Pinto bean cracker recipe
Posted: January 30, 2016 Filed under: Baking, Uncategorized | Tags: beans, gluten-free, low fat, pinto beans, snacks, sunflower seeds, Vegan, vegetarian Leave a commentI’ve read a few things here and there (nicely summarized in this article) questioning whether beans should be soaked before cooking from dried. This kind of article seems to gloss over the reduction in cooking time as unimportant whereas for those worried about fuel costs and/or without a sufficiently large oven and reliant on the stovetop method it is worth it to halve the cooking time even if you have to wait longer overall. In addition, longer cooking time using the stovetop means more steam, so more condensation which is annoying to deal with sometimes.
Despite my misgivings I decided to try the no soak route with some pinto beans. It could be that my beans were just old, or not a good variety, but the results did not impress me. I got some beans bursting while others were still very firm, and the skins are the toughest I’ve experienced in a long time. Maybe I’ll give no-soak another go down the line, but for now I’m happy to do what I’ve always done, which is why I put 1kg chick peas in my preserving pot this morning, covered in plenty of cold water and won’t boil them up until later on tonight. Then I’ll portion them up and freeze most of them.
Still, I have lots of tough-skinned pinto beans to get through right now, unsuitable for stew-like uses, so I thought I’d try making some rustic crackers where the texture would add to the pleasantly munchy effect instead of being a chore.
Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups cooked, drained pinto beans
1/3 cup water
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
1/2 cup porridge oats
3 Tbs nutritional yeast (optional. I’m not sure this adds much but it was sitting around on the counter…)
1/2 tsp yeast extract (e.g. marmite), or miso paste would also probably be good.
1tsp mixed herbs (I used Italian mix which included dried peppers)
1-2 cloves of garlic or a pinch of garlic powder
1/2 tsp chilli powder
pinch salt
Method:
Line baking sheet and lightly grease with oil.
Put beans in a food processor (I used the mini chopper that came with my cheapo stick blender) and add 1/3 cup water. Pulse until a rough paste is formed, stopping to scrape down the sides as necessary. Add seeds and blend for a minute or so, stopping and scraping down again. Add oats and blend. Add rest of ingredients and blend. You should have a dough that is a bit sticky but that you can scoop up and roll into a ball-shape in your hands.
Taste a little pinch of the unbaked mix for seasoning. Obviously they’ll taste better once they’re baked and the flavours will concentrate a bit, but if they seem too bland for you then add more herbs or salt or maybe a dash of mustard or something.
Leave the dough to sit for about 20 minutes so the oats absorb excess moisture.
Take walnut-sized balls of dough (about a tablespoonful) and flatten them a bit with your hands, then place them on the baking sheet. Although they won’t spread, leave a gap because once they’re in place you can flatten them down further with the palm of your hand. I rubbed about 1/3 tsp olive oil across my palm before pressing down to get a nice smooth finish. You want them to be about 3mm (1/8 inch) thick.
Bake in a moderately hot oven (around 195c/380f/a bit above gas mark 5) for about 15 minutes (check they’re not burning after 10 mins. I don’t have fan assist and I haven’t checked my oven temp for a while!). Carefully flip them over and bake for another 5-10 minutes until they’re just starting to get a tinge of brown around the edges, so they’ll get nice and crunchy.
Cool on a rack and store in an airtight container. They’d probably freeze pretty well too.
Makes around 15 crackers.
Black Forest trifle
Posted: November 15, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: cake, cherries, chocolate, Plamil, pudding, Vegan 4 CommentsWell, I don’t know about where you live, but the weather has been a bit stink-o around here recently. I guess it goes with the time of year, but the wind and the rain doesn’t really help elevate my mood (which is pretty darn sombre after recent events in the news).
I’m not saying this recipe is going to cure all ills (especially since sugar is the devil these days to a lot of folks. Hey, I still love you, sugar!) but it was certainly a worthy use of leftover cake. I made my standard chocolate cake a few days ago (this time with added flaked almonds) but that’s quite a large amount of cake for one person to get through and I’m a bit short on freezer space so it’s heading towards stale. How to deal? Take some inspiration from ye olde Black Forest gateaux!
Sainsbury’s were selling frozen cherries at a slightly reduced price recently and I had managed to find space to squish those into my freezer. They also had a modest discount on Alpro custard pots. You may also recall that I am never without a large supply of Fair Trade chocolate from Plamil, so I simply cut up some cake, placed some frozen cherries on top, heated up a pot of custard, added a few spoonfuls of chocolate chips to melt in and about a tablespoon of rum then poured the latter over the former! A good 5 minutes work, if I say so myself 🙂
Leicester Vegan Fair 2015 is coming soon!
Posted: October 25, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Leicester, Leicester vegan fair, LVF15, Vegan, vegan fair 1 CommentAnd it looks like it’s going to be amazing!
