Maple barbecue tempeh sandwiches with garlic cabbage slaw

September 13, 2021

   

We decided to take on a cooking project this week, and there's nothing more project-y than the recipes in Adam Sobel's Street Vegan - every recipe has about 8 components and a million ingredients. We simplified this one by dropping the beer-battered pickles, habanero mayo and marinated kale, and just focussed on the tempeh and the slaw. 

It's still a fair bit of faffing around - a couple of different sauces in the blender, pre-boiling of the tempeh and more spices than you can poke a stick at. Still: it was worth it - the sweet and smoky barbecue sauce is really wonderful, and perfect with the tangy, garlicky slaw. Definitely a sandwich that will go into our regular rotation.

Maple barbecue tempeh sandwiches with garlic cabbage slaw

(slightly adapted from a recipe in Adam Sobel's Street Vegan)

maple barbecue sauce

1 cup maple syrup

2 tablespoons treacle (the original recipe asked for molasses)

1/2 cup tomato paste

4 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

2 teaspoons ground coriander

1 teaspoon onion powder

1 teaspoon garlic powder

1 teaspoon liquid smoke

2 tablespoons tamari

1/2 cup olive oil

tempeh

600g tempeh

4 cups veggie stock

1/2 cup tamari

1/4 cup seeded mustard

1/4 cup olive oil

garlic cabbage slaw

10-15 garlic cloves

5 tablespoons olive oil

2 teaspoons dried oregano

4 tablespoons maple syrup

5 tablespoons mirin

3/4 cup vegan mayonnaise

zest of 2 lemons + juice of 1

4 cups shredded cabbage

2 teaspoons caraway seeds

dill pickles, finely sliced

6 long rolls

Put all the sauce ingredients in a blender and whizz for a good minute until everything is emulsified. You can make the sauce a few days ahead of time if you need, but we did it in one hit.

Cut the two tempeh blocks into thirds and then turn them on the side and halve them - you should have 12 thin rectangles.

In a large frypan, combine the stock, mustard and half the olive oil and lay out the tempeh pieces so they're submerged. Bring to the boil over high heat and then turn the heat down, simmering for 10-15 minutes. Take the tempeh pieces out with a slotted spoon and set aside (you don't use the stock mixture again, but you can store it to use in other recipes).

Now make the slaw - preheat the oven to 180°C. Thoroughly combine the garlic cloves, olive oil and oregano in a small bowl and then pour the mix out onto a baking tray lined with baking paper. Roast for 20 minutes, until the garlic is soft and golden.

Pop the roasted garlic and oil mix into a blender, with the maple syrup, mirin, mayo and lemon juice and blend them until smooth. Combine the cabbage, lemon zest and caraway seeds in a big bowl and then thoroughly mix through the garlic paste - it's easiest with your hands unfortunately.

Now finish off the tempeh - fry the pieces in the rest of the oil over high heat, for a few minutes on each side. Pour over a good splash of the bbq sauce and cook for another minute or two, turning once. 

Build your roll! A slab and a half of tempeh, a few sliced pickles, an extra drizzle of barbecue sauce and as much slaw as you can squeeze in. We got dinner and 3 lunches from this recipe - every one a delight.

Rum-glazed pecan cookies

March 20-21, 2019

If we're going on a weekend away with friends, you'd better believe I'm baking something sweet to take along. I pulled this recipe for rum-glazed pecan cookies out of Street Vegan - it seemed to strike the right balance between fancy and feasible. That is, after I researched the ingredient 'evaporated cane juice'. It seems that this is some wellness-culture nonsense that is easily substituted one-for-one with regular sugar.

With that taken care of, the biscuit dough is an easy oil-based mix with ground flax seeds as an egg substitute. The proportion of pecans to dough is quite high, and since I left my nuts quite chunky, it was challenging to wrap enough dough around them. (I'll try chopping the same quantity of nuts a bit finer next time.) I was pleasantly surprised at how stable the cookies looked after baking and the warm unglazed one I ate straight away was delicious and plenty sweet enough.

