Regrowing Pak Choi, an experiment

I have recently become a fan of the gorgeous 17 Apart site and their great tutorials on regrowing certain vegetables, I decided to have a go with a couple of pak choi bases and have been keeping a daily photographic record.  I'm also having a play with a couple of thumbnail gallery tutorials that I found and this is my first attempt, thanks to the good folk at Southern Speakers.  If it works as it should, clicking on a thumbnail should open them up to full size.

I now need to plant my pak choi on and see if it will carry on growing as happily as it has done to date and I have further experiments to try with celery, green onions and possibly, maybe an avocado tree... it looks so gorgeous on their site and if I do ever get my greenhouse finished (a whole other post) I will need things to grow in it!

Vegan Granola Bars Recipe

I found this on the Epicurean Vegan - one of my favourite cooking sites - and was immediately in love with how these little bars looked. 

As it was something of a last minute scramble, and we don't live Stateside, I had a bit of a play with the ingredients (the italics), otherwise I followed the recipe as is.

3/4 C quick oats - porridge oats

2 Tbs brown rice flour - Linwoods milled flax, sunflower, pumpkin and sesame seeds with goji berries (an all time favourite and available at Sainsburys)

2 Tbs quinoa flakes - Great Scot dried quinoa

1/2 C nuts, chopped (I used peanuts and pecans) - mixed, pre-chopped

1/4 C sunflower seeds

1/4 C chia seeds & 2 Tbs flaxseeds - mixed seeds selection from Asda (pumpkin, sunflower, hemp and linseed

1/2 C dried fruit, chopped (I used Craisins) - Asda's Orchard Dried Fruits (prunes, apricots, pear and apple)

1/2 C dark chocolate chips

3 Tbs almond butter - soya margarine

1 small avocado, pitted

2 Tbs brown rice syrup - agave nectar

3 Tbs almond milk

1 tsp vanilla - cinnamon

They are utterly addictive and delicious, even the lovely boyf has taken to them in all their vegan goodness!  We've since made a second batch to which I added cranberries and took what is my only picture so far;  I think that there will be plenty more opportunities to take more though ;o)

Cheesy Leek Stuffed Squash

I have an idea for the food for our Halloween party and am testing various recipes.  This wasn't one of them, but it may well be... it's Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Squash Stuffed with Leeks.  I couldn't get anything other than butternuts (to be fair, I would look harder if it was for a party and not just Tuesday's dinner) but it was pretty obvious, as soon as I'd chopped the stem off and scooped them out that they would make great, edible, Halloween Lanterns.

The filling is leeks, crème fraiche and Gruyere with mustard, seasoning and fresh thyme. 

It's a lovely dinner, I assumed that it would be very rich but the squash cut through the filling very nicely.  It was filling but a great dealer lighter than I thought it would be.  For the party we could have a selection of squashes and fillings... I feel a google coming on. 



The only question is how to carve a face out of my "pumpkin" but I think the boyf has got the answer; score the skin prior to cooking and then peal it away when they come out of the oven.  I'm going to have to work another stuffed squash dinner into my new monthly meal plan!

Veg Everyday! by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

As some of you may know, for health (rather than ethical, an important distinction, as I've come to find out) reasons I became a vegan/vegetarian last year; trying to keep to a ratio of approx 80/20.  I have vegan breakfasts and lunches and then dinner is at the very least vegetarian, sometimes vegan-able for me, and sometimes pure vegan. 

I think that I would, in all honesty be happiest as a vegetarian, but, as it turns out, I have huge ethical objections to dairy production know that I know what really goes on.  Don't talk to me about the poor dancing Anchor cows in the latest advert; it makes my blood boil!  Our milk consumption, I am delighted to say, is less than a quarter of what it was and I drink no milk at all, it's just that old demon cheese that we are all struggling with!  And when I say that "we" are struggling, I mean me: I am strict with myself, but have discovered that cheese is like a dangerous lover, you know it's not good for you, but you can't resist the odd flirt!  As for the boyf and the 10yr old, if I suggested a ban on cheese, they would disown me!  Again, however, consumption is way down and those lovely cheese board, bread and wine dinners are definitely a thing of the past.

The boyf and the 10yr old have gamely stuck with me all these months but I was starting to feel a little as though I was letting them down as, more and more, our dinners were coming out of a box!  Vegan food in particular seems to take an age to cook and we don't have that long in the evenings, but long before I gave up meat, I was giving up on packaging.  Now, in doing one good I was failing in my attempts to do another - why has eating well, both tastefully and ethically, become so complicated!  

Good vegetarian cookbooks seemed to be hard to find, I went through all the libraries offerings and found not one I would buy.  Online vegan websites are particularly good, as is The Kind Diet by Alicia Silverstone, but being primarily American in origin, there were often ingredients that are hard to track down in the UK and I have terrible trouble accurately converting measurements.  Dry good in particular, a half cup can vary by nearly 100gms depending on the "good" - it lead to some pretty funky eating!

