Produce - Big and Little

Andy and I have big appetites, so we love our veggies in giant proportions. Our favourite winter veggie in the garden is kale. It's getting to the time of year now that they are full of caterpillars. Andy is still happy to eat them, but I get a little grossed out at the idea. And on the weekend Andy cooked one, and it ended up in my bowl. That put my off my pasta.

But caterpillars aside, we prefer our kale to come in mountains, rather than the tiddly bunches you get in supermarkets.

Kale mountain.

Kale with cauliflower, jacket potatoes and corn cooked on the BBQ, and a tomato and cucumber salad

And when choosing a sweet potato at the market last week, Andy chose this gigantor. That's 2.4 kilos, or 5 pounds, of a single sweet potato.

Sweet potato chips with black bean burgers (recipe from Celebrate Vegan)

But sometimes we don't have as much success. We tried to grow a row of carrots, and they were pretty puny.

Tiddly carrots. We roasted them with Aloo Palak Pie.

And our corn grew really quickly and looked great, but was very small. Tasty, but tiny.

Not done yet. 

BBQ corn with pumpkin, potatoes and carrot, and Chickpea Pumpkin Seed Burgers (recipe from Let them eat vegan!)

The corn and carrots do prove that sometimes the smallest produce are the sweetest and tenderest. But we still love giants.

From the Garden

Practically since we moved in to our house almost a year ago, we have had a semi-productive garden which we've used to supplement our purchases of fresh produce. Now that we've been here a while, it's starting to get really good. Have a look at these meals that centred on the harvest from our own back yard.

This BBQ dinner is eggplant parma with sauteed luffa, potatoes and salad. The luffa was sauteed with lime juice which we were gifted from a friend's tree.

We grew the eggplant, all the salad ingredients - cucumber, basil, tropical spinach and chilli - and luffa. The luffa are a zucchini-like climbing vine which, if you let it get bigger, can be turned into the fancy bath sponges you buy from shops. This is what they look like when they are small.

And here is how they look when they grow.

Another night we made sushi. We used bought rice and seaweed, and condiments for dipping. But we grew all the fillings - eggplant that we marinated, snake beans, and cucumber.

Served with a side of sauteed luffa.

Andy's dad made the chopping board. I reckon her should go into business.

The cucumbers we're growing at the moment aren't your typical green variety. They're called "giant russian" and when I first saw one on the vine I thought we'd accidentally grown a butternut pumpkin!

And these nachos were made with black beans, tinned tomatoes, homegrown capsicum and chillies, and my favourite part...

Home grown sweet potatoes.

So we're not obligate locavores yet, but our locallivory is increasing. I just can't wait until our fruit trees start producing.

Meal Planning: Week 2

Look at me: back at work for less than a month and I've already fallen off the regular-blogging wagon. Obviously I'm no good at multi-tasking, so you can see why I need at least a semi-structured meal plan!

Our second week of meal-planning began with the best of intentions. We would go to the market, get whatever produce looked good and was cheap, and then plan a week's worth of meals. But on Sunday morning we woke to find Tika in a bit of discomfort and sporting a huge belly. The night before, I left the dog food bag open, and she helped herself. So we skipped the market, instead staying home to keep an eye on her (also, it was hot).

So I thought about what we had on hand, and started flicking through some cookbooks, but I only got through two before I had so many ideas. Week 2's meal plan became our Week of Urban Vegan. Her cookbooks tend to be my faves anyways, so I wasn't surprised to find a big list of possibilities. Here is the plan that I wrote, based on some input (and some resistance) from Andy:

• Esther's Baked Falafel (Celebrate Vegan p.107), or Chickpea Chilli Burgers (Urban Vegan, p.48) - early in the week, so Andy could have leftovers on his lunch-time sandwiches
• Black Bean and Bulgur Tacos (UV, p.83) - on Tuesday or Wednesday, so the lettuce was still fresh.
• Pumpkin risotto with sage and sundried tomatoes (UV, p.152)
• Spicy Seitan 'Wings' (Celebrate, p.165)
• Spaghetti alle Melanzane (UV, p.91)
• Pumpkin-Daal Soup (UV, p.54)

There were others I could have chosen, but there are only so many days in a week! At this point, Andy got a little nervous that my meal-planning would become inflexible, so we agreed that this was just a guide - a list of recipes that we could use if we didn't know what to make, but if we felt inspired to do something else that was cool too.

Here is how it turned out.

On Sunday, while soaking beans for the week, I decided to turn some overripe bananas into muffins. I used the recipe for Blueberry-Banana Bread (UV, p.24) as a guide, but changed it up heaps, so I will post the new recipe another time. These were high in protein, and super yummy, the perfect morning tea snack for a week without fruit (on account of not going to the markets).

