Planet Veggie

The Quick Cook Vegetarian cookbook is a bargain. Not only did it only cost me about £4 including postage from amazon, each recipe is accompanied by a full-colour photo and each recipe only takes 30 minutes to prepare. And if 30 minutes is too long for you, each recipe also has two other versions of it that take only 10 or 20 minutes.

Last night I made the Creamy Courgette Orzo Pasta (which I didn’t take a photo of) and I’m looking forward to trying out the recipes for

Smoked Cheese, Pepper and Spinach Quesadillas
Asparagus and Udon Stir-fry
Deep-fried Beer-battered Halloumi
Aubergine and Harissa Saute

amongst many others. I haven’t been so impressed with a cookbook for ages.

Tonight I made the Black-Eyed Bean and Red Pepper Stew which was cheap, quick, easy, super-healthy and delicious.

Black Eyed-Bean and Red Pepper Stew (says serves 4, but it’s more like 6)

2 tablespoons olive oil
4 shallots, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
2 celery stalks, diced (I left these out)
1 large carrot, peeled and cut into 1 cm pieces
1 red pepper, deseeded and cut into 1 cm pieces
1 teaspoon dried mixed herbs
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (I left this out)
2 x 400g tins of chopped tomatoes
2 tablespoons sun-dried tomato puree
75 ml vegetable stock
2 x 400g tins black-eyed beans in water, drained
4 tablespoons finely chopped coriander leaves, plus extra to garnish (I left this out)
salt and pepper
cooked basmati rice, to serve

1. Heat the oil in a large frying pan and place over a high heat.
2. Add the shallots, garlic, celery, carrot and red pepper and stir-fry for 2-3 minutes or until lightly starting to brown.
3. Add the dried herbs, cumin, cinnamon, tomatoes, tomato puree and stock and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat to medium, cover and cook gently for 12-15 minutes or until the vegetables are tender.
4. Stir in the black-eyed beans and cook for 2-3 minutes or until piping hot.
5. Season well, remove from the heat and sprinkle over the chopped coriander. Garnish with coriander leaves and serve with basmati rice.

I’d heard about the new Linda McCartney Fish-Free King Prawns in their range of vegetarian and vegan food and was dying to try them out as I used to love prawns. I wasn’t expecting much though as I’d tried the (now discontinued) Redwood Scampi-Style Pieces which had the texture of any generic chicken-style meat substitute and nothing like scampi at all. They didn’t even taste the slightest bit fishy (unlike their fish-style fingers which I love).

After opening the bag, I had a sniff of the prawns and blimey, they smelt fishy. Far too fishy for me and I hoped they wouldn’t taste too fishy when cooked (I am aware that I just complained about Redwood’s Scampi-Style Pieces not being fishy enough but I don’t like my meat/fish alternatives to be too much like the real thing).

The prawns were cooked in this Fish Free King Prawns, Garlic, Chilli, Tomatoes and Rocket with Spaghetti recipe (pdf file) that I downloaded from the Linda McCartney website.

I let The Meat Eater take the first bite, he said they tasted like prawns and so I had a bite. They weren’t overly fishy but had a definite fish taste that didn’t linger too long. The texture wasn’t particularly prawn-like but a lot closer to the real thing than the Redwood Scampi-Style Pieces.

The Meat Eater enjoyed this dish and said he preferred the prawns to the burger type substitutes and although I disagree that they’re nicer than the burgers, I’ll definitely be having them again.

Linda McCartney Fish-Free Prawns are suitable for vegetarians (but not vegans) and I bought mine in Tesco for £2.50.

I love soup, I love monthly themes and I love gruesomeness, so The New Covent Garden Soup Co’s Halloween theme is right up my street. They want us to submit our spooky soup recipes and, if we’re lucky, it’ll be picked to be sold during October. Recipes submitted so far include ‘Perilous Pumpkin & Lemongrass’, ‘Gruesome  Gargantuan gruel’ and ‘Ectoplasm – green Thai soup’, for more entries visit their website.

We need to submit our spooky soups by 10 May 2012, so get gruesome now!

For more information and the link to send your entries to, go to the New Covent Garden Soup of the Month Blog.

