Tag Archives: vegan

Recipe: Ratatouille for a ratty week

Posted on October 21, 2016 | Leave a comment

Taking a break from the travel diaries to write down a recipe that has been a bit of a lifesaver for me this year. It tastes like comfort food, it’s full of vegetables, it creates copious leftovers, and it takes maybe ten minutes of preparation time. Probably less, really. And because the vegetables are all soft, I can even make it when my wrist is acting up and doesn’t want me to chop things.

You can serve it with all sorts of things, really. It goes with bread and hummus (or you can fling some chickpeas in to bake with the rest of the ratatouille), or grilled haloumi (which you can also chop into chunks and throw in to bake for the last ten minutes); with roasted or boiled potatoes and felafel or grilled fish or chicken; it’s great over giant couscous (again, with chickpeas), or stirred through pasta, or even made into a bake with bocconcini and more pasta.

You can serve it hot, or warm, or at room temperature. Tonight, I’ll be serving it hot with some little pies from Zaatar – lamb, and haloumi, and spinach. And probably with some roast potatoes because everything is better with roast potatoes, especially when you are eating super late because it took nearly two hours to get home from work and your husband hasn’t even managed to leave work yet and it’s nearly 9pm…

This is not as fancy as my other ratatouille recipe, but it tastes very nearly as good and takes far less time. It’s Friday night-worthy, which is really saying something, especially after a fortnight like the one I’ve had, with lots of stress and very little sleep. (Though one of my scientists did bring me cake to cheer me up, which was possibly the nicest thing anyone has done for me ever.)

Oh, and it doesn’t create a lot of washing up, either. Just one giant baking dish. There’s really nothing not to like, unless you are entirely anti-vegetable.

Your Shopping List

3 large capsicums, preferably in different colours
2 red onions
2 medium zucchini
1 largeish eggplant
olive oil
lavender salt
black pepper
rosemary
dried mint
400g cherry tomatoes
500ml – 750 ml (whatever size bottle you have) tomato passata
dried basil

(I know these amounts are very vague. It really is a sprinkle of this and a sprinkle of that, and it is very much to taste. If you don’t have lavender salt, a pinch of salt with some culinary lavender is good, or skip the lavender and add a little fennel, and rather more rosemary. It will be fine.)

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Posted in dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, low glycemic index, main courses, nut-free, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged capsicum, dairy-free, egg-free, eggplant, gluten-free, nut-free, ratatouille, tomato, vegan, vegetarian, zucchini

Recipe: Modular Salad for Lots of Dietary Requirements

Posted on September 10, 2016 | Leave a comment

My best friend lives in Darwin, and she’s having a baby (!!!), so I went up for a quick visit last weekend, to hang out, help out a bit, but mostly just have a good chance to catch up for the last time before there is an adorably cute little barrier to conversation in the house!

The beach at Fannie Bay, just outside the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory

The beach at Fannie Bay, just outside the Museum of the Northern Territory

My friend has gestational diabetes, and her husband has a number of allergies and food sensitivities, and when you add to these culinary challenges the fact that Darwin is appallingly hot and humid, figuring out dinner is a bit of a challenge.

On the road south of Darwin.

Like many people in Darwin, they don’t have family living locally, so we also talked a fair bit about planning for food that requires minimum preparation time when there is a small baby in the house. (Not that I have ever had a small baby in the house, but I am all about minimal food preparation in hot weather. Or grant season.)

Wattle, coming into bloom. In hot weather. Did I mention that Darwin was hot?

We came up with this modular salad, which has the capacity to tick lots of mutually-exclusive boxes. It’s more an idea than a recipe, and it’s pretty simple, but it’s a useful one and worth sharing, I think.

(It’s unofficial name is Franken-Niçoise salad, because originally, there was going to be tuna. But since we skipped the tuna, and the green beans were looking a bit dodgy, it’s just Modular Salad now.)

We liked it, and hope you will too.

