Posts tagged ‘fruit’
Friday Feast: Mango Pico de Gallo
This home-made salsa is based on a mango pico de gallo we used to eat when we lived in Texas. It was my first foray into pico de gallo ever (I know! But I’m Australian and it’s not something we typically eat here.). It was from HEB. Don’t look like that. It was good! Especially with those Tostitos cups or fresh made tortillas. You can’t get fresh made tortillas in Brisbane unless you make them yourself. I miss them. I miss Tostitos cups too.
I eat this pico de gallo piled on Mission corn chips/strips which I heat in the oven. In my pre-vegan days, I’d put cheese on top, but I find that it doesn’t taste that different. The heated corn chips add a really rustic flavour to the bright salsa. I also sometimes eat the salsa as an accompaniment to beans and rice. Or as a dip. Or on a spoon.
Yankee Elv has a weird genetic thing that makes coriander (cilantro) taste like soap, so we substitute parsley for coriander. However, if you don’t have that weird genetic thing, you like coriander and you’d like to be authentic, then that’s what should really be used.
Mango Pico de Gallo
Ingredients:
- 2 mangoes, diced
- 1 red onion, diced
- 5 – 6 tomatoes, with the cores discarded and the outer flesh diced for use
- 2 green chilis, diced finely (include the seeds if you like more heat)
- 1 red chili, diced finely (include the seeds if you like more heat)
- a handful of chopped parsley leaves
- lime juice, to taste
Method:
- Stir all the chopped fruit/veges together in a bowl.
- Add the parsley and lime juice and combine.
THE END! Easiest recipe ever. 
Friday Feast: Pickled Watermelon Rind
It’s almost summer here in Australia, which means it’s time to eat watermelon! I like to use my handy dandy melon baller so I can eat it with a fork. I know, it’s kinda un-Australian to not eat it in great big slices and get it all over your face… but I don’t really like getting sticky. If someone builds me a swimming pool to jump into after eating it, maybe I’ll change my method.
Anyway, I was eating watermelon the other day and after I’d removed all the lovely pink flesh of the melon, I was left with the rind, and I remembered reading about a Southern (as in the South, in the USA) snack – pickled watermelon rind. I don’t mind regular pickles, but I’m not as in love with them as my Polish-American partner, so I wasn’t sure I wanted to eat the pickled rind of quarter of a watermelon… but I figured I might as well give it a try at least once. Everyone raved about them, so why not?
Well, I gotta tell you, pickled watermelon rind is yummy! It’s crunchy and cool and refreshing – a perfect snack for hot weather, and it’s not super sweet. Most cold foods are sweet. This one is vinegary, but a little sweet from the sugar. It’s nice for a change. And I really like the crunch!
I chose the absolutely easiest watermelon pickle recipe I could find. Others call for certain herbs, or soaking the rind overnight – stuff like that. Since I wasn’t even sure I would like them, I was going for minimum effort. I think this actually was a great idea. The simplicity of the flavours is part of what I really like about these pickles. Plus they’re quick and easy, and they use up something I’d normally discard. I just changed the vinegar to apple cider vinegar cos that’s what I had in the cupboard.
So now that I’ve raved… here’s the recipe.
Pickled Watermelon Rind
Ingredients
- Watermelon rind (from a quarter of a big melon)
- 1 very scant cup of water
- 1 very scant up of apple cider vinegar
- 2/3 to 3/4 cup caster sugar
Method:
- Cut the watermelon rind into small chunks, about 1 to 2 inches in size. Make sure you remove the green skin.
- Stir the water, vinegar and sugar in a saucepan over medium heat until the sugar has dissolved.
- Add the watermelon rind and stir.
- Turn off the stove, but leave the saucepan on the hotplate. Let the rind sit until it reaches room temperature.
- Place rind and as much brine as you can fit in a jar(s) and put them in the fridge.
- Eat them right away or save them for a bit in the fridge. Remember, these haven’t been properly sterilised and sealed, so they’re not shelf-safe. You should eat them within a few weeks at most and keep them in the fridge.
Note: swish your mouth with water after eating, because it’s not good for your teeth to let acidic foods like vinegar sit on the enamel.
