Day Nine: Noodle Salad with Spicy Nut Dressing

Another one I didn't want to do! But before we get into that, here is a cookbook condition update, as requested by Raven:

It got splatted with nut dressing while I was mixing it! The first casualty was the banana blueberry muffin page, decimated within minutes - and the Dilip page, as I discovered yesterday, actually became stuck to its neighbour... I've never been known for my neatness.


Back to the cold noodle salad. This inspired me with a chilly, glutinous feeling akin to accidentally putting one's foot in a puddle.

(That's a dressing? Really?)

But this time, I really was quite glad I made it. Even though I lacked coriander (I knew I lacked it, but after work I just couldn't face traipsing round the city in search of the bizarrely elusive herb), and couldn't be arsed to toast and chop any nuts to garnish with, this salad was a genuinely new and pleasant experience. I will no longer grimace at the thought of cold noodle dishes.


My noodles were thai rice noodles, because that's what we had in the cupboard, peanut butter, and my pak choi/bok choi/sui choy or whatever you call it was in fact romaine lettuce (thank you, veg box).

 Not quite so pretty after the sauce had been mixed in:

As a side note, I watched Julie & Julia this evening, as I felt somehow I ought to visit the origins of this challenge, and was pleased to discover Meryl Streep is capable of delivering a performance without her customary air of self-congratulatory Bono-style smugness. Not exactly gourmet film-making, if you'll pardon the expression, but entertaining enough.

Day Eight, a day late (hehee): Baby spinach and apple salad

The way I feel about salad recipes can be summed up in a single, effortless syllable: meh.

It's not that I don't like salads, a good one can be a joy and mid summer I often crave mountains of raw, crunchy, delicious green stuff. It's just that 1. I find it a faff to make them (all that chopping, grating, washing, bleh), and 2. the best ones are made off the cuff! There are a lot of ff's in this paragraph. So ordinarily this recipe would have been quickly skimmed past in search of bolder and more innovative, toothsome concoctions.

I'd like to say I'd been proved wrong and how glad I am that I was forced into making it, but I can only use mediocre words to describe the end result. Even though I love sweet things in salads, I just didn't really feel like this was a mixture worthy of a slot in a cookbook, and probably could have come up with something a bit more enticing without Sarah's aid, this time. It wasn't bad, I didn't dislike it, but it was 'nice', rather than fabulous.

It probably didn't help that it wasn't exactly a bright summer's day either - rather more Manchestery than is ideal for eating cold food. The north western gloom puts one more in mind of the solace of chips, gravy, puddings and custard...

Oops, I nearly forgot the picture!

(As you can see, I forewent the expense of pine nuts in favour of almonds.)

I'm late, I'm late, I'm late!

Unfortunately I don't have an enormous fob watch to check, but I do know I'm late with yesterday's blog post! Double whammy this evening, then.

Day Seven: A Dilip of some kind

The first week is complete and I'm already feeling the pressure! Mainly because of lots of other mean and stressful things happening in my life at the moment (mainly to do with teeth and houses), but I am worried I'm going to struggle when I start having to move house, visit places, etc.

Back to today's recipe: Blueberry Dilip.

What the hell is a dilip? Dilip, phillip, pillock... All these words were used by my partner to describe it as he filmed me baking the muffins the other day (boy + new toy = silly videos). I don't know if it is a 'thing', like Apple Charlotte or Eton Mess over here, but I'd never heard of it anyway. No blueberries here - I managed for the muffins, but 4 cups?! No, sorry, I draw the line there. And Raven, Challenge Master Extraordinaire over at the Vegan Culinary Institute, said substitution was A-ok. So I used whatever soft fruit looked good and reduced in price. Which turned out to be a mixture of cherries and greengages.


Interesting, and yummy.

I'm pretty sure I didn't have quite enough fruit though, because it was immediately enveloped by the rapidly expanding dilip batter when I poured it in. I managed to leave the batter on top of the hob, ie on top of the preheated oven, while I prepped the fruit, so by the time I got back to it it was bubbling away already! Oops.

The mixture of sweet cherries with tangy greengages and their slightly bitter skins was actually really good, although I was a bit startled by the bitter bits at first. I would have liked to serve it with ice cream, but we don't have a freezer! So soya cream it was. The dilip was served to a non-vegan, after the portobello pot pie, and the entire ensemble met with grand approval. Hurrah.

Day Six: Simple Leek and Potato Soup

 

Leek and potato soup is one of my all time favourite things. It was probably one of the first dishes I learned to cook for myself, and subsequently I haven't looked at a recipe to make it in more than 10 years.

But I did! I was good and followed the instructions. Except that I used the whole leek, not just the white and pale green parts (really Sarah, so wasteful!) - and I couldn't resist adding my customary pinch of nutmeg at the end. I confess I actually made this about a week ago, because we had all the ingredients in the house and I'd broken a tooth (eating muesli!) earlier that day, and it seemed like a good time to make soup.

The 'croutons' are actually cubes of 5 spice tofu, but it turns out that 5 spice tofu does not make particularly good friends with leek and potato soup, so I fished mine out and just ate them on the bread.

Yum.

Day Five: Estrella.com Peanut Butter Fudgie Mounds

I've always hated peanut butter, and neither am I fond of peanuts themselves, so until a a year or two ago these little offerings would never have passed my lips! Since becoming vegan, however, I've discovered that as an ingredient, especially in sweet things, I'm actually rather partial to the butter. I still can't face it alone though - ditto tahini.

These things were extremely difficult to photograph without appearing obscene - at a distance they resemble owl droppings, and close up they look like surplus disembowelling effects from a bad B movie. Which amount to rather the same thing now that I think about it.

Despite these cosmetic drawbacks, they made a very successful appearance at an impromptu dinner at a neighbour's this evening, where almost the entire trayful was consumed with delight all round.

Again I used palm sugar instead of granulated, because I simply couldn't face using an entire cup of sugar in a recipe - I could feel my dentine shrivelling up in anticipation just looking at the ingredients list. It has a caramelly flavour (palm sugar, not dentine), so it worked pretty well. Unfortunately I discovered, to my horror at 6.30 this evening, that we were out of peanut butter, so I had to buy inferior stuff from the corner shop (containing sugar and palm oil, yuck) in order to make the recipe in time. We also didn't have enough porridge oats, so about 1/3 of the oat quota was jumbo, meaning the mixture didn't stick together quite so efficiently. No detriment to the flavour, however.

Day Four (aren't we getting along!): Gerry's Artichoke and Basil Pasta

Ok, it's not difficult to make something delicious from artichokes, basil, tomatoes and pine nuts, is it. So as tasty as this dish was, I don't really consider it a great culinary achievement! Alas not very photogenic either, sorry about that. I used really small pasta because that's what we had in the cupboard, and it worked rather nicely. The sauce:pasta ratio was a little meaner than intended as I cooked far more than 2 portions. Well, far more than Sarah's idea of 2 portions. I'm rapidly coming to realise that her '2 large portions' is significantly smaller than my 2 large portions... If I made this again I think I might give it a bit more of a twist - some tamari, a drop of tabasco and maybe even a squeeze of lemon juice.