Spinach and Sun-dried Tomato Pancakes

I'm not sure what the tradition is in non-Catholic countries, but in Ireland people traditionally give up things for Lent (the 40-days before Easter) usually food products they enjoy. And so I assume that's where Pancake Tuesday comes from - people using up all their nice cupboard items the day before Lent (butter, eggs, sugar), and coming up with pancakes. Of course, in our consumer age, people go out and buy new ingredients or ready-made pancake mixtures, forgetting that such inventions originally came out of necessity or practicality.

When making vegan pancakes, there isn't really a whole lot to use up. No butter or eggs, and since I'm avoiding refined sugar there's none of that either. I did have a whole bag of baby spinach to use up though. And some white cabbage and stray bits of veg. So, I decided I'd make Spinach Pancakes.

First I blended the spinach with some sun-dried tomatoes and oat milk in a bowl (water is also fine - I used oat milk I made by blending oats and water - simple!). Then I added some wholemeal flour and some solid oats for texture. You want a nice sloppy consistency, so it'll spread on the pan. I fried up my pancakes and kept them warm in the oven, then served them with a sort of creamy topping, made thusly:

I fried up some cabbage, garlic, a bit of onion and some capers. As I went along I threw in some spinach I had left, as well as a bucket-load of nutritional yeast and Frank's Hot Sauce. Also, more sun-dried tomatoes and the oil that they come in. The nutritional yeast makes a nice creamy sauce with the oil (I normally add it late in the cooking process as heating it too high can kill off some of the vitamins it contains). I also threw in good few spoonfuls of soy yoghurt and grated a small amount of carrot in, but that's just what I had at hand. Any small amounts of tasty veg will go nicely in this. Throw a generous helping of the sauce on top of the pancakes and dress with some grated carrot, capers, spring onion and a sun-dried tomato.

Get it into ya.

- Dara

Roast Potatoes & Sun-dried Tomatoes

In keeping with the belated Christmas dinner posts, here are the roast potatoes I dined on. Roast potatoes are a lovely Sunday dinner treat (growing up in my house anyway) and my mother always seems to make them perfectly. As I was home for Christmas, these ones were a co-production with my auld one.

Her method (which in turn she took from my uncle) is to peel them, then boil them for ten minutes, then drain them, put them back in the dry pot and shake them round to get them fluffy. The fluffy bits make them deliciously crispy when roasted. Next, stick the shaken spuds in the oven with lots of oil. Since my family are partial to sundried tomatoes which usually comes in herb-y oil, I thought I'd use up the leftover, already-flavoured oil for roasting the potatoes. Roast them for 20 minutes or more, till you've got a crispiness level that satiates you and your diners. And about 5 minutes before they're done add in the sundried tomatoes themselves (maybe even less than five minutes as they burn easily).

 

Serve it with whatever you like. Or on their own. I love them cold as well - they're like really, really chunky crisps. In this case, they went together with the breadcrumb stuffing (in my previous post) and lots of veg to make up my Christmas dinner. But they are not exclusively festive. In fact, I have to wrap up this post as I'm about to have some more right now!

Bye!

- Dara

Breadcrumb Stuffing

So, stuffing is a strange vegan food. Being that it is normally stuffed into a dead thing. I've always loved stuffing, even back when I ate meat, stuffing was always my favourite part of a fancy Sunday or Christmas dinner. So, it is only natural that it has become the main focus of my Christmas dinners these days. Here's one I made last Christmas, that I've only put up now - because stuffing is not just for Christmas.

It's very simple, and a great way to use up stale bread that's too far gone for toast (but still not green). Blend up lots of bread (or if you don't have a blender and don't mind some bloody knuckles you can grate it, though I'd recommend the former). I add lots of fresh herbs from the garden; parsely, sage, rosemary, thyme, and anything else Simon and Garfunkel recommended in the song. Add a good glug of olive oil and some black pepper (and salt if you like). That's your standard there. Pretty good. Now to customize it: I diced up lots of apple and added it, along with cashew nuts (all from this), as well as some raisins. And then I added... orange juice! It makes it lovely and moist, gives it a bit of flavour and means you don't have to use as much oil (unless you want to). And it's a bit of natural sweetness that really brings out the raisins.

That's it, stick it in the oven for as long as you like (maybe a half hour or more) along with the rest of your dinner. You can cover it to keep it moist, or leave the top off to make it a bit crispy. Or both.

- Dara

Caramelised Onion, Cabbage and Mushroom on Toast

An excellent brunch!

Thinly sliced onions were fried in a bit of sunflower oil, with a teaspoon of molasses sugar and a pinch of salt. When they were caramelised I added thinly sliced cabbage, then when that was cooked I added sliced mushrooms. That's really all there was to it. Well worth trying, and an excellent way of using up the ubiquitous cabbage in the veg box.

