Flicking the Vs: May 2015

Happy Vegan Burger Day!

Like you need any excuse to eat vegan burgers, but if you do, I'm happy to provide one! I read on Tea and Sympatico the other day that a bunch of Belgian vegans had decided to start the event as a plant-based alternative to the omni burger day.

When it comes to burgers, normally I just reach for something out of the freezer (Fry's, I'm looking at you here). Given the importance of today's festival though, I thought I should actually try making my own and seeing what happens.

The result, accompanied by sweet and normal potato fries and coleslaw, was surprisingly tasty!

Here's what I did:

Ingredients
One small sweet potato
One white onion
One red chilli
Three garlic cloves
One tin of black beans, drained
One grated carrot
One teaspoon of coriander seeds, lightly toasted and ground
Two teaspoons of cumin seeds, lightly toasted and ground
One chopped chilli in adobo, plus half teaspoon of adobo
Half teaspoon of soy sauce
One ounce of oats

How you do it
Roast a small sweet potato in the oven until soft (or microwave it).

Sweat off one onion in 1 tbsp of oil. Once it's softened, add a chopped red chilli and three chopped up cloves of garlic and fry another couple of minutes.

Pile the sweet potato, onion, garlic, chilli into a bowl with the black beans, grated carrot, spices, chilli, soy sauce, and oats.

Take out a quarter of the mix, and blend to a paste. Add another quarter, pulse a couple of times, then add the rest of the mix and stir. If it looks a bit wet, add more oats.

Shape into patties and bake at 200C for 20-25 minutes, flipping over mid-way through cooking. They firm up a bit the next day, so they're good to reheat if you want a rerun of Vegan Burger Day tomorrow.

black bean

A black bean and sweet potato burger recipe for Vegan Burger Day

Happy Vegan Burger Day! Like you need any excuse to eat vegan burgers, but if you do, I'm happy to provide one! I read on Tea and Symp...

I've been banging on about spring for a while, but thanks to a bit of stuff I forgot on my camera, we're going to get a little bit up in autumn's grill.

Last autumn, I bought a bag full of cobnuts and promptly stuck them in the fridge. For months. Seriously, months. I'd never cooked with them before, they sort of looked a bit alien, so I put them in the vegetable crisper and forget about them.

It was only after a bit of fridge archaeology that I found the stray paper bag and the sorry looking cobnuts within. And then I made these cookies with the cobnuts:

I really am a dumbass. Did you know how good cobnuts were? You did? Why didn't you all tell me?! They're so sweet, like little blocks of caramel. They're well and truly delicious. My mind was truly blown.

So, lesson learnt. Next time autumn rolls around, I'm going to get shedloads of cobnuts in and believe you and me, I'll not be abandoning them for half a year.

OK, after a spot of praising autumn, we're back to spring and all that. Salads are back in fashion while asparagus season lasts.

I read somewhere that pumpkin seeds contain something that's good for memory so with exams coming up (not long now!) and all that revision going on, I'm pretty much putting them on everything right now - salads, dinners, oatmeal in the morning!

(Then again, I can't remember what it was the pumpkin seeds were meant to contain, where I read it, or based on what evidence the memory link was there, so clearly I should be more skeptical when I read pseudoscientific nutrition articles. Still, eating more pumpkin seeds is no bad thing.)

I wasn't kidding about asparagus either. I've been putting it in everything. Including potato farls.

Yep, I made some normal potato farls, and then stuck a load of asparagus, wild garlic and spring onions in there for good measure. You can't really go wrong with that holy trinity.

Began vegan, leafy greens are like mother's milk, so I was proper chuffed to see chard coming back in at the markets. I love chard when it's really tiny, so you don't have to bother with all the chopping the stalks first then messing around with the leaves later.

I got this recipe after some high level research - I put 'chick peas and chard' into Google and found this. It's apparently from the River Cafe cookbook, and there's the proper recipe on Google Books preview. It's not too hard to make, but it's really tasty. And you can't say fairer than that.

