Raspberry-chocolate chip blondies

Today was the first day of the climax of the German carnival season. As I work in the second biggest city who is into that, I got the afternoon off today and will have Monday off, as well.
As I'm not celebrating at all, I have a lot of cooking projects in mind, so stay tuned!

As everybody is eating lots of sweets at the moment- because the fasting period starts Wednesday- I finally made the raspberry blondies from VWAV to bring to work tomorrow.

They are awesome, yet turned out a bit to sweet for me. I'll experiment with the amount of sugar next time.
Hope the coworkers will like them!

Chickpeas, cherries and some Indian

That's what the post is about. This week I stuck to my plan to spend less on buying groceries. I love to buy whatever looks great and then come home and remember that I'm usually only cooking for myself. So I end up with lots of veggies and fruit to throw aways and a billion opened packages of rice, pasta, quinoa and whatnot.

Last week I only spent about 10 € on groceries, and that's part of what I made of it.

Almond-cherry muffins from VWAV. I had run of plain soymilk, and of course fresh cherries were not an option, so I used part strawberry soymilk and part cherry juice from the jar which gave iit a lovely pink touch.

Second was the Chickpea romesco from V-con. I had expected something good because it uses a lot of my favourite foods- and I even left out the booze and it turned out, um, saucy. Had it with plain couscous.



Yesterday I also made a batch of chickpea noodle soup. This has become such a standard soup in my kitchen- thank you, Isa!


But the winner of the week was an Indian dish- what else?
I slightly modified a recipe from a German forum, and what you get is

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Indian-European cauliflower
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1 small head cauliflower, in florets
1 medium-sized onion, sliced
3 tomatoes, chopped
1/2 red chili, chopped
an inch-sized piece of ginger, minced

1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp mustards seeds
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp salt (or less, if you're a salt hater)

In a wok, heat up some vegetable oil or vegan ghee.
Add the onions and sauté until slightly crispy. Add the ginger, chili and spices except the salt.

After a minute, add the cauliflower and sauté for about three minutes. Turn down the heat, add the tomatoes, salt and let sit for 5-8 minutes or until the cauliflower is tender ( I prefer mine crunchy).

Serve with rice and some chopped curly parsley (yes, it's actually good with it!).

Simple, spicy, satisfying.

Past two weeks' bentos

Nothing special today, but I'm sitting around with 5 days off work in front of me, waiting for fresh money - come on bank, it's payday!

So here's some of the bento I recently made.

# 1 is pasta with thai basil-pesto and the chickpea romesco from V-con. I love the romesco so much; it's got a lot of my favourite foods such as almonds, tomatoes and chickpeas.

# 2 holds a slice of raspberry nougat cake, a clementine and some almonds as well as edamame, homemade gyoza and a slice cherry tomato.

# 3 is a plain veggie sushi bento with some mango pudding, mine lemon-poppyseed muffins and a coconut rice cracker.

# 4 last but not least, leftover Thai tofu curry with rice and ginger sauce plus a container of hummus, one with chocoreale and tomato slices because it was a collegues' birthday on Monday and she brought bread rolls for everyone.
She insisted on paying for my (homemade!) hummus because she pities me as I can never have any of the treats customers bring all the time.

[how do you arrange pictures properly on blogger? Whenever I use more than two pictures in one post, they end up all mixed]

Donauwelle

Should I be apologizing for all those cake posts lately?

It's not only because of my new oven, but for the fact that 90% of the people I know seem to have their birthdays in January, so lots of excuses for baking.

Last weekend I made Attila's Donauwelle- part of the site and recipes are available in English, unfortunately this recipe isn't. But if people are interested, I'll ask him if I can put up a translation.
Me being me, I didn't follow the recipe exactly, anyway. For example, I used ready-made vanilla custard.

And didn't measure (and that's why you don't want my "adaption", but a proper translation).
Turned out delish, but far too rich for me- anyway, fooled the omnis once again.

I've never been much of a cake person, but I've always been crazy about everything that has cherries in it = )

I had about an inch-wide slice of it...

Spilled onion soup

Last Sunday, I tried the Roasted Garlic and Onion soup Nupur suggested some time ago.

I don't have much to say but that it's awesome. So little ingredients and work, so much flavour.

Unfortunately, I had to make two batches to find out.
I own two huge glass cutting boards that also serve as a cover for my stove. One of them fell down and swept the pot off the stove as the soup was just ready to eat.

Misteriously, not a drop of soup landed on me or my clothes, but I spent two hours cleaning the kitchen and another one trying to get the garlic and onion soup smell away.

Happy Bears

Tomorrow's gonna be one of those depressing school Wednesdays again, so I decided to spoil myself with a kawaii bento.

It's got to happy bear onigiri (cucumer/wasabi filling) on napa cabbage, some cucumber slices, and two cocktail tomatoes in the upper tier.
The smaller one holds potato salad (Vegan Lunchbox recipe), two mini lemon-poppyseed muffins and a ginger candy.
Hope this'll get me through the day.