The glaze, though, is a whole other thing! A huge quantity of icing sugar bound together with little more than dark rum. It complements the pecans, changes the whole profile of the cookies, and keeps their texture softer for longer. Not that that was a serious concern - these easily disappeared within two nights.

Rum-glazed pecan cookies
(slightly adapted from a recipe in Adam Sobel's Street Vegan)

cookie dough
2/3 cup vegetable oil
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup maple syrup
1 tablespoon finely ground flax seeds
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon coconut extract
2 cups plain flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/4 cup pecans, roughly chopped

rum glaze
1 1/2 cups icing sugar
2 tablespoons dark rum
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt

Preheat an oven to 180°C. Line two baking trays with paper.

In a large bowl, beat together the oil, brown sugar, maple syrup, ground flax seeds, vanilla and coconut extract for a couple of minutes. Sift in the flour, bicarb soda and salt, and slowly beat them in to form a dough. Fold in the pecans.

Roll tablespoons of the dough into balls and space them out on the baking trays. (I left my pecans pretty big and struggled a bit with crumbly dough balls, but they turned out OK!) Bake the cookies for about 14 minutes, until they're browning at the edges. Allow the cookies to cool for 5 minutes on the tray before transferring them to a rack.

Sift the icing sugar into a medium bowl. Add the remaining ingredients and whisk them together to form a runny icing. Spoon the icing over the cookies while they're still on the rack, making peace with the wasted glaze that will drip through the rack. Give the cookies at least 20 minutes for the glaze to set before serving or storing the cookies.

Glazed seitan with smoky onions

April 15-16, 2018

After a gloriously sunny autumn, Melbourne finally turned on some cold weather on the weekend and gave us a good excuse to cook up some wintery comfort food. We dug out Street Vegan and tweaked one of their sandwich recipes into something we could serve with veggie box salad. There are a heap of interesting takes on tempeh and seitan in the book, but it was this bourban-glazed seitan that caught my eye.

It's a fairly involved recipe - you've got to make seitan first (we used our new favourite recipe), marinate it and then slow-cook the onions and fry up the seitan. I was a bit over it by the end, but it was just about worth the effort - the glazed seitan in particular is outstanding, with a sweet and smoky richness that's pretty hard to top. The onions were good, but maybe not good enough to justify the effort involved - a long, low fry-up with a splash of liquid smoke would probably work almost as well. 

The original recipe has a complicated aioli as well, but we just stirred some lime juice and chipotle pepper into some mayo and dressed our salad in it.

Glazed seitan with smoky onions
(slightly adapted from a recipe in Adam Sobel's Street Vegan)

glazed seitan
~2 cups of seitan, cut into strips
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 small brown onion, sliced finely
1/2 teaspoon chilli flakes
1/3 cup raisins
2 tablespoons lemon thyme leaves
1/2 cup brown sugar
200ml bourbon
1/4 cup white miso
3 tablespoons molasses
1/4 cup rice vinegar

smoky onions
1/3 cup Lapsang souchong tea leaves
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup tamari
1 tablespoon dried oregano
2 tablespoons smoked paprika
3 tablespoons Dijon mustard
4 onions, halved

Preheat the oven to 120°C.

Bring 1.5 cups water to the boil in a small saucepan. Add the tea leaves, turn off the heat, and cover the saucepan. Let the tea steep and cool for 20 minutes.

Strain your tea into a blender and add the olive oil, tamari, oregano, paprika and mustard. Blend on high speed for a minute or so, until it's emulsified.

Place the onions cut side down onto a baking tray. Pour the marinade over the onions and bake for an hour or so, until the marinade has basically disappeared. Our oven might not have been hot enough, so the marinade didn't really disappear even after 80 minutes.

Slice the onions into thin strips. If you want them softer and have some marinade left you can do what we did and fry the onion over high heat for another 10 minutes or so, cooking the marinade off completely.

