Vegan 'beef and bacon' pie

This pie came into being when we purchased some new vegan products on a trip to Canberra.

Ingredients:

1- 1/2 cups of TVP beef chunks (soaked for a few hours in a soy sauce water solution, you can add garlic or other things too. After soaking, slice into strips)
1 slice of vegan 'ham'
gravy powder
garlic
ginger
mushroom, sliced
1 onion, diced
a little olive oil

1 potato, boiled and mashed (I use a little rice milk, marge and some chives)
1 sheet of shortcrust pastry (You'll love Coles is vegan)
Some breadcrumbs
Extra oil for drizzling


Method:

Add the oil and onion to a pan and saute until the onion is soft
add the mushrooms, garlic and ginger and saute until the mushrooms are almost cooked
add the beef and ham and fry for about one minute
Add enough gravy powder and mix in so that when you add the marinade from the 'beef' you have a thick gravy
Add any herbs you like, but don't add salt, the gravy mix and ham have more than enough!

Put this mix into an oven dish/pie plate that has had your pastry blind baked in
Cover with the potato
Sprinkle some breadcrumbs on the top and some oil (olive or sesame is good)
Bake in a 180-200C oven until the top is golden brown.
Serve with salad or steamed veg

(It was so good a meat eater didn't know until we told them!)

Vegan Restaurants

On a recent trip to Canberra we discovered some fantastic vegan resaurants in Dickson.
Au Lac Vietnamese and Kingsland (http://www.kingsland.canberra.net.au/)

We ate in at Kingsland and the food and service was fantastic. Restaurants like these are great places to go if you want to try vegan food but are a bit unsure as the food satisfies even the most hard core meat eaters.

Chocolate Croissants

Vegan Chocolate Croissants? Yes and the recipe comes from an unlikly source_ Nigella Lawson.
This was on her Express TV series.

It is simply some puff pastry cut into triangles and a square of chocolate. Roll the pastry up with the choc inside and shape into a crescent.

Bake at 180C for about 20mins.

Serve warm. I would dust with some icing sugar for extra decadence.

Chocolate Walnut Muffins

I would dust these with a little icing sugar if you want a sweeter muffin.

Here is the link:
http://bakingbites.com/2005/09/vegan-chocolate-walnut-muffins/

Pineapple Upside-down Cake

This was the first Pineapple Upside-down Cake I have ever made. I used fresh pineapple so there are no cherries in the holes and subsequently I needed to add some orange juice as I didn't have the juice from the tin.

It was still delicious.

Here is the link:
http://healthy-desserts.suite101.com/article.cfm/pineapple_upsidedown_cake_recipe

Pasta Bake

It's been a while since my last blog, I've just been so tired due to being pregnant and then having my baby on New Years Day. So there is a back log of cooking to share (I made sure to at least take pictures!).

Pasta Bake.

This recipe was just some cooked pasta mixed into a sauce based on the bolognaise from the lasagne recipe but with more and bigger cuts of vegies. I then used the bechmel sauce from the lasagne recipe to top the pasta bake and sprinkled some bread crumbs on top as well as drizzling some seasame oil on top (olive would be great too).

I baked until the top was browned (about 1/2 hour at 180C).

Pizza

Here is my healthy, tasty homemade pizza. Even though I don't put cheese or a substitute on it, it is still yum, my 23 month old loves it! I love the fried tofu on it too.

The dough recipe is a half proportion from the recipe in my bread machine book, but I add some dried basil to the mix.

Ass for toppings, the choice is yours. I usually use some tomato paste for the sauce base then add pineapple, onion, capsicum, mushrooms, olives, sundried tomatoes, fresh basil leaves and baby spinach as well as fried tofu (slice it, freeze it, defrost it, squash the liquid out, drizzle a little soy sauce on it, then fry in some oil til light golden brown!). I add a swirl of BBQ sauce to my husband's, and top them with a drizzle of olive oil.

Feel free to add something like cheesly to to top if you like.

It usually takes about 1/2 an hour on 180C to cook.