I really enjoyed the fair in 2013, which I wrote about here and this year it’s moved to a bigger venue at De Montfort University’s Queens Building, where the fair will run from 10am-4pm on 21st November, followed by an after-party at a nearby pub.
Here’s the poster:
There’s a good-looking mix of local and larger businesses, organisations and charities (and the charities usually have fancy calendars and chocolates and that kind of thing, which I like), a tempting array of purveyors of delicious things to shove in my gob (I cannot wait to see what Gelato Village bring to this fair!) and enough businesses who I’ve not encountered before for me to be intrigued.
I gather there’s going to be a family room which I heard and thought “sounds like it will be noisy and full of prams, I’ll stay away” but then I heard the person organising the room is planning all sorts of fun things, so I’ll probably have a good nosy around that as well.
I’m really starting to get excited about this event and it’s still over three weeks away! I hope there are a lot of visitors from Leicester and further afield because I really do think this city has a lot to offer vegans and those interested in eating more plant-based foods, and it gladdens my heart to see that we’re in the list of towns and cities putting on a fair this year.
There’s an events page on Facebook if you want to be reminded or there’s a community page where I think stall information is going to be added. Oh, and it’s on Meet-up under Leicester Vegans too, if you like to meet new people in a formal kind of way.
Hope to see you there! 🙂
Hangover food: chickpea omelette sandwich
Posted: August 15, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: breakfast, chickpeas, comfort food, garlic, sandwich, Vegan, vegetarian 5 CommentsI haven’t been drinking much since recently, but went out to meet friends last night and had a couple of ciders. I thought I was being careful (my trick is to order a half pint of cider in a pint glass, topped up with soda water like a cheapskate even-lower-alcohol spritzer) but I still woke up feeling slightly rough this morning.
It seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that fried food and carbs are what’s wanted the morning after a night out. There wasn’t anything ready-made lying around but I had half a baguette in the freezer and while it was warming up in the oven I made a chickpea omelette using half a cup of dried chickpeas (could use chickpea flour/besan if you don’t have a blender that can tackle whole chickpeas), a cup of water, pinch of salt, pepper and smoked paprika and two cloves of garlic, plus a tiny dash of vinegar.
The trick to chickpea omelettes is to fry them low and slow, otherwise the innards stay gooey while the outsides scorch. This amount of batter made two, and the first one turned into scramble because I tried to turn it before it had set, but it still tasted great. I was more patient with the second one, so it’s a bit more photogenic!
Potato-onion-cakes fried in an onion ring (AKA the real delicious potatoes)
Posted: July 24, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: brunch, delicious potatoes, Fry's, onions, potatoes, recipe, Vegan, vegetarian 4 CommentsI hang out on the Post Punk Kitchen discussion forum and from time to time spammers chance their luck, as happens with all forums. The mods are great at deleting things pretty quickly, but I sometimes click through because they are occasionally hilarious.
This morning a spammer posted two “recipes” with some extremely weird ingredients, instructions that made no sense BUT one post (entitled “potato latkes”) was accompanied by a picture that made me want gussied-up fried potatoes – it was what looked like mashed potatoes and very finely diced spring-onions or green peppers bound by a ring of onion. The other post was entitled “delicious potatoes” and was clearly a picture of latkes, so I choose to think the picture illustrating latkes was actually the one that was supposed to go with the “delicious potatoes” recipe. I didn’t have spring onions or peppers, but here’s my interpretation anyway…
Delicious potatoes before baking
Delicious potatoes – baked vs. fried
Delicious potatoes as part of a delicious brunch
How I made the delicious potatoes:
250g potatoes, boiled, drained and mashed
A single 220g onion, sliced widthwise into 4
olive oil for frying and basting
1 tsp soya sauce
1tsp balsamic vinegar
1tsp Herbamare seasoning salt
1TBS nutritional yeast
1/2 tsp smoked paprika.
Method: Take the two middle (fat) slices of onion and separate the outer rings. I used 6 rings, but you might want to use 7 or 8 instead and underfill them a little bit, because the filling stays the same size and the onion rings shrink when they’re heated, as you can see from the second picture above.
Chop up the rest of the onion and fry it on a low-medium heat in a splash of olive oil with the soya sauce and balsamic vinegar until browned and caramelised, about 12-15 minutes.
Add the onion into the mashed potato, stir in the rest of the ingredients, pack the resulting mix firmly into the onion rings and either brush with oil and bake in a medium-hot oven around 200 degrees F for 12-15 minutes or fry for 5-6 minutes on each side in a pan. I tried both, and they both taste good, I think presentation-wise the fried ones look a bit more appetising but there’s not much in it.
I wasn’t just going to eat 6 delicious potato cakes on their own (although I probably could!) so I cooked up some fancy baked beans (by fancy I just mean I spooned some from a tin and added a few peas, tomatoes, slices of garlic and chopped fresh coriander), Fry’s frankfurter-style sausages and a few fried mushrooms. Very pleasant brunch indeed!
