How to… Cashew cheese.

For my favourite naggingest friend, and member of our newly formed Gin Club With No Specific Purpose. I don’t have a photo, but by the time you cobble together the ingredients, there might be one.

I love this cheese because it gets better the longer you wait before eating it. It’s got a long but simple prep time, but it is fully totally worth it.

So, here’s how I do it.

You need:

2 cups cashews. Must be unsalted. You can choose raw or roasted; each gives a unique flavour.

1 1/2 cups water

1 probiotic capsule

2 tbsp nutritional yeast

1/4 tsp smoked paprika (optional, or substitute pepper or celery salt)

1 tsp sea salt

A pinch of commitment

A pound of patience

It’s a long but worthy prep time. If you’re doing it for a party, start a week in advance. First, soak the cashews in the water for 8 hours. Then add the contents of the probiotic capsule. Let them soak – at room temperature – for another 4-6 hours. This gives the tangy edge. Once you’ve done that, add your nutritional yeast, salt and spice. Then you blend it until it’s as smooth as your food processor or blender will allow. If it’s really really grainy, you might like to blend, then rest it for an hour, then blend again. Sometimes adding a bit of extra water can help too, although your cheese won’t be as firm.

Now, pour it into a greased dish. You can grease it with whatever you like – olive oil is my favourite, but you can use anything. The dish can be whatever it fits. I use a ramekin, and if there’s too much, a second ramekin.

Now you let it sit in the fridge, uncovered, for 3-5 days. This can be a terrifying thought, but it’s really necessary to get a crust on it. The 3-5 is flexible, really, it’s as far as you can survive without eating the whole lot in one go.

Spread it on crackers, or dump chunks of it on a pizza, or toss through your pasta, or whatever else takes your fancy!

If you can’t stand the rant, get out of the kitchen.

So one of my New Year’s Resolutions was to blog more. Specifically to blog more than Scott. And so far, just by having written this many words, I think I’m winning. (My research has not, however, been particularly thorough, I’m just making assumptions, really.)

So we’re slogging through a fairly hot summer at the moment. NASA tells me that 2014 was the hottest on record, and the 38th consecutive year of above average temperatures. Thirty eight. And yet our inaction on climate change and skepticism continues. Most days it leaves me feeling quite desperate. It’s real. It’s a thing. And you know what, even if that tiny 0.000001% chance that we’re wrong about it happens to be the case, well, so what? I think we’ll all be better off for chasing the alternatives. Cleaner air, more efficient transport, sustainability, and getting to keep the Great Barrier Reef.

Anyway, enough ranting. Most days I can’t stand to even look at my oven, let alone turn it on. So I’ve been looking for recipes that require less than 15 minutes on the stove, because I start sweating like crazy.

Oh, yeah, that reminds me. I got a new do:

From this crazy mop…

…to this delightful crop.

And I’m really happy with it. Except that sweeping side fringe acts as a sweat catcher, and then does this crazy flick to the side. But there are worse fates.

Back to the food! I made this Rocket and Mushroom Pasta loosely based on a recipe I got from a trashy mag when I was 13. I used to make it all the time and I loved it.

First, chop everything. Don’t light that stove a moment before you have to. I used 250g mushrooms, 5 cloves of garlic, 50g of semi dried tomatoes and the juice of 1/2 a lemon. I also used 200g of rocket, but I didn’t chop it as it was small leaf. And I used 2 cups of cannellini beans that I’d soaked and cooked earlier. You can do the same, or use a can, drained and rinsed.

Next, get your pasta water boiling, heaps of it, with plenty of salt. If your house is anything like mine, the water out of your cold tap will only be a few degrees short of boiling anyway, you’ll be done in no time! Also, get a big frypan, and heat it at medium level.

In the frypan, dry toast some pine nuts. The quantity is, as always, up to you. My favourite guideline is “as many as you can afford.” Once they’re nice and golden, add 2 tbsp olive oil. More if you feel like it; it does dress the dish pretty nicely. But not everybody is as crazy about it as me.

Your pasta water should be boiling by now; if you haven’t already, tip the pasta in. I did enough for 4 people. Almost any pasta is okay.

Put the garlic into the frypan, and about 30 seconds later, add the mushrooms, give them a good stir here and there until they’re evenly coloured. Add the tomatoes and beans, stir, then remove from the heat. Squirt lemon juice all over it.

When the pasta is cooked, drain it, then return it to the pot. Add the mushroom and bean mix, along with the rocket. I chose to serve it into bowls, garnished with some Smoked Cheddar flavour Sheese that we had leftover from Christmas. It took the dish to the next level. Add lots of freshly ground pepper and enjoy!

A badass dinner.

