Herbivores' Heaven

[I’m having another week off blogging:  here’s Dr HH telling you more about the food he cooked from Minimalist Baker!]

This week I’ll start with the main dishes.  I started out with the relatively simple looking Masala Chickpea Curry.   The recipe looked a bit light so I doubled up on a lot of the ingredients.  It was a good tasty curry, but it was a bit too sweet.  Again, I felt that the maple syrup in the recipe was probably unnecessary with coconut milk already in the dish.  The book calls for the addition of maple syrup to a lot of the savoury dishes.  This curry was one of the first things I made and it made me wary of adding maple syrup to other savoury dishes in the book.  This recipe was rather bizarrely  tagged as “30 minutes or less” even though it calls to simmer the curry for 20 – 30 minutes.  I served the curry with Cauliflower Rice.  This is a great alternative to regular rice and was really easy to make.  I really liked getting some of the slightly bigger chunks of cauliflower that survived the grater.

The Super-Thick Three-Bean Chilli had a lot going on.    Three types of beans, sweet potatoes, courgettes, sweetcorn and there was supposed to be some carrot but the local supermarket was out of loose carrots and I wasn’t going to buy a 1 kg bag.  This made a gigantic pot of chilli with great flavours.  It was perhaps a wee bit mild for my liking but just right for Ms HH.  I will of course grumble about a chilli recipe not including any fresh chilli but it’s probably a good thing if you want to keep things a bit milder.  Served with baked tortillas and avocado, this chilli made for good hearty meals.

The Hearty Cocoa Black Bean Burgers were the first burgers I have ever made.  I remember about 10 years ago I bought a rather exotic ingredient I’d never heard of before: tahini.  I was supposed to use it to make some bean burgers, but the jar remained unopened and the burgers never materialised.  10 years down the line, I know what tahini is now and I actually had a crack at making burgers.  

These were delicious! I decided against adding any maple syrup to this recipe and was slightly worried when I tasted the mix and it was quite bitter.  After baking them I didn’t notice the bitter taste and instead enjoyed a great nutty flavour from the walnuts and the combination of quinoa and black beans made for a hearty burger.  They didn’t hold together as well as I would have liked, maybe I needed to bake them longer or try and make my patty more compact.  The minimalist gimmick irks me again here, the recipe is tagged as “30 minutes or less” but one of the ingredients is cooked quinoa and the time to cook the quinoa is not included in the overall cooking time.  What irritated me even more was that there’s no guide to how much raw quinoa I need to get the desired mass of cooked quinoa.  Having to use other resources to complete the recipe seems to defy the point of having a cookbook.

I made the Easy Vegan BBQ Sauce to go with the burgers, I didn’t have the heart to go looking for organic naturally sweetened ketchup so just used the reduced sugar Heinz that was in the cupboard.  The sauce was fine but it just tasted like a flavoured ketchup rather than BBQ sauce.  

Riding the wave of euphoria after my first burger success, I decided it was time to make another.  The Smoky BBQ Veggie Burgers were made from a mixture of chickpeas and quinoa for all your protein needs.  The quinoa added some really good bite and I topped the burger with bread crumbs before frying for some added crunch.  Again, I struggled with the structural integrity of the burgers but it didn’t detract from the taste.  I served these burgers as sloppy joes using the Super-Thick Three-Bean Chilli

There was a recipe for a Thai Peanut Burger that had caught my eye but then I also saw a recipe for Thai Quinoa Meatballs. They both looked quite similar and I went for the meatballs.  These were fantastic! Little balls of savoury, crunchy, nutty goodness with a good kick of soy.  I just served them with the suggested peanut sauce and it was more of the same flavours, I felt like a different sauce would probably have been better.

Sticking with the Thai theme, next up are the Thai Baked Sweet Potatoes.  Sweet potatoes have been a little tricky to get a hold of in Prague.  Marks and Spencer has been the only place with a regular supply so imagine my joy when I stumbled into our local supermarket and found sweet potatoes.  Not just any old sweet potatoes, but sweet potatoes the size of a small moon! This from a supermarket that is usually chock full of all the veg you don’t want with most of it looking past its best.  The fried chickpeas had some good flavours in them, but the whole dish was lifted by the zingy ginger tahini sauce. It was bursting with great flavour from the soy, lime and of course ginger.  It all tasted very exotic even though it looked a bit beige.

The Spicy Tofu Vegetable Stir-Fry was cooked with a bit of a delay.  I hadn’t quite read the recipe through, so failed to notice that the tofu needed to be marinated for at least 2 hours, whoops.  2 days of marinating later and it was all worth the wait.  The tofu was delicious but due to my chronic lack of patience I didn’t fry it enough, so it wasn’t as crispy as I would have liked.  The tofu marinade also served as the sauce for the stir-fry and it made for a good dish where the tofu was definitely the highlight.

