Wha? Watermelon curry…

Jack and I recently recieved a vegetarian cookbook (The Modern Vegetarian) from Tom and Tony. Thanks guys!

I remember noticing that there was a lot of weird watermelon recipes in the cookbook and when we had some leftover watermelon from a breakfast we went to – I thought that we’d make something with that. The recipe was actually called Watermelon Curry with Black Beans and Paneer, but we modified it a little (couldn’t find tinned black beans, so replaced these with red kidney beans).

We found some paneer at the supermarket – which is an indian form of cheese, although with an unusual texture and according to jack “like eating wax…”, however I didn’t mind it. We fried up the paneer and added it to the rest of the curry.

The recipe basically involved blending the majority of the watermelon and using this as the basis for the sauce, frying off a bunch of spices then adding the watermelon juice to this, to simmer.

So…the verdict…the curry was alright, but not really mind blowing. The watermelon was an interesting texture in the curry for the most part it worked. I also made the mistake of putting in a bit too much cayenne pepper, as it just kind of jumped out of the container, which may have also reduced some of the more subtle flavours. I’m not sure if we’ll make it again, but we’ll definately try some of the other recipes in this interesting cookbook.

Firstly I’m sorry for neglecting the blog, it’s been my ‘turn’ for a while and I’m lazy ><; I’ve been really enthusiastic about food and cooking, not so good about getting around to uploading photos and typing about it

But here we go! This is a fancy fish and chips we made when my parents and sister came over for dinner one evening. The fish is Red Mullet from Seafresh Innaloo. I think the potatoes are Royal Blues.

We cut the chips chunky style with the skins left on, boilded them for ~12 minutes then seasoned with oil, salt, and chilli flakes and baked for like 45 minutes.

The fish has the skin left on and was oiled on both sides then had a mixture of breadcrumbs, salt, pepper and mixed dry herbs. Fried in a hot pan with a generous amount of olive oil. Skin side down for ~5 minutes then flesh side down for another ~3 minutes.

The verdict was multiple thumbs up!

It’s been a while between posts and I guess there isn’t any reason for this, apart from being busy or lazy or something like that. However, this doesn’t mean we haven’t  been cooking and eating vegetarian. This week, Jack made some very nice spinach and ricotta cannelloni – I’m a huge fan of pasta (and cheese).

Spinach and Ricotta Cannelloni before cooking

I think Jack pretty much followed the recipe on the back of the packet of cannelloni and it was pretty straight forward, although a bit fiddly trying the stuff the filling into the cannelloni tubes. However we didn’t have enough tins of tomatoes to completely cover the cannelloni, so we just mixed some tomato paste with vegetable stock, which seemed to work fine. We also could have put a bechemel on top of the tomato sauce however, we didn’t think of that and it wasn’t on the recipe.

The last few times we’ve made this dish, we made the pasta from scratch and it’s been a little thick and underdone. I think part of this is also not cooking the pasta in enough sauce, something we’ll need to consider next time we make our own pasta. As you can see from the pic, the sauce covers around 3/4 of the tubes, which was probably just about right.

It was extremely tasty, however it did get a little crispy in the oven, cause we were watching My Kitchen Rules – which was pretty funny. Therefore, we didn’t take a post cooking photo

Tempeh, you say? What the heck is tempeh? Tempeh is a fermented soybean cake…sound delicious right?

Jack and I decided to give some tempeh a go and it was fairly easy to find in the supermarket, near the tofu and vegetarian fake meat products (sausages, sandwich meat etc…). I wanted to make some tempeh burgers, cause I had heard of tempeh burger patties (either that, or I’m trying to deal with a burger craving ) but most of the recipes on the net required marinating overnight and I’m not that organised.

Anyway, we ended up making tempeh “sloppy joes” from this recipe.

It turned out ok, but I think there was still some of that tempeh “taste” – which might take some getting used to. It’s hard to describe the texture, I guess it’s kinda like lumpy tofu almost, although a bit more dense. Jack and I ended up putting on a lot of sweet chilli sauce on it, which greatly improved the flavour. However, given the amount of other tasty vego foods out there, I don’t think it is something we’ll be rushing back to try again.

Although we are giving vegetarianism a go, we are not really 100% vego, as we still eat seafood. I think giving up seafood, along with all other meat would probably lead us to reducing our 6 month target, plus severely limit our menu options, especially when going out. Although if we were to consider it logically, the reasons we are choosing not to eat meat, also apply to seafood, especially seafood that is not sustainably caught/farmed. But as I said…we couldn’t go the whole hog (so to speak) all in one go. However I digress…

Squid tubes and tentacles

The other night Jack made a squid stirfy, with some squid tentacles and tubes he bought from the Innaloo Seafresh. We actually hadn’t cooked any seafood since turning vego,  but had probably been eating more than usual, when we were eating out. The stirfry was pretty basic, had a bunch of random vegetables in it, some capsicum, onion, sugar snap peas, carrot, ginger, garlic. Jack cooked all that up and then added some soy sauce, brown sugar, lemon juice and added the squid at the last minute.

Squid stir fry

We also cooked up some noodles to with it, although we didn’t keep a good eye on them and they turned a bit gluggy and stuck together – still the stir fry was quite nice – especially the squid tentacles – so juicy and tender. Hopefully jack can make a trip to the seafood shop every week and we can experiment with some different types of seafood.

