This week I bought a box of Quorn fishless fish fingers. I also have a packet of Quorn ham in the fridge, veggie sausage mix in the cupboard and soya mince, veggie bacon and veggie sausages in the freezer. I know what you’re thinking, “just what sort of vegetarian is this woman”. If you are a vegetarian yourself, you might be disgusted that I am eating these processed foods which are designed to resemble meat and if you eat meat you might be wondering why if I am prepared to eat something parading itself as meat why don’t I actually eat meat itself.
So, here’s my answer. I am under no illusion that my veggie sausages are anything like real sausages (having said that a fellow mum didn’t realise the sausage rolls at N’s birthday party were actually vegetarian) and I don’t care. I haven’t eaten ‘real’ meat for 25 years. I know I used to like the taste of meat (I became a vegetarian for ethical and financial reasons not for culinary ones), but I can’t actually remember what meat tastes like. I do know I don’t like the smell of meat now, so I am personally quite glad that ‘fake’ meat isn’t too close to the real thing. Fake meat does however, lend protein and variety to my diet and sometimes a welcome short cut.
I do like lentils, nuts, rice and beans and curiously, if cooking for non-vegetarians these are the sort of ingredients I’ll stick too. I only very rarely and with extreme caution give them ‘fake’ meat because although I do know some meat eaters who eat vegetarian sausages and mince through choice (it tending to be lower in fat than its meat counterparts), why compete in a losing race – I can choose meatless cuisines from all over the world that were designed to be that way rather than dressing soya up in lamb’s clothing.
Plus S really likes fake meat. He was a confirmed vegetarian long before we met, but he came to it at an older age than me and he’s not keen on cooking; he’d happily eat veggie burger and chips every day if I let him. I don’t, but cooking for a family’s is about compromise, so this week fishless fish fingers are on the menu.
Speaking of which here is the menu this week:
Saturday – Chiara’s mozzarella pasta and tomato, red onion and cucumber salad (with enough for the freezer)
Sunday -Steamed suet pudding (or stuffed marrow if there are any when I go to the allotment) with roast veg (parsnips, potatoes, carrots and beetroot)
Monday – Mixed pepper fajitas and guacamole
Tuesday – Fishless fish fingers, chips and peas
Wednesday – Veggie sausages, mash, veg and onion gravy
Thursday – Baked potatoes with cheese and baked beans
Friday – Pasta with (veggie) herb and meatballs
Crikey, there’s a lot of comfort food in there. I suppose that’s a feature of the nights drawing in!
Monday, 10 February 2014
Vegan Donner Kebabs!
Here’s our menu for this week
Saturday – Suet pastry crunchy pasties with boiled potatoes
and peas
Sunday – Cheats roast beef with yorkshire puddings, roast
potatoes and veg.
Monday – Vegan donner kebabs and chips
Tuesday – Thai Green curry (from a couple of weeks ago in
the freezer)
Wednesday – Chick pea curry
Thursday – Stroganoff
Friday – Cashew nut teriyaki
This week’s spend - £38, but I had vouchers for £6, giving a
grand total of just over £32.
The pasties were filled with a swede, onion, carrot, celery and red
lentil mix. I used half marg and half veggie suet to make the pastry. I made 10 pasties, so that's at least two more meals stashed in the freezer.
Sunday and Monday’s dinners were made possible thanks to a
vegan beef roasting joint. The ingredient list for this anomaly is pretty small
and is based on wheat gluten. It’s not cheap at nearly £4.50 per joint, but my
Mum spotted these in a well known health food shop before Christmas reduced to
a £1 each, so I bought a couple and stashed them in the freezer. One joint will
do two dinners for us – a roast on Sunday and kebabs on Monday (S says the
veggie meat is quite like donner meat, but without the horror of having to eat
an unspecified meat that’s been rotating for an unspecified amount of time.
We’ll have these in pitta breads with salad and jalapenos.
