Chocolate fondue and biscotti

(Nederlandstalige versie)

It’s retro day! I’ve been looking forward to reading the entries for this VeganMoFo prompt, but I didn’t have a solid plan myself. I wanted to make something in my Mum’s old Wonder Pot, but we didn’t have all the parts. Then I started to look through old cookbooks, and while I found a few amusing recipes, I didn’t see anything I would actually like to eat. I thought I might skip this prompt until I saw this post by Jo from Hello Seedling: fondue! Even if I couldn’t make a full savoury fondue spread, I figured I could at least do chocolate fondue for dessert.

Fresh berries are probably my favourite for chocolate fondue, but we had bananas and those were nice too. I also made a batch of vanilla and almond-flavoured biscotti. They were basically one of the recipes from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar with all the mix-ins left out because we’d be dipping them in chocolate anyway.

This was fun! Not too much work, not overwhelmingly sweet, and I still got a retro-ish meal into my day.

Our actual dinner was mushroom stroganoff with pasta and broccoli. Stroganoff was on my to do list, I had mushrooms I needed to use up, and I saw that Sal from Alien on Toast had posted this as her retro recipe, so it must have been meant to be. My version was somewhere in between Sal’s recipe and the one in Vegan with a Vengeance, both adapted to what I had in the fridge. My fresh pasta skills still need improving, but I loved the stroganoff!

Links of the day

– Hannah from House Vegan wrote about malt shop hamburgers, milkshakes, and her love of the 1950s.
– I’ve never had a prawn cocktail, but Amy/nos.da made one with Fry’s prawns that actually sounds good! Emil from Hasta La Vegan took it one step further and made prawn cocktail waffles.
– Sandwich cake!

Dame blanche

(Nederlandstalige versie)

When I read today’s VeganMoFo prompt — to recreate a restaurant meal — there were plenty of dishes that came to mind. There’s the cashew fondue from De Hagedis, the vegan kapsalon from De Vegetarische Snackbar, the babi pangang from De Oude Plek …

But in the end, I chose something else, because
1. I didn’t have the time/ingredients to do those restaurants’ dishes justice anyway, and
2. I had a stronger craving: ice cream and chocolate sauce.

Dame blanche (aka vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce) used to be one of my favourite desserts to order when we went out to eat, and I think it’s a shame that vegan versions aren’t easier to find! But fine, we’ll just make our own. I used this ice cream recipe from Serious Eats with a few changes in order to use the ingredients I already had. I didn’t have corn syrup, but keukenstroop is also supposed to be high in glucose so I used that. I had some vanilla-infused whiskey from a vanilla extract experiment, so that went into the mix as well. My biggest mistake was probably that I used cheap (watery) coconut milk which made the ice cream a bit icy — but nothing a generous amount of chocolate sauce can’t fix!

Links of the day

I’m loving everyone’s recreated restaurant dishes and I’m seeing so many things I want to eat! Right now, I would particularly like to try this stoverij with seitan from De Groene Keuken and this aubergine/eggplant parmesan from Vegan Eats & Treats.

Friday favourites

(Nederlandstalige versie)

It’s Friday and I have favourite things I want to tell you about!

#1: When my wife was a shiitake

Yesterday I read the short story When My Wife Was a Shiitake, in which a man rediscovers food after his wife passes away, and I immediately felt inspired to make sushi with stewed shiitakes. I soaked my shiitakes in water, pan-fried them in oil, stewed them in water with soy sauce, vegetarian oyster sauce, and a pinch of sugar, and served them on top of vinegared brown rice with vegetables on the side.

#2: Pancake soup

Pancake soup! I’d heard about this before (probably on Mihl’s blog) but I decided I had to try it after reading this post by Bianca. You make a few thin pancakes, cut them into strips, and put them in your vegetable soup. They’re like noodles, but thicker and better and more like pancakes.

#3: Gewoon Vegan

Gewoon Vegan is a new website by Martine from Vegetus with photos and reviews of vegan products you can buy in the Netherlands. It’s already helped me discover a few things I didn’t know about!

