Erzatsz chilli spread/dip

Occasionally my other half's needs for nice things to put in sandwiches don't tally with expeditions to the sort of places where such things can be got. This is one way our usual stockpile of tinned beans can come in handy! I decided against hummus today because the process of turning chickpeas into paste is annoying - neither the potato masher nor the smoothie blender can deal with them that well, so I have to mash them up with my hands first. Not fun. Kidney beans are a lot softer and hence easier to make spread and dip out of.

Ingredients:
1 standard tin red kidney beans
A really tiny red onion (we had an entire crop of onions the size of a large marble - this would be about a quarter of a normal onion!)
Juice of half a lemon
Half a small red pepper
A sprinkling of paprika

Either:
Pour the ingredients into a bowl, stir everything together and squish with a potato masher
Or:
Put the whole lot in the blender jug and blend slowly, occasionally taking the jug off and shaking it to alternate which of the contents get near the blades.

That old chestnut

I bought some chestnuts before Christmas, meaning to roast them, but was then too busy to actually do that. Luckily many of them were still edible by today! I was home alone for lunch, so this just makes one bowl. It was quite quick to make today, but involved overnight soaking.

Ingredients
-1 or 2 tsp yeast extract
-About three quarters of a small net of chestnuts, or buy a tin of pre-peeled ones if this is what you're setting out to make.
-An onion
-Three medium cloves of garlic
-Olive oil
-Splash of balsamic vinegar

Peel the chestnuts. My preferred technique is to stick a knife into the middle of the shell and slowly bring the handle down towards you, then waggle the blade about to seperate the two halves. Try to get as much of the inner husk off as possible.

Mix the yeast extract with hot water and soak the chestnuts in it overnight.

The next day:
-Put a decent amount of olive oil in the bottom of a saucepan and heat up
-Chop the onion, crush the garlic, tip into the oil
-Scoop the chestnuts out of the stock with a slotted spoon or fork (depending on the size of your container) and drop into the oil.
-Stir around a bit
-Add the stock and a bit more water if necessary
-Bring to the boil then turn down and leave to simmer for half an hour

Quick snack

I have a cold, which for some reason seems to be making me extra-hungry as well as tired and bunged up. I've also struggled through a few days where I couldn't just give in to it, and am feeling the effects now. Also, my partner is at work late, so dinner will be late. I generally deal with this by snacking. This particular snack involves tomato and mushroom - two of the main vegan umami foods, in case anyone was wondering - and chilli-flavoured olive oil, because it tastes nice and spicy stuff is good for counteracting bunged-upness. It doesn't have magical powers of resurrection or anything, but I feel a little less out of it than I did earlier this afternoon!

-1 large tomato
-4 closed cup mushrooms
-Chilli oil (enough to cook the veg and still have a bit left over)
-Two slices of bread

Heat the chilli oil (not too hot, olive oil reacts badly to overheating). Chop the tomato and mushrooms small and cook them in the oil.
Toast the bread.
Pour the mess from the frying pan over the bread. Preferably on a plate rather than straight onto the worktop/table.

And yes, I'm a vegan, admitting publicly to having the same annoying but ultimately minor illness that many of my colleagues and students have had/will have in the course of a semester. Such is life. Detractors will be coughed on.

Making soup in the oven

This is currently one of my favourite things to have when I'm home alone at lunchtime!

-One tin of cannelini or borlotti beans (borlottis have more of their own flavour, cannelinis go mushy which helps the texture)
-One onion, four medium garlic cloves (or both)
-Olive oil - more than you think you'll need
-Two teaspoons of yeast extract dissolved in a coffee mug of hot water (just off the boil is best)

Tip the beans into a roasting tray. Add the chopped onion and/or crushed garlic and stir it in. Cover everything with olive oil and put in a hot-ish oven (200C or thereabouts). Take out after 20 mins or so and add the yeast extract liquid. Put back in the oven for another 20-odd mins. Take out and eat.

Chilli beanburgers

We often end up having burger-based meals, just out of convenience, so today I thought I'd have a(nother) go at making my own - mainly for variety but also because I feel that they are healthier because I can monitor what goes in them. So here goes:

Half a mug of white rice, boiled in a lot of water for half an hour or so.
1 standard tin red kidney beans
2 small onions, chopped finely
Half a red pepper, chopped finely
2 teaspoons potato flour - probably optional but I think it helps a lot with the binding.
1 teaspoon paprika
1/2 a teaspoon each of cayenne pepper and cumin

Saute the onions and pepper in a small sunflower oil until they soften.
Mix the rice, beans and spices together and mash with the potato masher. (all high-tech around here!)
Stir the pepper and onions in, make sure it is thoroughly mixed.
Leave it all to cool (unless you'd already left the rice for a bit!) then shape into six patties. Bake for 30-40 minutes, turning at least once.

I like this recipe because it uses cheap, basic ingredients that can be bought and stored easily. (At a pinch the onions and peppers could be left out, but they do make it a lot nicer) It does involve a lot more prep than whipping store-bought burgers from freezer to oven, but the beauty of it is you can make extra burgers to freeze for another time.