Mulberries: An Interlude
Guess who stepped in a mulberry?
Princess.
Guess who left little purple paw prints all over the tiles?
Princess.
Guess who was highly unimpressed I was taking her photo while she had a purple-stained foot?
Princess.
Yeah. Diva Princess. That’s who.
Just to show she’s not always messy and disgruntled…
Princess is very sweet to little Fruity.
Awwwww.
Now if only the possums would hurry up and eat all the mulberries on the ground under the tree. We were just lucky this time that we didn’t end up with purple stains on the carpet. Fortunately only the bedrooms are carpeted. Phew! Now, keep up, possums!
P.S. My eco-friendly cat toy tip of the day? A twig from a poinciana tree. I was using one to encourage Fruity to follow me back inside and she loved it. I forgot though, that I used to play with Princess in the same way… she had to come join in! They took turns to bat the twig. So cute. Pou was very confused as to what they were doing. An ex-stray, Pou doesn’t really understand the concept of playing like that. But my point is – who said cat toys have to be expensive and made of plastic? These two get more fun out of a bendy twig than they ever have out of some weird plastic ball with a bell inside. Yay nature!
Mulberries: The Beginning
I am attempting a semi-microblog. I don’t think I quite managed it! lol
Here are the mulberries Yankee Elv and Mr Teeny-bop picked. This is a ginormous sieve/colander. These berries filled two large containers.
The mega mound of mulberries.
Day One of The Great Mulberry Harvest: Muffins
Check it out: the crumb isn't right and neither is the outside. But I like how the mulberries stain the muffin bluey purple!
I made muffins with 1.5 cups of mulberries. It was the first time I tried this recipe. I didn’t use any of the lemon stuff, and obviously, I used mulberries instead of blueberries. Unfortunately, I wasn’t overly thrilled. They came out a bit tough; the outside was too hard and chewy and the crumb inside wasn’t right. My friend Jho said they tasted like cardboard! Yankee Elv was slightly more diplomatic and just said they tasted a bit bland. Mr Teeny-bop didn’t like them, but he is super picky, so that was no surprise. I thought, however; they tasted reasonably good when warmed up and spread with some nuttelex. And it used 1.5 cups of mulberries, so that was a win!!
Day Two of The Great Mulberry Harvest: Giveaway
I gave a container of mulberries to Jho and her partner BB. Jho, as it turned out, didn’t like them (“They taste like semi-sweet small cherries!”), and she shared them around to other pepole in the office. BB will eat them with yoghurt, though. Yankee Elv took a much bigger container to work, where everyone picked at them all day long, quite happily.
Day Three of the Great Mulberry Harvest: Taking a Break!!
We still have a couple of cups of mulberries left in a container in the fridge and we’re still getting through the muffins too! I don’t want to make much more til we get through those, but I’m going to have to do something tomorrow or the berries will go bad.
I think we’ll probably pick the next lot of ripe ones off the bush (tree) tomorrow and get going on the next lot of things to make. Ideas include:
- Mulberry nutbread: Yankee Elv makes a great one with zucchini and dried cranberries – I think the addition of mulberries would work quite well
- Frozen mulberries: For later in the year when we want berries but the growing season is over
- Mulberry cobbler: Yankee Elv introduced me to cobbler when we were living in the USA; we don’t have cobbler in Australia really. I love it.
- Mulberry jam: I’ve never tried making jam before, and I’d like to try, but it seems like such a big job. If I have time, I’d definitely like to do this – especially cos it means using up berries now before they go bad, but not having to eat them incessantly for a month!
- Mulberry syrup or stewed mulberries: To eat with pancakes, on icecream or with yoghurt.
- Mulberry/hoisin marinade to eat with tofu
- Mulberries in salad.
September Already?!
Whoa, so it has been ages since I’ve been here… I’ve been keeping an eye on things, but haven’t had a chance to post. It’s been a crazy year so far. Some major highs, like…
- Buying (mortgaging) our first house, just 5 mins up the road from my good friend Jho’s place
- Getting a new kitten (rescued off the road at 5wks old, poor wee thing, just in time for my birthday)
I hereby christen this kitten Fruit Tingle.
- Ending a lease for the last time ever (no more renting!!)
