MoFo Day 2: Albondigas

It's my second virtual day in Spain and after a scan through my recipe books I decided to tackle Albondigas - usually meatballs in a spicy tomato sauce. I found a great recipe for Tempeh Albondigas at Vegan Dad's blog but I didn't have any tempeh in the fridge so I decided to use his recipe for inspiration and to adapt the wheatballs from Robin Robertson's Vegan on the Cheap. You can find the recipe online here, but I highly recommend Vegan on the Cheap, which is one of my favourite cookbooks. I haven't made these wheatballs since I started Eating To Live so I was interested to see how they would turn out without any added oil. I replaced the olive oil in the recipe with a tablespoon and a half of vegetable stock, used smoked paprika in place of sweet paprika and added half a teaspoon of ground cumin to the mix. I baked them in the oven on baking parchment and the wheatballs kept their shape much better than the last time, when I fried them. 

While the wheatballs were baking, I made my sauce. I made it in the Vitamix and then heated it up on the stove so it was really quick and easy. The recipe calls for heating the wheatballs in the sauce - I was pleasantly surprised that they didn't fall apart when cooking. This made plenty of really tasty, sweet and spicy smoky sauce and I'm confident that it will freeze well, as do the wheatballs. I served mine with some steamed cauliflower, broccoli, petits pois and edamame. It would be really good as part of an assortment of tapas, so I hope to try out some more tapas recipes as the week goes on.

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Sauce:

3 cloves of garlic, crushed

half an onion chopped

2 tomatoes, chopped 
1 small red bell pepper, chopped

400 g creamed tomatoes or passata

1 Tbsp red wine vinegar

2 Tbsp fresh parsley

1/2 tsp smoked paprika

1/4 tsp ground cumin

1 date

juice of half a lemon 

freshly ground black pepper

Put garlic, onion, tomatoes and red bell pepper in the blender together with half the passata and blend briefly. Add the remaining ingredients and blend until smooth. If the sauce is too thick, add  some water or vegetable stock until you get the correct consistency.

Pour the sauce into a frying pan and heat over medium flame for 5 minutes. Add the wheatballs, coat with sauce and cook for a further 5 - 7 minutes.

Serves 3

MoFo Day 1: Fideua

       
                        

 First day of my round the Med MoFo virtual culinary tour and we're in Spain. I have to admit that I've only been to Spain once, a few years ago when I visited a friend living in a beautiful old house by the beach near Santander on the northern coast of Spain. Carmen had lived in England and Kenya for much of her life, so very little of the food that we ate was Spanish in origin. So for this part of my MoFo journey, I've scoured websites and all of my cookbooks, looking for authentic recipes that I could adapt. 

Shimeji, pink and yellow oyster mushrooms

Fideua is a dish usually made with a vermicelli-like pasta and seafood. I found a recipe on the Vegetarian Times website  and then scoured the net for more authentic recipes so that I could  devise my own version using as many of the authentic ingredients as possible. One thing most of the recipes seemed to agree on was the use of saffron and paprika (either sweet paprika or smoked). I decided to replace the seafood with a combination of  smoked tofu, asparagus spears and an assortment of button, chestnut and wild mushrooms which I found at the supermarket. 

Most of the recipes I found called for the pasta to be fried in tablespoonfuls of olive oil before cooking the vegetables. I used a spray of light olive oil in my frying pan which made the final dish taste too greasy for my taste. Next time I would try dry-frying the pasta instead, which would certainly make it more Eat To Live-friendly. I used both sweet and smoked paprika which gave a yummy smoky fragrance combined with the sweetness of the saffron. I served it with a handful of salad greens and stringless green beans with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. This made 2 generous portions, so there's plenty left for tomorrow's lunch.

