Tag Archives: Meat-Free Monday

January 10, 2012

Recipe Shed: Meat-Free Monday Vlog: How to make vegetable pakoras

I’m still getting the hang of this vlogging malarkey. I haven’t learned how to edit them yet – and they are taking an ge to upload to YouTube, so I’m probably doing something wrong – but I will persist.

This posts shows you how to make Spicy Vegetable Pakoras. I’ve done two videos here: one that shows the batter stage, and the other the cooking stage.

Here’s the recipe…

Make enough for 6-8 people

1 litre sunflower oil
Vegetables of your choice, thickly sliced (I used 1 aubergine, peeled ; 1 courgette; 1 potato, peeled and parboiled for 5 mins; 1 onion, peeled and sliced)
300g gram flour

Approx. 300ml sparkling water
2 tbsp hot curry powder
3 garlic cloves (peeled), 1 cm piece of ginger (peeled), 1 red chilli  (de-seeded), beaten to a pulp in a pestle and mortar
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper

1. Heat the oil in a large frying pan.

2. Mix the batter ingredients into a paste, thick enough to coat your finger

3. Add the vegetables and make sure they’re all coated

4. When the oil is hot enough to sizzle a drop of batter, carefully add the battered veg. Cook them in batches, taking care not to crowd the pan, for approx. 45 secs to 1 min 30 secs, taking care not to burn the batter. When they are golden brown, they are done. (I slightly overcooked mine because of multi-tasking with the vlog and the cooking!)

5. Serve with a dipping sauce of your choice. We had sweet chilli.

 

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January 9, 2012

Recipe Shed: Meat-free Monday..Herby baked mushrooms and sour dough bruschetta

I had this for breakfast this morning. It doesn’t look much and  is probably the easiest thing I’ve cooked for a while – but also one of the tastiest. 

Serves 1-2

2 portobello mushrooms
50g softened butter
1 tsp mixed herbs
1 tsp Dijon mustard
Pinch of sea salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
2-4 slices of sour dough bread
1 garlic clove, peeled and bashed to release the oils
Extra virgin olive oil, to drizzle

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4.

2. In a small bowl, mix the butter, herbs, mustard, salt and pepper.

 

3. Remove the woody stalk from the mushrooms and lay them upside down in a baking dish.

4. Add a big knob of the butter mixture into the centre of each mushroom. Cover with tin foil and bake in the oven for 20 mins.

 

5. Meanwhile, toast the bread, then rub each slice with the garlic and drizzle with olive oil.

6. Remove the mushrooms from the oven and lay onto a slice of toast. Drizzle over the juices collected at the bottom of the dish.

 

 

 

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January 3, 2012

Recipe Shed: Meat-Free Monday…Wagamama’s fragrant coconut, ginger & lemongrass stir-fry sauce with Soba noodles, red peppers, courgettes and spring onions

I’ve decided we eat too much meat in our house. Also, I read that raising livestock is bad for the planet – both in terms of greenhouse gases produced and the amount of feed needed to raise beef, pigs, lambs or chicken – and if we all had one meat-free day a week, it would make a difference.

So one of my New Year’s Resolutions was to To My Bit and thus every Monday in our house is going to be Meat-Free.

I’m no expert at vegetarian cooking, so I’m just going to chuck stuff together and see what happens.

Last night we had Japanese Soba noodles – which are wholewheat and about half the size of the noodles I’m used to – with sliced red peppers, sliced courgettes, stir-fried with a fragrant coconut, ginger and lemongrass sauce, made by the restaurant chain Wagamama’s, which I’d bought from the supermarket.

Here’s a quick review..

Time to prepare...5 mins

Time to cook…10 mins

Texture...crunchy from the veg; slurpy from the soft noodles and sauce

Taste...it was OK. You could taste the ginger and lemongrass, but the main flavour was the citric acid – an ingredient used to preserve it. The bottom line is, you can’t beat freshly made from scratch.

Would I have it again? No

 

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