- Everyone going great guns at work and school
- My health hitting a plateau (and since the only other way it could go was down, I’m taking plateau as a major win)
- Yankee Elv getting dreadlocks, which she loves, and which killed my hands for the 50-odd hours it took me to do them for her
Yankee Elv loving her dreads (they were less than a week old at this point)
Yankee Elv's new hairdo gave me the perfect opportunity to rock a dreadstache.
- Mr Teeny-bop getting taller than me and is starting to act less like an irritating teenager and more like a sensible verging-on-grown-up boy
- Our old mate The Dyke Mike coming back down under… maybe for good again
- My vegan-ness continues unabated
- …and did I mention our new house? Quarter of an acre, baby!
Yankee Elv running around the lounge room on the day we got the keys.
But there have been some heavy lows too. The biggest and hardest hitting was Loodle and Old Man Fatso leaving us for greener pastures/another turn at the wheel. They were both very old and it was time… but it still sucked. It’s been since January for Fatso and since May for Loodle, but we still miss them and catch ourselves looking for them. That’s probably partly why I haven’t been here too much. I didn’t feel like I could write about it. Time helps, a bit.
Fatso and Loodle in times gone by.
Otherwise… Yankee Elv’s health has gone down as mine has improved plateaued and we’re not sure what’s going on with her yet. The car has been a never-ending money pit, but we have found an awesome mechanic and our new place is closer to Yankee Elv’s work, so there’s less driving (better for us and the planet!) and everything seems to be on track now. There’s an enormous possum in our ceiling who refuses to leave and is probably peeing all over everything up there as I type. I think his little minion possums come bring him food and water. He sounds like an overgrown wombat wandering around over our heads.
But in the grand scheme of things, life hasn’t been treating us too badly. Some days are diamonds, some… no, I’m not going to go there John Denver. Especially since I only realised the lyrics were ‘stones’ when I looked them up just now. I always thought he said ‘dogs’. Why did I think that?
Sorry, sidetracked.
So anyway, basically, I’m here to say I’m here. I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth, I still read your comments and I still think of things to write here all the time. I just haven’t been able to get here to write anything. Mortgages involve a lot of paperwork. Paperwork = time-consuming.
I hope to get here more often from now on, I’ve got lots I want to say, but I’m going to be honest. No promises. There’s lots we want to do with the new house to get it just how we want it and the rest of my family are planning on applying for Aussie citizenship shortly, now they’re eligible. More paperwork; more time. But I’ll pop back again at least periodically, if not regularly… maybe I’ll do some shorter posts. Somewhere between the microblogging of Twitter and the super-epic-macroblogging I tend to do here.
So on that note, I leave you with one of the awesome surprises we found it our backyard (it was a stick when we moved in and suddenly, rapidly, ended up like this):
Mulberries
More mulberries (there are tonnes of them)
Peaches! I think it's a dwarf peach tree.
More to come…
Friday Feast: Cranberry Pecan Bread Pudding
A few weeks ago, I was looking through the cupboard and fridge thinking about what food I needed to use up. I try to avoid wasting food. If you want to know more about why, have a look on the Wasted Food blog, cos Jonathan Bloom lists a bunch of reasons.
Anyway, I found half a stale baguette, some pecans that were on their last legs (or would have been, if pecans had legs), and some apples. The baguette was like a rock – there was no eating that unless it was significantly softened somehow, which prompted me to think of a bread pudding. However, I was never the biggest fan of the kinds of bread puddings I had as a kid. They were made of white sandwich loaf (too soft, which made for a soggy pudding), with milk, eggs, sugar and sultanas. I’m not big on sultanas in sweet food, although I love them in curry. My childhood memory was not what I wanted for a bread pudding. (Sorry Mum and Dad, I know you like it, but it’s not my style.) So I hunted down a new recipe.
My google-fu did not fail me, and I found a recipe for Cranberry Pecan Bread Pudding in the Dairy Free Cooking section of About.com. There seems to be some good stuff there, so it’s worth having a look. I tweaked the recipe quite a bit (halving it, then increasing some ingredients, reducing others, swapping nutmeg for cardamom), but I’m really happy with the end result. It’s American tasting (hello cranberries, apples and pecans), but it’s got a special little something something that makes it unlike the typical American fare (probably the ginger and cardamom). The consistency was soft, but not soggy, and the nuts added a lovely bite.
