Dukkah crusted tofu with corn fritters and tomato salad

Tonights meal could probably really have been 2 separate dinners, however I had the ingredients and more importantly I had free time tonight to actually cook something a bit more creative for dinner. Haven't had that for a while!

A few days ago I had cut up a block of and marinaded it. When it became apparent I wasn't going to have time to use it right away I chucked it into the freezer for another day. Freezing it turned out well since it had a better texture when I used it tonight. After walking past Seddon Deadly Sins cafe and seeing their special that day was poached eggs rolled in dukkah, I thought this would be an awesome thing to do with tofu.

The corn fritters I made using a recipe from the book Vegan Yum Yum. I've been meaning to use this recipe for a while because corn is awesome. There are a lot of recipes in this book that I want to try actually.

Dukkah crusted Tofu
1 block of firm tofu (I used a 375gram block)
Marinade (I went really basic using braggs, 1/2 a cup veg stock, some garlic and some pepper)
Cornflour
Oil
Dukkah (I used a whole pack of premade pistacio dukkah)

Press the tofu between 2 plates for 20-30 minutes to get some of the water out.
Cut the tofu into desired size slices.
Place tofu into the marinade. It is better to leave it overnight if you can, but if you don't have time marinade it for at least 30 minutes. If you plan far enough ahead you can freeze the tofu for a more chewy texture.
Pour some cornflour into a bowl. Pour some oil into a second bowl, and put the dukkah in the third bowl.
Take the prepared tofu slices and dunk into the first bowl, making sure they are coated in cornflour.
Next take the flour coated tofu and spread some of the oil onto the tofu with a pastry brush making sure to thinly coat the tofu all over. The flour and oil coating should help the dukkah to stick and stay stuck through cooking.
Now dunk the tofu into the dukkah to give a nice crust.
Fry the tofu on both sides till the dukkah slightly browns. Mine just needed a couple of minutes each side.

Dukkah crusted tofu ready for frying

Corn Fritters
1/2 cup of flour (I used wholemeal)
1/2 cup of polenta
Pinch of salt (the recipe called for 3/4 tspn but I'm not all that big on salt)
1/2 tspn of baking powder (I added a little extra because I was using wholemeal flour)
1/2 tspn old bay seasoning (I didn't have this and don't know what it is so just put in mixed herbs)
1/4 tspn cumin
1/4 tspn paprika (I used 1/2 tspn since I have no idea where my cumin went...)
1/2 cup of soy milk
1/4 cup of water
2 cups of fresh corn kernels

Blend the dry ingredients together.
Add the soy milk and water and combine to a thickish batter.
Fold through the corn.
Heat some oil in a fry pan and place large spoonfuls of batter into the pan, flattening these to fritters with the back of the spoon. You will probably need to do this in a couple of batches to use all the batter.
Cook a few minutes till golden brown on one side, then flip to brown on the other side.

Mmmmm... Fritter batter.

I served the tofu and fritters with a very basic salad made simply of diced tomato, avocado and basil. It all worked together to become a very awesome dinner that made my tofu hating fiance say 'Hey, this tofu is actually really good!'. The corn fritters got great reviews too :)

Great food that didn't get the photo quality it deserved :(

Vegie pasta in mustard sauce

Pasta is usually pretty basic food with very little effort required. Generally not something I figured was worth much blog time.

Till I saw this in the local deli:

The pasta was just so pretty, and the ingredients were just durum wheat, and vegetable colour (provided you don't get the pastas with black where the colour looks to be from squid ink). From memory it was also around $12 a box. $12 for pasta? EEP! But I had to try some. I always have to buy wanky stuff like this when I see it, I just can't help it...

It was really nice pasta which held it's shape and retained a lot more colour than I expected it would when cooking. It looked so nice in the bowl it was a shame to go and spoil it by putting sauce in with it really...

Unfortunately not many people are happy to be presented with a bowl of plain pasta for dinner, so I did have to make a sauce to serve it with.

I get kind of tired of the usual tomato based sauces we do for a quick pasta dinner. I decided this time I'd try something different and make vegetable pasta with a mustard style sauce. The mustard sauce is just a basic roux sauce with mustard and garlic. This sauce tastes much like a welsh rarebit.

Vegetable 'chicken' pasta with mustard sauce

250gram mushroom
1 head of broccoli
2 bunches of asparagus
Handful of spinach
1 box frys chicken style strips
1 tspn mustard (i used whole seed mustard)
2 cloves diced garlic
2 tspn nuttalex
2 tspn cornflour
2 cups soy milk
Grated cheesly to taste
Pepper
1 box of pasta

Pour the pasta into a pot of  boiling water and set this cooking. The pasta took about 12 minutes to cook for me, so this should be done by the time you have your sauce and vegetables finished.

