Flicking the Vs: June 2014

The nightmare of the last few weeks of exams is finally over! I'm so relieved. One of the things that I've been most looking forward to is spending a bit more time in the kitchen.

With so many hours in my days being spent hunched over books recently, all food has been functional. Once I was freed from the shackles of study, I decided to make something that took hours - literally.

Making granita is no small task. While whipping up the ingredients doesn't take too long, once it's in the freezer, that's when the hard work begins. You have to get it out of the deep freeze every 20 minutes or so and break up the ice crystals that form. According to one recipe, you have to do this for about six hours, but I got bored and stopped after a couple. The texture wasn't perfect, but it was a lovely frosty dessert nonetheless, and I got four hours of free time back - score!

The granita I made was a mix of peach and basil. I bought a cheap bag of doughnut peaches from the local market and they were insanely good - so perfumed and full of flavour, just like peaches should be.

Here's the recipe I used, and here's the result:

Because Mr Flicking the Vs is a good sort, and knows I am a creature of simple tastes, he knew the best way to keep my motivation up during the hard slog of study was to bring cake.

On one particularly stressful day which I furrowed my brows over the cause of learning, he slipped out and returned with two different types of wonderful vegan cake and vegan beer to boots. Here's one from the wonderful Cookies and Scream:

In Cookies and Scream's defence, this was originally far larger, I just ate a massive chunk of it before I remembered to take a picture. It was a plum and almond beauty and gluten free too. It tasted pretty much like the best Bakewell tart I could imagine.

If I go quiet next week, I'm on holiday, so will hopefully return with lots of tales of vegan eating from a new land. With the weather so good over here, I decided to sacrifice the chard I've been growing on my windowsill because I didn't think it would survive during my absence.

Here's a few handfuls of my window crop:

OK, I'm not exactly self sufficient, but it's nice to grow your own veggies, even in a small first floor flat! (The basil in the granita came from my homegrown efforts too!)

In a pre-holiday fridge clearout, I fried off the chard with some spring greens and asparagus, added some nooched-up white sauce and breadcrumbs, and had me a gratin for dinner. No pic of that, but here it is in its formative stages:

Awesome colours!

Another new discovery for me is this bad ass hummus. Get ready for the picture, and don't think I've lost my marbles when you check it out:

OK, it looks like any normal hummus, but it's subtly different. The rest of the ingredients are what you'd normally find in hummus - lemon juice, garlic, tahini etc- but instead of chickpeas, the main event is yellow beetroot. Using this lovely root makes the hummus far sweeter than the usual, so you might need to step up the lemon juice to counteract it, but other than that, the beetroot version works in all your usual hummus dishes. Go try it!

cake

The end of chard, the beginning of granita, and a new discovery in hummus

The nightmare of the last few weeks of exams is finally over! I'm so relieved. One of the things that I've been most looking forward...

This week, it's been a proper sweet potato fest in my kitchen.

What makes this more surprising than it might otherwise be is that I really don't like sweet potatoes. They are my orange tuber nemesis! I think I just don't like sweet flavours in savory food - I like things like cinnamon and nutmeg, but I much prefer them in dessert to lunch.

Anyway, I always feel that if there's a particular vegetable that I don't like, the fault is mine, not the vegetable's. With that in mind, I embarked on a mission: Project I Will Love Sweet Potatoes At all costs.

My first foray into sweet potato world is age jaga, a Japanese stew (apparently originally inspired by English meat and potato stews) made from carrots, onions, potatoes, sugar snap peas and age tofu. I make it fairly regularly as it's the best thing you can make in a single pan with minimum effort - just veggies and tofu with water, soy sauce, and mirin, left to do its thing while you get on with something else.

Normally, the potato element comes from new potatoes, but I with my mission in mind, I got some sweet potatoes to keep the newies company. Here's what happened:

It looks weirdly meaty in the picture there, but it really didn't in real life. It did taste fabulous though. It's one of those dishes that's heavy with umami, and it can be really hard to stop yourself having just one more spoonful.

Traditionally, age jaga has brown sugar in it, but I left it out (see my no-sweet-tastes-in-savoury-food grumble above!) as the sweet potatoes did a far better job of bringing a hint of sweet, but also delivered a load more flavour to boot.

Part two of learning to love sweet potatoes involved a more wonky strategy: adding sweet potato to dessert. Yep, adding it to dessert.

I'd seen a few recipes for just such a crazy notion (including this one), so I used elements from each to make up my own brownies. I think I ended up with a mix of sweet potato puree, potato starch, chickpea flour, flax egg, cocoa powder, vegan chocolate chips, walnuts, and some other stuff I can't even remember.

Give the frankenrecipe, I was surprised how darn good it turned out in the end. It wasn't a traditional brownie by any means, more like a chocolate mousse cake, rich and fudgy.