Onto the seitan! Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat. Throw in the sliced onion and stir-fry for five minutes or so until the onions are cooked through. Throw in the chilli flakes, raisins, thyme and brown sugar. Cook, stirring for 2 minutes until the sugar dissolves.

Stir in the bourbon, miso, rice vinegar and two cups of water. Bring to the boil and then turn off the heat, stick a lid on it and leave it to cool for 20 minutes. Once it's cooled off enough, blend the marinade into a thick liquid.

Heat the remaining olive oil over high heat in a cast iron frying pan. Throw in the seitan and fry, stirring frequently, until it browns up nicely. Pour over the marinade and cook it off - it should take another five minutes or so, caremelising nicely. 

Serve the seitan, topped with the onions and with a salad and some tangy mayo alongside.

Chimichurri tempeh empanadas with mint-onion relish

April 29, 2017

We chose these Street Vegan empanadas as a cooking project last weekend. They're certainly a commitment: there's pastry dough to make, a chimichurri spice paste to saute the tempeh filling in, a sweet paprika-spiked glaze, some slightly fiddly assembly and a relish on the side. We made it a team effort.

There were a couple of recipe tweaks along the way, making the most of the sweeteners we had on hand and cooking down the onions a long time to make the relish sweeter still. The pastry has an unusual addition of silken tofu and is a huge bother to roll. I must admit that it baked up awfully well, though - a bit of crunch, a bit of crumble and a lot of toasty comfort. The glaze added some welcome brightness of colour and flavour to the hearty pastries, but there was far too much of it and I've reduced the quantity accordingly in the recipe below.

I feel ambivalent about these empanadas - they're very enjoyable, but their flavour isn't as complex as the range of ingredients that make them up. They take a lot of time and a fair number of dishes. I'll admit, though, that they entitled me to plenty of smugness when I toasted leftovers in the sandwich grill at work on Monday.

Chimichurri tempeh empanadas with mint-onion relish
(slightly adapted from a recipe in Adam Sobel's Street Vegan)

pastry
3 cups plain flour, plus more for dusting
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon chilli flakes
3/4 cup margarine
3 tablespoons pureed silken tofu

relish
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 garlic clove, minced
1 medium sour pickle, finely chopped
1/4 cup mint leaves, coarsely chopped
1 teaspoon barley malt syrup
1/2 teaspoon tamari
1/2 teaspoon apple cider vinegar

filling
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 cup parsley, roughly chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tablespoons pickled jalapenos, minced
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons olive oil
300g packet tempeh, crumbled
1/3 cup carrot, grated

glaze
1 tablespoon fresh coriander, finely chopped
1 1/2 tablespoons soy milk
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 teaspoons agave nectar
pinch of ground turmeric
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika

Begin with the dough. Place the flour, salt, coriander and chilli flakes into a large food processor. Process them for 10-20 seconds to mix the dry ingredients well. Blend in the margarine, then the tofu, then 1/4 cup cold water, until just combined. Turn the mixture onto a sheet of plastic wrap and gather it together into ball. Wrap the dough up and refrigerate it for at least 30 minutes.

Next, prepare the relish. Pour the oil into a frypan over medium heat. Add the onions and saute them until soft and sweet, about 20 minutes. Add the garlic and pickle, sauteing for a couple more minutes. Turn down the heat and stir in the mint, malt syrup, tamari and vinegar. Cook just until the mint has wilted, then turn off the heat completely and transfer the relish the another container.

Time to make the filling. In a spice grinder or blender, briefly blend together the oregano, parsley, garlic, jalapeno, vinegar, pepper, salt and 1/3 cup olive oil. Aim to mix everything together but let the texture of the chimichurri remain a little chunky.

Heat the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil in the frypan previously used for the relish. Add the tempeh and carrots and saute them for about 4 minutes, until the tempeh begins to brown. Pour over the chimichurri mixture and stir it through, cooking for another 3 minutes. Turn off the heat and allow the filling to cool to room temperature.

