Category Archives: Vegan

Endives & Butter Beans

25 Wednesday Dec 2024

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I see that it’s been far too long since I’ve posted anything, it’s not that I haven’t cooked and it’s not that I haven’t photographed some good recipes and scribbled down how I made them, I’ve just not got to the final typing and posting bit. I’m about to make amends.

The Italians have a way of taking a few, usually seasonal, ingredients and preparing them in a quite simple way to make dishes that are so tasty. This is one of those dishes.
The type of endive it uses is the large frilly one also known as frizze, in Spanish Escarole Rizada. The blanched inner parts are fabulous in salads, while the outer greener leaves can be cooked. They have a slight bitterness so need to be balanced with something soft in flavour like butter beans.

For 2 portions

1 small onion – cut in half and sliced thinly

3 garlic cloves – finely chopped

fresh red chilli – finely chopped

1 tablespoon olive oil

outer leaves of a large endive – washed well and drained

300 grams cooked butter beans – they can be tinned or from a jar.

salt and freshly ground black pepper

In a large frying pan heat the olive oil over a low heat.

Add the onions, garlic and chilli. I haven’t given an amount for the chilli as they vary so much in strength, for this you just want to know it’s there without it being strong, so add the chilli slowly if you are unsure.

Cover and cook slowly until the onions are soft.

Cut the endive into bite sized pieces and add to the pan. You might have to do this in two lots and let the first half of the endive cook down before adding the rest.

Cover and braise for five minutes. Stir and continue braising for another five minutes.

Season well and add the beans, mixing them in to the endive. Let cook a couple of minutes for the flavours to infuse.

Serve and enjoy

Tofu & Mushroom Cakes

25 Sunday Feb 2024

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Creamy on the inside and crispy on the outside, with the mushroom enhanced by the addition of seaweed and oriental flavours, you will love these little cakes as much as I do.

Per portion

130 grams firm tofu

50 grams oyster, or other well flavoured, mushrooms

1 sheet dried nori seaweed

1 cm cube, more or less, fresh ginger

1 clove garlic

fresh chilli

2 teaspoons miso soup base

1 heaped teaspoon cornflour plus extra for coating the cakes

oil for shallow frying

To a mini food processor add the roughly chopped ginger, garlic and chilli, then whizz for a few seconds.

Add the roughly chopped mushrooms and break the nori into the mix. Process to combine. Stop the processor and scrape down the mix from the sides if needed.

Break the tofu into the processor and add the cornflour and miso paste. Process until you have an even smooth paste that sticks together.

Remove the mix and divide into four equal amounts. Put some cornflour onto a plate and form each quarter of the mix into a little flat cake, coating it in cornflour as you do so.

Heat oil in a frying pan and add cakes. Cook on a low heat. The cakes are quite delicate so you only want to turn them once, so let the first side get nicely golden brown and crispy before gently turning them over.

I served them with chilli vinegar and some steamed green vegetable dressed with a little sesame oil and seeds.

Enjoy!

A Trio of Roast Vegetables

21 Sunday Jan 2024

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This is another one of my not really a recipe recipes. Plain roast carrots, beetroot roasted with orange slices and Pedro Jimenez glaze and roast tomatoes with spring garlic and a crunchy oatmeal topping.

The carrots bought from the local market were so sweet and full of flavour that I had the idea of roasting them to keep all that flavour in and concentrate it a little. I simply coated them with olive oil before roasting.
To accompany the carrots beetroot baked in tin foil. It was cut into chunks, I added chopped garlic and thin orange slices then drizzled with olive oil and Pedro Jimenez glaze which is a concentrated sherry glaze and similar to balsamic glaze, which can be used instead. They were seasoned with sea salt and plenty of freshly ground black pepper.
Currently I’m in love with roasted tomatoes, so a small tray of them had to be the third dish. I cut plum tomatoes into chunks, added chopped garlic, drizzled with olive oil and seasoned well with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. Then I crushed up one of my oat crackers, this batch had been made with the addition of Panch Poran, a mix of whole spices, cumin, fennel, black mustard, nigella and fenugreek seeds, and sprinkled this on the tomatoes. This worked really well as some of the oats soaked up the juice from the tomatoes and some stayed crispy while the spices added interesting flavours.

