Tag Archives: food

Vegan noodle pie

Posted on November 7, 2008 | 16 comments

vegan-noodle-pie

I dedicate this post to fellow blogger, Meg Wolff, who recovered from cancer thanks to a macrobiotic diet and Donna, a woman who befriended me at a Devon train station, who – it turns out – also cured her cancer after following a macrobiotic diet for ten months.

When Donna first approached me at the brightly-lit station on a dark wintry rainy evening last week, saying: “Hi, I am Donna,” I thought she had mistaken me for someone she knew.

Or maybe we had met…in another dimension?! (I love these stories so bear with me, you rationalists).

Donna asked me: “Are you interested in shamanism?”. “Always” I answered because I love real-life mystery.

To which she replied: “You have good medicine around you.” And I was thrilled.

Donna gave me her card and we are now in email contact – that’s how I know about Donna’s macrobiotic diet, and Axminster’s Awareness Centre, and her parents, the original ‘organic kids’, now 89 and 91. So listen up, you young things, eat your organic greens to get some healthy longevity inside you!

This is all the encouragement I need to eat more organic grains and vegetables, keeping animal-food to a minimum…

Donna and my other dedicatee, Meg Wolff, share many beliefs including the magic of writing things down.

Go visit Meg Wolff’s inspiring blog and I won’t even mind if you don’t come back.

Ah, you are back. OK, so Meg sent a newsletter which included a recipe for vegan lasagna. As a mama, I made lasagna but never considered how to veganise it – until this moment!

So I played around with Meg’s original recipe and here is mine – all ingredients from my local organic shop, the Better Food Company.

I peeled and chopped a big slice of pumpkin, putting the chopped-up pieces gently oiled, in a roasting pan to sizzle away in a medium-hot oven for 40 minutes.

For oil, I used Clearspring organic sunflower seed oil (first cold pressing for a naturally-nutty taste), a new discovery thanks to speaking coach, John Dawson.

While the pumpkin pieces were doing their thing in the oven, I made a vegan white sauce with organic soya milk, sunflower margarine and Dove’s rye flour, adding sliced fennel and mushroom, and tamari sauce, for interest and taste.

Then I drained and mashed 450g of tofu with gently-fried slices of onions and some sprinkling of smoked paprika.

I dunked 50g of gluten-free buckwheat noodles in a pan of boiling water until they softened – about five minutes.

Then I assembled my layers into an oiled-casserole dish, starting with the drained noodles covered with half the fennel and mushroom sauce, followed by the mashed-up tofu and the roasted pumpkin pieces, followed by the rest of the sauce – and baked it for 20 minutes.

I served it with fresh mustard leaves which grow on my balcony in salad pots from Cleeve nursery bought at the Organic Food Festival in Bristol last September – an easy way to have fresh leaves (see pic below)!

It was comfort food-supreme with the baked noodles reminiscent of lokshen pudding from the alter heim.

Happy Obama week!

How To Make Tofu From Scratch

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Posted in eating well on a budget, food, health, organic, recipe, recipe idea, restaurant, vegan

Tagged Better Food supermarket, Environment, food, Macrobiotic diet, organic, organic food, Soy milk, Soy sauce, Sunflower oil

Beetroot and lentils supreme

Posted on April 4, 2008 | Leave a comment

dark beetroot and lentils topped with yogurt on a bed of cooked millet

I peeled two beetroots from Marshford. After cutting the slithery vivid purple ones (careful not to stain my clothes) into chunks, I added them to a pan of green lentils, just covered with water. I’d soaked the dried green lentils for a couple of hours beforehand but for speed, use a can. Or red split lentils which don’t need soaking.

Within 40 minutes of simmering, the lentils and beetroot were tender. I added a teaspoon of salt for flavouring (I love salt. It makes what is bland tasty. But I must be careful not to be cavalier because over-salty is horrid not to mention unhealthy.).

To make this dish go further, I simmered some organic millet for 30 minutes in twice its volume of water. What a fine grain millet is! Gluten-free and nutrient-filled. Try it sometimes instead of rice to vary the minerals in your diet. Here are some more cooking instructions.