Home-made soya yoghurt the lazy way.
Posted: July 17, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: budget, DIY, frugal, soya, soya milk, Tesco, value, Vegan, yoghurt 1 CommentI do actually own a yoghurt maker, which was a gift from my parents. It’s a nice round contraption with cute little jars which make great individual serving sizes, and it keeps a constant temperature so a great guarantee of consistent results, and super-handy in winter time. The little jars are a bit of a faff to sterilise though, and at the moment I’m going through a lot of yoghurt because I like to use it as a salad dressing mixed with vinegar, smoked paprika, garlic and hot sauce, so I thought I’d try something new.
UHT soya milk is already sterile, so no need to scald it then wait for it to come down to temperature (110-115F), instead I got a large stock pot (also a gift from my folks!) and filled it 3/4 full of warm water. I got the temperature to around 120 degrees and then stood two sealed litre cartons of milk in the pot (one Value and one Organic one I had left over from when they were on offer for 59p!) and left them for 20 minutes to warm through. I then opened them up and tipped some of the milk into a glass for later (to make a bit of room in the cartons), and tipped a bit more into a measuring jug. I mixed about 6 heaped tablespoons of live plain soya yoghurt into the milk in the jug, and them poured half into each carton, sealed them well up and stood them up in the water bath, which came to just below the tops of the cartons.
The temperature had dropped to just below 110 degrees when I put them back in, but I just put the gas on a low heat underneath until they’d come up to 115, then draped a folded bath sheet over the top and sides. The volume of water kept a good heat (I think it being a warm day probably helped too), and after 7 hours I had yoghurt! It’s a bit lumpy, but I’m just going to be mixing it up with other stuff so I don’t care.
One concern I had (after I’d started making it) was that the cartons tell you to store them in a “cool, dry” place, which the stock pot most definitely was not! I started worrying that the plastic lining of the cartons wasn’t designed to be heated, and would leach harmful bits of itself into my yoghurt, and when I tried to find information on how safe Tetra Paks are to heat food in it was surprisingly difficult, however I did find something assuring consumers that they’re designed to withstand heat such as being left in a hot car, and a car’s interior can get well above yoghurt making temperature in the summer so it looks like it’ll be okay! 🙂
Hospital food’s not so bad, if you’re in the right hospital!
Posted: June 19, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: hospital, hospital food, Leicester, NHS, UHL, University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, Vegan 9 CommentsThings have been a bit quiet on here recently, as I had to plan a visit to the hospital a couple of weeks ago for some surgery. I’m feeling a lot better now, but one of the things I was worrying about prior to being admitted was that I wouldn’t be able to get any decent vegan food. I could not have been more wrong!
I was greatly heartened to see that they actually had an option listed as vegan on the printed menu!
My first meal was chick pea and sweet potato curry, served with rice. For pudding the vegan-suitable options were either a piece of fruit (orange, banana or apple) or a little cup of tinned fruit salad in fruit juice. Not the most exciting desserts in the world, but the fibre and vitamin content are surely helpful (anyone who’s been confined to bed for a while at the same time as having to have an anaesthetic and pain meds will know you need all the fibre you can get)!
I think there might have been some coconut milk in the curry, as it was listed as a calorie-dense meal. It was very mild, but well-flavoured and I enjoyed it a lot.
When the next meal-time came, I wasn’t keen to have the same thing again, even though I’d enjoyed the first one. Although there was only one item specifically marked as vegan, there was also an Asian Vegetarian section on the menu. All the meals were basically a vegetable dish, a pulse-based dish, rice, chapati and yoghurt, and there was a choice of about 7 meals. I asked the lady who had given me the menu whether the meal was milk-free without the yoghurt and confirmed they were all egg-free. She didn’t know about the milk, but I asked her if she could find out, and with a little insistence on my part I got her to agree to bring me whichever of the meals did not have milk listed on the allergens box (all the meals were pre-prepared and bought in from an outside company). The chapatis were somewhat disappointing on these meals, but apart from those they were excellent and I think I enjoyed them a lot more than my neighbouring ward-mate liked her meal – she told me the shepherds pie was okay, but “not how you’d make it yourself”. Since she seemed a very polite lady I took that to mean it wasn’t actually that nice, but was edible!
I also enjoyed the many tea rounds that occurred throughout the day. There were biscuits I could eat (chocolate bourbons), crisps, and fruit juice on offer. I got through a lot of little tubs of pineapple juice. I also liked the cheery demeanour of most the staff members who pushed the trolley, especially one who kept trying to tempt me to a cake because “they’re from Marks and Spencer”! I’d prepared a box of snacks in advance in case there was nothing I could eat, but I ended up barely touching them.
