Vegan cookies

God I'm tired - and lazy - its very difficult in the warm summer months to move beyond some kind of pasta to be eaten from the pot, prostrate on the sofa. A lot of birthdays this month, also I went on some kind of Amazon frenzy and didn't quite leave myself enough for interesting food this month.
My brother's birthday was a bit of a quiet affair - he's observing a religious fast and could only have vegan food. Are vagetables shorthand for quiet? Lets say they are. I made the plov from Veggiestan which I though was super bland (it's really supposed to have lamb in it) but which mysteriously disappeared between the 6 of us. Some stuff from Moro East, I think, shallots in sherry and mushrooms with rosemary, and the most celebratory tomato salad I could muster. Meh. For dessert I made this chocolate cake which is brain numbingly simple to do, but unexepctedly delicious.
I'm actually developing a pretty solid repertoir of vegan desserts, in a way inventive sweets are more difficult to come up with, especially if you don't have any fruit lying around. I have one or two vegan cookbooks and they rely very heavily on delicious things like strawberries or disgusting things like soy cream. I've tried a few egg replacers over the years and they're all pretty grim prospects. I used to have another, terrible, blog for a while and did a taste test with batches of cupcakes and you could absolutely tell that some sinister, synthetic ingredient had been added to the batter - in some cases the cupcake would not cook all the way through, in some cases it would collapse in on itself or crumble away like an old weathered brick and they were all disgusting. There are also some homespun version of egg replacer (flax seeds, mashed banana etc.) but I've always found that fucking around with an existing recipe is not as good as making something that was specifically developed to be egg and dairy free.
A surprising source of thrifty, vegan recipes are WWII cookbooks, I have a few Marguerite Patten compilation books (it's where I got the idea for vegan lemon curd) and the recipes are mostly terrifying and fascinating in equal measure. Snoek.
A book that is kind of languishing at the bottom of my Wishlist is Ratio which aims to take the guesswork out of substituting ingredients, which makes total sense. The thinking is that once you know what proportion of fat to starch to sugar to use, any baked good can be endlessly adapted, the only downside is that it takes the responsibility for a dish's success or failure away from the recipe writer and onto me!
I made WWII carrot cookies using vegan margarine and honey cakes from Cretan Cooking using olive oil. It's interesting that while I've found the Russian brand of Orthodoxy to be focused on denying yourself the little pleasures, and treating the fast as a time of quiet reflection, Greek Orthodox work around limitations and have developed a range of recipes for cakes and pastries that fit the specifications (on another note, apparently octopus is not considered to be an animal and is fare game during fasts!).

Both of these are fine, but you couldn't describe them as moreish or decadent, you can definitely taste some kind of an agenda in the slight blandness and dryness. Maybe the message is that if you want delicious biscuits, don't go on a fast.

Roasted Garlic Polenta with Sauteed Tomatoes

I always find it interesting that vegans are portrayed as hemp wearing, salad eating bitches, I've known some pretty hefty vegans, believe me - it's a myth. I've also met some who use veganism as an excuse for picky eating (chips and ketch, beans on toast).
The problem is that it always seems boring and austere, even I'm guilty of it - I was getting brownies for the office once at the local coffee shop and was told that all their brownies were vegan, even though I know better I immediately assumed that this was at the cost of omitting some delicious ingredient.
But vegetables have so much flavour and texture, as long as you don't append the dreaded V word to your dish, it;s entirely possible to enjoy a meal of 'side dishes'.
I'm pretty feeble though, I have to ease myself in, like getting into a hot bath. Here I'm using polenta and tomatoes as a vehicle for the leftover roast beef. I hate heating roast beef because I usually have it quite rare and hate to overcook if for leftovers.

