Chickpea Chips – VeganMoFo Day 8

Today’s VeganMoFo prompt is about Food Flops. Taking inspiration from things you’ve made that didn’t turn out so well. I actually have a post about my own flops, but this won’t be about any of them, instead about last year’s Polenta Chips. Now, there’s actually no flop in that recipe, because it’s nice and tasty…but along the way, I realised that my body isn’t actually a huge fan of polenta, so I can’t eat them anymore! But they were nice, so I wanted to find something similar. Enter…chickpea chips!

Chickpea chips are made in a similar way to polenta chips, only with gram/chickpea flour instead of polenta/cornmeal! You can get something similar under the name of “panisse” in France, but those are fried and I baked these for ease.

You have to make the mixture of these in advance – it’s done by mixing a chickpea flour & water combination on the stove until thickened, and then pressing it into a tray, and leaving to cool. This forms a block, much like polenta, which you then cut into chips and bake.

Chickpea Chips

• Servings: 1 tray
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Ingredients

• 250g chickpea flour, sifted
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 tsp stock powder
• 500ml cold water

to bake

• salt and pepper, to season
• spray oil

Directions

1. Mix your sifted chickpea flour with the salt and stock powder. Slowly pour in the water, mixing constantly, until thouroughly mixed (as lump free as you can get it!)
2. Pour the chickpea flour mixture into a large saucepan on low heat, and whisk continually for 5 minutes until very thick.
3. Turn out the mixture onto a lined baking tray, and spread until about half an inch thick. Leave to fully cool.
4. Preheat the oven to 200C/400F
5. Turn the cooled mixture out onto a chopping board, and cut into “chips” – you can be creative if you like but make them similar sizes so they cook evenly!
6. Place chips on a baking tray, season with salt and pepper, and spray with oil.
7. Put them in the preheated oven for 25-30 minutes, until golden brown.
8. Serve immediately.

Rainbow Pizza – VeganMoFo Day 7

You may notice that I skipped a day! Oops! Actually no, I won’t be posting every single day this month – just most days. Thirty days of non stop posts is a lot to get through! Though I know there are many fellow MoFo-ers who are doing it, and much respect to them.

Today’s prompt is about “colour” – be inspired by colour in your food. We’ve had colour themes before – red food (twice) and I’ve even done a beige day! But today I’ve gone multicoloured. And put it on pizza, because why not?

Pizza is such a versatile food, and most certainly not one you have to give up when you go vegan! I have several pizza recipes on here, and so I thought I’d add another one. This uses a variety of vegetables in rainbow colours (but if you’re not going for the rainbow look, just use what you like the taste of best) and Tesco’s Free From cream cheese – but again, any cream cheese you like the taste of would work great!

If you wanted to use premade pizza dough you could – check the ingredients to make sure it’s vegan – but I’m including the recipe for my own pizza dough too. You have to knead it, which can be a little tedious, but put on a nice playlist and take it all ought on the dough as you knead!

Rainbow Pizza

• Servings: 1 pizza
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Ingredients

For the Dough
• 250g strong white bread flour
• 1 tsp white sugar
• 1 tsp instant yeast
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 200ml hand-hot water (water should be hot enough to hold your little finger in without wincing)
For the toppings
• 1 pack vegan cream cheese
• Veggies of your choice, cut into bitesize pieces. I used black olives, purple radishes, red onions, red, yellow, and orange tomatoes, red, green and yellow peppers, and green courgettes.

Directions

1. Begin making your dough. In a large bowl, mix the flour, sugar, yeast, salt, and olive oil together.
2. Slowly pour in the warm water, mixing until a dough is formed.
3. Knead the dough for approximately 8 minutes, until it is smooth and bouncy.
4. Cover with a tea towel, and put in a warm place to rise until doubled in size – at least an hour.
5. Preheat the oven to 200C/400F
6. Roll your dough into a large circle ready for topping.
7. Spread the cream cheese evenly over the pizza base.
8. Get creative and place the vegetables on top of the cream cheese in a rainbow pattern!
9. Bake in the preheated oven for 15-20 minutes, until the dough is golden and firm.
10. Slice and enjoy!

Isa’s Chickpea Cutlets – VeganMoFo Day 5

Day 5 of VeganMoFo asks us to talk about cookbooks that have inspired us. There are a lot more vegan cookbooks out there now than there ever have been, and you’re spoilt for choice when looking for one! But the one cookbook I always go back to is the Veganomicon. First published nearly eleven years ago, there’s now a tenth anniversary edition which I don’t have, but both versions are amazingly good! There’s a plethora of amazing vegan recipes, ranging from basics to fancy and all the way inbetween. Including one of my all time favourite recipes – chickpea cutlets.

