Flicking the Vs: December 2012

Whether giving or receiving Christmas presents, for me, there's often food involved. Or, even better, there's often food and booze involved.

For my boyfriend's mum, this year I decided to go for a mixture of both - a big bottle of gin, and some homemade biscuits. She lived for a while in Denmark, so I thought I'd mix up some Danish biscuits, using this recipe from The Observer.

For a lovely friend of mine that I've spent several happy hours making and drinking our own booze with, I made some homemade clemencello (it's like lemoncello, but you use clementines not lemons). Basically, it's a mix of clementine rind, vodka and sugar. It's not hard to make, but it does taste wondrous - what more can you ask for? The recipe's here - I subbed out the star anise for a couple of cloves for bonus Christmas flavour.

I made one bottle as an experiment. Only said booze-making friend got a bottle to herself - what remains I'm keeping to get myself through a cold and rainy January in London!

For my parents, there was pear and dark chocolate jam. It ended up more like a rich chocolate spread, and again, I didn't make enough of it. (Yeah, who knew? The recipe I used was from Vegetarian Living magazine, but doesn't appear to be available on the web, but there are a few similar ones elsewhere out in the ether.)

You need to make this one yourself to believe me about how good it is. Get ready to make it, then double the quantity you're making because otherwise you won't have enough. Seriously, this stuff is so good, you'll be trying to bathe in it.

Here's my jar, nearly half empty. That's one happy Christmas right there.

biscuits

Christmas food gifts, part one - giving

Whether giving or receiving Christmas presents, for me, there's often food involved. Or, even better, there's often food and booze i...

Every Christmas, I cook pretty much the same thing: smoked tofu and cashew loaf, roast spuds, veggies and that sort of thing.

But what to cook for the lunch before the lunch? Something that's light and tasty, but won't overshadow the main event.

Inspired by my recent trip to the Vegetarian Cookery School in Bath, I decided to go for a bit of Asian goodness.

What I needed, I decided, was a few dumplings and a bit of Asian-esque coleslaw - like normal coleslaw but with added miso, tamari roasted pumpkin seeds and wasabi. (The dumplings were out of a packet, rather than from my own fair hand!)

It was a bit of a surprise hit, and meant we could still eat a truckload when it came round to Christmas dinner. One to remember for next year....

Christmas

Christmas lunch, before Christmas dinner

Every Christmas, I cook pretty much the same thing : smoked tofu and cashew loaf, roast spuds, veggies and that sort of thing. But what ...

I have been meaning to make stollen since forever. I just never have. Anytime I think about it, I break out in cold, stollen-related sweats. I don't know why, it just seems like stollen was my culinary K2 - destined to be contemplated, admired, but never conquered.

Well, behold! I have now planted my flag in that particular bready summit.

I used this recipe here. It called out to me for two reasons: 1) I had everything I needed to make it in the cupboard 2) it called for rum. Anything that involves rum has got to be good, and right, and just.

It wasn't even that hard to make - let the fruit sit in the rum, then knead pretty much everything else together, let it rise, then knock it back and make the stollen. A bit of a sit in the oven later, and here's what you end up with:

OK, that looks like something that's burst out of the temple in Prometheus, but trust me it tastes amazing. It weighed about as much as a baby and feels like it should be a heavy thing, but a small slice is somewhere between cake and bread, where the two meet and have beautiful babies.

I don't know why I waited so long to make this particular cooking bug bear. Now I've beaten it, there's nothing I can't conquer. Next stop, pierogi or something!

cake

Stollen - a first attempt

I have been meaning to make stollen since forever. I just never have. Anytime I think about it, I break out in cold, stollen-related sweats....

Indian food. It's like culinary kryptonite - I love it, but I really struggle to make it well at home.

Time to rectify that, I thought - so I decided to turn to my copy of India's Vegetarian Cooking, for a week of cooking foods from the subcontinent of vegetarian and vegan wonders.

Here's the first couple of things I made, served together: bhunia lobhia (stir-fried black eyed beans) and ghee bhaat (rice with ghee and spices).

