Scallion "pancakes"

How does one eat leftover mashed potatoes with a stir-fry?

Mix leftover mashed potatoes with some dry breadcrumbs (I used panko) and ginger-scallion oil.
Pan fry.
Eat, marvelling at the way they remind you of the real deal.

Creamy broccoli soup

I'm not usually a cream-of-whatever soup person, but this was easy and so delicious.

You need:
broccoli
onion
veg stock
almonds
miso
preserved lemon
salt and pepper
Sichuan chilli oil

Saute onions, add broccoli and stock and cook until soft.
Meanwhile, in a high-speed blender, puree almonds, preserved lemon and miso with a little bit of water.
When the broccoli is done, add to the blender and blend it up. You can puree it all, or leave some chunky. Finish with some chilli oil and pepper.

Why I'm googling "nonstick egg rings"

Discarded sourdough starter = crumpets.

Birthday cake

A veganized version of Black Star Pastry's Strawberry Watermelon cake:

For the almond dacquoise, I used my recipe, but with aqua faba in place of the water + versawhip (and I also didn't heat the mixture, working on my unproven assumption that baking would activate the agar). I made two layers a bit over 20cm in diameter -- next time I might make smaller, taller layers.

For the cream, I used rad whip with some rosewater added. Next time I might use Soyatoo, which I expect would hold its shape better -- the rad whip didn't whip up a lot to begin with, and then as the cake sat it deflated a lot.

Overall, not as impressive looking as its inspiration, but it tasted superb, and was still delicious when we finished it a day or two later.

The best seitan

I've had this recipe for seitan from the Vegan Epicurean clipped for ages, but only got around to trying it recently. It's brilliant! I've been making seitan for more than a decade, so I thought I'd tried every method around, but this one surprised me with its unusual texture: it's soft and juicy, and definitely not brainy.

What's unusual about this recipe is that you pan fry the dough before cooking it in liquid (in the pressure cooker).

I halve the recipe (142g vital wheat gluten), skip the onion flakes, nutritional yeast and marmite, and add some mushroom seasoning to the dry mix. For the cooking liquid, I use vegetable stock with some soy sauce. I pressure cook the cutlets for 25 minutes.

After pan-frying:

After pressure-cooking, the cutlets increase a lot in size. They are quite soft. I like to cut them into pieces and brown before serving.

Posole

One of the foods I miss most from the USA is hominy. Occasionally you will see an overpriced can for sale here, but never dried hominy. For years, I've been hoping to try making it from scratch -- starting with field corn, and nixtamalizing it (cooking/soaking with slaked lime) -- but I couldn't even find field corn for sale.

Then, suddenly field corn turned up in my favourite continental grocery store. So, I made a trip to the Thai grocery store to pick up some slaked lime. I consulted a long-bookmarked post on the Cooking Issues blog. And then today I made nixtamal, and posole.

Only took 6 years or so...

Vegan chorizo and potato tacos

SO GOOD!

With homemade vegan chorizo, and perfect fried potatoes (parcooked with vinegar) -- all from Serious Eats.

Ants on a log ice cream

Celery and peanut butter ice cream with raisins:

I can't remember where I read about celery sorbet with raisins and peanut butter. Rather than a sorbet, I decided to make more of an 'ice cream' by mixing the peanut butter into the celery juice mixture. (Ingredients: celery juice, celery leaves, water, sugar, peanut butter, powdered peanut butter, refined coconut oil, raisins, xanthan gum)

This was pretty good. I was worried about the peanut butter overpowering the celery, but the celery came through clearly. In fact, I think what would put this over the top into utter deliciousness would be a peanut butter ripple. Next time...

Homemade tempeh

For a long time I wanted to try making tempeh, but I was put off because it sounded too hard. First, the whole process of splitting and getting the hulls off the soybeans seemed like a big hassle. And second, it seemed like you would need an incubation chamber to keep the fermenting tempeh at a stable warm temperature. But reading Sandor Katz' The Art of Fermentation convinced me that it was totally doable.

I bought my starter culture from Indopal.