I actually made it with only a quarter of a chopped apple, but I couldn’t taste it at all, so I’ve increased it to a whole apple in the recipe below. I increased the pecans too – I used only a third of a cup, but Yankee Elv insisted it needed more. Otherwise, she loved this pudding though – and so did I!
Cranberry Pecan Bread Pudding
Ingredients
- 4.5 cups stale bread, cut into 1.5cm (about half an inch) cubes
- 1/2 cup dried cranberries (currants might be a good alternative if you prefer them)
- 1 apple, finely chopped
- 1/2 cup pecans, chopped or crumbled
- 1 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp ground ginger
- 1/4 tsp cardamom (or you could use nutmeg)
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 2 cups plain non-dairy milk (I used soy)
- 1 tab vegetable oil
- 1/3 cup liquid sweetener (I used agave nectar)
Method:
- Preheat the oven to 190°C (about 350°F).
- Lightly oil a medium-sized heatproof dish (such as a pyrex dish) and set it aside.
- In a large bowl, combine the bread cubes, cranberries, apple, pecans, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom and salt until well mixed.
- Using a wooden spoon, stir in the non-dairy milk, vegetable oil and liquid sweetener until well combined.
- Allow the mixture to stand for 10 minutes, so all the bread is soaked. The liquid should be almost gone.
- Spoon the mixture into the prepared dish and bake until mostly firm and golden brown, about 35 to 45 minutes.
- Serve warm with non-dairy custard (which I make the same way as dairy custard, just with soy milk. Please note: there are no eggs in my custard, ever!)
Friday Feast: Carrot, Pineapple and Soybean Stir-fry
Ok, I know this combination of ingredients sounds weird, but it’s good, trust me. This is one of Yankee Elv’s recipes, and she first made it while she was in the USA. I think it’s some kind of weird US North Pacific Rim fusion sort of meal. Anyway, it’s really easy and tastes great, so give it a go!
Carrot, Soybean, and Pineapple Stirfry
Carrot, Pineapple and Soybean Stir-fry, with rice.
Ingredients:
• 2 tablespoon oil
• 3 cloves garlic, minced (or as much as you want)
• 2 medium carrots, sliced
• 1 240g (8oz) can pineapple chunks WITH juice – don’t drain
• 1 – 1 1/2 cups frozen green soybeans (edamame)
• 2 tablespoon soy sauce
• 2 teaspoon sesame oil
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper (less or more to adjust spiciness)
• 2 teaspoon sesame seeds (optional)
• cooked rice (preferably cooked at least a day before, so it is less sticky)
Method:
1. Heat the oil in a wok or large frying pan over medium-high heat.
2. Add garlic and carrots and stir-fry for about 4 to 5 minutes
3. Add the pineapple with the juice. Saute on medium-high until juice is almost gone; about 5 to 10 minutes.
4. Meanwhile, defrost the frozen soybeans so they are no longer frozen (but they can still be cold) by heating them in the microwave, in water to cover, for 1 minute (if you don’t have a microwave, you can do it on the stove).
5. When the pineapple juice is almost gone, add the soybeans, soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger, and red pepper. Heat for 3 to 5 minutes, until the spices are mixed and the beans are warmed through.
6. You can either mix in the rice and cook it some more with the stirfry (gives the rice some extra flavor), or just ladle the stir-fry over the rice.
Optional: sprinkle sesame seeds over the meal for a bit of a crunch.
Friday Feast: Vegan Apple Crumble
Lately, I’ve been on a bit of a muffin kick. This isn’t a muffin recipe though – I’m still working on those. Don’t get all impatient-like, the recipes will come. But right now, this is an apple crumble recipe. It’s good stuff. I tweaked an apple crumble recipe I’ve been making since I was 13, took some inspiration from a berry cobbler that Yankee Elv makes, and ta-da! Vegan dessert-y goodness. I first made this about a month ago.
