C is for Cookie...

My kids love that song. In their honour, I made some coconut chocolate chip cookies from 'La Dolce Vegan!'. My husband is a cookie man too, due to their resemblance to his favourite Great British classic - the biscuit. Anything that can be dunked in tea will pass muster with him, whereas muffins and cakes - well, there's just too much faff involved isn't there? Too much faff and sugar for a simple man with an essentially savoury palate. But these little mouthfuls of coconut-flecked chocolate chip goodness were perfect as an after-dinner treat.

Moist, melt-in-the-mouth with an irresistible crunchy crust I'm going to have to struggle to keep enough over for lunchtime tomorrow.

Oh well, at least I haven't got this fella to contend with.



For other variations on chocolate chip goodness, have a look at Katie's irresistible version of chocolate chip cookie dough oatmeal - a perfect marriage of breakfast and badness! Don't forget, every click on her site this month benefits an extremely worthy cause so don't hesitate and snag yourself some delicious recipe ideas too!

Dill Pickles...

Are not the pickles we use for this delicious soup. This is going to sound like frugality gone mad, but believe you me, in our house when we have 3 medium Polish gherkins (the brine-pickled ones, Mrs Elmswood's Hamisha gherkins come a close second) and half a jar of gherkin brine left we celebrate because we know it means gherkin soup is on the cards.
Bazu recently posted about the importance of sour in Iranian cooking from ingredients such as sour grapes, pomegranate extracts and lemons and limes . Sourness is an equally important component in Polish cookery but it comes from the lactic acid produced during fermentation. Sauerkraut is the best known example, but brine pickles are also popular and the base of a popular Polish soup - bialy or white barsch - resembles nought so much as sourdough starter with it's twin ingredients of rye flour and water left to - you've guessed it - ferment.
Skint Vegan Dad may share the sauerkraut love but the rest of this appetite for the tangy has passed him by, so what better time to whip up a quick pan of pickle soup that when he's stuck on a train between Leeds and Edinburgh, returning from his brother's stag night?

Gherkin Soup (Zupa ogórkowa) (serves 8)

Ingredients
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tbsp margarine
1 yellow onion, finely diced
3 spring onions, finely sliced
2 medium potatoes, diced
3 medium brine pickles, grated
1/2 tsp celery salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
water to cover vegetables
1 heaped tsp boullion powder

For the zasmaska (roux)
1 tbsp vegan margarine
1 heaped tsp chickpea flour

Melt the oil and margarine together in a medium heavy-based pan. Add the chopped onion and sliced spring onion and fry for five minutes, until translucent. Add the diced potato and grated gherkin and fry for a further 2 minutes. Add celery salt, pepper, boullion powder and enough water to cover the vegetables and bring to the boil. Once bubbling turn down heat and simmer until potatoes are tender.
Once tender, take a seperate pan and melt 1 tbsp marg before adding 1 heaped tsp chickpea flour and stirring constantly with a wooden spoon. Once the flour mix is pale golden, start adding gherkin soup, ladle by ladle, stirring constantly between additions. This process will thicken the soup without diluting the flavour. Once all the soup is combined, make sure it's heated through and serve. Delicious - and tangy. (n_n)

Lunchmonkeys

I'm here to say I've had two of the best lunches of my life for the past two consecutive days. On Friday, I served the kids leftover pumpkin and lentil soup with animal shapes pasta, but unfortunately there wasn't enough left for me. So I decided to make myself a sandwich with the pumpkin and caramelised red onion foccacia that I'd baked the previous day. I don't generally eat a lot of sandwiches - I'm a bit sniffy about whether they constitute a proper meal or not, and I'd never eat anything so heavy for a snack, and generally I prefer hot food over cold. So even though I probably enjoy eating sandwiches more than soup, my overall preference for hot food would lead me to choose soup instead. Perfectly illogical, I know!