Chop the mushrooms, asparagus and broccoli and set in a saucepan to cook. While the vegetables are cooking, in a separate pan, fry the chicken style strips.

While the vegetables and strips are cooking, start the mustard sauce. In a small saucepan, melt the nuttalex. Add in the garlic, pepper and mustard and lightly fry for a minute.
Remove the pan from the heat and add the cornflour and stir in to form a smooth paste with no flour lumps.
Add the soy milk a little at a time, working the flour and milk mix into a smooth paste. Between additions of milk, return the pan to the stove for a short time to keep the sauce heated, but do not stop stirring while over the heat.
Once all the milk is blended in, return the pan to the heat and stir continuously till the sauce is thickened.
Add in the grated cheesly and stir.

Combine the vegetables, chicken style strips, spinach and sauce and blend through.

Drain the pasta and serve with vegetable and sauce mix.

Sure, the sauce doesn't look pretty, but it was damn tasty.

Mutant potato chickpea korma

Just as well we like curry, because we are going to be eating it for the next few days... It was meant to be a small potato and chick pea curry that just escalated into a huge saucepan filling vegetable/legume/curry free-for-all.

It all started going wrong when I failed to read the back of the pack of Sharwoods korma paste. I had cooked the potato cubes, and chickpeas, and poured a can of coconut milk in to simmer. After industriously scooping half the jar of paste into the saucepan and stirring it in, I decided to give a little taste test since the sauce was darker than I expected. I've never used a curry paste before. I just assumed it was like a jar of pasta sauce where you add the whole thing in. Apparently I was only meant to put in 3 tablespoons... With way too much curry paste, it was totally inedible. I had to add 2 more cans of coconut milk and a pack of soyatoo cooking cream to save it...

Now I was left with a big pot of curry sauce, that had a few sad chickpeas and potato bits floating in it here and there... So I rummaged through the crisper and the pantry to see what I had. I came up with half a cauliflower, a head of broccoli, a can of brown lentils and a can of kidney beans, which all went in the pot.

The end result was actually really tasty... Phew, nice save! I served it with some fried garlic chapattis (mission food  brand) and some extra soyatoo cream on top. Luckily Kev enjoyed it, and went back for seconds so we only have 2 days worth of leftovers now rather than 3...

I also had a bit of a brain fart and forgot to cook rice to serve with the curry. All round not the best of nights in the kitchen... I'm going to be more careful to read directions on labels for a while.

There's always room for pie

I really wanted to get a pie from the Funky Pies stall at World Vegan Day but since I had filled up on Mr Nice Guy cupcakes, Crumbs lemon donut and lunch from the Enlightened Cuisine stall before I saw the Funky Pies stall, there really wasn't any room for pie :(  They were also sold out of the Eezy Chic 'n' Cheezy by the time I did get round to them anyway. Actually I probably could have managed to share a pie a little later in the day, I just couldn't bring myself to fight my way back to the stall through the crowds of people milling around it.

Left with a pie craving, the only logical thing to do is make a pie. We had a couple of friends joining us for dinner who are big fans of their standard mince pie, so I decided to have a go at making a mock mince pie.

For the pie I used:

Pre made pastry sheets (because I am lazy)

Half a bag of TVP dry mince

Mushrooms

Kidney beans

Onion

Cheatin gravy powder

Braggs

Spring Gully Worcestershire sauce

Savoury yeast flakes

Pepper

To make the pie, I greased the pie pans, and lined the pans with a layer of pastry. I've had bad experiences blind baking pastry shells before, so I skipped blind baking this time. 

For the filling, I chopped and fried the mushrooms, onion and beans a little, added in the TVP cup for cup with water. While the pot was coming to the boil I added a couple of spoons of gravy powder, along with a splash of braggs, worcestershire, yeast flakes and pepper to get some flavour into the TVP. Once the water was boiling the TVP took about 5 minutes to soak up most of the liquid and what was left was a nice thick gravy base.

There was easily enough filling for the 2 pie shells, and just enough pastry left to top them. You probably can't see from the pictures but I got a bit carried away fluting the edges of the pies to attach the top pastry.

Baked at 180ºC for about 30 minutes and the pie came out perfectly. The pastry has to be one of the best I have used (and it was gluten free!!). It was perfectly golden and flaky with a great flavour. The brand was Pastry Pantry rough puff.

I was expecting when I cut the pie to have filling ooze everywhere, but the slices held their shape. The pie tasted great too, and got compliments all round.  

For every success there is a failure though. I got this ice cube tray that I love. My fiance hates it, but I love it. It's an ice cube tray made of silicone that makes 4 ice brains. Here is an example of what the ice cubes look like after they are popped out.