I was interested to see how the Butternut Squash Garlic Mac ’n’ Cheese  would work out. I’d not seen this idea of using squash as the main element of a creamy sauce.  I dived into the recipe in typical Dr HH fashion and was happily blending everything up but it was all too thick.  A closer look at the recipe and I saw that it called for 280g of squash, I had just thrown in all of the squash and when I looked at the sticker it estimated the mass as around 700g.  At this point, I went and did what I do best, freewheeled! I threw in various amounts of extra milk, nooch, salt and pepper until I thought I’d put together something that resembled a sauce and tasted kind of cheesy.  It was a roaring success!  The dish was creamy, hearty and full of flavour.  An excellent bowl of comfort food.

The last dish from the mains section is the Classic Vegan Lasagne.  I do enjoy making a lasagne, despite the fact that it takes forever and generates lots of mess.  There’s something incredibly satisfying about turning out a tray full of delicious layered pasta goodness.  The recipe was pretty easy to follow and it made a good hearty and tasty lasagne, I used the Tomato + Lentil Ragu for the saucy element.  This is another recipe that I feels suffers from the minimalist gimmick.  The suggested recipe for this to just use tomato sauce, that way it can fit into “10 ingredients or less”.  There’s also a suggestion to use the aforementioned ragu but without the lentils.  I like a good hearty lasagne with big vegetable chunks so I find the idea of removing the hearty filling from the sauce utterly baffling.

We’ve arrived at the final section of the book that I used: desserts! I do believe that it has been mentioned in the past that I’m not much of a dessert maker – baking isn’t really something I’ve ever really tried my hand at.  For this book I was willing to fish out some packets of flour and baking trays and get my hands dirty.

First up are the 1-Bowl Jumbo Chocolate Chip Cookies, which actually required the use of two bowls.  There is a disclaimer about this in the book but I wasn’t impressed by the title.  On the plus side I was more impressed with the outcome of my first ever batch of cookies.  They were nice and crispy at the edges and soft in the middle with plenty of chocolate chunks in there.  I did make a slight error and use dark chocolate that had some lactose in it which meant that this batch of cookies was just for me.  I made a second batch with vegan-friendly chocolate and I can happily confirm that they too were delicious.  They were quite different though.  They came out a bit softer and cakier, perhaps it was because I didn’t bake them for as long as the previous batch.  On both occasions I forgot to add a sprinkling of salt on top of the cookies, so I guess I’ll just have to make another batch one day.

Sticking with the cookie theme, next up are the Chocolate-Dunked Peanut Butter Cookies.

I will start with a gripe.  This is listed as a one bowl recipe but for it to be a one bowl recipe you need to clean your bowl half way through once you’re done with the cookie dough and then melt your chocolate in it.  That to me is still a two bowl recipe.  These cookies were easy to make and quite similar to the previous cookies. These would probably work excellently with chocolate chips in them rather than the dipping.  The cookies were excellent, not quite as sweet as the previous ones probably due to some saltiness from the peanut butter. I was a bit concerned after dipping them and not being able to get them off the parchment paper so I popped them in the freezer and they came away fine after that.  

The Peanut Butter Cup Puffed Rice Bars was another of the recipes I had eyed up early on.  The recipe calls for you to try and mash chopped dates with a fork into a mix of melted peanut butter and maple syrup.  Do you know what you get when you try to mash chopped dates with a fork into a mix of melted peanut butter and maple syrup?  You get a mix of melted peanut butter and maple syrup with chunks of dates in there.  I quickly abandoned that idea and took a hand blender to it and this resulted in a glorious thick, sticky, sweet, peanutty, datey caramel.  I almost wanted to stop and just eat it from the bowl.  I settled for just licking the blender clean at the end (don’t worry I kept my tongue away from the blades!).  The bars were great, but I would prefer them with something a bit crunchier in there to provide some bite.  Maybe some more sunflower seeds or some crushed peanuts.

That is the end of my August cooking odyssey.  I enjoyed being able to spend some time in the kitchen this month and really enjoyed using the cookbook.  The recipes were pretty easy to follow and packed with flavour.  In every recipe there were regular prompts to season the food and often guidance was provided as to what effect adding the spices would have on the overall flavour of the dish.  I felt that was much better than the often used “season to taste”.

 My main problem with the book is the minimalist gimmick.  There are recipes where corners are cut or which just include lies.  Too many recipes claim a prep time of mere minutes when you’re actually faced with chopping a mountain of vegetables.  I have heard that is a problem that often comes up in 30 minute cookbooks.  These are ultimately minor grievances and I recommend this book to anybody, as long as you’re prepared to use a few more bowls and spend a bit more time on your cooking.  