The three vegetable dishes went into the oven at the same time at 140C fan/ 165C/325F/ gas mark 3 for 40 minutes.
As is quite often the case, I had about a third of each dish left over, so the following day it made a not so pretty but super tasty tortilla.

Tagliatelle & Cauliflower Sauce

19 Friday Jan 2024

Posted by in Main Courses, Starters, Techniques, Vegan, Vegetable Dishes, Vegetarian

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Some dishes that I eat regularly are so simple that I almost don’t think of them as recipes worth sharing, but these are most likely the easy dishes that you would want to hear about.

I made my own pasta for this dish, which is much easier than you think, have a look at my post, the beginners guide to making fresh pasta. If you are mostly vegan like me you can choose flour that has a high protein content. I used wholemeal Khorasan flour which has 14.5% protein and holds together very well for pasta, spelt flour is very good too. I’ll put at the end of this post the address of a website for buying organic flours and pulses.

Of course using readymade pasta is perfectly fine. This recipe came from friends Gianni and Cinzia who I visited in Matera in the south of Italy and they use dried pasta.

For the sauce this time I used cauliflower as I have beautiful ones ready to eat in my veg patch,

but you can use quite a few other vegetables, broccoli, aubergines, peppers, courgettes all cut into small pieces, fresh peas or broad beans, the basic idea of the recipe remains the same. The vegetable is braised in olive oil with garlic until just cooked but still with a bit of bite, about a third of it is removed and put to one side, the rest has a little stock added and is braised until soft. This is then puréed with a hand blender or mashed to make a sauce, adding seasoning as you go. The removed vegetables are put back in the sauce to warm through and then the sauce is mixed into the pasta.

I love that this sauce is so light and full of flavour. It’s so versatile too as pretty well any vegetable that is in season can be used, herbs and seasoning can be varied. This has got me thinking about the recipe on this blog for Apicius inspired onions, with their flavouring of lovage, honey and herbs, which if two thirds of the onions were puréed would make a great sauce for pasta. I’ll try that next. it’s great that ancient Rome is inspiring today’s cooking!

Almost forgot the address for organic flour, grains and pulses

https://www.rincondelsegura.es/

Spicy Besan Cake

16 Thursday Nov 2023

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Continuing with recipes made with chickpea flour or besan, this super tasty cake is not complicated to make. You fry onions, garlic and ginger and then spices to make an intensely flavoured mix, then add chickpea flour and water to make a thick sauce, the cake is then spooned into an oiled dish and left to cool and set. That’s it! It can be eaten cold as pictured below or rolled in desiccated coconut and toasted in the oven.

Makes 2 good portions

1 onion – sliced

2 cloves of garlic – finely chopped

40 grams fresh ginger – cut into tiny batons

2-3 tablespoons olive oil

2 teaspoons panch poran – this is a mix of whole spice seeds in equal amounts – cumin, onion, fenugreek, fennel, and mustard.

seeds from 10 green cardamoms

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1 fresh green chilli – finely chopped

150 grams chickpea flour

625 ml water

salt and freshly ground black pepper

desiccated coconut and fresh coriander to garnish

Heat the oil in a sauce pan, add the onions, garlic and fresh ginger and cook on a medium heat until soft and slightly golden.

Add the all spices and cook for a further five minutes.

Put in the chickpea flour and slowly mix in the water stirring out any lumps.

Put on a medium heat and stir constantly, the mix will thicken and start to resemble a bechamel.
Keep cooking and stirring until the mixture is very thick and coming away from the sides of the pan.

Let the mixture cool a bit in the pan before turning it out into an oiled square dish. Don’t worry if you haven’t a dish the right size, the mix will be quite solid and can shaped into a bigger dish as below. You want the cake to be about 2 centimetres thick.

Once the cake is cool, it can cut into cubes, garnished with chopped fresh coriander and either enjoyed as it is with a fresh tomato relish, or rolled in desiccated coconut and toasted in the oven.