Vegan Fideua

50 g angel-hair pasta

1 small onion, finely chopped

3 cloves of garlic, crushed

1 small red bell pepper, diced

75 g mushrooms - button, chestnut, wild, or a combination of all 3, sliced

75 g asparagus tips, chopped

75 g smoked tofu, diced

2 tomatoes, diced

2 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley

pinch of saffron

pinch of sweet paprika

pinch of smoked paprika

1 cup of mushroom stock

Break the angel hair pasta in 5 cm (2 inch) pieces. Fry with a pinch of saffron strands in a couple of sprays of light olive oil until golden brown, taking care not to burn. Set aside on a plate lined with kitchen paper to remove oil. Add onion to the frying pan and saute in a small amount of the mushroom stock for around 3 minutes. Add garlic, mushrooms, tofu and bell pepper to the pan together with a pinch each of paprika and smoked paprika. Cook for 5 minutes until most of the liquid has evaporated. Stir in the diced tomatoes, remaining mushroom stock and pasta, cover and lower the heat. Simmer for 5 minutes, stirring frequently, adding water as required. Add asparagus and half of the parsley, cover and simmer for a further 3 minutes. Put under the grill for a few minutes and grill for a further 3 minutes or so until the pasta is crisp on top. Sprinkle with remaining parsley and serve with lemon quarters.

Serves 2

Two Years on...

                                                      

Vegan Mofo is almost upon us. I'm so excited to be taking part again this year having missed out last time around.

Things have changed quite a bit since my last post. At the end of last year I saw the movie Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead. The impact of that film, added to the realisation that I am fast approaching the age at which my mother died, made me think about what I wanted from the rest of my life and inspired me to completely change my diet from the start of the year. I started out with 15 days on the Classic Reboot plan of 5 days of juicing, 5 days of fruit and veg meals, followed by another 5 days of juicing. Doing the Reboot kickstarted the weight loss and helped to retrain my tastebuds, but I really wanted to find a way of eating that would be sustainable long term and probably for the rest of my life. The one way of eating that made sense to me was Dr Fuhrman's Eat to Live so on Day 16 I started on the Eat To Live 6 week plan and I've been eating that way ever since. Nine months later I've lost a total of 3 stones (42 lbs) and had to buy a whole new wardrobe. Last month I joined the local gym and I've been going there 4 times a week. I feel better than I have for decades so I can't imagine going back to my previous unhealthy eating. My only problem now is that my repertoire is rather small so it's time to search out some new recipes. Susan's Voisin's FatFree Vegan  website and blog are great resources but I'd like to find and adapt some more recipes over the next month.

After a very short summer up here in Scotland, the weather is turning cool and it feels like winter is nearly here, so my thoughts are turning towards warmer climes. My plan for the month of MoFo is to take a virtual Eat To Live culinary tour around the Mediterranean, starting out in Spain and then heading across North Africa into the Middle East and Turkey. If I have time I'll come home via Greece, Italy and France. I'm also hoping to try out some new low fat dessert and breakfast ideas.             

Spicy Bean Burgers

So much for posting two or three times a week! The last 2 weeks have seen us pretty much snowed in and I've had somewhat of a CFS relapse so I've been sleeping a lot and living off all the MoFo leftovers in my freezer. I've got so much out of the habit of taking photos, that I completely forgot to take my camera with me when we went out for a festive lunch at Kalpna Vegetarian Indian Restaurant yesterday. I love the Kalpna and have been eating there since the early 80s. It's the best Indian restaurant in Edinburgh and they are great at catering for vegans. At lunchtimes they put on an all-you-can eat buffet lunch and yesterday as they had been pre-warned that there would be a large group of vegans, the buffet was completely vegan. There were a variety of pakora and bateta vada with tamarind sauce and another fruit sauce, salads, brown, white and pilao rice, 3 different curries and breads. Sorry I don't have photos to share with you, but do check out the photos on their website.

At the end of last week I ventured out and found these Dee's Organic Spicy Bean Burgers in Real Foods. They caught my eye when I saw that they are made in West Cork, in Ireland, the land of my forefathers!

