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.

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.

Tom Yummo, or: I swish open a packet sauce and put an end to 'same same cookering'

When Lunchering with Lisa as CityWorkers, one of our favourite kitchens is at Chatterbox. Lately we've been gulping down the Tom Yum soup, made with huge chunks of fresh tomato, tofu and very orange indeed.

Chatterbox's Tom Yum

It was with great excitement that I seized this packet of Tom Yum paste at the supermarket, noting with glee that it was approved by the Vegetarian Society and displayed their tick. Further inspection proved it vegan friendly as well, which was miraculous given the ever-present fish sauce, shrimp paste or other fishiness in most Tom Yum sauces. In line with my policy of giving products which choose to present their veg credentials as a selling point, I chucked it in my trolley.


Although I'm generally loathe to resort to pre-packaged meals, which taste even more of plastic than the masses of it that they are covered in, a bit of ready-made sauce is hardly a Lean Cuisine. Having this packet on hand, for all of $1.99, allowed me to make something new very easily that I otherwise wouldn't have even begun. As far as a bit of a helping hand in the kitchen goes, I am choosing to place this sort of pre-prepared package on the same level as readymade pastry: a bloody useful convenience and a boon in the busy kitchen.

I assembled some simple ingredients, wary of my tendency to throw all my favourite ingredients into everything I make, regardless of cuisine, dish or intention. This is known as 'same same cookering' and it pervades my kitchen. To wit, I am quite capable of making tofu scramble, roast veggies, pasta, cous cous and a curry with exactly the same veggies and spices, rendering any difference between them negligible and me highly annoyed and eating the same dinner like Groundhog Day.

I selected some fresh chillis from the plant given to us by our friends Jess and Lachie at our housewarming; fresh tomatoes; fresh coriander; kaffir lime leaves (which I feel really uncomfortable about saying); rice noodles; red capsicum; lime juice (which didn't make it in after all); and field mushrooms. I left out the baby corn and bok choy of the Chatterbox version because they ain't much loved around these here parts (by which I mean my tummy). Next time I'd add some tofu and onion as well, but I'd probably ignore the broccoli and carrot of the Chatterbox version as they don't strike me as very Thai.


Although the sauce packet called for four cups of water for the stock, I used six knowing that I'd be adding rice noodles whereas the packet's recipe did not. This was an excellent amount and didn't dilute the sauce too much at all. I added Vegeta stock and dropped in the tomatoes so that they'd start peeling nicely. The tomatoes are the only vegetable that you actually want cooked; the rest should all be fresh and only a little soft. I let the stock come to a boil and then stirred in the the Tom Yum sauce. Taking it off the heat, I added mushrooms, finely chopped chillis, capsicum slices and some torn up lime leaves. I threw the rice noodles in at the last minute with a handful of chopped fresh coriander, letting them cook for just a couple of minutes. I garnished with some more fresh coriander, fresh chillis and lime leaves. You may discern a red-and-green theme here; I wonder if Tom Yum might replace biscuits and milk (or gin in my house) as the food left out for Father Christmas? Oh, facetiousness.


And here it is. No coconut milk, and less orangey and more browny than the Chatterbox version, but absolutely delicious nonetheless. The packet sauce was extremely well balanced and hugely easy to use. I can't really imagine preparing the sauce from scratch on a lazy Sunday or a frantic Thursday, but I can imagine tearing open the packet and adding a few readily available fresh veggies and noodles to some hot stocky water.


This one will go on regular rotation in our house, although I'll be careful not to remove my contact lenses while I still have chilli on my fingers (hours later, I might add)! It was a quick, easy and enjoyable meal to make, and I'm very pleased that I succeeded in not turning it in to my usual variation-on-a-theme cookering. In fact, there are now two more of these sauces in the pantry, along with a couple of other V-ticked sauces from the range.