(Side note: while a lot of ghee isn't vegan, you can actually get a vegan version if you look. That said, I subbed it for plain old vegetable oil here.)

I enjoyed both of these bad boys, but wasn't blown away by the flavour - both were tasty but a little weedy. I was a bit disappointed - I associate Indian food with all sorts of riotously deep flavours, and they were a little bit absent here. Maybe that's my bad - if you went into this expecting a more muted taste, you wouldn't be disappointed.

Next up, saibhaji (dilled vegtables). Trust me, it looked a bit nicer than this, but Mr Flicking the Vs had disappeared out with the camera, leaving me to take some ugly BlackBerry snaps. Forgive me, dear reader, for he has sinned.

Again, I was a bit surprised by the gentleness of the flavour - just chilli powder, turmeric and cumin as the spices, and then a whack of dill in the background. The dill goes in while the veggies are cooking, so it's not a strong presence by the time the dish has finished simmering.

But third meal lucky. This is the spiced potato and aubergine dish known as bhaingan bharta:

I've tried something similar when I was doing a week cooking from Asian Vegan Kitchen, where the aubergine was cooked over a naked flame to give it that smoky flavour. Indian Vegetarian Kitchen notes that's the traditionnal way to do it, but offers an alternative cooking method - boiling the the aubergine instead.

It might be a slightly easier method, but I kind of feared that all the flavour would be lost. Happily, it wasn't the case - the aubergine broke down into the silky sauce the recipe promised, and with the turmeric levels amped up, it was a surprise winner.

But what's Indian food without a sweet chick pea dish? Here's the one I made from Indian Vegetarian Kitchen, called chole, with rajma pulao rice on the side.

Chole was fun - I didn't have the required pomegranate seeds, but I did enjoy the chance to bust out the mango powder once again after MoFo. It was a simple dish, but hearty, especially when you get some kidney beans and rice on the side.

I love kidney beans and rice. If we were kicking it ancient Egyptian style and you were putting food in my sarcophagus to keep me fed in my journey to the next world, I'd want some kidney beans and rice in there. The pulao was subtle and wonderful - cardamom and peppercorns made this one a keeper.

Last up on my week with Indian Vegetarian Kitchen was a trio of dishes: tumater pulao (tomato rice), bengali dal (sweet and sour lentils) and shalgam masala (spiced turnips).

I was a bit dubious about the turnips. I mean, who's ever had a memorable turnip anything, let alone a turnip curry? I liked the flavours in here, but the turnip was kind of the stumbling block, give it has no flavour of its own to speak of, making everything kind of bland. The sweet and sour lentils did pretty much what they said on the tin, and the tomato pulao was another new thing for me and rice.

Not everything I cooked from India's Vegetarian Cooking was absolutely golden, but by the end of my cooking from it, I felt I could turn out a far better Indian meal than I could have before. Now pass the vegan na'an, I've got some learning to do. Tasty, tasty learning.

aubergine

A week cooking with India's Vegetarian Cooking

Indian food. It's like culinary kryptonite - I love it, but I really struggle to make it well at home. Time to rectify that, I thought...

When I find a vegan cookery place I like, I have a tendency to go back. And back, and back.

I've been to the Vegetarian Cookery School in Bath a few times to do different courses, but back in May, when I saw that they were going to put on a Christmas vegan cookery course, I had to sign up, even if it was seven months in advance.

I love Christmas. There, I've said it.

I love the sparkly lights, the slacking off at work, the weird impulse to socialise at warp speed ("we've got to meet up before Christmas!" "Why? I'm free in January too." "Before. Christmas.") and, needless to say, I love the food.

I love Christmas dinner - some centrepiece, roast potatoes, gravy, bread sauce, veggies and enough pudding to sink a frigate - and any new spin on cooking it makes me very happy indeed.

The Vegetarian Cookery School's Christmas course promised to give us not only recipes for Christmas dinner, with pudding and dinner rolls, but canapes, Christmas booze recipes, and the sort of light lunch you'd have on Boxing Day too.