So, in conclusion, I’d like to congratulate the catering team at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust on their menu choices for vegetarians and vegans, and I loved the blurb at the front encouraging people to enjoy their food as an integral part of the recovery process!
Creamy chocolate peanut-butter mousse
Posted: June 2, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: chocolate, dessert, Meridian, mousse, peanut butter, Plamil, Vegan, vegetarian, vitamix 7 CommentsHaving an obsession with something traditionally made with egg whites, double cream and/or gelatine is tricky as a vegan! When I was a child, my mother used to make an incredibly boozy chocolate mousse using dark chocolate, egg whites, cream and liberal splashes of brandy. I remember eyeing up the individual glass serving dishes chilling in the fridge in preparation for dinner parties. Perhaps I got to “help clean” the mixing bowl and I am sure I got my own dish at dinner, but I would happily have eaten the lot of them if I could have got away with it!
Since finally getting a long-wished-for Vitamix several years ago I’ve made a lot of moussey desserts, mainly based on nuts. They aren’t quite as smooth or light as the mousses of my childhood, but they have their own charms. Soon I hope to start experimenting with aquafaba but until then, I’m mighty pleased with the peanut-butter and chocolate creation I made a couple of days ago, especially as I think it will work as a recipe even without access to a high-speed blender if a few modifications are made.
The quantities I used made a huge amount, so I’ve frozen an ice-cream tub full in the hopes that it might work semi-frozen.
If you’re going to try this I suggest halving the quantities, which will still make several generous servings!
- 1 cup smooth peanut butter (I used Meridian organic because it’s palm-oil-free and I’m trying to be good about that, plus it was on special offer, £5 for a kilo from the Better Food Company in Bristol earlier this year)
- 1 cup dark (72%) chocolate chips (I used Plamil)
- 2 Tbs sugar (could be left out if using sweeter chocolate)
- 4 cups non-dairy milk (I used value soya)
- 1.5 Tbs flax seeds
- 1 Tbs vanilla extract
- 1 tsp chocolate extract
I put a cup of milk into the blender, followed by the peanut butter, flax seeds, then another couple of cups of milk and the extracts. That got blended up until the friction started heating the mixture, then I added the chocolate and sugar and it melted in and blended. It soon became evident that the mix was going to be too thick, so another cup of milk got added, then I poured it into a variety of containers and left it to chill in the fridge for a few hours. Once it sets it’s light and airy, creamy but with a slightly floury texture from the peanut butter. I daresay there would have been a smoother result from a more processed style of peanut butter, but this is fine, it’s kind of velvety!
I also added a few mix-ins to some of the pots, such as oats and raisins, and I blended an orange into the last cup or so of mixture to see if that would work (it was okay, but probably not worth repeating).
If I were going to make this without a blender, I would probably warm a couple of cups of milk, add the peanut butter and stir until it had thoroughly blended in, then add the chocolate and whip in another cup of milk, see what the texture was like and add more milk as necessary. I probably wouldn’t add flax if making a non-blender version as it’d make the texture grainy. If I try this version I will update this recipe, but if you happen to fancy trying it in the meantime please comment and let me know how you get on!
New Choc on the Block – iChoc white nougat crisp
Posted: May 28, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: chocolate, hazelnut, hazelnuts, iChoc, ricemilk, Vegan, vegan chocolate, Vivani 2 CommentsI try very hard to keep it frugal on this blog, but I’d be a hypocrite not to admit to a weakness for new types of vegan chocolate, and if not constrained by a budget I will buy anything sufficiently novel which costs less than a fiver, and maybe spend more if it’s big enough!
I’d never heard of iChoc until I saw a review of the white rice-chocolate bar they make; part of a vegan chocolate round-up. The reviewer wasn’t overly enthusiastic, but I thought I’d like to try it anyway if I saw it, as I sometimes like things other people think are too sweet. When I was visiting Currant Affairs today with the virtuous goal of buying wholemeal flour, I saw they were displaying a new bar at the end of their shelf of goodies, not the white chocolate but, even better, a white bar containing crispy hazelnut nougat. Hazelnut and chocolate is an ideal combination as far as I’m concerned so I didn’t hesitate to buy this even though it was £2.19 for 80g. Call it a payday treat.
I very much enjoyed this. It is very sweet, yes, and also very rich. I will be interested to hear what non-vegans think of this, as it’s definitely got a richness there that I’ve not experienced with most other vegan chocolates. It reminded me of a cross between the chocolate green triangle (“Noisette Pate”) and the (I’m informed by Wikipedia that this is a discontinued flavour) hazelnut cracknell chocolates from Quality Street selection tins.
This doesn’t quite replace the Vivani dark chocolate hazelnut bar at the top of my list of great chocolate worth splurging on, but I’d say it’s definitely got a place on the list in the “now and then” category.
dropscone 
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