Thursday 19 May 2016

Recipe Round-Up: Vegan Cooking For One

It has been a while since I have posted a round-up, but now that my travels have calmed down for a bit it is time to get back into the cookbooks! Today's Vegan Cooking for One is an older book, and one that I don't use very often. It is actually quite clever, with weekly menus and shopping lists designed for the lone cook, so that you don't end up with odds and ends left over. The servings are often very generous. I have posted previous round-ups from this book here. The book is divided into summer/spring and winter/autumn recipes, all of these come from the latter.

Scrambled Tofu and Leek: This is a standard scramble recipe, with turmeric and mustard and soy, but I like the addition of the leeks. It is served with toast, which I made avocado toast because that is the best.
Rating: :)

Scrambled Tofu and Leek


Baked Maple Apple Halves: The book includes a Sunday dessert in each week's menu. This has only four ingredients, and smells lovely during baking (while it takes moments to assemble, it does need to bake for awhile). Servered here with some vanilla soy ice cream.
Rating: :)

Baked Maple Apple Halves


Irish Stew with Frozen Tofu: This was a big serving, and very hot and satisfying. She uses yeast extract (aka Vegemite in this neck of the woods) for a lot of her stews, which lends a great savoury flavour. The tofu is frozen and then defrosted to give it a different texture. Plus, biscuits on top!
Rating: :)

Irish Stew with Frozen Tofu


Jambalaya: This was verging on meh, I have made much better versions of this recipe from other cookbooks. I subbed zucchini for green pepper here. It also had coconut and walnuts in it.
Rating: :|

Jambalaya


Savoury Eggplant on Toast: This is one of the Sunday lunch recipes, and is a different take on savoury toppings for toast. It is quite simple, eggplants and onions sauteed and seasoned. I found that there was too much onion compared to the eggplant in this dish, you need to reverse the ratios.
Rating: :|

Savoury Eggplant on Toast


Tempeh and Sweet Corn Roast with Tahini/Mushroom Sauce: Another big and satisfying hot dinner. I needed to add a bit of extra tomato paste and water to the roast, otherwise the mix was a bit dry even before baking. The sauce was nice, I love tahini.
Rating: :)

Tempeh and Sweetcorn Roast with Tahini/Mushroom Sauce


Baked Pears: This is very simple and plane, literally just a pear roasted with some sugar, Nuttelex and ground ginger, but the result was nice. Definitely great served with ice cream.
Rating: :)

Baked Pear


Noodles with Creamy Leek and Mushroom Sauce: The leeks and mushrooms were great in the sauce, but I had to thin it out with a fair bit of extra soymilk, otherwise it goes very gluggy and isn't at all suitable to mix through noodles.
Rating: :)

Noodles with Creamy Leak and Mushroom Sauce


Millet and Vegetable Stew: Even though I decreased the millet from 1/2 cup to 1/3 cup, this isn't really a stew because it was not brothy at all. It was more like a pilaf-style dish, which was fine. It had miso and sage and veggies in it, so was tasty.
Rating: :)

Millet and Vegetable Stew


Curried Chickpeas: This was OK, but there are much better curry recipes out there, that are not necessarily a lot more complicated than this one.
Rating: :|

Curried Chick Peas


Cute Kitty Photo of the Post

A very sleepy kitten.


Here is a very sleepy kitten, all tucked in. He is actually sleeping on top of my laptop bag, which was on the bench at work, and then we tucked him in with a blanky.

8 comments:

  1. I do love the idea of a cookbook for one, because I am the only human in my house, and sometimes I don't want to make a recipe that serves six to eight people, especially if it isn't the best. That's a lot of as you say "meh" meals for one gal to have to eat!
    I love the kitten, so sweet!

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    1. Ha, yes. There are some good recipes in the book, even some great ones, but the ones in this particular round-up were less than stellar. Definitely happy not to have to eat leftovers!

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  2. Is it the Leah Lehmann book? If it is that was one of my first ever vegan cookbooks :)

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    1. It is! Her other cookbook, Easy Vegan Cooking, was one of my first vegan cookbooks. I've cooked heaps from it, but most of it was before I got a digital camera and started taking food photos. I got this book quite a bit later, in a buy two get one free cookbook deal.

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  3. Walnuts in Jambalaya? That just seems wrong. So very very wrong.

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    1. It was weird. When I saw the photo was labeled Jambalaya I had to double check the book, because it didn't really look like any Jambalaya... but that is her interpretation of it, I guess! Odd.

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  4. Sounds like a pretty good book overall. I like that the desserts are simple - I'm not much for complicated ones.
    The noodle dish with the mushrooms sounds the best - but I'm a big mushroom fan, so I may be biased ;p

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    Replies
    1. Mushrooms are pretty essential for life, as far as I'm concerned. ;)

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