New recipe! Boiled fruit cake

It's been a very long time since I last posted in here. I'm still vegan and still going strong. I made a mistake in getting lazy and losing my initial enthusiasm in cooking all of my food from scratch. Lots of pre-packaged pies, sausages, burgers, etc. Not much imagination in the kitchen. But I'm hoping to change all of that.

One of the things that my housemate and I were always trying to do was to get back onto our much ignored diet. We've been doing The Cambridge plan for about 6 weeks now, with included cheating. I made a cake for my grandmothers birthday today, and I made it vegan, so I just couldn't resist trying a piece.
Boiled fruit cake was a much loved recipe of mine - I'd never eaten such a moist fruit cake before discovering this recipe and it's been a firm favourite of mine for over half of my life. I finally plucked up the nerve to make it today, veganised, and it turned out beautifully!


Boiled Fruit Cake
150g margarine (I used Vitalite)
300g Sultanas
300g Currents
180g Soft Brown Sugar (I used 90g of a stevia and brown sugar mix)
1tsp Mixed Spice
1tsp Cinnamon
1tsp Bicarbonate of Soda
1tsp Baking Powder
250 ml Water
6 TBSP Applesauce
150g Plain Flour
150g Self Raising Flour

Combine Butter, sultanas, currents, sugar, mixed spice, cinnamon, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder and water in a saucepan. Bring to boil, stirring, then set aside to cool for one hour.
Heat the oven to 180c/Gas 4. Add the applesauce, mixing well with a wooden spoon. Sift the two flours into the mixture and beat well. Pour into a lightly oiled cake tin.
Bake for an hour, or until a thin skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.
Remove from the oven, allow to cool slightly before removing from tin.
VOILA! Perfect, moist boiled fruit cake!

Sausage Casserole Recipe

My housemate said something surprising to me last night. She's ready to lay off the meat substitutes :)

In slightly older news (a few days at least), I tossed the pumpkin flesh in olive oil, placed it in a large baking tray (I had loads of pumpkin), added a cup of water and baked it until the flesh was soft. As I did that, I pan cooked the seeds until they were beautifully golden. My housemate came downstairs (she'd been working nights) and said that the house smelled very 'eggy'. I didn't get that until I got home from work that night and walked in to 'burnt egg'. I have no idea if it's supposed to smell like that. It might have been because I prepared the pumpkin in stages. We'd brought the pumpkins about a week before Halloween but I'd left them sitting in a bag until Halloween night when I decided that I really must start them. And then once they were all cut up, I was so sick of the sight of pumpkin that I put the chopped flesh into a bowl, covered it in clingfilm and put it in the fridge. Then didn't deal with it until 2 days later.
Or maybe pumpkin seeds/flesh just smell like egg when they're cooking? Who knows? Google offers 'smelly feet' so maybe I should have cooked them immediately?

And I've spent the last week off the diet. I've gained about 4lbs, but then eating anything after being on a VLCD is bound to make you gain a little something. And those 4lbs will be off as soon as I've disciplined myself to get back on the diet.

I cooked another casserole last night. I decided that I was going to make a 'sausage’ casserole by adapting this Quorn sausage casserole recipe.
I didn’t use sweetcorn because my housemate hates it, and I didn’t bother with smoked paprika, mild chilli powder, sherry or tinned broad beans/cannellini beans either.

‘Sausage’ Casserole
6 quorn sausages, pan cooked, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 pack chestnut mushrooms, chopped
1 red pepper, chopped
3 garlic cloves, crushed with Basil
1 tin chopped tomatoes
1 tin lentils, drained
1 litre vegetable stock

Nothing complicated. Just add all ingredients to a large casserole dish.

Herby dumplings
Vegetable suet
Basil, chopped
Self raising flour
1tsp Baking powder
Warm water

Combine ingredients until you have an elastic dough. Split into 6, roll into balls and add to the casserole.
I discovered that the basil leaves a slightly menthol aftertaste to the dumplings. The recipe I borrowed suggested I use parsley but, me being me, I ignored it because I love basil. I think I’ll trust the recipe suggestion next time, and it’s not as though it suggested thyme (which I loathe)

Cook on 200 until the housemate gets home from work and everything is slightly burned on top and the dumplings are mostly uneatable (unless you’re me and you love burnt and mostly uneatable food – years spent overcooking food has resulted in a love of charcoal).
There were just a few too many ingredients for the dish and it spilt over, so left a roasting dish underneath to catch the over flow. Maybe in the future I shouldn’t attempt to stuff everything into the dish.

Anyway, the liquid was soaked up so it wasn’t really a casserole (again), but it wasn’t a ratatouille either. And our taste buds have really opened up – it tasted beautifully subtle and you could taste everything.
Maybe next time I do this, it’ll be a fully vegan meal, with no meaty substitutes.

I'll try to remember to take a photograph next time. It wasn't really pretty enough for a picture anyway - the layer of charcoal kinda messed with it a little.

The Vegan Pantry

There are many things that I've realised I'll require as I make the transition to vegan. An entirely new pantry is one of them. Actually, it'll just be 3 cupboards and a combo fridge freezer filled to bursting, but you get the idea.


Chez Bettay has an incredible list that they say is their ultimate vegan pantry, which looks like it's filled with more food than an extremely large family could eat in a week, let alone my housemate and me. However, one of the things I immediately noticed about the list was that a few items that are used in many of the vegan recipes I've scoured are not present.


For simple scrambled tofu 'egg' I know that while I can add loads of vegetables to the dish, the simplest thing I can do is simply add a little Kala Namak (black salt) to broken down tofu and enjoy thoroughly 'eggy' scramble.

As a meat eater, I'd add Worcester sauce to Bolognese mince and I really don't see why I shouldn't continue to do so if I am using vegan mince, except that Vegan Worcestershire Sauce is also not mentioned.

While I am content to just use Cheezley to recreate my need for cheese, not all of the recipes I've been collecting endorse such trust in deliciously recreated solid fat and instead call for nutritional yeast, which, as you've probably already guessed, is also absent.

And lastly, while they’ve added Seitan and multiple forms of tofu, they’ve forgotten to add my new acquaintances Polenta and Tempeh to the list.


It seems that every single person seems to have their own ideas of what their kitchen should consist of. I personally fantasise about seeing a brand spanking new recipe in one of the many sites I stalk, which urges me to recreate it immediately. Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to go to the cupboards and pull down every single necessary item? I imagine myself recreating vegan versions of Nigella Lawson-esque food porn in my house, which I admit would be completely wasted on my cats, ferrets and housemate, but in my fantasy, my kitchen faces the main road instead of the garden, and a cute, vegan, pagan, 30-something, single, non-smoking, sober, cute guy with his own place, a well paid job and all of his own hair just happens to be walking past the open window and stops to request a taste, followed by a date. *sighs* A girl can dream, can’t she?



Anyway, am I using this post as just an excuse to write down a few of the more common vegan items that I constantly forget? Absolutely. Will it help me to remember? Absolutely not :)




EDIT: I think that rather than creating blog post after blog post with other ingredients that I remember/come across, I shall simply make a list of them in this post and link to them in Amazon (although if I could, I'd link to the UK Amazon instead! Our Amazon doesn't seem to have half of this stuff, sadly.)


Currently:

*Kala Namak

*Vegan Worcestershire Sauce

*Nutritional Yeast

*Tempeh

*Polenta

*Soy protein

*Xanthan gum