Packed lunch and dinner

Tomorrow I have a fairly long (although largely quiet) day at work, so I have to take in enough food to keep me going all day! Lunch is two homemade herby brown rolls with half a slice each of Tofutti plastic cheddar (because vegans can eat crap too...) and salsa (left over from nachos yesterday). I'm thinking I might add some carrot sticks, and also buy a small bar of plain chocolate from the campus shop for dessert. (Iron AND caffiene, what more do I need?) Dinner is the final installment of the last post. I mixed the leftover barbecue tofu with roast vegetables for dinner today, and made sure that there were leftovers of *that* so I could mix them with tofu for a portable evening meal.

I've no idea about the vegan-friendliness of the food outlets on campus, they look ok on the surface but I've always taken my own food in to save money. Taking your own can seem like a bit of a faff and adds extra weight to what you have to carry around (I miss having a desk to leave stuff on!), but it does guarantee that you'll have not just vegan food but vegan food you actually like (and don't have to pay over the odds or queue for).

Another Thursday lunchtime

My lunch yesterday:
-Half a tin of mixed bean salad
-50g or so of wholewheat couscous
-1 large carrot cut into sticks
-A banana

I think I should have incorporated ricecakes or a flapjack or something else extra and carby, because I was hungry enough to have to buy a packet of crisps in a hurry later.

Gap in posting!

Thursdays are my 'busy' day, my schedule runs from 9-630 and five hours of that time is spent directly in the classroom. I get an hour for lunch, and what I eat in that hour has to keep me going potentially from 1-9pm, so I tend to put a lot in there... This week it was:

• Sandwiches (on homemade bread, more about that later) with herb pate
• A Linda McCartney sausage roll
• A small bag of carrot and yellow pepper sticks
• A piece of homemade apple and pumpkin pie, again more about that later
• A packet of plain crisps from the vending machine

This is a bit of a mixture of pure carbs and vitamin content, of fast and slow energy, which is what I need!

Some packed lunches

I think I've finally managed to incorporate making a packed lunch into my evening routine. So, here's a peek at what this vegan eats in a working week (in no particular order, as I can remember the lunches themselves better than which day I had them):

* White rice with soy sauce; steamed broccoli; sticks of raw carrot and cucumber; little pot of wasabi paste and Plamil garlic mayo. By 'steamed' I mean I scattered the bits of broccoli over the top of the rice for the last two minutes or so it was cooking. Dinner the evening before also involved rice, to avoid using an extra saucepan. I made rather too much rice - this is the only day where I ended up throwing anything away.
*Chopped cucumber, red pepper and tomato, butter beans, grated carrot and pine nuts, in olive oil, balsamic vinegar and a small amount of Provamel cream cheese. (this is basically vegan goat cheese, although you wouldn't know it wasn't margarine from the fairly basic packaging) This was the only time I have had to go and buy a snack, as the salad itself didn't fill me up. The butter beans were boiled from scratch over the weekend - I have some more in the freezer. Should have kept more out.
*2 lentil burgers (homemade, see a few posts down for the recipe); couscous salad with spring onion and olive oil; shredded lettuce; hummous
*Brown rice and chickpeas topped with shredded lettuce and grated carrot. I ate the salad and half the rice mix and was full. Resurrected it with extra salad dressing and mayo the next day.
*2 lentil burgers with quinoa, grated carrot and watercress. This meal was put together at midnight after a few glasses of red wine.
*Couscous salad with cucumber, tomato, spring onions and pine nuts, in olive oil and balsamic vinegar; topped with shredded lettuce.

For the sake of maintaining harmony in a shared office, I've steered clear of ingredients such as raw garlic in packed lunches. I may try to introduce small amounts of onion and see if anyone reacts. At any rate, what I can make is usually healthier than what the canteen has, and is certainly cheaper. It normally takes about half an hour to put something together - maybe longer if waiting for rice or couscous to cool down, but you can always go off and do something else during this period. I think there are a couple of lunches where 'special' products like vegan cream cheese or mayo are used, but this is largely based on what I had in the fridge at that point. They aren't essential.

Dirty weekend

In the sense of getting my hands coated in lentil-burger mix, of course! The basic mix is about 50/50 lentils (soaked overnight and then boiled until they turn into a thick paste) and beans (from the freezer, given another boil to soften them up, then pounded with a potato masher. You could also do this with tinned beans.). I started out using just chickpeas, added white kidney beans at one stage because I had more of those in the freezer than I would use any time soon, and made a last batch of spicy burgers using red kidney beans. I think the chickpeas worked best in terms of holding the burgers together. I added various other ingredients - one batch of burgers had finely-chopped broccoli in, another grated carrot and the last lot just some paprika and tomato puree. This is one of those things that it is best to make in bulk - a lot of faff, not worth it for two burgers but certainly worth it for twenty. I now have two burgers for lunch today (with salad), four (burnt ones) in the fridge for use sometime this week and the rest frozen in packs of four for some other time when I feel like varying my diet a bit. I finished the burgers off by frying them, although if you were worried about fat content (lentils do absorb a lot of oil) you could try baking them. I may try egg replacer next time, due to falling-apart issues at various stages.

