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.

Down the pub!

No, that is not where I have been when on haitus from blogging. Well, not all the time. Anyway, the Guardian's Word of Mouth blog currently features this post, posing the question "Do you find the idea of a pub that serves only vegetarian food attractive or off-putting?" If you know me at all, you know my answer. You probably even guess that I might prefer a vegan one - Glasgow has several bars that are at least most of the way there, so it's doable. But (and you knew there'd be one, right?) I'm not convinced vegetarians - by which I mean ova-lacto vegetarians who eat anything not directly derived from meat - are a sufficient target market. They can after all get fed pretty easily in the UK. This means two things. 1) There have to be decent vegan options. That should go without saying, but in my experiences of vegetarian eateries it hasn't always been the case. (usually, but not always) 2) It has to be somewhere meat-eaters would also go. This means the food has to be up to scratch. You might at this point be rolling your eyes at the idea of accommodating people who aren't vegan. Fix your eyes back in place, though, and consider this - new vegans don't come out of nowhere, and they don't just come from existing vegans having sex. (Not disparaging those who do) Demystifying veganism is vital to encouraging people to go vegan. Tasty, readily available food in a good atmosphere strikes me as a good step here. Unfortunately either the spin of the article or the pubs mentioned in it don't seem that great. I would find the middle of Smithfield Market an offputting location, for a start, and the food sounds a bit uninspiring - a jacket potato sounds more like the sort of thing I'd eat at a pinch in the canteen at work rather than a meal I'd make an effort to go out for. Not great for their business, or our image. That's sad, because there are many great vegetarian and vegan pubs around! For example
Stereo in Glasgow (more a bar than a pub, but you get the idea)
The Red Lion in Great Bricett, Suffolk - I haven't been there personally but the reviews speak for themselves.
The Gardeners Arms in Jericho, Oxford - I've been here loads of times and always liked the food and the atmosphere. (There are two pubs with the same name in Jericho though, make sure you head for Plantation Road)
The George in Brighton. I went in there a few years ago while on holiday and liked it then. It has been through a few upheavals, and there were stories going around that it had dropped in quality and started to serve meat. The menu they have now seems to be back to vegetarian with several things that appear vegan (although the labelling seems a bit crap).

Hot stuff

I had a bit of time spare to play around in the kitchen today, and I used it to try making my own jalapenos. I love those things, but they are a bit pricey. Also, homemade ones are just peppers and vinegar, so no random additives.

I'm not giving any specific quantities here, the only measure is having a glass jar to hand that will hold the quantity of peppers you have plus sufficient vinegar to cover them. You can buy glass jars from Lakeland, but why bother when you get washable ones free with so many foodstuffs?

Here's the technique I used, which seems so far to have worked:
Cut the peppers into rings and sprinkle them with salt. Leave for half an hour or so (about the time it takes to have a cup of tea - might not need that long but I was reading something engrossing).
Use your glass jar to measure the vinegar (in this case white wine vinegar) into a saucepan. Don't fill it up to the top, you need to allow room for displacement. (Although if Archimedes had been bathing in this stuff he would not have been shouting 'Eureka', unless it has a secret meaning along the line of 'my balls are on fire!')
Heat the vinegar. Add the peppers. Bring to the boil. Simmer for half an hour or so. Don't inhale the contents!
Allow to cool before putting in the jar. Keep in the fridge.

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

Stuffing and stuff

So I'm still busy, but it's manageable. Anyway, we had an early 'Christmas' dinner this evening - a tradition from before we lived together - and the centrepiece was stuffed butternut squash. This was the first time I'd made my own stuffing, so I figured it was worth blogging!

You will need: one butternut squash with a large-ish round bit, olive oil, a large chunk of bread, three onions, four tablespoons of dried sage (more or less to taste), a splash of soy sauce (optional)and some yeast extract.

Heat the olive oil in a pan - preferably a frying pan with high-ish sides - and add the onions. Cook until translucent. Add the sage and breadcrumbs and cook until the latter go a bit crispy. Stir in the soy sauce and yeast extract. Add hot water, simmer until this is absorbed.

While this is simmering, cut off the long bit of the butternut squash and put it aside for something else. (something culinary, grow up...) Then cut a 'lid' off the round bit, so you can access the hollow area. Scrape out the seeds and stringy bits. (anyone want to share a foolproof recipe for roasting the seeds? I have a long train journey coming up and could do with snacks!)

