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.

Pumpkins, shopping and working in an anti-vegan environment

It's been a few weeks since I last posted here - naughty Lexa!

I don't really have very much to say. I haven't been cooking glorious vegan foods and I haven't done anything exciting to really warrent an update, but who cares?


Here's where I show that I'm a pumpkin virgin (despite my soup a short while ago).
I brought two small pumpkins to freeze so I could use it over the winter for soups and things. I didnt read instructions and I just did what felt right. So I cut the pumpkins into small pieces and cut away the outer bit. Then googled to find out how to prepare the pumpkin to freeze it. And discover that everyone tells me to cut the pumpkin in half, deseed, rub canola oil into the flesh and then bake for 90 mins. I don't have canola oil and the outside bit is in the rubbish. My pumpkin flesh is chopped into chunks in a bowl in the fridge. My seeds are waiting for some action too. I think I might toss the flesh in normal oil and bake until it softens, then freeze it once it's cool. I'm gonna toss the seeds in a frying pan shortly.
I can only mess up, right?
Besides, what do people do when they want to carve pumkinds and use the flesh? they can't bake the whole thing, surely?

In other news, I have visited the Whole Foods Market in Kensington, which was like walking into the Harrods of vegan cuisine. Ok, they sold everything, including masses of non vegan foods, but despite this, it was vegan mecca! (The one in Camden was like a tiny corner shop compared to this one).
I had already fallen off of the Cambridge weight plan wagon at the weekend and so went a little crazy. I wanted vegan marshmallows (which, incidentally, do not melt in hot chocolate and they float in the loo if you eat too much sugar and are sick later. Oops).
Vegan turkish delight was also purchased, along with diary free chocolate, sesame sticks (I know I'm not alone in considering these the best part of a decent bombay mix) and a vegan pasty (which, I hate to say, was much nicer than the one we brought from VX. A small-ish vegan chocolate cake may also have been purchased, on the basis that for something with eight slices, it was going to cost us £7.99, or we could have brought a solitary vegan cupcake each for £2.99. I live in the world of getting more for your buck, so I persuaded Helen (and it didn't take much persuasion, let me tell you) to say yes to us buying the cake. Cue an incredibly rich mass of cakey goodness that re-inforced the fact that as a vegan, I can still have my cake and chow down with the best of them. And then suffer the mother of all headaches later. My body has adapted to a fat free/bland diet (thanks to Cambridge) incredibly quickly. I'd been hoping that I could go wild with my cooking once I start eating after Cambridge again, but I may have to do the slowly slowly introductions. Or suffer. Oh well, it's hardly the end of the world.

Buying lunch in a non vegan world isn't so easy. Camden food co, Boots et al are all incredibly unhelpful. I didn't have time to go to Tesco (thanks to work cutting our meal breaks down to half hour) so I brought a non vegan sandwich. Lesson for the future: always prepare my own lunches for work - NEVER allow myself to get caught out. If I weren't still eating quorn or using Cambridge products, I'd have walked away with just a packet of crisps or something instead of a sandwich. I still felt like the biggest hypocrite on the planet as I scuttled back to my staff room and threw my (not very nice) sandwich down my throat before my colleagues entered the room. I'm not fully vegan but I've adopted the mindset (see, HUGE hypocrite) and I don't think I could have felt any worse about doing it had I taken a bite out of some meat. I know it's only a matter of time, but I can't wait for the cambridge products and quorn to be gone.

I'm going to be restarting my diet today - I really want to be fully vegan by my birthday, which means quitting using these cambridge products within 4 months. It doesn't give me a lot of time to drop 50lbs so it's time I quit messing about and focussed.

Recipe: Curry Pumpkin soup

I've downloaded dozens of apps onto my iPhone to help me to make the transition first to vegetarian and then to veganism, but after buying my [very first!] pumpkin, I was disappointed to see that very few of them had simple pumpkin recipes of things that didn't require more than a dozen ingredients. So I decided to look on an older app I'd downloaded goddess knows how long ago. Big Oven, thankfully came to my rescue!

Curry Pumpkin Soup

Ingredients

1 Kilogram Pumpkin, chopped

3 Potatoes, chopped

1 Clove Garlic

1/3 cup Red Curry Paste

400 millilitres Coconut Milk

2 cups Vegetable Stock

Yoghurt, natural

Cracked pepper, to taste

Preparation - Curry Pumpkin Soup

Cook onion and garlic in oil until soft.

Stir in curry paste and cook for 1 minute.

Add pumpkin, potatoes, coconut milk and stock.

Bring to boil and simmer for 15 minutes.

Puree in batches.

Serve with yoghurt and pepper.

(Image taken from the Big Oven site)

I admit to not being the type of person that bothers with measurements. I used a small pumkin and got maybe a quarter of what the recipe asked for. I used a handful of baby potatoes because that was all I had on hand. 1 ½ tsp of curry paste, a dash of coconut milk and maybe a mug of stock.

I didn't bother with yoghurt and I added the pepper to the soup instead of sprinkling it on top.

To go with the soup, I made flatbread with plain white flour, a little salt and water, which I didn't expect would work but did.

All in all, a very earthy and deliciously spicy soup, and I can now label pumpkin as a used ingredient.