Vegan MoFo Day 8 - Cookbook Challenge Week.

It's Cookbook Challenge Week! I'm a bit nervous about this week as this blog's more about reviewing restaurants than home cooking, I hope that I can make food look good even though I'll be plating it myself!

I have A LOT of cookbooks and I feel that most of them really don't get used enough. Although I do genuinely love to cook I often find myself relying quite heavily on processed foods & (delicious) meat substitutes - I'd like this to change & MoFo seemed like a good time for a challenge. So, I made a list of all the cookbooks I have & would like to use more & all week I'll be picking the name of a cookbook from this pile...

...I was going to pick them out of a hat but sadly I couldn't find my one and only hat! I'll then be using a random number generator to pick a page & that's what I'll be cooking that day. If a recipe I've made before comes up I'll be skipping it as that wouldn't be much of a challenge. I'm shooting for three recipes a day but if they're crazy involved or just make way too much food I'm going to do two.

First outa the 'hat' was 500 Vegan Recipes.

The generator picked page 182, Caramelised Onion Tart with a Sweet Potato & Sage Crust. This isn't something I'd have picked myself as Mr Jojo hates onion & the first ingredient, canned sweet potato, is not something you can buy here but this is a challenge so I started off by making my own sweet potato puree.

I got my sweet potatoes ready...

...and with a little help from the vegan twitter-verse I decided to roast and then puree the potatoes rather than boiling or steaming. It was decided that that would give them a better flavour.

Next up I made the dough for the crust, caramelised me some onions & made the parmesan-like sprinkles. I've never made dough using bread makers yeast before or caramelised an onion so this recipe was definitely throwing new things at me from all directions. I was also a little worried about whether the dough would rise as my house is pretty cold but I took it into the bathroom with me whilst I showered & that definitely helped! After 18 min's in the oven look how awesome it turned out.

I'm SO excited that my first cookbook challenge recipe was a success. This was really delicious & I'd definitely make it again, I'd consider changing the topping next time so my husband could eat some but for now I'm quite happy to scoff the lot! The only (very minor and totally my fault) problem here was that the onion's needed to be softball sized & I think mine must've been smaller as I think there should be a little more topping - also I kinda burnt some of them as I got distracted by Jersey Shore!

Second out of the hat was Vegan With a Vengeance & the generator picked Page 188, Sparkled Ginger Cookies. Wow, another recipe I probably wouldn't have chosen - I'm not the biggest ginger fan but I certainly do love cookies so I was convinced this would turn out okay.

This pick turned out to be much better than just okay, in fact I ate 6 of these whilst they were still on the cooling rack - they're delicious & I think they'll make excellent christmas cookies. I did cut down the amount of ginger in the cookie by 1/2 a teaspoon as I wanted to be able to eat them & as it turned out that's just the right level of gingereyness for me.

Third pick of the day was Viva Vegan!

I love this cookbook, I bought it because I've loved everything Terry Hope Romero's been involved in before but having never tried any South American food before I wasn't sure if I'd like it - so far I've LOVED everything & have been super excited to have my eyes opened to a new cuisine.

The random number generator picked page 100 - Chimichurri baked tofu. This is another recipe that I wouldn't have picked as the chimichurri sauce (page 42) is described as a spicy pesto and as regular readers of my blog will know, I can't handle much spice. I really wanted to stick to the challenge though so I made the sauce with less paprika & I totally left out the red pepper flakes.

We obviously couldn't just eat the baked tofu on it's own & it certainly wouldn't have gone with either of the other recipes I picked today so we served it with another Viva Vegan! recipe, yellow rice with garlic (page 96) and steamed broccoli. It made for a good quick dinner, which is great as we're just about to head off to London to see Less Than Jake (Yay!)

See you guys tomorrow for more cookbook challenge fun & don't forget to enter my competition.