I decided to skip the whole issue of splitting and hulling soybeans by using split hulled broad beans (fava beans) instead. I begin by soaking 460g of beans for 24 hours (the long soak at a warmish temperature allows them to start fermenting -- according to Katz this step probably creates a good environment for the tempeh mold to grow in).

The next step is to partially cook the beans. You definitely want to under-cook them: they need to be firm so that they don't mush together. Firm beans allow space between them for the tempeh mold to grow. I simmered these beans for about 12 minutes; they were firm but some were starting to get feathery on the edges.

Next, you let the beans cool to body temperature. It's important that they are dry -- with a batch this size it works well to tip the beans onto a towel and dry them. Then you put them into a bowl and stir through the starter thoroughly (the amount might depend on your particular starter -- mine calls for 1 tsp).

For the next step, you put the beans into sandwich bags, which you have poked some air holes into with the point of a knife. For this batch, I used 4 10x15cm bags. You should smush the beans down so that they fill the bags all the way to the corners.

I like to do all of this in the morning, on a day when I will be around to keep an eye on the incubation. For the first 12 hours, the tempeh needs to incubate at about 28 degrees. Luckily or unluckily for me, in the summer time in my house that's about room temperature, so I don't need an incubation chamber. After about 12 hours, the tempeh mold should have started growing and creating its own warmth. If you were using a heat source to incubate the tempeh, this would be the time to turn it off or down, and this is why I like starting in the morning: the cooler night time temperature arrives at the right time for the tempeh.

(When it's cooler, I've had success using my Excalibur dehydrator as a heat source. I run the dehydrator at its lowest temperature (85F) and put the tempeh on racks on top of the dehydrator, and then cover the whole lot with an overturned bowl to keep the warmth in. I check the temperature every so often, and turn the dehydrator off if it's getting too warm.)

After 24 hours, tempeh:

The David Lebovitz effect

I'm very suggestible. Reading this post on David Lebovitz' blog, along with the fact that I had some chickpea liquid in the fridge to use up, led directly to a completely unnecessary, yet somehow very necessary S'mores Pie.

It got a bit burnt under the grill, but I'm pretending that was intentional.

The crust is the Press-in Almond Crust from Vegan Pie in the Sky with some dark cocoa powder added. I baked it at 350 F for 10 minutes.

The chocolate pudding is this one, halved and veganised. (I added a tiny bit of liquid smoke but it was pretty subtle.)

The marshmallow topping went like this:

75 g chickpea liquid
75 g sugar
pinch of cream of tartar
0.5 g xanthan gum
vanilla
--whipped together

Then things get a little bit hazy...
I heated up agar (0.7 g?) with water (not a lot) and sugar (some). It got to at least 108 C (I was originally planning on letting it get to 118, but it was starting to look right so I pulled it early.) I poured this mix down the side of the mixer bowl as it mixed the meringue on high speed. (This is based on my recipe for marshmallows, but with more liquid [here the chickpea liquid is straight out of the can, not reduced]. It ends up marshmallowy but softly set.)

Spread the marshmallow topping on top of the pudding. Put it under the grill and watch it carefully. Put it in the fridge to set up.

Birthday cake

Not the prettiest, but the tastiest:

I made pistachio dacquoise, using my recipe but with chickpea liquid instead of versawhip. I didn't bother with heating the agar mix, I just mixed everything together and assumed that the agar would activate during the baking. (To be honest, I'm actually not even sure whether the agar and xanthan are necessary.)

The filling was a salted caramel mousse, based on a peanut butter mousse from The Voluptuous Vegan. Each dacquoise disk had one side painted with melted chocolate with some roughly ground coriander seeds and some dehydrated ground whole lemon mixed in. I thought I would make some beautiful swirls of chocolate on top but... well, you can see how well that worked. (I didn't count on the chocolate solidifying immediately on the cold mousse!)

I was aiming for the dacquoise to soften slightly, but hoped the chocolate would prevent that from happening too fast. After sitting for about 4 hours, the disks were still quite crisp. 24 hours later, they were quite soggy. Somewhere in between they would've been perfect. The flavour, though, was amazing. I got the idea for the flavour combination from this recipe for Pistachio Millionaire's Shortbread.