Chocolate Sponge Cake

Birthday Cakes :-)

Never have I boasted about my baking skills - I've always been a bit scared of making cakes and the like, as I was under the impression that ingredients always needed to be measured precisely, in order to be in the right proportions.

Well, this cake proves me wrong - I guessed at all the ingredients, and guessed at how much of each thing to use. So, the moral of the story is: go ahead and experiment with baking cakes.

This one contained about a cup and a half of flour (mostly self-raising, some plain when it ran out), about the same amount of hot chocolate powder (the type that is just cocoa and sugar), 5 teaspoons of baking powder, all mixed up. To this I added some golden syrup melted into sunflower margarine and mixed with hemp milk and a bit of sunflower oil. I stirred it all up and it seemed to be a cake mixture consistency, so I poured it into a greased baking tray and baked it for about 20 minutes.

Omnivore friends loved it. Score!

The first cake was an experiment to prepare for these birthday cakes. In case you can't work it out, I made one big one and a load of cupcakes. The decorating is a bought 'chocolate fudge icing' (surprisingly vegan friendly) and some fruit flakes, which are basically condensed fruit juice and taste like jelly fruit.

For these I used 2 cups self raising flour, 1 cup cocoa, 1 cup sugar, 7 teaspoons of baking soda, about a cup of sunflower margarine, 5 desert spoons of golden syrup and a splash of soya milk. Again, I mixed all the dry ingredients then added the melted fat and golden syrup with enough soya milk to bring it to the right consistency.

It's important not to open the oven as they are cooking or the cake with fall in on itself. Let them cool before decorating them or the icing will melt. Enjoy!

Chocolate and Brazil Toast

I discovered the joys of mixing cocoa, sugar and butter as a sweet-toothed child. This is my grown-up vegan version. Experiment with proportions to suit your taste. You may need to add a little (plant based) milk to help the texture of the mixture. Soon I am going to experiment with whiskey as the liquid. Very grown up.

Lazy Person's Crumble

SCORE!

While some frozen mixed berries are warming themselves up over a low heat prepare the crumble by frying some nice sugar and cinnamon/nutmeg in some vegan margarine, then stir in enough oats to soak it all up. Pour the fruit into a bowl and top with the crumble. Ta-daaar!

Parsley Popcorn

Popcorn so good that it's impossible to take a photo without a hand being in it :-)

Popcorn is AMAZING! Fun to make, fun to eat. For this one I dried a few bunches of parsley in the oven, which was then crumbled so that it looked like the dried stuff. This was sprinkled over the fresh popcorn, with some sea salt. I guess you could take the easy route and just buy it dry, but hey! I was experimenting.

To make popcorn from its kernels use a big flat based pan with a well fitting lid. A good glug of sunflower oil and a small handful of kernels (less than you'd think) will pop pop pop to fill up the pan. Practise makes perfect with knowing how much of each ingredient suits your pan, so get popping!

Salad Soup

In winter, most people would rather something warm than a salad, but feel compelled to buy leaves for health reasons. This is what was behind my friend giving me half a bag of wilting salad, and why I decided to try to make something a bit more comforting out of it.

I boiled an onion, a chopped potato and a few cloves of crushed garlic with some bouillon until the potatoes were starting to disintegrate, then I added the spinach, rocket, watercress and red chard. After taking it off the heat I added a handful of frozen peas, which after a few minutes cooled the soup down enough to blend it.

A dollop of soya yogurt (the remains of the sojade from the reviewing session) and some freshly ground black pepper made this a delicious and nutritious soup.

Soya Yoghurt - Review

As a lacto-vegetarian I consumed natural yogurt at an alarming rate, so decided to try some vegan alternatives. Here are two soya ones, and a pea protein desert, thrown in for luck. I have split my review into four sections: eating experience, nutrition, and ethics, as these are the things I take into account when buying food. I’ve left out price as there wasn’t much difference.

Provamel’s Bio-Organic Soja

· Eating Experience

This was the most enjoyable product to eat on its own – it is sweetened with tapioca and corn starch, which put me off a bit, but actually gave it a well rounded taste. The texture is smooth, and there’s a fresh and creamy aftertaste, which may be a paradox, but it is a reality that I remember from eating low fat dairy yogurt. It’s not quite as satisfying an experience as my beloved Yeo Valley low fat natural yogurt, but comes close enough to stop me mourning the loss of yogurt. I imagine that I will use it in much the same way as I used to use dairy yogurt, i.e. guzzle it straight from the pot, look around guiltily, then guzzle some more.

