That's it, the end of the Vegan MoFo. And I promised that I would finish my Top 10 and I will. But I realized that I don't have pictures of none of the one million burgers and potato wedge (these potatoes are a "must" here in Dublin and they are delicious!) that we eat at home. We don't have food for dinner, just sandwiches, so we are always eating hot dogs or burgers. And we love it. So this is my complete top 10, hope next year I can come back with more recipes or great pictures.
(I still have one more post for today, so I will be back in a few minutes :P)
Back to my "Vegan Food Top 10", I couldn't let the pancakes (or crepes) out! I cook them a lot and I also blogged about them sometimes. But yesterday I think I made the best ones.
"Humm... Huummmm... Huuummmmm!" was the sound that I heard from Matteo when he tried my pumpkin pancakes. Yes, pumpkin again (I told you!). I used the regular dough (recipe here) and for the filling I made a pumpkin puree. All you will need to make it are 1/2 pumpkin (make a soft cream with the food processor, I used also the skin), 1 tablespoon butter, 1 vegetable stock cube and black pepper. You can make it like a regular "potato puree" (mashed potatoes).
The best thing about pancakes is that you have endless options of filling. So, use your imagination and share your ideas with us too :)Vegan Food Top 10 until now:
1. Cupcakes
2. Mushrooms
3. Pizza
4. Soup
5. Risotto
6. Pancakes
Today I realized how unfair I have been with one more of my favorite food: risotto! I didn't find a post about it here! But you know, can be just my lack of tagging. So, let's talk about this wonderful Italian dish!
Every time I think about my life before being vegan I realize that I didn't eat too many kinds of food because there are a lot of things that I just started to eat a few years ago. To be true, in the case of the risotto, I just started to eat it with more frequency after Matteo arrived. Yes, I know, shame on me!! But it's never late and for the last (almost) 5 years I have been eating a lot of it. And you can imagine that I was just eating it, not cooking it, 'cause I have an expert of Italian food at home. And he knows how to cook the best risottos ever: risotto alla milanese (the yellow one, sometimes with mushrooms), risotto primavera (with vegetables), risotto alla piemontese (the white one).
But yesterday, excited with my new food processor (am I the only silly person in the world that gets excited with it?!), I decided to cook my first risotto (sometimes I helped Matteo, but never did it all by myself), that I called “Brazilian risotto”. Yes, it is green and yellow! We are having a small problem in Ireland to make risottos (maybe this is the reason that I didn't blog about it yet): we can't find the arborio rice anywhere anymore. So we stayed a few months without cooking risotto but a few weeks ago Matteo found another kind of rice: the parboiled. It's not the same thing but it works. I think my risotto was good and I did enough to lunch and dinner!
lunch
Recipe:
250g parboiled rice (the best quality is Arborio, Vialone Nano or Carnaroli)
1 tablespoon vegetable oil (or olive oil)
2 vegetable stock cubes
1 chopped onion
1 sliced zucchini
1 cup of broccoli
2 or 3 teaspoon turmeric
black pepper and parsley (optional)
1 tablespoon vegetable margarine
vegan parmezano
Put the oil in a pan and heat it for a minute. Add the chopped onion and let it fry until it turns gold. Add the rice and let it fry, stirring it, until it gets transparent. The traditional way too prepare risotto is to have the water with the vegetable stock cube (called brodo) separated and add it step by step while the rice is cooking but we cheat on it! Well, we learned from an Italian woman (my mother in law), so I think it's totally fine! So, our way to do is: add the water (enough to totally cover the rice and one inch more), the stock cubes, the turmeric and let it cook for 2 or 3 minutes, stirring it. Add the zucchini, the broccoli and the herbs. Let it cook until the water is mostly absorbed (you have to check it from time to time, but it will take more or less twenty minutes). At this point you have to try the rice to see if it's soft enough (using the Arborio rice is easier to notice that). If it's not, add more water (one cup) and wait the water being absorbed again. Don't forget to stir it sometimes or the rice can start to stick to the pan. When the water is almost gone, turn off the heat and wait 2 or 3 minutes. Add the vegetable margarine and stir it again. Serve it with vegan parmezano on top.
dinner
Vegan Food Top 10 until now:
1. Cupcakes
2. Mushrooms
3. Pizza
4. Soup
5. Risotto
I feel that I am walking (better, blogging) in circles! Hope this is not a bad thing, but to write about the food we cook a lot and that are my favorite ones I will repeat myself.
