Wednesday 30 May 2012

Megan makes the "masterchef oz harvest challenge" vegan

I'm watching masterchef.  Tonight is the team challenge where the participants take Oz Harvest refigerated vans, drive them around Sydney to various  hotels and restaurants, take food that would otherwise be wasted and turn their findings into a meal that they can present to 25 very serious chefs, restaurant critics and food editors.

Oz Harvest is a charity that takes food that's still good from hotels, shops and restaurants that would otherwise be thrown out and turns it into meals for the homeless. What a wonderful charity!  So, tonight they're taking premium food off the homeless and serving it to Australia's finest.  Ok. Oh! a wild development appears, They are donating to the charity based on what they think of the meals.  Good stuff!

Seriously though, food waste is a really major issue.  Up to 60% of the food that comes to westernised nations is just wasted.  It never makes it to the stomachs of people.  In a world where literally billions of people are starving.  You know that pizza crust you left behind?  There's someone on this world who would be grateful to have that as a meal.  Yes, I know you can hear me; I sound just like your mum.  I'm telling you "Finish what's on your plate! there's starving kids in Africa!"  Your mum is right.  There are people, in many countries around the world, literally starving.

I could go on, but to do so would break one of the rules of my blog; I don't discuss the 'why's' of being vegan on here.  So, if it's a topic that interests you (the connection between a carnivore diet and world hunger) feel free to email me to discuss, have a chat to your local vegan society or do your own research on the issue.

I decided tonight that in the spirit of the Masterchef challenge, I'd go through my own fridge and cupboard to use up some veggies that have been kicking around there since last weekend's shopping trip.  Here's what I found.

-1 punnet of (slightly wrinkly) cherry tomatoes.
-4 mushrooms (looking good vern)
-1/2 a package mixed salad leaves.
-left-over fresh pasta (from my megan makes fresh pasta vegan challenge)
-1/4 jar of discount olives (whole with the pit in)
-2 cloves of garlic
-whole-grain mustard

In my cupboard I keep a few basics.  These include:
-olive oil
-balsamic vinegar
-salt
-pepper


By the ingredient list, it all looks a bit italian... So I start by.
Putting on a pot of water to cook that pasta.

I think about a pasta salad, reject the idea because the tomatoes are a bit marginal and really need to be cooked, then realise that there is now law that says I can't do beautiful balsamic roasted tomatoes and put them in my salad. So:

I pre-heat my oven
I  get a oven-tray, pour a reasonably generous amount of olive oil into it.
Then, I cut my cherry tomatoes in half, tossing the halves into the oven tray with the oil.
Sprinkle it with a little bit of salt and pepper, adjusting the amount to your personal tastes.
Finally I splash it with a bit of balsamic vinegar. (you don't need much, maybe 6-7 drops or splodges as it comes out of the bottle)

I put that in the oven with the timer set on 20 minutes.

I wash my salad leaves and dice my mushrooms.

By now my water is boiling for the pasta, I decide to turn my left over fresh pasta into "Stracchi"  which is Italian for "Scraps" having stracchi pasta is a traditional peasant food, because it involves using your left over pasta to cook the final meal for the week.  You can use your broken pasta bits, broken up lasagne sheets or whatever is on hand.  Stracchi really captures the spirit of not wasting any food.

I cut my fresh rolled pasta into random sized bits and toss it into the water.  Fresh pasta cooks really quickly, so I now have 2 minutes to do a quick salad dressing.

I get a glass jar (an old coffee jar to be exact)

I don't use exact measurements when I make salad dressing, I use ratios, then guestimate the seasonings, taste it and adjust as needed.

-3 parts olive oil
-1 part balsamic vinegar
2 cloves garlic (very very finely diced)
approx 1tsp whole-grain mustard.

Chuck all of these into the jar, put the lid on very tightly and shake the living daylights out of it.

I assemble my salad very quickly by tossing the pasta, tomatoes, mushrooms and olives through the salad leaves.  I dress it with the prepared balsamic dressing. 

You'll have to trust me it looked good. I took a photo but "ate" all of my internet already so it's uploading slower than a wet week.

As an added bonus, I've got a lovely tangy balsamic vinagrette to store in my fridge for later.  It will keep really well for at least a couple of weeks.