When the stuffing has absorbed most of the water and cooled down a bit, pour it into the squash. Put the 'lid' on. It will need to cook in the oven for about two hours, and you may need to remove a shelf to get it in. (I didn't - it just fit, with zero clearance and a bit of tinfoil over the top to negate the hygiene issues of touching the next shelf up) I had it in on its own at 180C for an hour, then on 220C for 15-20 mins while getting the roast potatoes started, then 200C for the next 40-45 mins. This is not a hard and fast rule, it was dictated by what I had to do to get a whole meal together.

Festive veganicity #1: Edible gifts

Stone Soup* jogged my memory this morning to the effect that I'd planned to share some ideas for a vegan festive season. Her post was about edible gifts, and includes a recipe for chilli-infused olive oil that I hope to try sometime.

In general, food items - especially of the homemade variety - are a pretty good bet for vegan gifts. You might like to check your friends'/family members' allergy situation first though - sometimes people have bad reactions to ingredients you wouldn't have thought of, not to mention that if your kitchen isn't permanently nut-free some more severe allergies might be set off by a small amount of cross-contamination that defies normal washing procedures. Don't let this put you off - just ask if you're not sure.

I'm not doing much by way of food-based gifts this year, due to logistics of when I have time to make stuff vs when gifts will be received. Also, most of what I make will either need to go in the post or be fitted into my already overfull rucksack for a trip home. However, my students are getting mince pies in their last seminars of the term!

Stay tuned for what I have been making...


*Not a vegan blog, but she does give vegan versions of every recipe she posts. Your mileage may vary with how ok you are with that.

Tagine-ious!

I'm guessing that some folk out there like to imagine that, as an outreach-y sort of vegan, I make a habit of inviting non-vegan friends over and berating them about their choices over three courses of raw tofu and twigs. And some of these folk will encounter just such a setup for the first half hour or so of being in the house, because there is a lot of fun to be had in confirming prejudices.* For the less judgemental type, i.e. most of my friends and pretty much anyone I would voluntarily opt to spend the evening with, I'm more likely to dish up some tasty food, answer questions on veganism if they come up, and defer heavier conversations on the topic to an arena where there isn't alcohol.**

Anyway, this brings me to last night's dinner. This is a pretty massive quantity of tagine - dinner for three last night, lunch for two later today, and two margarine tubs full just went in the freezer.

Olive oil
2 medium red onions, chopped small
5 medium garlic cloves, crushed
3 large sweet potatoes, chopped large
1 large carrot, chopped large
450g pre-soaked dried apricots
2 x 240g tins of chickpeas, drained
1 x 400g tin chopped tomatoes
1 x 500g carton passata (the tomatoes and passata are probably interchangeable, your mileage may vary about whether you like chunks of tomato or not)
1 x medium aubergine, roasted in segements with salt and olive oil then chopped a bit smaller. (optional)
2 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground coriander
1tsp tumeric

Heat the olive oil in a pan. Turn the heat down to medium before it gets too crackly. Cook the onions and garlic for a bit, then add sweet potatoes, carrot, apricots, chickpeas, aubergine and spices. Stir around for a bit until the spices are evenly distributed. Turn the heat up and add the passata and tomatoes. You may also need to add some water. When it starts bubbling, turn the heat down and stick the pan lid on. Simmer for an hour or so. (Perfect if you're having guests and want something you can leave while getting yourself ready!) Serve with couscous and flatbreads, or pittas if you want bread without washing a mixing bowl.




*I should come clean and admit to never having done this. And sadly I've now exposed it as a prank so can't do it to anyone who might have read my blog.
**And probably not lunchtime in the canteen. Environments where food is a major factor aren't the best place to have vegan/non-vegan dialogue, as when people are eating they tend to be easily put on the defensive about what they are eating.

Flatbreads

Yesterday I made a bit of a snap decision to go to a Scottish Vegans potluck hosted by this lady. That left me with the morning to make something. Once I'd decided that, choosing what to make was the easy part - we have a colleague coming to dinner this evening and I was going to make tagine and flatbreads, so I ended up doing the flatbreads a day early. (Which also makes today more relaxed since I've already got a stack of bread and no mixing bowl to wash today - that's my least favourite part of making bread, it ruins my nails and almost always means throwing out a kitchen sponge afterwards! Anyone fancy a bit of washing up in exchange for bread?)

