Vegan MoFo Day 20: Compassionate Living Fayre

I managed to get up early this morning to do some more baking for the Fayre today which fortunately turned out a lot better than last night's baking. Here are the almond biscuits (cookies) which come from A Vegan Taste of North Africa. These have to be one of my favourites because they always turn out well and they don't have too many ingredients - ground almonds, almond extract, sunflower spread, sugar, flour and a little bit of non-dairy milk.

Here are the other cookies I made 
Date Oat Cookies
75 g dates, chopped
75 g walnuts or pecans, chopped
3 medium bananas, mashed
120 ml sunflower oil
175 g rolled oats
1 tsp vanilla extract
Mix together, spoon onto a greased baking tray, bake in a preheated oven at 400F/200C/Gas Mark 6 for 20 mins.

They don't usually look so pink - must be reflection off the table cloth!

The Fayre was great - quite a few of the Scottish Vegans group were there and everyone had done loads of baking: Gingerbread Cupcakes, Triple Chocolate Cupcakes, Chocolate and Peanut Cookies, Chocolate Chip Cookies, Chocolate Brownies, Cinnamon Whirls, Banana Bread, Sparkled Ginger Cookies, Almond Cookies, Chocolate and Coconut Fudge. We decided not to inflict my chocolate muffins on people for fear that they would just confirm everyone's worst beliefs about vegan baking! I brought them home again, so the diet will have to wait a few days more as there are still 9 left to eat.
Here's Penny with the Scottish Vegans Group stall:

And some more of the baking:

And more:

People descended on the stall like a plague of locusts (nothing like free food to get people's interest!) and we got a fair number of donations for Vegfam. It was really great to get to meet so many vegans - it can be easy to think you're the only one when you're sitting on your own at home. And it was especially good to see so many young vegans.
I was fairly restrained and managed to come away with only a few purchases: vegan marshmallow mix, some vegan soaps and Ani Phyo's Raw Food Desserts.

   

Vegan MoFo Day 19: Baking

It's the Compassionate Living Fayre here in Edinburgh tomorrow and I had promised to bake some cookies. I have CFS and seem to be having a bit of a relapse so I'd probably have been better going to bed instead, but I was determined to get some baking done this evening in case I have no energy at all tomorrow. I decided to bake two recipes from Vegan with a Vengeance. The first was a variation on the Mocha Chip Muffins, minus the mocha and the chips and with the addition of some halved frozen cherries. I've made this recipe before - it makes lovely fluffy muffins. I don't know if I need a new battery in my kitchen scales, but the batter ended up as runny as pancake mix. I ended up adding more flour and cocoa until I got a reasonable consistency but I should also have added more baking powder. The resulting muffins have not risen as much as they should and they feel pretty hefty. I shall try one in the morning to see if they are ok to be inflicted on the general public - I don't want to put them off vegan baking altogether! I had made some almond milk for my baking and it was cooling on the counter. Sadly whilst making the muffins I put 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract into my almond milk instead of into the muffin liquid. I realised my mistake as soon as I'd made it - I even watched myself put the second teaspoonful into the milk as if in slow motion, unable to stop myself! So now I have very vanilla flavoured almond milk - yuck, that it just so wrong, particularly as I had planned to use some of the milk to make almond cookies in the morning and the vanilla is going to fight with the almond flavour I'm aiming for.

The second recipe I made was the Sparkled Ginger Cookies. VeganinBrighton made these last week and they looked so lovely I really wanted to try them out. These were more successful, if perhaps a little overdone. Mine went a bit flat - I'm not sure is that was again because my mixture was a bit too liquid. If I have the time and the energy in the morning I plan to make those almond cookies and some date/oat cookies, if not then at least I won't be turning up empty-handed.  

