Cookbooks & Buffets

These are the new cookbooks that I received today! They’re Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, 500 Vegan Recipes by Celine Steen and Joni Marie Newman (both books that just came out), and My Sweet Vegan by Hannah Kaminsky (which I’d wanted to order for a looong time). I can’t wait to cook from these books, but meanwhile, I’m having loads of fun just reading them. Look at how huge 500 Vegan Recipes is! The other two are packed with delicious looking recipes, too.

On a different subject, I spent pretty much my entire Sunday eating at restaurants, and I found plenty of vegan options! In the morning, we had a lovely family brunch at Van der Valk in Rotterdam. Even though I called ahead to make sure there would be something to eat for vegans, no one at the restaurant seemed to know what I was talking about when I referred to this phone conversation. Still, the people there were very friendly and I was able to put together a decent meal of salads, fresh fruits, stir-fried veggies, and french fries. So the food was pretty good, and it’s always especially fun to have such a big family get together!

For dinner, my boyfriend’s parents took us to Happy Wok, a wok restaurant in a nearby village. They have a buffet where you can choose from a few prepared dishes, but you can also create your own dish by combining different raw vegetables from the buffet and having the cooks prepare the meal for you. I asked one of the staff members about vegan options, and he surprised me by showing me the vegan tomato soup, spring rolls, those triangles with curry filling (what are they called?), battered deep-fried banana, and different stir-fry sauces. I think I’m going to make sure about the sauces next time because he said all of them were vegan except the curry sauce, but they also sell oyster sauce and I don’t think that’s usually vegan. Still, this variety of things to choose from is awesome! I couldn’t get any good pictures, but here’s a little mosaic to give you an idea:

The food in the picture includes fresh fruit (and fruit from a can, probably), tomato soup, stir-fried vegetables in sweet and sour sauce, french fries, herbed potatoes, deep-fried snacks, and pears in chocolate sauce. Mmmmmm.

Oh, I also went back to Eazie last week and tried their tomato soup.

I thought this dish was always vegan, but it turns out they normally put in chicken pieces when you order the tomato soup. Luckily, I discovered this before they prepared it, so I made sure to ask for a vegetarian option. They did put in mung bean sprouts and sliced green onions, both of which were excellent additions. I’m not a big fan of the overwhelming sweetness of most Chinese tomato soups, but the fresh vegetables made the soup taste a lot fresher.

Going back to admiring my new cookbooks now :D

VeganMoFo 32: Happy Halloween!

This is a quick final MoFo post, because it’s almost midnight over here!

I don’t really celebrate Halloween at all, but I still enjoyed making these Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cupcakes (from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World). I only added chocolate chips to half of the batch, because I was afraid I wouldn’t like them in there, but they are delicious! They were a perfect dessert to the lovely dinner I had today.
Sorry for the horrible picture, by the way. I wanted to make it all cool and spooky and halloweeny with the cat in the background, but it was so late that my only lighting was a desk lamp and it turned out ugly. Oh well. Maybe the crappy lighting at least made it a little creepy? I think I’ll try and take a better photo in the morning.

So that’s it for this month… Goodbye, VeganMoFo 2009… I’m going to miss you :)

Have a nice day!

VeganMoFo 31: Fennel Soup

I just posted this in Dutch on the Plantaardig Maandag blog (which you should check out! if you speak Dutch, of course), so I figured I’d post the English version of the recipe on here, too. It’s my mother’s recipe for fennel soup and it’s one of my favourite dishes!

Ingredients:
1 (large) fennel bulb
1 litre vegetable bouillon
2-3 Tablespoons vegan margarine or oil
3-4 Tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon dried basil
soy cream (optional)
salt and pepper (to taste)

Start by cleaning the fennel: rinse it well and remove the bottom and tops. Reserve the leaves for garnish, if you like. Halve the bulb and cut the halves into slices. Boil the fennel pieces in the vegetable bouillon for about 10 minutes and set aside. Meanwhile, make a roux by melting the margarine in a separate pot and stirring in the flour. When the fennel pieces are done cooking, add them to the flour mixture (start by adding only a little of the bouillon at a time). Stir in the dried basil and purée the soup with an immersion blender.

I personally don’t think this dish needs any soy creamer, so I usually have it without. However, you can add it to make the soup extra creamy if you like. Add salt and pepper to taste and garnish with fresh fennel leaves.

VeganMoFo 30: Lemon Herb Tofu

This is one of my favourite tofu recipes: the Lemon Herb Tofu from Dreena Burton’s Vive le Vegan! It’s really easy to throw together and doesn’t even require any marinating time. And most importantly, the tofu slices are delicious and packed with flavour. I like the pieces as is, but I love them even more when they’re mashed with vegan mayonnaise and spread on a piece of toast. Mmm…

Also: today’s the last day of VeganMoFo! I feel like it’s gone by so quickly, especially since I didn’t find a lot of time to write posts this week. I actually still have a bunch of things on my list that I haven’t posted yet! There are also many MoFo posts by other foodbloggers that I haven’t even looked at yet, but I’m looking forward to reading all of them later!

This won’t be my last VeganMoFo post, by the way – I hope to make another one later today.

VeganMoFo 29: De Nieuwe U & Vegetarian Chicken Steak

There’s a little vegetarian store near Rijnhaven that I always see when I look out the window while travelling through Rotterdam in the metro. It’s called De Nieuwe U and I passed the store many times before I finally decided to go have a look. I found a couple of things that I had been trying to find for a while, such as tamarind paste (yay!). I also discovered a big freezer full of vegetarian mock meat products. As you can see on their website, those products include vegetarian fish, ham, chicken, meat balls, oysters, shrimp, duck, sausages, different kinds of steak… So many things! I was a little creeped out because all these veggie meats seem to resemble the real animal products so much, but I wanted to try something anyway.

After double-checking the ingredients to make sure I didn’t accidentally end up with real chicken (silly, I know), I decided on the Vegetarian Chicken Steak. At first, I wasn’t sure how to prepare it (The package suggests having it “fried with soy oil, microwave, oven, sliced then scramble with vegetable”), but eventually I just cut one into slices and added it to a stir-fry. In order to taste the steaks more properly, I also tried them in a sandwich:

I fried the steaks in a little olive oil and served them on a multigrain bread roll with peanut sauce (because I think that’s how some people eat real chicken meat?).

I have to say… I’m still a little creeped out by the flavour. It does really taste like chicken, apparently, because my boyfriend even asked if I was sure this meal was vegetarian. He says it not only tastes like a real chicken burger, but like a good quality chicken burger, too. It’s not that I don’t like the steaks (and I will probably buy something similar again), it’s just that I prefer other things that don’t resemble chicken so much. I’d rather have an Alpro filet or a chickpea cutlet or a bean burger, to be honest.

Still, I don’t want to sound too negative about the products (or the vegetarian shop)! I think it’s great that people are able to make vegan dishes that look and taste so close to non-vegan foods. I’d like to know more about how meat eaters like all these vegan chicken/fish/beef analogues! It would be great if all those products made it easier for some people to eat more vegetarian dishes.

I really liked De Nieuwe U, too. It’s a rather small store and the man who was working there at the time didn’t speak a lot of Dutch, but I’d love to go back sometime and try out a few more of the vegetarian items! Apparently they sell many different kinds of tea, too, but I haven’t looked at those yet.