Since this is something I haven't made before, I had to do a bit of 'net searching to find an initial recipe. Luckily they all seem to be basically vegan, so no need for substitutions. Here's the basic recipe - one of Allegra McEvedy's for the food geeks out there. I had wanted spicy bread, so adapted the recipe a bit by adding a heaped tablespoon of tumeric, the same of dried coriander leaves and a couple of sprinklings of cinnamon. I should also admit that I used a sachet of fast action yeast - I've never got the hang of the other sort, which is sad and something I want to remedy when I have the time and energy. But the recipe does work if you 'cheat'!.

Chocolate/cherry/chilli cupcakes

I wasn't sure these qualified as bloggable, but since they went down pretty well at last night's potluck (apart from inadvertantly poisoning a friend with a chilli allergy I didn't know he had - sorry again!) here's the story.

I used this recipe as a base, but since it is for a large cake with none of the ingredients listed in the post title some adapting had to be done.

First change: I used double quantity, because I wanted enough cakes for the potluck and to have some to eat at home.
Second change: adding chocolate. I replaced an ounce of flour per quantity with cocoa powder, i.e. 16oz flour and 2oz cocoa.
Third change: adding chilli. I put in two teaspoons of cayenne pepper, one per quantity. Halve this if you want a milder kick. Leave it out if you just want chocolate and cherries. Anyway, the chilli went in with the dry ingredients.
Fourth change: adding cherries. I put six tablespoons of cherry conserve (posh jam) in with the custard.
Fifth change: baking time. Cupcakes would be incinerated in the time the recipe suggests - I got them out of the oven after 20 minutes.

The recipe in question is one of my favourites, precisely because it is so plain - it can be adapted all sorts of ways and still work, or it can be dished up plain with icing, which is what I did for my boy's last birthday. (Making it was easy enough, getting it from one county to another was more perilous...)

Big basic balti

It's all go chez Duck at the moment, we both have stinking colds and, just to make it more fun, an appointment that means going out around the time I'd normally start to cook and coming home just after we normally start to eat. So I decided that a nice balti (literal translation - bucket, refers to slinging anything to hand in a cooking pot with random spices, or any curry that doesn't have a proper name) would be the thing. It can sit around while we're out, so the vegetables can absorb the spices - curry generally is the one thing I've found that benefits from being left hanging around.

So here goes;
-Sunflower oil
-Two large onions
-Cumin seeds
-Half a dozen garlic cloves
-Six medium potatoes
-Four large carrots
-A handful of green fine beans
-A tin of chickpeas
-Dashes of coriander powder, tumeric, ginger, cayenne pepper (SMALL dash) and paprika

Cook the onion and garlic in the oil until they soften
Add the cumin seeds and cook until they crackle
Chop and stir in all the veg, then the chickpeas, then add the spices
Add water until everything is covered, simmer until the veg is soft. Then leave standing for ages if the need takes you! I'm hoping this will do for tomorrow's lunch as well...

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.

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

Erzatsz lunch

We're at the stage of kind of needing to go grocery shopping, but having enough food in the house to make it not worth the effort. What we lack, however, is ingredients which obviously fit together and provide an equally obvious meal. Instead, today's meal came from a selection of somewhat random items, all of which need to be used up. It tasted good, anyway!

Cauliflower cheese
Half a cauliflower - cut into smallish pieces, place in a greased dish, bake for the time it takes to make the sauce.
The sauce is the slightly faffy bit. Melt a couple of tablespoons of margarine - start on a high temperature but turn down when it actually starts to melt, otherwise it'll separate instead. Take the melted margarine off the heat and stir in three or four tbsp of cornflour until you have a smooth paste. Slowly stir in soy milk until you have a liquid with no lumps. Put back on a high heat and stir constantly until it thickens. Add grated cheezly - I think I had a little under half a block. Stir until that melts.
Pour the sauce over the cauliflower, sprinkle peppers and tomato on top if you feel like it. Bake for half an hour or so, until brown on top.

Tapas potatoes
Cut three or four smallish potatoes into little chunks. Mix in a couple of crushed garlic cloves, large sprinkling of paprika, small sprinkling of cayenne pepper. Douse in olive oil, place in oven at 200C for 50 mins.

