Last night, I decided, was going to be curry night, and Mr Thrifty concurred as he is always up for a good curry. I made an old favourite, and tried a couple of new dishes too.

I’ve made Succulent mountain mushrooms several times before; it’s easy and tastes waaay better than the mushroom dishes that our takeaway does (for starters, it isn’t swimming in oil… why do some restaurants think everything tastes better with a slick of oil on it?)

Then I tried my hand at tandoori tofu kebabs. They were really good, but somehow were lacking a certain je ne sais quoi. Perhaps because I forgot to sprinkle them with lemon juice & coarse salt before serving. Oops. Also, I think I pressed the tofu a bit too much, so I might skip that step next time.

I also wanted to make something with potatoes (cuz, ya just gotta have potatoes when you have a curry), and settled on Potatoes cooked with mustard seeds, from Madhur Jaffrey’s Eastern Vegetarian Cooking. The potatoes were golden and crunchy and delicious, and I’ll definitely be adding them to my rotation of Indian dishes.

Today for my MoFo vegan world tour, I am featuring a couple of tester recipes courtesy of Taymer and her blog of Caribbean delights, Vegan in the Sun.

First up is Cheeseless Vegan Bajan Macaroni Pie. I made this tonight and it was so tasty and delicious, I really had to fight back the little devil on my shoulder who was prodding me with his little pitchfork and saying “I know you’re full, but it tastes sooo good… go on, finish it off”.

It was so full of creamy cheesy goodness that Mr Thrifty couldn’t believe there was no commercial vegan cheese in it. The other thing I loved about this sauce is that it doesn’t congeal when it cools down the way cheese sauce made with commercial vegan cheese does.

After you’ve finished salivating over the photo, you really must hop on over to Taymer’s blog and check out the background on this culinary piece of heaven.

I made these scrumptious Coconut turnovers a couple of weeks back. Even though I messed up on the sweet dough (dough and I don’t always get along, doh!), they were still amazingly delicious. The almond-scented coconut filling was delightful. If you want to see what they are supposed to look like, be sure to check out Taymer’s food-porn shot here.

Tonight we had burgers and chips with salad, a favourite in the Thrifty household. I love trying new veggie burger recipes, and decided to try one using rice and nuts.

The burgers were made with wild and brown basmati rice, pecans, pumpkin seeds, mushrooms, onions and a few other things. They were really delicious, with a great texture: chewy from the rice and crunchy from the nuts and seeds. No mush-burgers here! They held together fairly well in the pan, although they crumbled a bit whilst being inhaled eaten.

I’m not going to share the recipe just yet, because I need to tweak it to improve the cohesiveness. But you can have a peak at the recipe I used for inspiration here, though I omitted some things and added others, so it’s really not that similar.

Last night we had Buddha bowls with spicy chilli sauce. I used Chinese cabbage from our allotment, and a really good seitan “beef” from Kristin at Beans and Greens.

However, since I’ve blogged about the spicy chilli sauce before, tonight’s post is about Buddha bowls with black bean sauce that I made a couple of weekends ago. The sauce is easy to make and does not have any of the chemicals with big long names that are often in store-bought sauces.

To make it, you’ll need Chinese fermented black beans, which are actually fermented and salted soya beans. I bought a bag a couple of years ago for less than a quid, and there is still plenty left (it keeps a long time).

This sauce is quite strong and salty, so you may want to make some adjustments if you don’t like salty sauces.

You can substitute tempeh or seitan for the tofu, although I think tofu works best for this sauce because of its neutral flavour.

Buddha bowls with black bean sauce

1. First, make the sauce. Crush the garlic in a mortar and pestle. Rinse the black beans, then add them to the mortar and crush them with the garlic until you have a paste. In a small saucepan, heat one tablespoon oil over low heat. Gently fry ginger and black bean/garlic mixture for a minute or so. Add bouillon cube and mash to break it up. Reserve two tablespoons of water and pour the rest into the saucepan. Add soy sauce, sherry, sugar & pepper, and bring sauce to a simmer. Mix reserved water with cornflour (cornstarch), then add to simmering sauce and cook until thickened. Keep warm.