(In August I made nothing more taxing in the kitchen than a cup of tea!  Dr HH took over the cooking – and now he is taking over the blog as well.  He put me to shame by cooking so much that we need two posts to cover it all, so the review will continue next week.)

Hello! Dr HH here. Have you missed me? Probably not, as Ms HH keeps the good stuff coming all year round, but this month she returned to work whilst I was still enjoying summer holidays.  This led to me being tasked with the cooking so I’ll be providing the cookbook of the month write up.

Ms HH chose Minimalist Baker’s Everyday Cooking.  The Minimalist Baker started out (and continues) as a blog and has been so wildly successful that a cookbook has come from it.  Each of the recipes fits at least one of the three following criteria: 30 minutes or less, 10 ingredients or less (excuse the terrible grammar here, it is lifted directly from the book) or 1 bowl.  I guess Ms HH figured that the recipes shouldn’t be too taxing for simple old Dr HH.

The book is handily split into sections and I’ll talk you through them all as I go.  Where better to start than breakfast?

When starting with breakfast, who could look further than pancakes?  The Double Chocolate Gluten-Free Waffles Pancakes, to be precise. The recipe is for waffles, but I just used regular plain flour and thinned out the batter a little to made pancakes;  delicious, rich, decadent chocolate pancakes.  WIth cocoa powder and chopped chocolate in the batter, these pancakes were glorious.  They were a bit rich so it may have been a good idea to serve them with some fruit along with syrup.  The recipe called for me to curdle my almond milk before adding it to the batter but I have no idea why.  Answers on a postcard please.

The Vegan Breakfast Burrito is the kind of thing I love, lots of different little elements that can be combined as one sees fit.  There were beans, avocado ‘slaw, delicious little crunchy bits of potato, rice and some more avocado slices for good measure.  The book does suggest throwing some salsa into the mix too as an optional ingredient and I feel the burrito needs it.  On the first day, we had the burritos without salsa and the main flavour coming through was lime from the ‘slaw, there weren’t any really great deep Mexican flavours that I expect from my burrito.  The next day I fried up the remaining beans with some onion, garlic, chilli, tomato and spices and it gave the dish a much needed lift.  I feel this recipe suffers a bit trying to fit the minimalist gimmick, there’s the salsa shortcut rather than cooking the beans well like in Thug Kitchen.

The Savoury Eggless Benedict is essentially a fancy avocado on toast.  The recipe included a slice of fried tomato, but neither of us is particularly keen on big slices of tomato, raw or cooked, so I decided to just leave that out.  I have no idea what Hollandaise sauce is supposed to taste like so I can’t comment on how authentic it was but I can say that this faux sauce (Hollanain’t!) was delicious.  It was thick and creamy.  Tahini is suggested as an optional ingredient, but I think that the sesame flavour coming through was a real highlight of the sauce and would strongly recommend adding it.  

The Mango Coconut Lassi is in as a breakfast, but I decided to freeze them into little ice pops and what a great idea that was.  The pops were lovely and creamy but perhaps would have been better if I’d left some mango chunks in there.  This was a great treat on a hot summer day.

There are also the Cherry Chia Lassi Pops which are in the dessert section but I figured I’d throw them together with the previous recipes.  These weren’t quite as creamy but i did keep some giant cherry chunks in and they were great.

The Almond Butter + Jelly Granola Bars were wonderful sticky, sweet snacks.  I really enjoyed the extra flavour from roasting the oats and nuts rather than putting them in raw.  I used cranberries as my dried fruit of choice because cranberries are the king of dried fruit.

Most of my breakfast efforts went into making granola.  My first attempt at granola was the Homemade Hippie Cereal.  This was one of the first things I made from this book and a toasted mixture of nuts and syrup is meant to be mixed with puffed rice to make a breakfast cereal.  I quickly scanned the recipe and saw a sentence that said it could be served as granola without the puffed rice.  It eventually dawned on me that a bowl of crunchy sweet nuts may not have stretched to too many breakfast portions so I had to do some freewheeling.  I added 3 cups of oats and various quantities of extra sticky ingredients and came out with something reasonably close to granola.  It didn’t stick together too much and tasted a bit too sweet.  The lesson here is that when freewheeling, perfect results are not guaranteed.

There was one granola recipe in the book but now I had a taste for it, so I did a little digging into the blog and found a plethora of granola recipes to choose from.  The Almond Joy Granola was incredible! Admittedly it was slightly more walnut joy as I had just used most of my almonds in the above granola bar recipe.  The mix of coconut and chocolate with a saltiness from almond butter made a true breakfast delight.  I threw in half the chocolate whilst everything was still warm so it melted into the clusters.  I was starting to get the hang of this granola lark.

