Sometimes a vegan just wants to eat toads!

For some reason I had massive sausage cravings this morning. (Not like that - really, you are a dirty-minded lot sometimes) Since it was Sunday, I thought I'd google around for a vegan Yorkshire pudding recipe and make some toad in the hole. Thankfully such recipes weren't too hard to find, although finding one that fitted the ingredients I had to hand was a little more faff. This is what I ended up using, although I replaced the gram flour with potato flour. That may account for the puddingy quality of the resulting dish - I don't mind that but my other half apparently thinks Yorkies should be like 'air'. (No, they are puddings, the clue is in the name. Neither of us is from the relevant geographical location to have a valid opinion on the subject though. We're East Anglians in Central Scotland, bypassing Yorkshire entirely except as a place to go through on the train.)

How to make the recipe into toad in the hole:
Place some Linda McCartney sausages (or other vegan sausages of your choice) in the oiled-up dish while heating it up in the oven. They'll defrost and brown while you're mixing the batter.
Mix the batter
Fish the sausages out of the dish and put them aside. Don't use your fingers unless you enjoy being burned.
Pour the batter in the dish and drop the sausages in it.
It needs a longer baking time if you double the quantity!

I got up just before ten, and managed to have made this, a batch of bread and the more standard bits of a roast meal by 1, and also have done my teaching prep for the coming week. Not bad!

Spicy lentil and vegetable bake

This was part of the Sunday roast we just had, and I thought it up to finish the dhal that was left over from our lunchtime curry extravaganza. (Three curries that I'd made extra quantities of last night, plus dhal and rice, plus samosas, bhajis and poppadums - I don't fill up easily but this meal managed it!) I should warn you that it makes last week's cupcakes look like miracles of structural integrity - not a good one to make if you want something to tip out onto a plate and slice neatly! It is, however, a good thing if you like lentils and vegetables and want some protein as part of a roast dinner. ;)

Ingredients
-Half a milk pan* of some 'plain' dhal - ie without any added veg, just lentils and spices - the instructions for which can be found here.
-Two red onions, chopped
-Half a large courgette, chopped
-Two sticks of celery, chopped
-Two cloves of garlic, smashed up with the back of a spoon

Saute the veg and garlic on medium heat in sunflower oil. When cooked, mix with the lentils. Pour into a loaf tin - I used a silicone one that matches my cupcake trays, but whatever floats your boat. Bake in the oven at 200C for about half an hour. I put some Tofutti cheese slices on top for the last five minutes it was in the oven. This is totally optional but it did take things one more degree of seperation from the curry we had before.

This made decent portions for two people, when served with roast potatoes and mashed root veg.



*I'm well aware of the irony, but that's what the smallest saucepans tend to be sold as, and it's a useful guide since I didn't weigh or measure the dhal in any other way. Sorry, too busy getting dinner in the oven. :P