Vegan Recipes

I made the rice like regular sushi rice (recipe here) and for the toppings I just used a variety of Japanese pickles, plus nori and bamboo shoots, so this is actually a vegan sushi. It looked super cute!!

Something a little different today, not food but a floral face steam for my two teenagers! I have plenty of calendula and lavender in the garden so I picked some petals and put them in a bowl. Then you just need to add boiling water and enjoy a face steam. My kids loved it, and I am planning to dry some of the petals to keep for winter... just need a bit of sun though!!  (PS, the rose is just for fun.. but you could add rose petals too, try the next recipe).

This is my home recipe for a Vegan Monte Bianco so easy, (plus no cooking required) and one of my favourite desserts. Chestnuts are in my DNA, as they were the staple food of my ancestors, and mine to when I was little (we still have a chestnut wood in Italy). They are naturally sweet, low in fat and high in protein, but they are so difficult to find in NZ (please write to me if you have some!!). The original recipe calls for cream, but it seems that coconut cream goes really well with chestnuts too! Here are the ingredients:


1x 400ml can coconut cream, refrigerated for at least one day
1 drop vanilla
1 tbsp sugar
1 x439g Clement Faugier chestnut puree
1x 250g Clement Faugier Sweet chestnut spread
Dark chocolate to grate (I used dark vegan Mexican chocolate)

You can add a few drops of rum or Frangelico if you like.

Scoop the coconut cream out of the tin (leave the water at the bottom) and beat until soft and foamy. Add sugar and vanilla. Set aside. Beat the two chestnut purees together (I added the coconut water to make them softer). Add some grated chocolate (about 2-3 tbsp, or to taste) and if you like a little alcohol. Spoon the chestnut mixture over a plate and shape like a peak. Then cover with the coconut cream.

This is a delicious raw and vegan dish, serves 4 as a starter or side salad, and 2 as a main

Ingredients

2 avocados
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 crunchy legs of celery
2 tbsp vegan mayonnaise
cherry tomatoes and edible flowers to decorate

Cut the avocados and remove stones, drizzle with lemon juice. Clean the celery legs and remove the strings (I use a carrot peeler for this). Cut into small bite sizes and mix with the vegan mayonnaise (click here for the recipe). Fill the avocados with the celery and decorate with cherry tomatoes and edible flowers.

I love to eat flowers, and if you have a banana plant in the garden you can eat the blossoms!  First you need to remove the pink/mauve petals (and small banana florets under each petal) from the blossom until you get to the pale centre. Keep the petals though, they are good as food containers or decorations. You can find the step by step photos on how to peel and cut a banana blossom here, where there is also a delicious banana flower (blossom) recipe. Then cut the centre and mix immediately with lemon juice. Put into a bowl and add more lemon juice and a couple of tbsp of Japanese soy sauce. Put another bowl on top (inside the first one to press down the content) and fill the second bowl with something heavy (a rock, for example). Keep the cut blossom pressed in this marinade overnight, in the fridge. This is necessary or the banana blossom will taste too astringent.

The day after, cook the noodles and drain. Rinse under cold water, and place into a bowl. Cut the tofu into squares and fry in a mixture of sesame oil and vegetable oil until golden, then add a tbsp of lemon juice and 2 tbsp of Japanese soy sauce, sizzle quickly and toss with the noodles. Squeeze the banana blossom from excess liquid and add to the noodles. Mix well and serve at room temperature, decorated with some Thai mint or coriander. This noodle salad was delicious and I will make it again, in fact so far this has been my favourite recipe with banana blossoms.

Ideal for 'baby's first Christmas' trees, sweet pastel colours, they can be used for Christmas cards too!

White and hand painted with a thin brush

Chocolate fondant, they smell great!

Green and silver for the trees

 Place the coconut cream in a pot, fill the can with the same amount of boiling water to rinse it and add into the pot. Remove the flowers from the sugar (it will be crumbly and moist) and add it to the mixture. Add a tsp of agar agar and bring to the boil stirring constantly. You can add a few petals of lavender if you like, but don't overdo it - not everyone likes to find 'bits' in such a smooth pudding. Fill 6 individual jelly moulds and let them set. The container with the lavender and sugar still had some sugar around the sides so I put the blackberries there for a few hours to marinate (with the lavender also) and get a bit of juice! I serve them alongside the tipped agar agar, which tasted a bit like young coconut flesh and with a subtle but distinctive lavender flavour.

This vegan bacon recipe can be life-changing for those former bacon lovers and for new vegans. This is the best recipe so far, considering also that it looks like the real thing in quite a spooky way (with those white stripes and all), and requires just a few easy to find ingredients.



The first 'secret' ingredient (and this is my first very own input) is sun-dried (or semi dried) tomatoes, which I soaked in a little hot water for 5 minutes. Then I added a tsp of smoked paprika, 1 tbsp of Japanese soy sauce, 2 tbsp of extra virgin olive oil, half tsp of salt and a little aquafaba (water from a can of chickpeas). I blended everything into a paste (using the nutribullet). The resulting paste should have the consistency of a spread, so add more aquafaba if it is too thick. Don't make it runny.



Now for the second main ingredient (and here I got the idea from my friend Lucia who has a vegan bacon recipe here): rice paper. I found this to be such a cool idea, plus it is an alternative to gluten meat or tofu. I had a quick look at all the other rice paper bacon (also called vacon) recipes around the internet and I tried a few ways to combine the rice paper with the paste to assemble the 'bacon' slices, but somehow I didn't quite like the idea of cutting the rice paper into strips, nor soaking them with the flavoring paste: they didn't fry well and the result was more like a burned crispy slice, rather than a juicy rasher with fatty white stripes. So I came up with a easy and less messy system, which produced the best results.



Soak the rice paper disks in hot water, just enough to soften them, and then place them on a clean gauze or kitchen towel. Brush the centre with the sun-dried tomato paste and then fold like shown in the photos.





The verdict: well, we all liked it! I thought that the best test was to have a bacon sandwich with some good bread and lettuce; my husband found it very realistic and the kids, who never tasted bacon so they could not compare, thought that it was simply really yum! It is also very filling so we had lots left over, I put them in the fridge and then quickly heated up a few slices in the skillet the day after for more sandwiches, and I did the same in the evening with the last slices chopped into small pieces, to make pasta sauce (the second test). It worked really really well.