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.

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.

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* 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.)

Lemon meringue pie, again

I love experiments where you can eat the data.

 

I've almost perfected my meringue recipe from last time.

This is a small batch: it made enough to cover 3 ramekins. I think if you double it it would be enough for a pie.

60 g water
50 g caster sugar
pinch of cream of tartar
vanilla
1 g versawhip 600k
0.5 g xanthan gum
0.6 g agar powder

1. Mix the water, sugar and agar in a small pot and bring to the boil.
2. Put the cream of tartar, versawhip and xanthan in the bowl of a stand mixer. Add the agar mixture and whip with the whisk attachment. Add a little bit of vanilla extract.
3. Whip the mixture until you have a thick foam. When you lift the mixer head, the whisk should have a big blob of meringue in it. It should be thick enough to just stick there, not dripping off.
4. (You could put it on your pie at this point, but here's what I did.) Cover a baking tray with parchment paper, then make meringue circles the right diameter for the ramekins. Put the tray under the grill for a minute or two, watching closely because they brown fast.
5. Put the browned meringues in the fridge or the freezer. If you serve them straight out of the freezer the foam is slightly firmer, and I find the cooler temperature pleasant. Out of the fridge they are perfectly acceptable, just slightly less firm.
6. Place the chilled meringue on top of your lemon pie (or ramekin) to serve.

Note: I bet it would work if you put all of the ingredients into the pot in step 1.

Vegan lemon meringue pie

Here's how you make a meringue that doesn't set:

I based it on my pavlova recipe, but used water instead of flax goop. In the pavlova recipe, I think the baking step provides the heat necessary to activate the agar, but I didn't plan to bake this meringue, only run it under the grill to brown, so I whipped half the water with the versawhip and sugar, and heated the other half in a pot with the agar (using twice as much agar as in the pavlova recipe). I then poured the agar mixture into the versawhip mixture and kept whipping. I ended up having to add more versawhip because it was taking forever to whip up properly. The agar left a few little lumps in the meringue, I guess because it solidified when it hit the room temperature versawhip mixture.

 I put the meringue on the pie, ran it under the grill, and it browned charmingly and the surface firmed up. Overall, the meringue layer was way too soft. It was runny rather than marshmallowy. Tasted good though. I guess the agar didn't do much work at all. It might have helped to use warm water in the versawhip mixture, and then leave the meringue to cool down and firm before grilling/serving.

Here's how you make a meringue that sets:

Take the pie you made in the first version. Freeze it. And voila!

The pastry wasn't that good frozen. So in future I might make a meringue disk, brown it, freeze it, and then place on the lemon tart to serve. It was the perfect texture.

Smoking

I got a stovetop smoker for my birthday. Since then we've been eating lots of smoked things. Probably my favourite things so far have been smoked tofu and tempeh. Here's the smoker packed full of veggie protein (marinated pressed tofu, tempeh, and two homemade seitan sausages).

For the tofu, I press it overnight and then marinate it for a day in soy sauce with a bit of maple syrup and sesame oil. Once it has been smoked for 30 minutes, it's ready to be sliced thinly for sandwiches. The tempeh just goes in plain -- once smoked, it's ready to be cooked however you like. I like to slice it thinly and pan fry, adding flavourings (soy sauce plus whatever other things) at the end for a glaze.

Other things I've smoked so far: cherry tomatoes (10 minutes), garlic, potatoes (45 minutes from raw to cooked -- too long; better to parcook them before smoking), young coconut, coconut flakes (20 minutes), lemon. The young coconut was a bit odd -- I ended up pureeing it and making a smoky ice cream which was pretty good. The coconut flakes were great as a bacon-y element in a salad. The smoked lemon I didn't know quite what to do with, so it is sitting in the freezer waiting for inspiration to strike.

Garlic scapes

I miss the farmers market in Noho a lot. For one thing, although you can get okay tomatoes all year round here, there are NO heirloom tomatoes. None!

I miss the little seasonal markers too, like the few weeks when they sell garlic scapes. But now, it looks like I may have garlic scapes any time I want, so maybe Perth isn't so bad after all. I didn't recognise them at first because they are straight and have had their heads cut off, and they're labelled 'garlic shoots', but they are scapes. Now, they are not seasonal, local scapes -- I didn't look too hard at the label, but they may have come from China -- but they are delicious nonetheless. (I hadn't realized it, but garlic shoots are not just an American farmers market thing, it seems they are actually a common Chinese ingredient.)

My favourite thing to do with them is saute them on a very hot pan with green beans. I like them to get browned and blistered. We had them with a Meyer lemon risotto, and chickenish seitan. (I liked this meal so much that I broke my own unspoken rule and made exactly the same thing the very next week.)

Citrus

One thing I really love about Perth is that so many people have citrus trees in their yards. I love walking around our neighbourhood, in this, the 'dead of winter' (read: more like a Massachusetts spring), and seeing enormous lemon trees laden with fruit everywhere.

We aren't so lucky: our house doesn't have a citrus tree, but generous friends and family have shared lemons (regular and Meyer), key limes, oranges, and a mystery citrus fruit. The mystery fruit is orange-skinned, but tart like a lime. I think I would describe it as more floral than regular lime juice. Here's one of the mystery fruits:

My internet research had almost convinced me that they were rangpur limes, but the fruit did not have the green seeds that rangpurs are supposed to have. Maybe they were bitter oranges?

I was a bit overwhelmed and not quite sure what to do with a bounty of mystery fruit, so these guys ended up zested and juiced and stashed in the freezer.

Lemon pizza

Well, technically it was a lemon, thyme and olive pizza. The lemon was kind of overpowering, in a good way.

(The other pizza specs: olive oil pizza dough from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (2/3 all purpose flour, 1/3 whole wheat, plus some vital wheat gluten) and mozzarella style Cheezly.)