To make the glaze, whisk together all of the ingredients in a small bowl.

When you're ready to assemble the empanadas, preheat an oven to 180°C. Line a large baking tray with paper.

Lightly flour a clean bench, and use it to roll out the pastry dough to 2-3mm thick. Cut the dough into 10cm-diameter circles using a biscuit cutter, large glass or similar. Spoon 1-2 tablespoons of filling onto each pastry circle. Dribble a bit of water around the perimeter of the dough, and fold it into a semi-circle, crimping the edges together with a fork. Repeat with the remaining pastry circles, and pull together the pastry scraps to roll again and make some more. Transfer the empanadas to the baking tray; poke a few air holes with a fork and brush them generously with the glaze. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until golden brown.

Serve the empanadas with the mint-onion relish on the side.

Strawberry & rhubarb poptarts

November 26-27, 2016

I know it means a lot to many women my age, but I have never taken more than a passing interest in Gilmore Girls. Dean vs Jess vs Logan? Choose self-esteem, Rory. Nevertheless, the new season was a big deal for some of my friends, and it was fun to share their fandom for a night. We went all out on themed viewing snacks - coffee, popcorn, marshmallows, cookie dough and home-delivered pizza. Although the Gilmore girls aren't ones to bake, I preferred making my poptarts over the real thing. 

Street Vegan served me well in the poptart stakes once before, and if anything it did even better this second time around. I chose a strawberry-rhubarb filling instead of chocolate, and doubled down with pink icing. My version has more rhubarb and less strawberries than the cookbook version, which does no harm. I had some moments of concern when I poured in the cornflour thickener and the filling seized up into a dense jelly. Thankfully it relaxed into a more appetising jam after the tarts were baked.

I wasn't deeply impressed with the pastry recipe the first time I made it, but I really liked this second batch. I made sure to bake it more thoroughly and liked this crisper, flakier rendition. My pink glaze is loosely inspired by the mango-lemongrass one in Street Vegan, in that I blended lemongrass into it. But instead of mango, I tipped a little leftover tart filling into the blender to make a tangy pink topping. A few coloured sprinkles and we were ready to party like it was 2006.

Even after the success of my first poptart batch, I didn't imagine that I'd return to them again so quickly. But for this occasion, I'm glad that I did - they hit our theme and my taste buds with equal success.

Strawberry & rhubarb poptarts
(adapted from a recipe in Adam Sobel's Street Vegan)

filling
1 punnet strawberries, chopped
2 stalks rhubarb, chopped into 3cm lengths
1/4 cup agave nectar
2 tablespoons lime juice
2 tablespoons cornflour
2 tablespoons water

pastry
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
2 teaspoons cornflour
1/2 cup water
3 cups plain flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup margarine

icing
tender white middle of 1 lemongrass stalk, chopped
1/2 cup lime juice
generous pinch cardamom
1/2 cup icing sugar
2 tablespoons coloured sprinkles

Place the strawberries and rhubarb into a medium saucepan over medium heat. Saute them, stirring regularly, for a few minutes, until they begin to soften. Add the agave nectar and lime juice and continue to cook, stirring, for a couple more minutes. 

Place the cornflour and water together in a mug and stir them together into a smooth paste. Pour the paste into the fruit filling and stir to combine. Turn off the heat and allow the filling to cool to room temperature (I refrigerated mine overnight).

Place the vinegar, cornflour and water in a medium-large bowl and beat them together with an electric mixer until foamy. On low speed, mix in the flour, salt and margarine until the mixture comes together as a dough. Allow it to rest for at least 15 minutes - I covered my bowl with a lid and refrigerated it for a few hours.

Line 1-2 baking trays with paper and lightly spray them with oil. Preheat an oven to 180°C.

Lightly flour a clean surface and roll out the pastry to 2-5mm thick (I did this in about 3 small batches). Slice the dough into rectangles of the same size - mine were about 6cm x 10cm. Spoon filling into the centre of half of the rectangles, place the other rectangles on top of each filled one, and use a fork to crimp the edges together (see photo above). Set aside 2 tablespoons of the filling for use in the icing.

