Salads

I’ve had salads on my mind lately. We had an extraordinarily cheesy chicory gratin for dinner a few days ago. We made it with a mix of both white and red chicons and cooked it up using this, which cheeses up most things, the vegan way, suprisingly well actually, to be in powder form. And then we topped it with my favourite smoked cheddar Bute Island “sheese” for good measure, hence it became a tad heavy. But enter the humble green salad and as if by magic the meal felt just right.

This particular salad was a very leafy one coming from my hands as usually I’m more of a chunky-salad-person but for this meal it was just perfect. We used frisée lettuce and little bits of wild pink radicchio, seasoning, basil oil and really good balsamic vinegar. I’m on the hunt for some (for me) new interesting ingredients to add to my salads and I just bought some agretti which I am looking forward to try in my next one.

I hope you’ve had a satisfying week so far. I’m off to watch some indulgingly pointless evening television.

So Long, my little darjeelings, see you soon!

 

Christmas Tables

Goodday to y’all. I hope the new year is treating you alright. Some christmas tables and food.

Our kindest of hens, Ada, has been critically ill and has spent the last three days in a veterinary surgery; not fun. But on happier notes, she is now safely home with us again and we are hoping that she will recover soon. If you want to take advantage of some specific flavour sale goodness hop over here. The January Sale has started!

 

Yellow Goodness

Try this Finnish mustard if you want to add some oomph to the christmas table. It has to be said, it’s quite hot and quite sweet, but if you prefer you can make it milder/less sweet by upping the cream a little. This recipe is easy to make and adapted from “Falling Cloudberries” by lovely Greek-Cypriot-Finnish food fairy Tessa Kiros. Here goes:

20g (2tbsp) Hot English Mustard Powder

50g (1/4cup) Sugar

1/2 tsp Salt

125ml (1/2cup) Vegan Pouring Cream

1tbsp Olive Oil

1tbsp Good Vinegar

Juice of half  Lemon

Mix mustard powder, sugar, salt in a bowl, squashing out any lumpy bits with a wooden spoon. Put the mixture in a small saucepan over a low heat with the cream, oil, vinegar, lemon juice and bring to the boil, stirring constantly. Cook for 7-8 mins, stirring often and then remove from the heat once it darkens and thickens a little bit. Presto!

This keeps in the fridge for a few weeks which means it can be made in advance and leave time for other more important things nearer to Christmas. Have a lovely week!

 

Autumnal Appareling

I am currently coveting these His ‘n’ Hers crazy-beautiful vegan shoes from the charming made-to-order shoe company of greenshoes.

And even in my dreams I couldn’t get very much closer to autumnal perfection than this! The mallard (yes, mallard!) skirt can be acquired here from allencompanyinc at etsy, isn’t it just lovely?

Plus this year’s (scarf) knitting fest has begun chez moi. I am no whiz when it comes to knitting but scarves are just so foolproof. Repeat row after row, continue for as long as you want and get something useable at the end of it and you can compose eternal variations all to your own taste. Above: autumn’s first two scarf projects. I’m into stripes right now; brown-turquoise and peppermint-red.

 

Lullaby of a Sweet Tooth

The occurance of the Royal Mail strike makes my packages come in bundles these days. That is; I don’t receive any for a while, then suddenly I get a pile big enough to make it feel a bit like Christmas Day. Today was one of those days and in the pile was this box of truffles from Montezuma’s. It seems my sweet tooth is growing longer along with the days getting shorter so this was a very suitable arrival.

Montezuma’s has a good selection of vegan treats; just type in ‘vegan’ in their search box and you get many a handful of delicious options, such as this truffle collection. The Kirsch Cherries, Moondance pralines and chocolate dipped Orange Slices also look exceptionally intriguing and shall all have to be trialled one of these chilling October days.

Until then this rich, chocolate-y, but not-too-sweet ‘Sunrise’ spicy orange flavoured truffle shall do very fine thank you.

Have a sweet weekend my dears!

 

A Transoceanic Visit

Sorry for being astray for awhile. We’ve had another far-away visit. Johan’s brother and his partner have been staying and a lot of the time has been spent roaming around out of doors, on picnics, shopping tours, bbqs and meeting wildlife such as the above quite worryingly tame squirrel.

One of the leasurely activities we got the time to enjoy was playing ducks and drakes (skimming/skipping stones). It must be the greatest sport in the world, where half of the fun obviously is searching for the perfect stone! I adopted such a peculiar style I now go by my ducks-and-drakes-name when playing; mesdames et mesieurs, meet The Beach Angler!