The Gingerbread Granola had a really Christmassy feel to it.  The combination of molasses, ginger and cinnamon gave this a lovely warmth.  I managed to make giant oat clusters that would be worthy of presenting to the granola gods as breakfast.   The downside of using molasses was that everything was brown from the start so it was a little harder to tell if things were burnt or not.

The Quinoa Granola was made up of really good crunchy nutty clusters.  The quinoa gave a bit of a different texture and I threw in a load of cranberries at the end to add a bit of a different texture to it.  This granola was a bit light on oats and I tend to prefer ones with more oats in them.

The Cinnamon Snails should have been pretty easy to make.  It turns out that even after spending more than 10 years as a practical chemist I still sometimes struggle to follow a recipe.  This recipe from the blog required 1 cup of almond milk but I had it in my head that I needed 2.  I was pretty puzzled when, after adding the required amount of flour, I still had a sticky mess in the bowl.  After checking the recipe again I saw the problem and managed to get back on course, and what a course it was!  These cinnamon snails were a gloriously sticky and sweet breakfast treat.  My error following the recipe may have left me flummoxed and led to an increase in the prep time, but it did also result in double the quantity of snails.

The second section of the book is appetizers + sides. I generally dipped into this section for lunches.  Regular readers know that Ms HH values good soups in a book, so I made sure to test out a few of the recipes.

The Creamy Broccoli + “Cheddar” Soup was thick and flavoursome.  There was lots of nooch in here to give it that savoury cheesy flavour and there was a nice bit of sweetness coming from the butternut squash and maple syrup.  It was a really nice vibrant colour and I didn’t completely blitz it, so there was still some good chunks of broccoli and squash in there.

The Coconut Red Curry Vegetable Soup was full of great flavours and had some good heat from the red curry paste.  The coconut milk provided some nice balance and I opted against adding any maple syrup as I figured the coconut milk would be sweet enough.  The soup was light on vegetables though, I added about 5 times the recommended number of mushrooms and double the carrots, but I still think it could have used more vegetables.  For the second serving I threw in lots of rice noodles and it unsurprisngly made a tasty noodle dish too.

I liked how easy the recipe for the Creamy Tomato + Herb Bisque was. It was pretty much a case of chuck stuff in the pot, blend it and then let it simmer.  No time consuming chopping or frying to be seen.  I was a little wary about throwing coconut milk into my tomato soup but it was fine, adding creaminess without adding a coconutty taste.  I let it simmer for more than an hour (20 minutes was the minimum recommended time) and I ended up with a thick, creamy soup that was packed full of flavour from dill and chilli.  

We had this soup with Garlic “Cheddar” Herb Biscuits and they were incredible!  They were like little savoury scones that were very easy to make and packed full of great savoury flavours from the chives and nooch.

The Simple Curried Carrot + Lentil Soup is actually from the mains section but everybody knows that soups are for lunch.  The recipe recommends using green curry paste but I just used the red curry paste that I already had.  I definitely recommend partially blending the soup as it all seemed a bit watery before that.  It was a really flavoursome soup, most of it comes from the curry so make sure you like your curry paste.

I threw together the Beet, Orange + Walnut Salad with Lemon  Tahini dressing for a lunch one day.  I was mildly concerned when I tried the dressing on it’s own and it seemed a little bitter but it was fine when combined with the sweetness of the beetroot and orange.  There was a bit too much orange in the salad.  The recipe has an equal amount of beetroot and orange and it would probably be better with less orange.  The walnuts added some nice crunch and it was worth making for the visual experience.

I had spied the Garlic Scalloped Potatoes within moments of looking at this cookbook and knew I had to make them.  I was struggling to figure out what to pair them with and was wondering if I could justify just eating a tray of cheesy potatoes for tea.  I ended up serving them with a Linda McCartney pie and some broccoli. The potatoes were fantastic, it was a great creamy sauce that was bursting with cheesy flavour from all the nooch.  I baked them for about an hour and they were a bit underdone for my liking so I’d recommend baking them for longer.

I made this Easy Vegan Fried Rice from the blog and used it as the filling in some stuffed peppers.  I did things a little differently: the book and the blog both suggest baking the tofu without adding any oil or seasoning to it and then tossing it in a marinade.  I didn’t want to take any chances with my tofu not being sufficiently flavoursome so I marinated mine before baking.  Little bits of the marinade charred as the tofu baked and I thought it added great depth to the flavour.

That’s all of the breakfasts and lighter meal – come back next week for some mains and desserts!