rehydrating the beets

I don't know what I was thinking. Obviously! I left my kilogram of beets (bought for a dollar) in the oven for just over four hours last night. FOUR HOURS AT 180 C. It felt so tragic, I just couldn't look at them after the first glance. They were shriveled, rock hard little pieces of charred red-brown sadness.

All more more chafing was that the gas I used to cook the bejesus out of those beets probably cost $864. And gas is a one time burn, never to be seen again. So I needed to do something with the Pyre of Beet, like make something in the crock pot. Hooray! Here comes some Red Stew.

I had no canned beans so I had to boil up half a kg of dried kidney beans for about an hour and a half. While the beans were on the boil, I cut up the onions and threw them into the pot.

Here's the list of all the things that went in this Red Stew:

1 med red onion
1 med brown onion
3 jalapeño peppers from a can, chopped small, seeds included
2 med bulbs roasted garlic, squeezed out of the papery bits
1 400 g can condensed tomato soup
2 tablespoons dried thyme
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon dried marjoram
1 teaspoon sweet paprika
400 g fresh mushrooms, cut into quarters
2 sticks celery, chopped very finely
500 g dried red kidney beans (I reckon about 5 of the 400 g can variety)
750 mL vegetable stock
250 mL water
What used to be 1 kg of beetroot, roasted to buggery

Aside from the beans having to be boiled and being drained then added last, everything went into the crock pot in a pretty haphazard way. My strategy for crock pots is really just to throw all the food in there and leave it cook for as long as I can wait, preferably at least six hours! I know that seems like forever sometimes, but it means the food is usually rather good. All the flavours develop and the hard things go nice and mooshy.

Anyway, I've ended up with a fairly runny product after being in the slow cooker on low now for four hours. It could do with some thickening up. You could cut up some carrots to really small dice and check them in and turn up to high, or add some flour or cornflour. Otherwise serve it with some millet or brown rice. Or put some rice in there for the last hour or so! I think we will need to discard the beets out of this stew, as they're probably going to be a bit too chewy, but they've imparted a gorgeous red colour and a lovely sweet flavor to offset the low burn of the jalapeños. And I feel heaps better for not having to waste the bargain beets straight up. Hooray!

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.

The Big Roast-Up

When you are vegetarian, and especially vegan, you do seem to spend a fair amount of time on food preparation, compared to the days when meat-and-a-side graced our tables. Part of me enjoys the preparation- it's part of the practice of eating mindfully; and moreover I enjoy cooking- the anticipation of good food lovingly prepared is a pleasure in itself. I may only be planning to have a giant delicious salad for lunch, but preparing something wonderful for dinner is an observance that dulls the edge of any sense of deprivation I might momentarily feel.

There are lots of ways to expedite vegan food preparation... Think in terms of things like a big container of pre-cooked quinoa or even rice in the fridge to be used in salads, soups or what have you as the wish arises. Likewise an idea I got from a wonderful (non-vegan but very pro-wonderfulness) book called 'An Everlasting Meal' by Tamar Adler is to have a big weekly roast-up. When I return from the market with a boot full of fresh stuff, it may include goodies such as bunches of raw beetroot (pendant from their bunches of exquisitely red-veined dark green leaves); ears of sweet corn, pumpkins, kale (finally found it in Australia!), carrots, beans, broccoli, cauliflower, potato and sweet potato- you get the picture. If it's not specifically a salad vegetable, I usually include it in the Big Roast Up. Like Tamar, I roast and then happily eat all kinds of odd greens- beetroot greens are an obvious fave! But also the green part of a cauliflower, and the stems of broccoli are delicious roasted.

With the oven on and hot, I stow trays of the above veggies- things like beetroot in a bit of water covered with foil, pumpkin in large pieces with skin on, half a head of cauli, etc. I keep the oven full and rotate the trays of veggies out as they become cooked, Then the cooked goodies go into the fridge, to be used in recipes, salads, or just eaten during the coming days. I figure that if I cook it fresh, it stands a better chance of being eaten than after several days shrivelling in the fridge. I love having cold cooked pumpkin at the ready, for pizza, salad, rissotto or to have on toast.

Along with always soaking beans, because you will want them tomorrow or the next day, the Roast Up is my favourite efficient-vegan habit.

So why are you Made from Bean?

So why another blog about food? Why another blog about exercise? In short because we are asked, regularly, "what can you eat?".
We feel like we have something to add to the conversation, even though the blogosphere is already well-stocked with really great vegan content (which we will be delighted to introduce, and hope you will join in and do the same.)

I (H) clearly remember being put on the Scarsdale Diet by my mother when I was probably about 8. Boy does that date me!

My weight has crept steadily up since childhood- starvation diets mixed with periods of regain with interest- to a top out at about 115kg. I would lose weight (and I do mean weight- not fat- because I whittled my lean body mass down to nothing, killing my metabolism even more with each cycle).

I did well on Atkins ( I did a very "clean" version, eating mostly unprocessed foods) but hated the meat-heavy way of eating. Palaeo diets made a lot of sense to me, but my inability to enforce any kind of portion control on myself made them healthier, but not a way for me to shed kilos.

I finally went on a major calorie-reduction campaign. Started with Optifast shakes ,and made major changes to portions and to my attitude towards hunger and deprivation.  Major lifestyle changes followed.

The first of these was that I began running. At about 90 kg I suddenly had heaps of energy, so I started the Couch to 5 km programme. Every day I expected to be the one that would injure me or be too hard, but I loved it and haven't looked back. Proud to say that I completed my first half marathon in November 2011.

Running led to reading about running, and I realised that many if not most endurance runners are vegetarian or vegan.

Skimming vegan health and diet books, I stumbled upon "Eat to Live" by Joel Fuhrman and really that was the turning point for me. Evidence based, sensible nutrition that rang true with my own experiences as a lifelong dieter and on again off again vegetarian. The evidence implicating an animal-based diet in carcinogenesis scared me badly and made me force my friend K, a cancer survivor, who has her own weight loss journey to share- to read "Eat to Live" and "the China Study", which caused her

in turn to ditch Jenny Craig and start a new, vegan life! K is also working her way through C25k at the time of writing.

So here we are- two mums in their early (cough) 40s who are learning to run, and learning to be vegan. I reckon our combined weight loss to date is approaching 80 kg or so. Since we are both gigantic (but shrinking) nerds, a blog seemed like the logical next step.

That's my long introduction- I'll let K write her own as she has her own story to tell.