Thursday 15 July 2010

14/7

Had a few foodie disasters lately. Okay, maybe not disasters. Just... meh.

Made some low fat spinach & potato balls. Given the ingredients, I don't know why I was expecting something tasty. But I was, and it wasn't.

Then, I made Hokkien noodles with black bean sauce from Vegetarian Asian by Lynelle Scott Aitken. I modded the recipe quite a lot- missed out the choy sum, added a green pepper, replaced the black bean sauce with hoisin sauce AND replaced the hokkien noodes with Singapore-style noodles (cheap wheat noodles boiled then fried in oil, curry powder, fried onion and turmeric). It was really hard to manage keeping the noodles warm without nuking the sauce and it ended up looking mushy. It also made my kitchen smell kinda gross. I think I'll stick to the recipe next time. Vegetarian Asian is a nice-looking A4 cookbook, with big colour photos and unusual recipes, like agar-based almond jelly that I've been meaning to make ever since I bought the book. Maybe one day I will do the book justice and make something good.

Yesterday I made a roasted veggie lasagne by Delia Smith. Replaced the milk with soy milk and rice milk, used normal lasagne sheets and omitted the cheese. It came out okay, but was pretty bland. Not very pretty either. I like white sauce, but when I have to wash up afterwards it just reinforces my beliefs in going raw. Seeing that goop harden on plates really puts me off.

My copy of Ani Phyo's Raw Food Essentials turned up.




















(Image from aniphyo.com)

Most of the pictures are in black and white, with a few pages in the middle with colour pix, but the black and green layout is nice, and there are tonnes of recipes. The majority of them are quite heavy on fat, but that's okay. I tend to be an on/off raw n00b anyway. I like how Ani isn't all petty about small amounts of non-raw stuff. I get tired of reading if you eat agave syrup/raw cacao/maple syrup/salt/herbs you're going to die or something.

Some of the recipes get recycled a lot to make other, complicated recipes. I don't envision myself making 3+ different types of raw sauces or cheeses to create a raw taco or making 'bacon' from coconut (my other half's reaction: "what the fuck!?"). But the more simple things, like raw sushi, raw ice-creams and salad-based recipes look pretty do-able. I've done the vegan to raw vegan transitional gourmet stuff before and and the novelty of it wears off pretty quickly when you're constantly washing up blenders, grinders and food processors.

Hopefully the book wont end up getting eBayed like my last raw book, Rawvolution- which was stunning, but every other recipe used a cup of agave or oil so everything I made from it tasted either gooey or greasy.

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