Your shopping list (for about 5-6 serves, which can be held over for later if need be)

One lettuce
Two punnets of cherry tomatoes
Two Lebanese cucumbers
Two red capsicums
One tin of cannellini beans, drained
Six smallish potatoes, preferably waxy ones
Six eggs
A handful of olives (optional)
A few spring onions (optional)
A tin or two of tuna or salmon; or leftover poached or roasted chicken; or tuna steaks if you are willing to cook such; or marinated and grilled tofu; or pre-prepared felafel, or even toasted hazelnuts or cubes of cheese. You want about 100g per person of protein that is ready to eat, essentially.
Extra virgin Olive oil
Red wine vinegar (or cider vinegar if that’s what your friend can eat)
Salt, pepper
Tzatziki, or mayonnaise, or plain greek yoghurt with a teaspoon of dijon mustard

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Posted in dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, low fructose, low glycemic index, main courses, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged allergy-friendly food, dairy-free, easy food, egg-free, gluten-free, low fructose, low glycemic index, modular food, nicoise salad, nut-free, salad, vegan, vegetarian

Recipe: Jacket Sweet Potatoes with Vegetarian Chilli and Guacamole

Posted on August 27, 2016 | 3 comments

I have no idea when I will escape this food blog hiatus! Even when I make and photograph food, there never seems to be time to write about it – and most of the food I’ve been making this year has fallen into the category if quick and simple. And they tend to rely pretty heavily on Gewürzhaus spice mixes, which isn’t so helpful for recording them here.

I’m very fond of jacket sweet potatoes. Actually, I’m very fond of jacket potatoes, but my husband has an unnatural dislike of them, and sweet potatoes are better for you anyway, so that’s how it goes. If I ever manage to achieve regular writing on this blog, you can expect a fair number of jacket sweet potato recipes going forward, as they are becoming a bit of a winter staple…

This particular recipe, though, I’ve made a few times recently. It’s a nice, healthy, vegan dinner that is straightforward enough for a Friday night at the end of a long week. It wasn’t vegan on purpose, which is one reason it is so good, I suspect – I always get the cheese out, but never seem to use it, and when I made a point of using it once, it didn’t taste as good. So this is a meal that really wants to be vegan! It also happens to be gluten free and low-GI, and reasonably healthy, and tastes lovely and fresh and comforting, which makes it a much better alternative to the Friday night takeaway which was becoming a habit.

Your Shopping List

3 medium sweet potatoes (I know that’s vague, but aim for a similar sort of weight to what you’d do for an ordinary jacket potato meal)
1 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, brown or red
1-2 tsp cajun spice mix, or a mixture of cumin, oregano, garlic, paprika and chilli
1 tin of black beans, drained (these are suddenly available at the supermarket! Yay! But if you can’t find them, red kidney beans also work)
1 tin of chopped tomatoes
1/2 tsp chipotle chilli powder, or to taste
a little salt (lime salt is great if you have it)
2 spring onions (the long, thin ones that also get called shallots)
2 roma tomatoes
juice of one lemon or one lime (I almost never have limes, lemons do nicely)
2 tsp Gewürzhaus Guacamole Spice, if you have it, but failing that, a mixture of salt, cumin and chilli will do – probably a teaspoon in total will be fine.
2 avocadoes
chopped coriander, optional

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Posted in dairy-free, egg-free, everyday cooking, gluten-free, low glycemic index, main courses, nut-free, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged avocado, chilli, chipotle chilli, dairy-free, egg-free, gewürzhaus, gluten-free, low GI, main meals, recipes, sweet potato, tomatoes, vegan, vegetarian

Recipe: Super Easy Tomato Soup

Posted on August 1, 2016 | Leave a comment

Hello! It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Sorry about that. I got back from overseas, and dove straight into election mode, which meant a heap of work on my politics blog, and then I slept for several days, and then I went back to work, and then I got sort of low level sick for about a week and a half and then horrible things happened around the world and I got depressed about it, and then I had fiction writing to do, and then it was suddenly August. I shall try not to go on such a prolonged hiatus again, but I make no promises – politics happens, work never stops happening, and I’m really enjoying writing fiction on my Stories Under Paris site at the moment, more than I’ve enjoyed writing anything for years, so a lot of my energy will be focused there. I’m trying to reduce my hours at work, which should help a little, and I want to use some of the time I recapture to work on a cookbook, but I have to do things that aren’t writing sometimes, too, especially as my wrist is still not great…

Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of very easy cooking recently, and I’ve made this soup a couple of times (without once managing to photograph it, alas), and really like it. I’m not going to claim that it is a work of genius, and it does rely rather on things from the pantry, but it’s a tasty soup for a winter night, especially when served with a toasted jarlsberg cheese sandwich. I like the combination of tomato flavours from passata, chopped tomatoes and freshly roasted ones – I think you get an interesting balance of tomatoishness from the different treatments the tomatoes have received. (But mostly I like it because it feels like a healthier version of my childhood comfort food of Campbells Tomato Soup from a tin…)

Your Shopping List

1 kg roma tomatoes
1 red onion
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp balsamic vinegarolive oil, salt and pepper for roasting
1 tin (400g) chopped tomatoes
1 bottle (500-700ml) passata

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Posted in dairy-free, egg-free, nut-free, Recipes, soups, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, nut-free, recipes, soups, tomatoes, vegan, vegetarian

Recipe: Chocolate THING that is basically evil but really yummy

Posted on January 31, 2016 | Leave a comment

A couple of Thursdays ago, I read an article in the paper lamenting the fact that many Australians would be letting down their employers by taking a sickie on the Monday before Australia Day. (The article did, at least, point out that employers should be reasonable about granting annual leave on this day, but something about the way it was written still left an unpleasant taste in my mouth.)