I coated them with melted dark chocolate for goodness (it's pictured above in its nude state). It didn't taste hugely (in fact, at all) of sweet potatoes, but as a way to learn to love a vegetable, eating it covered in chocolate is pretty much up there with the best of them.

And summer has finally arrived in London. The weather is beautiful here, so I've been ditching hot food for big made up plates of salad using whatever happens to be in my fridge at the time.

First up, a sort of Middle Eastern arrangement. There's some pickled turnip (the pink cubes up top), falafel (not made by me), pitta bread (also store bought), baba ganoush (that was made by me), and Turkish everday beans and pumpkin, carrot and caraway salads, adapted from recipes in Veggiestan (adapted according to which of the ingredients I had at the time!)

I love meals made up of loads of little elements - you get to enjoy so many different tastes in one meal. Admittedly, it takes loads more effort to makes and means loads more washing up, but it's worth it. When aubergines are in season over here, I could - and do - eat it by the bucketful.

My other plate of lots of different stuff is a bit more of a mish mash - vegan sausages, a bit of bread that was leftover, potato salad with red onion and tarragon, French carrot rapees salad, and sugar snaps in an avocado sauce.

And yes, you guessed it, there's some more sweet potatoes there - a thick dip of sweet potatoes, celery, garlic, cardamom and cumin. While I'm not yet a sweet potato devotee, I'm beginning to come around to it. More orange is on the way!

baba ganoush

How to learn to love any vegetable? Put it in your dessert

This week, it's been a proper sweet potato fest in my kitchen. What makes this more surprising than it might otherwise be is that I re...

You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, so conventional wisdom goes. Fine, I get that. But don't tell me you haven't splashed out a few quid on veggies on looks alone, just because something interesting caught your eye.

Case in point: these radishes. Check out the colours on those bad boys! I'm only used to radishes that are one colour, so when I was at the market and saw a dash of purple and yellow in with the usual pink, I decided I had to take a big bunch home with me.

Only, what happens when you've picked up your new hot veggie date based on looks alone? Now you've got to work out what to do with them. Not easy.

I'd had a craving for banh mi for a while, so in the absence of any Japanese radish in my fridge, I decided to make a version of the Vietnamese sandwich with the English kind of radish instead. Using it as a stand-in for mooli, I pickled some radishes and carrots, added them and some herbs to some marinated tofu, and bundled the whole lot into a baguette with some mayo.

Here's what happened:

I'll be honest, it wasn't great. No disrespect to the radish though, it subbed for the mooli admirably - it just wasn't the best bit of bread I've ever put in my face.

The baguette was so chewy I had jaw ache by the time I finished the thing. I think the tofu cubes had been taking some tips on density from the bread too - that banh mi left me feeling like I'd had a whole face workout rather than a meal. I should have just tucked into a plate of radishes and left it at that.

Interestingly, I was wondering if radish leaves were edible (who wants to throw away good greens like that?) when I remembered dimly seeing a recipe for radish furikake a while back. I made a dehydrator version to see if I could turn the radish leaves into a nori-sprinkle type topping for rice. I'll let you know how that one goes in future...

Another bulletin from foods-that-looked-pretty-good-but-were-actually-disappointing world came in the form of an attempt to make a savoury vegan clafoutis, having been inspired by this non-vegan version.

The one I made was a mix of asparagus, spring onions and garden peas in a batter of soy milk, flour, flax eggs and cornstarch. Let's just say I got the ratios wrong, and ended up with something of the consistency of rice pudding with some veggies floating around in it. Not so good. (I mean, it tasted fine, and I'll give it another go with a bit more flour and that, but the texture? Yeuch.)

Just when I was starting to think I would never cook something worth sticking in my face again, I hit upon a new pasta dish. How exciting can pasta be, you might ask. Very, I would answer.

All it was was a head of fennel, a white onion and some garlic sweated off, with some chopped tomatoes, pasta, vegan sausages and my new secret weapon, aci biber salçası.

As far as I can work out, biber salçası is pretty much the pepper equivalent of tomato puree - a thick paste of boiled down hot and normal red peppers. It's got some nice, but not overpowering, heat to it, as well as lovely deep flavour. A tablespoon or two added into some pasta sauce left me covertly chasing the last smears of sauce around my plate with a hungry spoon.

I also put the sauce to work in a simple dish of roast veggies (aubergine, new potatoes, cherry tomatoes, onions) and black beans. I smothered the lot in a little stock, a little paprika, and a lot of biber salçası, and baked in the oven for a while. Once it was done in the oven, it got a going over with lime juice and parsley.

I was kind of pleased with the result - it did double duty as a topping for rice, and then as a sandwich filling with some guacamole. If you happen to see some biber salçası near you, I heartily suggest you pick some up - not only will it perk up your food, it can also help ease the sorrows of any recent failed dishes.