Ok maybe they’re not the prettiest of meals to photograph, but they are amazing, seriously, well worth making. And they’re really easy too – I use the oven baked method (I think that’s often regarded as the tastiest way to make these!) and they turn out brilliant every time.

The cutlets use vital wheat gluten, which I wrote a bit about in my post on seitan last year, and they’re a great protein source what with that and the chickpeas. They’re honestly good however you choose to serve them – with salad, with roast potatoes, or in a sandwich!

The recipe for chickpea cutlets can be found either in the Veganomicon book or on Isa’s website, here! Her recipe online is for a double batch, which is well worth making as you’ll want as many as you can get.

Enjoy!

 

Simple Baked Flatbread – VeganMoFo Day 4

Today’s prompt, carrying on with the “inspired by…” theme, is about art, and how art inspires you. “Art” can encompass so much, but for this purpose I’m applying it to music, specifically the song “North” by Sleeping at Last.

Let the years we’re here be kind, be kind.
Let our hearts, like doors, open wide, open wide.
Settle our bones like wood over time, over time.
Give us bread, give us salt, give us wine.

The song is about homemaking and finding a place to call home. About finding somewhere full of peace, love, and of course some good bread. So what did I do? Made bread, simple but delicious.

A lot of flatbreads either require rising time, or want to be pan fried…these need neither, they come together really quickly and they bake in the oven in just ten minutes! Which makes them really easy to just whip up to go with soup, stew, or anything you want. They’re best eaten fresh on the day of baking, but will keep for a couple of days afterwards.

Easy Baked Flatbread

• Servings: 8 flatbreads
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Ingredients

• 250g plain flour
• 1 tsp instant dried yeast
• pinch salt
• 1 tsp olive oil
• 200ml plain sparkling water
• olive oil spray
• Salt for sprinkling on top

Directions

Preheat the oven to 210C/410F
1. In a bowl, mix together the flour, yeast, salt, and olive oil.
2. Slowly pour in the sparkling water, mixing until a dough forms.
3. Knead for approximately 5 minutes until smooth.
4. Break the dough into eight pieces (half, and then half again)and roll each one into a large circle.
5. Place on baking sheets – leaving space to rise – and spray with oil and sprinkle with salt.
6. Bake for 8-10 minutes until golden brown and bubbling.

 

Marshmallow Tiffin – VeganMoFo Day 3

Day 3 of VeganMoFo 2018! It’s another sweet recipe coming your way today. The prompt for today’s MoFo post is “Inspired by a leader of a place, country, or group”. I tried to think of leaders with food associations and I ended up thinking royal – specifically Prince William, seven years ago, getting married. A royal wedding cake you’d think would be fruit cake – pretty traditional, right? But for his wedding, the prince requested a tier of his favourite tiffin! Being a prince and all he was able to get McVities to make it for him, enough to serve 600, but I decided to create a vegan version which instead makes about thirty servings.

Tiffin – in this case, referring to a dessert and not an Indian meal – is an unbaked cake make from crushed biscuits and chocolate at its most basic. In many cases, it also has raisins or other dried fruit, but those are controversial ingredients as many people don’t like them, so I replaced them with marshmallows. I used the mini Freedom Mallows but you can use whatever vegan marshmallows you have, if they’re big just chop them into smaller pieces. Many people use digestive biscuits for tiffin, but like Prince William himself I prefer using rich tea biscuits as, contrary to their name, they’re not as rich and carry the chocolate well! If you can’t get rich tea biscuits you will want to use a plain crunchy biscuit.

I used white chocolate as well as plain chocolate here – just in the topping, marbled, but if you can’t get vegan white chocolate, plain chocolate works just as well!

Vegan Marshmallow Tiffin

• Servings: 30 small tiffin bars
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Ingredients

• 300g vegan dark chocolate
• 3 tbsp golden syrup (or sub for maple/agave/vegan syrup of choice)
• 75g vegan butter (I used vitalite)
• 250g rich tea biscuits, broken up (pulse them in a food processor until mostly chopped)
• 50g mini marshmallows
To top
• 100g dark chocolate
• 100g vegan white chocolate

Directions

1. Prepare and line a baking dish with non-stick paper.
2. In a large bowl, melt together the dark chocolate, golden syrup, and vegan butter. Either do this in the microwave or in a double boiler on the stove.
3. Into the melted mixture, add the biscuits and marshmallows, and stir until fully coated.
4. Press all of this into your lined baking dish, try to make it even!
5. In two separate bowls, melt the remaining dark chocolate and the white chocolate. Place blobs of each on top of the tiffin mix, and use the back of a spoon to swirl them around to create a marbled effect.
6. Place in the fridge for 2+ hours until fully set, and then cut with a sharp knife.