Farinata

08 Wednesday Nov 2023

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or socca, torta di ceci or cecina is a thin savoury cake made from chickpea flour. This recipe originates in Italy, though due to the high nutritional quality and good flavour of chickpeas and their flour there are many recipes from many counties that use chickpea flour as their main ingredient. I’m going to give you a selection of these recipes in the next few posts.

This is a super easy and simple dish to make. A batter is made with chickpea flour and water, seasoned, poured into a shallow baking dish on top of smoking hot oil, topped with whichever flavouring you fancy and baked for ten minutes.
You can have your flavouring as simple as fresh herbs, rosemary is particularly good, or vegetables that are part cooked. In the photo below I sliced and fried fresh artichokes, the version above is spring onions and garlic with cima di rapa, a type of mustard green that has a lovely sweet and slightly bitter taste.

For 4 servings – cooked in a 36 centimetre diameter shallow pan

150 grams chickpea flour

450 ml water

4 tablespoons olive oil

salt and freshly ground black pepper

prepared topping for the farinata

Preheat the oven to 230c / 210c if a fan oven/ 450f /gas 8

Put the water into a bowl and slowly whisk in the sieved flour. Whisk to eliminate any lumps.

Put in a warm place for an hour or two when it should have bubbles on the surface.

Stir in 2 tablespoons of oil and season with salt and pepper

Put the other 2 tablespoons of oil in the pan and warm the pan in the oven until very hot and nearly smoking.

Take the pan out of the oven and quickly pour in the batter, arrange your topping evenly over the cake and put back in the oven for ten minutes until golden and crispy around the edges.

Serve straight away with a salad or two.

Aubergine & Purslane Salad with Figs & Yoghurt Dressing

30 Sunday Jul 2023

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Here’s the recipe for the final dish of my Turkish lunch. For those of you not familiar with Purslane or Verdolaga as it is called here in Spain and have vegetable gardens, it is a salad plant that is well worth cultivating as it is succulent even in the hottest months. You only have to sow it once and let it go to seed, then it will appear every summer.

In Turkey a particularly large leafed variety has been developed, and its leaves are regularly made into a salad with just goats milk yoghurt and salt. If you can’t get hold of Purslane, then substitute Corn Salad (Canónigos), or Watercress.

For 4 portions

1 large black aubergine

purslane or corn salad

2 large black figs – diced

2 tablespoons finely diced sweet onions

juice of 1/2 lemon

sea salt

2 -3 tablespoons goats yoghurt or vegan yoghurt

Either roast or microwave the aubergine until soft. If you have never cooked an aubergine in the microwave, it is a good fast way to get soft creamy flesh. Prick the aubergine all over with a fork to prevent it bursting while cooking. Cook on a high setting for a couple of minutes, then turn and cook for a couple more minutes. Keep doing this until you can feel that it is soft all the way through.

Leave the aubergine to cool, then cut it into quarters lengthways, remove the flesh discarding the skins and dice the flesh.

Put the flesh in a large salad bowl with the rest of the ingredients and mix well.

Check the seasoning and serve.

Bulgur Wheat Salad

29 Saturday Jul 2023

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As promised the recipe for the bulgur wheat salad that was part of my Turkish lunch.

Makes 4 generous portions

150 grams bulgur wheat

80 ml boiling water

200 grams grated soft tomato flesh

1 tomato – cut into small cubes

1/2 cucumber – peeled and cut into small cubes

2 tablespoons finely chopped spring onions

1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

fresh green chilli – finely chopped – to taste

salt and freshly ground black pepper

sprigs of fresh basil roughly chopped

black olives to garnish

Start to prepare the salad a couple of hours before you plan to eat.

Put the wheat in a large bowl and pour over the boiling water. Stir to mix well and leave to soak for five minutes.

Next grate in the tomato. I had a nice big beef tomato that had gone soft and watery. Cut the tomato in half across its equator and the grate the flesh side on a coarse grater, seeds included, until you are left with just the skin in your hand. Bin the skin.