As I said the other day, I am now a pea soup convert, so today I decided to make my own for lunch. I adapted this recipe from the BBC Good Food site. Their recipe includes mint, which I don’t like, so I left that out. I also swapped spring onions for a white onion, added seasoning (which isn’t in the BBC recipe) and didn’t make the Parmesan biscuits.

After adding the stock to the onion and potato, I couldn’t see how that was nearly enough stock so I had a look at the original recipe again and saw that they use half a bunch of spring onions and I used a whole white onion (and it was quite a large one). I had halved their recipe as 900g seemed like a hell of a lot of peas and so halved the amount of stock, but I ended up using a litre of stock, not 450ml. Maybe the potato I used was too big, too.

The resulting soup was nice, with a delicate pea flavour. It was a little bland although the consistency was perfect so it wasn’t because I ­­­­used too much stock. Maybe it could have been improved with garlic and more seasoning. Or maybe the peas weren’t a good enough quality. Any suggestions?

Frozen Pea Soup (serves 4)

1 tbsp olive oil
1 knob of butter
1 onion, sliced
1 potato, cubed
1 litre vegetable stock
450g frozen peas
Salt and black pepper

Heat the oil and butter in a pan

Add the onion and potato and fry for 5 minutes

Add the stock and simmer for 10 minutes

Add the frozen peas, bring back to the boil and simmer for 3 minutes

Add salt and black pepper

Blend until smooth

Hemp oil is an alternative to olive oil. The packaging for this Good Hemp Oil is certainly an alternative to those boring plastic bottles you usually get and 30,000 special edition bottles will be available in stores from 1 May. The bottle is beautiful, it’s a shame it’ll be hidden away in a cupboard.

Suitable for vegetarians and vegans, you can use it in salad dressings or fry with it; use it in whichever way you usually use olive oil. Good looks don’t come cheap though – the RRP is £5.99.

Eating a casserole for lunch seemed a bit much but I had been to the gym for two hours this morning and was hungry. Like yesterday’s tin of pea soup, before heating it up, I sniffed it (I don’t have a fetish for sniffing things in tins, honest). It smelt tomatoey. According to the tin, it contained chickpeas, tomatoes, onions, water, red pepper, green pepper, olive oil, garlic, sea salt, and herbs and spices. Nothing scary there, then (except maybe the unspecified herbs and spices; why can’t they say what the herbs and spices are? Still, better than mystery meat, eh?)

This can be microwaved for 5 minutes or heated on the hob for 7 or 8 minutes. I poured it into a bowl (it’s a bit lumpy for a mug, it is a casserole after all) and put it in the microwave. The casserole was mostly chickpeas (it is the first ingredient in the list, so this was to be expected) with a few lumps of red and green pepper and had a pleasant tomatoey taste with a chilli kick. I really enjoyed this although I would call it more of a hearty soup than a casserole.

The Spanish Chickpea Casserole costs around £2 for a 400g tin, contains 200 calories per tin and is vegetarian and vegan.

Pea soup. Sounds disgusting, doesn’t it? It does to me, anyway. Still, it was free, so I thought I’d give it a go.

I opened the tin and had a sniff. It smelt like peas. I suppose it would really, but I wasn’t expecting it to. I heated it up in the microwave (on checking the instructions I was surprised to see that it was quicker on the hob but I didn’t want to wash a saucepan) and had another sniff. It didn’t smell of peas anymore, it didn’t really smell of anything.

I had a taste. Pea soup is fantastic, why didn’t anyone tell me this before?! The taste is hard to describe (probably because I am rubbish at describing tastes), kind of earthy without a strong taste of peas. The texture was fine – not thin and watery, but just right and perfect for someone like me who likes to drink soup out of a mug so I have a hand spare for mousing around the internet.

Free & Easy Organic Pea Soup costs around £1.40 and is available from major supermarkets and health food shops. It’s vegetarian and vegan and contains 96 calories per 400g can (which apparently is 2 servings, unless you’re like me and have the can to yourself). For more information, visit http://www.healthyfoodbrands.co.uk

I am now a pea soup convert. Can pea soup be made from frozen peas?

