Falafel is your best friend when you're looking for a healthy meal, and you can't be bothered cooking.
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!
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'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.
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.
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 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.
A bit of a mix of the med meals there with the Greek tzatziki and the Italian salad.
These are the 'Cheesy Bean and Cheese Enchiladas' (brilliant title, eh?) from Vegweb. This is the second time I've made them. They make absolutely loads and the first time I made them I thought "Great! We can have the leftovers for lunch tomorrow". Alas, it was not to be, lots of Gary's smelly friends appeared and ended up eating them all! The cheek of it all! They all loved them so this recipe is very omni friendly and like I said it'll feeds loads!
It really was. On the pizza was tempeh sausage crumbles from Vegan with a Vengeance, red onion, pizza sauce (bought), and there was some sneaky sundried tomato paste hiding under the pizza sauce. It was absolutely delicious. The base (also from VwaV) was lovely and crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. We has it with some garlic and herb mayo, which went with it perfectly.
As I mentioned earlier, it's Burn's Night tonight so I thought I'd turn my hand to something traditional. Why? Mainly because I thought it would give me something semi-interesting to blog about.
Yesterday I made the Italian Bread Salad from Vegan Italiano by Donna Klein. It has tomatoes, cucumbers, red onion, and spinach with a red wine vinaigrette, and herbed croutons. I'm not one for just having a salad for dinner so I made Tomato Bombs from Vegan by Yvonne and Tony Bishop-Weston. These were hollowed out tomatoes, stuffed with cream cheese which was mixed with some of the tomato juice, garlic, and herbs. They went really nicely together, the filling of the tomato bombs which exploded onto the plate when you cut into them made a nice, creamy extra salad dressing. The herbed croutons gave a nice crunch to the salad, as well as the extra herby flavour they added.
We got a menu through the door today for a local chinese takeaway. I had a quick look through it and was pleased to see that they did quite a variety of tofu dishes. This is really unusual for where we live so it made me disturbingly happy. We were thinking about ordering from there tonight but the more I thought about it the more I realised how silly it was, we had everything in the fridge to make something similar to what we would have ordered. So I whipped up some sweet and sour tofu and vegetables with white rice. I dipped the tofu in cornflour before frying it off to make it lovely and crispy, I then stir fried up some onions, peppers, and spinach and added it to the tofu with some sweet and sour sauce (sorry - shop bought sauce, I'm bad). It was really tasty and ridiculously filling - neither of us could finish it, so we've got some leftovers for later which is always a bonus.
Wow... Sometimes I astound myself. I seem to have developed the skill to make whatever really good food I make look like crap in the pictures! Oh well... When I get rich I'll get a fancy camera and... I dunno... take some photography night classes or something... I get really impatient when I'm taking the pictures, I mainly want to eat!
When I first went vegan Gary and I were living in a shared student flat and cooking was often not very convenient, and at times completely unsanitary. I think spaghetti bolognaise was the first dish I properly veganised and because it was so quick and simple that we used to eat it around three times a week! I use Realeat Vegemince, but I've also used Redwood Mince before and both are pretty good for meals like this. These days we rarely ever eat it, mainly because I've become a lot ore adventurous, but also because we tend to not really eat frozen food much. It's still nice to have every now and then, it's very much our comfort food!
The Dec/Jan issue of satya had a really tasty looking recipe for tempeh pasties with a spiked mustard sauce, so I thought I'd give it a try. The pasties were great, but I think I'd adapt it a little bit more next time, it was a little grainy for my tastes. The recipe makes a lot of pasties so we have some in our freezer for later.
For one reason or another we ended up not eating dinner until really late last night, so we were absolutely starving! I had a jar of Seeds of Change sundried tomato pasta sauce, some pasta and lots of veggies so the meal was pretty much self explanatory. The vegetables I used were, onion, kale, sundried tomatoes. I added a little bit of oregano and garlic as well.