      

Vegan MoFo Day 18: Aduki Bean Soup

I have over 100 cookbooks and booklets, about one third of them are vegan and the rest vegetarian. Despite this bounty of recipes, I still find myself cooking the same 20/25 recipes over and over again. It strikes me that perhaps some of the vegetarian cookbooks might be better appreciated by someone else and that maybe the time has come to start looking out a few to take to the Oxfam bookshop. My initial goal is to get rid of 10 books - eeek! As a prelude to this I looked out and catalogued all of my cookbooks and chose one to cook a recipe from and then to let go of.  I'm starting small - parting with books is hard for me, even when they have been sitting unopened on a shelf for a decade or two. Today's book is The Today's Vegetarian Book of Soups. I suspect that this may have been a free gift with a vegetarian magazine. I've had this wee book since the early 90s and I don't think I've ever cooked anything from it before today. I chose Aduki Bean soup as I had a can of aduki beans in my store cupboard and a pack of fresh winter herbs in my fridge comprising all the herbs required by the recipe. I substituted a tub of tomato salsa which needed using up for the can of chopped tomatoes called for by the recipe.


Aduki Bean Soup
100 g/4 oz aduki beans, soaked or 1 can of aduki beans
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 onion,  chopped
1 stick celery, sliced
1 clove of garlic, crushed (I used 3)
1 Tbsp tomato puree
1x 225g/8 oz can tomatoes or 1 tub of salsa
1 bay leaf
1 tsp fresh thyme
900 ml/1.5 pts vegetable stock
Salt and pepper to taste
Chopped parsley for garnish

Saute the onion for a couple of minutes in olive oil or a small amount of vegetable stock. Add the celery, carrots and garlic and saute for a few minutes more. Add the tomatoes, tomato paste, bay leaf, thyme and vegetable stock. Bring to the boil and then simmer for about 20 minutes. Season to taste. Serve garnished with chopped fresh parsley.

This was a quick and straightforward soup to make. Would I make it again? Probably not: to be honest it's nothing special and doesn't begin to match up to my current favourite soups. I've also had a quick look through the rest of the recipes and don't see anything I can't live without trying. So the book has gone into my Oxfam bag. That's one down, another 9 to go...           

Today was a bit of a difficult day and I definitely needed cheering up. Fortunately my uncheery self was in the vicinity of Coco Chocolate in Bruntsfield - I managed to restrain myself and came away with just one enormous chocolate praline, a bag of chocolate coated orange peel and one choclate coated fig. Why is it that things don't look so bad anymore when viewed through a haze of chocolate bliss? 

          

Vegan MoFo Day 17: Chickpea Roast

I was planning to cook something from scratch today but a look in the fridge showed that I had a chickpea roast that needed to be cooked today. This was a new Cauldron Foods Vegetable Roast that I picked up at the supermarket last week. It seems to be so new that it isn't on their website yet. Taking it out of the packet I was surprised to see that it looked not dissimilar to a large veggie haggis:

  It needed to be baked for 35 minutes in its plastic coating so as the oven was on, I roasted some potatoes and parsnips at the same time. Then I decided that it would probably need a sauce of some sort - I discovered some mushrooms lurking at the bottom of the fridge, chopped them up, heated them in some water with half a mushroom stock cube and then whizzed them into a sauce with my hand blender. The roast was meant to be rested for 5 minutes before being opened. I was too hungry to wait and opened mine up straight away. This was probably not a very good idea as it didn't slice very well when piping hot out of the oven. I really liked this loaf - its main ingredients are chickpeas, sweet potato, carrot, bulgur wheat and oatmeal, which are all things that I enjoy. I suspect that it would be better with a tomato based sauce or the recipe for red wine and pepper gravy suggested on the packaging.I served mine with steamed broccoli, cauliflower, sugarsnaps, baby corn and brussels sprouts.
I will certainly buy this again. It can be frozen and also has instructions for cooking from frozen so it would be a handy standby for days when I have no energy for cooking.

Vegan MoFo Day 16: More Noodles

For today I thought I'd try a recipe I've had picked out to cook for quite a while - Bryanna's Golden Vegetable Noodle Soup, which I found here. I like split pea soups which is one of the reasons this soup really appealed to me and I've never cooked anything containing nutritional yeast before. I thought this was a fabulous soup - tasty, really easy to make. I added extra garlic and half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper, plus a tablespoon of vegetable bouillon powder. It ended up a really sunny looking soup - welcome on a rather grey cold day. I will definitely be making it again. I served mine with some Kalamata olive ciabatta bread and some extra nooch.

