Vegan MoFo Day 18 - Viva Vegan Night.

Now I'm going to have to be totally honest here, we had friends over for dinner this evening & I totally forgot to take pictures of the food!

But, at the suggestion of my guests, I made up a plate of leftovers & took pictures of that. If you're reading this, thanks guys!

This isn't a very good picture but it's better than no picture at all!

Nick's choice for this meal was the recipe for Peruvian Seitan & Potato Skewers from Viva Vegan so I built this meal around them.

Alongside the skewers we had the Latin Shredded Seitan, Chimichurri baked tofu (with the leftover Chimichurri sauce from last week), Braised Brazilian Shredded Kale, Yellow Rice with Garlic (not pictured as there were no leftovers!) & leftover re-fried beans from our meal the other day.

This was a great dinner & I'm excited to say that I've found yet another Viva Vegan recipe that we'll be making a lot more of in our house - the Latin Shredded Seitan. It was really delicious & ridiculously easy to throw together. I'm looking forward to trying some of the other variations on this dish too.

Sorry it's such a short one but we still have guests & I should stop being a terrible hostess! I will, of course, be back tomorrow.

Vegan MoFo Day 17 - Fondue

It's finally the week where Nick gets to choose what we eat, he has the same pile of cookbook's I used last week and at some point I hope he'll pick something that includes vegetables!

The reason I decided to do this is because about 5 months ago Nick decided to go vegan & ever since I've done pretty much all of the cooking. I love to cook so that's fine but the main reason I've been doing it is because Nick doesn't really know how to cook anything vegan, he discovered this recently when I went to Vienna for a whole week leaving him to fend for himself. He said he felt a little ridiculous being a grown man who didn't know how to cook anything so I promised to teach him how!

His first choice was fondue, he's always been a big fan of nooch based mac n cheese's & this seemed like a fun new way to pack in the nooch. We'd planned to use the Swiss Fondue recipe from The Uncheese Cookbook but sadly it was a bit of a disaster. I don't know if we did something wrong but it wouldn't thicken up & it tasted way too onioney so we quickly turned to my favourite recipe for anything cheesy, the Cheezy Sauce from Veganomicon & as always it saved the day.

We're the lucky owner's of an electric fondue thing, it was a wedding gift! You can do oil, cheese or chocolate fondue in it & I think it's one of the funnest kitchen gadget's I own.

I did a bit of internet research to work out what you should dip into cheese fondue & decided to go with roast potatoes, french bread, seitan, Medium Cheddar Sheese & apple. It was all SO delicious...

Yup, that's me narrowly missing getting melty cheese all over a clean t-shirt & here's Nick trying to eat the largest chunk of cheese covered bread I've ever seen!

We both liked the roast potatoes the most, I think it's mainly because I bought really nice organic red skinned potatoes & they roasted beautifully, if you live in Brighton go to Infinity Foods & get some asap. Sheese dipped in cheese sauce was brilliant & the french bread worked really well. I loved the apple too but Nick refused to even consider dipping fruit in cheese - crazy!

We're having friends over for dinner tomorrow & I think the plan is to cook up a Viva Vegan based feast & hopefully I'll manage to get my blog post up in time!

MoFo Day 16 - Taking the day off!

Yup, that's right I'm taking the day off.

Not from MoFoing of course but I've been feeling sick & headachey all day & I can't handle the idea of cooking another meal! This is meant to be the week that Nick gets to pick all the food but because he's awesome he let me convince him that what he want's most for dinner tonight is take out.

Yay for Nick not letting me have some kinda MoFo based breakdown! That's us in Scotland!

I haven't exactly cooked nothing all day, as Nick's picking the food this week I knew there'd be a lot of seitan eating going on so I made a double batch of our favourite seitan, the Steamed White Seitan from Viva Vegan.

This is the most reliable & easy seitan recipe I've ever tried, I love it & I use it in pretty much every recipe that calls for seitan!

For lunch I managed to use the leftover Uncheese Cookbook Amazing Mac n Cheez Sauce from Friday to make a sort of Welsh Rarebit creation.

I just mixed some vegan worcestershire sauce into the cheese sauce, gave it a stir, spread it onto my toast & stuck it under the grill for a few minutes. It was really good & much healthier that the cheezly I'd usually use for this kind of lunch. As we said after eating the sauce on Friday it's not quite noochey enough for us so of course I thought the same about this toast!

We're having Pompoko for dinner, it's probably our favourite take out option because you get this huge bowl of rice, veggies & tofu for £4.40. It's also right around the corner from our house, we usually call in the order as we're leaving & by the time we get there it's all ready for us to collect.

