste

Fry off the onions until translucent and then stir in garlic and cook for a hot second – don’t let ’em burn. Then add the fennel seeds and add the tomatoes which you’ve squished with your hands if you’re like me or put in a food processor if you’re a bit more of a princess. Simmer with the lid on while you prep the stuffing.

Stuffing:

100g dried quinoa

1 tsp fennel

50g hazelnuts

1 clove garlic

1 spring onion

1/2 cup tahini

Salt

Garnish:

Coriander

Tahini

Cook the quinoa until you’re happy with the texture. Whenever I follow recipes for this it ends up crunchy so I add extra water anyways to get it unfurled and soft. In a bowl, add the hazelnuts, garlic, spring onions, tahini and salt to taste. The tahini is there as a binding agent so depending on the moisture content of the other ingredients you may need to add more or less.

Assembly:

Roll about a tablespoon of the stuffing into an oblong shape and place at the fat end of the eggplant and roll toward the to so that the eggplant surrounds the filling. Add these little gems into an oven proof dish and pour the tomato sauce over the top of it and drizzle with a bit of tahini. Bake at 190C for 30 minutes and leave to sit and settle for another 15.

I felt like it needed a bit of freshness so I served this with a little salady-type thing consisting of cherry tomatoes and spinach wilted in garlic and seasoned lightly with salt and balsamic vinegar.

Panang Curry and Coconut Rice

Panang curry is possibly my favourite food of all time – it’s spicy, creamy and has beautiful hints of lemongrass and coconut. So delicious and nourishing.

We start with the base of the curry:

2 tbsp vegetable oil

1 brown onion

7 small red chillies

7 cloves garlic

3 tbsp thai red curry paste

2 X 400ml coconut milk

1/4 tsp salt

Vegetables:

1/4 butternut squash

1 head broccoli

1/2 red bell pepper

2 carrots

2 zucchinis

1 cup spinach

1/2 cup basil

Garnish:

handful basil

1/4 cup lime juice

roasted peanuts

beansprouts

Method:

Put the onion, chillies and garlic into a food processor or chop finely by hand and fry in pot with vegetable oil. After a minute or so add the thai curry paste and fry for another minute and then add the coconut milk and bring to the boil. Add the squash and cook until mostly cooked then follow with the rest of the vegetables and simmer until cooked. You can garnish with any leftover basil and roasted peanuts would also be good for a bit of crunch.

For the coconut rice, what I did instead of cooking the rice in coconut milk is I just added a handful of desiccated coconut into the cooking rice and then drained the excess water. The desiccated coconut softens and adds a lovely flavour to the rice

Sydney Buddha

“Created with 20 tonnes of incense ash and standing at over five metres tall, Sydney Buddha is a meditation on the brevity of life and the cycles of renewal and destruction.Sydney Buddha is made of two parts: an aluminium sculpture and an ash casting of its interior. The works are installed facing each other; however, as time passes, one of them is destroyed. For over two decades internationally renowned artist Zhang Huan has examined contemporary life through an engagement with the traditions and rituals central to Buddhist, Chinese and Tibetan histories.”

– from the Sydney festival website

I headed over to Carriageworks last week to practise using my new camera. It’s a Nikon D3200 and I’m still very much a noob. The sculpture was breathtaking, I hope I did it justice 🙂

Bliss balls, nice cream and falafel

Did some experimentin’ today. Was pretty fun. Made lotsa good clean food.

The first thing I made were bliss balls. Which I did a lot of reading up on online on and the entire time thought I needed a bunch of really fancy ingredients for but these are really things you can make with whatever you have lying around. I would recommend starting with a base of fresh dates though, because they have a bulkiness to them that’s sort of the perfect texture and sweetness. Other than that you just need to adjust things according to the texture you want and the taste.

7 dates – seeds removed

About half a cup of cranberries

A combination of cashews, walnuts and almonds – as much as your heart desires

1 tsp acai powder

1 tsp cacao powder

A pinch of salt

Desiccated coconut

So I pretty much just blended everything together except for the coconut and used that to toss them through after I formed the mixture into balls about 1 tsp in size. I like them to be quite small so you have more control over how much you eat. These are really great before a big walk or a workout and travel really well also.