Sunday night's dinner was a mash-up of the two chickpea patty recipes. I couldn't decide, and then I did, but then I changed my mind. So the flavouring is falafel, but I added oats as per the burger recipe to bulk the patties up. They were a little dry, so not very well suited to BBQing, but they were delicious with BBQ potatoes, beetroot and corn.

Monday night we had eggplant pasta, basically following the recipe for "alle Melanzane" but adding a jar of pesto (because our freezer is so full of it!), and using penne pasta.

Up until now, our meals for Week 2 looked strikingly similar to Week 1, with a few minor variations. Andy would have preferred to keep this up, but Tuesday is where I took a more serious detour. Instead of our normal tomatoey Mexican meals, I made Dynise's Black Bean and Bulgur filling, with the addition of some corn, which we ate burrito-style. I thought they were delicious, and a great change. Andy likes what he likes, and thought these were just okay.

On Wednesday, we got a break from the sticky, hot weather - instead, it was 25 degrees and we got 200mm of rain. I felt like something warm and snuggly, so flicked through the two cookbooks and decided to make an afternoon snack of Milk Pudding (Halvaye Shir), a Persian sweet (Celebrate, p.10). Except I didn't follow the recipe well - I used different spices, vanilla instead of rosewater, and walnuts instead of pistachios. It was very yummy, anyways.

Then for dinner, we went off-plan in favour of something hearty and warm - Mesir Wat with Chappatis.

Thursday was still a little on the cool side, so rather than BBQ-ising Dynise's seitan wing recipe, we followed the original recipe and baked them in the oven. I think of them as nuggets, more so than wings, but whatever you call them they are fantastic (with oven-baked potatoes).

On Friday, we fell into old habits (not necessarily bad habits...) and threw some gnocchi and jarred tomato sauce together and called it dinner. It did the job, got us through the week, and made a dent in the big pile of gnocchi taking up space in our freezer. So Week 2 was a little similar to Week 1, a little creative, and still flexible. A success, even if not a resounding one!

Vegan Bacon Cheeseburger

Last week I was browsing one of my favourite quirky-lifestyle blogs, Offbeat Home & Life, and was stoked to see this guest post by The Sweetest Vegan about a vegan bacon cheeseburger. I pinned it and facebook shared it, partially to let the Offbeat blog admin people know the post was a good one, but also because - OMG vegan bacon cheeseburger! Sure, I make vegan burgers all the time. I make vegan cheese semi-regularly. And vegan bacon recipes are plentiful. But this recipe was straightforward, and it put all the components together. 

Filed away in the back of my mind, the recipe made its way back to the front on Monday night when I saw this post by Tara. On Tuesday, I decided I just had to make it. I am still on holidays, you see, while Andy is back at work, so I have been getting lost in complicated recipes this week. 

Not that this recipe is complicated, but it was a mammoth effort in multi-tasking (it would be less so if you used canned beans). First I put black beans and white beans on to soak while I went out to grab the few ingredients I didn't have on hand - sweet potato (though I could have probably dug some from the garden), coconut flakes, and bread rolls.

When I got home, I put the first batch of beans into the pressure cooker. Then I peeled my sweet potato (and cooked the peels in the oven for a crunchy snack for Tika), and put it in boiling water to cook.

 I mixed up the marinade for the coconut bacon and put it all in a bowl to soak up the flavours.

When the black beans were done, I put the white ones on to cook while I made the burger patties: mashing together the beans and sweet potato, but leaving out garlic powder (we can't keep it in our humidity), sriracha (we don't have), and onion (I don't love). I had about 1 cup of beans leftover, and 1/4 cup of sweet potato, so I threw them in too, and then folded through the oats. This I set aside while I got on with other things.

I put the coconut bacon in the oven to crisp up. I had it in there for nearly half an hour and it didn't crisp, so I  took it out in case the crisping happened as it cooled. It never did, but oh well.

While the coconut bacon was bakin', I put the cheese together. This is a great recipe, because it doesn't require cooking. I cut the recipe in half, because I only had half a cup of nutritional yeast, and we still have about 4 times as much cheese as we needed. 

I formed my patties and put them in the fridge to chill out, and then it was time for me to chill out myself. Less than an hour and a half in the kitchen and I had cooked two batches of beans from scratch and turned them into the vital components for a vegan bacon cheeseburger. 

The only thing left to do was cook the patties, but instead of putting them in the oven I did them on the BBQ, because we have one, and it's summer.

On the Weber with some okra and a tiny eggplant. 

And because, check out those grill marks. 

Then I put it all together. A bit of mayo on the top of the bun, and some cheese on the bottom. Then lettuce, a burger, some more cheese, some bacon. Andy added tomato sauce, but I didn't think it needed it.