Sorry about the week-long gap between posts!

Here are some photos of some awesome pumpkin and feta puffs we made during the week. The recipe is from a great vegetarian cookbook given to us by Rob and Anna. Cheers guys!

We decided to go with some WIP shots for a change: Feel free to follow along with our step by step instructions!

Fill ~15 cm squares of puff pastry with slices of roasted pumpkin, feta, basil, thyme, toasted pine nuts and a drizzle of (lemon infused!) olive oil.

Pull the corners up to the top and pinch the edges together.

Wash with egg yolk and milk and sprinkle with poppy seeds (was meant to be sesame seeds! Our bad ><;)

Bake for like 15-25 minutes I think it was!

We enjoyed them with a salad of Lebanese cucumbers and cherry tomatoes with balsamic and pepper dressing.

The only issue we had with them was that the pine nuts kind of disappeared, taste and texture wise. I think being engulfed in soft feta and pumpkin kind of hid them away. We could have done without them entirely I think. We made 16 of them so they were really great for lunch cold the next day as well!

Jack and I have been vego for 3 weeks now…seems much longer some how. Maybe this is partly due to this blog, as I feel like I need to keep updating and talking about being a vegetarian and of course explaining, discussing and justifying why you are not eating (land) meat.
I don’t feel too different, my energy levels seem much the same, so I guess it’s all going well. I’m still enjoying preparing meals and all the new foods and recipes to try.
A couple of things I have noticed though, that I eat a lot more cheese (feta, ricotta, cheddar and parmesan) and eggs. I think I’d be pretty stuck if I was a vegan – a lot more commitment.

I’d been feeling like I’d been neglecting my protein intake over the past week and reading a friends vegetarian book, I knew that vegos needed to combine a pulse and a grain to get the correct number of amino acids to constitute a whole protein (or something like that). Anyway, the key is to combine things like bread, corn chips, rice with things like beans, chickpeas (including hommous – another vegetarian fave!) and lentils.

So I decided to make a pasta sauce with lentils. I really love pasta sauces, especially roast vegetable pasta sauces. So, I roasted some vegies I found at the bottom of the fridge, cherry tomatoes, pumpkin and eggplant and combined it with some tomato and lentils to make a pretty tasty basic sauce.

Then as that was bubbling away, I tried to think of what else to add – to pack a bit more flavour into the dish. I remembered that we still had a bunch of pine nuts in the cupboard (left over from the housewarming filo pastry triangles – see jack’s post below) and so I toasted them up in the oven and put them in.

As I was waiting for the pasta to boil  – I’m pretty impatient with pasta – always seem to end up a little bit too al dente I saw some chillies sitting in the fruit bowl. I quickly chopped one up and put it in.

The result was a pretty awesome pasta sauce – and the chillies and pine nuts really added a great flavour. I think these “super tasty” foods may be the trick to keeping this vegetarianism going…Anyone got any other “super tasty” foods they’d care to share?

We had a house warming on Sunday and made some nifty (in our opinion) snacks. We didn’t want to do anything too complicated. I guess the unintentional theme was food in parcels

Rice paper rolls. Filled with: Bean sprouts, rice vermicelli, carrot, spring onion, red and yellow capsicum and snow peas. The dressing/dipping sauce was lime and lemon juice, brown sugar, sesame oil, fresh chilli and sweet chill sauce. They are actually reasonably easy to make and with practice pretty quick.

We also made feta, ricotta, basil and pine nut filo pastry triangles. Filo pastry is pretty intimidating but was actually pretty easy if you keep it cool and damp after opening it. Folding the triangles was good fun!

All in all it was pretty successful I think. We made more rice paper rolls tonight. (we over bought on the paper, turns out there are like 30 sheets in a pack!) I’m glad that we have added rice paper and filo pastry to our arsenal. We’ll try to use them again, and discover more ingredients.

So, week three of vegetarianism for me was a little tough and I put it down to barbeques. Had 3 barbeques this week and the main (only) focus of a bbq is the meat! Steak, sausages, kebabs, burgers are all very meaty. Another tough part of barbeques is the smell. Everyone’s hanging out around the bbq and the meat smell is pretty overwhelming and it smells pretty good (well it did this week). I didn’t think of myself as a huge meat eater, but some of the bbq’d meats smelled pretty delicious. Perhaps you get used to the smell and don’t notice or want the meat as much, but I found it a little tough.  However, I did try vegetarian sausages and they weren’t too bad – quite tasty in fact (Thanks Rob!).

There are a number of vegetarians that can’t have their meals touching the meat on the bbq. I’m not sure if I’d ever be too worried about that, but then, my reasons for trying vegetarianism aren’t because I don’t like meat, just that I don’t want to purchase and eat it. One of my friends cooks her bbq’d veges on baking paper, which is a pretty good idea, so that it doesn’t touch the meat or soak up any of the juices.

Another point that contributed to my third week weaknesses was a general laziness about cooking food. It seemed like all the vegetarian options were just that extra bit harder…which is a pretty lame excuse and not totally true. I was actually quite enticed by some sort of chicken burger that was advertised on tv…weird – Anyway I’m over it now and looking forward to week 4. We’ll be cooking up a few vego dishes for the housewarming – fingers crossed it all goes well.