Nice cream seems to be crazy popular right now and I’m not even in the least surprised why. It’s freakin’ amazing. And where has it been all my life. Essentially just frozen banana whizzed up and then you can add whatever you want to flavour it but you don’t even have to do that.

This was my lunch #sorrynotsorry.

2 bananas

2 tsp cacao powder

Magic.

The previous two things I had made before or at least attempted. This last thing I was hella intimidated by. But now I can’t see why. It was amazingly simple and so delicious and filling.

1 brown onion

6 garlic cloves

6 small red chillies

2 x 400g tins chickpeas (drained and rinsed, obv)

2 tsp coriander

1/2 cup wholewheat flour

1 tbsp olive oil

2 tbsp tahini

1 tsp spirulina powder

So the first thing I did was put the onion, garlic and chilli into my magic bullet so it got real liquidy, real quick. Then I whizzed up my chickpeas whose texture became very interesting and very inconsistent because I guess the magic bullet was not quite up to all that volume, however we must persist. The inconsistent texture was actually a rather nice side effect, I’ve decided, as it made the falafel feel a bit more… substantial? Then I mixed everything else together in a bowl and when I went to form it into balls it was not having a bar of it because it was a bit too smooth. So I ended up doing what I normally do and treated it sort of like pancake batter. So I essentially spooned the mixture into a hot pan with a small amount if oil in it and made sure to press firmly down to ensure even cooking.  It required quite a bit of heat and I just flipped when golden and then drained on some paper towel. Didn’t take too long at all and was a really good dinner served with some sriracha, slaw and corn bread but you can have it however you like. I think it’d make a perfect vego replacement to a burger pattie.

My first post.

So finally. My first blog post. This was rather a delayed start, huh? I’ve decided to dedicate this first blog to my dinner. After being away for a week I was missing my kitchen to say the least. So I decided to peer into the fridge to see what concoction I could create. I was pretty happy with the result. Baked tofu, roasted broccolini and soba noodles.

The baked tofu was made by slicing the tofu (hard preferably) and covering top and bottom in paper towels and pressing for about 20 minutes to extract all the moisture out of it. I think of it like a sponge. Then I made the marinade, now this does not have exact measurements because it was all adjusted according to taste but the ingredients I used were:

Tamari

Sesame oil

Mirin

Honey

Lemon juice

Chopped coriander

Grated ginger

Then I let it soak for about another 20 minutes in a shallow dish. Generally the longer you leave these to drain and soak respectively, the better the end result will be, however be careful not to overdo the soaking as this might make the final product taste slightly too harsh. Then I baked at 200c for 20 minutes and flipped halfway through.

These are probably the easiest thing to cook. Just rinse your broccolini and trim the ends off and any leaves you might not want to eat and coat with a small amount of sesame oil and salt and I roasted them for 15 minutes at 220C.

Broccolini

Sesame oil

Salt

This has the most ingredients and was the bulk of the meal

Soba noodles – cooked according to the instructions or even a minute less

1 onion – sliced thinly

1 clove garlic – grated

1 zucchini – grated

1 carrot – grated

4 mushrooms – sliced

1 handful green beans – cut into 3cm pieces

1 handful cabbage – finely shredded

1 handful red cabbage – finely shredded

1 handful snow peas  – cut into 1cm slices

Sriracha (or equivalent chilli sauce)

The cooking of this was fairly straightforward – cook the onions until translucent, add the garlic, zucchini and carrot then after a couple of minutes add the mushrooms and the green beans and after a minute or so add the cooked soba noodles and toss with the rest of the marinade mixture from the tofu if there is any remaining as well as sriracha  and finally the cabbages and snow peas for an interesting texture.

This is the first time I’ve made this exact meal as I normally just make things up as I go, but I think a good addition next time would be bean sprouts which are really lovely and fresh and maybe some nuts – probably peanuts for a different dimension.