We moved. Everything is at the right place and I started cooking at the new kitchen. Today I bought some stuff, so I'll have some news here soon! With the Autumn, the cold is arriving (and I love it!) and I started to cook soups again. Yes, I told you before that I love them. Potato one is my Top 1. And I cooked it yesterday night for me and Matteo after a very busy day. There is no big secret about making soups, you can make them with basically everything! Yesterday I decided to add spinach and onions and garlic on it. I don't like to use raw onion and garlic because the taste is to strong, so what I did was to fry them with water. I know that a lot of people fries food with water, but I'm not used to that, so it was something new for me and I love it! I used one vegetable stock cube too. And we had a great meal, followed by some Guitar Hero game after :)
So, until now, my top vegan food special to Vegan MoFo has:
1. Cupcakes
2. Mushrooms
3. Pizza
4. Soup
I will make a top 10. And I still have a lot to tell you related to my vegan world!
Well, well, I was hoping that we would finish moving yesterday but we are not done yet. I am not feeling that great so I can't help Matteo as much as I would like to do. But we are almost there and tomorrow we will be in our new apartment, bigger and beautiful (and one block away from the old one!).
But even the food comes at the right time. I was thinking about making my post number 3 about pizza and this is actually all we are eating these days. Not the great one that Matteo makes, but a good one from a pizzeria close to here (I took some pictures but the cable is at the new apartment and the computer is at the old one), so I chose this one that is from Matteo's family's in Italy. It was there that I learned that the Italian way to eat pizza is like that: one big pizza for each person! And that's the way I keep on eating it!
I really love pizza (as you can see here) and couldn't let it out of my Vegan MoFo top food!
Sorry about the short text but I have to go back to packing and unpacking stuff. Hope I can have internet soon at the new home :)
I think I'm pretty bad at tagging posts (or I'm bad at posting too!) because I just realized that I have just a few posts about all my favorite food. And because of that I decided to make a chapter of this Vegan MoFo about the food we cook a lot at home. This will be just one part because I have more to write about and I believe that veganism is much more than a diet.
Cupcakes were the first. I won't go in order of what I cook more or like more, but I'll share some passions here and I hope you can share some of yours with me too!
Now I will talk about mushrooms. If you are a new reader of this blog, you will notice that this space is not that much about recipes, is more about tips. Many people think it is hard being vegan and this is my way to show them that it's not like this (mainly to Brazilian friends and readers that are the majority here). And it's great to know that I have a lot of Irish and American readers too, that have even more options to cook vegan food! Ok, let's go back to the mushrooms. They are another thing that is not that easy to find in Brazil (and they are expensive there too). So I just started to cook more with them afeter we moved to Europe (where you can find all kinds of mushroom everywhere and they don't cost too much). They are great with most of the food we cook: pasta, risotto, lasagna, snacks, salty pies... And even without tagging properly I know that I posted some recipes here that have them in!
My tip today referes to those days when you don't have much time to cook and want something delicious. Cook a white sauce with mushrooms, soy cream and herbs (I always use a vegetable stock cube too) and use it with one of these pre-cooked meals (I love them with the Fry’s Vegeterian Golden Crumbed Schnitzel, white rice and potato wedges). Or use this sauce as a layer of your lasagna. Or add some tomato sauce for a different option.
And if you don't know a lot about mushrooms, Wikipedia always helps: "Edible mushrooms are used extensively in cooking, in many cuisines (notably Chinese, European, and Japanese). Though mushrooms are commonly thought to have little nutritional value, many species are high in fiber and provide vitamins such as thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, biotin, cobalamins, ascorbic acid. Though not normally a significant source of vitamin D, some mushrooms can become significant sources after exposure to ultraviolet light, though this also darkens their skin. Mushrooms are also a source of some minerals, including selenium, potassium and phosphorus."
Let me know what is your favorite recipe with mushrooms!
PS. Now I'll go back to prepare today's lunch, that is actually the next food of my Vegan MoFo top: risotto!
I was thinking about how to start my first post of the Vegan MoFo 2009. It's the first time I'm being part of this event and it's important to me. Some days before I wrote here how this blog had begun and how cooking and writing about it is now part of my life. And when I think about my current life, when I look back to these 12 months I've been living in Dublin I can tell you that my life changed 100%. What I do everyday here is completely different from what I used to do in Brazil. But if there is something that I learned is that different isn't always bad. Different can be good too. But you have to open your mind to learn how to live (and be happy) with the difference. I am learning, every single day. And I still have a lot to learn.
March
April
And because of all these changes in my life, I decided to dedicate my first Vegan MoFo post to something that I'm doing now and that I never thought about before: baking vegan cupcakes.
May
June
July
August
September
I just hope that is something sweet.
