Pear Tart

This was a tart we made from pears grown in our back garden. The fruit were a bit sour but nice, and the tart came our really well. The recipe: Put a big handful of raisins into a mug and fill it up with hot water. Leave them to soak. Take 5 pears and slice them into very thin wedges. Mix half a jar of vegan yoghurt with the soaked raisins and some pear syrup. If you don't have pear syrup, use golden syrup, maple syrup, or runny honey. Take an oven tray with raised edges, grease it if necessary, and line it with puff pastry. Blind bake for 5 minutes, then arrange the pears in an overlapping fashion. Pour the yoghurt/syrup/raisin mix on top evenly and put back into the oven until the pastry is brown.

Extended Edition Salad

Vegans, as we all know, eat vegetables, and vegetables means salads. Salads do not have to mean health food, however! We recently had a salad made from the following ingredients:

• head lettuce
• cherry tomatoes
• fresh basil
• humous
• pesto
• doritos (Yes, they're vegan. They may not technically be classed as food, but they are vegan.)

With a sauce made of:

• 1 part olive oil
• 2 parts balsamic vinegar
• salt and pepper

International Almond Cupcakes of Mystery

Adapted from Peanut Butter Cupcakes in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.

My friend Martin gave me this amazing book for Christmas and Dave and I have been slowly working our way through it since. I made the Gingerbread Cupcakes at the weekend -- they were delicious -- and wanted to repeat them tonight. Unfortunately, once I'd sieved the flour into the bowl I realised we were missing some key ingredients. I flicked through to find something I could bake instead. The substitutions I had to make gave a certain international aspect to the recipe!

Ingredients

3/4 cup soya milk
2 tsp sushi vinegar
1/2 cup whole nut almond butter
1/3 cup vegan margarine
2/3 cup granulated sugar
2 tbsp maple syrup
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/3 plain wholemeal flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 salt

1. Preheat oven to 180 °C and line a 12-cup muffin tray with paper liners.
2. Add sushi vinegar to soya milk and put to one side to curdle. (Finally, a recipe where you're meant to curdle the soya milk!)
3. Mix the almond butter, margarine, sugar, maple syrup and vanilla together in your main mixing bowl. Add the soya milk and vinegar and mix them in well.

4. Sieve the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt into a smaller bowl. Add the dry ingredients to the main bowl and mix.
5. Fill the cupcake liners equally and bake for 20-25 minutes (ours were done after 20 minutes). They're ready when you can poke a skewer into the middle and it comes out clean.

Dave made a chocolate "buttercream" icing to put on top from margarine, lots of cocoa, some icing sugar and a little soya milk.

The cupcakes were tasty and very satisfying. The recipe called for plain white flour and next time I would use that instead of the wholemeal, but it didn't really matter because the almond butter had a strong enough flavour to stand up against it.

These were so good, I may never make the peanut butter recipe in the book -- unless I run out of almond butter, of course.

Star anise schnapps

The picture above is rather misleading. Last summer, my colleague Martyn gave me half a dozen unripe walnuts from his tree, to make schnapps with. I steeped them in vodka for five months, according to this recipe, and left the liquid to mature for seven months. Just as the schapps should have been ready to enjoy, I moved house and the jar was spilled in the process.

Martyn gave me some more walnuts this year, the ones shown above. Unfortunately, it was too late in the year and they had already formed their woody shells. I cast about the kitchen for something to schnappsify, and found a bag of star anise. Here's a recipe for star anise schnapps from the same site.

This recipe had the advantage that it was a lot quicker to mature. (Being absent-minded, I still left the star anise in for a few days longer than recommended.) A week later, I served it to some friends as a digestif: seen below are Jenny, David and Dave.

The schnapps had a beautiful amber colour and a strong flavour of aniseed, with delicate undertones -- more complex than, for example, sambuca. The next time I make it, I'll probably leave the pods in for the same length of time and dilute it slightly with more vodka. I also want to try turning it into a liqueur and experimenting with the rest of the spice cupboard

Beetroot and squash soup with red bean mash

When this blog started, the first couple of posts were of beetroot-based recipes, as Rachel had just gone to the market and brought back a lot of beetroot. This is once again the case, so here's some delicious squash and beetroot soup:

Recipe (serves 2)

• 2 small squashes/pumpkins
• 2 beetroots
• olive oil
• a stock cube
• garlic paste, salt, a bit of cayenne pepper, and lots of cumin

Peel, de-core and cube the squashes and cube the beetroots. Put into pan with a generous amount of olive oil, some garlic paste, and the spices. Gently fry for 5-10 minutes. Then add the stock and enough boiling water to cover the vegetables. Simmer, occasionally stirring, for half an hour. The squashes will have dissolved, the beetroots softened, and the soup become thick, red, and creamy.

To go along with this, Rachel made a bean mash consisting of chopped spring onions, mashed kidney beans, lemon juice, tahini and pepper:

Knobbly courgette, pea and tofu tart

One of the nice things about my company is that a lot of my colleagues have vegetable gardens and are generous with the produce thereof. This is how I came by this knobbly Venetian courgette. After it had served its time as an alien ray gun, it had to be cooked, and we thought this variation on a favourite meal would work nicely.

The original recipe is from The Really Useful Vegetarian Student Cookbook and contains courgette, peas, leak and anchovies (not too vegetarian!). Edit: no, it was in The Really Useful Student Cookbook, where anchovies would be less of a problem.

For this meal we steamed the courgette, as it was quite hard, while frying an onion in margarine, and then added the courgette, some frozen peas, salt and pepper and a packet of Cauldron marinated tofu chunks to the pan for a bit. We used readymade puff pastry for the base, leaving a margin around the edges to puff up.

The result was delicious. Steaming definitely helped the courgette play nicely with the other, fast-cooking ingredients but it kept its character in the mix. On the side I served some Greek-style chickpeas that another colleague had given me.

Blackberry Jam

I go swimming twice a week, and on my way to the pool, I walk across a large common bisected by a railway line. The other day, when crossing the bridge over the railway, I noticed that the bushes to either side of the line were brambles heavy with ripe blackberries.

So on Monday night, I met Rachel on the way back from work and we went picking blackberries. It turns out that the most important tool in the blackberry-picker's arsenal is a hook made from a wire coathanger, which we used to great effect to draw in branches too far away to reach otherwise. One of us would hold the hook while the other would pick the berries.

When the box I'd brought was full, we headed home via the supermarket, where we picked up sugar and pectin. It was time to make jam.

When we got in, we were ravenous, so we quickly prepared and ate dinner. Then we took out the stock pot and set to work. Conveniently enough, the bottle of pectin had instructions for making blackberry jam on it, so we followed them (or tried to - I added the pectin too early). We ended up filling a big jar with jam, and putting a bit of overflow into another one. Finally, we got out some bits of white bread and polished off the jam sticking to the inside of the pot.

We left the jars to cool off overnight. To our satisfaction, when we checked in the morning, the full jar had pressure-sealed. Rachel made a sandwich using jam from the overflow jar, and it was delicious.

Since we still have lots of pectin left, we plan to return to the common. There may be more blackberries, and the elderberries are ripe too...