#4: Vegan Easter eggs

If you’ve been to Martine’s site you already know about this, but just in case you don’t: Lidl now has several kinds of vegan chocolate eggs! Pictured above are amaretto-filled eggs (on the left), eggs filled with hazelnut praline (on the right), and a big hollow egg (in the middle). Usually solid dark chocolate eggs are the only vegan ones (in regular supermarkets, anyway) so I’m glad Lidl is giving vegans a few more options this year.

#5: Poffertjes

I finally made poffertjes in my waffle iron and that worked wonderfully and now I want to eat them every week. I did feel like these came out a little drier than the ones made in a poffertjespan, but that may have been due to the amount of fat I used. I updated my recipe so it’s now available in Dutch as well as English and in grams as well as cups.

Have a good weekend! :)

Speculoos Spread Cookies and Chocolate Syrup from Have Cake, Will Travel

When I started looking for vegan recipes online years ago, Celine’s Have Cake, Will Travel was one of the first food blogs I found and it remains one of my absolute favourites. Some of the first vegan recipes I ever made were from her website (mostly breads and baked goods) and they really helped me fall in love with cooking and baking. My favourite is probably her recipe for French vanilla cupcakes (which I can’t find on the blog right now, but is similar to this equally lovely lemon cake), which is the best cake recipe I’ve tried. Celine has also written a number of excellent cookbooks, but since I’m focusing on blogs this month, I picked two new recipes to try from her site!
First up is this recipe for Speculoos Spread Cookies because I couldn’t resist the idea of taking a spread made with biscuits and then turning it back into a cookie again. I had to scale the recipe down considerably as my jar of Speculoos was nearly empty (how did all of that disappear so quickly?), so I got two good-sized cookies out of it. This amount was actually perfect as my small oven can’t hold that many cookies anyway, I got to use my new mini baking sheet, and my boyfriend and I each got to have one of them to dip into our hot chocolate, which we made using Celine’s chocolate syrup:
This recipe is quite simple but it’s great to have on hand. My boyfriend really appreciated the chocolate soy milk, and I’m looking forward to trying the syrup on fruits and desserts as well!

I hope everyone’s enjoying MoFo so far! I haven’t had much time to read posts yet so I can’t wait to catch up.

Chocolate raspberry tartlets and market produce

When I came home from the market with two boxes of raspberries that needed to be used quickly (more on that below), I immediately thought of this amazing-looking white chocolate raspberry tart I’d seen on Celine’s blog. Unfortunately I didn’t have the white chocolate or silken tofu required for the filling, so I went with a slightly different idea and made mini dark chocolate tarts instead. I halved Celine’s crust recipe, replaced the whole wheat flour with plain flour as that was all I had left, added a little cocoa powder for extra chocolate flavour, and baked it in a muffin tin (about 8 minutes for 6 mini crusts). The filling is a recipe from Vegan Pie in the Sky (Lagusta’s Chocolate Raspberry Pie) and even though I think I let the chocolate melt too quickly which prevented the ganache from firming up properly, I’m really happy with the way they turned out. I like that they’re not too sweet, so the flavour of the raspberries really shines. I’d love to try the white chocolate pie as well!

Lately I’ve been buying most of my vegetables (especially the ones that tend to be overpriced at supermarkets) at a local market. After shopping there a few times at different times of day, I now try to go in the morning when it’s not too busy and there’s still a good variety of produce to choose from. I usually bring a limited amount of cash (say, €10) and stick to that as my budget. I often spend less than that and just bring as much as I can carry, which will last us for 1-2 weeks. And I’ve found some pretty good deals! Here’s what I brought home today:

– eight (striped) aubergines for €1
– a bag of tomatoes (also striped! couldn’t resist the gorgeous patterns) for €1
– five courgettes for €1
– three ears of corn for €1
– one watermelon for €1
– two artichokes for €2,60
– two boxes of raspberries for €1,50

I did my best to protect the raspberries while carrying them home, but some of them still got crushed in my bag. Oh well, all the more reason to eat them straight away! The mushier berries were perfect in the tart filling and most of the whole ones found their way into our mouths by the end of the day as well. I don’t buy fresh raspberries very often so they’re a wonderful treat.

