The other night I made this marinade with some tofu (pressed in a TofuXpress to get more water out).

The recipe for the marinade is:

• 1/3 cup soy sauce
• 1/3 cup maple syrup
• 2 Tablespoons lemon juice
• 1 Tablespoon toasted sesame oil

I marinated the tofu (I used a really firm tofu – which is also really high in protein) and fried it in a really hot skillet (which gave it a lovely colour). It was delicious. I served it with some broccoli (quickly fried with garlic and ginger and a tablespoon or two of the marinade) and some cous cous.

Actually… I think I’ll have to make this again soon. Really simple to do (although pressing the tofu and marinating takes time, but time you can do other things) and really tasty.

I’ve made this wonderful Bourbon Whiskey BBQ Sauce a couple of times now and it’s been great. It’s pretty quick to make up a small batch, and you can immediately use it for whatever you have that requires BBQ sauce.

Below is a photo I took about halfway through reducing it. Unfortunately, I can’t convey the awesome smell and taste.

This started with Michelle Bridges’ Lentil Shepherd’s Pie recipe: http://www.dailylife.com.au/health-and-fitness/dl-nutrition/michelle-bridges-lentil-shepherds-pie-20120704-21g7d.html and ended up with this. I’ve made some modifications, e.g. making it Vegan.

The biggest modification is in the cauliflower topping. Like the original I avoided putting mashed potato on the top. This greatly reduces the calorie content, dose low-GI something and a million other things that people try and sell you in food bar form. Basically: cauliflower is awesome, let’s see what we can do with it.

This should be gluten free too…

This serves about 4 people.

Ingredients for the filling:

• 1/4 cup dried green lentils
• 1/4 cup dried red kidney beans
• 1 whole onion (small, peeled)
• 1 chopped onion
• 1 bay leaf (or 2, depending on size and your addiction to the awesomeness that is bay leaves)
• 1 large carrot, diced (I used a purple carrot, because, well, how awesome looking are they?)
• 1 zucchini, diced
• 1 capsicum, diced
• 1 garlic clove, crushed (I ended up using probably closer to 2.. but I like garlic)
• 400g can diced tomatoes
• 1tbsp oil (olive works, but Canola or similar should work fine too)

Ingredients: topping

The original recipe also used mushrooms and didn’t have the zucchini or capsicum. I didn’t have mushrooms (I’d eaten them all) but I did have zucchini and capsicum, and they’re yummy. So feel free to vary.

Method

You’re going to need a saucepan. Put the dried lentlis and dried kidney beans in it with 2-3 cups of water. Add the whole onion and bay leaf, bring to the boil and simmer for 40+ minutes, until the lentils and kidney beans are tender. When done, if there is an excess of water, drain it. You’ll want to have about 1/4 cup of liquid left in there. Remove the onion and bay leaf from the pot.

Pro tip: sprinkle a small amount of salt on the onion and eat it. Deny that it ever existed and enjoy your mid-cooking snack.

The original recipe used all lentils instead of half with kidney beans. I like red kidney beans. If you don’t use red kidney beans and just use lentils, the simmering time is probably the original 40mins, while it took a bit longer for mine – maybe 50 (it’s easy to tell. attempt to eat one of the kidney beans :)

At the same time, you want to grab the cauliflower and steam it for about 15 minutes. You want it to be very soft, you’re going to be mashing it (so if it’s not done at 15, wait a little longer).

Get a bowl that’s good for mashing and put the cauliflower in it. Add the butter beans (you may want to zap them in a microwave for up to 1 minute to get them warmer and easier to mash). Mash the two together, adding the nutritional yeast and perhaps a small amount of salt. The nutritional yeast will give a cheese-like flavour without, well, being cheese. I added the nutritional yeast a bit gradually and tasted along the way to get it right. You’ll know when you start to get close, as you’ll start getting this kind of creamy cheesey cauliflower taste.

In a large frying pan, add some oil (about 1tbsp is fine) and cook the onion, carrot, zucchini and capsicum until they start to soften, stirring regularly (this could be ~10mins). Add the tomatoes, lentils and kidney beans, season with salt and black pepper to taste. Depending on how much liquid was left in your lentil and kidney bean pot, you may need to add a little. Transfer to an oven proof dish, topping with the cauliflower+butter bean mash.