I love asparagus. And it’s cheap right now. So, one easy dinner night, I ate a whole bunch of it. Because I’m a badass like that.

Also, kale chips, potato chips, salad and a Linda McCartney sausage. The kids ate their sausage, their kale chips, and then shared two asparagus spears – little one eats the tips, big one eats the stalks. And THAT is winning life.

Beetroot salad + tahini dressing

I once went to a friend’s house for a barbecue. She asked me to bring a salad, and I obliged with a carrot and green olive concoction I discovered in a friend’s share house in Scotland. Her words “That’s why I asked you. I knew you’d do something a bit unexpected.”

Hells yeah. Because I can make friends with salad. This one is super easy too:

• 1 beetroot, grated
• 1 carrot, grated.
• chopped fresh coriander
• a sprinkle of salt and pepper

Gently toss those about, and into your serving bowl of choice. Then, in a jar, mix up your dressing:

• 1 tbsp tahini (hulled if you’re a badass, unhulled if you’re a bastion of nutritional virtue)
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 1/2 tsp ground cumin seeds
• 1/2 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tbsp olive oil

Put the lid on the jar and shake it like a Polaroid picture. Depending on how far through the tahini jar you are, and the humidity where you are, and the phase of Venus where you are, you may need more olive oil. If you can’t pour it out, you need more.

Tip it over your salad, and serve. If you like the people you’re serving it to, you could even do a cool spiral or some other delectable pattern. But it’s not compulsory.

Taco night!

Clockwise from the top:

• Shredded lettuce
• Cucumber and cherry tomato
• Mashed avocado (guacamole with all the fun removed)
• Jar of Aji Amarillo paste
• Refried Beans
• Brown rice
• Homemade white corn tortillas

There’s so much effort involved that I just have to photograph it every time!

That chocolate slice you love

I knocked this together one night. And everyone who tasted it wants the recipe. Like, they’re asking me twice. They’re nagging. They’re sending texts before 9am on a Saturday morning. (which is fine because I’ve been up for a stupidly long time by then)

So, fine, here’s how you do it. Don’t fall over when you discover how easy it is.

Preheat your oven to 180 – the golden temperature of all things baked. Then, assemble the dry ingredients:

• 1 cup wholemeal spelt flour
• 1 cup desiccated coconut
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• rind of two old and kind of soft oranges. (You could, as an alternative, use lovely plump fresh ones, but I’m being authentic.)
• 2 tsp baking powder
• a shake each of cinnamon, nutmeg and ground coriander (measurements are inexact as I let the kids do it.)
• 1/4 cup cocoa

So you mix all that stuff together, and then you need to add the liquid.

• Juice of two oranges
• 1 cup coconut milk

Mix that all together, then pour into a greased tray. A 20 x 10cm lamington tray works well, but this slice is very forgiving, so don’t go running to the shops if you don’t have to. It takes about 45 minutes in my oven, so in a normal, non-leaky one, it’s probably about 30 minutes. The beautiful thing with this slice is that if ti doesn’t cook through, it just goes chewy and fudgy and delicious, and because there’s no raw animal products in there, undercooked is just fine!

Anyway, then, you give it some shiny icing, which is equally simple:

• 4 tbsp icing sugar
• 2 tbsp cocoa

Put them in a bowl – you don’t have to mix them up, then slowly and gradually add 1 tbsp water. It needs to be quite stiff, as it becomes runnier with time. So mix that all up, and spread over the top of your cooled slice. Allowing it to set in the fridge gives it a lovely shiny finish; allowing it to set in the boot of the car on the way to the picnic gives it a gooey delicious top that will terrify the parents of any toddler who goes near it. Either option is delicious.

I don’t have any photos because I didn’t plan to blog it. You’ll just have to believe that it was stunningly beautiful and utterly delicious.

Food for vegan kids

 

Our kids get dragged along on the dinner merry-go-round. As a result of doing baby-led weaning, perhaps, we adults just eat what we want to eat and the kids pretty much take it or leave it. They get plenty of healthy, nutritionally complete snacks and meals through the day, and by night there’s usually some component of the meal they’ll eat. We encourage them to try things, and don’t force them into it. (usually. Occasionally we do have to trick the big one into trying stuff) So we dish up hot curries, long and slimy noodles, hot soups, wraps and burritos and all manner of stuff that isn’t strictly kid friendly.

And from time to time, we do this:

 

It’s pasta dinosaurs with “neatballs” and tomato sauce. Kid heaven. Sort of. The three year old flatly refuses to even have the balls in her bowl. Cue eye roll. So she just eats the pasta. I used to have an internal apoplexy at the lack of protein, until I came up with a hideously ingenious trick. I put lentils in the pasta. I wish I’d thought of it earlier! It’s red lentils, and I just cook up 1 cup with 1.5 cups water, so they go mushy. Only takes about 10 minutes – same as the pasta. Then drain the pasta, return it to the pot, and stir the lentils through. The lentils stick to the pasta but don’t change the colour or the consistency enough to be noticed. The flavour barely comes through, but the kiddies seem to love red lentils anyway, so everyone’s a winner.

