Here is our Christmas dinner… vegan turkey roast with stuffing, roasted potatoes with rosemary, roasted parsnips & carrots, sprouts, sunspuds (aka Jerusalem artichokes), leeks, stuffing balls, and of course, gravy.
Wishing a happy and joyous festive season to all creatures!
It is freakin’ cold here, the temperature has not above freezing for days, which is very unusual for these parts. We’re very frugal with the heating (I blame my Scottish highland ancestors) and it’s difficult to get enthused about spending a couple of hours creating something spectacular in the kitchen when it’s only 11C (52F) inside.
So today we had a meal that required spending minimal time in the frigid kitchen: slow cooker chili. It’s similar (but simpler) than the chili I made a couple of weeks ago in the slow cooker. I gave it a Mexican twist by using passata (tomato sauce) and salsa instead of tinned tomatoes, and leftover taco seasoning mix instead of the individual spices. It tasted great, with a slight sweetness from the salsa.
We served it with garlic toast and a Caesar salad.
Well, it appears I’ve fallen off the daily-vegan-MoFo-blogging wagon. But never mind, today I bring you — all together in one post — a week of vegan meals!
It’s difficult to get excited enough to blog about the same meals over and over. But I did take pictures of most of our week’s meals, and even went into the vault to share a couple of cat pics.
Monday: homemade veggie hotdogs with Greek salad and potato wedges. That weird-looking stuff on the hotdogs is in fact caramelised onion chutney from Costco, and even though it doesn’t look appetising in the photo, it tastes really yummy.
Tuesday: another Buddha bowl stir-fry. Apparently, we eat stir-fries a lot. Since one looks pretty much the same as another, I didn’t take a photo, but I did take one of Mr Thrifty holding this giant Chinese radish. One of our allotment neighbours, Yan, gave it to us. I’m definitely going to grow these next year if I can get some seed from Yan. Chinese radish is great to eat raw, and awesome in a stir-fry.
Wednesday: veggie weiners & beans on toast, wedges (again) and rocket with sun-dried tomatoes.
Thursday: homemade veggie burgers, oven chips and a salad made from shredded carrots and yacon. We grew yacon for the first time this year, and we are going to keep growing it. It produces big, crisp, juicy tubers that are great in stir-fries or raw in salad.
Friday we had pita pizzas again, with Cheezly, mushrooms, onions and veggie bacon bits. Evidently I didn’t take a photo, however, here is one of The King instead.
Saturday: Buddha bowls yet again. And a photo of Princess Caraboo.
Sunday: roast dinner with veggie haggis version 2.0, roasted potatoes & Jerusalem artichokes, mushroom gravy, peas, braised leeks and sweetcorn from the freezer (grown at our allotment this summer). The haggis turned out more like commercial veggie haggis, but I think I prefer the one I made last week. Next time I’ll aim for a result in between the two.
There you have it. A week of delectable vegan meals!
A typical weekend of eats here in Thriftyville.
Friday night being (of course) pizza night.
Saturday, a mezze meal… little bit of this & that, a great way to use up leftovers.
And that great British Sunday tradition, the roast dinner!
Friday’s pizza was made with Sainsbury’s onion & balsamic vinegar pitta breads, topped with pasta sauce, mozza Cheezly, mushrooms, spinach and sweetcorn. Scrummy! If you’ve never had sweetcorn on pizza (it’s popular here in the UK, but not on the other side of the pond), then you really must try it.
Saturday’s mezze consisted of panfried Spanish Padron peppers, Linda McCartney veggie sausage rolls, mixed bean salad (a markdown from the deli), Israeli couscous salad (ditto), and a big Caesar salad. A delightful mix of flavours and textures.
Sunday’s roast dinner featured homemade vegetarian haggis. I know what you are wondering. Why would a vegan want to recreate a Scottish speciality traditionally made with sheep innards and oatmeal? The answer is, well, because commercial vegetarian haggis — made with oatmeal, onion, lentils, mushrooms & kidney beans — tastes pretty darn good, and it’s a very budget meal. Besides, as Nac Mac Vegan points out, there is evidence that the original haggis was vegetarian.
The recipe I made was adapted from the 1904 book Reform cookery book: Up-to-date health cookery for the twentieth century by Mrs. Jean Oliver Mill. I added too much water to the mixture before steaming, making it too moist, so I ended up frying the slices after to firm them up. But we both really liked the haggis, and I’ll be making it again. It tasted different to — and much better than — commercial vegetarian haggis.
Alongside were roasted potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, carrots, peppers and mushrooms; as well as Brussels sprouts done in the slow cooker. The sprouts were pretty good, but I have to say that I do like roasted sprouts better.
Happy weekend MoFo!
One of the great British traditions is the Sunday Roast. Never mind that a Sunday Roast usually consists of carved up pieces of animals, vegan roast dinners are just so much better!
Today I decided to make a “meat”loaf, and chose this recipe from Hardcore Herbivore, made with TVP, oats and seasonings.
I took the suggestion in one of the comments to substitute half the TVP with okara. I wasn’t sure whether to use “wet” okara (straight out of the soymilk maker), or okara that had been squeezed dry. I ended up using squeezed-dry okara, but with enough water added to make it about the consistency of okara straight from the soymilk machine.
I used leftover pasta sauce instead of ketchup. (There is somewhat of a ketchup emergency here at the moment.)
I made half a recipe, and instead of baking it in a loaf pan, used three ramekins instead.
The “meat”loaf turned out really well, though it was still a bit soft on the inside after baking, so I’ll tweak the recipe slightly next time.