Thanks to those of you who entered my giveaway of the Riverford Farm Cookbook. To pick the winner, I used a random number generator and the person chosen was Zoe (who blogs at Life of a Vegetarian Girl). Well done, Zoe!

Do you ever look at those Quorn Fillets in the freezer section, then not buy them because you don’t know what to do with them? Me too. Then I decided to have a go at adapting meat-based recipes and came across this Creamy Tarragon Chicken Bake on the BBC Good Food website and turned it into a Creamy Tarragon Quorn Fillet Bake instead.

The original recipe is gluten- and dairy-free, using rice flour instead of wheat flour, and dairy-free cheese, but I used what ingredients I already had, so this version isn’t gluten- or dairy-free. It is chicken-free though.

This was nice and creamy, but I found it a bit bland (probably because I forgot to season it – I’ve made it before and it wasn’t bland then). The Meat Eater enjoyed it though.

Creamy Tarragon Quorn Fillet Bake (serves 4)

2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp plain flour
300ml soya milk
1 pack Quorn Fillets, defrosted
2 red onions, cut into wedges
250g cherry tomatoes, halved
250g asparagus spears, blanched
1 tsp caster sugar
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
150ml vegetable stock
3 tbsp chopped tarragon
4 tbsp breadcrumbs
1 tbsp grated cheese

1. Mix half the oil and flour in a saucepan (off the heat), then blend in the soya milk. Bring the sauce slowly to the boil, whisking constantly, then simmer for 1 minute. Remove from the heat, cover with greaseproof paper and set aside.
2. Heat oven to 200C/fan 180C/gas 6. Heat remaining oil in a frying pan, add the Quorn fillets, then fry for 2-3 minutes or until they go brown. Transfer to an ovenproof dish. Add the onions to the pan and fry for 2-3 minutes. Spoon over the Quorn fillets, then top with the tomatoes and asparagus. Set aside while you prepare the sauce.
3. Put the sugar and vinegar into the pan. Stir over medium heat until the sugar is a dark caramel colour, then add the stock. Bring to the boil and simmer for 1 minute. Whisk into the milky sauce until blended, seasons, then add the tarragon. Spoon sauce over the Quorn fillets and veg, sprinkle with crumbs and cheese, then bake for 20 minutes or until cooked through.

Last night’s dinner was a disaster and ended up in the bin. It was a tofu stir-fry with some ready made sauce. I don’t know how Cauldron have managed it, but they’ve made their tofu even more soggy than it used to be and there was no way I could squeeze enough water out of it to adequately fry it until it was in a less blancmange-like state. It was like boiled tofu and absolutely vile. The stir-fry sauce I used with the tofu and vegetables (sugar snap peas and broccoli) was too strong and bitter, even though I’d watered it down. I served the saucy tofu/veg combination on some noodles, The Meat Eater ate a couple of mouthfuls before declaring it inedible and he heated himself up some leftover chilli, while I bravely ploughed on, eating the noodles but pushing the soggy tofu to one side.

Tonight, however, I redeemed myself. This asparagus, tomato and feta frittata out of 200 Veggie Feasts was absolutely delicious and I served it with new potatoes, cauliflower and broccoli.

Asparagus, tomato and feta frittata (serves 4)

3 tbsp olive oil
2 leeks, thinly sliced
1 garlic clove, crushed
250g asparagus, trimmed
6 eggs
100g feta cheese, diced
4 tablespoons grated Parmesan-style cheese
175g cherry tomatoes
salt and black pepper

1. Heat the oil in a frying pan, add the leeks and garlic and cook over a medium heat, stirring frequently, for 10 minutes until tender. Leave to cool.
2. Cook the asparagus in a large saucepan of lightly salted boiling water for 2 minutes. Drain, refresh under cold water and pat dry. Cut into 5cm (2 inch) lengths.
3. Beat the eggs in a bowl and stir in the leek mixture, asparagus, feta, half the Parmesan-style cheese and salt and pepper. Pour the mixture into a 20 cm (8 inch) square baking dish and top with the tomatoes. Sprinkle over the remaining Parmesan-style cheese and bake in a preheated oven, 190C, Gas Mark 5, for 25-30 minutes until puffed up and firm in the centre.