Then we topped the dark beetroot/lentil mixture with Greek yogurt. I also added capers because I love the vinegar they reside in.

For its photo-shoot, I placed the bowl on a book (picked up secondhand in an Oxfam shop) by one of my top-favourite cartoonists, Posy Simmonds.

How appropriate the book had fallen open at jealousy! (An emotion to which I confess I am prone.)

Scallops for the faint-hearted

Posted on February 22, 2008 | 1 comment

Scallops are easy to cook. I bought a dozen for ten pounds at the Hand Picked Shellfish stall at Bristol Farmers’ Market. They take minutes to cook in a frying pan with olive oil and tiny slices of fresh chilli. You only need a couple per person to add utter luxury to a dish (four if you are feeling flush) and I added fried mushrooms for further economy.

I served the scallops with boiled potatoes topped with a dollop of taramasalata from the Radford Mill farm shop on Picton street. Plus chard and purple carrots. Yes, purple. Apparently this was a carrot’s original colour but when the protestant William of Orange nabbed the British throne in 1698, carrots were bred orange in celebration. Crikey, I only discovered that on Wednesday – a real food lover never stops learning.

Talking about learning, three-year-old Mackensie fried his own mushroom and scallops.

It is never too early to get up close and physical with cooking. As my mother (the real food lover empress) says: “Food is the best education you can give a child.” It’s a guaranteed life skill. Once you know how to choose raw ingredients and cook them, you can eat well for less.

Mackensie’s mama is a faint-hearted fish eater who hates bones. This was her first taste of scallops and they went down well. “They’ve got the texture of lychees,” she said. “And they are so easy to eat.”

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Posted in food, recipe idea

Tagged food, recipe, scallops

What’s in your cupboard?

Posted on February 8, 2008 | Leave a comment

Today I decided to explore the forgotten corners of the kitchen cupboard.

That’s where I found the dried peas. Cinderellas of the store cupboard, they scrub up well when you take them to the ball. Feeling like a fairy godmother, I whisked them away from their dreary existence.

I rattled them into a pan, then added water and a peeled whole onion pierced with a few dried cloves. (Respect and credit to Rose Elliot’s The Bean Book).

That in itself (with salt and black pepper to taste) will make a fine pea soup in twenty minutes.

But I was an experimental mood so I continued my expedition in the Land of Cupboard.

Peering into unlabelled jars, I unearthed more treasures. Into the soup went a palmful of buckwheat, the same of puy lentils and (I thought this rather masterful) ground almonds.

The result was a lovable, luxurious yet light and comforting soup.

What’s in your cupboard?

Is GM safe?

Posted on January 21, 2008 | 2 comments

The simple answer is: we don’t know.

A recent review of the scientific literature concerning potential health risks of GM plants published in Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition has found that published toxicological studies are very scarce, making it very difficult for anyone to claim GM foods are toxicologically safe.

Do you know anyone who actually wants to eat GM?

“Waiter, I am very disappointed – there is no GM food on the menu.”

What about the starving people of the world? Surely they would be grateful for GM food?

But it’s not really cricket to try out experimental foods on the poor, is it? Especially when GM could contaminate other crops and tie impoverished farmers into a cycle of paying for expensive pesticides (which go with the GM crop).

No GM foods are currently grown to alleviate world hunger. It’s a PR ploy to win us over.

Don’t be fooled!

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Posted in food

Tagged food, genetically modified, organic

I hate tomatoes

Posted on January 21, 2008 | 4 comments

Today is the most depressing day of the year. A perfect time for a rant. Well, a mini-rant.

Have you noticed how many vegetarian dishes contain tomatoes?

These are the very things I can’t eat. I am not alone here. An intolerance of tomatoes (especially raw) is very common.

If you can’t live without tomato products, try Nomato. Sold in the UK, they substitute the dreaded red slimy things with yummy beetroots and carrots.

That reminds me: can anything beat a salad of beet? Grated raw beetroot and carrots (organic of course for extra nutrients and no pesticides) with an olive oil dressing and a sprinkling of roasted sunflower seeds…

That makes me feel more positive already.