Falafel

Falafel is your best friend when you're looking for a healthy meal, and you can't be bothered cooking.

We had it in whole wheat pittas that we got from our local health store and they were so much better than the ones you get from the supermarket. We also try to shop in our local health store for as much as we can because it's a family run business and we'd rather give our money to them than a supermarket.

Anyway, falafel good, pitta good. That's about all there is to say about that.

Potato Pizzas

This was the featured recipe on the fat free vegan site a few weeks ago, it looked so yummy I knew I had to try it!

The basic idea is you slice a potato lengthwise into thirds, bake them until they're soft, and then top them and bake them again. We topped them with spinach, onion, and sundried tomatoes, and of course the obligatory pizza sauce. It was a really tasty light meal. I'd probably make it again because it's quick and easy and uses ingredients we usually have around.

Gary's Dish Washing Rating - 1/5

Tester Recipe - Frittata

This is a tester recipe from Joy's cookbook. It's a pepper frittata and oh my gods was it good! It's hands down the best vegan frittata/omelette recipe I've ever tasted. It was deliciously crisp on the outside and lovely and gooey on the inside. Weeg and our friend Stu were almost fighting over the leftovers. We had it with a spinach salad and some boiled potatoes. It was a lovely light meal. I will most definitely be making this again, it really was that good.

I have another picture of the slices close up but Blogger doesn't seem to want to let me add it just now, so I'll maybe add it later.

Once again my photos really don't do the food justice

Gary's Dish Washing Rating - 1/5

I Wanna Be Like Schmoo!

I'm in uni all day on Fridays (the horror) so I try to pack a lunch so I don't just end up eating junk food. This is what I took this Friday - A poppy seed roll with chilli tofu (from the same company as the basil tofu), spinach, and onion; a little bag of strawberries; and a Trek raw food bar in cocoa brownie flavour.

The roll was really good but I think I prefer the basil tofu to the chilli tofu. The biggest surprise was the trek bar, it was absolutely delicious! I'm always a little bit wary of raw food bars that claim to be healthy. I've had bad experiences in the past with them, all the ones I've tried seem to have tasted like dirt. This one was amazing, it tasted exactly like chocolate brownie! And it was healthy! It claimed to be unlike other energy bars because it was high in protein and had no added sugars or anything on it, and looking at the ingredients, it didn't lie. There was no artificial anythings! I'll be buying them again but they're quite expensive so I'll only buy them once in a while.

Baked Tofu Salad

I'm sorry I've been a bad blogger of late. I've been really getting into eating a much healthier diet so I've been eating some boring not very blogworthy things of late to ease myself in gently. I've also been testing some recipes for Joy's forthcoming cokbook, I should be able to post some pictures of that soon.

I saw this basil tofu in the health food store and thought it would make a great salad. The basil flavour isn't just a marinade, it's infused all the way through the tofu, which was lovely. I baked the tofu for about 20 minutes, with absolutely nothing else, no oil or anything. I then roasted some tomatoes with it. After the tofu was pretty firm I topped it with some crushed garlic mixed with a teeny bit of olive oil. I then served it on top of some spinach and onion and slashed a little bit of balsamic vinegar on top. It really was delicious. The basil tofu seems really versatile, I'll definately be using it again.

Gary's Dish Washing Rating - 1/5

Valentine's Day Treats

Commercial crap, blah blah blah, I know. To me V-Day is an excuse to cook slightly better than normal food. I went with an Italian theme, because it seemed appropriate. For the first course we had olive ciabatta with sun dried tomato pesto. It was delicious. I usually make my own pesto, but I found a vegan brand (Mother Hemp) which saved me time so we had that instead. It was a tad oily, but still delicious.
Next we had stuffed shells that I've blogged about before. They're always a hit. They're really creamy and quite rich so they really are quite filling and neither of us could finish our portions.
For dessert we had Gary's favourite dessert as an omni - Tiramisu. It was great, it was a little more cakey than traditional Tiramisu, but all the elements were there, just perhaps not in exactly the correct quantities. It was indeed, absolutely delicious. See that slice down there? That was all I had of it. Gary didn't even bother to cut himself a slice, he just grabbed a fork and dug in. Tut tut.

Tempeh 'Chicken' Strips, Spicy Potato Wedges and Garlic Mayo

Not the healthiest of meals but it's a Friday night so meh. The Tempeh strips are inspired by a recipe from vegcooking but being the control freak that I am I adapted it, I think for the better. The recipe tells you to dip the strips in a mustard, flour, nutritional yeast and water mixture before dipping them in another flour mixture and then frying. I left my strips in the mustard mixture for about an hour and a half to really soak up the flavour, and it worked. I'm not sure how good they would have been without adding that step.

I got all fancy with the stacking and Gary joked that I really wanted to play Jenga with them instead of eating them. Har.

Anyway... They were really really good. The mustard marinade clung onto them really well and dipping them into the flour mixture before cooking them made them not as greasy as they could have been, which was good. I also dried a bit of the grease of and then cooked them in the oven for a bit, which helped a bit too.

The spicy potato wedges were spiced with sea salt, garlic, onion powder, cayenne pepper, and paprika. I could probably have done with a little bit less cayenne pepper, but they were still really good.

Gary's Dish Washing Rating - 4/5

Creamy Mushroom Pasta

I didn't actually eat any of this because I'd had dinner out with a friend earlier in the day. I got home and Gary was going out soon and needed a quick dinner, so I whipped this up with the leftover natural soy yoghurt from yesterday, some mushrooms, garlic and herbs.

Not really much I can say about it as I didn't eat any of it... Mushrooms freak me out... They're all weird...

That is all.

Aubergines with Tzatziki and Italian Bread Salad

A bit of a mix of the med meals there with the Greek tzatziki and the Italian salad.

I've made this salad before with the tomato bombs and it's always a hit. The aubergines were batter fried and it made them all lovely and gooey in the middle. I reckon the aubergines would be pretty good on sandwiches like that too. For the tzatziki I used Sojasun natural soya yoghurt, which was good because I nearly bought the Alpro Soya one which only came in like double the size of containers as the Sojasun one, and I only really needed a little bit. I think I preferred the taste of the Sojasun as well.

Ooh! The Cheesy Bean and Cheese Enchiladas that I made a while ago, remember them? They are absolutely amazing the next day! The cheese goes amazingly gooey and the flavour of everything seems to come out properly. Next time I make them I might actually just refrigerate them until the next day - they were that good.

Gary's Dish Washing Rating - 3/5

Behold theTower O' Cupcakes!

Or not... Whatever.

We had a fairly boring meal of spag bol tonight, it's dull so I didn't take a picture. However, as you can see I also made cupcakes tonight, and as everyone knows cupcakes are always blogworthy.

I haven't made cupcakes in ages, I got sick of them fairly quickly after the release of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. Not long after the release of it I catered a few vegan buffets which involved staying up all hours baking what felt like twenteen bajillion cupcakes and then not eating any of them, so me and cupcakes have a very strained relationship these days... But Gary begged me so I made some tonight.

These are the basic chocolate cupcakes with peanut buttercream and some chocolate sprinkles I got at the Health Store ages ago. They were really good, I mean, it's chocolate and peanut butter, you can't really go a whole lot wrong, can you?

Ooh! Isn't my new cupcake tower pretty? It's from the new Argos catalogue (link). Gary bought me it so I would make cupcakes again, it's much nicer than a smell old plate, eh?

And yes it's a rubbish picture, it's becoming a bit of a theme here, deal with it.