I haven’t made teriyaki sauce before, but I’ve got some
fresh ginger which needs using up and still have garlic from N’s mum and dad’s
allotment, so I thought why not give it a whirl.
I’m hoping to supplement our diet with our first foraged
food of the year this week, alexanders and hairy bittercress, but more on that
another time. . . .
No Egg Cakes
Twice in the last week I have observed Facebook statuses
which tell of baking crises during which baking is forestalled by a lack of
eggs. No eggs, no problem, I say. On one occasion I recommended a tablespoon of
vinegar for each missing egg (reacts with the bicarb in self raising flour to
produce bubbles and hence a rise – you may need to add extra bicarb if using
plain flour) and on another I promised to pass on recipes. So since the weather
outside is stormy, I’ve decided to bake a cake with N and this is a perfect
excuse to blog two of my favourite cake recipes for my eggless friend.
Both these recipes use citrus instead of vinegar, which
gives a nice flavour, but I promise you, if you use vinegar instead (as many
vegan chocolate cakes call for) you won’t taste it in the finished product.
Mum’s Lemon Cake
This is my mum’s invention and doesn’t call for any weird
ingredients like soya flour (soya milk is readily available, but you could
substitute for normal milk if you’re not concerned about being dairy free).
8 oz of SR flour
2 tsp of baking powder
3 oz of cornflour
Pinch of salt
4 fl oz of oil (I use sunflower)
2 fl oz of soya milk
Rind and juice of 2 medium lemons*
9 fl oz of water (including the juice of the above)*
6 oz of caster sugar*
*I couldn’t get unwaxed lemons so I used all lemon juice instead
and in my efforts to reduce my sugar intake I cut the sugar down to 4 oz
(futile really as I’m going to smear the cake with butter cream).
This is the easiest method ever!
1.
Grease and line the cake tins.
2.
Preheat the oven to c. 180 degrees or gas mark
5.
3.
Weigh out the dry ingredients and mix.
4.
Measure out the wet ingredients and pour into
the dry ingredients.
5.
Mix and pour into the cake tins.
6.
Bake for c. 30 minutes.
7.
Cool and sandwich with lemon buttercream (I use
vegan marg) or lemon curd.
On reflection having made this cake, the cornflour makes the cake slightly chewy. Next time, as I have it in the cupboard, I'll use soya flour instead.
N did the piping on this. Not bad for a 3 year old.
Coffee Cake
This is one of my best cakes. Every time I make I get lots
of requests for the recipe and I have been told by more than one person that
it’s the best coffee cake they’ve ever tasted!
10 oz of SR flour
2 oz of soya flour (many big supermarkets sell this, or you
can get it cheaply from your local health food shop – I’ve known people to just
substitute flour or cornflour, I haven’t tried this myself)
1 tsp of bicarbonate of soda
8 oz of sugar
8 fl oz of oil
5 fl oz of orange juice
5 fl oz of boiling water mixed with a heaped teaspoon of
instant coffee, then cooled.
1.5 tsp of vanilla essence.
1.
Grease and line the cake tins.
2.
Preheat the oven to c. 160 degrees or gas mark
4.
3.
Sift the dry ingredients together.
4.
Measure out the liquids and whisk.
5.
Mix wet and dry ingredients together.
6.
Bake for 30 minutes.
7.
Cool and sandwich together with coffee butter
cream and decorate with walnuts.
The consistency of the batters for these cakes will probably
be looser then you are used to. Don’t worry, it’s completely normal and will bake fine.
Give them a try and let me know what you think.
Wednesday, 5 February 2014
Sugar is the new tobacco!
So last week Horizon was about the ills of sugar, which is something I have considered before on this blog. In truth I have a love hate relationship with sugar: I have a very sweet tooth, but I am fully aware of how bad sugar is. When I was a kid and I used to ask for sweets my Dad told me how the people who make sweets didn't like me very much and he was right. Now he commonly refers to sugar as the 'Devil's Grains'. Anyway, despite knowing all this I still struggle with suagr addiction and so does N, despite my best efforts early on.