Not wasting food just makes perfect sense.  You save money, you reduce waste and the impacts that throwing things out to landfill has on the environment and you know that weather near or far, your mum is proud of you for being so thrifty and clever.

Also, if you are reading this blog and are a producer of food, anything from fine-dining to convenience stores and you'd like to

A)help out people who really need it
B)get that feel-good sensation that only comes with doing some good
C)save on your garbage disposal costs
D)possibly get a mad sweet tax deduction (check with your accountant/financial adviser to be totally sure on that)

Then check out Oz Harvest, or even a few other charities who do similar worthwhile work, such as One Umbrella and Food Not Bombs.

Now... getting this world from a place where we feel good by helping the homeless, to where we feel good because we've stamped out all poverty and everyone has a home, a job, and the opportunity to shine is a bit more of a journey.  Starting with not wasting things is good though.  Do you know someone who'd appreciate a surprise meal they didn't have to cook for themselves? Turn your thrifty-cleverness into a semi-random act of kindness.  You'll literally be making this world a better place.




Tuesday 22 May 2012

Megan makes fresh pasta vegan

Masterchef is on TV!  I've been so excited by season 4 so far.  I'm loving that the show is getting back to basics, it's all about cooking great food.  I'm hoping it stays that way and doesn't become all about he-said she-said politics and power plays.  I really want the best cook to win.  At this stage, my money is on Amina.  I think she's a wonderful cook who truly loves food and knows how to present it. 

The Masterchef pasta challenge (on TV last week) was actually a really good and fair test of skills a cook needs.  The first phase of the test involved identifying different types of pasta by their traditional Italian names.  Knowing your ingredients is an important skill for any chef.  The next challenge involved making a minimum 250g of fresh pasta, without the benefit of scales to weigh out the flour.  Another fair test of a chef.  They need to work fast and need to be able to eye-ball measurements.  The final challenge involved reproducing a dish without a recipe, just by seeing and tasting the dish.  I feel there's a few parallels to my efforts on this blog here.  Only I don't taste the meat dish before trying to make it vegan.  Occasionally I bombard my work colleagues with questions like "what does salami smell like?'  "who in the world actually likes scollops?"   I really feel for the Masterchef contestants.  They have to live in the Masterchef house, with a bunch of new people, cook on TV and do it all to some pretty serious time pressure.  Meanwhile back at home....

Meet Kavesh.  An almost unlimited source of cuteness

 My biggest challenge is typing a blog around an inquisitive kitten who likes to alternate between attacking the cursor and the keyboard.  Shows like Masterchef make me realise that what I most like about cooking is that it's so relaxing.  When I'm at home in my kitchen cooking something new, or whipping up an old favorite I'm having fun and relaxing.

Nigella says "Would you cut the crap and blog about food?"

Hey Nigella it's not all about you, in fact this blog entry isn't even about you at all!



Fresh pasta is incredibly simple to make.  If making it according to the traditional recipe, you just need flour and eggs.  100grams of flour to one egg to be precise. Mix those two ingredients in these ratios together and you will end up with pasta dough.


You can make a vegan pasta by just using flour and water.  However this will really only produce pasta that's at most one step above the dried pasta you get in the supermarket.  I want to make pasta that is really special.  So I do a little bit of extra work to replicate the chemical composition of an egg in my pasta.

I start by weighing out 200g of plain flour.  I then add 50g of chick pea flour.  You can also see Chick pea flour labelled as Besan.  It's more commonly used in Indian cooking.

Chick pea flour


The Chick pea flour is high in protein, and will help replicate the protein present in egg white.  I then add 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil.  Any vegetable oil will do really.  I also add a very tiny pinch of tumeric.  This spice is also commonly used in Indian cooking, but in the quantity used here won't flavour the pasta at all but will add a little bit of yellow colour that would normally be obtained from the egg yolk.

I also needed 2/3 of a cup of water to get this mixture to become a firm dough.  Your pasta may need a little less or a little more depending on a few factors such as how dry your pasta is, how cold the water is or how humid the air in  your kitchen is.

Once I mixed my pasta dough together it looked like this.

I now need to roll this pasta out.  I don't have a pasta machine, so just use my rolling pin.  I roll it very thin (approx 2mm thick).  It looks like this.