I made up some soy custard to go with it. I just followed the instructions on my Poppy custard powder box, but added extra custard powder as soy custard seems to thicken up a bit less than dairy custard. It turned out beautifully. For those of you who can’t find custard powder, you could probably just use cornstarch (cornflour) with some vanilla flavouring and yellow colouring. The only other ingredients are non-dairy milk and a spoonful of sugar.
Yankee Elv asked me to make this again the next week. She’s a bit obsessed with it now. But it really does taste so good…
Apple Crumble
Apple crumble with home-made soy custard. It's a dreadful photo, sorry - it was night time so I had to use flash and it's very glary.
Ingredients
**filling**
- 800g tin pie apples (or equivalent fresh apples – I work full time, so I’ve no time to stew apples. I have to make do with recycling the tin)
- 2 tabs white sugar (I use low GI cane sugar)
- 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
**topping**
- 1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
- Heaped 1/4 cup vegan margarine, softened and in small pieces
- 1 1/4 cup rolled oats
- 1/2 cup plain flour
- 1/2 cup unsweetened desiccated coconut
Method
- Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F).
- Combine filling ingredients in a pie dish.
- Combine topping ingredients, except margarine, in a bowl.
- Rub in margarine until combined.
- Cover filling with topping.
- Bake for approx. 30 mins, or until topping is starting to brown and get crunchy.
Wassup?
I haven’t been steadily posting recently cos I’ve either been busy or tired. Life has been interfering with my life! So here’s a snapshot (in hindsight, it’s more like a full school photo) of what’s been happening in the house of ELV.
The house of ELV (speaking of) is being sold – we have to move elsewhere. We don’t know for sure whether they want us to see out the lease for a few more months, or leave ASAP (although they can’t force us), but already plent of debate about buy vs rent has ensued. We’ve decided to rent again for now. So the house-hunting begins. I will miss our friendly neighbour even if he does kill passionfriut vines and can’t understand most of what I say. I already miss the duck at the other neighbour’s house – I don’t know what happened to cute little Mishka. I will also miss the sounds of the chooks over the back clucking away in the mornings. *sigh* I hate moving.
My butternut pumpkin vines are growing rampantly and have already started to flower (so pretty!). If we can stay for a few more months, I may get a pumpkin or two. Otherwise, the new owner will be feasting on the fruits of my labour.
I’ve been telecommuting up a storm, which has proved more enjoyable than I anticipated. I really thought I’d miss the camraderie of the office, but due to a combination of many of my chatty friends moving to other jobs and the use of collaborative technology to talk to my remaining friends, it has been pretty cool. I get more work done and my lungs enjoy the lack of air conditioning. I’m only going into the office once this week. Think how little the impact of my transportation is this week!
I read No Impact Man‘s book. I liked it, although it did get a little preachy at times, but only momentarily, then it went back to interestingly philosophical and funnily anecdotal at the same time. It took me back to when I first started reading No Impact Man’s blog a couple of years ago. I loved it and it inspired me no end. It was nice to feel that zeal again. A note though: why was it ok to tell the world that his wife used menstrual cups, but not share what he used instead of toilet paper? I’m not one for secrecy about bodily functions anyway, although I respect his choice not to expose everything, but isn’t that a bit of a double standard? (I shan’t stir up controversy by discussing what this double standard may indicate…).
My buddy went to Singapore and all I got were these two metal ear diggers. I only got them on the proviso that I blogged about them! Yankee Elv and I have both tried them. Apparently I have pretty clean ears, so nothing much is happening for me, although I’ve heard good things from others. Yankee Elv doesn’t get dirty ears at all (we’re not sure why, perhaps something to do with a lack of inner ear hair due to deafness?). She mostly uses cotton tips to itch the ear in which she wears her hearing aid. For this purpose, she tells me, the ear digger is a poor substitute – she can’t think of anything other than a cotton tip that will do the job, as she doesn’t like the hard, scrape-y feeling of the ear digger. Can anyone think of an alternative?
I’ve been reducing the amount of soy milk I’m consuming, since I’ve increased my intake of soy yoghurt and soy cheese as I’ve struggled through my first six weeks of veganism. I’ve been supplementing my soy milk intake with oat milk, and thought I’d do a little unofficial research into which is the best. Expect an oat milk review post coming soon.
