Cookering Bookering, or: I have purchased more instructional veganic literature

I've oohed and aahed before over the excellent vegan cookering bookering section at Dymocks in Collins St.  They seem to have more all the time, including Terry Romero's Viva Vegan for those who like Latinesque foodering (not enough pictures for me ... yet. But I do really like the cover and think it's a bit a la Nigella ... so therefore mainstreamish and more appealing to audiences. I rate that). 

Dymocks' psychic pull on me is intense, because recently I have bought:

• The Vegan Table by Collen Patrick-Goudreau (also of The Joy of Vegan Baking). We've made some verrry noice burgers from it. No pictures, breaking my usual rule, but beautifully laid out and fonted. (Fonted?).

• The Ultimate Vegan Cook Book (not Veganomicon ... I can't find a picture of it and it seems like a stock published book, but it was only $25 and it even has instructional pictures)

• Clean Food by Terry Walters. This book doesn't contain the word 'vegan'. But any book that uses agar agar in dessert recipes sure darn is. Quite American as its focus is seasonal ingredients, but still looking sensational and heeeeeps of recipes.

• Babycakes by Erin McKenna (even though I'm not really a bakerer, I loved the purdiness of the book and also the chance to cook something vegan and gluten free so I can share it with Buzz's mama)

• Easy Vegan (again, a publisher only book, but 'easy' rings bells in my soul)

• The 30 Minute Vegan by Mark Reinfeld and Jennifer Murray (like 'easy', 'quick' is like angel wings beating against my heart). 

My collection is growing ... soon to take over more shelves in the kitchen and colonise a cupboard. 

Catch me, catch me! or: I trawl the archives

More catch ups, while I'm da mood. 

As Buzz and I are still Champions of the Crystal Quest to End Same-Same Cookering, I'll be trying to upload pictures of some of our weekly cookering more regularly - but be warned! I cannot commit to giving a full run-down on each! You shall get quick snappy pithy descriptions and cutting insightful opinions! That is all, comrades!

Rice Queen, June 2009. Oh jeez...

Oh jeez just because of the delay. Rice Queen's staff were able to point out a couple of straight-up vegan dishes on their menu without pausing, and a quick consultation with the kitchen yielded still more. Yes, ladles and jellyspoons, there is more than one main and entree we can eat. Below is a Masala Dosa and a Plantain Curry with lovely little crispy papadums. I'm sure you'll understand that I don't recall specifics. It was good though, and good value. Thanks. 

 

Red Emperor, October 2009

Dislike. We thought Red Emperor was going to be upscale Chinese cuisine, but the interior is very grey-vinyl chairs, tubular metal fixtures and early 1990s furnishings. The service focusses on bringing you steaming towels, but not your beer. And when that beer is poured that it's half head, that beer is not replaced. 

So yes, I remember that the beer was poured badly. So sue me. 

I also remember that the food was expensive and sub-standard. Below is a cream of corn soup - adequate, and a plate which purported to be a mix of vegetables. They were mixed, but in oval shaped fried balls of ickiness. And that plate cost $32. Don't go. Just don't. Especially on your anniversary.

Prospect Park Potato Salad from Veganomicon, a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away

I'm pretty meh on potato salad. I'm very blergh on mayo. But I thought that this would be a great one to take along to a gathering of omnis because it's familiar and would probably lead to '" Oh, however did you make it without dairy you marvel you?!" comments. 

Actually I can't even remember if I took it anywhere and where that anywhere may have been. But I did enjoy the seeded mustard and the explicit instruction in the recipe to grate - and grate only! - the carrot into the salad. 

More dinners from the T-House, or: A Selection of Goodies

Yo yo yo yo, babypop 

Continuing in the grand tradition of playing catch ups, I humbly present to you two more meals from the T-House which went down a treat. 

Yellow Thai Curry

A bit of a cheater. Vegan With A Vengeance set out a bewdiful recipe for homemade curry paste. Yet in the back of the pantry was a ready-made jar, ninja vegan. The recipe called for a number of separate steps to prepare the rest of the curry anyway, so the jar was opened. 

And it was good. We've made it again and the jar will give us one more batch too. We added rice noodles to bulk up the curry, and you see version-topped-with-coriander below but version-topped-with-basil was also excellent. Versatility! (I also recommend frying the tofu in soy sauce instead of oil. Or both, but be warned that you will be picking at the tofu after it's cooked like chippies).

Corn Chowder

I'm usually not a soup fan, preferring my dinner to be chewable. But this one, also from VWAV, was heeeeearty. It did involve removing half of the soup and blending it before returning it to the pot, but as we are absent a stick blender it was necessary to make this thick and smooth chowder. Buzz and I spent a very lamely amusing evening arguing over 'chOWder' and 'chow-DAIR'.