Flavored couscous
Half-fill a bowl with couscous. Add coriander and mint, squeeze on the juice of half a lemon or lime. Fill the bowl with boiling water and leave to stand for 10mins or so.

Impure puttanesca

Since the name 'puttanesca' has certain interesting connotations, I don't feel too bad about messing with its purity. The traditional recipe involves anchovies, so a true purist would throw their hands up in horror at what I just made. That's their problem. ;) If you want a vegan puttanesca that hasn't been messed with quite so much, try this. It was the recipe I had in mind when buying the olives and capers the other day, but when I came to make it tonight I couldn't resist the allure of vegetables that need using up. And impurity turned out to taste good...

-Three mushrooms
-Two smallish red peppers
-A few green (French?) beans
-Two or three cloves of garlic, crushed
-A dozen or so olives, cut in half
-Two teaspoons of capers
-A standard tin of tomatoes
-Olive oil
-Chilli flakes
-Cayenne pepper
-Paprika

Heat the olive oil on high (it should cover the bottom of the pan) and add the chilli flakes. Turn it down.
Cook the mushrooms in olive oil over a medium heat. (I NEVER EVER want to bite into a raw mushroom in any situation that has an alternative other than starvation - hence the mushrooms always go in first!) Mushrooms can be a bit absorbent, add extra oil if necessary.
Add the peppers and green beans, then the garlic, olives and capers. It's fine, nay great, if some of the liquid from these things gets in.
Stir in the tomatoes, a small amount of cayenne pepper (half a teaspoon or so) and a larger (maybe a teaspoon) amount of paprika. Rinse out the tomato can with clean cold water and add that to the contents of the pan.
Simmer for 40 minutes or so. If it seems a bit too runny add tomato puree to thicken.

This made four servings (two each for two people) with a decent quantity of fusilli.

Garlicky bean sauce

We had this with pasta, I guess it could go with other things too though. I'm getting quite into making pasta sauces from scratch rather than using a jar. This is because I realised that pasta used to be one of my favourite foods, whereas now it just seems like a make-do meal if there's nothing else to hand. So this is me reclaiming my pasta!

Take one tin of haricot, cannelini or blackeyed beans, tip into a roasting tin.
Squash three or four cloves of garlic and scatter the bits around the roasting tin. Splash the whole lot with olive oil. Put the tin and its contents in the oven on 200C for 20 minutes or so.

Chop a couple of handfuls of green beans and an onion (I usually use red ones) and cook in olive oil for about 10 mins at medium heat. (Olive oil can go yucky at higher temperatures, although NOT poisonous as some have claimed) Add the contents of the roasting tin. Add a tablespoon or two of tomato paste (your mileage may vary on this one) then enough hot water to cover everything. Bring to the boil then simmer for about half an hour. Add more water if necessary.

Because I've recently become a fan of aioli, I added some vegan mayo - maybe two tablespoons - during the last five minutes before serving. I think this improved the texture and taste a bit, but it is a completely optional part of the recipe!

Parsnip curry, a nice surprise

We bought a large bag of short-dated parsnips the other day, too many to roast for one Sunday dinner, so they needed using up. I'm not quite sure whose idea parsnip curry was initially, I'm happier about claiming it having happily eaten a couple of helpings, on the other hand I should probably give the significant other credit if it is due. I've never made or seen a recipe for parsnip curry before, so it took a bit of thinking about - I figured mild and creamy would work best. This was a relatively small meal - we stretched it out to two helpings each but that was with extra rice and poppadums (and a naan bread for the one of us who isn't vegan - the Co-op do vegan ones but I hadn't had time to go there, they aren't my favourite thing anyway though).

Start with what appears (from checking the label and what is left in the bag) to be three quarters of a kilo of parsnips. You might like to do more if you don't have any extras around. Peel and chop the parsnips and boil for 20 mins or so.

Strain the parsnips in a colander. Heat some margarine (or veg ghee if you can get it) in the bottom of the saucepan, briefly cook a sprinkling of coriander and cardomom seeds in this, add two or three crushed garlic cloves (less if you aren't keen, more if you love it or have a vampire infestation in your house). Stir the parsnips back in after a few seconds. Add a tablespoon or two of ground cumin.

Crush or grate a sachet or so of creamed coconut (you could probably use a tin of coconut milk if you have it, the creamed stuff keeps better and is cheaper though) over the parsnips and stir in. Add warm water (obviously not if you used coconut milk!) and stir in until the coconut dissolves and everything is covered. Simmer for half an hour or so.