2. Cut veggies into bite-size pieces, and set aside.

3. Heat a large wok (I use cast iron) over medium heat. Saute fried tofu until heated through, then remove and keep warm.

4. Increase heat to medium-high. Add one tablespoon oil to wok. Lightly salt the oil, then stir-fry veggies until crisp-tender. Periodically, add a tablespoon of water to create steam and help soften the veggies.

5. When everything is cooked, put rice (or noodles or quinoa) into bottom of two large bowls. Top with veggies and tofu, then with sauce.

Makes two servings.

Spaghetti & meatballs always reminds me of the “spaghetti scene” from Lady & the Tramp. These are so tasty that you may find it difficult to give that last meatball to your loved one.

I made them a bit different than my usual meatballs. I added a third of a recipe of mushroom burgers to the mix, and omitted the oil. They were really good, a bit firmer than usual. Next time I’ll probably just add extra mushrooms to my standard meatball recipe. I think the mushrooms make the meatballs moist without having to add oil.

The sauce was bolognese from Seeds of Change (which, despite the name, contains no meat or faux meat).

You know how you sometimes get a craving for food from your childhood, even though it’s not exotic, exquisite, elaborate, etc? With me, that craving is for Ukrainian food.

Holubtsi (cabbage rolls), perohi a.k.a. perogies (filled dumplings) and kielbasa (garlic sausage) were ubiquitous at family gatherings… on my mum’s side, at least. The cabbage rolls were sometimes vegetarian, and other times contained bits of ground cow or bacon. The perogies were almost always vegetarian, save for the odd bit of bacon that sometimes found its way into the potato perogies.

Wanting to recapture some of the flavours of my youth, but not feeling up to a marathon cooking session, I decided to make cabbage rolls yesterday.

I followed this recipe loosely. I poured boiling water over the cabbage to soften the leaves (instead of steaming). I sauteed the onions in vegan margarine, cooked white basmati rice until “al dente”, omitted the meat (obviously), and added a few slices of veggie bacon. To season the filling, I used smoked salt to enhance the smoky flavour of the bacon, along with freshly ground pepper. You really do need to over-season the filling, because the cabbage leaves diminish the flavour quite a bit.

I don’t think I’ve ever cooked cabbage rolls for two hours before, but doing so made them really tender. Yumm. They were served with pidpenyok (mushrooms with sour cream), based on this recipe, roast potatoes and salad.

Next I’ll be tackling perogies. The wait for vegan kielbasa may be a long one, though!

Mr Thrifty has been asking me for ages to try my hand at vegan Yorkshire puddings. Since I finally have a Yorkshire pudding tin, I have no more excuses.

Woo hoo… success on the first try!

I cannot take credit for this creation.. it’s from the now-defunct blog gorgeousveganblog.co.uk. They are super-easy to make, with only four ingredients: plain flour, gram (chickpea) flour, soya milk and salt.

They are sooo scrummy! Since I’ve never had traditional Yorkshire puddings, I relied on Mr Thrifty to critique their authenticity. He said the only differences between traditional ones and these vegan ones were that these had a slightly sweet taste (from the soya milk, which has a bit of sweetness that I’ve never really noticed before); and also they didn’t rise quite as much.

They were perfect with our Sunday roast dinner.

Sharing the plate is a beefy seitan roast, stuffing balls, roast potatoes, vegan gravy and stir-fried Chinese cabbage with garlic.

For those who aren’t familiar with Yorkshire puddings (which is probably everyone outside of the UK), they’re like a pancake on the bottom with a crispy coating on the sides & top and a hollow middle. They are traditionally served with Sunday roast dinners, but Mr Thrifty has guiltily admitted to having them with curry in the past.

In future, these will make a regular appearance on the plate whenever we have a roast dinner.

The gal who created the original recipe made them in a muffin tin, and the recipe yielded six puddings, but my Yorkshire puddingn tin only has four holes. There is more batter here than is needed for four puddings, so I’ll tweak the recipe in future.

Because I’m lazy, I didn’t convert the UK “weight” measurements to US “volume” measurements, but will do so next time I make this recipe.

