Black Bean Brownies (grain and processed sugar free)

I found a recipe for black bean brownies on the internet which I really liked, but foolishly did not bookmark it or save a copy, and then forgot where I'd found it, and forgot the recipe as well. So this is my attempt at figuring out a recipe for myself, which avoids most of the things which really mess with my health. These are moist and fudgy (at least if you don't overcook them) and delicious. I slice these about 1 inch square and freeze them, otherwise they would disappear extremely fast.

1 ½ cups cooked black beans
16 dates, soaked overnight and drained
2 eggs
4 tbsp cream
4 tbsp honey (or maple syrup)
3 heaping tbsp hazelnut meal
3 tbsp cocoa
½ tsp vanilla essence (optional)
2 tsp baking powder

Preheat oven to 180C and line a small baking dish with baking paper. Combine in the food processor until smooth. Pour into tray and smooth the top. Bake for 30 minutes, slice then leave in tray to cool for a few minutes before turning out.

This recipe is veganisable if you sub maple syrup for the honey, coconut cream or nut milk for the cream, and 2 tbsp flaxseed meal mixed with 5-6 tbsp warm water and left to gel for a few minutes for the eggs.

Chickpea, Tofu and Walnut Burgers

2 onions, quartered

6 mushrooms

1 tub of firm tofu

1 tbsp paprika

2 cans chickpeas OR 2 ½ cups cooked chickpeas

1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

2 eggs

~1 cup wheatgerm

125g walnut crumbs

In a food processor, roughly chop the onions and mushrooms. Add tofu, paprika, chickpeas, Worcestershire sauce and process. Add the eggs and about half the wheatgerm with the engine running, and process until mixture has come together, but stop before it turns into a smooth paste. Scrape the mixture into a bowl, and stir in the walnut crumbs and enough of the wheatgerm to make the mixture thick but not dry. Cook for about eight minutes each side, or until brown.

I made ours in our two sandwich presses and they were perfect, holding together really well but still moist and flavourful inside. This might be a good one to feed to the kids' friends or family members who are a bit dubious about meatless cooking – with the paprika tinting it pink it looks remarkably like a real meat burger and the mushroom gives it a bit of a meaty texture. Everyone in our house devoured it, including Mr I-Don't-Liiiike-That, who had seconds (hence why the first thing I did after finishing my dinner was to write down this recipe so I can reproduce it!). 

I suspect that this recipe could be made vegan fairly easily, possibly with the addition of some soy flour. It's the tofu which makes the vegetarian versions stick together, since if I make it with just the eggs they fall apart. 

Roast pumpkin with lentils and fetta

~1kg pumpkin, diced and roasted
mixed Puy and green lentils, cooked in stock until almost dry
3 onions, thinly sliced
3 garlic cloves, finely diced
cumin, coriander, cinnamon, paprika
celery
grated carrot and zucchini
bunch of chard
big wodge of home made fetta cheese
pine nuts
olive oil


While the lentils are cooking, saute onions in butter over a low heat until very soft and starting to caramelise. Add garlic and spices, saute celery, grated vegetables and chard. Combine roasted pumpkin and cooked lentils with onion mixture, and add some more stock if it looks too dry. Cook down until mixture comes together. Remove from heat, toss through fetta and pine nuts and a bit of olive oil (or serve separately in small bowls so you don't waste the fetta on ungrateful children!).

Crockpot Baked Beans, refinements

About 500g (dry weight) navy beans, soaked and pre-cooked (for about half an hour), or any combination of cooked legumes (brown lentils and black beans in addition to navy beans is good!)
2 tins of tomatoes
3 tbsp each Worcestershire sauce*, golden syrup or honey, and apple cider vinegar
2 very large onions, finely diced
handful of diced bacon (use more if you have it, or leave it out)
3 heaping teaspoons (none of these anaemic measuring spoons, just splodge it in) of wholegrain mustard
1 tbsp paprika
water

I used to saute the onions and bacon, but now I can't be arsed, especially since I'm usually putting this in the crockpot at 11pm after forgetting about it until bedtime. It doesn't make a noticeable difference, but by all means saute away if you want to. Also, I used to only put in one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, but last time accidentally put in three and it was superb, so that's what I've included.

So, easy-as method: half fill the crockpot with beans or mixed legumes, then add the rest of the ingredients and stir. Add water until about an inch below the top of the crockpot (the top of the ingredients should be about two inches below, otherwise add more beans). Leave on Auto overnight. Provides breakfast for everyone on Sundays, and a couple of people most of the rest of the week.

