Veganmofo 2009 – Yellow Rose Recipes October 6, 2009

This book definitely falls into the category of books I love. I had to get it from Amazon US. That was in the days of the pound being strong against the dollar and the exchange rate was so great that even including shipping it was cheaper to buy books from abroad than here. Let’s hope that day comes around again before we visit next year!

But I didn’t regret it for a minute. This is such a fun book. It’s got cute hand drawn pictures of the author, and some pictures of the food – they’re not all perfect stylized photos but they’re real pictures which show you what you’re aiming for without looking too unattainable.

The recipes are fairly straightforward, don’t rely on weird ingredients, and are actually fairly healthy and low fat without singing it from the rooftops and relying on nasty over healthy stuff. It’s easy, tasty comfort food that won’t break the bank, won’t have you scouring the internet for unusual ingredients and won’t pile on the pounds. Perfect.

It was a sad day when the author announced she wouldn’t be writing a second book, but I’ll certainly be getting a copy of her forthcoming cookzine.

These are some of the recipes I’ve loved, in case you want to try them:

Vegan Parmesan
Beer battered chicken seitan
Kasha Varnishkas
Twice stuffed potatoes
Sesame green beans
Mustard crusted seitan
Sloppy Joannas

and just last night I tried the tofu marsala. I served it with mashed potatoes and broccoli and it was a divine, warming, tasty comfort food which I highly recommend!

Purple sprouting broccoli with leek and shallot farrotto December 4, 2008

Since my vegetarian days I have been a big lover of Denis Cotter, his cookbooks and Cafe Paradiso. The restaurant is lovely and the food there is great but I think what appeals most is his wonderful amusing writing and modest outlook on life. I first went over to Cork to visit Paradiso for my tenth wedding anniversary and was lucky enough to meet Denis. For such a highly regarded, creative chef and writer he’s amazingly modest and one of my favourite people. I have been to the restaurant twice in one weekend since I became vegan and the food was excellent, but some of my favourite recipes from his books are no longer available to me. I have made vegan versions of some, and sometimes you’ll stumble across a naturally vegan one (usually Asian influenced), but if you do eat cheese I can highly recommend his recipes as some of the most creative lacto vegetarian recipes you’ll ever find.

I’d had my eye on this recipe from his latest book for quite a while. Last year when I was inundated with sprouting broccoli from my vegetable box, I hunted high and low for farro and couldn’t find it. The day I found it, in Sainsbury’s no less, was just about the last sprouting broccoli of the year!! Anyway, today I remembered both, and English sprouting broccoli was back, so I decided to make a vegan version. I made the farrotto almost as listed but I used plenty of Yellow Rose Recipes parmesan and olive oil instead of their dairy counterparts. The broccoli part I followed exactly but my broccoli was a bit stringy so I steamed it briefly first.

It was my first time using whole farro/spelt and I loved it. The whole combination was absolutely delicious and I was blown away by the risotto part of it. It was so tasty and a great texture. The idea of the tomatoey, spicy broccoli was good but my broccoli remained staunchly stringy and chewy, which ruined it a bit. I’d definitely make it again but I’d substitute the far cheaper and more reliable kale or greens for the broccoli next time because I think they’d have the same earthy green effect against the creamy farrotto.

Recommended.

Beer battered chicken seitan September 20, 2008

This is another Yellow Rose recipe that came right at the end of the week and didn’t make it into the last post. I’ve talked about making seitan before and although I’ve made seitan sausages that worked really well I’ve not had much success with seitan steaks. I really wanted a version that made nice smooth steaks that I could use in a variety of recipes. I can buy seitan in tins at the chinese shop but I find they leave a bit of a strange aftertaste. I can also get good smoked seitan but you don’t always want a smoky flavour to what you’re cooking.

When I saw this version on Joanna’s blog I decided to try again. Well, this was my best effort so far but still by no means perfect. It made an absolute tonne of seitan but it was still very spongy. I know that different brands of wheat gluten work differently and I suspect that I will never get a good smooth steak using this brand (the only brand I think you can get in the UK).

Still, I wasn’t going to let a bit of sponginess get in the way of fried beer batter so I pressed on with the recipe regardless. If there’s anything better than frying something, it’s frying it twice, so I was always going to love this recipe. You could really taste the beer in the batter, unlike other beer batters I’ve tried. That may not be to everyone’s taste but as we both love beer and we both love oil, it worked really well for us! The sponginess of the seitan was still noticeable but it didn’t ruin the dish at all. I can only imagine how great it would be with lovely smooth seitan!

