Vegan pizza and other treats

By Tracy

This is what the kids had for dinner tonight: vegan pizza, topped with Redwood's melting "Cheezly" (a vegan cheese that comes in several different varieties).


There are other ways you can make vegan cheese and cheese sauces, many of which are detailed in Joanne Stepaniak's The Uncheese Cookbook, now revised as The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook.

Nutritional yeast, which often sells in Australia under the name "savoury yeast", is one of the ways vegans make "uncheesy" sauces, fillings and toppings (such as for lasagne).

As far as pizza goes, you can of course put anything vegan on it. This one was mushroom, olive, and tempeh strips.

The other vegan undairy item pictured here is vegan cream. We had a vegan "Devonshire tea" for K's 18th birthday a few days ago, and I adapted a method from both the Wakeman & Baskerville book I've mentioned before, and Rose Elliot's Vegan Feasts. The vegan cream is made by combining, little by little, a very slightly heat-thickened cornflour, vanilla and soymilk sauce with some whipped-up Nuttelex. The texture is such that it can be scooped, piped or shaped -- and as W&B; say, even floated on coffee if you thin it a little. It tastes good and doesn't have that grainy texture that tofu-creams sometimes have. (Though I like them too...)

Cheer-you-up cakes

By Tracy

Tim (6) has a cold... and a theory that cakes "cheer you up" when you are unwell. (A theory that is not in any way self-serving, of course.)



My icing spirals are a little unsteady, but they still taste okay. There are now only two cakes left, in the time since the photo was taken!

If you want to make cakes like these without dairy or eggs, you can simply substitute with non-dairy plant milks (I used soy, cup for cup) and any of various "egg replacers" -- I used Orgran's "No Egg", because it never fails and you can keep it in the cupboard for ages (it's powdered, made of potato starch basically). Other things you can use instead of egg:

Half a mashed banana (always works, but your cake will have a banana-ish tang, which you may or may not want!)
Mashed soft tofu (neutral taste), about 4tbsp
Apple sauce (works beautifully to make a moist chocolate cake, for example), about 3 tbsp
Ground flax (have never used this myself, but How It All Vegan says about 3 tbsp)

and another one I've never used, but it sounds good -- Wakeman and Baskerville's The Vegan Cookbook also suggests 4 tbsp of pureed mango...

Instead of butter, you can use a vegan margarine (Nuttelex, in Australia), or light vegetable oil, which I find makes a good texture (canola or sunflower oil -- a quarter cup per two cups of flour in the cake/s). Sometimes, when using applesauce, you don't even need extra fat content at all, because the cake is moist without it. You can also use coconut milk, but it's not super-healthy.

Quick vegan cooking

By Tracy

Here's tonight's vegan apple pie, sweetened with sultanas and little flecks of dried apricot, and eagerly sampled by Tim just before he went to bed.:


















And below is the last remaining piece of the vegan lasagne we had for dinner:



Tim was excited because for once he ate exactly the same as us (rather than a simplified, bland child's version based on the same ingredients!). He adores lasagne and in fact all the Italian-style vegan dishes he knows.

Disclaimers:
I wouldn't usually make a lasagne and a pastry dessert in one evening, but the lasagne was very light (just tomato and mushroom filling, with a vegan bechamel sauce which is made using nutritional yeast, one of my favourite ingredients).

I'm no food photographer, but at least it gives some idea...

For those wanting more detail and more regular postings on vegan food and recipes, there are some blogs dedicated to this, e.g. Notes from the Vegan Feast Kitchen, or The Vegan Lunchbox, and doubtlessly many others.

Mostly I don't use recipe books -- I'm a very informal cook. But some of our staples have come from books like How It All Vegan and The Vegan Cookbook.

Every recipe I have tried from How It All Vegan actually works -- this is not always the case with cookbooks!

And the second book, a UK title by Wakeman and Baskerville, is a kind of standard that tells you how to make everything basic (including vegan cream, vegan custard, vegan yoghurt etc -- parts of it are almost a Golden Wattle for vegans). It doesn't have any pictures other than on the cover, but it's very practical and my copy is much stained, especially from making a vegan chocolate-cream tart which I based on their chocolate custard, and will have to photograph next time I make it...