* If like me you start making this at 11pm and realise you've run out, I've had success replacing the Worcestershire sauce with a mixture of Vegemite, fish sauce and Balsamic vinegar. 

Easy Roast Vegetables and Couscous

An honourable mention must go to today's lunch. Since I'm trying to up our vegetable intake and stop relying so much on bread products, I'm now aiming to cook lunch at least three times a week. Today, I roasted a couple of pans full of sweet potato, potato, carrot, onion and cauliflower, all tossed in olive oil. I served it over couscous made with a knob of butter, and 1/4 tsp each of cumin and coriander just to warm the flavour up a bit, and the leftover pickled red cabbage from the other night. I originally contemplated making gravy, since my family used to do the full sit-down roast beast, gravy and veges every Sunday lunch and I had a hankering for it, but in the end decided to go with half a jar of tomato chutney which nobody liked very much on sandwiches, heated up with a handful of sultanas and a tablespoon or two of water to make it more of a sauce. Oh my, was it good, and beautifully simple to prepare, too - just what I want from a lunch!

Pickled Red Cabbage

Another one of my winter comfort foods. Tonight I served it with sausages and mashed potatoes for a quick meal, but it's delicious with quiche or cottage pie or lots of other vegetarian options.



Pickled Red Cabbage

1 tbsp butter
1 onion, sliced
1/4 smallish red cabbage
1 red apple, diced
2 tsp caster sugar
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

Melt the butter and saute the onion. When it's tender, add the cabbage and saute gently til it starts to soften. Chuck in the apple, then stir through the vinegars and sugar. Cover and simmer gently for about 10-15 minutes, or until the cabbage and apple are tender - but not limp - and the onions and apple have taken on a rich purple colour.

Hunza Pie

Tonight's dinner was so magnificent I have to write down the particular variation on the recipe so I can hopefully recreate it. Hunza Pie is one of my mother's old standbys, and one of my favourite winter comfort foods. I've seen a number of variations using potatoes in the filling or pastry above or below, but my mother's was always a quiche-like combination of brown rice, silverbeet, cheese and eggs in a pastry shell, topped with sliced tomatoes and more grated cheese. Nom.

Today's effort at recreating it achieved an amazing flavour by gently cooking down the shredded silverbeet in melted butter and olive oil, together with onion and garlic, and with a slug of balsamic vinegar added. The pastry was dead easy, done in the food processor and crisp despite not bothering with blind-baking - in fact, if you have a food processor you can do a lot of the prep in it and save washing up. I served the pie with baked potatoes for a perfect winter meal.


Hunza Pie

1c uncooked brown rice
1c wholemeal plain flour
3/4c plain flour
125g butter, chilled and diced
3-4 tbsp cold water
1 bunch silverbeet
3-4 small onions
2-3 cloves garlic, finely diced
~1tbsp butter
~1-2 tsp olive oil
~1-2 tsp balsamic vinegar
~1 tsp oregano
freshly ground black pepper
4 eggs
~1c grated cheese
2 tomatoes, sliced

Cook the rice in two cups of water in a covered saucepan. While it's burbling gently away, put the flours and butter in the food processor and pulse until it looks like breadcrumbs. With motor running, add tablespoons of water down the tube until the pastry comes together. Give it to your daughter so she can roll it into a ball and stash it in the freezer to cool (you can stick it in the fridge, but we don't have one, hence the freezer).

After the pastry has rested a bit, flour a work surface and roll it out to fit a large deep pie dish*. Meanwhile, ask your offspring to rip up the silverbeet and cram it into the food processor. Add a couple of roughly chopped onions, and whizz briefly (don't pulverise it). Melt a hunk o' butter (depending on how nervous you feel about the amount of butter in the pastry) in a big frypan, and add enough olive oil to stop it from burning. Gently fry the garlic for a minute or two, then add the silverbeet and onion and cook til the silverbeet reduces a bit. Slosh in some balsamic vinegar and add the oregano and pepper. When the silverbeet is starting to darken and wilt, add the rice and stir to combine, then quickly toss through half of the cheese and turn into the pastry case. Whizz up the eggs in the food processor and pour over, then top the pie with tomato slices and the rest of the cheese. Cook for around 35-45 minutes.

 * Mine was 25cms across and 4cms deep - if yours is smaller reduce the amount of filling, and you'll have some leftovers from the pastry unless you reserve a third of it for topping the pie, as in the original recipe I adapted this from.

O Dumplings, glorious dumplings!

