Veganomicon

I posted something the other day about "Appetite for Reduction" by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. I loved that book so much that it sent me running to the Kindle store for the famous but new-to-me 'Veganomicon'- this lady is rapidly becoming my new hero. Recipes that are detailed in the suggested order of steps (there can be a lot of steps in any scratch cookery, not only vegan!)- but also allow the cook to use common sense and preferences should she or he have any of either. 'If you haven't tried white balsamic vinegar, this recipe is a good place to try it. Otherwise use regular'. Same idea with miso. Isa opens my eyes to the variety of inspiring ingredients out there, without creating recipes that require a pantry full of awkward and strange ingredients found only in the great cities of the world.

I'm the kind of shopper and cook who prefers to have a menu for the fortnight planned. Now more than ever it really helps to know that I have the necessaries on hand to cook evening meals for most of my 2 week pay cycle- I top up fresh stuff during the period, but really our new fridge is so good that properly stored veggies seem fine after a few days. Mostly I sit down with a little notebook and plan say 12 meals, writing them down ia list, on one page, and a shopping list of corresponding ingredients on the other page. Often most if not all of the recipes I plan to start from come from blogs or sites like taste.com.au, lately from some of the great blogs you see in the right hand sidebar. This week, I thimk almost all of my plans came from Veganomicon, and that's just a few of the meals I want to try. Here's my plan... Let's see how closely I stick to it!

• spinach noodle kugel with sweet potato and pear tsimmes
• seitan pot pie (veganomicon contains detailed instructions for homemade seitan! I am super excited because the canned stuff is good, and I want to make my own. Gluten flour was ordered today, hope it comes soon!)
• eggplant/potato moussaka
• pineapple quinoa stirfry
• lasagna (made this tonight... Used isa's recipe for vegan ricotta... Mindblowingly good!
• pumpkin saag
• spaghetti and beanballs
• risotto
• mujadarah
• burgers
• mac and cheeze
• curried kidney beans (again so soon? They were pretty awesome)

Here's a pic of the lasagna I made tonight- seriously delicious and eaten up by all the meat eaters at the table.

Garbage Soup

What a terrible name for a delicious soup- but I can't help thinking of this soup like that! I THINK but am not 100% certain that Tamar Adler, in The Everlasting Meal calls it that- so blame her.

It really is delicious, in spite of the name- as evidenced by the fact that I almost emptied my bowl before I remembered that I wanted to take a photo.So what is in garbage soup? Well- the base of it is made-from-scratch veggie stock. Fill your stock pot with all your week's veggie peels, stems, skins, pods and so on. In my case, I include things that I probably ought to chuck- limp bunches of celery, slightly frostbitten spring onions- edamame pods (the chooks love them so I figured they must be good). Cloves of garlic, half an onion or two. Some slightly wrinkled carrots. Rice wine, soy sauce, some miso. Star anise. ONE clove (I ruin soups with too many cloves! ONE clove suffices!). Ginger. This time, a packet of wonderful, weird Chinese soup base:

I like a pretty decent ratio of veggies to liquid- I JUST cover them. Simmer a while- but not too long or I find things just end up tasting like nothing. Maybe an hour? Then I drain the stock, give the chooks the over-cooked veggies (they love them).Back into the stock go the veggies I want to eat. Not-so-limp-celery, carrot, onion, more star anise etc. A head of cauliflower in tiny pieces that really needs to be eaten NOW. About a cupful of adzuki beans. Dried shiitake mushrooms.

Finally a can of seitan "chicken". This stuff will get its own blog post soon, it's really good! After dinner, about a cup of cooked basmati rice was added to the soup as well. Very tasty, thrifty, healthy and declared excellent even by my meat-lovin' spouse!

Rasedar Rajma (Curried Kidney Beans)

This recipe from the Fatfree Vegan Kitchen blog has been on my weekly "menu"/shopping list for months. It keeps falling off the bottom- I had the ingredients but hadn't cooked it, week in week out. Tonight I couldn't come up with any other idea- and decided to give it a try. WOW. This is a really delicious recipe! I am not even the world's biggest Indian food fan and I really like it and totally wish I had made more.

