Tuna Baked

As I mentioned below I bought a package of Vegetarian Tuna from Vina's on Thursday after being tricked by my loving partner (because clearly I have no will of my own and blah blah blah who gives a shit, I bought some fake tuna).
I get excited about mock meat because I LOVE MEAT and mock meat is commonly made from gluten products which, because I HATE THE A.W.B., I don't partake of (this is a lie but being a coeliac is BORING) but will happily munch down on any "meaty" product that I can.

Tuna however, I never ever ever ate as an omnivore because I don't eat things that smell like yucky (see: Vegemite -maybe YOU like it, whatever) unless they look good or I'm given a reason to believe I'll enjoy it.
So it would only be a case of trickery that I would venture into untouched meat territory with this purchase, and with a waste-not-want-not policy of purchasing I set out to use it. I was not going to be making some sort of tuna dip or soup or spread for a sandwich (gluten free bread is too expensive for yucky risk taking) and the Vegan Tuna Bakes had been making the rounds through Melbourne's Vegan blogging and pot lucking scene with great success so I thought I may as well give it a go. (ZB also did one recently with tempeh, so maybe there is a national wave of mock tuna happening)

I'd never eaten a tuna bake before, but I do enjoy a macaroni cheese casserole (which is essentially what this is) whenever it's on offer so I figured the only risk was that I'd have to pick out the bits of tuna if I didn't take to it.

I went by Harriet's basic formula of Pasta + Beschamel + Veggies + Tuna topped with Breadcrumbs (naturally gluten free's crunch loaf is what I have around at the moment) and some grated Cheezly Edam in the oven for half an hour and seasoned servings with the good ol S&P, savoury yeast and some home grown parsley.

The veggies I used were red capsicum, mushrooms and broccolini.

The Beschamel/Cheese sauce I make is based on Karina's "Best Cheesey unCheese Sauce" and I combined it with some of Kingland's soy mayonaise on a whim and popped it into the oven at 180c for half an hour which was enough time for the dishes to be done and for Alex to come home with some cola he snatched from his pizza delivery job up here.

The Result? A warming, nourishing meal that had my trickster of a love making incredibley happy "as good as my mum's" noises which (considering the fact that his mum is all about meat and cheese) is enough to satisfy my checklist for a good meal, despite what I think about a certain fish.

I'm not convinced that I'm going to run out and buy another packet of this stuff unless tricked again but I did enjoy it quite enough to eat two servings and feel happy. If you ever liked tuna but can't eat it anymore, this stuff probably does everything you want it to.

unapologetic photo dump.

tofu fritatta (favourite!) messy version with added "pork" sausage and home grown oregano. made without a cast-iron frying pan befuddled me in a fight against gravity and made the result turn into rustic almost scramble. for an unmessy recipe with a cast iron griddle go back in time to this post. major changes were adding a bit of umeshu and fresh tomato and yellow capsicum in place of the red.

If you make a mess then it's an unbelievable sandwich filler. the toast is Naturally Gluten Free's Classic bread which is probably the best gluten free brand I've had and luckily I only have to travel to Leura (the township next to Katoomba) to get a loaf for myself. It fared very well in french toast last night. Good sign.


okay i am a bit apologetic that i've almost abandonned my fooding blog, especially because of all the time i spend thinking about food and plants. guh, moving, unemployment and stubbornly staying off centrelink hasn't meant that i havent been making and inventing in the kitchen, i've just been unprepared in my mind to take photos or make alex wait to eat because i need to get the right photo. damnit.

and for those who are curious, i'm still putting too much salt on my portions of food for health reasons, and i'm not getting much better except for that moving to a cold cold cold place for winter has calmed my heart a bit.

this is our new house. yes, the tibetan prayer flags do mean that we are sharing with hippies.
but they're fellow coeliacs and vegans so its tolerable.

In the meantime, I'll try to pick up the recipe'ing habit again. maybe..

Red Emma's Sausage Fest.

There's a couple of habits A and I have when it comes to cooking together.
Alex is really good at making use of all the spare/going bad veggies in the fridge (there's a lot of prolific dumpster divers living in MGTVLE, plus there's 7 of us and only one fridge) before they're totally uselessly expired. This sometimes frustrates me (because I really don't think we have to put EVERYTHING in one dish just cos it's there and the chances are that noone will use xyz thing before it's too late) but sometimes it works well, and it works especially well when we have a couple of "stock" meals that we like to make quite regularly that have very basic guidelines and lots of room to move with, so the meal can be as simple or as heavy as you like/require, based on the likelyhood of chucking out some old veggies.