Okay, now I've made a lovely sheet of fresh pasta what do I do with it?  I decide that since I've been receiving requests for some time from a friend to make her favorite food vegan, I figured that today was the day to make lasagne vegan.

I want to do this dish carefully, the lady I'm cooking for is a very serious lasagne connoisseur... a lasagnesseur. 

I start by preparing a vegan bolognaise style sauce.  I use.

2 cloves garlic
1 onion, diced
splash olive oil
1 can diced tomatoes
2tbs tomato paste
2 tsp mixed herbs
3 button mushrooms
1 cup TVP.

WTF is TVP?

TVP 
You will find this bad-boy in the health food aisle.  It's made from 100% soy beans.  Prepare it to package directions (which involves soaking it in boiling water)

I start by heating the olive oil in a pot, then once it's fragrant adding the onions.  Once the onions brown throw in the can of tomatoes, herbs mushrooms, tomato paste and prepared TVP.  Taste the sauce and adjust the herbs to your personal taste.  Feel free to add salt and pepper to your own preference.  My bolognaise looks like this.

Turn the heat down low, and let it simmer away until it's nice and thick.  To make lasagne you want to have it a bit thicker than a regular bolognaise sauce that you'd use for spaghetti.

The next component in a lasagne is a really good bechemel sauce.  I decide to make a vegan bechemel sauce with a hint of garlic.  Here's what I used in my vegan garlic bechemel sauce.

3tbs nuttelex,
2tbs flour
2 cups soy milk
2 cloves garlic.

Melt the nuttelex on the stove, while finely chopping 2 cloves of garlic.  Once the nuttelex is melted add the garlic.  Add the 2 tablespoons of flour while rapidly stirring over a medium heat.  You are making a roux.  The flour and butter will thicken, if it gets lumpy don't panic.  You can do what the real chefs do and just pass it through a sieve at the end. :-D 

Here's my Roux.

Then you need to add your 2 cups of soy milk in a slow and steady stream while stirring.  Once the sauce is heated through it will be cooked.  Taste it, adjust if you need to.  I found mine was absolutely perfect!

Show off.

Now it's time to assemble your lasagne.  Start off with one ladle of the bolognaise sauce on the base of your lasagne dish.  Then a layer of pasta, then a layer of bechemel, then bolognaise, then pasta.

I only have small baking dishes, so I actually made 2 lasagnes, one square, and one oval.  The oval lasagne is shown above.

Traditional lasagne is finished with a layer of bechemel sauce then cheese on top.  Vegans don't eat cheese so I need to improvise.

I take a tub of tofutti, some garlic dried parsley, oregano, salt and a pinch of tumeric (for colour) and beat it to a smooth paste with approximately 3tbs of vegetable oil.  I topped my lasagne with this mix and baked it at 190 degrees C for half an hour.

Here's what the finished product looked like.

holy crap it actually looks like lasagne.
Here's my review:  "OMG! That vegan lasagne was great."

Thanks for trying out my vegan lasagne Stacey.  It was a pleasure to cook for you.

Thursday 17 May 2012

Megan makes Nigella's "left-over chicken thai soup" vegan.

Howdy,

Well winter seems to be making an early arrival here in Australia's national capital.  Minimum temperatures are getting below freezing, mornings have that beautiful winter-wonderland frosty look.  It's getting cold.  Also I'm back in the office beavering away at my day-job.  Saying it's a bit busy would be an understatement!  That's how I like to work though, I tend to do better with a bit of deadline-pressure.

I got home from work the other night wanting a dinner that was quick, easy, tasty and warming.  I thought it would be time to make Nigella's left-over chicken thai soup vegan. 

Thai cooking lends itself really well to vegan and vegetarian cooking.  Most Thai restaurants list their curries on their menu with options to have the dish either with tofu, vegetables, meat or fish.  I say hi to the feline residents, but they politely decline to join me in the kitchen today.  They're camped out on my bed having a snooze and do not wish to be disturbed.  So I get out of my suit ASAP, slip into something a little more snuggly and start cooking.

I am warm and comfortable, your argument is invalid.
Nigella wants me to start off by heating up one liter of chicken stock in a pot. 