Lemon ice box pie

Well, actually, since this was just a test run, I skipped the biscuit-crumb base, so technically this is just lemon ice box pie filling, veganised. I wish I'd made a whole pie: this was fantastic!

I read about this pie in the Tipsy Baker's review of John Besh's book My Family Table (searchable on Google Books). You fold a lemon/sweetened condensed milk mixture through whipped egg whites and freeze, for something that is almost better than a perfect bite of lemon meringue pie. (I say almost because the one thing you are missing is that touch of caramelised meringue. Still, this is really delicious and perfect in its own way: a fluffy sweet lemon mousse-meringue.)

Here's what I did:

14 oz (1 3/4 cups) sweetened condensed soymilk*
1/2 cup lemon juice
3 t lemon zest
1/4 t salt
144 g chickpea liquid
pinch of cream of tartar
2 T sugar
0.8 g xanthan gum
60 ml water
0.8 g agar powder

Mix together the sweetened condensed soymilk, lemon juice, lemon zest and salt.
In a stand mixer, whip the chickpea liquid, cream of tartar, sugar and xanthan gum until you have a nice firm meringue.
Put 60 ml of the condensed soymilk mixture in a small saucepan with the water. Whisk in the agar, and bring to the boil. Simmer a couple of minutes to activate the agar, and then with the stand mixer going on high, pour the agar mixture down the side of the bowl and whip until it is well incorporated.
Fold the meringue into the condensed soymilk mixture, and freeze for at least three hours.

=======================
* Sweetened condensed soymilk =  3 parts by volume Better than Milk original soymilk powder, 2 parts sugar, 1 part boiling water, and 3 T vegan butter per cup of soymilk powder, processed in a blender until smooth. (It makes just slightly more than the volume of milk powder you use: so if you need 1 cup of condensed soymilk, use 1 cup of powder, and you will end up with a little bit leftover.)

Sorghum injera

When we first arrived here, I was dismayed that there didn't seem to be any teff available in Australia. But things changed a year or two later: now you can buy it, though it's kind of expensive. Recently, my cheapskate tendencies have led to me making injera from sorghum flour (teff =$22/kg, sorghum = $4/kg). Apparently this is a traditional injera variant -- I found the recipe (thanks to Google books) in a book called Pseudocereals and Less Common Cereals.

Here's the slightly adapted recipe:

200g sorghum flour (I used red)
150ml water
teaspoon of sourdough starter

Mix together, cover and leave to ferment for 2 days. The original recipe called for less water (only 100 ml). This ferments well at cool room temperature.

After 2 days, take 80g of the ferment and mix with 30ml water, and then stir into 200ml boiling water. Cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Remove from the heat, and cool to about 45C. Mix into the original fermented dough, and then add 100ml water. Leave to rise for a couple of hours, then cook.

They're not quite as stretchy as teff injera, but they are really tangy and bubbly. To be honest, the recipe seemed pretty weird to me -- I wasn't sure that my sourdough starter would like such a long fermentation -- but it worked surprisingly well. As well as being cheaper, it works more reliably for me than making injera with teff. I recall a few times when making teff injera where the process didn't go smoothly, or getting the timing right for the fermentation was a bit tricky.

Durango

Almost Durango cookies (veganized with a bit of cornstarch and water, and dark instead of milk chocolate):

I used alder smoked salt, and though I thought I was sprinkling it on a bit too generously, in the end I couldn't really taste any smoke at all. Nevertheless, these are excellent chocolate chip cookies with almond and cocoa nibs, and salt, and they are flat with crisp edges and chewy middles. A bit more smokiness would be delicious I'm sure. I read about these on the Tipsy Baker, and I think she might've suggested using smoked almonds which is an excellent idea.

Cilantro?

Yesterday, I happened to read this post on the Food 52 blog. This blogger's cilantro chocolate chip cookies made it onto their 'what's in' list. It was like a compulsion or a dare, I couldn't not try them. I followed her recipe for basil verbena cookies, replacing those herbs with cilantro. (It was easily veganized: I just left out the egg and added a little water and cornstarch).