What to fill it with? No hummus, no roast veggies, no tapenade, no (edible) vegan cheese in the fridge. But there was tofu. So I quickly whipped together a tofu eggless salad - 1 cup chopped tofu, 2 finely sliced spring onions, 2 diced Polish pickles, 1/2 tsp sweet paprika, freshly ground mixed pepper, salt and plaimil mayo - and spooned it up between two slices of foccacia.
The result was an immense, delicious sandwich. My seasoning for the salad was perfect, bland-textured yet salty and creamy, very authentic! The foccacia was better the day after too. It was soft and yielded complicitly to the bite, the onions adding some chewy, roasted contrast. I could have eaten another of these straight away, but I didn't as I'm trying to be a little more sensible in my eating decisions at the moment!

Today - Saturday - my kids have ballet and tap classes in the morning. So we're kind of up and at 'em first thing and they usually have a bowl of cold cereal and some juice to eat before we go rather than the leisurely breakfast I would prefer them to enjoy. So, I had a brainwave as I got them ready this morning. Breakfast-for-Lunch! Tasha at the Voracious Vegan posted tantalising pictures of her pumpkin pancakes yesterday, and as I still had about 2 cups of pumpkin puree leftover, I decided to make pumpkin-choc chip pancakes with Linda Mac sausages and baked beans. I used the recipe for Daniyell's banana pancakes from 'La Dolce Vegan!' but substituted 1/2 cup pumpkin for the banana, used hemp seed oil for added nutrients, upped the sweetener to 1/4 cup and stirred about 1/2 cup dark chocolate chunks and 1 tsp cinnamon (we ♥ cinnamon!) through the flour mix before adding the wet ingredients. I'd gone and bought a new non-stick frying pan from Tesco this morning while McGonnagle was at her dance class simply because my last really good one - that I'd had for about six years - finally died on me and two crap pans later, I couldn't stomach the thought of no pancakes in my future. Especially considering they are the birthday breakfast of choice for my little ones. This pan can stay because I think it just helped me make the best pancakes I've ever eaten.

Soft, fluffy and delicious with that spicy warmness of cinnamon and warm melty blobs of dark chocolate, these babies rocked!
I still have a little pumpkin left so I think I'm going to make some more foccacia. There's also the small matter of tidying the garden up for winter. Hope you all have a great weekend!
P.S. I'm just about to take the kids to Mill Farm for some spooky-dooky goings on, so I thought I'd dress in appropriate colours.

Yes, that's right - I really am a black-hearted old trout!

Over and Out....

They Eat Pumpkins, Don't They?

Well we do around here, that's for sure!
Bathgate has gone Halloween-mad, and with the inevitable outfits, candy and monkey nuts come pumpkins. They're selling 'carving' pumpkins at Tesco - real whoppers - for £1.50 each.
You know what we do with Carving pumpkins round here?

We Curry them.

And we roast them with just a spritz of olive oil to stop them from burning.

We really do! Don't bother peeling them, you can just scoop them out of their rinds once they're lovely and soft. And if there's room in the roasting tray, we may even put some chunks of swede in there too - it's all going to go in the same delicious soup. No salt or pepper, because while some of it's for soup, the rest goes into lovely soft spicy pumpkin muffins.

Pumpkin chocolate chunk muffins that we might eat naked with some Earl Grey tea before Judo, or we might leave them till they've been suitably attired for Halloween with some green cream cheeze frosting and happy little pumpkin heads.

And we might really push the boat out, and as we're having pumpkin muffins and pumkin and lentil soup, we might make some pumpkin and caramelised red onion foccacia bread to go with it.

Yeah! You know, I think we might just do that... (-_o)

Gratuitous 'Ho-Tep as burglar for Halloween Party' shot.

Queso Crazy!

No time to post, my ironing pile is almost sky high, the dishes need doing, I'm in the middle of clearing out the kids' bedroom and those little savages are shouting for popcorn as they watch 'Muppets From Space' but I just thought I'd show you guys what I knocked-up for lunch today.