If you like, sprinkle some bread crumbs (or those gluten free quinoa crumbs that Ogram sells) on the top, and bung it in a 180C oven for anywhere from 15-30 minutes to get things all warm, a bit golden and depending on how hungry you are :)

Plate it all up and you can end up with something like this (cell phone pic, with awful white balance, lighting and generally the worst photo I’ve ever taken):

We really enjoyed this, and if you’re looking for a good sized plate of food that checks in at (i think) around 400calories, there you go.

bacon salt « The Edibility Exam

Quite possibly…. maybe a way to find out what some people seem to be so obsessive about?

Paul notices the “non-dairy Creamer” thing that the US seems to have some kind of if not love affair, hidden addiction to. What’s almost worse than the non-dairy creamer actually containing dairy is that in my experience, sometimes airlines (and others) believe this is somehow Vegan.

Tried a vegan pancake recipe for breakfast (with maple syrup and jam for tapping… and i was wishing i had some soy ice cream around). yum!

The recipe was from Vegan with a Vengeance (a pretty awesome book):

I have purchased exactly one loaf of bread this year. The fact that it’s May is kind of amazing for this…. and it’s not as if I haven’t eaten any bread – I love the stuff. I’ve been making it.

Relatively recently, I bought a bread machine. It’s a breville and was only a couple of hundred bucks. The idea behind this was to still have bread when I was feeling too lazy to do everything by hand (or was time pressed).

I have discovered the following:

The 750g loaf is a bit small, the kneading can end up missing some ingredients in the corners of the bread machine. the 1kg loaf is fine, the 1.25 is freaking huge.

The area of the bread (as in how big a slice is) is much larger than any of the bread tins I use in the oven.

The crust on the side of the loaf is usually nicer than on the top (top isn’t as thick and crunchy).

To avoid using bread improver, instead use the juice of an orange (or I’ve also used about 1/3 cup of fresh orange juice). This gives lovely structure and texture to the bread without adding anything artificial.

Some recipes say add some milk thing, i’ve just ignored it and done fine.

Waking up to fresh bread smell is amazing.

We put on a friends bucks night last weekend, and in the afternoon we did food at a friends place. Sort of a lunch/dinner thing to keep us going with the nights drinking and general revelry. I baked 3 loaves of bread and it went down really well (10 of us finished all 3 off). Got lots of compliments for it too :)

Of course, the majority of bread from everywhere else now just tastes shit (because it is). If you’re going to buy bread – buy it from a *really* good baker. Or, take the hit – buy a bread machine and do it. Cost per loaf for yeast, water and salt is approximately nothing and bakers flour is cheap.

Join the war on bad bread, bake your own today!

Wasn’t feeling like spending a lot of effort on cooking last night, but still wanted something fresh, delicious and quick to prepare. So… I just made a nice, simple stir fry. I here try to reproduce what I did from memory.

Started by heating some oil in a wok, adding a teaspoon or two of mustard seeds. Leave until the mustard seeds start to pop (that gives the oil a nice flavour).

Add a finely chopped onion, a finely chopped chili (this is all the chili i used in this, adds nice flavour, a tiny bit of spice and it’s certainly not too much) and some crushed garlic (I used 2 cloves of some good organic garlic… may want more or less depending on the strength of your garlic).

Basically, you want the onions to start going clear… I also added a tiny amount of turmeric.

I then added some finely chopped capsicum, then some carrots. It’s about now that I added some light soy sauce. Keeps things moist and adds nice flavour.

In a mortar and pestle, I ground up some sesame seeds, cumin and cardamon (not much of each, the aim is to add subtle flavours) and then add to mix. I also added some roughly chopped swiss-brown mushrooms (button mushrooms would work too, I just felt like the swiss-brown as they have a nice flavour). I also added a bit more of the light soy, just to keep things moist.

I also added finely chopped broccoli and at the end snow peas.

Served on rice, delicious.

Was interesting for me as I usually end up using tofu and creating some sort of sauce to go over a stir fry. This was flavoursome (Michael also thought so, ended up coming over for food before we all went out), filling and there’s left overs :)

(I also used my Microwave’s wonderful “Rice” button… I love that. Obviously, put the rice on *FIRST* before you start any prep for the stir fry. Both were ready about the same time.)