Cooking
I made a fresh and summery lentil, courgette and mint salad using a recipe from Deliciously Ella's Book. The full recipe can be found here. I found the colours of the ingredients looked so beautiful together that I instagrammed this picture and Ella herself liked it.
Adventures in Vegan Cooking
I have been a vegetarian my whole life but I have recently been toying with the idea of becoming vegan. I'm interested in living a cleaner and healthier lifestyle- I don't think I'm ready to convert to a full plant-based, gluten free diet but I am trying to make small changes and experiment with vegan substitutions. Using a mixture of recipes from well-known bloggers such as Deliciously Ella, Madeleine Shaw, and My New Roots- I created a three course vegan meal for my family.I made a fresh and summery lentil, courgette and mint salad using a recipe from Deliciously Ella's Book. The full recipe can be found here. I found the colours of the ingredients looked so beautiful together that I instagrammed this picture and Ella herself liked it.
It is such a light and flavoursome salad. The lime juice and fresh mint, picked from my garden, worked so well together. Avacado in anything catches my interest and with the thinly sliced courgette it tasted heavenly.
Alongside this salad we had sweet potato cakes (Deliciously Ella again) with a fresh rocket salad. Sweet potatoes are a staple in our family, we seem to have them with every meal.
These were super simple to make. You essentially make sweet potato mash, add spices, shape and bake.
There were so soft and tasted brilliant with both the rocket and courgette salad. We needed the courgette salad to take away some of the spice, I think I added too many chilli flakes.
For my main course I made Deliciously Ella's Mushroom and Chickpea Stew. It is such a simple stew but this allows for a deeper flavour in the sauce. It is such a versatile stew, you could add anything to it.
There is so much stew left over that we will be eating it for days. I'm thinking crusty bread or perhaps some herb dumplings.
To accompany the stew I found a recipe for cardamom spiced cauliflower rice on Madeleine Shaw's blog. When you're a vegetarian most meals consist of some carbohydrate such as rice or pasta with curry or chilli or some kind of sauce. It was therefore refreshing to have an entire main course consisting of just vegetables and pulses.
I simply blitzed a whole cauliflower in the food processor, melted some coconut oil with some cardamom pods in a frying pan, and fried the 'rice' for around 3 minutes, adding some more spices mixed with a small amount of water.
It is so much quicker to make than normal rice and tasted great. A brilliant way to get more vegetables into my diet.
My favourite part of any meal: dessert. I wanted to make a refined sugar-free and vegan dessert but was slightly worried that it would end up tasting like cardboard. Most vegan desserts I've found use really expensive ingredients but I found this recipe for Banoffee Pie from New Roots which mostly included ingredients which we already had. The base is made by blitzing all the ingredients in a food processor, pressing the mixture into a tin and baking for around 10 minutes.
For the toffee I started off by making my own almond butter by roasting almonds for 10 minutes and then blitzing them in a food processor with a pinch of salt until it reaches a smooth 'gloopy' consistency.
The toffee was then made by softening the dates by pouring hot water over them and then blitzing until smooth. When I usually make toffee using sugar I normally end up burning it but this was so straightforward. It also tasted amazing, I couldn't stop myself from having a little taste.
The toffee was then made by softening the dates by pouring hot water over them and then blitzing until smooth. When I usually make toffee using sugar I normally end up burning it but this was so straightforward. It also tasted amazing, I couldn't stop myself from having a little taste.
The cream substitute is simply whipped coconut milk. Although the smell resembles cat-food it gives a tropical taste to the tart.
After assembling the tart I topped it with more banana and dusted some vegan chocolate over the top.
The whole family loved it, there were so many 'best ever' s. It wasn't as sickly sweet as most Banoffee pies are and I couldn't quite believe that it was sugar-free and vegan.
I will definitely be making cauliflower rice and vegan Banoffee Pie again in the future and I look forward to introducing new vegan alternatives to my diet and potentially becoming vegan in the future.
Love Rhiannon x
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