I don't quite start off the same way Nigella does.  I can't use some of the Asian seasoning Nigella uses such as fish sauce; so I want to give the spices I can use the best chance to make this dish as flavoursome as possible. 

I start off by heating 2tsp of crushed chilli, 1tsp crushed ginger, 1tsp of crushed garlic and 2tbs of lime juice in a pot.  I'm not adding any oil to this as later on I'll be putting some coconut cream in the soup, which will add plenty of texture, and allow any fat-soluble flavours to be well and truly dissolved into the mix.

Yet another occasion I wish you could smell this blog.

While that's heating, I take about half a packet of mung-bean vermicelli noodles and place them in a large bowl.  Turn on the kettle to boil some water.  These noodles will cook just by soaking in the hot water.  They're great to take camping, or for any time you want to have something cooked with minimum time, effort or equipment.

Once the spices smell really good, I add 2 cups (500ml) of vegetable stock and 2tsp of tamarind paste.  This is less stock than Nigella used, but I'm cooking a smaller quantity of soup than she did.  My plan is to make 2 servings, one for me and one for my freezer.  I haven't scaled down the tamarind paste, as I want the dish to taste very tangy which is what the tamarind will do.  The tamarind paste you can buy in the jar is easier to use than the hard preserved tamarind you buy in plastic bags at a deli or other food store.

By this time the kettle has boiled, so I pour enough water over the mung bean noodles to cover them and leave them to soak for a few minutes.  I then get to work chopping some green vegetables to add to my soup.  I use a bunch of spinach (leaves and stalk) and a baby bok-choy.  Just about any leafy green will do.

Foreground: Chopped spinach.  Background: mung bean vermicelli noodles soaking away
At this point Nigella fetches her left-over roast chicken from the fridge and pops it into the soup.  This is all going to cook very quickly, in a matter of minutes.  I decide I want this dish to be fairly light, so don't go for any of the commercially available meat substitutes.  I'm keeping this one very simple, and substituting some sliced button mushrooms in place of the chicken. 

After the mushrooms go in (I used three, but that's mainly because that's how many were in my fridge) I then pop open a can of coconut milk and pour it in.  My can was 270g size.

While I'm waiting for the mushrooms to cook a little, I drain the mung-bean noodles and pour them into the soup pot.  I place the spinach stalks in first, stirring the soup to get them right through the mix.  I float the spinach leaves on top of the soup, to let them steam and wilt a bit before stirring through.

I then chop about 1/3 of a bunch of coriander and 2 red chillies (I love chilli and hot flavors if your palate is more sensitive than mine you can reduce the amount of chilli to suit your personal preference) while waiting for the spinach to wilt a bit.  I then turn off the heat, stir the spinach leaves through the soup.I then quickly stir through the coriander and chilli, then ladle out my serving.






Making this soup vegan wasn't a huge challenge at all and I feel I kept with the spirit of the recipe by using 'left over' vegetables in my fridge rather than going to the shop to buy something specially to cook.

The whole dinner from walking into the kitchen to walking out of the kitchen took me a grand total of fifteen minutes, so it's an absolute win for a week-night meal.


I'm happy with how this one turned out, I'd be comfortable to make it for visiting friends.  Give it a go and let me know how it worked out for you.




Wednesday 9 May 2012

Megan makes Nigella's french toast with stewed fruit vegan

I'm on holidays from work.  I'm taking my sabbatical at home to get enough time to build my veggie garden.  By gardening I mean....

Yep that's a B-double backing up my driveway with my gardening supplies.
and...

No they are not matchsticks, each one of those logs weighs about 70kg.

On the first morning of my holidays I made myself Nigella's french toast vegan.  I felt like a truly indulgent breakfast to kick-start my relaxation time, and I'm pleased to say it really hit the spot.  I'll apologise in advance for the pictures in the blog, for some reason it looks like a drunken lemur is operating my camera instead of me.  I never profess to be a skilled photographer, but these photos are pretty terrible.  You'll see in a moment.

Nigella wants you to make a french toast mix using eggs, milk, vanilla essence and a little sugar.  I did a little bit of research into getting the optimum vegan french toast recipe.  In actual fact, there's a very easy way to replicate the exact taste and texture of a french toast mix, but you need to buy a product from an online store, or a very well stocked health-food shop.  However, as the rules of my blog limit me to an average supermarket, I'll be making it from what's available.  Here's the recipe for the stuff to dip your bread into.