Place the pastries on the trays and bake them for 20 minutes, until they're a little firm and just starting to go golden. Allow them to cool to room temperature.

Place the reserved fruit filling, lemongrass, lime juice, cardamom and icing sugar into a small food processor or spice grinder. Grind them together into a smooth icing. Spoon the icing over the cooled pastries and scatter over the coloured sprinkles. Allow the icing to set for at least 15 minutes before serving.

Thai barbecue seitan sandwiches

August 20, 2016

We had a pretty quiet weekend lined up, so I decided it was time to get stuck into one of the many intriguing but complicated recipes in Street Vegan, my birthday present from Cindy. The sandwiches section of the book is filled with amazing combos, all of which require a fair amount of effort. After much debate, we settled on these rolls filled with Thai barbecue seitan ribs, pickled onions and smoky, roasted peanuts.

There are a lot of elements to these but they're all relatively simple and standalone, which means you can make them whenever you've got time - you could easily prepare the nuts, onions and sauce well ahead of eating, which would make the actual assembly trivially easy. 

We doubled the ribs component of these to make sure we had leftovers, but even then we wound up with a disproportionate amount of the barbecue sauce - don't be afraid to tweak the quantities a bit to balance things out. 

The end results were spectacular: the ribs themselves were probably a little bit on the soft side (don't be afraid to add even more gluten flour than specified in the recipe below), but that meant they soaked up the sauce very effectively, making for a tangy, smoky sandwich filling. The pickled onions and nuts added more zingy flavour and a bit of crunch - these are some impressive goddamn sandwiches. We had the leftover ribs with the barbecue sauce and some roast veggies, which worked superbly as well.

Thai barbecue seitan sandwiches

(slightly adapted from a recipe in Adam Sobel's Street Vegan)

pickled basil & onions

1/2 cup rice vinegar

1/3 cup apple cider vinegar

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon black mustard seeds

1 tablespoon sugar

3/4 bunch of Thai basil leaves

1 large red onion, sliced

In a small saucepan, combine the vinegars, salt, mustard seeds and sugar and bring the mix to a boil. Stir in the basil and onion. Once the mixture has come back to the boil, cover the saucepan and kill the heat. After 20 minutes or so, transfer the cooled mixture to a sealable container and set aside.

smoked chile-roasted peanuts

1 cup roasted, salted peanuts

1.5 tablespoons agave nectar (or maple syrup)

1.5 tablespoons rice vinegar

1 tablespoon smoked paprika

1/2 teaspoon chilli powder

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

1 tablespoon olive oil

Preheat the oven to 180°C and line an oiled baking tray. In a bowl, thoroughly combine all the ingredients. Spread the seasoned nuts onto the baking tray and roast for 8-10 minutes, until the liquid has dried up.

Thai barbecue sauce

1 cup lime juice

1 cup olive oil

1 stalk lemongrass, stripped and chopped into large chunks

1 tablespoon minced galangal

1/4 bunch of Thai basil leaves

1/2 cup coriander leaves

1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and stemmed

3 tablespoons tamari

2 teaspoons ground coriander

1/2 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

1/2 cup tomato paste

Put the lime juice into a medium saucepan and add in the lemongrass, galangal, Thai basil, jalapeno, cayenne pepper, tamari and the ground and fresh coriander. Bring the mix to the boil and then kill the heat and allow the mixture to cool. Pour the mixture into a blender or food processor, along with the tomato paste and olive oil and blend until smooth.

seitan ribs

500g firm tofu

6 tablespoons tamari

1 onion, chopped

1 celery stalk, chopped

1 carrot, chopped

4 garlic cloves, chopped

1.5 cups gluten flour (our seitan was still very soft, consider adding more)

2 tablespoons smoked paprika

2 teaspoons ground cumin

1 tablespoon Thai red curry paste

2 tablespoons ground coriander

oil for frying

In a food processor, puree the tofu, onion, garlic, carrot and celery together until smooth - this took at least five minutes of blending for me, but it will depend on your equipment I guess.

