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.