I haven't seen these before and as I rarely find vegeburgers that are suitable for vegans, I thought I'd give them a try.  The main ingredients are aduki beans and millet, with onion, garlic, chilli, ginger and spices. I fried mine and it held together well and I really enjoyed the flavour, although it didn't seem very spicy to me. The ginger gave it something of a smoky flavour. I served mine with sauteed potatoes and steamed green veggies. I'd definitely buy these again and I 'll try grilling them next time. They have inspired me to break out the millet, so I plan to cook something with that later in the week.        

         

Vegan MoFo Day 30: Full circle

Here we are at the end of November already - I can't believe it. It seems like only a week ago that I was wondering if I would be able to come up with enough variety in my cooking to blog for 30 days. I've made it! I've tried 7 new (to me) vegan products, attempted 12 new recipes, used 3 previously unused cookbooks and cooked 20 old favourites. I now have enough leftovers in my freezer to keep me going for the whole of December! I've only managed to let go of one of my old vegetarian cookbooks, but I have highlighted another two to look through and then part with over the next few weeks.

I was wondering what to cook for today and then when searching through the kitchen I came across two of the purple potatoes I started out MoFo with. It seemed the right time to come full circle and finish with a variation on the meal I started the month with. So here we have mashed purple potatoes, chickpea cutlet and a rainbow of steamed veggies, served this time with a lemony lentil sauce, based on the Lemony Mixed Bean hotpot recipe I made earlier in the month.

But as a commitment to the future, I also wanted to try a new recipe from a previously unused book. My gaze fell upon Lickin' the Beaters, subtitled Low Fat Vegan Desserts, by Siue Moffat. I bought this book over a year ago and had never got round to using it. I was drawn to the homemade halvah recipe. I associate halva with Istanbul and the most excellent Haci Bekir in Istiklal Caddesi. However, there will be no trip to Turkey for me this year, so making my own halva seemed like a good idea. The ingredients are all very simple - sesame seeds, maple syrup and vanilla with optional cocoa. The first mistake I made was using sesame seeds with their shells on. They were just too bitter for a sweet. Fortunately I had only put maple syrup and vanilla extract in half the mixture, so I can use the other half of the crushed sesame seeds in gomasio. Then I started again with shelled sesame seeds. This worked much better - it looked the right colour and taste much less bitter. I left half of the mixture as it was and added some cocoa powder to the other half. The recipe suggested putting the mixture into a small container and chilling. I used heart shaped chocolate moulds. The finished product was nice - not great, and it really would have been better with more maple syrup added to the cocoa flavoured half of the mix - but it's good as a sweet treat on a cold snowy day. It lacks the consistency of Turkish halva and I'd be tempted to replace half the sesame seeds with ground almonds next time to make it even less bitter. I will definitely be making more recipes from this cookbook.

So where to from here? When I started out, my goal was to blog for MoFo, I didn't believe that anyone would read any of my blog entries and I didn't actually think beyond that. Now I've decided to continue. I can't keep up the same rate of daily entries, especially as i still have all of those leftoves to eat up! But for December my plan is to blog twice or three times a week. I aim to try at least 2 new recipes a week. I'd like to get myself in gear for the PCRM 21-day vegan kickstart in January by cooking mainly low fat recipes, but that plan may change...        

Vegan MoFo Day 29: A Snowy Day and Very Berry Scones

It was 13˚C in my bedroom this morning and I really didn't want to get up. It was snowing  yesterday and most of the night and has continued during today as well. This amount of snow is pretty unusual for Edinburgh - we are beside the coast so on the rare occasions that we do get snow, it rarely lies for any length of time. How typical in this age of global warming that the weather in Scotland gets colder! This snow is going to be a shock for the bulbs in my window boxes. A couple of days ago I had great hopes that the snowdrops might be flowering in time for Christmas; now I'm wondering if they'll recover by springtime. Both cats are refusing point blank to set paw out through the cat flap and are demanding extra snuggling time.