I served it with some "yogurt" on top- silken tofu blended with some salt, lemon juice and a dash of splenda. My 9 year old daughter who likes curries but is not a fan of tofu ate it happily, so I think it fooled her! As I usually do- in the case of the curry I did use the spices in the recipe- garam masala, fenugreek, coriander root, garlic, tumeric- but substituted caraway seeds for the ajwain seeds and used quite a lot more of all the spices than whatever quantities the recipe suggested. Maybe some of my spices are a bit stale as I think it would have been pretty bland otherwise. Oh- I used canned kidney beans (yay Aldi- feed a family of 5 for 4 bucks? Yes please) 4 cans. Next time I will probably make double as everyone loved it and I only have a tiny bit eft for lunch tomorrow!

Red Velvet Mole with beans

from "Appetite for Reduction" by Isa Chandra Moskowitz

I love love love this cookbook

. I have actually been *reading* it- rather than just flipping through and thinking "yeah looks good". "Appetite for Reduction" pretty much epitomises what I am loving about this new vegan life. The recipes are decadent but pure and light as a feather, some simple, some complicated. Tonight I flagged the 'Black Beans in Red Velvet Mole' recipe as not requiring anything not already present in my pantry- cooked it and ate it! My 18 year old son added some cooked quinoa to our plates when serving it up and it was a great addition, the chewy quinoa a nice contrast to the velvety beans and smooth mole.

Here's a precis of the recipe, as prepared by me (not quite the same as the original as I am incapable of following a recipe!)

Mole:

spray of olive oil

1 large onion, diced

3 cloves garlic, chopped fine

1 star anise thingabob

a big shake of chili flakes

I was out of oregano so added a bit of basil

1 tsp cinnamon (I used more)

1/4 tsp allspice (wtf is 1/4 tsp?? I used more)

1 tsp smoked paprika (yeah I used more)

1 bottle of passata/tomato puree

1 veggie stock cube + 1 cup water

1/4 cup raisins (ummm.... I shook in a bunch, no idea how many)

crumbled up corn chips, a couple handfuls

a big glop of Aldi peanut butter

3 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder (this is what makes mole mole- go ahead!)

a small glop of agave syrup

1 can of black beans

2 cans borlotti beans

saute onion, add garlic and herbs/spices. Saute together.

Add passata/tomatoes; water, sultanas, corn chips, stock cube, peanut butter. Simmer for a while. I added the agave nectar with the other ingredients- the original recipe says to add it right at the end. Didn't seem to matter.

Used my stab blender to mostly puree the mole. Then added

the 3 cans of drained, rinsed beans.

Isa Moskowitz suggests plantains or sweet potato as the side to serve with this! What a genius. Plantains would have been perfect but sliced sweet potato, steamed was also delicious, and hit the mark almost like plantains would have.

DELICIOUS! I love this cookbook!

The Big Roast-Up

When you are vegetarian, and especially vegan, you do seem to spend a fair amount of time on food preparation, compared to the days when meat-and-a-side graced our tables. Part of me enjoys the preparation- it's part of the practice of eating mindfully; and moreover I enjoy cooking- the anticipation of good food lovingly prepared is a pleasure in itself. I may only be planning to have a giant delicious salad for lunch, but preparing something wonderful for dinner is an observance that dulls the edge of any sense of deprivation I might momentarily feel.

There are lots of ways to expedite vegan food preparation... Think in terms of things like a big container of pre-cooked quinoa or even rice in the fridge to be used in salads, soups or what have you as the wish arises. Likewise an idea I got from a wonderful (non-vegan but very pro-wonderfulness) book called 'An Everlasting Meal' by Tamar Adler is to have a big weekly roast-up. When I return from the market with a boot full of fresh stuff, it may include goodies such as bunches of raw beetroot (pendant from their bunches of exquisitely red-veined dark green leaves); ears of sweet corn, pumpkins, kale (finally found it in Australia!), carrots, beans, broccoli, cauliflower, potato and sweet potato- you get the picture. If it's not specifically a salad vegetable, I usually include it in the Big Roast Up. Like Tamar, I roast and then happily eat all kinds of odd greens- beetroot greens are an obvious fave! But also the green part of a cauliflower, and the stems of broccoli are delicious roasted.

