m. 27 no-knead bread

perhaps one of our first foodie credentials came with participating in the cult-like obsession with mark bittman's no-knead bread (i've linked the youtube video so that those of you preserving your precious new york times page views won't have to cringe before you click), we still make it in between making other things (like our recent dan lepard experiments), here is the last round that we made in all its simplistic glory:

m. 26 "slider buns"

and what came out of the oven just 30 minutes after we finished making the post below, why the buns to go with our tofu burgers of course ... these are a dan lepard creation, we have been doing a lot of his recipes recently and will certainly be getting his book soon ...

they were yummy, i think we're going to have to make tofu burgers again to have an excuse to eat them right!

m. 25 tofu burgers and sweet potato french fries

we don't really accumulate gimmicky cookbooks, but we do have one, the mammoth 1000 vegetarian recipes from around the world, so unlikely is it that one cook could amass 1000 recipes on their own that the cookbook has no author, just a producer, it's published by parragon ... we have actually noticed that a lot of their recipes cut  corners so we rarely look at it, but that changed after i was searching for borlotti bean recipes and i came across the appetizer section of the 1024 page book, it included a number of things that we've made this week: bean burgers and lentil croquettes, but only this deserved a blog entry:

it's a tofu burger (pictured under carrots, tomatoes and a cucumber-yogurt "relish"), flanked by sweet potato fries and a slice of mark bittman's no knead bread, everything was very tasty, although the bean burgers we made earlier in the week tasted a little bit more savory, and it's certainly something we will be experimenting with in the near future!

m. 24 "humble home-cooked" borlotti beans and homemade veggie sausages

dinner this evening involved something old and a lot of something new, we made this amazing jamie oliver recipe called "humble home-cooked" beans that used some of our fresh borlotti beans, we first made this last year and it was just as amazing this time as last time (we don't really cook much from jamie oliver, the patronizing attitude on some of his travel/cooking shows annoys us a little, although we're down with the whole school kids need to eat better thing) ...

and then there was the little matter of our experiment with making veggie sausage (pictured unflatteringly below):

sometimes it's hard to find well-crafted vegetarian food in the uk, the ubiquity of those "veggie burgers" in all kinds of takeaways that are effectively just potato patties with peas and carrot are a good example, so when you do find some good vegetarian food it is impossible not to become a little obsessed ... in oxford (a city that perhaps because of its resident tourist population has very little good everyday food) there is a small butchers in the old market called david john butchers that make maybe the best veggie sausages i have ever tasted, the website for the now closed big bang restaurant provides a little more hyperbole by suggesting that they are the "best vegetarian sausages the world over," way to go david john ...

like about two months ago, after we started making seitan and fake chicken, i started to think about how to "clone" the david john sausages, i spent a lot of time daydreaming about what it would take to replicate their mozzarella sausage (which i was a little disappointed to hear is not their most popular even though i think it is by far the most interesting of their 10 or so kinds of veggie sausage), and so tonight we experimented.

we had a pretty good sense of some of the ingredients: onion, carrot, mozzarella, some kind of tomato, and then maybe some flour and possibly bread crumbs and egg to bind it (m had the brilliant idea of adding some leftover brown rice as well) with maybe oregano and thyme, salt and pepper, the two primary questions were what kind of tomato is used and what do you do with the onions: cook them or leave them raw, we tried four different configurations:

1. raw onions, carrots, and tomatoes
2. sauteed onions, carrots, and tomatoes
3. raw onions and carrots with tomato puree
4. sauteed onions and carrots with tomato puree

every one of these worked, with the raw ingredients providing a little more flavor, something i didn't really expect, and the puree worked as well, although i think next time we are going to experiment with a basil tomato sauce, i can't wait ...

... but do david john's methods, whatever magic they contain, still produce the better sausage?  i think so.

m. 23 borlotti beans in tomato sauce with polenta

we have a lot of fresh borlotti beans from the allotment, last year we were wowed by jamie oliver's crazy borlotti beans on toast recipe, but this year we wanted to start off with something a little more substantial, in the neighborhood of this:

borlotti beans in tomato sauce with polenta, of course an absolutely gorgeous picture of this meal's true culinary potential can be found by following the recipe link ... it was totally wholesome and very yummy, and i definitely think that we will be seeing more polenta in our future!

m. 22 hazelnut and stilton loaf, balsamic brussel sprouts, and pilaf

tonight we had a kind of friday night roast, after a couple of days of eating out (nothing special unfortunately)/not cooking much, we splurged:

 

hazelnut and stilton loaf, which is an adaptation from a green kitchen stories recipe (basically just adding 200g of stilton to the mix), it is super easy to make although it takes some time in the oven, then we had balsamic roasted brussel sprouts, and a dill mushroom pilaf (that I make basically once a week for one reason or another, and i can't remember the first time i made it) ... the nutloaf was served piping hot (hence the first blurry picture that is not the fault of my camera), it was a yummy dinner!

m. 21 paneer and zucchini herbed rice and butter soft zucchini and tomatoes (louki tamatar tarkari)

with a surplus of courgettes sitting in the fridge, m and i have been scouring cookbooks to come up with ways to use them, today i had the idea to turn once again to yamuna devi, and the result was amazing:

(the quality of my photos seems to be inversely related to the actual beauty of the food itself--both in image and in taste, so the more amazing the food the more ridiculous the photo) 

the rice was basically a pilaf with zucchini and paneer, it was delicious, and in the wintery future (if we ever have one) this rice could be made just with the paneer, the buttery courgettes and tomatoes was incredible, yamuna (aka joan) you have really outdone yourself this time, and here is an adapted version of the recipe (spinach is added at the very end, something we did not do).

the best thing was that the two dishes took just an hour from start to finish, m said "if you can make food this good there is no reason to out for curry,"  but she also said "is there any left, i can't wait to eat it for lunch" ... there go the leftovers!