Apple palov, soup and salad

The last night of Uzbek attempts was another palov, this time with apples, another soup, and another salad.

Both the soup and the palov recipes came from this blog (http://uzbekcooking.blogspot.com.au/) although I tweaked them a little to be vegan friendly. The salad I just threw together, using ingredients that seem to repeat a lot in Uzbek recipes.

The soup was half fried cabbage soup. The name got my attention, because I love cabbage, I love fried things, and I had a glut of cabbages in my garden. To make it vegan I left out the chicken, and used vegan chicken stock powder to add the flavour.

Half-fried cabbage soup (please excuse my watch and panadol in the background)

The soup was glorious, and one I will be making again. I especially liked the effect of blending some of the potato with the water, to make the soup thicker without making the whole thing gluggy.

The apple palov was also pretty tasty, although I did have to use chunks of apple rather than whole ones, as I don’t have a corer. I also left the meat out, of course.

This was a tasty rice dish, and I enjoyed the apples. Mine got a little too cooked though, because I was reveling in the fabulous anti-stick qualities of my expensive new hard-anodised pan, and it turned out a bit like a cake.

Palov cake

The salad was your basic cabbage and carrot affair, with a little parsley, salt, pepper, oil and vinegar thrown in for good measure.

Cabbage and Carrot Salad

So, that’s it for my foray into the cuisine of Uzbekistan. It was tasty, and I always like the comfort-food element of cooked rice dishes. I was surprised to find a cuisine so dominated by carrots and radishes, but I think it worked out, and I’m sure our eyesight is better already!

The Super-Late Christmas Post

Okay okay, its way past time for Christmas posts now, but I never wrote mine and now I am sitting in Abu Dhabi airport with many hours to kill (13 down, 10 to go) so now is the time.

Oddly, being away from home made celebrating feel more important than usual, so I tried to pull out all the stops (within my limited means) to make up for the lack of family and decorations and what have you. This meant me trying to make food I’ve never even eaten before, such as a yule log, and a Christmas pudding.

The whole menu eventually included (or was supposed to include):

Red Currant “cider” stuff
Roast Veg
Chickpea gravy
Nut Roast
Apple Sauce
Yule log (fridge cake rolled up into a log shape)
Rum Ball Christmas Tree
Christmas Pudding

Way more than we could actually eat, but good for getting through all the ingredients still in the cupboard, as we had to move out and head to Turkey on the 28th.

Our vegan Christmas Feast

So, how did it go? Well, as usual, a few successes a few ho-hums, and a disaster or two.

The Ho-Hums
My attempt at a red currant-based hot drink was inspired by the mulled wine I saw all over the net. I don’t really drink, Mr doesn’t at all drink, and no non-alcoholic wine was available. I did, however, have way to many fresh red currants (well, I think they were red currants) and no plan for how to use them. I pictured a nice jug of pretty red drink flavoured with cinnamon and cloves. Sadly, what I got was a creepy-looking, mud brown drink with stringy bits, although it did taste pretty good. In the end we totally forgot about the stuff, as I made it the day before, and left it sitting on the bench in a saucepan. It ended up being skulled cold in the hurry to get out the door before we moved out.

The yule log was also a bit ho-hum, but I think I’ll try it again another year. I made a basic fridge cake by crushing plain biscuits, mixing them with cocoa, dried fruit and nuts, and then mixing it with a heated milk and sugar mixture (instead of sweetened condensed milk). I let is half-set in a thin layer on a baking tray, then rolled it up and rolled it in more coca with desiccated coconut. The texture was good, although it was just a little dry, and I though it looked cute, but I over did it on the cocoa and it tasted a little bitter to me. Mr, being a fan of the dark, dark chocolate, loved it.

Vegan Yule Log

The Successes
I made a nut roast out of every nut I could find (walnuts, a few almonds, and some nearly raw peanuts), mixed in with bread crumbs, herbs, salt, pepper, bulgur, cooked onion and garlic, and a little left over millet. I made my usual short crust pastry recipe to wrap it in, and chucked it in the fridge. On Christmas I baked it for about 45 minutes, which as it turns out was a bit long. I’ve never had a bad nut roast, and this was no exception. It will probably never grace my Christmas table again, because I hate using the oven in summer, but it was really yummy. It ended up in a horse-shoe shape, because I made it too long and it didn’t fit in the oven.