 

Pumpkin Spice Cake – VeganMoFo Day 2

Some may say it’s too early to be thinking about autumn and all things pumpkin, but I can definitely feel a chill in the air – and besides, when is it too early to be thinking of tasty food? This year, you can even get vegan pumpkin spice lattes at Starbucks in the UK, so what better choice for “emoji day” than the good old pumpkin?🎃🎃🎃

I discovered recently that here in the UK you can buy canned pumpkin in Sainsbury’s for just £1! This was excellent news to me as often I’d tried making recipes that called for pumpkin puree by cooking and blending a pumpkin from scratch which is a bit of a hassle. Apparently this has been available for years but I never knew. At first, I wanted to make cookies, but I decided against that and went for spiced pumpkin cake bars!

These are spiced with cinnamon, ginger, allspice, and cloves – and the canned pumpkin gives them a gorgeous texture. Sprinkled on top with a spiced sugar mixture they go perfectly with a mug of tea or coffee and will definitely give you autumnal feelings.

Pumpkin Spice Cake

• Servings: 25 bars
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Ingredients

• 100g vegan butter (I used vitalite)
• 150g pumpkin puree
• 100g white sugar
• 150g brown sugar
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 0.5 tsp ground ginger
• 0.5 tsp allspice
• pinch ground cloves
• 350g plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 0.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda
To top
• 50g white sugar
• pinch allspice
• pinch cinnamon

Directions

Preheat the oven to 175C/350F
1. Begin by creaming the butter and sugars together.
2. Mix in the pumpkin puree and spices.
3. Stir through the flour, baking powder, and bicarbonate of soda to make a stiff mix.
4. Press the mixture into a lined baking dish.
5. Mix together the remaining white sugar, allspice, and cinnamon, and sprinkle evenly over the pumpkin mixture.
6. Bake in the preheated oven until turning golden in colour.
7. Cool in the tray, and then cut into squares.

VeganMoFo18 – Day 1: Introduce Yourself

Well, it’s been a while hasn’t it? But I’m back for this year’s VeganMoFo with plenty of posts and tasty food! I’ll be posting both here and on my instagram so make sure to keep an eye on both.

As usual, we have prompts and themes to follow throughout VeganMoFo, which can be found here, and I’ll be doing my best to stick to them!

Today’s prompt is pretty simple, to introduce yourself, and since I’ve not posted here for a long time I may as well start with that!

I’m Emma, a mid-twenties history grad with a myriad of health problems that has led me outside of the “traditional” work way of life. I live in Derbyshire in the UK, which is a beautiful place, with my husband Greg and my cat Sassy!

I don’t know how long I’ve been vegan as it was a gradual change for me – I have always been vegetarian, and I realised I was intolerant to dairy, and the rest just followed suit! I love to bake and have found it’s surprisingly easy to bake tasty vegan food – you do not need the eggs or dairy at all! I’ve got quite a few recipes already on this blog, but there’ll be more coming throughout the month.

That’s about all I can think of to say about me – but I’m looking forward to posting more and getting to know everyone who is taking part in this year’s VeganMoFo!

 

 

Slow Cooker Sweet Potato Dhal

Wow, so, I had a tough time writing this up. I posted this recipe on my instagram in January for MiniMoFo, but I just could not get my blog to work! It just refused to load. I’ve finally figured a work around, and fingers crossed this will post. I’m sorry you have had to wait so long for this recipe!

This recipe is all about warmth, and warming yourself up and keeping cosy when it’s cold outside. Now, it’s the final part of February now, and here’s hoping that it’s not going to be too cold from here out, but, you never know. And there will always be cold days.

This is actually a slow cooker recipe! My slow cooker is very under utilised, I seem to always forget it exists, but it’s a very forgiving way to cook, and it makes the house smell absolutely gorgeous. For this dhal recipe, you just put all the ingredients in the slow cooker, and cook. No other pots and pans are needed. If you want any “croutons” on top, like I’ve done with the cashews in the picture, you can do them separately, but if not, it’s delicious on its own.