How did I make neatballs? Bit of a fluke really. I was constructing a nut roast, which was bound with risotto, and had waaaaaay too much of it. So I blended together 1 cup risotto, 2 cups green lentils, 1 cup chickpeas, 1 cup breadbrumbs and 1/2 cup quinoa flakes. I seasoned it with 1 tbsp Braggs (you could easily use soy. Easily) and 1 tsp of thyme and rosemary, and a good whack of pepper. You could be much more heavy handed with herbs and spices, as they were a bit bland. Anyway, then I oven roasted them for an hour on a low heat – 160 in my oven is probably more like 120 in a proper oven.

The tomato sauce is a brown onion, a spring onion, two cloves of garlic, 1 can of tomatoes and 4 semi-dried tomatoes. Brown the onion in olive oil, then add spring onion and garlic, give it another 30 seconds, then add the dried tomatoes, and can of tomatoes. I then half fill the can of tomatoes with water, and tip the water in too, and add a splash of balsamic vinegar for caramelly tangy godness. Salt, simmer for 10 minutes, then cool slightly and blend with your blending apparatus of choice. I recently heard stick blenderers referred to as “stab mixers” So violent – but in a cathartic kind of a way. I’m using it.

Caterpillar Pie

Not actually that delicious at all – It had a black eye bean and mushroom filling that tasted a bit like dirt. It was supposed to be creamy, but came out more grainy, and not really all that great.

I’m blogging it anyway as a stance against the perfectionist blogs that are out there. There’s one I know of that is full of blatant lies and stolen recipes, carefully put together to look like a perfect life. Well, that’s not me. Sometimes, I screw up. In cooking, in parenting, in friendship, in the fine art of not being a jerk – I screw up in that one a lot.

But anyway, how cute is the caterpillar?

Smoothies!

 

Or “How to Medicate the Masses”

We’re right into our afternoon smoothies these days. I love that the girls love them, I can pack whatever extra nutrition I like in there, and they just gulp it all down. 

In this particular version we had:

1/2 litre of rice milk (A friend moved interstate and bequeathed 7L of rice milk)

1 tbsp coconut yoghurt

Probiotic powder (1 dose)

Soaked flaxseed

Soaked almonds

1 pre-frozen banana

1/2 cup frozen raspberries (big kid is obsessed with “pink” smoothies, which is interesting because she’s not that into pink otherwise)

A tiny dash of maple syrup

1/4 teaspoon vanilla

And nutmeg. I’ll post one day about the nutmeg mania that is possessing our house.

Blend, pour into cups and watch it disappear. From the cups. I wish it would just magically disappear from inside the blender. I hate cleaning that thing.

Pear and raspberry crumble

Hot dessert tip: if you add hazelnuts, it’s gonna be amazing. 

This is a very thrown together dessert of ours. I made the crumble bit using our food processor and a variety of things from the canisters in our pantry. The great thing about crumble is that it’s very forgiving. It almost always tastes good. This one was just there to use up the canned pears that I had in the fridge. I can’t remember why I had canned pears in the fridge, but I’m sure it was an excellent reason.

The filling:

4 pear halves, roughly chopped. I used canned, but there is nothing to stop you from using them fresh. I normally would, except for that aforementioned good reason I can’t remember.

1 cup frozen raspberries

1 tablespoon each of water and raw sugar.

Toss all these together in the dish you’ll be baking in.

The top:

As I said before, this is very forgiving. There’s two crucial ingredients; fat and sugar. The rest is just details. Here’s what I used:

1/2 cup raw sugar

1/4 cup Nuttelex

A handful of each of hazelnuts, macadamias, almonds and oats.

Just for fun I also added 1/4 cup gluten free flour. Makes it a bit cakey.

And a little shake of nutmeg. Because the toddler likes to shake things into things.

Blitz it all up in a food processor until it looks like breadcrumbs. Then scatter it over the fruit and bake it for 45 minutes at 160 degrees. (Celsius. Because modern.)

Serve it with ice cream or custard. I can’t remember which of the two we had. I was too mesmerised by the sweet blandness of the pears mixed with the jarring tartness of the raspberries. I’m a sucker for a hot dessert!

Note: If you want to make this nut free, it’s no problem. Just stick to the flour and the oats, and/or try a handful of buckwheat flour in there for nutty flavour.

It’s already gluten free and vegan, but you can muck around with those properties too.