Sounds good, right?

The light lunch was Asian dumplings with a brussels-sprouty filling. The veggies were chopped and dressed, and we got stuck in assembling the dumplings. The pan cooked results were a little rubbery - a side effect of the dumpling skins being too thick, and being left to sit while we messed around too long in the kitchen - but the filling was lovely.

There was a shedload of it left over after our dumpling stuffing marathon, so the filling was transformed into another dish by cooking with some noodles, and it turned out to be delicious too. (And there was a simple salad of greens and pomegranate to go alongside - how beautiful does this look?)

Here's some of the dinner rolls we made, each with a different filling - black olive, summer and winter pesto (one with pine nuts and basil, the other with watercress and walnuts) and a tomatoey one.

The bread dough we made for the dinner rolls got another lease of life wiht these little tartlets. I'll be honest, I thought on paper, this recipe looked grim - butternut squash leaves me cold, especially in the relatively undressed state in which it appeared here.

Well colour me yellow and call me Henry's cat - it turns out the cookery teachers at the Cookery School are not only lovely and friendly, they also know their stuff. The tartlets were subtle, but rather lovely nonetheless - just a load of garlic, a bit of lemon juice and some leek, and they're away.

The tartlets were topped with membrillo though, which was new to me. After my first taste, I was pretty much convinced it was so good it could probably make cats lie down with dogs and cause spontaneous outbreaks of world peace or something. Yes, the membrillo was honestly that good, and the tartlets too.

The centrepiece for the Chrimbo dinner itself was this porcini and pearl barley Wellington, served with slow cooked red cabbage and some roast spuds. The roasties and red cabbage were prepared as a demonstration, but the pastry and the Wellington were made by our own fair hands. It almost met with a sticky end when I tipped in a slick of soy sauce by accident, but it all worked out for the best, George's Marvellous Medicine style.

Here's our wellingtons before they went into the oven:

And the final dinner:

The pudding was a rich pistachio torte, full of chocolate, dried fruit and coconut cream, and it appeared on the table with hot custard. Yes, custard. Sauce anglaise to the French, manna from heaven to me.

I was so stuffed, I could barely get this down. But it was lovely, so I did nonetheless.

And that wasn't all. There were cute little Christmas tree biscuits, and my favourite bit of the class (seriously): gløgg.

Think gløgg is like mulled wine? Oh no, friend, think again. Gløgg is like mulled wine's smarter, better looking, more charming cousin - the sort of cousin that you invite along to your Christmas party and everyone's like 'who's that? They're pretty cool. Nice hair too.' I'll be inviting it back again and again.

In the meantime, I'll be checking out when the Vegetarian Cookery School is running its next vegan course - that's my kind of Christmas present.

The Vegetarian Cookery School
http://www.vegetariancookeryschool.com/
6 Terrace Walk
Bath
BA1 1LN
01225 427938

bath

Cooking Christmas in Bath

When I find a vegan cookery place I like, I have a tendency to go back. And back, and back. I've been to the Vegetarian Cookery School...

Back when it was MoFo (yeah, seems a good long while ago, doesn't it?) I made my first tentative steps into cooking with tempeh.

Time to strike while the iron was, if not hot, then still a little warm - time to try out some more tempeh cooking.

I have a bit of a fondess for 1,000 Vegan Recipes - not everything is perfect in it, but whenever you need an idea for that bit of something turning to mush in the back of the fridge, or for that bit of weird esoteric nonsense you picked up at the farmers' market, 1,000 Vegan Recipes has a suggestion.

Needless to say, it had a few suggestions for tempeh - the one that caught my eye was the Creole tempeh, and some Creole rice and beans to go alongside it.

I know less than sod all about Creole cooking, but anything that involves dipping tempeh in spicy flour and then cooking it up to a glossy tomato sauce has got to be good.

But would the tempeh hold up to a second bite of the cherry? There was a potent mushroomy tang running through the whole dish, which I can only assume was the tempeh (help me out tempeh addicts - is that what it normally tastes like, or was mine to far north of the Best Before date?!)