Here, thanks to gorgeousveganblog.co.uk, is the recipe for making these scrummy delights!

Vegan Yorkshire puddings

4oz  plain (all-purpose) flour

salt to taste

1 heaped teaspoon gram flour (chickpea flour, besan)

half a pint of soya milk

vegetable oil

1. Preheat oven to 230C (450F). Pour a thin layer of vegetable oil in the holes of a Yorkshire pudding or muffin tin and place in oven. The oven needs to be hot and the oil needs to be hot.

2. Mix plain flour, salt and gram flour together with a whisk. Gradually pour in the soya milk taking in the flour slowly until all the milk is added and the flour is incorporated. Whisk with all your might until you can see bubbles. (I used the whisk attachment of my stick blender.) Note: the batter will be very thin, much thinner than pancake batter. It’s supposed to be that way.

3. Carefully remove tin from oven and fill the holes. If using a muffin tin, fill half way up; if using a Yorkshire pudding tin, fill all the way up. Put back in oven and cook for about 20 minutes. Don’t open the oven door to check them, as the oven needs to stay really hot. If your oven cooks hotter at the back than the front (like mine), you can rotate the tin halfway through, but do it quickly.

Enjoy!

This isn’t a very authentic Mexican recipe, as I’m pretty sure tofu isn’t used at all in traditional Mexican cuisine. However, it is exceedingly tasty.

I based my recipe on one from Matt of My Veggie Kitchen. His Cheezy tofu enchiladas looked and sounded so yummy, I knew I had to make them.

I modified Matt’s recipe a bit. I sauteed the onion in olive oil instead of just simmering it in the enchilada sauce. I also added red pepper and garlic. I didn’t have any salsa on hand, so I used fresh tomatoes instead. I omitted the olives (though next time, I would use them). To add more flavour, I scrambled the tofu instead of just crumbling it in straight from the package.

I used jarred enchilada sauce instead of a homemade one.

Matt’s Nacho cheeze sauce was great; because I couldn’t find pimentos or diced green chillies, I substituted a bit of red pepper simmered in water to replace those ingredients. I used twice the amount of nacho sauce for the enchiladas: 1 cup nacho sauce for half a recipe of enchiladas.

The package of organic flour tortillas I bought contained six tortillas, so I used all of them for half a recipe; this made enough for three servings.

The enchiladas were so delicious, I had to stop myself from having thirds (no hope for avoiding seconds).

A very successful result… thanks, Matt!

I’ve been wanting to make peanut sauce for awhile now, so I decided to go to Indonesia for inspiration and a recipe. (I didn’t literally go to Indonesia, of course… that would just be silly.)

The recipe is from Vegetarian Times. I used to buy VT, many moons ago, but found the recipes kind of hit and miss. This one sounded like a winner, though.

My changes: I used onion instead of shallot; 1/2 sachet of coconut cream mixed with water instead of 1/2 cup coconut milk; added an extra tablespoon of soy sauce; omitted the lime juice (because I forgot) and the sugar (the sauce seemed sweet enough without it).

I served the peanut sauce over pan-fried tofu, plus greens from our allotment (spinach, perpetual spinach, turnip greens, broccoletto and chinese cabbage), a few ’shrooms and a package of baby corn. And rice.

The verdict? In a word: spectacular. Mr Thrifty even finished the leftover sauce with a bit of bread, followed by scraping the pot with a spoon.

The only problem with it is that the calorie content is probably quite significant.

But so worth it.

This is a quick & easy pasta dish, perfect for a busy day when it’s already well into evening and the stove has not yet been lit. Not authentically Italian, perhaps, but delicious.

I used this recipe, omitting the cheese, and adding some veggie prawns for protein. Instead of a tin of cherry tomatoes, I used passata (tomato sauce) that I had left over in the fridge, and added fresh cherry tomatoes from our allotment (just about the last of them).

I cooked the fresh tomatoes with the garlic for about seven or eight minutes before adding the passata and basil.

The veggie prawns were sauteed separately with a some freshly minced garlic, and were added on top of the pasta for serving.

Squisito!