In a medium bowl, combine the gluten flour with the paprika, cumin, coriander and curry paste. Mix if the blended tofu mix and knead for a minute or two until you get a reasonably dry and firm dough. Add more gluten flour as needed here - my guess is we added about another 1/4 cup.

On a cutting board, roll the dough out into a flat square - about 20cm X 20cm. Slice the square into ~15 thin strips and then cut them in half.

Heat a generous layer of oil in a frying pan until it's hot and then fry the 'ribs' in batches, turning to brown the outsides, for 5-8 minutes per batch. Top up the oil between batches if required. Pop the fried ribs onto some paper towel as you go to soak up the excess oil.

When you're ready to eat, heat the pre-fried ribs in a pan (we just used half of our batch) and, once they've warmed up nicely, pour in about a cup of the barbecue sauce. Stir everything together gently, so that the ribs get coated in the sauce and cook for a few minutes, until it fries off a bit and things aren't too liquidy.

sandwiches

4 long rolls

1 cup vegan mayonnaise

1 tablespoon Sriracha sauce

2 cups mixed green leaves

Build the sandwiches!

Start by combining the mayo and Sriracha to make a slightly spicy spread; smear it on the rolls.

Pop some greens on the rolls and then 5-6 seitan ribs. Sprinkle the pickled onion and some peanuts on top and then serve.

Reese's poptarts

August 6-7, 2016

While I was in the US, missing Michael and cooking stuff together, we agreed that we'd try making the Street Vegan poptarts when I got home. While I would have happily embarked on them any old weekend, we had a nice opportunity to bake them for a 2-year-old's birthday party and share them around.

Michael picked out the peanut butter-chocolate filled version and I set to work a day in advance. The filling is a simple, reliable mix of chocolate ganache swirled with peanut butter. The pastry is made with electric beaters and includes egg replacers, which isn't my usual pace. It seemed too mushy and I upped the flour to make a more sturdy, rollable dough (I've adjusted the quantities accordingly below).

On the morning of the party I set to work assembling and baking the poptarts. The recipe's designed to make 10 hefty tarts but instead I cut at least twice as many two-bite treats. I barely used half of the filling since my mini-tarts had a higher edge-to-middle ratio (again, I've altered the recipe below for a better fit). The edges sealed easily with a fork just so long as I didn't dust too much flour around.

It was difficult to work out when the poptarts were fully baked since they're not supposed to brown. I gave 'em a few extra minutes on a hunch and they were still a little underdone - I'd suggest eating a tester before you progress to the icing stage. Once you spill the glaze over them there's no going back! The original recipe suggests using chocolate glaze all over and white vanilla glaze in decorative stripes, but I thought some coloured sprinkles would be less fiddly and for an audience of under-5s.

Indeed, I overheard one youngster declare these poptarts his favourite food at the party. A couple of adults got a real kick out of them too. I'm not quite convinced that they're better than a more conventional pie or tart, but they were a fun little party project to share with friends.

Reese's poptarts
(slightly adapted from a recipe in Adam Sobel's Street Vegan)

pastry
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
2 teaspoons egg replacer powder
1/2 cup water
3 cups plain flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup margarine

filling
1/2 cup soy milk
1 cup dark chocolate chips
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup peanut butter

glaze
1/2 cup icing sugar
1 tablespoon cocoa
1 tablespoon soy milk
coloured sprinkles

Place the vinegar, egg replacer and water in a medium-large bowl and beat them together with an electric mixer until foamy. On low speed, mix in the flour, salt and margarine until the mixture comes together as a dough. Allow it to rest for at least 15 minutes - I covered my bowl with a lid and refrigerated it overnight.