Oddly shaped vegan nut roast

The roast vegetables were  fabulous, but I have to thank Mr for that. He is probably the very best roaster of vegetables in the whole world. I don’t know what he does that I don’t, though I expect it has something to do with patience. They were served up with the bad chickpea gravy, and some apple and red currant sauce (the same as this recipe, but with some red currants thrown in).

Roast veg and apple-red currant sauce

The biggest food success was the rum ball tree. In the end I actually made two trees, because we ate the first one the week before Christmas. The second time I left out the marzipan centres (because I couldn’t find marzipan), and I made extra plain rum balls instead of the white ones, as the vegan white chocolate I had brought with me from the UK had run out. There’s just no replacing rum balls, so far as I’m concerned, and they made the best snack food to accompany our present enjoying in the arvo.

On an un-foodie note, I wanted to share our present giving trick this year, because it worked really well. Mr and I are both not-exactly-stuff-oriented, and to add to that we wanted to spend our cash on trade, and can’t add anything extra to our backpacks. We were going to skip presents, but even my hardened atheist heart just can’t do a December 25th without gift-giving, so I hatched a plan. This year, we each spent some time researching each other’s interests, and gave each other a bunch of free-ebooks, cheap or free movie files, and links for websites. It worked out so well. I found a bunch of obscure survivalist and 80′s electronic music stuff for Mr, and he dug out some new feminist blogs and movies for me. Best present ever.

The Disasters
The chickpea gravy was doomed from the start really, seeing as I had no blender or masher or anything. It got worse, too, as I realise when I went to make it that I was out of onions. Foolhardy me gave it a try anyway, and we had a seriously lumpy, slightly dry, chickpeas in gravy dish instead. It looked kind of grey and thin, and  didn’t really end up featuring much on our plates in the end. Too bad, because I’m usually a big big fan.

The really big disaster was the pudding. I have never made a Christmas pudding before, because my family doesn’t really get into it much. Mr’s family always ha a pudding though, so I had a go this time. I scoured the internet, subbed a great number of ingredients, and boiled the thing for the required four hours a few weeks before Christmas. I was really unsure about leaving it for several weeks, but when I unwrapped it on Christmas morning I was happy to see an intact, mould-free, creation. I gloated too soon though. During the second boiling someone (not naming names here) poured the extra boiling water onto the pudding instead of beside the pudding basin. My pudding got totally soaked, and turned into a light brown, great smelling, oily sludge. No pudding for us. Many sad faces.

All in all, it was a fun Christmas day, with much Skyping of family, new movie watching, and lot and lots of food. I had fun planning the whole meal, which never happens to me usually because there are always so many people contributing food in my big and complicated family, and one, fairly obsessive cook managing the food in Mr’s family. I’m looking forward to playing with rum ball shapes more in the future, but I am never, ever making pudding again. All that boiling and worrying! Not for me, Christmas is stressful enough

Happy Hanukkah

With all the buzz about Christmas, and numerous potatoes hanging out in my kitchen, I decided it was probably time for a little Hanukkah cooking.

I made potato latkes, apple sauce and knishes (not typical Hanukkah fare, but they are Jewish and I wanted pastry).

As per usual I used the might power of the Google to find recipes, and as per usual I didn’t follow them at all. You can find what look like fabulous recipes at ChooseVeg, SunnySeedUp, HeyThatTastesGood, and of course in Vegan With A Vengeance, but here’s what I did:

An odd photo of the yummy feast

Vegan Latkes

Serves 2

Latkes generally have eggs, and vegan ones generally have corn flour (Cornstarch) or egg replacer. I have none of these things and I don’t eat eggs, so I made a slightly heavier version, with plain flour.

