The grand vegan BBQ

Last weekend the much anticipated East London (Essex?) BBQ took place - due to girly things and wacky train scheduled I didn't spend the night, but one day way plenty to suffer a proper vegan protein shock.

The night before I realized I had to bring something and invented some burgers (actually one kind, the other was an old standby recipe of mine). Alas, it was dark and I didn't take any proper pictures. Here are a few of them on the BBQ, along with awesome kebabs, shrooms and corn:

I had a lot of leftovers from making thai curry, so I decided to try a Thai-influenced burger... no pictures sadly, but here's the recipe since a few people asked for it.

Steffiburgers Thai-Style
(for 10-12 medium burgers)

• 150g tofu, drained and crumbled
• 4-6 medium mushrooms, finely chopped
• 2-3 spring onions, chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 tbs rice wine
• 2 tbs soy sauce
• a pinch of shichimi togarashi (Japanese hot spice, any sort of chili powder will do as well)
• 2-3 tbs Thai green curry paste (I used Tesco's which I think is medium hot)
• a little flour

Mix everything and use flour as a binding agent- if you've squeezed the tofu properly, you'll only need about 3-4 tablespoons. Then form burgers- you can freeze those right away, but I pan-fried them and then froze them so they only took a short time on the bbq later.

The other week I made use of my Amazon.co.uk gift certificate and ordered a few new cookbooks, including Get it Ripe which I absolutely love!
Yesterday's dinner was influenced by the Quinoa with Bok Choy, Beans and pesto, except I forgot to buy bok choy and used spinach. I would never have thought of a combination like this, although it's so easy, very healthy and not to forget, yum!


And ah, keep your fingers crossed! I had the perfect job interview for an amazing job (event coordinator for an international exhibition company) the other day and will hear from them on Tuesday...

November Rain

Happy World Vegan Day to all of you!

This also means the MoFo is over... and I'm relieved. Honestly, I still don't understand how people manage to blog, cook, bake, shop and be an AR activist and still have a life... I can't. I'm happy if I find the time to check my private e-mail every other day. I'd love to do more for the vegan cause but I just can't spare the time.

I won't be doing much today since it's the only day and I've been to busy lately to arrange for a meetup or something :(
I had so many great plans for Halloween but work got in my way... which leads me to thinking... (yes, I should start a vegan foodie philosophy blog)-

Still, we had a neat little Halloween party, featuring too many Jamie Oliver recipes and the fact that Halloween is originally an Irish custom (when I asked people about Halloween, they'd often answer "We don't need to adapt all that American shit, do we?"). No pictures sadly, I had to revive my camera this morning (it sounded like a duck when I tried to start it!).

Anyway, recent eats:

very blurry tom yum soup! We're on winter time here again which means it's still almost dark when I get out of the house and I don't return home before it's dark again, so I'm back in my vampire vegan mood with horrible pictures. Sorry!

Fried tofu, broccoli and brown rice with homemade sweet/sour sauce.

More rice and curried veggies made with *gasp* a jarred organic curry sauce. When I buy convenience food, it's usually the only in the house that's not organic- turned out to be a big mistake. This sauce cost 2 € (would make 4-5 servings) and is divine! I didn't add any seasonings, and usually I use a lot of extra chili, ginger, garlic and soy sauce on anything.

And the only pretty bento I made this week. I'm not sure why, but all my other lunches this week looked like butt, not due to bento-making-skill or no time, but because of the nature of the dishes (curried/lentils and so on), so I didn't take any pictures. I swear they still were yum and nutritionally balanced :)
Pretty bento has mini knödel/German dumplings (not gnocci!), raw tomato sauce, 2 falafel-sort of balls and steamed peas, green beans, broccoli and brussels sprouts with balsamic vinegar.

Euro-Thai Noodle Soup

The first couple of dinners I spent with my Thai friend's family, her mother made a real effort to make "European" dishes for me (or what she thought traditional European food). Until I told her I don't need schnitzel and goulash every day.
Now when you live in the middle of nowhere, Asian groceries are not easy to get and we ended up having a lot of wannabe-Thai dishes with supermarket staples, including many many noodle soups.

This is my favourite and the dish that first got me into cooking when I was 15. It's not too exotic and easy to prepare, yet doesn't use fancy ingredients and it's still authentic.
The trick is to really cook everything seperate, it's still very quick to finish, I promise!

you'll need (for 2 servings or one very hungry vegan):

• 1 square ramen/chinese soup noodles (or spaghetti/linguine...)
• 1/4 block of tofu, finely diced
• 2 garlic cloves
• 1/2 red chili, cut into fine rings
• 2 cups vegetable broth
• 1 cup mung bean sprouts

garnish:

• 2 tbs chopped parsley
• crushed peanuts
• sugar
• chopped spring onions
• chili powder/ pickled Thai chilis

1.) Saute the tofu in a small saucepan until slightly browned, then take out of the pan and set aside.
2.) Same saucepan- bring some water to a boil and cook the noodles. Take them out.
3.) Quickly saute the garlic and chili, add broth and bring to a boil.
4.) Now assemble your bowls- first bean sprouts, then noodles, then tofu and ladle the broth on top eventually.

