Christmas Eats

Christmas lunch is always held at my mum's house & whilst she is fearless with veganising desserts she sometimes gets a bit confused about what vegan main meals to make us so I like to take something along.  It is especially important to make it incredibly delicious so that my omni family realise how delicious vegan eating can be.  After reading a thread on PPK about what people were making for Christmas I read about a Jamie Oliver recipe in the December/January issue of Delicious magazine for Pumpkin & Mushroom Wellington & knew immediately that this was going to be what I brought to lunch.
This recipe incorporates lots of ingredients that I love - pumpkin, mushrooms, chestnuts, sage, pine nuts, lemon, rosemary...  This is not a difficult recipe, but there are a lot of steps so it does take awhile.  I am not going to type out the recipe because it is loooong, but someone has done it here with beautiful photos to boot.  I did really enjoy this, as did my family bit I found the cinnamon flavour a bit overpowering so would reduce that by half if I were to make it again.
I hope everyone has had as wonderful and delicious Christmases as I was lucky enough to.

Vegan MoFo - Mushrooms 3 ways!

Halfway through the alphabet today!  So, in celebration here are three meals that I have made with mushrooms recently - yes, we are do like a mushroom in this house.

Mushroom Tart
I loved the idea of making a mushroom tart & topping it with asparagus but this was disappointing.  You know when you start making a recipe & you know immediately that it is not going to work but you have already committed to it so you decide to keep going anyway?  Well that is what happened here.  I used this recipe & as soon as I started making I realised that the quantities were no way near going to fill a normal size tart so I just added more of all the ingredients in & it just wasn't quite right & the filling was really dry.  The people that I made it for said that they liked it but they were possibly just being polite...

Mushroom Schnitzel
It never occurred to me before to make a mushroom schnitzel but when I read about it on Of the Kitten Kind I thought it was such a brilliant idea.  I used this recipe but mine obviously did not turn out as beautiful & golden as in that picture.  I did like these but I found them a bit boring, I think adding a gravy or turning them into a parma would be a better option.

Mushroom Sandwich
This is something that we eat quite a bit as they are easy & delicious.  This sandwich features tomato chuntney, marinated mushrooms, caramelised onion, tofutti cheese, tomato, baby spinach & avocado.
The mushrooms were enormous so I only needed half in each sandwich & I marinated the mushrooms in a mix of garlic, soy sauce & veg oyster sauce.
These sandwiches were the goods, but normally I prefer to use rolls as the mushrooms make the bread soggy in no time at all.

Vegan MoFo - Dumplings

There is a lot of love for dumplings in my household & we usually just buy the frozen ones, but on the odd occasion I do make them as well.  The one thing that makes dumpling making a whole lot easier is a dumpling press, it seals the edges really well so that your dumplings stay together & you don't get filling leaking out everywhere.

For the filling of my dumplings, I chopped up some button mushrooms, shitake mushrooms, silverbeet & water chestnuts which I cooked off in a frying pan with garlic, ginger, some silken tofu & a splash of veg oyster sauce.  Once it was all cooked through I put a teaspoon of the filling in a dumpling wrapper & pressed - easy!  They were then steamed for around 5-10 minutes until the wrappers were looking translucent.  I drizzled them with a mixture of soy sauce, black vinegar & chilli paste & served these with scallion flatbread which I also made last MoFo.

Good things to do with hommus

I love hommus & often have some in my fridge but get bored of just eating it as a dip or on sandwiches.  So, here are 2 other super tasty ways to eat hommus.

Hommus stuffed mushrooms.
Greg was looking through a recipe book in a book shop & saw a recipe for this, I was skeptical that it would work - I think my reaction was "cooked hommus??  Yuck!!"  But he was very keen so I gave it a go & it is really delicious as well as being dead easy.

• Bake a portabello mushroom for 10 minutes on about 180
• Chop up some semi dried tomatoes & mix into some hommus
• Remove from oven & spread the hommus mix thickly over the inside of the mushroom
• Top with some pine nuts
• Return to the oven for another 10 minutes

Creamy Lemon Pasta
I used this recipe, but didn't measure anything - gotta love a recipe where you can just throw it all together & it works!  I had never thought about putting hommus on pasta before but this was really good & also dead easy.