Then a dear friend gave me a copy of  Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's, Veg Everyday! and my cooking is transformed!  Everything about this book makes me smile, from the forward, to the photos, to the beautiful illustrations, and the wealth of easy to cook and delicious recipes.  My friend recommended that I read the forward, he thought that I'd like it and he was right.  HFW has such a good way about him and his journey to eating more veg is very similar to mine; you start of just eating, then you think about what you are eating, then you think harder about where it comes from and how it gets to your plate, then you think about the impact of all of that on our beautiful planet, and yes, suddenly, you want to eat more veg!  Plus, you don't really want to eat stuff that looks and tastes kinda like meat, because what's the point?  If you have got to the place where you know that you need to eat more veg, then you eat more veg!  A third of the recipes are vegan and he says that another third are adaptable to vegans (who "will know what to do"!)  I would disagree, the majority of the recipes can be made vegan, without too great an adjustment.

Looking for dinners that I could get used to and thus knock up quickly once we were all back at work/school, over the holiday I picked 4-5 recipes a week, shopped for them and jumped right in.  Shopping is a treat, mounds of veg piling up the basket and so little else; cooking is (always) good fun; and the dishes have been without fail interesting and delicious.  I love picking next weeks recipes and now have some new favourites that can be rotated in.  Of particular note have been the Macaroni Peas (very good), the Kale and Mushroom Lasagne (as events transpired I ended up eating the whole 6 portion lot over a couple of days!), the "fiery" bean Chilli, stuffed peppers, Fennel and Lemon Linguine, various risottos (especially the Mushoom and Chestnut one) and tonight I have high hopes for the Swede Speltotto...  We're all eating veg that we normally wouldn't too, it's lovely to test the taste buds again, and I am slowly working up to the Beetroot Tarte Tatin (pictured) as it would be my idea of heaven if, currently, no-one else's!

 

A culinary diversion!

Anyone who knows me well knows that I love to cook, but not only that, I am passionate about the food that we eat.  I buy organic, fairtrade, ethical, local, I want to know where my food has come from and how it got to my plate; not always possible, or easy, but I care to try to find out.

And so I have watched with interest a good friend's near instant conversion to a vegan diet (see  http.cookingwithleyla.blogspot.com) and the recipes that she has posted.  As part of her process she watched Earthlings, a profound movie that I am still struggling my way through.  As with all arguments made to have the strongest impact some of the detail is truly horrifying, but it was in some of the "quieter" details that I think I found myself most shocked by.  It has left me greatly ashamed of the cruelty that we humans are capable of and mindful of the fact that the vast majority of people have no idea of the cruelty being perpetuated in their name; for their much-loved pets, food, clothing, medicine and entertainment.  We may know the odd detail, hear the odd story, see the odd picture, but we do not have the full transparency that allows us to make truly informed and conscious choices.  I can only hope that we would choose differently we truly knew.

Added to that the information that I learnt about how meat production impacts global hunger and I came away determined to set myself a culinary challenge, for just a week to start with, and eat even more consciously that I have done before.  So I made a deal with the boyf and the 9 yr old; if I could, at our local supermarket, stock our larder to live predominantly vegan/vegetarian for a week, they would be up to the challenge of trying some meat free eating.  I was going to go predominantly vegan for the week and only vegetarian if I had to.

If I am brutally honest, I can not imagine a meat-free future for myself.  This was more an intellectual challenge and a chance to cook differently again and expand my culinary horizons.  I was also very interested by people's reactions; vegetarian... a slight mutter; VEGAN... well, I think a good majority of the folk I know think that I have gone just plain crazy!

But it has been extremely easy, I don't miss meat, I have loved the cooking - which is quite a different experience - and the experimenting.  I feel far more in tune with what I am making, willing to try flavours and marry new ideas together.  And, most amazingly of all, I feel at peace with what I eat.  I don't think about what I'm making or eating in the same way that I did, I don't worry about the fat-salt-blah-blah-blah content, I don't wonder where is came from and if it really is local, free-range, ethical as it says it is (don't get me started on packaging and labelling!)  I just cook, eat, and enjoy!

And to those of you that would argue that I think too much... I say that you don't think enough!  We all have the choice to make our own path, but we have the responsibility to do it in the best way that we can, not only for ourselves but for our health and our children and our place on this planet.  If we all truly believed that we should leave this planet in some way better than we found it, we would all be living in a far better state right now.  So we can start with what we put in our bodies, the sustenance that enables everything else we do... go learn, go think, go experiment and I dare you not to, in just the teeny tiniest way, like it!