The chief offender is my well meaning Grandad. He's just so lovely, but comes from a time when you showed children love by giving them sweets. Since my maternity leave started he has literally showered us with sweets and chocolate. I've had to throw it away (although the idea of throwing food away goes against the grain we were inundated) more than once. Fortunately, I was somewhat protected by reverting to veganism, but poor N was constantly taunted by the sweets in the tin and the chocolate in the cupboard.
So after the latest clear out I decided to take action and restock with healthy snacks. My (re)discovery was toddler snacks in the pharmacy aisle at the supermarket - organic sugarless snacks - brilliant, but why do food producers think that wanting to be healthy stops after 2! Not for us at least, dehydrated banana chips (as opposed to driedf and sweetened), organic maize tomato snacks and fruit juice ginger bread went into the trolley. I also saw they had oat bars, but thought I could make my own.
My first attempt was recipe free and turned into extra granola ;-) So I decided to find a recipe. I'm sorry to say I can't remember where I found the recipe (so if anyone can rectify my plagiarism then please do), but this is roughly the recipe (as I can remember):
3 apples grated (skin, seeds and all)
300 ml of apple juice
160 g of raisins (I think)
30 g of seeds (I used a misture of pumpkin and sunflower)
200 g (I think of oats).
couple of teaspoons of cinnamon
Cook the apple in the apple juice until it's cooked to a mush.
Add all the other ingredients.
Press into a greased 22cm dish and bake at c. gas mark 4 for about 25 minutes (keep an eye on them as I can't quite remember the timings).
Leave to cool for 10 minutes then score in the tin and leave to cool.
Turn out and eat!
Brilliant, sugar free oaty snacks, yum.
The chief offender is my well meaning Grandad. He's just so lovely, but comes from a time when you showed children love by giving them sweets. Since my maternity leave started he has literally showered us with sweets and chocolate. I've had to throw it away (although the idea of throwing food away goes against the grain we were inundated) more than once. Fortunately, I was somewhat protected by reverting to veganism, but poor N was constantly taunted by the sweets in the tin and the chocolate in the cupboard.
So after the latest clear out I decided to take action and restock with healthy snacks. My (re)discovery was toddler snacks in the pharmacy aisle at the supermarket - organic sugarless snacks - brilliant, but why do food producers think that wanting to be healthy stops after 2! Not for us at least, dehydrated banana chips (as opposed to driedf and sweetened), organic maize tomato snacks and fruit juice ginger bread went into the trolley. I also saw they had oat bars, but thought I could make my own.
My first attempt was recipe free and turned into extra granola ;-) So I decided to find a recipe. I'm sorry to say I can't remember where I found the recipe (so if anyone can rectify my plagiarism then please do), but this is roughly the recipe (as I can remember):
3 apples grated (skin, seeds and all)
300 ml of apple juice
160 g of raisins (I think)
30 g of seeds (I used a misture of pumpkin and sunflower)
200 g (I think of oats).
couple of teaspoons of cinnamon
Cook the apple in the apple juice until it's cooked to a mush.
Add all the other ingredients.
Press into a greased 22cm dish and bake at c. gas mark 4 for about 25 minutes (keep an eye on them as I can't quite remember the timings).
Leave to cool for 10 minutes then score in the tin and leave to cool.
Turn out and eat!
Brilliant, sugar free oaty snacks, yum.
Urgh, the weather is horrible. Comfort food is called for. Plus I am still nursing a cold which followed a really horrible virus (hence no post last week).
So the menu this week is as follows:
Saturday - S and N had pizza and I had, erm, can't remember, but something easy, some pasta I think!
Sunday - Homemade pie, mashed potato and assorted veg
Monday - Tofu hash
Tuesday - Tacos
Wednesday - Stew and dumplings (from the freezer)
Thursday - Fish fingers and chips (yes, vegan fish fingers really)
Friday - Kidney bean pasta
So there's a lot of soya and processed food this week, but as I said I am still nursing a cold and needing easy meals.