I’ve still got loads of seitan left so I’ll be looking for other ways to try it, and I’ll let you know how they go. Incidentally just in case frying the seitan twice wasn’t enough, I served it with chips and a nice homemade spicy tomato sauce.

Yellow Rose Recipes Week September 13, 2008

The good people of the Post Punk Kitchen forums came up with a way to get more use out of our cookbooks. It’s similar to my Cafe Flora weekend a while ago but this time the whole forum is using the same book. Last week they picked Voluptuous Vegan, a book I love, but I didn’t get my arse in gear to join in. This week they picked Yellow Rose Recipes. I’ve liked what I’ve tried from the book so far but not used it as much as I’d like, so I joined in with gusto.

Over the course of the week I made 4 new dishes so I think I made a pretty good stab at it. The first dish I made was for week lunches and I didn’t photograph it – couscous chickpea salad. It stored and travelled well and I loved the leeks and mushrooms in it, but the dressing was a bit sharp for me. I would make it again but change the dressing and up the seasoning a touch.

The first evening meal was twice baked stuffed potatoes with sesame green beans. The idea of the potatoes was the same as the one I tried from Veganomicon a few weeks ago but the filling was very different – a nice broccoli and mushroom. The beans were simple but amazing and I’m not normally a huge green bean fan but i’d willingly eat a whole plateful of these.

Next up came Kasha Varnishkas. I’d been looking at this recipe for ages but since my husband is not a big lover of buckwheat I was waiting for him to clear off one night so I could try it. In the end he said he would try it so I made it with the addition of the mushroom gravy and some cabbage. Wow. We both loved it, and Joanna was right in her intro that it tasted even better the next day. If you haven’t tried buckwheat or think you don’t like it, try it this way and I think you’ll have a new love. It seemed to use quite a lot of pans but as I don’t do the washing up, I didn’t really care!

Last but not least, pasta e fagioli. This was quite a simple pasta dish with beans and spinach, but it had a nice combination of herbs and spices and was a nice comfort food meal and made really good lunch leftovers too.

This was a really successful week. It made it nice and easy deciding what to eat and it made me try a few things I’ve had my eye on for ages. If you’ve got lots of partially used cookbooks cluttering up your shelves, why not pick one out and try a few new dishes one of these weeks?

Samosa baked potatoes with dahl and spicy courgettes September 4, 2008

I had a spell of trying new things last week and this was one of them – again from Veganomicon. The idea is that you stuff a baked potato with all the yummy things you’d normally find in a samosa and don’t mess around with the pastry. It’s a great idea but baked potatoes don’t thrill me much. I don’t like microwaved versions and I don’t like waiting forever for oven cooked ones either. But while my jambalaya was in the oven I decided to throw a few potatoes in at the same time, so that the next day I could just stuff and rebake them. Genius or what?

I had heaps of courgettes to use up so I did some spiced courgettes and dahl to serve with them. I had planned to make Veganamicon quick mango chutney to serve too, but my mango was annoyingly black inside when I cut it open!

Even without it it was a really tasty dish. Handy to assemble the potatoes in advance and then just throw them in the oven to heat through too. One half served with some raita would make a really nice, novel starter too. There’s a similar idea in Yellow Rose Recipes too, so I’ll be throwing potatoes into the oven everytime I’ve got it turned on from now on.

Buttermilk biscuits with almond milk gravy June 22, 2008

We went Texan for breakfast this morning. I first came across biscuits and gravy when I went to Virginia for a wedding a few years ago. To British ears, biscuits and gravy just sounds plain odd but it’s a very typical American dish. As soon as you start to realise that biscuits are a totally different thing to what we know as biscuits, and likewise the gravy, it starts to make a bit more sense. I have heard people describe biscuits as being a bit like scones but I don’t think that’s right – biscuits are lighter and fluffier and I’m amazed that we haven’t embraced them in this country.

I’ve made biscuits and gravy several times before, usually the biscuits from Vegan With a Vengeance. However, I realised recently that although I’ve liked everything I’ve made from Yellow Rose Recipes, I’d hit a dead end and stopped making things from it. So I asked people on PPK what their favourite dishes were from it, and someone suggested these biscuits and gravy. That person is from Nashville, and Joanna (book author) is from Texas, so I thought that this would be a good Southern US breakfast.