Time to revive this blog from its hibernation. After our epic holiday and 3000km drive to our new home (during which our camera met an Unfortunate End, so alas this blog will be returning to bland monochrome for the foreseeable future), we've settled in happily over the last week. Part of the process of making a house into a home for me always involves cooking, putting my the skill of my hands and heart into filling the house with familiar scents and energy. I've been experimenting with perfecting a bread recipe, kneaded in the bread machine to spare my RSI but baked in the oven, baking muffins and cakes, and taking advantage of the glorious bounty of fresh fruit and vegetables on every roadside farmstand.

While I might be waking the blog from a hibernation, the weather is definitely encouraging the reverse. Since we arrived in the Huon Valley, the weather has been rainy and autumnal, blessing us with sunshine, fogs and a multitude of rainbows, but over the last two days we've had a real taste of winter's blast on our hilltop. So tonight was definitely a night for a rich, warming winter soup of grains and root vegetables, topped with the glorious fluffy clouds of dumplings.

I love dumplings. They are not, as they are for my Beloved, a childhood comfort food - indeed I don't recall my mother ever making them when I was a kid - but I discovered them a few years ago in Sara Lewis' cookbook, Veggie Food For Kids. Since then, I've made them innumerable times and this particular recipe has never failed me. Tonight, however, I absentmindedly mixed up two recipes I had been reading, and made the dumplings with different proportions and added an egg. The dumplings attained gigantic, saucepan-dominating proportions with the larger quantities, and the addition of the egg seemed to make no particular difference, so I'm giving my usual recipe here instead.


Barley and Lentil Vegetable Soup with Dumplings

Soup
2 onions
2 cloves garlic
2 potatoes, diced (I used Dutch Cream, grown ten minutes up the road from here, and they were superb)
1 carrot, diced
1/2 sweet potato, diced
2 tbsp pearl barley
2 tbsp red lentils
2 tbsp Puy lentils
lots o' stock, or 2tsp stock powder and water
1/2 tsp each cumin and coriander
2 bay leaves
black pepper
1c frozen peas

Saute the onion until tender, add chopped garlic and fry until fragrant. Brown the root vegetables for five minutes or so for deeper flavour. Cover the vegetables generously with water or stock and add stock powder (if using) and other seasonings. Toss in the barley and legumes of your choice (I like the way that the red lentils cook down and thicken the soup and Puy lentils are just divine, but use whatever you have or prefer), bring to the boil, and simmer, covered, until vegetables are almost tender. Add the peas just before you're ready for the dumplings, but make sure the water comes back up to the boil before you add them.

Dumplings
200g plain flour (I use a mix of wholemeal and white, but it works with all wholemeal too)
2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground parmesan or 1/2c grated cheese
50g butter, diced
enough cold water to form a soft dough

In a food processor, whizz the flour, baking powder and cheese to make sure it is evenly mixed, then add the butter and process until it forms coarse crumbs (don't overprocess). Gradually add water and knead gently until it comes together into a sticky dough; try not to handle it too much or the butter melts and the whole thing goes horribly squoogey. Quickly form into a log, and cut into 12 equal pieces. Let your kids practise their ninja playdough rolling skills and make them into rough balls, then drop them into the gently boiling stew, evenly spaced out. Put the lid on and simmer for fifteen minutes or until light and fluffy - don't take the lid off if you can avoid it. They should double in size into gorgeous fluffy pillows of carbolicious goodness. Devour!

Gado Gado

This is another one from The Vegetarian Gourmet. It was kind of a cheat, since I've made it before, but by the time I'd discarded four other cookbooks because I didn't have the ingredients or hadn't left myself enough time, it was this or just flinging something together, and I didn't want to fall in a heap on the second day of my challenge!

Gado Gado is a very useful "bottom of the vege crisper" recipe, since you just pull out any vegetables you've got and whack peanut sauce on them. Mmm, peanut sauce... I added noodles to the suggested list of foods to serve, and cooked up enough hard boiled eggs for everyone to have one (or, in the case of the kids, two). I'll give the recipe for peanut sauce as written, because I actually followed it with only one substitution due to missing ingredients, but just tell you what veges we had instead of giving you the suggested ones. You can use whatever you want, or whatever needs to be cleared out of the fridge before you go shopping.

My nearly-5yo also had enormous fun with this recipe. She peeled veges for me, then cleared the table (because she wanted it to be "pretty" for the photographs) and assembled most of the veges on the platter by herself. She did not, however, eat the peanut sauce, which kind of made it less like gado gado than a big plate of vegies, noodles and eggs, although she didn't seem to mind this.