This is a great recipe - aside from a few exceptions, the ingredients are easy to find in most pantries. Aside from some soy sauce, all three components are soy free - no tofu or soy milk here. They also lend themselves to being gluten free, if you used gluten free oats, or subbed in something like quinoa flakes. For vegan junk food, there isn't really too much that is actually unhealthy about any of the meal. And, holy pants it was yummy. 

Potlucking

Andy and I were invited to his friends' house for a board game night / potluck extraveganza. I thought about easy-to-bring potluck food - Andy suggested rice & beans, but I didn't want to be too boring so I settled on jambalaya! (I have a hard time saying or typing that word without an exclamation mark.) I used the recipe from Celebrate Vegan by Dynise Balcavage, except that instead of tempeh bacon & veggie chorizo, I used tvp, black beans and chickpeas. To make up for the missing flavours that fake meats would have contributed, I also added some liquid smoke, extra chilli powder, and paprika. The verdict: "It's amazing how vegans & vegetarians can make such tasty food without using meat!" -- success, I think.

For extreme ease, we made this the day before - to give the flavours a chance to meld, you see - and packed it into this really lovely casserole dish Andy's mum has given us.

The best part of dinner, though, was eating cake - Raspberry pound cake with lemon glaze, recipe courtesy of Urban Vegan, also by Dynise Balcavage (we love her recipes!) - and drinking tea while playing a completely original, albeit marine biology-centric, board game. Yes, nerdy, but we are.

Unglazed raspberry lemon pound cake.

Some Things Vegans Eat - Beans, beans...

Beans are one of the cheapest sources of protein around, especially if you buy dried and cook them up in a pressure cooker.  They are also versatile, and (I think) delicious.

 Andy made chickpea cakes from Vegan Dad's recipe, but changed it around to incorporate okara.  We had some leftover from dinner, so he made a big salad with spinach, tomato, grated carrot, cucumber and more chickpeas.  This was a delicious and huge Sunday lunch.

 Kidney bean patties are very hearty to eat, and went great with what I think are risotto balls, quick-wilted ceylon spinach, and tomato.

Beans are also a key ingredient for every fiesta!  This colourful burrito filling has black beans, kidney beans, corn, red & green capsicum, seitan, and tomatoes.  Ole!

Travel Meals.

Andy and I are perhaps a bit strange, but when we go on holidays we don't really see it as a chance to eat out (February 2010 Sydney trip excepted). 

For instance, last year we went to Port Douglas and made full use of the communal BBQ.  In 2008 we headed to Mission Beach with no intentions of eating out.  Part of our reasoning is that we rarely eat out anyways -- it's just not something we love doing.  Part of the reasoning is that we are frugal/thrifty/tightasses.  And part of the reasoning is that our holiday destinations are not always very vegan-friendly.  Luckily for us, there is a lot of accommodation in North Queensland for self-caterers.

On our recent fortnight in Far North Queensland, we ate a total of four meals in restaurants (not including our breakfasts at the Daintree Eco Lodge, but including our two dinners there).  We had sandwiches in Port Douglas for lunch one day, and veggie burgers in Cape Trib another day.  Otherwise, we took care of our own meals.

We often choose our accommodation based on a few factors.  First, the presence of a spa bath.

The spa bath on the balcony at Daintree Eco Lodge.

The indoor spa bath at Mt Quincan Crater Retreat.

Second, king sized beds.

The giant bed at Daintree Eco Lodge.

In the tablelands, heaters and/or fireplaces were a key ingredient.

This fireplace at Mt Quincan swivelled!  We could point it at the bed or the couch!

And finally, kitchens.  Then we get creative about what to bring up, and what to buy once we're at our location, to ensure that we have tasty, healthy, and varied meals.  A big batch of black bean burgers lasted us most of the week at the caravan park with our parents, supplemented by a pasta meal.  When we moved on to the honeymoon, we still had a few burgers left.  They went really well with local brussels sprouts and potatoes.

We brought up a box of felafel mix, which we ate with the rest of the brussels sprouts and some local broccoli.

Upon checking in to our honeymoon accommodation, we were greeted with a fresh loaf of bread, which we enjoyed with olive oil and balsamic.

Look! You can see into the crater in this photo.  It's the grassy marsh in the background.

The other things we brought up were pancakes -- mix the dry ingredients in a jar and then just combine with soy milk and veggie oil when you want to cook them; dhal -- dry ingredients and spices combined, then mix with a tin of tomatoes and some water, and serve over rice; seitan mix -- gluten flour and veggie stock/herbs in a jar, mixed with water and tomato sauce, then boiled (we would have BBQed but unfortunately didn't have access) and served with local veggies; and easy-peasy pasta.  Cooking in another kitchen isn't always the easiest, but it is our preference.

(That said, there is one very vegan friendly option in the Tablelands, Nick's Swiss Italian Restaurant in Yungaburra, which even has soy ice cream available.  By the time we made it to Yungaburra, though, we couldn't be bothered leaving our super-nice accommodation.)