Breakfast?

Vegan breakfast seems like a tough one.  Not sure why- after all, simple things liks toast with plant-based margarine and vegemite count both as vegan and as breakfast!  Fat-free vegan breakfast is a little more problematic, no margarine!  And a whole-foods, unprocessed fat-free vegan breakfast can seem a bit bewildering!

If you're like me and don't care what time of day you eat foods- leftover dinner makes great breakfast.  I often am heating up curry at work, or soup, or... when my stomach wakes up and realises it's empty at about 8:30, 9 o'clock.  I love a nice breakfast salad- an Eat to Live staple that had never really occurred to me until I read that book.  

Somehow eating leftover curries and salads for breakfast seems ok at the office, but at home I wish for something a bit more "breakfasty".  Vegan cookbooks are full of delicious looking recipes for french toast, breakfast casseroles, eggless fritatas and so on.  American blogs are chockas with crazy things like "carrot cake oatmeal" and the like-  which are probably delicious, but kind of symbolise the kind of eating mentality I am trying to get away from.  I live in a country where we have never heard of canned pumpkin (which is ubiquitous in many of these recipes)  and most of the "spice mix" concoctions called for in these recipes are a complete mystery to me.  So... what are some practical, healthy vegan breakfasts for the working, harried vegan mum who doesn't feel like leftovers or salad?

- baked beans on rice cakes, toast or alone

- avocado spread on rice cakes, toast or alone

- fruit

- soy yogurt or silken tofu dressed up as yogurt (hints on this magical substance to follow in another post)

- quinoa cooked as porridge:  This requires a tiny bit of forethought if you want it fast, as unflattened quinoa is not the very fastest-cooking of the grains.  Soaking it overnight is rumoured to increase its nutritional superpowers, as well as speeding cooking in the AM.  I eat it with a packet of stolen Splenda and a splash of soy milk.

- millet cooked as porridge:  this is my new favourite thing.

 

as you can see from the crappy plastic bowl, this is not going to be the kind of blog where you get all inspired by our perfect lives and awesome photography skills!  Hopefully you will have an ideas what to have for breakfast though.

Millet is CHEAP.  A kilo was like $3 at the Chinese market.  This morning I added some goji berries (also cheap at the same grocery) and a small pour of red quinoa, because that's how I roll.  Covered with water (a lot of water!  About 3 times as deep as the seeds are in your pan) and simmered until the water was absorbed.  Millet cooked alone has a fluffy texture and light, wheaty flavour like couscous.  However, unlike couscous, which is essentially pasta, millet is a whole grain, and an ancient one at that.  So much more nutritional goodness, cheapness and deliciousness packed into a little seed.  It has not even a HINT of the gritty budgie-cage taste that I secretly expected.

-oatmeal:  of course, good old oatmeal is vegan!  I thik I have been so busy eating all these new-to-me wonderful things that poor old oatmeal has taken a back seat.

- cafe breaky:  At a cafe where we sometimes go, the only vegan breakfast option is a grilled field mushroom, served with cubes of butternut pumpkin and wilted spinach, alongside soursough toast.  I have never made this at home, but you totally could!  

Talking about Running

What's the deal with running?  Well my personal deal is this: 

 I lost probably the first 15 kg through portion control alone.  At a certain point, it seems that one's metabolism gets the news and starts trying to conserve energy.  I hit that point, and decided that I needed to start some kind of daily exercise, hopefully to build some hungry hungry muscle, also to try and kick my metabolism into gear.  I had started the couch to 5 programme before, on a hired treadmill, and hated it- it just sucked, and I hurt my knee right away.  

This time I thought I would try it again, on the road, and just do it til I hurt myself or it got too hard, at least I would be exercising! Luckily I mentioned it to a blogless online friend who was a big lady herself, but still an experienced runner.  She recommended the book "ChiRunning" by Danny Dreyer.  I snagged the Kindle version and settled in that night to read it.  I firmly believe that the excellent advice on form in that book is almost solely responsible for me still running happily (and a lot more than 5 km!) months later.

My point?  If you are someone who has never run, or run before but hurt yourself somehow, please give Dreyer a whirl before you start.  He teaches running like a child runs, with a natural gait and posture that doesn't stress the body mechanically.  There is a lot to take in, but it is explained so well that one can easily incorporate the information a bit at a time into your practice, it isn't an 'all or nothing' proposition.

Resources:

Couch to 5

Chirunning

Also, and this is a topic for way more discussion later- if you are wanting to start running, consider starting in simple, non-orthotic shoes, like cheap Chinese sneakers/sandshoes.  Barefoot running is its own "thing" with its own controversies- however simple footwear that allows a natural gait, and allows your body to strengthen and work with its pronations and dysplasias.  We are evolved from runners!  Your feet aren't special, no matter what shoe salesmen have told you.  Don't let a perceived need for expensive shoes stop you from starting.