With the oven on and hot, I stow trays of the above veggies- things like beetroot in a bit of water covered with foil, pumpkin in large pieces with skin on, half a head of cauli, etc. I keep the oven full and rotate the trays of veggies out as they become cooked, Then the cooked goodies go into the fridge, to be used in recipes, salads, or just eaten during the coming days. I figure that if I cook it fresh, it stands a better chance of being eaten than after several days shrivelling in the fridge. I love having cold cooked pumpkin at the ready, for pizza, salad, rissotto or to have on toast.

Along with always soaking beans, because you will want them tomorrow or the next day, the Roast Up is my favourite efficient-vegan habit.

So why are you Made from Bean?

So why another blog about food? Why another blog about exercise? In short because we are asked, regularly, "what can you eat?".
We feel like we have something to add to the conversation, even though the blogosphere is already well-stocked with really great vegan content (which we will be delighted to introduce, and hope you will join in and do the same.)

I (H) clearly remember being put on the Scarsdale Diet by my mother when I was probably about 8. Boy does that date me!

My weight has crept steadily up since childhood- starvation diets mixed with periods of regain with interest- to a top out at about 115kg. I would lose weight (and I do mean weight- not fat- because I whittled my lean body mass down to nothing, killing my metabolism even more with each cycle).

I did well on Atkins ( I did a very "clean" version, eating mostly unprocessed foods) but hated the meat-heavy way of eating. Palaeo diets made a lot of sense to me, but my inability to enforce any kind of portion control on myself made them healthier, but not a way for me to shed kilos.

In 2011, I made the decision to have weight loss surgery. It was an idea I always hated- I felt that gluttony was my only problem, and that I should be able to deal with it myself. I decided on a vertical sleeve gastrectomy, after doing my research.

Basically it is a permanent, irreversible surgical reduction ithe size of the stomach. There is no other change to digestion or fat metabolism, it simply reduces appetite (or at least capacity) to match my metabolism. Many sleeve patients seem to have very very tiny stomach capacity- mine seems more like what a normal person would have. I can eat a normal small meal- but not two meals at one sitting, and finish everyone's dessert! I can drink as much as I want (a lot) and generally feel like a normal person for the first time in my life. I get hungry, I eat, I get full. Amazing. As I mentioned, my stomach capacity is still enough that I could easily "eat around" it by grazing or eating high calorie, low nutrient density foods. Hence I have a great tool in my smaller stomach, but I have had to make major lifestyle changes too.

The first of these was that I began running. At about 90 kg I suddenly had heaps of energy, so I started the Couch to 5 km programme. Every day I expected to be the one that would injure me or be too hard, but I loved it and haven't looked back. Proud to say that I completed my first half marathon in November 2011.

Running led to reading about running, and I realised that many if not most endurance runners are vegetarian or vegan.

Skimming vegan health and diet books, I stumbled upon "Eat to Live" by Joel Fuhrman and really that was the turning point for me. Evidence based, sensible nutrition that rang true with my own experiences as a lifelong dieter and on again off again vegetarian. The evidence implicating an animal-based diet in carcinogenesis scared me badly and made me force my friend K, a cancer survivor, who has her own weight loss journey to share- to read "Eat to Live" and "the China Study", which caused her

in turn to ditch Jenny Craig and start a new, vegan life! K is also working her way through C25k at the time of writing.

So here we are- two mums in their early (cough) 40s who are learning to run, and learning to be vegan. I reckon our combined weight loss to date is approaching 80 kg or so. Since we are both gigantic (but shrinking) nerds, a blog seemed like the logical next step.

That's my long introduction- I'll let K write her own as she has her own story to tell.