As I've not posted a recipe for the last couple of days, here's a picture of a happy little cat with her catnip bag - ahh the simple pleasures!

Vegan MoFo Day 15: Sweet and Spicy Noodles

This is a day late because I've had internet problems - the MoFo-ing carries on regardless though! Yesterday I thought I'd try a recipe from a new (new to me, that is) cookbook - The Everything Vegan Cookbook by Jolinda Hackett, which I bought weeks ago and have never got round to using. I had no particular recipe in mind and as I've been so impressed by Vegan.in.Brighton's way of choosing recipes, I thought I'd try something fairly random. Rather than selecting a recipe, I went with the one on the page where I had put the receipt before leaving the bookshop. This was Sweet and Spicy Peanut Noodles. This is not a recipe that I would usually be tempted to try. It called for pineapple juice, which I don't have but I did have a pineapple that had been languishing in my kitchen for somewhat longer than I would care to admit, so I ran three quarters of that through my juicer and diced the rest to go into the recipe. It also called for fresh chillies, which I didn't have so I used dried crushed red chillies instead. 

The finished meal was not a resounding success. The recipe called for "Asian-style noodles". I used rice noodles which were the only noodles I had available, but perhaps something a little more substantial might have been better. After soaking the rice noodles in boiling water as per the package instructions, then adding them to the fried chillies and pineapples and finally stirring in the peanut/pinapple sauce, with a minute's cooking and stirring at each stage, my noodles were losing their integrity and most of them had become a gloopy lump of rice and peanut. I was really glad that I had lightly steamed some vegetables to give the whole meal some bite. However, I did really like the idea of the sauce. I think it would go well with baked and breaded tofu, or perhaps it would have been better just poured on top of the noodles.

Vegan MoFo Day 14: Barley Couscous and Banana Bread

But not together... I was working this morning so once again I didn't have much energy for cooking. Couscous is always a quick standby and I had some barley couscous I've been waiting to try and salad leaves that need to be used up. I added the juice of half a lime and a pinch of harissa spices to the couscous and mixed in half a diced avocado, some smoked tofu with sesame and sunflower seeds, olive halves and some defrosted petits pois. I put the couscous vegetable mixture onto a bed of little gem lettuce with pea shoots, lamb's lettuce, red chard. cherry tomatoes, cucumber and radish and then topped it with some chopped strawberries, pinenuts, toasted almond slices and cress. Served with a sesame pitta bread, some falafel and hummus and a mug of vegetable bouillon. The verdict - the whole was a great combination. I didn't really notice any difference in the barley couscous but then as there were so many other flavours competing it probably had a hard job making itself known. Since it cost around 3 times the price of wholewheat couscous and I usually eat my couscous with a lot of flavours, it probably isn't worth the extra cost.

  Next weekend some of the Scottish Vegans group are baking for the Compassionate Living Fayre here in Edinburgh. This will be my first time in taking part and I'm feleing quite excited and having people taste my baking. I've already decided on a couple of recipes and then thought I'd also like to try a new recipe. The one I chose was the Best Banana Bread recipe from The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes  I've had this book for ages but hadn't yet got round to baking any of the recipes. The best banana bread has had a great write up on blogs I've been reading. My oven isn't the best - it usually runs at a slightly lower temperature. Thie time, however, the outside of the cake was baked long before the inside. When I tested after 43 minutes the outside was already a medium brown colour, but the inside was still uncooked. After 48 minutes it was much the same and I ended up having to bake it for a further 10 minutes before the inside was cooked. By that time the outside was a much darker brown than I would have preferred. I'm still not sure where I went wrong. I used home made oat milk, but the recipe didn't specify any particular non-dairy milk. I baked the cake on the middle shelf of my gas oven so it shouldn't have got too hot. Perhaps next time I could cook the batter in muffin tins so that it cooks through quicker. Any suggestions gratefully received. The middle of the cake tastes great, the outside slightly overdone. I think I'd better work on perfecting my baking of this recipe before I inflict the results on the general public! 

    i had a really hard time uploading this image - is that because all the Vegan MoFo-ers are uploading at the same time?