Simple Garlicy Spinach Pesto

This is the perfect recipe for when you feel in the mood for a quick, fresh pasta sauce/dip/spread. Very versatile and easy.
It is basically like pesto, but stripped of a few ingredients for those of us who never quite manage to keep that pantry nice and stocked up. It still tasted awesome though! (Assuming you like spinach and garlic..).

All you need:

- Spinach (2-3 cups)
- Garlic (2-3 bulbs)
- Olive oil

For a more fancy proper vegan pesto, add:

- Basil (1 cup)
- Pine nuts / walnuts (1/2 cup)

Then just blend everything together.
Look at this beautiful green mushyness:

This will go well on pasta, bread, rice, anything really. Have fun with it!

Inspiration for the pesto was found on K <3 Wellness, get body phat, mindbodygreen and Vegan Visitor. Thanks for that, people.
Enjoy your weekend guys!

A fresh and spicy start

Dear readers,

I have decided to finally rejuvenate this blog and restart to tell the tales of my vegan eating. Yes, I am indeed a vegetarian now, still I intend to cook more and more vegan food and reduce animal products in my diet. This blog will hopefully help my motivation to do so!

Now, the other day I happened to see a Whole Foods pantry in a small town somewhere in Ontario. The lady there was incredibly nice and it was great to see all her different products. Positively suprised by the offers, I decided to stock up right away for my new blogging and vegan cooking ventures. This is my phat loot:

Let the fun begin …

(1) Sunflower seeds

(2) Israeli CousCous

(3) Bulgur

(4) Nutritional Yeast

(5) Chia seeds

Now, what to do with all these babies? Suggestions are always welcome.
Can’t wait to start cooking!

Day 5: A (not-so) Cheesy Matter

Cheese is what I thought I’d miss most this lent. I don’t drink much milk, and I hardly ever buy any eggs, but I do like cheese. So I started looking around for alternatives straight away…

I did some research, and it turns out that vegan cheese is available in all kinds of colours and textures and even quite cheap – but quite a few people claimed the taste was rather unpleasant and simply ‘not the same’.
Then, however, I found out about nutritional yeast “cheese”. I read about it in all kinds of other blogs like here, here and here and they all reported tastiness, easy preparation and yummy cheesy texture and feel. I also like the idea of producing the stuff myself.
So, once again, went to Health Foods on Market Street and luckily found this:

The vegan margarine, on the left side, is also a valuable ingredient. I found it in Tesco after scanning all the other one’s ingedrient lists: Who knew even plant-based margarine had buttermilk or milk proteins in it? :S

So you will need:

- 2 tbs Vegan margarine
- 3 tbs Flour
- 50 ml Water
- 1 ts Mustard
- 1 ts Salt
- 4 tbs Nutritional yeast flakes
- 100 ml Water

Mix all the stuff together in a pan in the given order after melting margarine first.
Bring it to a quick boil and then you’re done.
Then, it will have the texture of a very thick cheese sauce, so you can do whatever you like with it. I chose to pour it over my potatoes and bake it in the oven for about 5 min.

Aaaand this is the end product:

Very happy with it. Incredibly tasty, the texture is very similar to that of cheese. As you can see in the picture, it melts nicely and even has a little brown crust on it. Yum.

Day 2: Home-made Springrolls!

So, today was the day I decided to start trying new recipes, which I had aimed to be a positive side-effect of the experience. The first one I wanted to try was a really simple recipe for Vegan spring rolls I found at PepperAnn’s Blog .
For the non-German speakers amongst you, I shall re-post the recipe here:

You Need:
- Rice paper / pancakes
- Random vegetables
- Oil
- Some spices or soy sauce
- Bowl of Warm water

You can find the rice pancakes in Health Foods on Market Street for only 1.79. (picture taken from GoodnessDirect

Instructions:
- Cut up the vegetables into small cubes, put them into a nice big bowl. Throw in some spices in (I used Tesco’s ‘Chinese 5 Spices’ mix) and a bit of soy sauce.
- Heat up about 0.5cm of oil in your pan.
- Start soaking two rice pancakes in the bowl of warm water for a minute or so.
- Take the first one out and spoon about 2 TS of your vegetable mix on it. Fold the rice pancake carefully leaving one corner open, then take the second pan cake out of the bowl and fold it around that corner.
- Put the rolls in the pan.
- Cook until they’re nice and crispy, for around 3-5 min.

Hints:
- BE CAREFUL with the hot oil! If you have a deep-fryer, use that – but frying them in the pan should work perfectly as well.
- You will have to actually use two layers of pancakes for each roll. I did attempt to save some by using one layer, but all that happen is that the rolls fall apart and it’s a big mess. So, unless you make your rolls really small so you have several layers of the one pan cake around it, just use two.
- Make sure not to put the roles too close to each other in the pan, they will stick! Also try to use a plastic cooking utensil and store them on a ceramic plate – the rice pancakes will stick to anything wooden like there’s no tomorrow.

The camera unfortunately died in the process of making the spring rolls. Since they were so yummy, though, I shall make them again soon and then post some pictures.

On a slightly unrelated note, this is the perfect spring-roll-cooking soundtrack: Blue Foundation

Guten Appetit! Enjoy!