Millet and Mushroom Concoction

Check this recipe out.  It's really good.  I love millet, and I have made a mushroom and gravy concoction for ages that I usually have with wild rice mixed in on wilted greens.  This is like that, kind of- only with millet!

I made it my way- just normal mushrooms, no idea what crimini mushrooms are!  Used a bunch of obscure Chinese greens, instead of kale.  And I added one of my awesome vegan sausages (recipe from post punk kitchen- will blog about it later!).

Very yummy, heaps of leftovers.  I have had about 3 lunches as well as the initial dinner.

Vegan "alfredo"

When I visited my friend Ann last year, I nearly died laughing at this book:

and at the image you see above in particular.  I'm not really a grammar po-lice, honestly I don't understand the intricacies of English grammar well enough to join that force.  I do however get kind of stabby over abused quotation marks and their sadly misused cousins, the apostraphes.  I just thought I'd share that fun fact- since when I typed "alfredo" up above I started thinking about fresh brown "eggs" and giggling.  Because I am 5.

Anywhoo.  My stepmom An anonymous vegetarian emailed me some time ago a recipe (I really wanted to type "recipe") for a vegan alfredo based on cauliflower (look away, K-dog).  Caulis are cheap or seasonal or something here at the moment and I find myself with 4 in the fridge.  I like cauli, but 4?  It could be time for a Big Roast Up.  The recipe, as written originally would have been pretty bad, but heroically I managed to diddle it into something quite good.  It wasn't very photogenic, but I did take a pic of an empty bowl with about 6 green peas in the bottom.  That was all that was left after one of the dogs cleaned up a portion that I couldn't store.  I figure that if my hounds ate the pasta and sauce, and carefully licked the peas clean before spitting them out, it wasn't too bad.

Here I "present" for you- Pasta "Alfredo":

-1/2 cauliflower steamed until very soft (I threw mine in the slowcooker on HIGH with some boiling water- an inch or so while I went to kid-ballet for about a hour)

 
-an onion (I used one red onion and a few spring onions.  Don't think it matters.  Onion flakes would have been ok too)

1 stock cube (I used Massel "chicken" (see what I did there?)).

- garlic (to taste.  This was pretty bland so I ended up using about a teaspoon of the dried garlic stuff).

- parsley

- salt, pepper

- nutritional yeast

- flour

- pasta

brown onions, add stock, simmer

put cauli, onions and stock into blender (I used a stab blender because that's all I have) and blend it all up.  Taste it- add salt, pepper (lots) and about 1/2 cup of nutritional yeast.  I added some arrowroot flour to get rid of the slightly watery consistency, and simmered it while adjusting seasonings.  When it tastes the way you like it, add some frozen peas- it was so bland looking I had to and even though the dog wasn't impressed I think it was a good move.  The consistency when I served it was like a thick soup, and in fact it would not make a bad soup!

Served on pasta, and it was indeed good.  They way I remember Alfredo is a lot richer and this wouldn't fool anyone, especially cauli-haterz.  But if you like cauli this is a nice, very light pasta sauce.

"enjoy"!

In the name of Seitan

Seitan- another of my roadblocks to becoming vegan.  I had it confused with tempeh, which I hate.  Recipes for seitan consist mainly of "vital wheat gluten"...gluten being about as popular in the vaguely-informed public mind as herpes, and "vital wheat gluten" itself being one of those whacky ingredients that are blithely listed in vegan cookbooks- but are simply not seen in what passed for "whole foods stores" in my part of the world.

Then I found cans of faux meat in the Chinese grocery- and lo, they were seitan!

Like George Costanza's mother, I will try and like almost anything as long as I think it's Chinese.  Really, this canned stuff is not half bad.  Flavour is somewhat meatish, certainly not that horrid dogfood taste of Sanitarium fake-meat-in-a-can.  Texture a bit chewy, not at all bad!  At a couple of bucks a can, it's certainly a useful item to have in the pantry, but homemade would surely be better and cheaper, right?

When I got Veganomicon and Appetite for Reduction I was super excited to see that there are step-by-step instructions for homemade seitan!  

The only remaining roadblock was finding the sinsiter-sounding and elusive Vital Wheat Gluten.  My usual sources didn't carry it (probably because everything on there is gluten FREE, my search just didn't find it) but I found it at the unfortunately named "Fundies" whole foods online store, and they were great to shop with, I will be back!

All ingredients gathered- I set about making my own seitan. It was EASY.  This isn't the exact recipe I used- I used the one from Veganomicon.  [ oh look- Isa Chandra has a pretty similar recipe posted here.  Use this one!] However having made it I can say that any simple recipe, like this one will do.

 If the recipe you find calls for using normal flour and washing it until everything but the gluten fraction is gone- forget it.  Spend the money on the gluten flour and whip the stuff up in minutes.  

I made it easier by cheating a bit and throwing the dough into my bread machine for a kneading.  2 or 3 minutes in the machine is fine!  This stuff is TOUGH.  I am not strong enough to knead it sufficiently by hand.  In fact the bread machine was making mechanical "slipping" noises, like even its motor wasn't up to the task.

What comes out is an incredibly tough, stringy bread dough. That's what seitan is- essentially a dumpling!  If I had known that I wouldn't have been so intimidated!  After kneading, you divide it into little loaves which then you simmer in a flavourful, salty broth of your own preference.

I wrapped each cooked little loaf (each about the size and heft of a chicken breast?) in plastic and froze most of them.  I gave one to K who made a fab looking stir-fry from it.  I made another into the seitan pot pie in Veganomicon.  My freezer is stocked with quite a few meals' worth of seitan- for the price of an $8.50 bag of expensive flour.  Pretty good eh? 

Obviously not for the gluten-intolerant, but if you are okay with wheat, seitan is not the scary weird stuff that it may seem before you meet it in person.

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!  

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!