VeganMoFo 2015! and redcurrant pancakes

(Nederlandstalige versie)

It’s 1 September, which means the ninth Vegan Month of Food has officially started! You probably already know all about VeganMoFo if you follow my blog, but just in case: the Vegan Month of Food is an awesome worldwide vegan blogging marathon dedicated to celebrating vegan food. Starting this year, it’s no longer limited to bloggers: you can now participate through Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or any other platform you can think of.

As for me, I’ll be updating this blog when I can and supplementing blog posts with photos on Instagram (which may be enough of a challenge in and of itself as I haven’t used it much and don’t own a smartphone). I hope spreading MoFo across many different platforms will be a nice way to take the pressure off blogging and to allow people to participate in whatever way they want. It also means that you can still join in even if you haven’t signed up: just use the hashtags #veganmofo and #vgnmf15!

Another new element in this year’s Month of Food is this list of daily prompts from the MoFo HQ: a different theme for each day of September. This means that lots of people will be posting about the same topic at the same time, which I think will be really fun to see.

Today’s prompt is an easy one: “show us your breakfast”! I’ve already posted this morning’s breakfast on Instagram, so here’s one from last Saturday.

Redcurrant and oat pancakes (adapted from Vegan Brunch), citrus and pomegranate soya yoghurt swirled together with pomegranate seeds on top, an apple, and fresh mint tea. Best breakfast of the week! I love making savoury brunches, but most days I need something sweet to get me out of bed. It’s usually just oatmeal porridge, so these pancakes made me happy.

Links of the day

To spread the VeganMoFo love, I thought I’d share some of my favourite posts that I’ve seen so far.
– I loved this post from Vegan Eats and Treats, partly for the breakfast ideas, but mostly for the incredibly cute illustrations of Amey’s morning routine which includes three dogs and two cats.
– Jojo from Vegan in Brighton posted a recap of the best soya yoghurts she’s tried so far while travelling through Europe. I love soya yoghurt and Alpro’s is the only one I eat regularly (those are the Mild & Creamy pomegranate and citrus flavours pictured above) so I liked seeing the different brands she’s found.
– Speaking of vegan yoghurt, Rose from Dandelion Vegan Blog posted about her experiences making cashew yoghurt. I’ve made my own soy yoghurt before, but it always comes out very thin, so I’d love to try adding cashews sometime.
– If you’d like to look at more delicious vegan pancakes, check out these buckwheat pancakes with blueberry coulis from Little Vegan Bear, these carrot cake pancakes with aquafaba from Veganopoulous, and these spelt pancakes with salted date caramel from Tartes and Recreation.

Who else is participating in VeganMoFo this year? Please let me know if you think I might not be following you yet – Happy VeganMoFo everyone! :)

Dornish chickpea scramble with red chillies

(Nederlandstalige versie)

Yesterday I posted about a specific meal from the world of Game of Thrones. The dish below isn’t mentioned in the books, but this is what I imagine a vegan breakfast in Dorne would look like. Fiery dragon peppers are a typically Dornish ingredient and they’re mentioned a few times in the description of egg dishes. I think they’d work just as well with chickpeas. This dish is supposed to be very spicy, so choose the hottest pepper you can handle! (In my case, that was still a pretty mild one.)

The recipe is really a combination of the tofu scramble from Isa’s Vegan Brunch and the chickpea scramble from Isa Does It. I love the flavours from the former, but I can see how tofu would be hard to come by in Dorne, so chickpeas seemed like a better choice. (Although I also don’t know where in Westeros you’d find nutritional yeast, but shh.)

Dornish scrambled chickpeas with red chillies

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, halved and thinly sliced
1 red chilli (or pepper of your choice) seeded or not seeded (depending on your preference) and thinly sliced
1 cup chickpeas
1 clove garlic, minced
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon lemon juice
½-1 teaspoon ground cumin seeds
2 tablespoons nutritional yeast
fresh coriander/cilantro (optional)

1. Heat the olive oil in a frying pan over medium heat. Add the onion and sauté for about 3 minutes. Stir in the red chilli.

2. Meanwhile, mash the chickpeas with a fork until they are mostly broken up but with a few larger pieces here and there (you can also mash them once you’ve added them to the pan). Add the chickpeas, garlic, and salt to the pan and cook for 5 minutes or so, until the chickpeas start to brown; stir occasionally.

3. In a small bowl, mix together the lemon juice and cumin and stir them into the chickpeas. Heat everything through, adding a spoonful of water if it looks too dry.

4. Turn off the heat and stir in the nutritional yeast. Garnish with fresh coriander, if you like, and serve with flatbread for a Dornish breakfast.

Pancakes from BitterSweet and Kumquat Poppy Seed Scones

I’m super sleepy right now, so here’s a quick post about the delicious breakfast & scones I made today!
I felt like having a nice leisurely weekend breakfast but I didn’t really want to make something elaborate just for myself when I had too many other things to do. I did have some blueberries I needed to use, though, so I was really happy to come across this Pancakes for One recipe on Hannah’s blog. Okay, most pancake recipes don’t really take very long to prepare, but I guess I just needed the reminder that sometimes it’s worth a little extra effort to make a meal a bit more special. In the end my boyfriend joined me for breakfast even though he didn’t have much time (who could say no to blueberry pancakes?) so I made a double batch of the recipe to share.