I was reading a thread on the MSE forums about cheap and lazy dinners and came across a recipe for easy cheesy quesadillas. Now, I've never made these before but it sounded a piece of cake and I had a packet of 6 spinach tortillas in my bread bin so, as I 'm out of soup, why not? What to fill them with, though! Well, I had a can of red kidney beans leftover from our holiday so I combined that with 1/2 cup vegetable stock, cumin, garlic powder, cayenne and a couple tbsp passata to make refried beans. I stirred through some chopped spring onions at the last moment before smearing over a tortilla, drizzling with some leftover salad dressing from last night and sprinkling generously with nooch. On the other tortilla I spread some quick almond sour cream I'd just knocked-up. Just ground almonds, 2 tsp lemon juice, 1/4 tsp salt and enough cold water to form a thick paste.
Five minutes in an oil-misted frying pan, turning halfway through, and we had some seriously good, seriously hot eating. But what, no queso? I hear you ask. Well, that's the funny thing, you see - I didn't have the time or the inclination to knock any up so no, we went cheezeless for this one. Us Crazy Kids!

Sponsored by the letter 'T'

For tea, that is!

I've mentioned before about my love for tea and it's something Skint Vegan Dad and I share - leading to us having an entire shelf in our tiny little kitchen dedicated to different kinds of tea. And marmite, of course!
Sometimes I buy teas that end up sucking ass - too strong, too bitter, too spicy or too bland for our palates. But being the frugal kind of gal I am, I never throw them out. I find alternative ways to use them. So today I made a batch of iced tea using up some summer berries fruit tea, green tea with lemon and blueberry maple syrup for sweetness.

I used 4 fruit teabags, 1 green teabag and 3 tbsps syrup for 1 quart of water. It was a nice twist on the fruit cordials we usually drink, fruity yet not too sweet as I had a firm handle on the amount of sugar that was going in to it. McGonnagle - sharing my love of slightly tarter drinks - especially liked it.
This morning I got a special tea-time treat in the post - my extra wide straws, all the way from Thailand, perfect for bubble tea! So I cooked up some extra big rainbow tapioca pearls, threw together a quick prototype using earl grey tea and away we went!

Verdict? Chewy! I've never had bubble tea before but the idea of a drink with chewy tapioca in the bottom? How could I not like such a multi-sensory experience?! I think I'll need to play around with my recipe before I'm happy with it though.
My third tea experience came courtesy of the cold weather sniffles. Yup, my nose is dripping, I'm feeling tired and rundown, so what better way to combat this than by an all-out nutritional assault led by a hot cup of Dr Stuart's echinacea plus tea.

Protein-rich hemp milk and some soporific little gem salad with carrot, spring onion, pickles olives and a kickass dressing - inspired by Tasha from the Voracious Vegan - made from tahini, hemp seed oil and dijon mustard accompanied this brew. Lets hope it's enough to keeps the sniffles away!

Limey Oh Riley!

Pearsauce muffins with lime drizzle icing

So, I was really surprised to find I enjoyed being back in my kitchen carrying out all the day-to-day chores that had been kicking my ass before our Autumn break last week.

I started my day with a tall, creamy and refreshing glass of purple hemp milk.

Half a lime gave this a sweet and tangy kick that lifted it from the ordinary to the stellar. But then, as McGonnagle always says to me with a classic pre-teen eye-roll - 'You love hemp milk so much you want to marry it!' so I may be a little biased (-_o)!
I set about making a pan of smoky chipotle-spiced split pea soup for lunch. It was good upon first tasting but just needed a little something... I turned to the little green guys again, squeezing half a lime into the soup before tasting again. Perfect! I made 'Kissing Cousins' oat bread from 'La Dolce Vegan!' to go alongside and it was great - warm and slightly crumbly straight out of the oven with vegan margarine slathered on it.


And I even had time to whip-up a quick sweet for the kids after swimming. Applesauce muffins from 'How It All Vegan' microwaving a few squishy pears to make them pearsauce muffins instead. I ran out of agave as I was making these so they were a touch less sweet than I wanted them to be. Solution? Lime drizzle icing of course! Crunchy, tangy and adding that much-needed sweet boost to these lovely light muffins. My daughter tried these and said straight away they reminded her of Christmas. And with the raisins, sultanas, cinnamon and citrus flavours I kinda understand why.
This blogpost is courtesy of Lidl's current 5-for-50p offer on limes -I just can't stop buying them!
Over and out...