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Kate L Pugh - Cookery Diary

This is highly experimental. Don't be surprised if I get fed up of updating it. It's dual-purpose - first, it'll give new vegans or people thinking about becoming vegan an idea of what a real actual vegan eats day-to-day; and second, it'll encourage me to cook properly instead of living on toast.


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Week Beginning Sunday 1 April 2001

Sunday

Baked some more of the soya-flour bread this morning (testing it out for adding to the site), and also tried out a banana oatmeal muffin recipe in the evening. Both those recipes came from Natural Land's Cooking with Soy website - a rather good site that Fritz on alt.food.vegan pointed me to (thanks, Fritz!).


Monday

Randomly decided to make up the mix for Garden Burger with Mushroom and Peppers. I used some of the leftover rice from supper. Didn't make up the burgers tonight, but put the mix in the fridge to put together tomorrow or the night after. I also made the dough for another batch of soya bread and left it to prove in the fridge overnight. Just before I went to bed, I made tomorrow's breakfast and lunch.


Tuesday

Tomorrow's packed lunch is sorted; leftovers from supper. I made another one of the wholemeal english muffins with peanut butter and Marmite, for breakfast. I really should think of an alternative packed breakfast, but this one is just so easy. Maybe avocado tomorrow (got half of one left in the fridge). I also baked the soya bread dough that I put ready last night, but it came out of the oven rather flat. Could have been because there were other people using the oven at the same time - this means another round of testing before it goes on the site.


Wednesday

I went to the market this morning before work, mainly looking for calalloo to try a recipe posted in rec.food.cooking; but couldn't get any, so I ended up getting a bag of okra, a huge bunch of fresh coriander (cilantro) and a Chinese bitter gourd from the stall instead. The coriander's going to need using up pretty quickly, and I also had a very nice aubergine, so I decided to try and invent an Indian-style dish using lots of coriander, and aubergine.

What I came up with was: puree lots of fresh coriander with some fresh garlic, ginger, onion and deseeded green chilli, then fry aubergine cubes until browned, remove, reserve; fry the coriander paste for a bit then return the aubergine cubes, mix and simmer. It was inspired by Ashbury's Asian Eggplant recipe. Turned out quite nice, though it needs tweaking. Maybe chop and fry the onion with the aubergine, rather than putting it in the puree, possibly add a chopped tomato or two as well. I had some of this for supper and saved some for later in the week.

I'm also trying to formalise the potato and chickpea dry curry thing that I invented at the start of last month, so I parboiled some potatoes ready. Will make the actual dish tomorrow evening.


Thursday

I had another go at the potato and chickpea curry that I mentioned last night. Not bad, but wants a bit more testing. I also cooked up the rest of the veggieburger mix and made a sandwich with some soya bread, for tomorrow's breakfast. Tomorrow's lunch will be potato-chickpea curry, aubergine curry, and rice.


Friday

I made a pizza tonight; just a plain no-fat bread dough with some nice toppings. I was going to add some olive oil to the dough, since both doop and I like it like that, but I forgot. Adding fat to a bread dough will make it softer. For toppings, I first put on some drained chopped tomatoes from a can, then caramelised onions, thinly-sliced mushrooms, sliced peppers, sauteed courgette (zucchini) slices, finely-chopped red chillies, and chopped black olives. I did my cunning trick of rubbing the whole of the dough with pureed garlic (from a tube) first, though. This makes the pizza crusts a lot more interesting. Baked it at Gas Mark 8 (that's probably about 250C, 400F, something like that) for 15 minutes, which was too long, but I forgot about it. 7 minutes would have been better; the crust got a bit hard. When doop got here, I fed him some, and he liked it.


Saturday