Something is eating my sweet potato leaves. I thought it was a caterpillar, but I only saw it on them once. For a while I saw these shiny little bugs about the size of large fleas, but they seemed to disappear a week or so ago. Now they’re just holey leaves. What has been munching them?
I’ve decided before we move house, I am going to take cuttings of rosemary, pink frangipanis and jade plant. All three are growing brilliantly here and I don’t want to lose them. The grapefruits aren’t in season or I’d plant some seeds – the grapefruit tree really is prolific in its bounty and produces the most enormous, spectacular, juicy fruit. Alas, I think I shan’t be around to see it this year. Does anyone know if you can grow native ginger from a cutting? I’m sure we have some of that somewhere too…
I’m looking for a copy of Sharon Astyk’s Depletion and Abundance at the library as I’ve heard it’s good. I used to read her blog, but found it too heavy for my short internet attention span. I think I will like it better in book form. Unless I know the author or have read the book already, I try to get all my books from the library. What’s the point of wasting resources and space with a bazillion books you’re only going to read once? I like the books on my shelves to be old friends.
I’ve been trying hard to be a good vegan, and I think I’m mostly succeeding, but I haven’t always been able to keep a cheery face on. Now, you might think that a cheery face about veganism isn’t necessary, but I think it is when you’re talking about it with non-vegans. As a vegetarian, I always present the face of ‘gosh, I am supportive of everyone’s choices, and if you want to eat meat, that’s your right – but wow, vegetarianism is easy, tasty, fun, healthy, good for the environment… wow, it’s just so great!’. Yeah, that’s quite a face. I better hope the wind doesn’t change. However, I guess I didn’t have as many people to talk with when I first went veg, as opposed to now, when all my co-workers know and ask me how it’s going. They are all very supportive, but I find it hard to publicly keep my chin up on a day when I’m really missing cheese or chocolate – especially since these things are often to be found in our office! I think they all think I’m a bit of a fringey, fanatic weirdo – in a nice way, of course. Telecommuting has helped since I’m not around those foods so much, and so has Lindt Lindor’s 70% dark chocolate (I know it’s not Fair Trade, but one step at a time)… but still, I find myself feeling guilty over my inability to be perky, sunshiny vegan at work. Breaking the dairy addiction is hard – much harder than giving up meat was! Sometimes I think it’s too hard and I’m being mean to myself (after all, isn’t life about experiences? I like my experiences to be as pleasant as I can make them). I think maybe I could just get dairy sparingly, from a nice organic farm… but then I think of the baby cows, especially the bobby calves, and their poor mamas! I think the guilt I’d feel over that would surpass any nice feelings the cheese/chocolate/ice-cream gave me. And so I stick with it. Soldier on, you know. Codral hit the nail on the head with that one.
Yankee Elv and I went to the West End markets on Saturday. We missed out on Dagwood Dogs from Ykillamoocow, to our surprise. They normally start cooking them at 10am and this week they started at 7am, bowing to popular demand. Not my demand, I like a sleep-in! I got a pumpkin/barley roll (kind of like a vegan sausage roll, but one that isn’t trying to taste like herbed, minced animal bits. It was a tasty breakfast with the home-made tamarind sauce and the homestyle lemonade we bought. Plus I had a few of Yankee Elv’s Greek honey puffs for dessert, and a vegan melting moment (passionfruit cream, from The Bakery V stall). We also tried Hibiscus juice (gorgeous, tasted similar to sweetened cranberry juice), tapenade, local honey (also not vegan, I knooooow), pineapple chunks and more juice. We were quite restrained really. We got lots of stuff, including some things I haven’t tried before (parsnips and fresh olives, like, right off the tree kind of fresh). I also got a couple of plantains, which I think I’m going to use in a curry, plus lots of our usual kinds of veges/fruits. I loved going to the counter and paying tiny amounts; I paid 75 cents for the two most enormous carrots ever. I did not like going within a five stall radius of the feral seafood stall. We mightn’t eat fish, but Yankee Elv and I both grew up around seafood and I’m sorry, but if it smells like that then you do not want to be putting it in your body. Ew. We wound up the morning with a visit to Reverse Garbage, but didn’t buy anything. It’s fun just to look and imagine.