Vegetable Salad with Peanut Sauce (Gado Gado)



Sauce
oil
2 cloves garlic
1/2 - 1 1/2 tsp chilli powder (I used a bit less than 1/4 because I am a wimp)
1 medium onion, finely diced
225g crunchy peanut butter
1 tbsp brown sugar
1 tbsp rice wine vinegar (because I didn't have any lemon juice)
450mL water

Heat the oil in a saucepan and saute the onion until golden. Add the garlic and chilli and fry until fragrant. Add the peanuts, brown sugar, and rice wine vinegar or lemon juice and stir to combine, then gradually stir in the water. Bring it to the boil, then reduce heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the sauce has thickened but remains thin enough to pour. Keep the sauce hot on a very low burner while you finish preparing the vegetables.

Vegetables platter
1 small red and 1 small green capsicum, sliced
about two cups of shredded won bok
1 tin of baby corn, or use fresh
1 medium zucchini, cut into 2 inch long sticks
1/4 cauliflower, cut into florets
1 medium sweet potato, cut into 2 inch long sticks
2 small carrots, cut into 2 inch long sticks
3 cakes of rice vermicelli
hard boiled eggs (optional)

I didn't blanch the capsicum or won bok, although Scott suggests doing so for some vegetables, because I could not be arsed. I steamed the sweet potato and carrots until almost tender, then added the cauliflower for a couple of minutes, then the zucchini for another couple of minutes.



Boil the noodles for a few minutes until cooked, then drain and put in the middle of the platter. Arrange all the vegetables in piles around the edge of the platter. Pour the sauce over the vegetables, or serve in a separate bowl. We gave everybody a hard boiled egg each, although Scott suggests using 1 egg as a garnish. Omit entirely for a fabulous vegan meal!



Verdict

It was bloody marvellous. Two out of two recipes from this book have been roaring successes: I think this book is going on the "keepers" pile!

Vegetable Paella

Recipe from David Scott, The Vegetarian Gourmet. This is another one which has been hanging around in my bookshelf for decades and is rarely used. I think it was originally from my mother as well, come to think of it.

A rice dish jumped out at me tonight, because we all like rice but I'm bored with risotto. I always thought a paella was pretty similar to a risotto anyway, but I've never made one with brown rice before. It might have been a good idea to take the extra cooking time into consideration when choosing a recipe when it was already 7pm! It took over an hour to cook. But that may have been an advantage, because everyone was so hungry by the time it appeared that it was hoovered up with great enthusiasm by everyone, including Ms I Hate Brown Rice, Actually (B) and Miss I Will Never Ever Eat A Tomato [Or A Capsicum Or A Mushroom Or Any Visible Onion] (K).

This would be easy enough to veganise if you just leave out the cheese garnish at the end (although you might want to add a contrasting flavour to serve with it, or up the seasonings, since I suspect it may have been a trifle bland without the cheese).

Here followeth the recipe, with the usual variations noted (because I am constitutionally incapable of following a recipe exactly as written).

Vegetable Paella

Ingredients

Oil (I used the infused oil from a jar of sun dried tomatoes, for extra nom)
2 cloves garlic
2 medium onions, sliced
2 medium green peppers, sliced (I used one green, one red)
1c chopped mushrooms (my addition)
2 medium tomatoes, chopped (I used a punnet of cherry tomatoes, halved)
375g brown rice
850mL water or stock
salt and black pepper to taste (I added 1 tsp each cumin and coriander and a slug of red wine vinegar, because I thought it sounded dreadfully bland)
100g cucumber, peeled and sliced (omitted)
2 sticks celery, chopped (omitted)
100g chopped nuts (I used cashews, slivered almonds and pine nuts)
1 bunch English spinach, washed and shredded (my addition)
1c frozen corn kernels (my addition)
50g olives
175g grated Cheddar cheese

Heat the oil in a heavy frying pan and saute the onions until they start to colour. Add the pepper and mushrooms and fry for a further 2 to 3 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes, rice and spices and cook over a low heat, stirring, for 5 minutes. Pour in the water or stock [I had mine at the boil], season with salt and black pepper, and boil rapidly for five minutes.
Add the cucumber, celery and nuts, reduce the heat to a simmer and cook until the rice is tender and all the liquid is absorbed [add the slug of vinegar at some point in this process]. Stir in spinach and corn towards the end of the cooking time. Serve garnished with grated cheese and olives [we probably used twice as much as specified].