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.

Planning ahead for Christmas recipes

I've made a decision about what I will be cooking for Christmas. Actually, I've made a decision about which recipes I will be using for Christmas. I will be making finger foods for the 21st, that I am planning on taking around to my sick grandmother.

Something to make now:
Christmas pudding
Mincemeat

Leading up to Christmas week that I'll be sharing w/neighbours:
Pumpkin spiced bread
Banana bread
Pumpkin Pie
Banana-maple oatmeal Cookies

Foods I am planning for the 21st are:
Individual Vegan toads in the hole
Vegan sausage rolls
Home made hummus with cheezley bread sticks
Individual pizzas
Roasted tomato and pepper soup w/flatbreads (no links, sorry, this is my own recipe)
Stuffed peppers w/cous cous
Baked paprika sweet potato crisps

Individual apple pies
Chocolate and coconut truffles
Vegan Milanos

Christmas eve:
Christmas cake
Chocolate tiffin
Gingerbread cookies
Mince pies
Chocolate cake

Christmas Day:
Quorn family roast (which will be the only non vegan item on the menu - I'll have a whole year to convince my housemate to allow me to try cooking a nut roast)
Swede and carrots
Vegan Cauliflower cheese
meat free bacon wrapped sausages


This Christmas, dinner will be brought to the Herbivore household courtesy of the following sites:
Fat Free Vegan Kitchen
Vegan Village
Parsley Soup
My Vegan Planet
Vegan Cupcakes
Razzle Dazzle Recipes
Cook Dannemann

My neighbours are going to love me this year! I hope some of this stuff will freeze ;)

Vegan Sites

I've been trawling the net looking for vegan suitable recipes for Christmas, and stumbled upon a spakly treasure trove of recipes to suit all occasions. I'll be honest, I walked into this diet thinking that it'll be 101 ways to cook chickpeas and lentils, and to be honest, there are a thousand ways to incorporate these into the foodie lifestyle, but there's so much more! You truly believe that you'll never eat another cheese scone or tiramisu dessert again, and I'm overjoyed to be shown how wrong I am!



Some of the sites thrilling me right now:

Veggie Love Planet

The Vegan Society

Vegan Village

BBC food

Veganfamily

Vegetarian Society

Parsley Soup

Veg family

Whole Foods Market

You may have noticed that a lot of the links are to the Yule section of the recipes. Enjoy and please feel free to suggest more :)

On the books front, my housemate ordered Skinny Bitch in the Kitch, which is just brilliant! I also received my copy the The Quorn Kitchen, which would have been perfect for when I turned Veggie back in June. I can still use it though - I just need to substitute lol.

I've also ordered my copy of Alicia Silverstones The Good Diet and Skinny Bitchin', which I'm anticipating imminently :)

Greetings from the Apprentice Herbivore

I made the decision on June 22nd to go vegetarian after watching a video on PETA about the cruelty in an Ohio based kosher slaughterhouse. Like most people, I knew that inhumane slaughter occurred in all slaughterhouses, but Kosher is meant to be humane, right? 

From the PETA site: workers  were using a meat hook and a knife to rip out cows' tracheas while the animals were still conscious—after the shochetim (kosher slaughterers) had cut their throats.

Read the full article here. 

Like everybody I know, I'd turned a blind eye to the ritual slaughter in all slaughterhouses, but I was truly sickened by the video, which, let's face it, you are meant to (PETA is fond of punching you with the most horrific images they can find). As a Brit, you'd hope that UK slaughterhouses were nothing like American ones. Alas, from their McDonald and KFC fast food lifestyle, the UK has followed America like a willing puppy.

I'd eaten fish and chips on the 22nd (before watching the video on the train home from the seaside). I became a vegetarian from the 23rd (today is day 96) and have moves to becoming vegan. It helps that my housemate Helen has become intolerant to lactose, but after learning just how meat consumption is directly linked to cancer and heart disease, she has gamely joined me on the green wagon. 

We are both overweight from a sedentary lifestyle of meaty, fatty, unhealthy pizza, Chinese, Indian and other general crap. So we are both on the Cambridge Wight Plan. It's hard for her - she can't drink the conveniently premade tetra paks of milkshakes and I've swapped out my powder shakes and porridge for her (which still contain miniscule amounts of milk unfortunately), so I've not launched as immediately into a vegan lifestyle as I'd have liked, although everything that is nothing to do with the diet has been replaced. I'm using soya milk and before restarting my weight loss plan I made vegan cauliflower cheese, vegan pancakes and vegan Yorkshire puddings (sooo yummy!). We are both also currently eating Quorn, which contains free range egg. I'd like to become comfortable with using tofu - I've only used the Cauldron pre-marinated pieces so far, which tasted deliciously of sausage.

I'm hoping that by the new Year, or my birthday in late February at the latest, will be the point at when I can make the change complete.

I've decided to create this blog to chronicle recipes that I've discovered and used, or created (like my Curried pumpkin and potato soup, roasted vegetable soup, vegetable stir fry or vegetable casserole that I'll post at a later date).

It will also be a place for me to link to other blogs, complain about how hard it is to get a decent sandwich in a supermarket, and how annoying it will be to be completely unable to get a soya latte or food in a little cafe in the middle of nowhere (as we discovered when we visited Newport in the Isle of Wight, and trundled from cafe to cafe - in a town filled with cafes - looking for at least a vegetarian sandwich and found only one that offered egg mayonnaise, but no soya for our coffee or hot chocolate)

On that note, thanks for reading (or skimming) my first blog post :)