Treading a fine line between heady forest and sweaty gym T-shirt, tempeh has just about managed to earn its ongoing place on my shopping list.

So, tempeh lovers everywhere, help me out again - what shall I make with it? What recipe can turn any tempeh sceptic into a confirmed tempeh fan?

1000 vegan recipes

Learning to love tempeh

Back when it was MoFo (yeah, seems a good long while ago, doesn't it?) I made my first tentative steps into cooking with tempeh . Time...

As one of my recent MoFo experiments, I cooked with girolles - little golden mushrooms also known as chanterelles.

When I was having a google around to work out what to do with the girolles, I came across a suggestion of using them to flavour vodka. Another of my MoFo experiments involved vodka. 'Holy moly - that's food serendipity right there!', I thought, and quickly combined the two, leaving them to sit for as long as it took to turn the vodka a dainty beige.

Here's what it turned out like. You reckon it looks like a science experiment involving formaldehyde? I'm with you there, buddy.

Still, I'm very much of the belief that you never leave alcohol behind if you've paid for it, so I turned it into a chanterelle Bloody Mary.

MoFo taught me I really like chanterelles, and I like cooking with vodka. It also taught me that two rights can in fact make a wrong - as it did spectacularly here.

Jeez, but this was grim.

Turns out if you're making chanterelle vodka, you need to buy a decent vodka, not the paintstripper crap that's on special offer at Tesco. I tell you this, dear reader, from bitter experience, having wasted both a quarter-pint of cooking vodka and a handful of chanterelles in concocting something that appears to have taken the best elements of both and stamped all over them like a toddler after too much tartrazine.

Still, never leave a drink behind right? I'm off to Google 'recipes using godawful chanterelle vodka'. Wish me luck.

chanterelle

Experiments with chanterelle vodka

As one of my recent MoFo experiments, I cooked with girolles - little golden mushrooms also known as chanterelles. When I was having a g...

Another November, another spot of learning shojin ryori at Atsuko's Kitchen. (you can tell I wrote this post a while back, right?!)

Shojin ryori is the temple cuisine of Japanese Buddhist monks, and it's all totally vegan. Hurrah!

Every year, Atsuko's Kitchen (a one-woman cooking school that holds classes in Shoreditch, London) hosts a cooking lesson with Mari Fuji, who's so good at this shiz, she's quite literally written the book. I've been a couple of years before, and when Mari was in town a few weeks ago, I knew I had to make a return visit.

On the menu this year was mock sushi - turns out in shojin ryori, you might not eat meat, but you can make sushi that looks like it. Check it out - the red pepper nigri (bottom right corner) is meant to be like salmon, and the pumpkin sushi (top right corner) is meant to be sea anemone. Who knew?

The sea anemone sushi topping was a mixture of pumpkin, dashi stock, and spice, turned into a creamy paste, and then piped on top. It was my first time piping anything, and I didn't even mess it up (alas, I didn't get a shot of my handiwork, but I was chuffed it looked like it was supposed to!)

The other sushi up there is beetroot, eringi mushroom, aubergine, and asparagus. They were all lovely, but the winner was the asparagus by a country mile. I kept sneaking an extra one while no one was looking.

The three-hour ish class saw us around 12 people making a dish each. Aside from those beauties up there, there was a fake eel sushi made with potato and nori, the ever-reliable agedashi tofu, and a delicious - and deliciously simple - mushroom soup.

There was also a bit of experimenting with agar to make a savoury jelly with dashi stock, kumquats and avocados. Sounds like it would be a bit grim, right? Not even close - it was a gem. A squidgy, sharp gem.

The best bit? You get to eat everything that you, and everyone else, made. Actually, that's not the best bit. The best bit is that you get to eat everything that you, and everyone else, made - and it's all delicious.

Atsuko's Kitchen
At The Grocery
54-46 Kingsland Road
London
E2 8DP

atsuko's kitchen