My scientists work ridiculous hours, and don’t tend to take sickies, even when they probably should (leading to the fun phenomenon of the Lab Lurgy – we are a sharing sort of team on 5 West!), but I thought that if others were getting a four day weekend, legitimately or otherwise, we should do something to make it worth coming in to work that day. Accordingly, I proposed a casual lab lunch – anyone who wanted could bring a plate to share, and we’d set up in the meeting room for a couple of hours, with people dropping in, chatting and eating when they had time.

It turned into a smallish but pleasant gathering – certainly worth doing again, with an interesting variety of food ranging from Turkish bread and dips provided by our German lab head and vegetarian sausage rolls from one of our British postdocs, to a proper Gallette des Rois, brought in by one of our French scientists.

Normally, I would make Nonna’s pizza for this sort of occasion, but my left wrist is still giving me a lot of trouble, and kneading is definitely beyond me. So instead, I decided to pursue my current favourite confectionery strategy of melting a lot of chocolate, and then opening the pantry and flinging any sweet contents that seem plausible into it. The results were very tasty – it’s quite a sophisticated, dark chocolate thing, full of glacé and freeze-dried fruits, but I also couldn’t resist pouring in some popping candy, and I got a great deal of glee out of hearing people go “oh, this is really nice – ooh! Oh my God what is that?” at irregular intervals through the afternoon…

All in all, an excellent way to liven up the day before a holiday.

Your Shopping List

500 g good dark chocolate (I used half Lindt, half Green and Blacks, both 70% cocoa)
250 g glacé fruit (I used pineapple, peach and apricot, but cherries, pears, oranges, or anything else that takes your fancy would work. Probably not citron, though.)
50 g crystallised ginger
35 g freeze-dried fruit (I used strawberries and blueberries, but again, pick your own preferred flavours)
35 g popping candy
100 g praline paste (I used almond, but use whatever you prefer)

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Posted in confectionery, dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged chocolate, dairy-free, egg-free, freeze-dried fruit, glacé fruit, gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian

Recipe: Vegan Cheeseburger Cupcakes

Posted on December 31, 2015 | 4 comments

This is the time of year when bloggers do their retrospectives, but I don’t feel like doing a blog retrospective for 2015. For one thing, I did hardly any blogging, and barely kept up with reading other blogs. For another, the end of 2015 was made absolutely horrible for us by the disappearance of our beloved cat, Mystery. She slipped out on the evening of December 22nd, and has not been seen since. We’ve letterboxed and doorknocked and rung vets and visited shelters, but to no avail, and at this stage, we hold out little hope. It’s been a painful and distressing way to end an exhausting year, and it’s very hard to look ahead and come up with plans, resolutions, or even hopes for 2016 at this point – because right now we are all too aware that life is uncertain and cannot truly be planned for.

So no perspectives from me, just a remarkably silly recipe, inspired by Rosanna Pansino’s Nerdy Nummies Cookbook. She has a very fun recipe for a cupcake that looks like a cheeseburger, with a brownie patty, coconut lettuce, and buttercream piped to resemble cheese, tomatoes.

It’s very cute, but it also looked terribly sweet. Also, I was cooking in part for Steph, so I needed a vegan recipe, and frankly, I found the idea of a vegan cheeseburger cupcake absolutely hilarious and thus irresistible, so off I went.

To avoid the excessive use of buttercream, I decided it would be more fun to give the burger a fruity sort of theme. Mango fruit leather strips make an excellent (and truly revolting-looking) substitute for plastic cheese, jam makes a fine substitute for tomato sauce, and tinned plums replace the beetroot that is a necessity in any Aussie hamburger. Mint leaves made a delicious substitute for lettuce, and at that point, you’re done.