Next to our usual order of Sesame Tofu Don (the rice bowl) is Yubamaki, described on the menu as tofu roll filled with vegetables. This is made of yuba (tofu skin) and filled with sweet potato, mushroom & something white that we still haven't identified. This is delicious comfort food at it's best.

Now, I promise I'll be back with some proper cooking tomorrow but for now I'm going to sit on the sofa & do nothing for the rest of the day!

Vegan MoFo Day 15 - Cookbook Challenge Week Part VIII

It's the end of cookbook challenge week but we're going out with a bang. The book goddesses wanted me to have brunch today so that's exactly what I did.

First book of the day was Yellow Rose Recipes & the generator gave me page 24, Very Berry Muffins. Now I've tried to make muffins before & they've never turned out well so I was a little nervous. I didn't have any need to worry though because these were not only easy to make & they used up some of the egg replacer I bought years ago & hardly ever used but they definitely came out better than any other muffin recipe I've tried before.

The only change I made was using frozen berries rather than fresh, partly because it's really not berry season here at the moment but also because the frozen berries have been taking up freezer space I could be using for MoFo leftovers & the tonne of stock I made yesterday! Seriously, once it gets to December I might not have to cook again until Christmas! The muffins don't exactly have the texture of the store bought muffins I remember from my pregan days but they were still awesome & I'd definitely make these again.

In fact, whilst we're talking about Yellow Rose Recipes, if you want this book head over to Herbivore or Etsy (to buy it directly from the author) asap. There'll be no more copies left soon & there are no plans to re-prinit it at the moment.

Second pick of the day was Vegan Brunch.

I was pretty excited because I love this book! It made me like tempeh (the bacon & the chesapeake tempeh cakes are aewesome) and I made my first ever yeasted bread thing (the bagels) from here which has given me the confidence to try other yeastey things!

The generator picked page 95 - Gingerbread Waffles. This number generator certainly seems to be determined to make me like ginger! I happily got out my waffle iron - I wish I had room to keep it on the counter all the time.

This was a wedding gift, and I love it, hard!

I've never made any of the waffle recipes from this book, not because they don't sound great, they do, but because I already have a go to waffle recipe (Waffles I from The Joy of Vegan Baking) & I'm usually hungry enough by brunch time that failure isn't an option!

Not to worry though, this recipe certainly wan't a failure...

...this was a delicious pile of waffley awesomeness & I think Mr VeganInBrighton'll be excited that I froze some so he can have them as a quick breakfast before work.

Third pick of the day was Viva Vegan which seems like a great way to end Cookbook Challenge Week - right back where we started! I think I've mentioned before that I love this cookbook so I won't go on about it again but you should definitely buy it. The generator picked me page 103 - Latin Baked Tofu. I'm a huge tofu fan so this sounded perfect but of course just tofu on it's own wouldn't have been much of a challenge. You can pretty much serve this tofu with anything & I went for re-fried beans because I'd always wanted to make them (& I had the ingredients!) and decided we could throw all this stuff onto some Sopes.

The tofu was delicious, just like all the other tofu's I've tried from this book but the refried beans were too spicy for us even with my slight change to the recipe - I totally left out the fresh chilli & I can't imagine how burney it'd have been if I'd included it! Yup, I'm a spice wuss!

Thankfully as you can see from the photo we had sour cream to cool it down a little as well as lettuce & a mix of Super Melting Edam Style Cheezly & Melty No Muh Chas that I picked up in Vienna.

The actual sopes were wonderful, we pan fried them & it definitely took us a few goes to get them right. We started off with much too little oil & shaping them's definitely a bit of an art - one Mr VeganInBrighton had much more luck with than me because he actually has patience! We were worried they'd fall apart as you ate them or that it'd at least be really messy but nope, it was like a little plate of food - but you could eat the plate - perfect. We'll definitely be having these again.

Sadly it's the end of cookbook challenge week but don't think I'm going to be getting all lazy with my MoFoing - there'll be no chance of that because next week Mr VeganInBrighton (we'll call him Nick from now on because that's his name!) is going to be choosing all the recipes. I'm a little worried mainly because he's been playing X-Box all evening & not picking out recipes but hopefully I can resolve this & write myself a shopping list soon...

Vegan MoFo Day 14 - Cookbook Challenge Week Part VII

I slept until lunchtime today (if you eat lunch reeeeally late!) & when I got up I ate a whole world of toast, which was awesome but sadly it means I've had a bit of a failey day on the Cookbook Challenge front; by the time I'd cooked anything it was actually pitch black outside.