I need to give this book a few more goes before saying something cruel like how boring and thoughtless instead of how safe and approachable it is, but The Joy of Vegan Cookery isn't really killing it so far. It doesn't have any pictures, which isn't very joyful and doesn't help to explain how 125g of polenta is meant to serve 4 people. You sprinkle the polenta, eccentrically, through your fingers into some boiling water and cook while two heads of garlic roast. Then mix half of the garlic into the polenta and the other half into a freaking kilo of tomatoes! and sautee, long enough for the tomatoes to release their juices and turn into a watery mess, but not long enough to cook down and thicken. Serve.

I don't know if you can tell, but I was disappointed. There were two of us, but had I planned to feed 4 people it would have to be with a sad solo tablespoon of polenta swimming is a sea of tomatoes. Flavor wise this would have been ok without the beef, but on the strength of this recipe, I'm not buying it!

Meat Cooked with Cardamom, Cauliflower with Ginger, Stuffed Baby Aubegines

There is a market in Shepherd's Bush Market that I didn't know existed, duh. Last Saturday my dad drove me there, past the throngs of people heading into Westfield, to buy a new foam mattress for the day bed in the spare room. Very glamorous, but let me ask you how much a bushel of lemons, a head of cabbage, a bag of potatoes, three cauliflowers and a bag of baby aubergines would cost you anywhere else - £4.50? Yeah, me too.
I didn't really need so many vegetables, it was an impulse purchase, something I have been trying to curb, but which is a beast that cannot be tamed. I was going to make some pasta for dinner and went to a local store for spaghetti and came out with a kilo of bone in lamb neck and a bottle of carob syrup. It feels too pathetic to say that I haven't bought myself any clothes since before Christmas and almost didn't pay my phone bill this month because I spend all my money on food. Is there like a support group I can join? And would I want to hang out with any of those losers?
On Saturday night I made some recipes from 50 Great Curries of India by Camellia Panjabi. I actually have an enormous collection of Indian cook books, and only the most rudimentary understanding of how to make Indian food because somehow I have always lived near an amazing curry house (Everest Spice in Drayton Park and Curry Garden in Arnos Grove). But interestingly enough I had all of the ingredients required in my spice cabinet. There are a few recipes in this book that call for things like mango powder or cocum, which you would have to go out of your way to buy, but overall this book is very accessible.
I made the interesting sounding Meat with cardamom out of the lamb which calls for grinding 33 green cardamoms, and them boiling in water with the meat and some other spices. Panjabi describes this as 'very delicate' but it was entirely too bland with no discernible cardamom flavour. On Monday I took some for lunch at work and ended up with this beautiful display of bone fragments.
To go with it I made cauliflower with ginger which is steamed in it's own juices and delicious, worth the price of the book. I defile all of my books now with notes on the recipe's success and there is a wonderfully hyperbolic note next to this one.
Also stuffed baby aubergines which are very cute, didn't do it for me on the night but are amazing as leftovers.
Oh yeah, I'm supposed to be on the soup diet, ooops!

Tomato Soup with Two Fennels

Good God do I hate fennel, sweet baby Jesus is that aniseed kick nasty. I was going to also say that fennel tastes like the Devil's arsehole, bit this is a cooking blog after all.
Isn't it funny, my favorite blogger described the taste of this soup 'like eating hot tinned tomatoes', and it's actually got fennel in two forms, veg and seed, but I'm still making it. As I was shopping for the two tins of tomatoes after work I got very depressed at the prospect of eating this when I got home, but it's still on the menu. In life, you see, you have to force ourselves to do things we don't want to do. Life isn't an endless parade, someone has to walk behind the elephant and pick up the poop.
OK, that's really unkind. This soup isn't that bad.
It does totally taste like hot tinned tomatoes, undercooked and thin, but I'm very forgiving of that because it reminds me exactly of the pasta sauces I used to make before I really know what I was doing. It's thick and watery at the same time, but tastes pretty fresh, very sweet and the flavour of fennel is just a background note.
I like the taste, but I know that the reason I like it is because I have a fondness for bad pasta sauce. I would never dream of giving someone a recipe for this, but I would tell people who've decided to make it to sprinkle some nice salty feta on top.