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Posted in baking, cakes, dairy-free, egg-free, Recipes, shameless bragging, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged berries, brownies, cheeseburger cupcakes, chocolate, cupcakes, dairy-free, egg-free, nerdy nummies, orange flower water, recipes, shameless bragging, small cakes, tahini, vegan, vegetarian

Recipe: Cauliflower, Carrot, Crouton and Beetroot Thing of Great Yumminess (Vegan!!)

Posted on December 13, 2015 | Leave a comment

As you might have discerned, I have no idea what to call this recipe. It’s sort of technically a main course salad, though a salad with absolutely nothing green in it doesn’t seem quite salad-y to me. I know that ‘Bowls’ are the current big thing, but calling it a Bowl just seems pretentious to me. Mélange sounds right to me, but probably sounds pretentious to everyone who isn’t me, so that’s no good.

The important thing to know about this meal is that it is *delicious*. Picture this scenario: it’s the end of a long day at work. The grants have just opened on RGMS. I’ve gotten home late, because I was running choir after work. I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in about a week. I’m tired and I am cranky and I am sulking because basically I want fish and chips or takeaway, preferably something with lots of creamy cheese in it like four cheese pasta, or alternatively all the chocolate in the world, and here I am with stale bread, leftover beetroot dip, a cauliflower and a bunch of slightly elderly carrots.

This is not the stuff of which comfort food is made.

And yet… honestly, I feel like this is the best thing I’ve eaten all week. It was sooo good. Warm and earthy and crunchy and soft and squidgy and aromatic and sweet and savoury and probably nowhere near as good for me as I’d like to pretend, though better than fish and chips, eh, and actually not too much of a pain to make.

So here I am, desperately wanting an early night but unable to rest without writing down just what I did, because I will need to do it again sometime. Sometime soon. And maybe so will you.

(I apologise for the slightly vague quantities and the terrible photos – this is what happens when you are making dinner from the fridge and don’t really have plans to write it up because you are sulking at having to eat vegetables when all you want is cheesy cheesy pasta or maybe cheesy cheesy chips.)

Your Shopping (or leftovers) list

1 cauliflower – fairly large, I’d say
1 red onion
olive oil
1 tbsp ras el hanout or other moroccan spice mix
salt
6-8 smallish carrots (no idea how many really, more or fewer will be fine, and colourful is good)
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
about half a baguette’s worth of sourdough olive bread, or any other good chewy bread
a tablespoon of parmesan (optional)
400g tin of chickpeas
about 100 – 150g of beetroot dip – I had about half a pot of beautiful beetroot and hazelnut dip with dukkah from Shouki and Louise, which is what I used here.

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Posted in dairy-free, egg-free, main courses, nut-free, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged beetroot dip, carrots, cauliflower, chickpeas, croutons, dairy-free, egg-free, leftovers, main courses, nut-free, olives, recipes, salads, vegan, vegetarian

Recipe: Cherry Ripe Cookies (Gluten Free, Vegan)

Posted on December 9, 2015 | Leave a comment

Look! It’s a slightly different (but still dead easy) biscuit recipe! This time, it’s vegan!

I love the idea of two ingredient cookies, where you get a sweetened nut butter and some flour – or chocolate tahini and rice flour and make a biscuit and then bake it. But let’s face it, sometimes two ingredients isn’t enough. I found myself eyeing off one of those chocolate and coconut butter spreads in the supermarket and thinking, you know, add a glacé cherry and you’re kind of half way to a cherry ripe here. And then I thought, yeah, but you need a bit more coconut.

And… that was it, really. So here you have them – cherry ripe cookies that are vegan and gluten-free. They are a little chewy and only just barely sweet – most of the sweetness comes from the cherries – but they are nicely chocolatey and coconutty. (There is a definite air of chocolate crackle to these, too. That whole coconut and chocolate thing will do that.)

Ooh, and I just realised how you could make vegan gluten-free LAMINGTON cookies, by replacing the cherry with jam! The possibilities are endless…

Your shopping list

150g chocolate coconut spread (I used Pure Harvest Coco2Almond spread, which purports to be a health food, but don’t worry, there’s nothing healthy about these cookies)
100g almond meal
50 g shredded coconut
12-16 glacé cherries

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Posted in biscuits, dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged almond, biscuits, cherries, chocolate, coconut, dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Recipe: Fruits in Liqueur

Posted on November 19, 2015 | 2 comments

A couple of years ago, Diana Henry put out a book called Salt Sugar Smoke, which is all about preserving things.

I’m terrified of preserving things, because my kitchen is always full of dirty dishes and I’m convinced that no matter how careful I am about sterilising jars, I’m going to give everyone botulism.