• 1 large potato, grated
• 1 small onion, chopped fine
• dash salt
• dash pepper
• 3 tbs plain flour
• oil, for frying

1. Put the grated potato and chopped onion in a large bowl with the salt and pepper, and let it set for about 10 minutes. The salt should pull some of the water out of the potato, to help make the batter.
2. Mix together with a spoon, then add the flour, and continue to stir until well combined.
3. In a non-stick pan heat some oil. Add spoonfulls of the latke mixture, and fry until brown on both sides. Continue until all mixture is used up.
4. Serve with apple sauce and, if you have it, vegan sour cream
   

   Latkes!

 

Apple Sauce

Serves 2 or 3

• 1 enormous apple, or two small ones, peeled, cored and diced small
• 1 cup water
• dash each of cinnamon, clove and nutmeg

1. Add all ingredients to a small saucepan and bring to the boil.
2. Return to a simmer and cook until the apple is mushy.
3. You can mash with a fork, masher or blend.
4. Serve with latkes

I actually don’t know if the sauce is supposed to be hot or cold. I served it warm, because I made it while the knishes were in the oven. I apologise for any offence given by my inappropriate apple sauce serving.

Home made apple sauce

 

Vegan Knishes

Makes about 15

Knishes often have potato in the pastry, but I don’t have proper mashing equipment and couldn’t get it fine enough, so I left it out.

• 1 1/2 cup plain flour
• 1/3 cup oil (I used sunflower and olive)
• 2 Tbs to 1/4 cup cold water

• 1 1/2 large potatoes, diced
• 2 tbs olive oil
• 1 leek, finely chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 200g tin kidney beans (my very untraditional addition, because we needed to use them up)
• salt and pepper to taste

1. Pre-heat oven (I only have 3 gas marks, so I’m not sure, but I had it on hot, it felt like about 200 to 220 celsius).
2. In a mixing bowl add the oil and flour and mix with a metal spoon until it resembles crumbs. In a warm climate you need to ensure the bowl and spoon are cold to ensure a flaky pastry. Where I am it’s minus 2, so no worries, I mixed by hand.
3. Add a little cold water and mix through with a metal spoon or knife, until combined. Continue to add water, 1 tbs at a time, until your dough is soft and pliable.
4. Smooth the dough into a ball and set aside.
5. Boil the potatoes until tender. Drain leaving just a little boiling water, and mash with together.
6. In a frying pan heat a little oil and fry the leek and garlic until soft.
7. Add the leek and garlic to the potatoes, along with the drained beans and salt and pepper. Mix together and set aside until cool.
8. On a floured surface, roll out the dough until it is about 3 or 4 mm thick.
9. To fill the pastry, spoon the mixture onto the pastry. You can either spoon it down one length of the pastry, roll and chop (like sausage rolls), or spoon it onto the pastry in sections make small pouches.
10. Place knishes on a baking tray and pop into the oven for about 25 minutes.
11. If you have the goods, feel free to brush them with something to aid in colouring. I didn’t as I only had vanilla soy milk, but they coloured okay anyway.
12. Serve with mustard.
    

    Round and flat vegan knishes

 

Holodnik and apple pie

This is the last of the Belarussian posts – I actually wrote it ages ago, but got so busy, I forgot to post it.

Holodnik

Holodnik is chilled soup, and this one is made of beetroot.

We have had beetroot growing in the garden for months, and this week it was finally time to pull ‘em out and give them a try. I was so exciting picking the biggest one in the garden, puling it out and admiring its pretty purple colour.

I got it inside, washed it, and sliced into it. Alas, it was white inside, with just the occasional  light pink streak. Has anyone else come across this before? Did we plant white beetroot? Did we pick it too early? Do we have crappy soil? Let me know if you know what we did.

In any case, I fished out the last tiny CERES beetroot, and cut them both up. I boiled and vinegared and sugared, and then blended them together. In the end you could hardly tell the difference.

Holodnik, vegan style

Mr loved this soup, being a big fan of both beetroot and cold soup, but I wasn’t so convinced. I found it a little vinegary and sweet for me – sorry beetroot, but we just don’t have any chemistry.