Spicy Fried Cauliflower and Mackerel Balls

For the last couple of weeks I've been thinking about what to serve for Christmas. I have absolutely no minimalistic tendencies and will feel like a failure if the table isnt groaning and my family isnt crying at the end of the day.
I'm thinking about little side dishes to have on the side of whatever beast I decide on this year. Obviously I'm going to have potatoes and sprouts, probably carrots and I'm making some sauerkraut, but I'm sure there's something a bit more interesting that will become my holiday classic, out there. Now is the time to have these crazy experiments. By the time you have a family you should really have your crazy traditions down. It's a shame I don't have a crazy aunt that makes spam stuffing or something.
I'm using Moro East for the cauliflower recipe (which can also be found here) and Home Cooking the Flavel Way for the balls (they were supposed to be sardine balls, but all I had was mackerel in tomato sauce).
Flavels was a maker of gas stoves and produced this cookbook for hosewives in the 50s. It's exactly as old fashioned as you would expect, I bought it in a charity shop and it's quite charming. You can always find these slightly naff old book in second hand shops, and I can't resist. It's like a time capsule, here's an interview with a chef who collects old cookbooks. His motivation is to learn and he has a problem with the fact that modern cookbooks give excrutiatingly elaborate instructions for every process, which inhibits learning. Older book don't even tell you the temperatre that the oven is supposed to be, you're meant to use your intuition and the inevitable trial and error forces you to learn to be a better cook. The problem is that nobody is going to want to waste ingredients on something that might fail, but the implication that you can just wing it does appeal to the ego.
And look at it! There is a recipe for tinned sardines next to one for lobster, like you know, whatever, have one or the other for dinner tonight. A modern cookbook would have a two paragraph apology for the extravagance of one and the paucity of the other printed alongside.
For this you're meant to just combine all of the ingredients, roll in breadcrumbs and bake in the oven. I'm using mackerel instead of sardines, fish sauce instead of anchovy essence and panko instead of brown breadcrumbs. They look almost like truffles when the come out of the oven, and taste pretty nice too.
The cauliflower is eaven easier, just fry in olive oil, sprinkle with the ground spices and lemon and serve. It's lovely, and makes your house smell aniseedy and warm. V. good and a great way to make your cauliflower phobic boyfriend eat almost an entire head of it.

Grapevine

What do you do when you walk into the garden for the first time in months, to do the autumn pruning, and realize that the grapevine you've been saying bad things about all summer is heaving with bounty? You thought it was shriveling but it just won't die.
I ended up picking two huge bowls of grapes, more than everyone in my family could eat before they went off.
I used about half of it to make syrup for the trifle for the Aviation dinner. You put the grapes, vines and all, in a large pot and cover with cover with water, heat very gently for a couple of hours (if it's boiled it will taste vegetably), leave to cool overnight and then pass through a fine sieve. Yummy. If you reduce the juice for a few hours you get a rich almost syrup, no sugar needed, which makes a nice jelly (cold food tastes less flavorful so you have to make sure it's a little sweeter than you would usually have).
Grapes are nice too frozen, as a snack.
I also made some raisins.
Grapes go in,
Raisins come out
There are a lot of options of how to make raisins on the internet, good old sunshine is the best but not practical for me, I don't have a dehydrator (yet), so ended up using the oven. A nice, cozy 7 hours on 95C fan assisted.
'But Sasha' you say 'I can't run my oven for 7 hours, what do you think I am, a millionaire?'
Well it doesn't actually cost that much, maybe a pound, srsly. But if you're really worried use the oven to cook other things at the same time. Meringues need slow, low cooking for example. Or you could slow roast some of the last summer tomatoes for a sauce.
'But Sasha! I don't want my raisins to taste like vegetables!!'
Dude, use a roasting bag, they're awesome.