Veganomicon

I posted something the other day about "Appetite for Reduction" by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. I loved that book so much that it sent me running to the Kindle store for the famous but new-to-me 'Veganomicon'- this lady is rapidly becoming my new hero. Recipes that are detailed in the suggested order of steps (there can be a lot of steps in any scratch cookery, not only vegan!)- but also allow the cook to use common sense and preferences should she or he have any of either. 'If you haven't tried white balsamic vinegar, this recipe is a good place to try it. Otherwise use regular'. Same idea with miso. Isa opens my eyes to the variety of inspiring ingredients out there, without creating recipes that require a pantry full of awkward and strange ingredients found only in the great cities of the world.

I'm the kind of shopper and cook who prefers to have a menu for the fortnight planned. Now more than ever it really helps to know that I have the necessaries on hand to cook evening meals for most of my 2 week pay cycle- I top up fresh stuff during the period, but really our new fridge is so good that properly stored veggies seem fine after a few days. Mostly I sit down with a little notebook and plan say 12 meals, writing them down ia list, on one page, and a shopping list of corresponding ingredients on the other page. Often most if not all of the recipes I plan to start from come from blogs or sites like taste.com.au, lately from some of the great blogs you see in the right hand sidebar. This week, I thimk almost all of my plans came from Veganomicon, and that's just a few of the meals I want to try. Here's my plan... Let's see how closely I stick to it!

• spinach noodle kugel with sweet potato and pear tsimmes
• seitan pot pie (veganomicon contains detailed instructions for homemade seitan! I am super excited because the canned stuff is good, and I want to make my own. Gluten flour was ordered today, hope it comes soon!)
• eggplant/potato moussaka
• pineapple quinoa stirfry
• lasagna (made this tonight... Used isa's recipe for vegan ricotta... Mindblowingly good!
• pumpkin saag
• spaghetti and beanballs
• risotto
• mujadarah
• burgers
• mac and cheeze
• curried kidney beans (again so soon? They were pretty awesome)

Here's a pic of the lasagna I made tonight- seriously delicious and eaten up by all the meat eaters at the table.

Garbage Soup

What a terrible name for a delicious soup- but I can't help thinking of this soup like that! I THINK but am not 100% certain that Tamar Adler, in The Everlasting Meal calls it that- so blame her.

It really is delicious, in spite of the name- as evidenced by the fact that I almost emptied my bowl before I remembered that I wanted to take a photo.So what is in garbage soup? Well- the base of it is made-from-scratch veggie stock. Fill your stock pot with all your week's veggie peels, stems, skins, pods and so on. In my case, I include things that I probably ought to chuck- limp bunches of celery, slightly frostbitten spring onions- edamame pods (the chooks love them so I figured they must be good). Cloves of garlic, half an onion or two. Some slightly wrinkled carrots. Rice wine, soy sauce, some miso. Star anise. ONE clove (I ruin soups with too many cloves! ONE clove suffices!). Ginger. This time, a packet of wonderful, weird Chinese soup base:

I like a pretty decent ratio of veggies to liquid- I JUST cover them. Simmer a while- but not too long or I find things just end up tasting like nothing. Maybe an hour? Then I drain the stock, give the chooks the over-cooked veggies (they love them).Back into the stock go the veggies I want to eat. Not-so-limp-celery, carrot, onion, more star anise etc. A head of cauliflower in tiny pieces that really needs to be eaten NOW. About a cupful of adzuki beans. Dried shiitake mushrooms.

Finally a can of seitan "chicken". This stuff will get its own blog post soon, it's really good! After dinner, about a cup of cooked basmati rice was added to the soup as well. Very tasty, thrifty, healthy and declared excellent even by my meat-lovin' spouse!

Rasedar Rajma (Curried Kidney Beans)

This recipe from the Fatfree Vegan Kitchen blog has been on my weekly "menu"/shopping list for months. It keeps falling off the bottom- I had the ingredients but hadn't cooked it, week in week out. Tonight I couldn't come up with any other idea- and decided to give it a try. WOW. This is a really delicious recipe! I am not even the world's biggest Indian food fan and I really like it and totally wish I had made more.

I served it with some "yogurt" on top- silken tofu blended with some salt, lemon juice and a dash of splenda. My 9 year old daughter who likes curries but is not a fan of tofu ate it happily, so I think it fooled her!As I usually do- in the case of the curry I did use the spices in the recipe- garam masala, fenugreek, coriander root, garlic, tumeric- but substituted caraway seeds for the ajwain seeds and used quite a lot more of all the spices than whatever quantities the recipe suggested. Maybe some of my spices are a bit stale as I think it would have been pretty bland otherwise. Oh- I used canned kidney beans (yay Aldi- feed a family of 5 for 4 bucks? Yes please) 4 cans. Next time I will probably make double as everyone loved it and I only have a tiny bit eft for lunch tomorrow!