I cooked my dhal on “high” in the slow cooker for four hours, but I know not everyone works with that time frame, and if you’d rather set it in the morning and leave it till night, you can put it on “low” for 8 hours instead and it should be just as good!

• Servings: 4
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Ingredients

• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 3 sweet potatoes, diced into bitesize chunks
• 1 tsp cumin
• 1 tsp ground coriander
• 2 tsp garam masala
• 1 tsp turmeric
• pinch cayenne (to taste, however spicy you like it!)
• pinch salt
• 150g red lentils
• 1 can chopped tomatoes
• 1 can coconut milk
• 300ml vegetable stock

Directions

1. Place all of the ingredients in the slow cooker.
2. Turn the slow cooker to “High” for 4 hours, or “Low” for 8 hours.
3. Check for seasoning, and serve.

Spiced Pumpkin & Barley Soup – VeganMoFo Day 31

It’s the last day of VeganMoFo 2017!! Can you believe it?! It’s always a challenge – I’ve posted 28 days this month which is more than I posted all year (!) and it’s not always easy coming up with ideas to fill the whole month. But so many people have done it, and it just shows how much creativity there is out there. You can check out roundups of this year’s participants on the VeganMoFo website – the final one will be up soon!

Today’s final VeganMoFo day coincides with Halloween, so that was our prompt for the day. I don’t do Halloween, but I decided to make something using an ingredient you may have plenty of…

Pumpkin! This recipe will be great for all those pumpkins that will go on sale after Halloween. It’s the one you saw in my roasted chickpea recipe – they really do go very well together.

It’s got all lovely wintery spices in – cinnamon and paprika and cloves – and the addition of pearl barley makes it hearty and warming for the cold days (like today! where has this cold front come from?!).

Spiced Pumpkin & Barley Soup

• Servings: 2
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Ingredients

• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1/2 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
• Pinch ground cloves (be careful – these are strong!)
• Half a medium sized pumpkin, diced
• 100g pearl barley
• 1 tbsp vegan worcestershire sauce
• 1 tbsp tomato puree
• 700ml vegetable stock

Directions

1. Begin by heating the oil in a saucepan, and frying the onion and garlic until translucent.
2. Add the cinnamon, paprika, and cloves, and cook for thirty seconds.
3. Add all the remaining ingredients, stir well, bring to the boil, and lower the heat and simmer for 50 minutes, stirring regularly.
4. The soup is done when the barley is tender, and the pumpkin is melting away to create a nice thick soup. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

 

Nut Roast Burgers – VeganMoFo Day 30

Today, the penultimate VeganMoFo 2017 day, is about doing a practice run for an upcoming holiday. Well, I’m a Brit, so I don’t celebrate thanksgiving. It’s my birthday in November, but I’m secretly hoping someone else will take care of that. And Christmas? Uhh…I kinda haven’t thought at all about what I’m going to eat for Christmas yet, except some cranberry marzipan cookies which are the best thing about the season. So, I went with something familiar, but Christmassy enough.

These are nut roast burgers! Side note: how difficult is it to take good photos of burgers?! I like making burgers but it’s really hard to post recipes, because I can never get good photos… Anyway, I made these nut roast balls earlier in the month, and they were so tasty that I thought I’d make them into burgers. They’re almost the same recipe as the balls, except they also have beans in, to make them more burger-y. They’d be really great for a casual kind of Christmas meal!

These are baked in the oven, which means you don’t have the hassle of frying them, and I bet they’d work really well served with more seasonal flavours like brussels, cranberry sauce, and so on!

 

Nut Roast Burgers

• Servings: Makes 6 burgers
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Ingredients

• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1 can white beans, drained & rinsed
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 150g mixed nuts
• 50g walnuts
• 50g ground almonds (almond flour)
• 2 tsp peanut butter
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp ground pepper
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 200ml vegetable stock
• 200g breadcrumbs

Directions

Preheat the oven to 180C/355F
1. Begin by frying the onion and garlic in the olive oil, until translucent.
2. Meanwhile, in a large bowl, mash the beans until thoroughly mashed.
3. In a food processor, blitz the walnuts and mixed nuts until they are finely chopped. Transfer to the bowl with the beans.
4. Into the nuts and beans, add the cooked onion and garlic, and the remaining ingredients, and stir until completely combined.
5. Form the mixture into six burger shaped patties, and place on a baking tray.
6. Put the burgers in the preheated oven for 30 minutes, turning once half way.