As a bonus I finally decided to give myself some time to try and make dolmades from scratch. I vaguely followed the instructions in Vefa's Kitchen for the most basic simple vegan version.
What you do is blanch the fresh leaves in water for a few minutes, then fill with a rice, herb and oil mixture, roll up and cook gently in stock for an hour. The leftover blanched leaves can be stored in the freezer.
Wah-lah!

Fakhida bil forn

Maybe its all of the Masterchef I've been watching, but I kind of lost my cooking mojo. The last couple of weeks have been a greasy blur of takeaways and microwaves. Bad girl.

Anyway, here I am, so get over it. It is what it is.

Maria Kahlife's book on Middle Eastern food, is pretty much my favorite source. My employer is Iranian and I've had the most amazing food at her house, I suppose part of the appeal is the fact that unlike good old Spain or Mexico you can't just jump of a plane and pootle off to get the real stuff, I can't imagine traveling there for a holiday. The situation in the region is uneasier than ever, and it almost seems trite to mention that the political and social unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Libya and inevitably others, will hopefully improve the way of life and how the West perceives the Middle East. Lets hope so. Nobody likes change, but as the anarchist Bakunin put it, the urge to destroy is a creative urge.

Fakhida bil forn is pretty much a Lebanese meat and two veg. You marinade a leg of lamb in garlic, oil, lemon juice, cinnamon and allspice, then roast for a hour before throwing a few shallots and carrots into the pan. I's sliced and served on a bed of rice, which is made with more cinnamon and allspice, as well as lamb mince, onions and nuts. It's all very fragrant, spicy, a little greasy, and very satisfying.

I served it with Foul Medammas, a delicious Egyptian broad bean dish, and Naaz Khaatoon, a very herby Iranian aubergine dip.

Oh, and here is an amazing blog I've been reading, written by an American student in Egypt - he travels through the region making it seem so accessible, and above all, relevant.

http://foodjihad.com/

Vegan cake and a drink

I had some of my stepmother's relatives over for dinner, they're very religious and observe the Lent... religiously, which means totally vegan and alcohol free for the next couple of months.
I got in some falafels and houmous (which it was totally tempting to pretend to have made), olives and artichokes, and made guacamole, cucumber dipping sauce, steamed broccoli, fennel salad and lemon risotto. All of which I forgot to photograph of course.
I made this incredible vegan, flourless orange cake which went down LIKE A FREAKING HOUSE ON FIRE!!! Natasha asked for the recipe, it made me so happy, basically you boil a couple of oranges then blend with tofu, olive oil and ground almonds. Very very grown up, tart and delicious. See? Last little piece left.
But the thing I'm most pleased with (apart from almost reducing the boyfriend to tears when I made him hoover and wash all the floors twice before the guests arrived) is my incredible alcohol free cocktail. You just crush together some raspberries and ice and pour over equal measures of apple juice and tonic. I swear to God it tastes like there's booze in there, that's why I've dubbed it Miley Cyrus. Best served out of vintage girly goblets.
Oh, and everything went smoothly despite it being the freaking Ides of March, and almost nobody got stabbed...