Later we had a picnic in the park with flat bread from our local Turkish corner shop supreme (I do not know how we managed before it was there) artichoke & olive oil purée, couscous salad with tarragon and crisps and more…

including conjoined twin cherries…

and carrot cake cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and little crystallised rose petal toppings.

The boys played beach ball whilst us girls dosed off on the blanket.

All in all a very refreshing day out.

Good Bye and see you soon again; have a wonderful rest of the weekend!

 

On Sunny Days

This was my breakfast a couple of days back when we had an amazinly summery day.

Later we went down to the allotments accompanied by a picnic:

including ciabatta sandwiches

and litchis

This gentle giant was to become the last of the leeks for the season; except for the ones we’ll leave to flower because I think they’re just so absurdly nice in bloom and we’ll get to look forward to the extra treat of lovely baby leek clusters next winter/spring. I don’t know why not more growers practise this little “perennialising” trick, but I guess I might have other priorities since I’m a bit spoilt for space.

When we went home the ground was covered with these “seed tassels” looking (in my mind) very much like the hand of an eight fingered giant.

They had coloured the whole path was white.

I’m sorry for being so quiet recently. Don’t really know why. Will be back with more soon! xo Bella

 

Super Sticky Toffee Apple Buns

Hello hello; it’s Sticky Toffee Apple Bun time! These are really nice and cinnamony, as a bun should be, but with the added lovely gooeyness of cooked apples.

These buns were inspired by last weekend’s “How to bake” column by Dan Lepard, in the Guardian above (click and zoom for ingredients). We veganised it and made some changes depending on what we happened to have at home at the moment and these were the result:

We used veg margarine instead of butter and skipped the salt, as the margarine already had salt added to it. We used soy milk instead of cow’s milk. We skipped the yoghurt as we hadn’t any at home and added the same amount of extra milk instead. The egg; we just plain skipped. We used a mix of walnuts, almonds and pistachio nuts instead of just walnuts and that actually worked really well. Last, but not least the recipe called for “dessert apples” but we used Bramley apples (cooking apple) and it worked out deliciously. Although it might have made the final bun a bit less sweet than the original, I say I like a bit of  tart bite in my apple-y bun so I think it was just perfect!

Instructions:

Put the flour, cinnamon, sugar (+salt, if using) in a bowl and rub in the margarine. Whisk the yeast into the milk then add to the bowl along with the nuts. Mix eavenly, then leave for 30 mins. Knead on a lightly oiled worktop for 10 seconds, cover and leave for an hour.

Cut the apples into 1cm cubes. Heat the caster sugar in a frying pan with a spoonful of water until it turns into a golden caramel, add the apples and another spoonful of water and cook until the caramel becomed a thick syrup. Drain, cool and save the apple syrup for later.

Roll the dough into a 30cm square, spoon the apple mix on the top and roll up tightly. Cut into nine slices and place three by three in a deep, 30cm square tin lined greased foil. Cover, leave to rise by half (1 1/2 hours) and bake at 200C/400F/gas mark 6 for 30 minutes. Spoon the syrup on top and leave in the tin till warm.

Ah! Really sticky, gooey, lovely, apple-y buns!

 

Birthday

It was J’s birthday yesterday and I made this black and white cake with a bright pink and black inside and this little fella as a cake topper (excuse the blurry photos):

The cake is raspberry liquorice flavoured, which I thought was a nice combination for the event. I used fresh raspberries mixed with sugar for the filling and black dyed vegan buttercream frosting flavoured with ground anise seeds for the topping + some rice whipping cream for good measure. It would have looked a lot better if I had used white buttercream instead of whipping cream I think, but you know how it is; it’s always easy to be clever afterwards! Tonight I’m going to the cinema to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Have a lovely weekend!

 

Easy Peasy Sprout Sauté

Some time back I was revelling in the wonders of brussels sprouts here on the blog and in the heat of the moment I think I might have promised a recipe on these little green delights, so here it is:

Sautéd Brussels Sprouts with almonds, garlic and chilli

I have left this very open, both on ingredients and on how much of each to use so to make it flexible, quick and super easy!

Note: If you like your stir fries less crunchy, add some water.

Ingredients

use as much as you’ld like of these:

• brussels sprouts, halved

• garlic, chopped

• olive oil

• salt

• (+ freshly ground black pepper if you don’t use the chilli)

• (water, optional)

and use one from each group of these:

group 1

• chilli, chopped
• red pepper, chopped
• smoked tofu, cut into thin strips
• smokey bits

group 2

• sesame seeds
• almonds; whole or flaked
• sunflower seeds
• pumpkin seeds

Stir fry all the ingredients until desired texture is acquired. If using the water, leave your nuts out until all the water has dissapeared so not to lose their crunch. Then fry until their toasted. Finito.

Dig In!