Apple Pie

I found a recipe for a yummy looking apple pie on the blog “Belarussian Food”. Its mre of a slice or a cake, by Australian standards.

The recipe calls for a sour apple, called ????, but I just used the apples we got from CERES (pink lady or sundowner I think), as I wouldn’t have a clue where to find Belarussian sour apples in Melbourne.

It relies pretty heavily on egg, which I would usually replace with tofu, but I wanted to go a little easy on the soy, so I used some flour, spelt milk, egg replacer, and corn flour.

The batter tasted fab, so I covered the apples in it, and popped it in the oven.

It coloured nicely, smelled lovely, and held together well. Actually, it held together a little too well. Clearly I had gone a little overboard with the corn flour and egg replacer, as it had an odd rubbery texture I hadn’t expected.

Vegan Belarussian Apple Pie - tasted better than it looks

It tasted good, if a little bland (probably due to the lack of sour from my apples), and was a nice warm, not too unhealthy end to the meal.

“Romantic” fried chicken dinner and the best apple pie ever

When I think of a romantic dinner, I think candles, wine, maybe some music. Fried chicken and tv doesn’t usually come to mind. But that’s what we went with on Friday night, and it didn’t turn out half bad.

Candles = Romantic (also, flash=bad photo of candles)

I was already making the seitan (yeah, i totally made seitan) when Mr called sounding very tired. We decided to stay in and have a quiet night together, which to be fair, takes hardly any discussion, as it’s what we usually do.

Non-alcoholic, fizzy, sweet "wine"

Mr sounded like he needed a pick-me-up, so I decided to try to make it a little more romantic than usual. Also, I was avoiding doing an assessment. So while the seitan was setting, I went to the shops and bought some “wine”, and got a copy of a “romantic” dvd from the library. Ok, I got carbonated non-alcoholic dark grape beverage and Season 4 of the West Wing, but you get the idea. Oh, and we don’t drink, so don’t own wine glasses, so the “wine” was served in ordinary glasses. Class? We haz it.

For eats, I had already decided Friday would be the time to try a very American meal of fried chicken, vegies and apple pie.

Simmering Seitan

I used the recipe from Vegan YumYum to make the seitan. I didn’t make any tweaks, but the reader should beware that I ended up with enough seitan to fee about 6 people, not just 2.

The recipe says that you have to be careful not to boil it, as it may turn out rubbery. I avoided boiling, but may have had the temperature down to low, as it turned out a little soft. Mr loved it, but I found the texture a bit creepy.

Dinner

We had it with roasted potatoes, greens and white beans, and steamed carrots. We have everything with carrot at the moment, because we just evicted a crop from our garden to make room for beans.

For dessert, I made apple pie. I used this recipe as inspiration, and it turned out wonderfully. Crisp, flaky pastry, no burned edges, yummy not-too-sweet apple filling.

I substituted the 6 tbs each of butter and shortening that the recipe called for with 8 tbs of Nuttelex lite and and 4 tbs of canola oil, which seemed to do the trick. The secret is keeping everything very cold, which isn’t too hard in our chilly kitchen at the moment.

We had it with some packet-mix custard. I could go on and on about it, it was seriously delicious!

A slice of Pie

New-York Pizza and waldorf salad

I love making pizza. I have this pizza base recipe I was given in a high-school hospitality class, and I’ve used it ever since. In an odd piece of coincidence, my recipe for Waldorf Salad is also something I picked up in that same class. Seems like something from high-school stuck after all.

I haven’t been to New York, but I have seen movies, and even I know that New York pizza is thin, large, bid on cheese and sauce, scant on other toppings, and so greasy that is drips oil.

To emulate, I used my general pizza base recipe of 2 tsp dried yeast in some lukewarm water to prove, then added to as much flour as is necessary to make a non-sticky dough, kneaded for 10-15 minutes, rested for 30 then stretched. Just play with the amounts of water and flour for more or less dough. To make one medium sized, medium crust pizza, its about 200 ml water,  to 2 cups flour.