Hurry Up Alfredo

Vegan Yum Yum is the recipe book that keeps on giving. Having seen a number of bloggers, including Kristy, enjoy the creamy alfredo that Lolo at VYY created, we weren't surprised when it was bloody good. A tangy, creamy alfredo - go easy on the mustard - hit many spots. However, with the great big bowl of pasta that the fatty sauce thickly coated, and topped with Parmazano, this is a meal for after you've belted it out at the gym. 

Let's catch up! or, I mass upload

Hi Kiddles, 

Transmission has resumed!

Given the massive gap in which the T-House was offline, I've decided just to wham-bam-thankyou-blog and upload a lot of pics with little descriptions. 

Buzz and I have been continuing our quest to end same-same cookering with 3 or 4 new recipes a week, which has been working well and has cemented my love of the Vegan Yum Yum recipe book. 

Nuttelex Tofu (what else am I going to call Butter Chicken eh?)

 

It was ok - but really fatty by the time we'd fried the tofu and added the Nuttelex. A bit guilt-making. I'm loving this brand of spice pastes though - they do the Tom Yum that I was raving about and label the vegetarian packets, so there's just a little packet reading to check for vegan credentials.

Semolina porridge at The Mess Hall

Totally incredible and I've started making it at home. 

Chilli Linguine

One of the coolest Xmas presents we got was from my uncle Biffs and cousin Zacman, who gave us this packet of chilli linguine. It. Rocked. Hard .

We added chillis from the chilli plant that our friends Miss Jess and Mr Lach gave us at our housewarming.  I totally recommend this brand of pasta and will be giving gifts like this too!

A Candle re-lit, or: the next stage in our campaign to end Same-Same Cookering

Is anyone else having problems with the new Blogger settings? Photos are very strange to upload and I can't seem to position them properly. Spaces are also weird and hard to control. 

I have previously waxed lyrical about the joys of Candle 79, the organic vegan haute cuisine restaurant in New York that Buzz and I eatered at twice, and fell desperately in love with.  We didn't get a chance to visit its younger, chilled out sister, Candle Cafe, so I was thrilled when Miss T Junior (with connivance from the tricksy Buzz) gave me the Candle Cafe cookbook for Christmas. She had helpfully tagged the recipes she wanted to me cook for her first.

It's a plain-paged cookbook with only one section of photographs, but with over 150 recipes there will be enough to keep us going for a while. As part of the T-House's campaign to rid itself of same-same cookering, we chose Tex-Mex Tostadas with Coriander Tofu Sour Cream as our first attempt. 

The Coriander (Cilantro if you're from Noo Yawk) Tofu Sour Cream was a doddle to make. We skipped the optional agar agar and didn't bother to blanch the tofu first, and then whizzed tofu, lemon and lime juice, olive oil, sunflower oil, coriander, sea salt, cayenne pepper and minced garlic. It turned out to be one of those strange concotions that changes as you taste it more. At first try, this was seriously awesome, but it went downhill from there until it just tasted a bit wrong. Not sour creamy, not tofuey, and not like dip. Next time I would just use Tofutti Sour Cream (or even the Better Than Cream Cheese) instead of tofu and skip the oil. However, Buzz really liked this one so it's probably worth a go.

The tostadas fared better, although not until I discovered we have a faulty timer buzzer on our new oven, which failed to go off and resulted in cindery-burnt tortillas. In a fit of annoyance I had to go and buy more. 

The recipe was reasonably involved.  Firstly, it called for seitan to be  charcoale grilled  and then shredded in a food processor. This we replaced with diced fried tofu.

   

The fried tofu, onion, garlic, oregano, thyme, salt and kaffir lime leaf mixture.

Secondly, it called for the sauteeing of various ingredients (including kombu, which we immediately struck off), to which the charcoal shredded seitan should then be added. We did this, but next time would combine these two steps. We also subbed kaffir lime leaves for Pico De Gallo.

The recipe also wanted refried pinto beans. Nothing doing. After purchasing an imported can of pinto beans at vast expense, all they got was a quick heat through and a mashing. 

My little salad with the yellow tomatoes.

Finally, I chose to make a little salad with cos lettuce, cucumber and yellow Roma tomatoes, as I couldn't really see enough greenery on my plate. 

The three main ingrdients for layering on the tortillas.

Having finally secured some baked but not burnt tortillas, we spread them with the bean mixture, topped it with the tofu mixture and some salad, and then dolloped some tofu sour cream on top.