First outa the 'hat' today was The Urban Vegan, I bought this cook book pretty recently & hadn't cooked anything from it - until today. The generator picked page 14, Brownie Bites. "Hell Yeah" I though, this is my kinda recipe!

I made one change, the author suggests half wholewheat & half spelt flour, I went for 2/3 plain & 1/3 spelt. As far as I could tell this didn't mess up the recipe or anything because these were delicious, really god-damn delicious! The only thing I'd say is don't wait the 15 min's for them to cool, these are at their gooey best eaten as soon as they're cool enough to handle - don't be as impatient as me though, if you try to remove them from the pan immediately they'll fall apart & you'll have to eat them outa the muffin pan with a spoon & that'd be just terrible!

Second recipe of the day was from Vegan With a Vengeance and the generator picked me page 71, White Bean & Roasted Garlic Soup. Now this certainly isn't something I'd have picked as I don't really like soup BUT the one soup I loved happened to be a roasted garlic soup from a bar called Ruups in Vienna so for soup this seemed promising.

I decided to start by making my own stock, I went renegade with this one & didn't follow a recipe.

I threw all my peelings from the week into a pan with a bit of leftover parsley, some garlic cloves, celery & a parsnip that'd seen better days & simmered for 1 hour 30 min's.

Yup, those are my sunglasses on top of the microwave, I wear them when I'm peeling onions!

I'd never tried to make my own stock before, for some reason I'd gotten it into my head that it'd be too much of a pain in the ass & that stock cubes are super convenient so why bother - it turns out I'm an idiot! This was so easy & do you know how much salt's in a stock cube?! I'm definitely going to be making my own stock from now on.

Anyway, back to the soup; this was one of the easiest things I've ever made, seriously.

I served it with delicious local organic bread from the Infinity Foods Co-op but sadly I still don't think I really like soup - maybe if I'm sick I'll come back to this but I'd probably double the garlic & maybe make it more brothy? I did love the flavour the roasted garlic added to the soup & I'll definitely be roasting more garlic in the future. Also, the recipe suggests that you use a food processor to blend the soup & I did this before taking the picture. Afterwards, once I'd tried it, I decided it was still a bit lumpy & gave it a good old blend in my Kitchenaid blender - it was much creamier & if you have a rubbish food processor I'd definitely suggest blending your soup.

I'll be back tomorrow with the final part of Cookbook Challenge Week & hopefully I'll get up & into the kitchen before dark - which in my kitchen is around 3pm.

Vegan MoFo Day 13 - Cookbook Challenge Week VI

I'll be announcing the winner of the sweet treats at the end of this post so stay tuned...

The cookbook challenge continued today with Veganomicon being the first pick.

The generator gave me page 179 Tomato & Roasted Eggplant Stew with Chickpeas. That sounded pretty good to me & I think it's a recipe I probably would've gotten around to making eventually. The instructions look a little long & complicated but once you've gotten the veggies roasting in the oven it all comes together really easily.

I served the stew with some cous cous & it was a really satisfying cold weather meal, perfect for England in November! I made 1/2 the recipe & there are two tubs of leftovers that I'll be putting in the freezer ready to be reheated after MoFo!

Second pick of the day was another one from Vegan Comfort Food and this time around the generator picked out page 204 - Thai Peanut Sauce. Obviously you can't just have sauce for dinner so I decided to go with the authors suggestion of her Spicy Soba Noodles in Peanut Sauce recipe, I've also decided that that counts as recipe three of the day! I've only tried one peanut sauce before, the recipe from Vegan With A Vengeance, but I was definitely up for giving this one a try.

The sauce was really easy to throw together, you just needed to whisk the ingredients together in a bowl & then heat if you're planning to serve it hot - or not if you're going to use it as a dip.

The rest of the meal was pretty simple too, you just steamed some veggies, did a spot of stir frying & cooked the soba noodles. I only made one change to the recipe, I'd intended to add tamarind paste but after going to two stores to look for it I gave up & just left it out.

The only thing I'd do differently next time would be to add some seitan or tofu because I love them & one thing I'll definitely be repeating in all my stir fry's is that I'll be steaming my broccoli & carrots from now on - I usually boil them but this was SO much better.

I think this was another successful day *yay* I will of course be back with more Cookbook Challenge fun tomorrow but now here's the bit I'm sure you've all been waiting for...

The competition winner is Falovi from Cooking green food up north. Congratulation's Falovi, leave a comment on this post letting me know how I can contact you & I'll get your prize in the mail.