The artichokes were a little more expensive than I’d hoped, but I decided to splurge on them anyway because I love artichokes and my boyfriend has never tried them! I’ve never cooked them myself so I’ll have to look through my cookbooks for tips first. I’m hoping to counter my boyfriend’s reluctance to try new vegetables by appealing to his love for foods that come with dipping sauces, so I need to make a good vinaigrette or mayonnaise (or both)! Any ideas? :)

Thanks to everyone who’s been reading my posts and/or leaving comments! <3 Hope you have a lovely day.

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Pancakes with Chocolate Sauce

I almost forgot to post my MoFo meal for today!

This morning I made these delicious Chocolate Chocolate Chip Pancakes from 500 Vegan Recipes. They were really good all on their own, but then I figured since we were already having chocolate chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast, why not go ahead cover them in chocolate sauce as well? Mmm. These were amazing, as you probably guessed. I made a huge stack, so we still have leftovers, too!

Hi there!

Oops, sorry for the slight absence after my final London post! The new semester started last week so I’ve been a little busy with that. I’m enjoying my new classes, though, and one of them is during the evening, which means I either have to pack a quick dinner or buy my food at a restaurant. Homemade is obviously the cheapest option, and here’s what I packed today:

I made a batch of tomato soup (in the thermos) with chopped red & yellow bell pepper, carrot, corn, courgette, and spring onions and I added some chili powder and other spices as well. It was delicious! I only just discovered we actually had a thermos in the house, but I’m definitely going to use it to bring more of these hot soups when the weather gets colder.

On the left is a salad of sautéed tempeh, shallots and asparagus over a bed of lettuce mixed with yellow bell pepper and white grapes. There’s a balsamic dressing in the little container on the side. This was tasty, although next time I’d add more tempeh and use less balsamic vinegar because the salad was a little too sour for my taste, but the tempeh was really tasty. I used the Italian marinade from Vegan with a Vengeance, which is originally meant for tofu, but it worked nicely for the tempeh as well!

And next to the thermos in the little cupcake box is a delicious double chocolate muffin based on a Have Cake, Will Travel recipe. I love how the recipes uses whole wheat flour and is so low in fat, but I did add a spoonful of oil just to make sure they won’t dry out even if I keep them for a while. The muffin was the perfect treat to enjoy on my way home! Mmm. I just wish I’d used a different cupcake pan so the muffins would get a nice high top instead of spreading out in the liner, but hey – at least they taste great.

Oh, and check out what I received in the mail today! I really needed some new lip balm due to the sudden cold weather, so I ordered three varieties of a product I’d been wanting to try for a while – Crazy Rumors lip balm! I thought it would be good to sample some different scents, so I got Apple Spice (tea scented!), Almond Fudge (ice cream!), and French Vanilla (coffee). I’ve been using the Apple Spice one today, because it’s the scent that appealed to me the most, and I love it! It truly smells like apple spice tea – when I just put it on, I felt like I was sitting with a lovely cup of tea under my nose all the time. In a good way! It feels wonderful and moisturising, too, so it’s just what I was looking for. I’ve only been using Lush lip balms up until now and I still like those, but the little tins can be inconvenient at times. These little tubes are much easier to apply!

I got the lip balms at Alice and Jo’s Havesentials, by the way, and I love them for carrying the Crazy Rumors brand, as I hadn’t seen it available anywhere else in the Netherlands. They were really quick, too – I placed my order on Sunday evening and got my little envelope of lip balms this morning. I can’t wait to try the other Crazy Rumors scents… mmm!

I have some old(er) photos that I need to put on here, too, but I’ll save those for a later post – for now, have a great day, and thanks for reading!