However. There was one collection of recipes that that looked so simple that it was basically irresistible. Also, they are completely full of alcohol, and I defy any botulism bacteria to find a way in to something that is basically alcohol and sugar.

Lots of alcohol. Lots and lots and LOTS of alcohol. And sugar.

Also also, it’s November, and I’m about to get consumed by Christmas singing. If I don’t get onto Christmas now, I’m basically stuffed. And what could be more Christmassy than fruit preserved in excessive quantities of alcohol and sugar?

So on Sunday morning I hied me to the Farmers’ Market for stone fruits, and then to the bottle shop, where I proceeded to buy more alcohol than I have ever seen before (and probably considerably more than I have consumed in my lifetime to date, come to think of it), under the helpful supervision of the kindly Hannah at Dan Murphy’s, who took pity on my complete confusion about what eau de vie was and which kind of rum might work better in Confiture Vieux Garçon, and helped me find options that were not too outrageously expensive.

(She also very kindly did not look at me as though I was a total lush, though, to be fair, my obvious ignorance of what most of the things I was buying actually tasted like probably made it clear that I wasn’t a very promising candidate for alcoholism. Though I did get quite distracted by a Sicilian blood orange liqueur which I could absolutely not justify buying…)

Anyway, first, I want you to know that putting fruit in alcohol is awesome, and so is Diana Henry’s book. My personal favourite recipe so far is the aforementioned Confiture Vieux Garçon, which is essentially a thing where you take fruit as it is ripe, mix it with sugar and cover it with brandy, kirsch or rum, and then leave it until the next round of fruit is ripe, at which point you sugar that and add it and cover it with more alcohol, and so on, until your jar is full of layers of different kinds of fruit, all thoroughly sozzled.

But the reason I’m really writing this post, the magic, glorious thing that I discovered this weekend is because I have discovered the ultimate Christmas gift recipe. You can make it in November and then forget about it while you do all your mad Christmas parties and singing in December. In fact, you want to make it in November, because it needs time to steep and become glorious. It looks beautiful. It tastes divine. It is luxurious. And it takes less than five minutes to make.

Do I have your attention?

Here it is:

Your shopping list

500 g dried nectarines
750 ml white muscat Continue reading →

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Posted in confectionery, dairy-free, desserts, egg-free, gluten-free, nut-free, Recipes, Special occasions, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged christmas ideas, confectionery, dairy-free, decadent, desserts, egg-free, gift ideas, gluten-free, muscat, nectarines, nut-free, recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Recipe: Quandong and Bush Food Jam Thumbprints (Vegan, Gluten-Free)

Posted on November 13, 2015 | 1 comment

Still with the biscuits. I made a lot of biscuits last weekend. Can you tell? I’m also still swimming in brownie mix, which is completely awesome, though I’m glad I chose the route of sanity with regard to mixing up all the random bits of chocolate and using them as choc chips, and instead grouped them in ways likely to result in pleasing, rather than alarming, flavour combinations.

But I digress. I had more macadamia nut crumbs leftover after making my super-awesome strawberry gum biscuits, and this inspired me to go looking in my pantry for other bushfood ingredients to play with. I couldn’t find the lemon myrtle which I am positive is lurking somewhere, but I did find dried quandongs and also a mixed bush-fruits jam from Outback Spirit (they don’t seem to make it anymore, alas, but you can get Rosella Jam here). Good enough!

The dried quandongs looked a little unpromising at first, being very hard and dry and woody in texture, so I reconstituted them with water and found them pleasingly tangy. Also, when blended, they were moist enough to obviate the need for egg in the biscuits, yay, vegan biscuits!

The biscuits came out a lovely pink colour, but alas, lacking in the expected tang. Instead, they tasted mostly like a macadamia-based jam thumbprint – which is certainly not a bad thing to taste like, but is nonetheless a little disappointing if quandong was what you were after. I’d recommend adding some quandong essence if you have it, or maybe some lemon or finger-lime zest to the dough. (Finger lime zest would be better, from a bushfood standpoint, but you’d probably need a few of them to do the job…)

Your Shopping List

25 g dried quandongs (mine came from Footeside Farm)
1/2 cup water or lemon juice
100g macadamia nuts
zest of 1 lemon
100 g almond meal
30g maple syrup
about 6 tsp rosella jam, or other bushfood jam

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Posted in biscuits, dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, low fructose, Recipes, vegan, vegetarian

Tagged biscuits, dairy-free, egg-free, gluten-free, macadamias, probably low fructose but I make no promises, quandongs, recipes, rosella jam, vegan, vegetarian