Mix the tomato into the wheat and leave to steep for 20 minutes.

Add the rest of the ingredients except the olives and basil and mix well.

Leave to steep until you are ready to serve.

Put the salad in your serving dish and decorate with olives and basil. Enjoy 😊

Red Pepper & Walnut Pate

23 Monday Jan 2023

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This rich, spicy pate is popular throughout the Middle East with each country having their own variation of flavourings added to the two main ingredients of walnuts and roasted red peppers. In Turkey it’s name is Acuka, and it’s fiercely picante, in Syria it’s Muhammara. You, of course can make it as mild or spicy as you prefer.

For the red pepper flesh, either roast about 400 grams of thick fleshed peppers in a hot – 180C – oven until the skin is slightly charred and blistering.
The peppers can be roasted over a glowing fire or barbecue as well of course.
Remove to a container with a lid and leave to cool.

Skin the peppers and remove the seeds and stem keeping any juice that flows out of them.
We are aiming for about 300 grams of flesh including any juices.

Alternatively, if you can get hold of a jar of ready roasted and skinned Pimientos de Piquillo, these can be used for making a quick dip.

So you will need –

300 grams red pepper flesh

50 grams walnut pieces

1/4 teaspoon cumin seeds

1/4 teaspoon allspices/ pimienta de Jamaica

1/4 teaspoon black or mixed peppercorns

1 clove garlic

1 small chilli or more to taste

4 tablespoons virgin olive oil

zest of 1 lemon plus 2 tablespoons of its juice

salt

2-3 heaped tablespoons dried breadcrumbs


Toast the walnut pieces in a thick based pan on a low heat, turning them over from time to time until they ara golden colour at the edges and you can smell their rich scent emerging.

Put to one side to cool.

Now put the cumin, allspice and peppercorn seeds in the same pan and toast until their aroma is detectable.

Put them into a small food processor and whizz to a powder.

Add the pepper pulp, garlic, olive oil, a pinch of salt and the lemon juice and zest. Whizz to a fine purée.

Add 2 of the tablespoons of breadcrumbs and pulse to mix in.

Leave for about half an hour for the breadcrumbs to absorb the liquid in the purée and thicken it. If it is not the texture of a spreadable pate and is too liquid add more breadcrumbs.

Add the toasted walnut pieces and pulse to mix in to the pate and be cut up a bit smaller but not too small.

Check seasonings and enjoy

Patatas a lo Pobre – Poor Mans Potatoes – with Broken Eggs – con Huevos Rotos

17 Friday Dec 2021

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This is a very common dish down here in Andalucia, especially at this time of year when, in the old days, the ingredients for it were pretty well all that was in the larder. Potatoes, good olive oil, onions, garlic and green peppers. It can then be fortified with whatever you have, chorizo, fresh sausages, a slice of pork, or my favourite, eggs, or if you are really hungry, all of those.
All sorts of other ingredients can be added to this basic recipe to vary it. Mushrooms work well, red peppers of course, olives for a different flavour.
Per person you want

150 grams more or less of waxy potatoes – scrubbed and cut into thickish slices

1/4 of a large onion – cut into slices

2 cloves of garlic – cut into thin slices

1 green horn shaped pepper – cut into bite sized pieces

extra virgin olive oil

salt and pepper

one or two free range eggs

Traditionally the potatoes are fried with the rest of the ingredients from raw, but as you have to use a generous amount of olive oil to ensure that they don’t stick in the pan, I prefer to par boil them for five to seven minutes until half cooked, then I drain them and put them to one side while I cook the rest of the ingredients. You can do this or go the traditional method, the choice is yours.

Put two tablespoons of oil into a shallow pan, add the onions, garlic and green peppers. Fry on a low heat stirring regularly, until lightly browned at the edges.

Add the potatoes and continue frying and stirring, adding more oil if you think you need to.

Season well, and continue cooking until the potatoes are cooked.

Either poach or fry the eggs.

Serve the potatoes with the eggs on top cutting into the eggs so that the lovely warm yellow yolks dribble into them.

Enjoy!