For the sweet fix this week, I've been making sultana oatmeal cookies. I think they're an American thing maybe, because you don't see them over here. A friend of mine was going back to San Francisco, where's she's from, and she brought me back some oatmeal raisin cookies from Trader Joe's and ever since I've been craving them little devils.

For a first attempt, they were darn tasty. Admittedly, they looked a bit like something that you'd find on the side of a volcano when the lava cools, but that didn't stop me enjoying them.

And after I'd made may way through those cookies (not all in one go, I'd like to make clear), there was still this little beauty waiting for me from last month's Vegan Kind box:

It's a sea salt peanut butter cup from Eat Chic, an artisan East London chocolatier (so the internet tells me). As someone who happily eats peanut butter from the jar with a spoon, and sometimes with my hand if I'm too lazy to get a spoon involved, I was completely smitten. I love Go Max Go's peanut butter cups, but these are something else. They're very grown up with the sea salt and dark chocolate, with a little sweet filling. I am officially in love.

chard

Cobnuts to you all

I've been banging on about spring for a while, but thanks to a bit of stuff I forgot on my camera, we're going to get a little bit u...

I'm about two weeks away from (hopefully) my last exams. If all goes well, this September I'll be at university and I'll have spent a whole summer enjoying remembering just what I did before I had to spend all my free time either working or studying.

The first thing I think I'll do is spend a lot more time reading, seeing friends, and cooking. I love cooking. I mean, I write a blog about what I ate for dinner, that's how much I like cooking. All those things I bookmarked and tore out of magazines to cook, I might finally get around to making. In the meantime, here's a few spring-like delights.

More stuff on muffins again. I might get the blog sponsored my Sainbury's basics muffins or get a muffin tattooed on my neck or something. Turns out most things go well on muffins - some avocado, some spinach, some asparagus, and some cheesy cashew sauce.

More asparagus and muffins for another late weekend breakfast - this time with a lot of miso marinated mushrooms. Underneath, a few spears of asparagus, grated carrot, leaves, and spring onions and sesame on top. I keep making these miso marinated mushrooms whenever I run out of ideas. I guess my brain is too full of science revision to think up anything clever to eat.

I did manage to remember why I like runner beans - that's something of an achievement. Albeit, a really small achievement, but still.

I got a big load of runner beans in my vegbox recently and wasn't too sure what to with them. I remember my granny always served them up with Sunday roasts, and I liked them then. I bought them again on whim last summer, and forgot to take the strings out. I made some loubia with them and had to chuck it all away because eating the stringy beans was like flossing my teeth with a vegetable.

This time around, I remembered to de-string the beans. I thought they might like some beany company from butter beans and some of this 'revved up runner beans' sauce. I like the sauce, but if I was making it again, I think I'd add a bit of paprika. Everything tastes better with paprika, right?

A less successful attempt to recreate a childhood dish was this go at bread pudding:

Bread pudding is a great dish. Whoever came up with the idea of putting milk and sugar into bread and baking it was a genius - what a great way to use up leftovers and get a sweet treat at the same time.

I think bread pudding started to go wrong when I used sourdough instead of normal bread, and figs instead of sultanas. Oh, and I put some brandy in there. I'm not sure why. I really should start up a section of this blog called 'things I tried to make and it sort of worked but mostly didn't'.

It was bit wet, and the spices could contend with the sourdough's tang. After conquering the runner beans, I'm pretty sure I should give bread pudding another go in the near future.

In the meantime, I'm mostly eating this:

I love that stuff. It's homemade ice cream of sorts. I really like getting the ice cream maker out, warming coconut milk with something and all the rest of it, but sometimes, all I've got is the energy to stick a frozen banana in the blender.