I couldn't let the cookie dough rest as long as it should have: it rested for about 3 hours in the fridge. And the verdict? Delicious. The cilantro added a mild but zippy mintiness. Overall, though, I think I might prefer actual mint. I might try basil next time, as in the original recipe.

Croissants

These are sourdough croissants made with homemade vegan butter. They worked out pretty well (though they're nowhere near as impressive as their inspiration, txfarmer's gorgeous ones). They're much better than the last time I attempted vegan croissants.

The annoying thing about the recipe is that it asks for a 3 hour final rise at 26C. I couldn't see how to make that happen and still have them ready for breakfast, so I left them at cold room temperature (15 - 17C) for about 12 hours, and then put them near the oven as it preheated. They definitely rose a lot in that time, but they weren't (as the recipe puts it) 'soft and jiggly', so maybe they were slightly underproofed. 

The vegan butter behaved nicely for the encasement step, but I was a bit worried about the first turn after it had a rest in the fridge for an hour. I think the butter was too firm: it seemed to crumble as it folded. The final dough looked like pie dough, with specks of butter, which didn't seem quite right. I wonder if it would be better to let the dough rest at room temperature for 20 minutes between turns, as in Peter Reinhart's recipe.

Cauliflower inarizushi

Dinner: 'inarizushi' filled with cauliflower rice, plus dolmades, over salad greens.

The cauliflower rice was half a cauliflower, pulsed in the food processor, plus one carrot, likewise, plus sesame seeds, salt and liquid from the can of inari wrappers. The dolmades were from a can, and were a sort of jokey last minute addition to fill out this meal.

I read that there are various options with inarizushi: you can use plain rice, sushi rice or sweet rice (okay, cauliflower) like I did here. I think I might prefer sushi seasoning over the sweet version.

Also, it should be noted that Inari herself, as the goddess of rice, would be very unhappy with these cauliflower imposters. I'm not sure how foxes would feel about them.

Catchup

Good things I ate (or drank) in the second half of 2014:

From Vedge, Broccoli Rabe Philly Style (seriously bitter homegrown broccoli rabe [which I cut with gai lan to tone it down a bit], roasted red capsicum, porcini mayo)

 Pizza and roasted cauliflower at Pizza Domenica in New Orleans:

 Birthday/journal acceptance cake (Chocolate/root beer):

Asparagus pizza:

Enchiladas Especiales Tacuba style (wish I'd had poblanos; made do with green chillies and used rehydrated yuba sticks as chicken, and cashew cheese)

Pasta with a pureed caramelized onion / nutritional yeast sauce and cubed smoked tofu:

Pumpkin and pecan pie(s):

Home brewed saison:

Smoked carrots

I made this dish from Vedge: spiced little carrots with chickpea sauerkraut puree. It's a play on a reuben -- the carrots are roasted with a spice mix inspired by Montreal-style smoked meat. I smoked the roasted carrots (10 minutes, then left in the smoker box until cool). It was really nice. Unsurprisingly, the leftovers made a good sandwich.

Pok Pok

This was a great dinner courtesy of Pok Pok. Maybe I should say 'inspired by', because I did a lot of veganizing and lazifying to the very precise recipes.

It's a cucumber salad in the style of papaya salad, with coconut rice and grilled eggplant salad. We also had (not pictured) some flavored tofu with this -- I was inspired by the recipe for Khao Man Som Tam (papaya salad with coconut rice and sweet pork). The combination of the cucumber salad, rice and sweet tofu was superb -- I kept making myself perfect little bites with a bit of each on my fork. The coconut rice in particular was the best version I have ever made: the secret is coconut cream instead of milk, and a bit of sugar. (Who'd have thought adding extra fat and sugar would make something taste better?)

For veganizing, I replaced fish sauce and dried shrimp with a healthy dose of toasted and ground tua nao. I didn't have a mortar and pestle for the cucumber salad, so I just bashed everything a bit in a bowl.