All combined, it was an enjoyable, varied and filling meal. Next time I'd definitely make things simpler, which is more in line with how I imagine something simple like toasted tortilla wraps to be (which is essentially what this is). Nonetheless, it was a definite success in the campaign to end same-same cookery. Same-same cookery is marked by the regular appearance of the same type of meal, along with the regular appearance of the same ingredients. This was something entirely different to what we'd usually make (our burrito attempts to date have been fairly pitiful) and actually tasting like something different too.

We're looking forward to trying more recipes from the Candle Cafe cookbook; we just might try some where we don't have to sub quite so many ingredients and skip quite so many steps.

Big Up, Dymocks, or: Veganic Literature Abounds

A small but heart-felt hands-in-the-air to Dymocks in the Australia on Collins Arcade, who are currently stocking 13 - THIRTEEN - vegan cookbooks. And that's not vegetarian, not general vegetables, bot philosophical analyses by Pollan, Schlosser et al. Vegan Cookbooks (and two and a bit shelves of vegetarian ones too). 

I bought* Vegan Yum Yum by Laren Ulm, notwithstanding PPK scragfights about it. I am a big fan of cookbooks with pictures and colour - is there anything that makes you feel less like creating food than a dull page with dull font and dull black ink and no illustrations or even a little swirly decoration? This book is full of photographs of the food on every single page - very helpful when you're trying to work out what your meal should ideally look like -  and easy to read instructions. Having had some success with Vegan Yum Yum pasta and tarts before, and having seen the many posts debvoted to her Hurry Up Alfredo, I'm looking forward to giving this one a whirl. 

*I have acquired three new cookbooks in the last week. But no** new handbags so it's ok.

**Just one very cute, very useful tote for carrying all my extras to work, at a reduced price, with Rs all over it and kanagroos.

Korean Vegetable Pancakes, or: I cause an oil-slick in my stomach

I can't pretend this was a success, in either execution or taste. Excited by the new cookbook that Father Christmas brought me - Asian Vegan Kitchen by Hema Parekh, which is filled with a huge variety of recipes from across Asia and beautiful photographs - we chose the Korean Vegetable Pancakes as our first foray.

Oh sigh. We got all prepped for this one, with ingredients for the batter, the veggies and the kochujang sauce. The batter recipe called, amongst other things, for rice flour and potato starch. Although the rice flour was easily found, after three supermarkets yielded mountains of potato flour but no starch (which the interwebs informs me are quite, quite different), I subbed arrowroot as a replacement starch.

I couldn't find any kochujang sauce or paste, which I suspect is much more common in the US than Australia. A quick Google revealed that the key ingredients were soy sauce and chilli, and in the interests of breaking 'same same cookering', we subbed Sambal Oelek for crushed chillis. Oh, throw caution to the winds!

My first gripe was making the kochujang sauce. It took Buzz as long to prepare the sauce as it took me to saute the veggies, whisk the batter and cook four pancakes, and not because he's slowpokish. The sheer number of ingredients and steps in the process were just too many to make this sauce worthwhile (although it was yummy ... just aggravatingly labour intensive).

The recipe called for you to pour the batter (which required much more water than stated), frizzle it for a minute, and then press some of the previously sauteed veggies into the top before leaving it another minute, flipping it over, and frizzling it again. Here is the pancake with the veggies patted into the top ... but there is no picture of when I flipped it over because the veg fell off! This technique was not particularly effective and very, very annoying.

I made two pancakes following the recipe, which turned out slippery and pale despite a lot of frizzling.

Frustrated, Buzz called for a radical rethink and suggested that we mix the veggies and batter together to make fritters. We gave it a go, and the new mixture did stick together pretty well. However, it did require masses and masses of oil to keep frittering, so let's not pretend that this is in any way a healthy kind of veggie dish. Look at the sludge around the edge of my poor Magic Pan!

The huge quantity of oil we used in the sauces and the pan was enough to make a whale feel sludgy. To add a bit of blandness to fatness, the batter itself was as blah as beige can be, despite the addition of my lovingly toasted sesame seeds. I ate these pancakey-fritters with a growing sense that I was heavily moisturised and had slapped on a full tube of lip gloss as the oil started seeping out of my pores. I am completely uninterested in your feedback that it was I who poured the oil into the pan. Don't care, won't care, will complain.

In all, the idea of fritters came out a winner, with Buzz declaring an intention to make some again soon. However, out will go the sesame oil, sesame seeds, sauteed vegetables, floury batter, and the death of a whole field of canola to contribute the amount of oil needed to mix and fry. In will come more vegetables, a soy-flavoured batter, and spray oil. And out with the rocket-science level sauce-making.