This week I went over budget - £46 but that followed a bargain shop of £32 the week before, so it's swings and roundabouts I guess.
Here's my recipe for tofu hash (I'll try and upload a pic too)
1 block of tofu,
3 medium potatoes
2 tomatoes
half a can of sweetcorn
half a packet of green beans
2 small onions
Drain the tofu, wrap in kitchen paper and press witha heavy book on a plate.
Cut the tofu into cubes and fry, drain on kitchen paper.
Peel the potatoes and cut into cubes, parboil.
Saute the onion and tomatoes.
Add the cooked potato, it will mush up a bit.
Lightly blanch the beans.
Add the sweetcorn and beans.
Serve.
I also deglazed the pan with a bit of balsamic vinegar and put that on the side.
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Hmm, I promise it was nicer than this looks. Must learn to take better food photos!
So the menu this week is as follows:
Saturday - S and N had pizza and I had, erm, can't remember, but something easy, some pasta I think!
Sunday - Homemade pie, mashed potato and assorted veg
Monday - Tofu hash
Tuesday - Tacos
Wednesday - Stew and dumplings (from the freezer)
Thursday - Fish fingers and chips (yes, vegan fish fingers really)
Friday - Kidney bean pasta
So there's a lot of soya and processed food this week, but as I said I am still nursing a cold and needing easy meals.
This week I went over budget - £46 but that followed a bargain shop of £32 the week before, so it's swings and roundabouts I guess.
Here's my recipe for tofu hash (I'll try and upload a pic too)
1 block of tofu,
3 medium potatoes
2 tomatoes
half a can of sweetcorn
half a packet of green beans
2 small onions
Drain the tofu, wrap in kitchen paper and press witha heavy book on a plate.
Cut the tofu into cubes and fry, drain on kitchen paper.
Peel the potatoes and cut into cubes, parboil.
Saute the onion and tomatoes.
Add the cooked potato, it will mush up a bit.
Lightly blanch the beans.
Add the sweetcorn and beans.
Serve.
I also deglazed the pan with a bit of balsamic vinegar and put that on the side.
Hmm, I promise it was nicer than this looks. Must learn to take better food photos!
Sunday, 19 January 2014
What's in the cupboard
I want to talk about store cupboard staples this week, but first I'll start with this week's menu:
Saturday - Shepherd's pie (freezer) and sweetcorn
Sunday - Crunchy pie (freezer), brussel sprouts, mange tout, roast potatoes and carrots
Monday - Butternut squash Thai Green Curry
Tuesday - Sausage, mash, peas and onion gravy (this is one of my favourite meals ever)
Wednesday - Nut spaghetti bolognaise
Thurdsay - Chips etc
Friday - Pasta bake
This week's shopping was a wee bit over at £46.
I would also like to add my onion bhajis last Friday were a triumph. Here's the recipe I used.
Ingredients (these are approximate)
About a cup full of gram flour
About 3/4 cup of SR flour
Bit of salt
2 tsps of cumin (I didn't have any ground, so I toasted some and ground it in a pestle and mortar)
2 tsps of tumeric
1 tsp of cayenne pepper
1 tsp of garum masala
Lots of sliced onion (I used 4 small onions)
Enough water to make a gloopy batter
Oil for frying
I heated about 1 cm of oil (I used sumflower) in a frying pan until it was really hot.
Meanwhile I mixed the dry ingredients together and then added the onions, mixing them about so they were coverd. I then added the water until it was a thick batter.
I added desert spoon sized dollops to the pan, let them set on one side and then turned them, once or twice until browned. I then drained them on kitchen paper.
These quantities of ingredients made about 15 onion bhajis. Yum!
But the store cupboard, yes, that's the point of this post. . .