I had a minor hangover this morning and my husband had a major one, so this was a potentially good hangover cure. Under normal circumstances I’d like to make my own sausage for the gravy but today I decided to rely on Realeat frozen sausages. Almond milk is quite new to me and is very expensive but I love it and plan to try making my own soon.

The biscuits look a bit burnt but they’re not – they’re made with wholewheat pastry flour. This again is new to me and I thought I couldn’t get it in this country but someone very helpfully on the BBC boards told me that Doves Farm fine wholemeal flour is the same thing. That’s really good to know because quite a lot of US recipes have it in now.

The gravy was very strange to our tastes because it was savoury and sweet at the same time. I think that’s a traditional southern US thing and it was really nice but did take a bit of getting used to. It certainly cured our hangovers and I’ll do the biscuits again definitely but I think I’ll stick with a more savoury gravy in future. If you’ve never tried this US breakast treat I urge you to give it a go!

Snobby Joe April 2, 2008

I’d never even heard of a Sloppy Joe sandwich before I became vegan, but it’s nigh on impossible to buy a vegan cookbook written by an American author which doesn’t have a vegan version in it.

Some research (well, a look at wikipedia) tells me that it’s normally made of ground beef, onions, sweetened tomato sauce and seasonings, and it’s called sloppy because the filling spills out of the sandwich when you try to eat it.

I’d already tried the Sloppy Joannas from Yellow Rose Recipes and loved them, so I thought I’d give the Snobby Joe version from Veganomicon a whirl. They’re the same basic idea but the Snobby version uses lentils instead of TVP and the spicings are slightly different. They’re both very easy, very tasty, and very filling though.

For me, I prefer using lentils to TVP, but I preferred the spicings used in the Sloppy Joanna version, especially the use of liquid smoke in it. So in future I’m going to use lentils in Joanna’s dish – and create my own version – Snobby Joanna? I’ll write it up here when I do it!

Jalapeno corncakes February 20, 2008

Yet another blurred photo. The harder I try the worse my pictures get. This one should have been OK because it was in the morning with bright lights but obviously not.

This was a lovely Sunday breakfast from Yellow Rose Recipes. Quick and easy to mix together and used ingredients I’ve always got in the house. It would have been better to just have one or two and have them as part of a spread with other dishes, but I was hungry and lazy and very very greedy – because I ate this whole plateful myself………

Butternut squash lasagne February 20, 2008

I know this looks like a pile of sick, but for once I can’t blame my poor photography skills because it really did look like a pile of sick. There really didn’t seem to be any other way to present it. Maybe I could cut out a perfect square but life’s too short when there’s lasagne waiting to be eaten! But no matter what it looked like because it tasted great!

My husband isn’t particularly fond of butternut squash and I’d had one sitting around for a while. He was out so I decided to try out the recipe for butternut squash lasagne from Yellow Rose recipes. It took quite a few steps so it’s not one to whip up when you get in late from work but on a Sunday afternoon it was fine.

It was quite an unusal recipe in that the filling was also blended into the sauce. This made for a very rich creamy lasagne. The filling is roasted squash, onion, garlic and sage mixed with tofu, and the sauce is a vegan bechamel with some of the squash blended into it. I used spinach lasagne sheets which accounts for the pukey green bits on the picture.

Next time I’d make a couple of modifications to the recipe – I’d put some lemon juice in there somewhere to cut through the sweetness a bit and I’d add a bit of cayenne or chilli powder into the sauce.

But otherwise it was a great new way to use butternut squash. I like this book!

Curried chickpea patties with broccoli February 4, 2008

Another test recipe from Joni’s Just the Burger book. This recipe seems to have caused a few problems for some of the testers so I approached it with caution! It’s a mixture of chickpeas, broccoli, Thai curry paste, tahini, sesame and flour – and it could be my favourite burger so far! And it had the added bonus of using up the broccoli from my vegetable box too.

Joni is going to include sauces and dressings to serve with the burger, but I decided to make the lemon tahini dressing from my new Yellow Rose cookbook, which was very garlicky but delicious and a great match for the burgers. There are some fried potatoes hidden under the burgers, too!