 My snowy back green (more of a back white!) as seen from the window

Brave cyclamens still flowering in my window box, but I'm not holding out much hope for the bulbs come springtime

I'm eating leftovers for dinner today (as I shall be for most of December after all the cooking I've done this month!) but I still wanted to cook something, so I chose another recipe from Vegan Brunch - Berry Scones. When I was still a vegetarian, I used to enjoy the Very Berry Scones from a certain multinational coffee shop chain. I was really excited to try this recipe and had a bag of summer fruits in the freezer to use up. I had lots of fun making them - the consistency was nothing like any scone I have ever made before and I ended up wearing some of the scone mixture. I really don't know what's happening with my baking over the last few weeks - after my dense and compact chocolate muffins and my Salvador Dali-esque ginger biscuits, I didn't hold out much hope for scones when the dough attempted to drape itself over any available surface. They spread on the baking tray as they cooked and 6 of them actually joined up, despite starting out quite far apart. So they ended up rather flat and not terribly attractive, but they taste AMAZING! I've eaten 3 already and I shall have to hide the rest if they are to last out the rest of the day. How sad that I will need to try that recipe again to see if I can get the consistency right. In fact I can well imagine that it may take several tries to perfect the recipe - what a hardship!!

                         

Vegan MoFo Day 28: Pesto and Scrambled Tofu

Two firsts for me today - the first time I've made pesto and the first time I've made scrambled tofu. As a vegetarian I loved pesto, so I'm not sure why I haven't attempted to make it since I took to a vegan diet. I suspect that I was harbouring a belief that you really needed parmesan cheese to make a good pesto. When I first made the change to a completely vegetarian diet in the 1960s, food choices when eating out were very limited here in the UK. There were basically two options: cheese salad (comprising a pile of grated cheddar cheese, a couple of leaves of iceberg lettuce, 2 halved tomatoes with perhaps some sliced cucumber and a couple of spring onions, topped with salad cream) or cheese omelette and chips. When I went to college things got even worse and the vegetarian meal on offer in the cafetaria invariably included 2 fried eggs. Being offered 6 fried eggs a day as the only food option meant that after a couple of weeks I never wanted to see another egg again and I put on over 3 stone (50 lbs) in as many months by comfort eating chocolate bars. So after becoming vegan, I couldn't really see the point of eating scrambled tofu when I had never enjoyed scrambled eggs in my pre-vegan days. Today I've proved myself wrong on both counts and I will be making both pesto and scrambled tofu again.

I took Vegan Brunch as my starting point for both recipes. I've had this book about a year and although I've read it like a novel, this is the first time I've used it to cook from. I'm not very good at just sticking to a recipe as printed, so of course I made a few adaptations.

Pesto
1 clove of garlic, crushed
50g/1/3 cup pine nuts, toasted
28g/1 pack of fresh basil leaves
pinch of salt
2 Tbsp light olive oil
1 Tbsp water
1.5 Tbsp nutritional yeast

Buzz crushed garlic and toasted pinenuts in food processor, add basil leavessalt and olive oil and process until smooth. Add water and nutritional yeast and blend well.

Pesto Tofu Scramble with Mushrooms and Tomatoes 
1-2 Tbsp light olive oil
2 spring onions, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
8 cherry tomatoes, halved
175g chestnut mushrooms, halved and finely slliced
250g firm tofu, squeezed and crumbled into large pieces
2 Tbsp nutritional yeast
2 Tbsp pesto (or more to taste)
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Gently saute spring onions for a couple of minutes. Add tomatoes and saute for a futher 3 minutes. Add crushed garlic and mushrooms and saute for another couple of minutes. Add crumbled tofu, stir well and cook for 5 minutes. Stir in pesto and nutritional yeast and cook for a further 2 minutes until warmed through.  Season with salt and freshly ground black pepper, if required. I served mine with steamed broccoli and petits pois. I think it would be really nice with sauteed potatoes or rosti. I really like that pesto, tomato, mushroom combination and the nutritional yeast in both the pesto and scramble made it taste really creamy. This made enough scramble for 2 servings, so I'm really looking forward to breakfast already. the pesto made about 4 servings, so I'll be having pasta with pesto sometime in the next couple of days.