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).

The gift that goes on giving

For lunch yesterday we had vegetable and tofu skewers. Apologies for the lack of photos, still having bandwidth issues that makes uploading them a massive liability. The vegetable content included tomatoes, mushrooms, courgettes and red peppers. The tofu (after dry-frying for AGES, if we had a tumble dryer I'd be tempted to put it in that!) was done in a slightly improvised barbecue marinade:

-Enough sunflower oil to cover the tofu pieces
-Three or four cloves of garlic, peeled and bashed to pieces with the knife handle. (You can extract the flavour more efficiently as it breaks the cellular structure in a way that cutting with a blade doesn't - I have a favourite knife for the purpose!)
-Tablespoon or so of maple syrup
-Dash of soy sauce (yes these two ingredients sound WEIRD together, but it worked)
-Chilli powder (the one I used has cumin in as well as chilli - I've only sussed this out recently!)
-Paprika

I left the tofu in the marinade for an hour or so while getting on with other important tasks such as drinking coffee and reading the newspaper. Amazingly, despite the battering it went through in the attempt to shift the water out, the pieces held together when skewered. We had two skewers each with couscous and bean salad.

The leftover marinade proved useful when making chilli for dinner - I used some of the excess flavoured oil for frying the soy mince, onions, peppers and so on, and scooped some of the garlic in for good measure. We still have some tofu left as well, so I'm planning on doing that with roast vegetables for dinner today. The leftover chilli is going to be the basis of pasta sauce for lunch.

Incidentally, if you want to get chilli powder that is JUST crushed dried chillis (without anything added), the only brand I've found so far is Julian Graves - available in Holland and Barrett. Alternatively I've been using chilli flakes - Schwartz I think - which look like fish food but work well. Of course I tend to add cumin seeds anyway, being a contrary sort of duck.

On another note, I downloaded the kindle edition of Vegan Freak yesterday, liking it so far, watch this space...

Iron Vegan #1 - masala chickpeas

So the other day I alluded to feeling a bit run-down. Given recent events in the vegan blogosphere I wouldn't blame you for suspecting that was a lead-up to an ex-vegan epic of meatgasms and frantic scrabbling for why veganism was suddenly teh evul despite everything I've said before. Sadly for the ex-vegan contingent who seem to be actively recruiting, that isn't the case. What I actually did was a) wake up with leg cramps, which are a sign of low iron (I always get them during that speshul female time, but not usually in the rest of the month) and b) take a tablet*, google vegan sources of iron to refresh my memory on what foods would be good, and make a concerted effort to cook and eat those foods. Anyway, here's today's lunch - this was for two with minimal seconds when served with couscous:

8 tomatoes, cut into 8ths.
1 normal tin chickpeas
6 blocks of frozen spinach
oil
black onion seeds, fennel seeds
garam masala, cumin, mint

Heat the oil in a frying pan. When hot, add and briefly fry the seeds. Add the tomatoes. Put the spinach in the microwave (6 minutes), add the chickpeas and the ground spices. When the microwave chimes, take the spinach out, pull it apart a bit or cut with scissors and add to the mix. Leave to stand for a while - at least the time it takes to get couscous or rice sorted.

*Yes, I take supplements. I don't see this as letting the side down - I've known many meat-eaters who do the same, especially women taking iron.

Why I love dumplings

Reason 1: They taste good. Which should be enough on it's own, but isn't the full story.

Reason 2: They provide a bit of a fat and carbs injection into a vegetable and bean stew which would otherwise be short on those things. (I happen to see fat and carbs as a necessary part of nutrition rather than OMGDOOM :P)

Reason 3: They are deceptively easy to make. The basic formula is twice as much (white, self-raising) flour as (vegetable - Atora Light is the most common UK brand) suet with just enough water to hold the stuff together.

Reason 4: On the other hand, it is easy to add things to the basic formula to make your dumplings more interesting. Today's have dried chilli flakes and coriander; last week's involved a bit of added maize flour.

Reason 5: They bulk out today's portions of stew and help to ensure that there is enough left over for lunch tomorrow.

Reason 6: They qualify as an energy-saving measure, since they make an insulating layer over the top of the stockpot, meaning that I can have the stove at a lower temperature and still keep everything underneath simmering away.