Calzones

I love calzones. They seem healthier than pizza & you can add pretty much anything to them & they are tasty & look impressive. On a quiet saturday night recently I made some bolognaise calzones. I made them up as I was going but they featured pasta sauce, tomato paste, mushrooms, garlic, onion, red wine & reconstituted tvp.

I used the same dough recipe as I used in my pizza post, rolled it out into 4 rounds, filled with my bolognaise, topped with some grated cheezly & cooked them on very hot on a pizza stone until brown & served with a salad of rocket, roasted red capsicum & avocado.




A perfect weekend dinner (& lunch the next day!)

Creamy mushroom pasta

I don't think I have had a creamy pasta since I have been vegan & I didn't eat it a whole lot in my pre-gan days but I had some tofutti cream cheese in the fridge & half a kilo of mushrooms so thought I would give it a go. It was really tasty, it would probably be a bit too much to eat a big bowl of it on its own, but it was really nice to have a sereve with some yummy salad.

Creamy mushroom pasta
I made 4 smallish serves with this

6-8 button mushrooms sliced (I also had a jar of aldi cocktail mushrooms so I added maybe 2 tbsp of these as well)
1/2 tub tofutti cream cheese
2 tsp garlic
1/2 onion diced
1 tsp stock powder
olive oil
soy milk
cooked pasta of your choice

• Boil water & put your pasta on to cook & when ready set aside with a little bit of the cooking water
  
• Saute onion in a little bit of olive oil until soft
  
• Add mushrooms & garlic & cook down until soft
• Add cream cheese & stock powder & mix together, season as required
• My pasta wasn't ready so I left my mushrooms in the frying pan on low & when they dried out added a couple of tablespoons of soy milk
• Add the cooked pasta to the sauce with a little bit of the cooking water (like 2 teaspoons) & mix all together

I served this with a salad of rocket, avocado & roasted tomato which I drizzled with a balsamic glaze.

Apologies for the dodgy photo - I was hungry & didn't want to wait for it to cool down!

Weekend lunch - warm soba noodle salad

A couple of months ago I had a meeting at the Como in South Yarra & for my lunch they made me a soba noodle salad. It was so, so delicious & I have tried to recreate it a couple of times but just can't quite get it right. This, however, was really tasty & a great weekend lunch. I didn't measure the ingredients so the measurements are very approximate, I pretty much just keep tasting the dressing as I am going & when stop adding more when it is tasting good.

* Soba noodles (I used those organic ones that have 3 portions in a pack & I used 1.5 portions for the 2 of us)
* Broccoli florets from about 1/2 a broccoli
* 1 carrot sliced
* 1/2 red capsicum sliced
* Handful of baby spinach leaves
* Peanuts

Dressing
* 1 tsp garlic
* 1 tsp ginger
* 4 tbsp soy sauce
* 2 tbsp sweet chilli sauce
* 2 tbsp rice wine vinegar
* 1 tsp sesame oil
* 2 tsp sweet soy sauce

Mix all the dresing ingredients in a large bowl
Boil the noodles according to the directions on the packet (mine took 4 minutes)
Add the carrot the boiling water after 1 minute, then add the broccoli when there is only about a minute to go
Drain vegies & noodles
Add the drained noodles & vegies to the dressing, along with the raw red capsicum & mix thoroughly
Place the baby spinach in the bottom of 2 serving bowls
Top with the noodle mix
Top the noodle mix with chopped peanuts (I also topped with veg seaweed/sesame floss because I had some in the cupboard & it is really yummy)

Knishes

I read this post from "wanting kneading" & was very intrigued. I had never heard of knishes before, but these sounded really good so I decided to give them a go. These were the goods. They were easy to make & I absolutely loved both the dough & the filling. I am going to make this dough again to use for some sort of pie, maybe a creamy "chicken" & corn style.

I followed the recipe to the letter which is unusual for me & I am glad that I did because these were awesome & we happily ate them for lunch for the next two days as well.

Pizza

Everyone loves a pizza night! On weekends I usually cook things which I can take my time with & which is a bit more fun than the usual tofu & roasted vegies that we have during the week. Pizza is a perfect weekend meal for me because I can make everything from scratch & it is kinda junk food.
I made 2 pizzas, one was this one from Yeah that vegan shit & oh my lord was it good!! I would say that it is the best pizza I have ever eaten! I did make my own base & my own pesto though which I think makes a huge difference & I used the cheezley edam "cheese". Sadly my camera died so I have no photos. The second pizza was more traditional & this was the one that the boyfriend preferred. It featured a tomato sauce, mushrooms, olives & tvp meatballs from this recipe. The base I used was this, very easy to make & works really well:

Pizza dough

• 8g sachet dried yeast
• pinch salt
• 1 teaspoon caster sugar
• 2 1/2 cups plain flour
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

1. Make pizza dough Combine 200ml warm water, yeast, salt and sugar in a jug. Stir with a fork. Cover and stand for 5 minutes or until bubbles appear on surface. Sift flour into a large bowl. Add yeast mixture and oil and mix to form a soft dough.
2. Turn dough onto a lightly floured surface. Knead for 5 minutes or until elastic. Cut into quarters. Roll each piece out to an 18cm (diameter) round. Brush edges with water. (Personally I have issues rolling dough into round shapes so mine was more of an abstract rectangle than a round circle)
   

Yum, I love pizza night!

New blog

So I have started this blog because I am slightly obsessed with reading everyone elses. I am a vegan who loves to cook living in Melbourne's Northern suburbs with my lovely vegan boyfriend & our 3 crazy cats.