In a medium bowl, bring the soy milk to the boil. Take it off the heat and stir in the chocolate chips and salt. Keep stirring them together until they form a thick, smooth ganache. Chill the ganache for at least 2 hours, I refrigerated it overnight. When it's time to assemble the poptarts, swirl the peanut butter through the ganache.

Line 1-2 baking trays with paper and lightly spray them with oil. Preheat an oven to 180°C.

Lightly flour a clean surface and roll out the pastry to 2-5mm thick (I did this in about 4 small batches). Slice the dough into rectangles of the same size - mine were about 4cm x 6cm, but the recipe was designed for larger ones. Spoon filling into the centre of half of the rectangles, place the other rectangles on top of each once, and use a fork to crimp the edges together (see photo above).

Place the pastries on the trays and bake them for 15-20 minutes, until they're a little firm. Allow them to cool to room temperature.

Sift together the icing sugar and cocoa in a small-medium bowl. Stir in the soy milk to make a smooth glaze. Spoon the glaze over the centre of the poptarts and decorate them with coloured sprinkles. Allow the glaze to set at room temperature for at least an hour before serving.

Cheesy broccoli beer soup with smoky sunflower chorizo

June 24, 2016

Cindy bought me a copy of the Cinnamon Snail cookbook for my birthday (and whipped up an amazing meal from it while we were in Stockholm), and I wanted to take it for a test drive before she jetted off to the US. Melbourne was turning on typically soup-friendly weather, and this broccoli/beer soup seemed like something I could tackle on a Friday night. 

It came together really easily - you can cook the soup while the 'chorizo' is cooking. The sunflower seed chorizo is worth the effort too, smoky and spicy with a little bit of crunch. This recipe made way more than we needed, but I enjoyed the soup so much that I made a second batch straight afterwards to use it up. The soup itself come out nice and thick thanks to all of the blended up potatoes - it's part soup/part mashed potato, with the nooch adding some cheesiness. Ours didn't come out the kind of vibrant green that was pictured in the book - the broccoli colour was swamped by the beer and tamari, so we got more of a khaki. 

This is a solid winter dish - it'll slot into our regular soup rotation for sure. 

Cheesy broccoli beer soup with smoky sunflower chorizo

(adapted from a recipe in Adam Sobel's Street Vegan)

Sunflower chorizo

1.5 cups sunflower seeds

2 tablespoons tomato paste

2 tablespoons Cajun seasoning (we found some in Woolies)

2 teaspoons ground cumin

2 tablespoons tamari

2 tablespoons maple syrup

1.5 teaspoons liquid smoke

1/4 cup olive oil

2 teaspoons fennel seeds

Soup

3 tablespoons peanut oil

2 shallots, roughly chopped

3 garlic cloves, roughly chopped

1 celery stalk, chopped

2 tablespoons Dijon mustard

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper (don't be heavy-handed with this, the cayenne really packs a punch)

1 tablespoon smoked paprika

2 tablespoons tamari

1 head of broccoli, roughly chopped

1 stubby beer

2 cups Massel 'chicken' stock

3 small potatoes (the recipe specifies Yukon golds, we used Pontiacs I think)

1/2 cup nutritional yeast

The first step is to make the chorizo. 

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees and line a baking tray with baking paper sprayed with oil.

Combine all the ingredients in a food processor and pulse for about a minute - you want to combine everything and break the seeds up a bit, but you don't want it to grind to powder or anything.

Crumble the mixture over the baking tray and bake for 15-20 minutes, until just before it starts to burn - if you've spread the mixture out it should go a bit crispy.

Then, onto the soup.

Heat the oil in a big pot and saute the shallots, garlic and celery for about 4 minutes. 

Throw in the mustard, cayenne, paprika and tamari and stir-fry everything for another couple of minutes. 

Stir in the stock, beer, broccoli, nooch and potatoes. Cover the pot and bring the mix to the boil, cooking until the potato chunks are soft (about 15 minutes for us).

Allow the mix to cool a bit to lower the burn-risk and then blend everything up with an immersion blender. 