We also had roast potatoes (obviously), brussels sprouts, maple roasted squash & parsnips and braised leeks. And gravy, of course.
Which just proves that a delicious, satisfying roast dinner can easily be made without any animal products whatsoever. Yay!
Who doesn’t love pizza?
Tonight I wanted to make a mushroom and pepperoni-type pizza. At first I was going to make seitan pepperoni, but then I came across a recipe for pepperoni topping made from TVP from Joni at JustTheFood.
I made half the recipe and tweaked the seasonings somewhat (using just 1/2 teaspoon liquid smoke, which was about right for our tastebuds; less cayenne and salt; and fennel instead of aniseed.)
Next time I will lightly saute the mixture before topping the pizza, because it was too moist for my thin-crust pizza and I really had to cook it well to firm the crust.
But the taste and texture were great! I am sold on TVP toppings for pizza. Next time I’m in the mood for a meaty-type pizza I am going to try making Italian-sausage flavoured TVP.
I used Cheezly super-melting cheese (which melts best when it’s put directly on top of the sauce, underneath the toppings), sauteed mushrooms and onions, and fresh grape tomatoes.
Scrummy!
Occasionally I buy faux meaty things instead of making them myself… but sometimes it’s research, ya know, so that I can try to back-engineer the products to make at home.
My favourite company for back-engineering attempts is German company Viana. They make a huge range of vegan faux meaty things, and all of the ones I’ve tried are scrumptious. They use less processed ingredients (like tofu & wheat gluten), rather than stuff like “isolated soy protein”, which makes back-engineering easier.
Tonight we had Viana “Chickin nuggets”. They were good-sized and had minimal coating on them, which made them seem very substantial. The flavour was a bit different to other faux chicken things I’ve had, not as “chickeny”, but very tasty nonetheless. I’d definitely buy them again (if I can’t figure out how to duplicate them, that is).
We served them with homemade potato wedges and vegan Caesar salad.
Nom!
Awhile back, I came across a recipe for slow-cooked seitan and have been wanting to try it ever since.
Usually I am not coordinated enough to start preparing a meal the day before, but this weekend, I was.
The recipe for Roast Beast (slow-cooked seitan “beef”) is courtesy of Kreeli’s Tasties. I made 1/3 the recipe, and modified the seasonings. After I mixed up the ingredients, I realised that there is a newer version of the recipe here, which uses less tapioca starch and more oatmeal. I think I will try the modified version next time, to make it just a bit firmer.
But the version I made was excellent anyway. The roast is cooked overnight in a slow cooker… I cooked it for 18 hours on low, then switched the setting to warm for another couple of hours. The seitan was very juicy and tender, quite different from any seitan I’ve made in the past. Mr Thrifty had the idea to pan-fry slices of the cooked roast in a bit of oil to give them a slightly crispy exterior, and it worked a treat.
The roast was served with Dijon mustard and gravy, along with stuffing balls (Paxo, alas, not homemade), maple-glazed parsnips, sauteed brussels sprouts and roasted potatoes.
Mmmm, I do love a good Sunday roast dinner!
Anyone who makes their own soymilk knows all about the okara mountain. The soybean pulp left over from a batch of homemade soymilk used to just get composted here at Chez Thrifty.
Now, however, I’ve discovered that okara makes a fine substitute for tofu in homemade sausages and hotdogs.
With okara, the raw sausage “dough” isn’t quite as easy to work with as when tofu is used, because it’s slightly less cohesive. The sausages are also a bit more delicate when cooked, so be gentle with them. But okara makes a very fine sausage indeed.
Yesterday, I made hotdogs using okara, and today we had a simple supper of hotdogs, pan-fried spuds and coleslaw.
I followed my standard hot dog recipe, except instead of tofu, I used the okara from one batch of soymilk from my SoyQuick Premier 930P. I use okara that is well-squeezed, which yields a weight of 190-200g. I then add water to the okara so that the total weight of okara & water is 250g. This okara/water mix is used instead of the 250g of tofu in the original recipe. Other than that, the recipe and directions are the same.
You may be tempted to use wet okara instead of well-squeezed okara plus water. But I would advise against this, as the one time I tried it, the dough (and resulting sausages) turned out too soft. I think the soymilk in wet okara pulp was the culprit.
I should also add that I remove the skins from the soaked soybeans before making soymilk with them. I think this makes a superior okara.
Today, November 5th, is Guy Fawkes Night, which originated as a celebration of the failure of Mr Fawkes, a Catholic, to carry through to fruition his plan to assassinate the Protestant king of England with a cellar full of gunpowder, back in 1605.
Nowadays it’s an excuse to light bonfires and set off fireworks.
So what better for this night of fire than a meal to set the tastebuds alight?
Okay, so the veggie “ribs” weren’t actually that hot. They were pleasantly spicy, though.
I used this recipe for the ribs (which are made using “bean curd sticks”, which taste much better than they sound), using Levi Roots’ Reggae Reggae sauce for the barbecue sauce. Since the bottle is only 315g, I made up the difference to 500g [2 cups] using passata [tomato sauce]. Ribs made from bean curd stick turn out pleasantly chewy, with none of the nasty fatty/gristly bits you get with the “dead-animal-parts” type of ribs.
Then to give Mr Thrifty his potato fix, I made homemade tater tots. OMG were they good. The first batch fell apart in the oil, though, so a couple of tips. First, press the tots firmly into shape before frying. Secondly, don’t shake the frying basket whilst frying… let them cook in peace until they are done.
We rounded the meal off side dishes of sweetcorn and broccoli salad with sesame dressing.
A most taste-tastic meal.