4/5

· Nutrition

Both soya yogurts were very similar so I’ll write about them together. Although the recommended serving size is 125g, I think it’s more realistic to talk of 150g as a serving. (That’s not just me, is it?) So, in a Gwen sized serving you get about 75 calories, 6-7g protein, 3-4g carbohydrates, 3-4g fat, and reasonable amounts of everything else. Sojade’s product has next to no sodium, while Provamel’s has Seems like a pretty good deal to me. Live cultures in Provamel’s were bifidobacterium, Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus, while Sojade’s were Bifidus and Acidophilus. In laymen’s terms these are tummy friendly bacteria that do all the good things probiotic yogurt is said to do, including helping restore balance which has been disrupted due to antibiotics.

5/5

· Ethics

I LOVE this company. Originally set up to produce protein rich foods at an affordable price for developing countries, They are just all-round goodies, and to top it all off they have an IBD Ecosocial label, (http://www.provamel.co.uk/sustainability/ecosocial.htm) which guarantees that they are socially, economically and environmentally ethical. Especially cool is the fact that they decided to build their processing plant by a canal, so that for the main part their soya beans are transported by barge. I don’t know about the vehicles used to transport the products, but they clearly have a real desire to be as ethical as possible, just look at one of the projects they’re involved in: “The ‘Vitagoat’ is a bicycle like contraption that is helping to combat malnutrition and poverty in Africa and Asia and which we part fund. A small, entirely pedal-powered bicycle like machine, it produces nutritious soya milk without electricity or running water, cooking and grinding soya beans merely through ‘legwork’. Each unit can generate between 5 and 10 jobs, up to 30 litres of soya milk per hour and precious nutrition for literally 100s.”

5/5

Provamel have an online quarterly magazine: http://www.provamel.com/downloads/foodandlifestyle%20Summer10COMPCLOSED.pdf

· Conclusion

Feel good food 5/5

Sojade’s Fresh Soya Speciality

· Eating Experience

If you imagine what soya milk might be like if it were approaching a solid state, then you have a good idea of what this tastes like. It has the same soya aftertaste too, which isn’t something I enjoy very much. As the ingredients are purely water, soya beans and live cultures then it makes sense that its characteristics are very similar to soya milk. It was ok on its own, but would be much better accompanied by some jam or something else to add to the taste. I would buy this again to use in savoury cooking, e.g. to make mushroom soup creamier.

3/5

· Nutrition

See Provamel’s review.

5/5

· Ethics

Sojade is a Breton company with a background in organic farming. They use French soya beans which are organically produced, and GMO free. They seem like a really good company – their website says “In this complex world we live in, the values ​​behind the company are focused on respect for humans, nature, material, maintenance of good practice and common sense.” Energy used is partially from their solar panels, they are installing a wind turbine, and their vehicles are electric and hybrid. They are the same company as Sojasun, which are non-organic and don't seem to shout about their ethics too much. They also sell cow and sheep milk products, but don’t say much about how their animals are treated so I can’t comment on this. There is a rumour that the starter culture is animal based: http://plants-vs-vegans.blogspot.com/2010/11/sojade-sojasun-and-bacteria-problem.html

3/5

· Conclusion

Good for cooking, questionable suitability 3.5/5

Redwood’s Wot No Dairy? Plain dessert

· Eating Experience

In its defence, this product describes itself as a dessert, rather than a yogurt, so maybe my misled expectations caused my disappointment, but this isn’t something that I will buy again. It tastes like one of those cheap supermarket deserts that are sort of a cross between custard, mousse and yogurt and are more for the sake of having something a bit naughty, rather than actually experiencing any enjoyment. It felt artificial and without genuine character – the Katie Price of the vegan desert world. The ridiculous name with a kool misspelling put me off too. Not impressed.

1.5/5

· Nutrition

The small pot provides 122 calories, 4.5g fat, 16g carbohydrates, 3.6g fat, 1.45 mg sodium. It doesn’t have any nasty added extras.

3/5

· Ethics

Unlike the other two companies Redwood doesn’t mention the process which their soya beans undergo which makes me think that they may use chemicals to extract the milk, rather than doing it mechanically like Provamel and Sojade. I took an immediate dislike to the company when I spotted a basic grammar mistake on the website (there instead of their), but putting the pedant in me to one side, they seem to be making a good effort to be ethical. I should also remember the adage about stones and glass houses, and remind myself to learn the difference between a desert and a dessert. First impressions make me think that their ethical stance roots from a commercial shrewdness, rather than a true passion, but that might just be their PR failings. Environmental policies are available to look at, and they have won a large number of ethical awards – including Best Vegan Company in the Vegan Environmental Awards 2007 - so they must be doing something right. On top of the grammar mistake, I am also prejudiced against them because they are an American company which focuses on meat and dairy product alternatives. This probably says more about my issues than anything about them…

4.5/5

· Conclusion

Might be good for nostalgic eating here and there 3/5