Serve, topped with a generous sprinkling of the chorizo.

Mandarin-chocolate ganache tart

May 27, 2016

This year we celebrated Michael's birthday in Stockholm. I had organised a couple of gifts for him while I was in Melbourne and he was already travelling. I hid a proudly home-sewn shirt for him in the lining of my backpack, but didn't want to carry the weight of the cookbook I'd ordered all around Europe. Instead I photographed a few of the recipes that might plausibly be made in a small foreign kitchen, and prepared a couple of them for him as a birthday preview.

The cookbook was Street Vegan, a collection of recipes from the Cinnamon Snail food truck that won Michael's affection and appetite in New York City two years ago. There's a detailed review and recipe trials on Veganopoulous posted late last year, and she kindly let me browse her copy while we were hanging out around then. There's lots of tasty-looking seitan that draws on our whole pantry-full of supplies and an entire doughnut chapter. It'll be fun stuff for weekend cooking projects at home. I wound things back a little in Stockholm, but was still able to draw on some specialty vegan groceries thanks to the nearby goodstore.

For dinner, I embarked on beer-battered Buffalo tofu with roasted garlic ranch dip. Sobel suggests serving it with stewed collard greens and vegan mac'n'cheese. Echoing his way, I used handfuls of kale-based salad mix and a just-add-soymilk packet of vegan mac'n'cheese. Add a couple of beers from the Systembolaget and we had a pretty great celebratory dinner.

For dessert I skipped over the doughnuts and made a mandarin-chocolate ganache tart. It has a base of crushed Oreos and a silky-smooth filling of dark chocolate, coconut milk and orange juice for a creamy jaffa effect. I reluctantly left out the cinnamon, cloves and cardamom due to my kitchen sitch and reckon I'd enjoy some spicy complexity. The impressive flourish is the candied mandarin slices on top, skin and all, baked for just 10 minutes, all chewy and brightly flavoured.

The local pie dish was very wide and shallow - I struggled to stretch my crushed biscuits across the base, and was a bit haphazard in my measuring. As a result my tart slices didn't hold together, and we didn't mind spooning through sloppy slices of biscuit-crumbed ganache one bit. I guess I'll just have to try this recipe again, as Sobel originally intended, when I'm back home.

Mandarin-chocolate ganache tart
(adapted from a recipe in Adam Sobel's Street Vegan)

candied mandarins
1/4 cup golden syrup
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon water (added by me to thin out the glaze)
4 mandarins, washed

crust
154g packet Oreos
3 tablespoons vegetable oil, plus more for greasing tray

filling
200g dark chocolate
165mL can coconut milk
165mL orange juice (probably too much)

Preheat an oven to 180°C. Line a baking tray with foil.

In a small bowl, whisk together the syrup, salt, oil, vanilla and water. Carefully slice the mandarins into rounds, as thin as you can get away with while keeping the pieces round and whole. Dredge each mandarin slice in the syrup and place them on the tray without overlapping. Bake for 10 minutes. (I turned the oven off and let them sit there as the oven cooled, to caramelise further and dry out a little.)

To make the crust, crush the Oreos and place them in a medium bowl. Stir through the oil. Lightly grease a pie dish, then press the biscuit crumbs into the base and up the sides of the dish - I use the back of a spoon to smooth them out. Refrigerate the crust while you make the ganache.

Roughly chop the dark chocolate and set it aside. In a medium-large saucepan, stir together the coconut milk and the orange juice. Bring them to the boil and then turn off the heat. Whisk in the chopped chocolate until smooth. My mixture was very runny, and I allowed it to sit and thicken for about 20 minutes. Retrieve the pie dish from the fridge and pour the ganache over crust, smoothing over the top as needed. Refrigerate the tart for at least an hour.

When the ganache has begun to firm up, arrange the mandarin slices decoratively over the tart. Refrigerate the tart for at least another 4 hours, until the ganache is firm enough to slice.