I think having a well stocked cupboard is essential to making cheap meals. Sometimes I only need a bit of flour, or a spoonful of raisins, to make something, but if I had to buy everything I needed for every recipe it would be an onerous task shopping for all this cooking. It does make it hard for me to cost things out though. I forget what a packet of rice costs, let along diving that cost by the small amount I've used. What I do though is try and balance things out so the cupboard is always stocked with essentials and these are bought within the weekly budget.
So what are the essentials? They are (in my humble opinion) as follows:
Plain flour, self raising flour, gram flour and soya flour
Cornflour
Pasta
Long grain rice
Sugar (icing sugar and golden granulated as standard - I know you're meant to use caster for cakes, but I'm not a stickler for this)
Vanilla essence (although I've run out of this at the moment, but I do have vanilla pods)
Raisins or sultanas
Cocoa powder
Seeds (usually pumpkin and sunflower)
Red lentils
Pearl barley
Dried beans and/or chick peas
Other grains such as millet, quinoa, cous cous and/or bulgar wheat
Sunflower oil
Olive oil
White wine vinegar
Malt vinegar
Chopped tomatoes
Tomato puree
Baked beans
Soya sauce
Yeast extract
Course sea salt
Pepper corns
Cayenne pepper
Cumin
Tumeric
Sage
Thyme
Oregano
Peanut butter
Vegetarian gravy granules
I also have peas in the freezer, onions and potatoes and oats in the pantry.
Various other bits come and go in the cupboards, other herbs and spices, stock powders, oils, vinegars and nuts, but what I have described above is my starting point. With these ingredients I can add a few other fresh things and make a meal (or even resort to what's here if needs be). So I make sure I don't run out of these things. I wonder what your staples are?
Saturday - Shepherd's pie (freezer) and sweetcorn
Sunday - Crunchy pie (freezer), brussel sprouts, mange tout, roast potatoes and carrots
Monday - Butternut squash Thai Green Curry
Tuesday - Sausage, mash, peas and onion gravy (this is one of my favourite meals ever)
Wednesday - Nut spaghetti bolognaise
Thurdsay - Chips etc
Friday - Pasta bake
This week's shopping was a wee bit over at £46.
I would also like to add my onion bhajis last Friday were a triumph. Here's the recipe I used.
Ingredients (these are approximate)
About a cup full of gram flour
About 3/4 cup of SR flour
Bit of salt
2 tsps of cumin (I didn't have any ground, so I toasted some and ground it in a pestle and mortar)
2 tsps of tumeric
1 tsp of cayenne pepper
1 tsp of garum masala
Lots of sliced onion (I used 4 small onions)
Enough water to make a gloopy batter
Oil for frying
I heated about 1 cm of oil (I used sumflower) in a frying pan until it was really hot.
Meanwhile I mixed the dry ingredients together and then added the onions, mixing them about so they were coverd. I then added the water until it was a thick batter.
I added desert spoon sized dollops to the pan, let them set on one side and then turned them, once or twice until browned. I then drained them on kitchen paper.
These quantities of ingredients made about 15 onion bhajis. Yum!
But the store cupboard, yes, that's the point of this post. . .
I think having a well stocked cupboard is essential to making cheap meals. Sometimes I only need a bit of flour, or a spoonful of raisins, to make something, but if I had to buy everything I needed for every recipe it would be an onerous task shopping for all this cooking. It does make it hard for me to cost things out though. I forget what a packet of rice costs, let along diving that cost by the small amount I've used. What I do though is try and balance things out so the cupboard is always stocked with essentials and these are bought within the weekly budget.