I usually like to make a fluffy, crusty base of medium thickness for my pizza, but this time we went with thin… we were making New York pizza, after all.

The topping was tomato sauce (semi-home made with tomato paste and chopped tomato simmered with water, salt, and oregano), Cheezly, thinly sliced hot dog (the left over one from the night before), and mushrooms.

It went in the oven, and came out as an enormous, not-quite-round-but-otherwise-perfet-looking pizza.

Pizza

We sliced it and tucked in. I tried to fold it like they do on the Ninja Turtles, but either it wasn’t thin enough, or it was over cooked. It did bend/flop when you picked up a slice though, and that was satisfyingly movie-like enough for me.

A slice of melty wonderfulness

We had it with Waldorf salad, which is a simple salad of celery, apple, grapes and walnuts, dressed with mayonnaise, which was created at the Waldorf Hotel, in New York. I left out the grapes and used Plamil Egg Free Mayonnaise instead. It was pretty good, although next time I’ll use less dressing. It was my first taste of vegan mayo, and I have to say, I was impressed- I didn’t even like mayo before I went vegan, but this stuff was pretty good.

Waldorf Salad

A very tasty New York-ish night, it turned out to be.

Rhubarb crumble cake

This is the promised vegan rhubarb crumble cake post.

My partner’s Nanna gave us some rhubarb to use recently. I’ve never cooked with rhubarb before, and in a fit of creativity I decided to make something up, rather than turn to the internet for help.

The result was delicious crumble cake, with a layer of vanilla pear cake, a layer of stewed rhubarb and apples, and a layer of crumble. Yum.

Vegan Apple and Rhubarb Crumble Cake

It turned into a recipe worth sharing, so here it is.

Rhubarb Crumble Cake

Cake layer

• 2 pears, peeled and diced
• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 tsp rose water
• 125g strawberry soy yoghurt
• 2 cups white flour
• 2 tsp baking powder
• soy milk (about 1/3 cup, maybe more)

Stew layer

• 8-10 rhubarb stalks washed and chopped
• 1 apple (I used fuji)
• 1 cup raw sugar
• 1 tsp rosewater
• water to cover
• 4 tbs jam (i used strawberry and apple)

Crumble

• 1/3 cup whole oats
• 1 cup ground oats (ground in a coffee grinder)
• 3/4 cup flour of your choice
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup raw sugar
• 3 tbsp vegan margarine

1. Pre-heat the oven to 160, and line a 28cm square cake tin with baking paper*.
2. Add rhubarb, apple, sugar and just enough water to cover to a small saucepan. Bring to the boil, then simmer, stirring occasionally until the rhubarb falls apart (about 15 minutes).
3. In the meantime prepare the cake batter. in a large bowl, beat oil, essences, sugar and yoghurt with a wooden spoon until thoroughly mixed and homogenous-looking. Add the flour and baking powder, and beat until a thick batter forms. Fold in the diced pear. Add the milk, and stir until smooth. It may require a little more milk (I didn’t measure it), and should end up looking like, well, cake batter. Pourable but not runny.
4. Pour the batter evenly into the cake tin, and back for about 30 minutes, or until a skewer poked in the middle comes out clean.
5. While the cake is baking, remove the rhubarb mixture from heat, and taste. Add enough jam to sweeten to your taste (this was a LOT of jam in my house). Leave to cool.
6. To prepare the crumble, add all fry ingredients to a mixing bowl, and mix thoroughly with hands. Continuing with your hands, rub in the butter until the mixture resembles very fine crumbs.
7. Once the cake is ready, top immediately with the rhubarb mixture, tapping the tin to ensure an even spread. Top with the crumble, and place it back in the oven to bake for 15 minutes.
8. Remove from the oven, and let it settle for at least 20 minutes. Serve warm or cold.

* I want to be more resource friendly, but just can’t part with baking paper, so we now wash it and reuse it. If you use it, give it a try. It just needs a quick wipe down with a warm sponge.

Hope you enjoy it!

It will be a few days before there is any Azeri cooking, but look out for something mid to late next week.