The following treat doesn’t technically fit in with my MoFo theme for this month as it’s not a recipe from a blog, but it is from one of Hannah’s cookbooks so I’m including it anyway:
Kumquat poppy seed scones! My parents came dropped by for a visit today and I wanted to make them something tasty they hadn’t tried before. I knew they love baked goods with poppy seeds and I’d just picked up some kumquats at the market, so these scones from Vegan Desserts were perfect! I hadn’t tried kumquats before but I knew I could rely on Hannah’s recipes to turn a new ingredient into an original and delicious treat.  I was a little worried these wouldn’t turn out as I had to replace the margarine with oil, but I don’t think it affected the texture too much (I froze the oil beforehand so it was solid – a trick I’d learned from Vegan Pie in the Sky) and these scones were absolutely lovely.

I hope everyone’s enjoying MoFo 2012 so far. The first week’s gone by so quickly!

VeganMoFo 2012 & English Muffins from Cooking in Color

Wait, it’s October already? I’ve participated in the Vegan Month of Food before so of course I’ve been excited to join in again to do as much food blogging as I can for a month, but I haven’t found the time to plan out my posts as much as I would’ve liked to. I do have a very broad theme though: blogs! For me, VeganMoFo is a celebration of vegan food blogs around the world and in that spirit I’d like to spend this month cooking recipes from as many different blogs as I can. Other than that my posts probably won’t be very elaborate as I expect I’ll also be busy with homework and other things, but we’ll see!

For today, I picked a recipe from Nanette’s blog, Cooking in Color. I’m always in favour of cooking with a variety of colours and I love Nanette’s photos and recipes for highlighting colourful vegetables and fruits (not to mention the adorable rabbit pictures!), but this time I was looking for a quick bread recipe, so I decided to make these no-knead English muffins.

I’d wanted to make my own English muffins for years and now that I’ve finally tried them, I know I’m definitely going to make them more often. They’re so easy! I love making big crusty loaves of bread but those recipes usually require quite a bit of planning ahead, so I really appreciate quick recipes that I can make on week nights as well. These muffins were perfect – they’re a no-knead bread that I can make in under an hour without even turning on the oven. And because the recipe made enough dough for 10 English muffins, I put half of them in the fridge uncooked so I could cook them in the morning with minimal effort and have fresh, warm bread within minutes.

This evening we had some of the muffins with tofu scramble and sautéed mushrooms and tomato as a breakfast-for-dinner-style meal. The picture looks a little gloomy but this was a lovely dinner for this rainy day. And besides, I think I’d better get used to the gloominess in photos because let’s face it, it’s October and I live in the Netherlands. There’s no escaping the gloom!

Who else is doing VeganMoFo this year? Have you thought of a theme? I can’t wait to read everyone’s posts and I’m looking forward to discovering new favourite blogs as well!

Sourdough waffles from BitterSweet

Waffles are a pretty wonderful breakfast food. They’re versatile so they can be made as healthy or as decadent as you like, they freeze well, they even make great portable snacks. For some reason, though, my waffle iron had been sitting in a box unused for a while now. I really want to start using it more often, so when I was looking for new ways to use my sourdough starter and came across this this waffle recipe by Hannah Kaminsky, I couldn’t wait to give it a try. Like most sourdough recipes, these waffles require a little planning as you need to make part of the batter ahead of time, but this only means there will be less work to do in the morning so you’ll be tucking into a stack of waffles in no time. I used my grandmother’s waffle iron and got eight big crispy waffles out of the batter, which was plenty for the two of us. These would have been amazing with maple syrup and fresh berries, but we had neither, so we spread them with strawberry rhubarb jam – perfect!

Summer Breakfasts

Today was a long, cold, dark day. Seems like the perfect time to go through my photos from this summer and share a few breakfasts I’d been meaning to post! I don’t remember all the details about these, but I assure you everything was delicious.

First up is this plate of tofu scramble (with almost more veggies than tofu, it seems), roasted vegetables and a few strawberries as a little dessert. I used the Roasted Root Vegetables recipe from Vegan Brunch as a base for the side dish, using potato instead of some of the roots. Loved this!

I made these Blueberry Corn Pancakes from Veganomicon as a treat for my boyfriend one morning because he usually really likes things with blueberries, and we both loved them! I definitely have to remember to make these again when I have blueberries around.

I also made poffertjes! I had made them before, using a recipe from a cookbook, but this time I adapted a basic recipe from Wikipedia. They were really tasty (and so much fun to make), so maybe I’ll try and post a recipe if I try them again in the future.

Hmm, I think it was already autumn when I made these muffins, but their name definitely fits the summer theme: the Pineapple Carrot Sunshine Muffins from Veganomicon. Lena from the NVV forum recommended them to me, so I gave them a try, and they turned out perfectly! I didn’t have golden raisins, as you can see in the picture, but these were still a great success. They’re very moist and tasty and made for convenient snacks to take with me to classes (in my little cupcake container!)

Oh, I’m already looking forward to being able to enjoy summery breakfasts outside in the garden again. Meanwhile, I’ll keep enjoying delicious pumpkin-flavoured foods! More on that tomorrow.