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.

Recipe: Cream of roasted tomato and red pepper soup

Cream of roasted tomato and red pepper soup

Time I updated this blog with more than just posts about my poor memory.
My very first soup was beautiful, if only because it was my own, very simple creation. I'm usually a follow the recipe kinda gal, but I had a basic concept of what a tomato soup should consist of, so just followed my instincts and added other things for flavour.

Serves 2

Ingredients
1 red pepper, deseeded
10-12 various fresh tomatoes (I used 8 plum and 3 salad)
1 small red onion, peeled but whole
3 cloves garlic, peeled but whole
2 Portobello mushrooms
Soya cream
Basil

Instructions
Place the deseeded pepper, tomato, peeled onion, garlic and mushrooms into a roasting tray,drizzle a little olive oil over and roast on 200c until soft (usually around 15-20 mins. Remove from oven and allow to cool.
Peel the peppers and tomatoes before blending all vegetables until smooth. Sieve the liquid from the mixture into a saucepan and add soya cream (I used Alpro although use whatever type suits you). stir and reheat gently.
Serve immediately and enjoy x

Note
If you wish for a little heat, add half a teaspoon of vegan red chilli paste to the soup after it has been sieved.
The mass of vegetables that won't go through the sieve are delicious warmed slightly or left cold, spread on toast, crackers, dipped with breadsticks or just inside pita pockets.

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.