Thanks to some clever soul out there in blogworld (whoever you are, kisses to you) I worked out that putting some frozen cherries in with the banana along with some choc chunks gives you a vegan Cherry Garcia. Spring has been here long enough that I'm already thinking of summer and when I get to eat this All. Day. Long.

asparagus

Spring things: Runner beans, stuff on muffins, and vegan Cherry Garcia

I'm about two weeks away from (hopefully) my last exams. If all goes well, this September I'll be at university and I'll have sp...

You know when you think 'there's all sorts of crap in my freezer, why don't I go all Iron Chef and see what I can make with it?' Well, that happened this week, and it wasn't all good.

My clearing out frenzy resulted in one of the weirder plates I've eaten in recent times, but I thought I'd post it for amusement value. Here's a couple of beets I defrosted earlier and arranged into this jaunty fan salad thing. It tasted fine, but you can't really go wrong with roasted beets. You can even put beetroot in cake and it's nice, so I'd have to foul up things up pretty badly to not be able to eat one slice on top of the other.

As for the other thing, I'd love to tell you a) what it was and b) I was drunk when I made it, but nope, I think I was just hungry and desperate and I've no idea what I was thinking. It's a masala roti type thing with some leftover salad in it - roasted peppers, chick peas, salad leaves and know knows what else.

It looks alright doesn't it? It wasn't. It was less than the sum of its parts. Masala rotis are best saved for curries.

Still, what better to go with clearing out old food from the freezer than going a bit mad with all the good new stuff that spring's brought in. Yes! It's gorging time for anything new season, pointy and green: roasted asparagus, purple sprouting broccoli, and wild garlic. I love spring, it brings an abundance of some of the best veggies of all time.

Here's the rest of that yellow beetroot coupled with some lovely pointy green things and cashew cheese from the back of the fridge. I could eat this pretty much every day. In fact, I pretty much will do until asparagus is out of season (Dear Mother Nature, please don't let that be soon, love Flicking the Vs x).

Yep, while asparagus is cheap at the markets (and not air-freighted in from Peru), it's going into everything. Like chick pea scramble.

I love chick pea scrambles. They're like a blank canvas that you get to paint all over with veggies. I think if you take a serious peek at that scramble, you'll see a bit of wild garlic in there. I wasn't joking when I said I'd been eating these veggies almost every day (Dear Mother Nature, leave us the wild garlic next to the asparagus for a while, would you? Thanks, Flicking the Vs x).

No spring stuff in this brunch type dish, but lots of green stuff nonetheless. And note the avocado fan attempt here - I'm just trying to impress you by slicing my avocado funny.

Here's a bit of marinated tofu, snuggling up to its new avocado best friend, all sitting on a sun lounger of English muffin and spinach. Note the huge lump of ajver - thanks to Maud at Food Feud for reminding me just how much I love that stuff. I think it's because it's like the Swiss Army Knife of jarred sauce - you can use it for so many things. It's a dip, a tofu topping, a sandwich filling and a pasta sauce all in one.

You know I can't go too long without cooking up something sweet, and thanks to find some scarily speckled bananas in the fruit bowl, it was time for banana bread.

Oh banana bread, why don't I make you all the time? You're almost no effort to cook, you taste amazing, and you freeze really well. If there's every any left to freeze, of course. Banana bread is one of those cakes for all seasons as well - you can have it with a cup of tea in the afternoon, or a couple of slices for breakfast. There's not many cakes you can say that about.

(Side thought - when I lived in France many years ago, you used to be able to buy sponge cakes sold as a breakfast food. They were known as 'le cake'. I'm pretty sure I didn't imagine that, but if anyone could confirm, that would make me rest easy in the knowledge I've not lost my marbles in my old age.)

And from the readymade pile, a vegan Wagon Wheel! I love the variety of weird and wonderful things people have veganised. I salute you, Ananda Foods, for making the Wagon Wheel vegan. It's so cute - I love the little Alice in Wonderland inscription. I think the fluffy mallow bit has got a slightly weird texture, but the biscuits were delicious and I'd eat this whole thing a million times over.