Serve with small bowl of all of the garnishes and enjoy :) I like mine with lots of chili and sugar!

Cheating and rice soup praise

Ok, I'm cheating. I didn't blog yesterday because I came home last night and dropped right into bed.
Seriously, I'm so happy when this week is over. I'll be working late this night as well.


At least I'm doing my best at breaking or stopping to develop habits that come with working 50 hrs a week.

I got up at 5.30 AM today and did my yogas ;-)

In times like these, there's always one friend by my side- rice soup!
I've almost always have leftover rice and so a basic rice soup is a filling breakfast that cooks itself while I'm in the bathroom.

Probably I'm the only person outside Thailand that has rice soup for breakfast, but who cares!

My usual one consist of leftover rice in veggie broth, spiced with some red eagle-eyes chillis, tamari, lemongrass paste, five-spice powder and is garnished with roasted chopped peanuts and chopped scallions.

Yesterday I decided to go the extra mile and try another variation.

I browned some sliced garlic (2 cloves) with a tsp of green curry paste and one red chilli in some peanut oil, than added half a cup of rice, and each half a cup of coconut milk and vegetable broth (more if you like a soupier soup). Spice up with some mushroom and soy sauce.
Simmer for 5 minutes and then add some halved cocktail tomatoes and serve with chopped p-nuts on top and coriander leaves if yours wasn't eaten by the basil bugs, as mine was.

Still Vegan-NO-micon T_T

After amazon.de has been playing with me for the past weeks, saying Veganomicon will be delivered on 30 October, then postponing the whole thing for an entire month. Yes, I received a mail from them saying it won't be in Germany until December.

And guess who ran the doorbell why I was grocery shopping this morning?
DHL, with the book... they never ever come that early.
So I have to pick the book up at the post office Monday night... what a drag, especially when I'm thinking that I won't have any time to read or even cook something from the book before Sunday next week!

Anyway, I managed to try a lot of new things this week.

I bought a German vegetarian Thai book some weeks ago and didn't get try much from it, but made this flashy mushroom soup earlier this week.

for 4 servings: 300g mushrooms 1 tsp lemongrass paste (to spare you the process of cutting the woody lemongrass) 1/2 tsp green curry paste 1 eagle-eye chili some grated ginger 1 small can coconut milk 2 cups vegetable broth soy sauce and coriander leaves Sauté the lemongrass, curry paste, chili and ginger in some peanut oil until fragrant. Add the vegetable broth and coconut milk and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat and add sliced mushrooms. Let simmer for five more minutes. Add some soy sauce if you want it saltier and garnish with coriander leaves.

I bought a butternut squash last week because I decided it's time to make friend with the good ol' pumpkin for halloween. My childhood was pumpkin-free and when eating out, I never really found anything with it that I liked. That's changed now, thanks to a collegue making a wicked soup with it and the amazing curry recipe from bentoyumyum
which is the best bento site ever (of course I substituted veg broth for the beef boullion).

To get away from all this Asian fare for a change, I made seitan bourgignon
with the seitan based on the seitan steak from... ugh, I don't remember!
Anyway, I had to use less liquid because it all had to fit in my small countertop oven, that's why it turned not as stewy-as supposed. I'll try it again sometime but then on the stove.

A VWAV weekend and coconut cakes

Yesterday in Dortmund I bought a package of Kanom Pia, thai coconut dumplings or also called "Chinese cakes". I've had them before and they are heaven. Still, I haven't found a proper recipe (probably it's the kind of food nobody makes themselves in Thailand)...

Apart from that, Azumi had borrowed my cam on Friday, so I had to take another snapshot with my mobile cam... of gorgeous Seitan Portobello Stroganoff from VWAV!

As there are no portobellos in Germany, I used regular mushrooms and canned peas because I had run out of dried ones. The seitan I used was fairly spicy seitan o'greatness. To be honest, it's not really what I cook usually- I don't like too hearty and European-style dishes, but this was great!















Dinner tonight was back to my regular Asian, at the moment especially Indian food. I did a twist on the Almond rice in VWAV... used ground almonds which gave it a nice texture and no raisins because I had run out of.
With the rice, there was -FINALLY!- braised cauliflower in three-seed sauce which was absolutely yum!

Thai salad

I haven't been posting for two weeks because I really didn't have the time to cook and basically lived on salads, pasta and cookies (ok, only salads and cookies are new, I always live on pasta). Yesterday I made one of my first recipes from vegweb, and by far my favourite! It's very authentic, just the way I know it from a Thai friend. My personal changes are that I use fresh, grated garlic and ginger and lime juice instead of the powdery versions and am too lazy to smash the peanuts.