So what are the essentials? They are (in my humble opinion) as follows:
Plain flour, self raising flour, gram flour and soya flour
Cornflour
Pasta
Long grain rice
Sugar (icing sugar and golden granulated as standard - I know you're meant to use caster for cakes, but I'm not a stickler for this)
Vanilla essence (although I've run out of this at the moment, but I do have vanilla pods)
Raisins or sultanas
Cocoa powder
Seeds (usually pumpkin and sunflower)
Red lentils
Pearl barley
Dried beans and/or chick peas
Other grains such as millet, quinoa, cous cous and/or bulgar wheat
Sunflower oil
Olive oil
White wine vinegar
Malt vinegar
Chopped tomatoes
Tomato puree
Baked beans
Soya sauce
Yeast extract
Course sea salt
Pepper corns
Cayenne pepper
Cumin
Tumeric
Sage
Thyme
Oregano
Peanut butter
Vegetarian gravy granules
I also have peas in the freezer, onions and potatoes and oats in the pantry.
Various other bits come and go in the cupboards, other herbs and spices, stock powders, oils, vinegars and nuts, but what I have described above is my starting point. With these ingredients I can add a few other fresh things and make a meal (or even resort to what's here if needs be). So I make sure I don't run out of these things. I wonder what your staples are?
Monday, 13 January 2014
Why Do I Write This Blog
As I made my random granola I started to wonder why I write this blog. My granola was inspired by Jack Monroe's recipe. Jack writes a very succesful blog which documents her frugal food journey - much more frugal than mine and more accesible (a lot of her recipes are vegetarian, but she does include meat and fish) - who really wants to hear about my weird vegan food? Jack also calls herself a writer and justifably so with a column in the Guardian and a book deal. Do I want to be a writer? Yes, of course, a little bit. It was a childhood dream and I'm sure I've got a book in me, but I know I'm not really a writer. I haven't got the skill or the patience - this blog isn't an exercise in getting noticed by publishers or honing my craft.
So what's it all about then?
Well, I guess a little bit of me hopes that people I don't know might stumble upon this and find out something they wanted to know. Many of my ideas for my weird vegan diet and experiments to find natural cleaning and body products come from people's blogs I found through Google searches.
And it's a little bit about showing how you can eat cheaply (my food isn't the cheapest around, but less than £40 a week for 63 meals isn't bad). I know many people won't want to eat lentils, nuts and beans as often as I do, but as many of my meals substitute these things for meat, they could be reversed again.
It's also about writing stuff in general for other people to read, not as a career move. I'm lucky enough that I already have a career I quite like and don't have the pressure of needing to be good at this.
But most of all it's a project for me and I love project's (especially the ones that are a bit like school homework - what a geek). I can ramble on about food and turn it into a project - it doesn't hurt anyone or cost me anything. I get to have a go at blogging and when I've got some more time I look forward to looking properly at the design and maybe even do a bit of coding (I can be a super geek sometimes). So yes, it's pretty self-indulgent and I thank anyone who's reading this for indulging me, and cyber space for giving me the opportunity.
So if you find this blog and find something useful on it, then I am very pleased, but if you don't, then I don't mind either, I'm still having fun writing it and thinking about it.
So what's it all about then?
Well, I guess a little bit of me hopes that people I don't know might stumble upon this and find out something they wanted to know. Many of my ideas for my weird vegan diet and experiments to find natural cleaning and body products come from people's blogs I found through Google searches.
And it's a little bit about showing how you can eat cheaply (my food isn't the cheapest around, but less than £40 a week for 63 meals isn't bad). I know many people won't want to eat lentils, nuts and beans as often as I do, but as many of my meals substitute these things for meat, they could be reversed again.
It's also about writing stuff in general for other people to read, not as a career move. I'm lucky enough that I already have a career I quite like and don't have the pressure of needing to be good at this.
But most of all it's a project for me and I love project's (especially the ones that are a bit like school homework - what a geek). I can ramble on about food and turn it into a project - it doesn't hurt anyone or cost me anything. I get to have a go at blogging and when I've got some more time I look forward to looking properly at the design and maybe even do a bit of coding (I can be a super geek sometimes). So yes, it's pretty self-indulgent and I thank anyone who's reading this for indulging me, and cyber space for giving me the opportunity.
So if you find this blog and find something useful on it, then I am very pleased, but if you don't, then I don't mind either, I'm still having fun writing it and thinking about it.
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