Raspberry-Nougat cake

This recipe is from a German vegan forum I frequent.
It turned out delish, though it's another proof that I can't bake anything without having it fall apart. But it's good enough to share.

for the cake:
100g sugar
180g flour
1/2 package baking powder
100 ml soy milk
100 ml oil (I used soy oil)
10 g soy flour
50 ml water

Mix all ingredients and fill in a greased cake pan (I used heart-shaped because that's all I've got, but a star or a simple round one would work as well).

Bake for 40 minutes at 180°C, let cool for 10 minutes and take out of the form.

Now bring 200g raspberries, 150 ml soymilk (I used strawberry-flavoured), 80g confectionary sugar, and a package Agartine/ 2 tbsp agar agar to a boil, constantly stirring.
Lower down the heat, but keep stiring for 2-5 minutes.
Pour into the cake pan.

While you wait for the filling to become solid, slice the cake in two halves horizontally (that's where huge parts of my heart came crumbling down :( ).
Now when totally solid, put the jelly part on the bottom part and top with the other part of the cake.
It's a bit tricky, but totally worth the effort.

Now melt 200-400 g nougat (microwave!), depending on the surface of the cake and ice the cake with it. When the nougat has cooled down a bit, springle with some more confectionary sugar.

This is best after you've allowed it to set in the fridge for a day or so.
Enjoy!

halfway-iced sideshot:

Groceries

On Thursday after work I went to the Japanese grocery store for the first time in ages.
It's really expensive so this week it wasn't the usual 20-30 € I spend on groceries, but I got some nice bento-able foods.

Afterwards I went shopping after 8 PM in Germany for the first time. Stores just started being open until 8 PM about five years ago, and still it's only the bigger supermarkets- many small stores, among them Asian and health food stores where I mainly shop close at 7 PM at the latest.
Amazing when you commute to work and are never home before six.

However, in late 2006, a new law concerning opening hours was made so now stores are allowed to be open until 10 PM. For the first half year or so only shops in the really big cities (~ more than half a million inhabitants) actually did.
Now for two months, even some (actually, THREE) supermarkets in my "tiny" quarter million city started opening until 9 PM. Wohoo!

- And I know why they didn't earlier: the shops are totally deserted. Just as people in this country refuse to go shopping on Sundays (everything closed here), they refuse to go shopping in the evening.

But the media keeps telling me Germany is full of urban singles. They even have ads telling me to start a family (not joking!). They tell me there are too many unemployed who have all the time in the world. Now where are those people when I'm out shopping at half eight?

Anyway, I found the supermarket to have built a new veggie section with lots of different soy milks, fake meats etc - are we participating in civilisation after all?

What I bought (green is organic) :
napa cabbage, spring onions, cocktail tomatoes, green bell peppers, apples, satsumas, a baby cauliflower, okras, parsley, frozen raspberries, agar agar, tinned tomatoes, veggie "salami", fake fish fingers, tiny baked tofu cubes, soba noodles, coconut milk, whole-wheat bread mix, mugicha (Japanese barley tea), inari pouches, dried kampyo, tinned edamame, chocolate, blanched almonds, dried wakame, star anise, sweet pickled Japanese red beans

Savoury pancakes

My first meal of the year were the stuffed pancakes from the "Peter lebt Vegan"-Project .
For those who don't speak German, it's a blog from your next-door student who decided to go vegan for a month. Not only that he went (and stayed, woot!) vegan, but he uploaded an entertaining, informative and professional short podcast on a daily base.

Pancakes were one of my troubles when first going vegan. I managed to make American-style, thick and small pancakes, but the more omelet-like version as can be found in Germany and the Netherlands would stick to the pan and become pancake scramble (aka Kaiserschmarrn ;-P ).
The trick? Don't overmix the batter.

The pancakes are really divine, though I had never imgined sprouts and mushroom pâté to go together so well.

Au lac

I'm not a big fan of fake meats- or protein-food in general, but have this urge to try any vegan product available on the market.

Now that I've grown fond of the fake meat dishes many London restaurants have to offer, it seems one of the Asian grocery stores in Krefeld started carrying products from Au Lac- a company of whose products I recognized many as the ones I ate in London.

It's a Vietnamese company that seems to export foods all over the world.
I've at least tried some of their chicken, beef and shrimp alternatives. Some seem to be great, other gross ("vegetarian intestines of chicken"... excatly what we were waiting for, huh?)
Does anybody else use their products and if, what can you recommend?
I'd love to here the recipes.

I tried cooking with the mushroom/seaweed dumplings last week and it wasn't a big sucess. The texture was very gum-like and they wouldn't heat through. At least the dish made a pretty picture.

Yesterday I tried the shrimps which I had marinated in olive oil with garlic and chilli and they were amazing (sorry, no pics yet!).

Green Food

Maybe it's the temporary lack of Irish people in my life, or the fact that I decided to eat more greens and get over my December/holiday ignorance of most things, food in the last couple of days was very green.


<- simple fattoush (Lebanese bread salad) with hummus. Did I mention I love Lebanese?

Stir-fried udon with broccoli and gomashio in a tahini sauce (from Quick-fix vegetarian). It's so easy, so quick, so heavenly. It has everything I love except for the fact that it's always gone too quickly.

Bear's garlic pasta with homemade basil-almond pesto, roasted brussels sprouts and basil tofu.