I have YET MORE LENTILS sitting in a sieve on my kitchen windowsill, allegedly sprouting although this is very much an experiment. I will not be devastated if I don't get to eat sprouted lentil salad at some point this week, really. I promise. (If this experiment does work, phase 2 will involve chickpeas. Everything in my life involves chickpeas at some point.)

I also did a batch of butter beans (all over the un-vegan names, d00d) and put some chickpeas on to soak until this evening. My bean saucepan is getting a lot of action. This might be because I've been eating Alpro yoghurts for breakfast most days since returning to work, meaning a whole new supply of yoghurt pots to freeze beans in.

Talking of the big saucepan... I've started collecting veg peelings and the like to make into stock. I don't have much idea if or how this will work yet, but if it gets a bit more use out of vegetable matter eventually destined for the trash (I live upstairs - no garden, hence no compost heap) it may be worth the faff. So far I have mostly carrot peelings and spring onion stalks.

Salad days are upon us again

So after the weekend of indulgence described in the last post (hey, forgot to mention scrambled tofu - might save that recipe until I'm short of stuff to post...), I'm back to the healthier end of things for a while. (Not that the moussaka was especially unhealthy, but I have no illusions that vegan cupcakes are any different from non-vegan ones in that regard!) I was, however, getting a little bit bored of lunches that always seemed to be focussed on raw (usually chopped) carrots - tasty and healthy though they might be, a wider range of tastes and textures is always good. So today I had a salad that did NOT involve carrots, or for that matter garden peas since these had also featured heavily over the past week.

Salad:
Half an avocado, chopped
Half a tin of butter beans (200g)
One tomato, chopped
Two cloves of raw garlic

Dressing:
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
A few sprinkles of black pepper

Another food post

Excuse the proliferation of food posts. This is my first week back at work and I don't have time to make 'proper' posts for the time being. Anyway, there is a post in the pipeline about the difficulties of being vegan, so think of these posts as the antidote to that, in terms of containing practical tips on making it easier.

Cooking beans from dried...
This is a bit of a faff, but the upside is the beans keep reasonably well in the fridge and can also be frozen.
Tip 1: If you haven't done this before, start with white beans rather than black or red. They have fewer toxins so you're less likely to mess up to the extent of getting sick. I've got sick from red beans that weren't cooked properly - including ones I've bought ready-cooked in a tin! - but never from chickpeas or similar.
Tip 2: Make loads, like half the packet at once - this is what makes it worth the effort. Freeze any you aren't going to use in the next week.
Tip 3: When refrigerating, the best thing is to put the beans in cold salt water in a glass jar (with the lid screwed on to avoid leakage!).
Soak the beans for a day - stick them in a pan of water before leaving for work, and they're ready to boil by the time you get back. Change the water before cooking. Boil for about an hour, more if beans are still hard, but they shouldn't be.

What I did with the first part of this batch...
I made lentil and chickpea dhal for dinner last night. Basically this entails boiling lentils until they become nearly liquid, in water seasoned with miso soup (no, this isn't culturally accurate!), lime juice, cardomom and cumin. Tastes better than it sounds. I added some of the chickpeas that had just come off the boil, when the lentils had just reached the boil.
Again, things like this take a bit of messing around, so always make enough to freeze a portion and keep some leftovers for the next day. I have a small amount left today, so will pour it over stirfried vegetables.

And some packed lunches...
My biggest problem with being vegan has always been eating during the day, while at work. Our canteen is not the best on that front. So my new year's resolution - the one i'm admitting to here! - was to bring a packed lunch every day. I always make this the night before - I can NEVER be relied upon to get up in time to do anything beyond putting clothes on (to the relief of the people i work with) and catching a bus.
Monday: brown rice, edamame (green baby soybeans), green salad. The brown rice was left over from dinner on Sunday night (Tesco readymade curry which i adorned with brown rice and another salad - effect similar to icing on a turd...) and the edamame had been lurking in my parents' freezer for several months so i decided to bring it back with me. It tastes more like broad beans than the normal white soybeans. I added some soy sauce for flavour. Might cook the rice in miso another time.
Tuesday: Salad made with chickpeas (see above), couscous (i made some to go with the dhal and did a bit extra, see below), tomato, cucumber and spring onions (chopped while doing a green salad for dinner then night before).

Couscous
Couscous is the ideal convenience food, in my experience. (Unless you're allergic to wheat, which i'm not - 'addicted' would be a more accurate term!) You just pour it in a bowl and put boiling water on it, and leave it until the water is soaked up. You can buy flavoured ones with dried veg and so on in - Sammy's make a wide range of these, most of which are vegan and available in health food shops and supermarkets. Can be used instead of rice or pasta if you only own one saucepan and that has vegetables in (ie, my situation for five years or so) or if you don't want to cook. Can be a bit dry on its own - add oil or some kind of sauce if nothing else.