Only two of my spring onions have lived and they are tiny – I think they drowned in their wet little corner. From one extreme to another with them! I’ll try again at the new place. I can’t tell my carrots from the weeds, so I guess the new owner will be in for a surprise eventually…
The new Clem 7 tunnel is brilliantly fast, but apparently has tonnes (literally) more pollution that was originally estimated. I don’t know that the two air sucker towers (I can’t remember what they’re called! One is Jacaranda purple and the other is Poinciana red) are doing their job.
One of the Clem 7 air sucker tower things is the colour of the flowers on the Jacaranda trees.
Motorists have been advised not to wind down their windows in the tunnel because the pollution is so bad. We found this out after we spent 25 mins in a traffic jam in there, with the windows down cos our car has no air conditioning. This is why I like buses. The tunnel was very zippy outside of peak hours though, taking about 4 mins from end to end.
I’ve just remembered I haven’t hung out the wet sheets and blankets I washed, which made me think of the clothes line, which made me remember that all potential new houses must have a place for an under-the-house line. The list of requirements seems to be mounting.
And I have also realised that I’ve written a tonne! Clearly I needed a post like this. I started on the oat milk review yesterday and it just seemed to drag and things kept distracting me… sometimes I guess you need to just let it all flow out higgledy-piggledy.
Speaking of pigs (well, piggledy, close enough) – look!
It's Edgar Alan Pig from Edgar's Mission! He's so cute!
And that’s all I have to say about that.
Friday Feast: Oatmeal Cookie Bars
Here comes the latest recipe… it’s a cross between a slice, a cookie and a granola bar – it’s Oatmeal Cookie Bars! I’ve just veganised these tasty treats, which wasn’t too hard. They’ve come out a little more crumbly than their non-vegan versions, but that could also be because I used gluten-free flour and baked them about ten minutes longer than usual (I momentarily forgot they were in the oven).
Regardless of any mishap, they’re still super tasty. Eat them fresh from the oven (be careful you don’t burn your mouth on the cranberries, which seem to get to a scalding temperature), cold the next day, or re-heated in the microwave. I used to eat these with ice-cream in my non-vegan days (as if they were so long ago!), so if you’re into vegan ice-cream, that could be a winner too. I’m going to try them with this new vegan cream I bought last week… I hope it’s good!
Oatmeal Cookie Bars
A slice of Oatmeal Cookie Bar, half crumbled on the plate. Look at the cranberries and that chunk of vegan white chocolate - yum!
Ingredients:
- 230g (0.5lb or 2 sticks) vegan margarine (I use Nuttelex)
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1/2 cup white sugar (I used LoGIcane – a low GI version of cane sugar)
- Egg substitute, equivalent to 2 eggs (I used Orgran Egg Replacer)
- 1 tsp vanilla essence (imitation is ok)
- 1/2 cups plain (aka all purpose) flour (I used 1/2 cup each of wholemeal spelt, barley and Orgran’s gluten-free flours)
- 1 tsp bi-carb soda (aka baking soda)
- 1/2 tsp salt – optional
- 1 tsp cinnamon – optional
- 3 cups rolled oats
- 1 cup sultanas or dried cranberries (I used the latter this time, but sometimes I do half and half)
- 1 cup vegan chocolate chips (I used 1/2 cup each of Sweet Williams chocolate chips and chopped Sweet Williams white chocolate)
- 1/2 cup to 1 cup of desiccated coconut
Method
- Preheat oven to 180°C (350°F).
- Beat margarine and sugars until creamy (it’s ok to do this by hand).
- Add eggs and vanilla and beat well (still ok by hand..).
- In a separate bowl, combine flour(s), bi-carb soda, cinnamon and salt.
- Mix the aforementioned dry ingredients into the wet ingredients.
- Add oats, sultanas/dried cranberries, chocolate chips and desiccated coconut, and mix well.
- Press into a greased baking tray or dish (I use a square pyrex dish) and bake for 30-35mins*.
*You can also use this recipe for cookies, rather than cookie bars – if so, shape into cookies, place on a tray and bake for 10 to 12 mins.
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