1 cup soy milk. (full fat, don't use the low-fat one)
100 grams sugar.
1 tsp vanilla essence, or extract.
1 heaped tbsp corn-flour.

Put all of these ingredients into a bowl, and either whisk, or use a stick-blender to make sure they're really well mixed.

I used a hand-cranked beater.  I found it at a second hand shop for a dollar in a small country town.  I like the hand-operated one it's less noisy which is a bit easier to tolerate first thing in the morning before getting to your first coffee.  However, the stick blender would do it quicker.  My french-toast mix looked like this.

Frothy!

Put that aside, and get the fruit started.  Stewed fruit does not need to take ages, and isn't difficult.  Nigella's stewed fruit is actually completely vegan. (thanks Nigella!)  I adjusted the recipe slightly, to use up a marginal apple.  You can stick to Nigella's recipe or throw in some other fruit if you wish.  Here's the stewed fruit recipe.

-1 plum, cut into half and stone removed. (quarters if it's a big plum)
-1 apple cut into chunks and core removed.
-1 cup cranberry juice
-1 cinnamon quill

Nigella added sugar to her stewed fruit recipe, as I'm not a huge sweet tooth, and the french toast is pretty sweet, I left the sugar out and let the natural fruit sugars in the plum and apple do the job for me.  Feel free to add sugar if you really like sweet things, it might be a good idea to start with about 1 tbsp, then increase bit by bit until you get it to your personal taste.

Place the Cranberry juice on a high heat on a shallow fry-pan on the stove.  Once the juice starts bubbling add the cinnamon quill, the plum (cut side down) and the apples.  Let them bubble away while you get started on the french toast.

Then all you need is some bread, preferably slightly stale.  I used some  fairly crusty italian-type bread that I'd left out the night before specifically.  Really any bread would be fine, you could even take the sweetness up a notch and use slightly older raisin bread.  The only bread that would be a bit difficult would be a really dark rye bread, as it might be harder to see when it's cooked, or some gluten-free breads may not hold up so well when soaked with the mixture.

Place a slice of bread (or two if you have a big shallow bowl) in the soy-milk mixture.  Then, put (another) fry pan on the stove, add a nob (approximately 1dessert spoon) of nuttelex (my preferred butter substitute).  Once the nuttelex is melted, and the bread fully soaked with the soy milk mixture gently lift the bread out of the bowl and place it in the pan.

Yours may look less blurry than this.
Mine took about 2-3 minutes per side to achieve golden brown perfection.  This works out very well, as the soy-milk mixture makes enough for about 4-6 slices of bread, and your stewed fruit will take about 10 minutes to be done. 

Keep a bit of an eye on the fruit as you're cooking the french toast, turn the heat down to medium or low if it looks like it's getting too bubbly.

The sugar in the soy-milk mixture helps impart a lovely sweet-vanilla flavour to the french toast, and also helps it caramelise and brown nicely, mine looked like this.

mmmmmm french toast goodness.

As a final touch of fancy-ness once the french toast was done, I tossed a few pecan nuts in the left over nuttelex, which had soaked up a little bit of the sugar from the french toast.  Then I had a go at making my food look pretty.  While doing this I turned the fruit down to very low, just so that it was kept nice and warm.

It looked good trust me.




So what you see there, is 2 slices of the french toast, some of the stewed fruit on top, and the toasted pecans beside.

What happened when I ate this was an immediate sensation of pure oral bliss.  The sweet vanilla bread, crispy on the outside, soft and warm in the middle.  The slightly sharp tang of the cranberry tempered by the sweetness of the plums and apples, along with the pecans made this my favourite cooked breakfast ever.  Should I be lucky enough to have a guest for a weekend breakfast whom I really really like very much, I'd love to cook this for them.

Hey Megan, sure there's plenty of fish in the sea... but you're a vegan, in the desert, forever alone.  Buhahahahaha!
  I might have the last laugh on this one Nigella.  My french toast with stewed fruit and toasted pecans is completely awesome.  Also... my veggie garden is going to totally kick arse.