Vegan Lemon Meringue Pie

Moron, what's wrong with you, don't you know that lemon meringue pie is made almost exclusively out of eggs? How are you going to make that vegan, you must be some kind of a dumbass.
Well anyway, it's my dad's birthday and because the Orthodox season of fasting is upon us he's going vegan/pescetarian for the month of December. Fun! (I'm so glad I don't live there anymore).
So cast yer eye on this sorry collection of objects. What possible cohesive dish could be conjured up from the bunch or nonsense?
I'm using the austere pie crust recipe from Sugar Blues (with a few modifications), a war time lemon curd recipe with marrow substituted for eggs, and a really bizzare sounding mix of what I would call chemicals (but really aren't) for the meringue top.
The crust is easy and boring and goes in the oven for blind baking.
Then, as illustrated in this delightful cartoon from Marguerite Patten's 'We'll eat again' you take your marrow, skin and gut it (or 'peel and seed' if there are any children reading this), weigh the pieces and then casually weigh out the same amount of sugar! Um, no. Normally I would follow a recipe even if seemed wrong to me, just out of curiosity, but I am not the sugar baron and haven't got piles of it lying around in my yard. My marrow ended up being 500g and I measured out a scant 150g of sugar and that's your lot. I suppose if you were canning it to keep for the winter, you'd want more sugar to help preserve it. But I'm planning on eating mine.
You mash the steamed marrow add in the lemon and sugar, and cook for half an hour. If you close your eyes and hold your nose it's just like lemon curd. If you open your eyes, it looks like this and smells like cabbage soup. But nobody's really interested in the curd! It's the egg-free meringue that you really want to see.
I had to go to Planet Organic for the xanthan powder, which is a thickener, 8 times more potent than cornflour, and made from sugar.
And I had to drag my ass to Holland and Barrett for the soy protein isolate which is made into a drink for body builders and vegetarians to get more protein, I think. This is my favorite summation of it's many uses, gleaned from Wikipedia
"Soy protein is used for emulsification and texturizing. Specific applications include adhesives, asphalts, resins, cleaning materials, cosmetics, inks, pleather, paints, paper coatings, pesticides/ fungicides, plastics, polyesters and textile fibres."
Yum yum, I'm ready, lets go!
The recipe I used is from this blog, but if you're too lazy to click I'll write out the whole thing at the bottom of this post.
At first it really thew me that the measurements for the topping are in teaspoons, really, good luck trying to whisk two teaspoons of anything together. It's wierd and annoying. But then you gradually add in more and more ingredients end it thickens up and starts to approximate whipped eggs, it's pretty amazing (and also, your arm falls off from whisking for a solid 20 minutes - use an electric whisk)
Result:
Here's two things I learned whilst making this thing, the blow torch your friends gave you for your birthday won't work unless you fill it with lighter fluid first, and if you leave a pie under the grill for too long it will burst into flames and you'll have to start again from scratch.
Anyway, the second pie was pretty amazing. I swear to God, you can't tell the difference between this and the real thing. Visually, the topping is flatter and less solid than a meringue usually is but the taste and chewiness is identical. The curd has a slight whiff of the vegetable before you cover it up with with meringue and isn't quite as thick and glossy, but I would imagine, much better for you. Try it, really it doesn't take any longer than a real lemon meringue pie would.

Recipe for Vegan Lemon Meringue Pie

Pie crust (makes enough for two small sandwich tins)
2 tbsp semolina/ cornmeal
1 cup plain flour
1 tbsp icing sugar
2 tbsp sunflower/ rapeseed oil
water
Combine the dry ingredients and mix in the oil until well blended. Slowly add water until the mix forms into a firm dough. Set in the fridge for 30 minutes, then knead, roll out, line your pie dish and blind bake on a high heat for 20-30 mins. (until cooked)

Lemon curd (makes a lot, half a litre)
1 marrow, peeled, seeded and steamed. Around 500g
1 lemon, juiced and zested
150g caster sugar
1 tbsp vegan margarine
Mash the marrow and gently simmer for 30 minutes with sugar, lemon juice and zest, and margarine. If the mixture isn't thickening up as much as you want, add a little cornflour mixed with cold water. Taste and add more sugar, lemon juice if you'd like to.

Meringue topping (makes just enough for topping one pie)
Sugar mixture - 6 tbsp caster sugar, 1 tsp soy protein isolate powder, 1/2 tsp xanthan powder

4 tsp soy protein isolate powder
5 tbsp water
2 tsp cider vinegar
1 tsp vanilla essence

Mix up the sugar mixture and set aside. In a large bowl whisk together the soy protein powder and water until thick and well blended. Add the vinegar and vanilla and whisk until it begins to thicken. Gradually whisk in the sugar mixture, one tablespoon at a time, until it thickens ups and becomes white.