Coconut water and orange mango brain freezes

I got what I thought was a brilliant idea of using the tray to make chocolates. Since I had half a block of rice milk white chocolate left, I painted this into the groves in the mould before coating the whole thing with dark chocolate. When it was set I put in some soft caramel I made, and then put some dandies marshmallow in on top, then sealed with chocolate again.

Everything looked like it was working perfectly till I came to pop the brains out. Unfortunately the silicon mould did not want pop straight out and needed to be forced and stretched around the chocolate. I had made the chocolate coating too thin so it just cracked leaving me with a disgusting oozing mess.

Aside from the breaking and the oozing, I actually quite like the affect of the two chocolates together in the mould. They still tasted great too, a sticky messy sugar and chocolate explosion. I will have to try this again, just make the chocolate shells more durable next time.

Organic spinach breeds better caterpillars

I've never written a blog before. I did try starting a personal journal during first year Uni, and managed about a weeks worth of entries before all my good intentions vanished and my journal writing time became Tekken 3 time... So basically I am new to this, so please be kind :)

I've been reading and enjoying my friends blog at In the Mood for Noodles for some time now, and they have inspired me to have a go at starting my own vegetarian food blog.

For now, I thought I would start with getting a box of ingredients and turning it into a dish. Some of the ingredients I have started using are new to me, so there will be dishes that just don't work, and there may be better ways of using the ingredients that I am not aware of, and hopefully there will be 1 or 2 people who stumble across my posts that have some suggestions for me on how I can get better results.

The first dish I decided to make was a vegan version of a creamy pasta sauce. My fiance loves his creamy pasta dishes, but I am lactose intolerant so avoid dairy and eggs make me feel sick so I don't use them either. This leads to a sad cream, cheese and egg loving man.

I had a block of Sheese and a little carton of rice cream left from my last trip to the Radical Grocery store, so I figured I would have a go at cooking with these. A trip to Plump Organic Grocery down the road, and grabbed some vegetables and pasta and I was all set. 

The box of ingredients above contains:

Spinach

Asparagus

Mushrooms

Cherry tomatoes

Cheshire style Sheese

Creme di Riso

Savoury yeast flakes

Rainbow pepper corns

Parmazano

Also hiding somewhere in the box is an onion and some garlic but I think they were under the giant wad of spinach.

Since I had never used the rice cream before I, was not sure how thick it was or how it behaved when heated. I figured it was probably something that should be added after the vegetables had cooked, so I started by frying the chopped onion, garlic, mushrooms, and asparagus.

As a lesson on why all produce, even organic, should be washed thoroughly, while I was preparing the spinach I found a little family of caterpillars was still living on the leaves. One of these guys was absolutely huge, the biggest damn caterpillar I have ever seen! They nearly ended up as bonus protein in the sauce. If one hadn't moved during my rush job washing the spinach I probably would have missed them. At least you know your vegetables are fresh when the bugs are still alive. I really should have gotten a picture of them, one was nearly as thick as my little finger!

After I added the tomatoes and spinach (minus bugs) to the pot, I drained off the liquid that had formed from cooking the mushrooms. I grated in about half a block of the Sheese and poured in the rice cream, which was runnier than I expected. I tossed in some pepper, savoury yeast and parmazano to flavour and was done.

  

The end result was a little disappointing. The sauce was really runny. In hindsight I should have made a roux sauce base with the rice cream so that the sauce was a little thicker and able to coat the pasta. I also should not have drained off the mushroom juice from cooking the vegetables as this was probably needed for a better flavour, but I had been cautious of the sauce being too runny.

While I was at the grocery store, I also picked up a bag of pure cocoa butter. I have been curious to try cooking with this stuff for a while as I had heard it added a chocolate flavour boost to cooking. What better way to try this out than baking a batch of cupcakes?

To use the cocoa butter, I substituted the margarine portion of the basic cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World with a half and half bend of cocoa butter (which I had to melt) and vegetable oil. The end result was a batch of cupcakes with a subtle flavour that was more slightly coconut than chocolate. The cocoa butter did seem to affect the baking though, as the cupcakes really didn't rise much. They still had great texture, they just didn't rise much.

So next I decided to try substituting a blend of almond oil and cocoa butter for nuttalex when i made the icing. This worked well, though since the oil was warm after I had melted the cocoa butter, it did take a bit more icing sugar to thicken up than usual. The result was icing that tasted a lot like marzipan. Since it was really sweet and the cupcakes were so little and flat I didn't spread it on very thick.

Fail cupcakes. You may be flat, but you're still tasty.

Baking with cocoa butter I think has some merit, and I do want to do some more experiments with this to get it right. If only it were not so expensive though. I got the loving earth brand and it was around $17 for the bag. I still have some enough left to try a couple more batches of cupcakes to see if I can get a better result though.

Has anyone used rice cream before, or have any suggestions for making a dairy free creamy sauce?