Red Emma is a pasta dish that has incredibley loose rules. Which should be so, considering the dish's namesake, couldn't be more appropriate!
The "rules" for Red Emma are: at least one chargrilled red capsicum in the sauce. Hopefully the chargrilled capsicum is a stand-out feature of the sauce for the pasta, otherwise it's good to put in other red things (chillies and paprika and tomato paste are smiled upon!).

This version made use of a very intriguing vegetarian "roast sausage" I found in a asian grocery store on Marrickville Rd that seems to be made completely out of soy. I've found the sausages to be almost overwhelmingly pork-like (the only meat that really repels me unless it is in the form of salami) but it found it's place well used in this pasta sauce. I don't often get the chance to cook with sausage (most vege sausages are wheat laden) so felt a bit at a loss with these guys and took a chance for Monday night's dinner..

Fried the sausages (2 small sized sausages cut into circles) with lots of garlic and mushrooms, balsamic and tamari. added chillies, tomato paste and one large charred capsicum, skin peeled off. to make it more 'saucey' I added a thickening mix of cornflour and water, let the sauce come together and added a bit more tomato paste before throwing in a roughly chopped bunch of basil.

This turned out pretty well. Alex was impressed with my soy-heavy sausages' flavour and said in this sauce they smelled/tasted like Csabai sausage!! Which is disgusting if you think about it too long but is really impressive, suitabley european for miss Emma G.

Change of Address.

I have been eating but nothing terribly exciting.
The last week was spent saying goodbye and packing up and was pretty hectic.

Philippa made me some beautiful cookies to eat whilst we travelled for 9 hours north, back seats folded forward and crowded with everything I've owned in Melbourne that I hadn't discarded. An entire pantry's worth of flours and grains and condiments in towe, the cookies lasted until I woke up this morning in my new room.
It's interesting for me to enjoy food made specifically gluten free (ie. using gluten free flours) by people who aren't gluten free but are mostly just being very kind towards someone with an intolerance. I would probably be stumped making a cake with wheat flour these days, not instantly assuming certain adjustments to liquid/flour ratios required when cooking with GF flours or subsitutes.

Alex kindly kindly kindly gifted me a chocolate cake with rasberries he bought from Rowie's Cakes, a gluten and dairy free bakery that makes some egg free cakes and cake/pastry mixes in Marrickville, where our warehouse is.
I feel very spoilt and lucky whenever anyone takes wheat out of food that they are preparing and sharing with me, and it is an extra special treat to be able to eat a cake that has come from a store. Such a novelty, more than anything. Last trip to Sydney before moving here included a taste of a raw cake our friend Lawrence had in his fridge from Concious Choice. I became giddy at the event of that cake particularly.

SO here I am now, in Sydney town. For as long as we last, perhaps. Expect updates with food pictures soon, when they happen and everything is more unpacked and settled. I haven't dug out my camera yet, but it'll happen soon.

TASMANIA IS EMPTY

this map shows our route.
yellow dots is where we slept the night and green dots are where we stopped.
if you click the map it will expand and you can identify it. we drove clockwise.

Or so you'd think, seeing as the only people in these photos are Alex and I and the golliwogs (R.I.P) I am basically going to cut+paste what I emailed to my family about our trip with more tidbits of info and probably more foodie stuff (though we didnt have much excitement after hobart) because I am lazy.

day 1 - Hobart. we arrived the night before to go see Mt Eerie play a show. My friend grant supported. it was nice. This picture show an armchair that was constructed out of golliwog dolls at the resource collectables shop on Elizabeth street... Hobart was kind of dull but there was an awesome vegetarian chinese place we had lunch pretty cheaply (this was Shu Yuan and was FUCKING AMAZING and we both had dreams about it). There is also a veg/vegan restraunt that is open for dinner but it was INCREDIBLEY pricey/bourgeois and so we gave it a miss (this was Siren's. We read the menu outside the door, Quinoa Caviar, and other fancy crap. averaging $25 a pop, no thanks!). We also found a decently stocked record store on elizabeth street.

day 2 - Upper Florentine Valley. We drove to the site of the Camp Florentine (camp flozza) on day 1, got told some information (see: myspace.com/stillwildstillthreatened) about the site and had tea and soup with the protesters (tree punx) we made dinner at ted's beach at lake pedder and slept at a lookout point over the gordon dam. We thought this would be nice to wake up to in the morning but it was SOOO WINDY AND RAINY that we didnt even look outside.
We had breakfast at ted's beach again and then went back to the tree punx! yay! they showed us where we could go for a beautiful rainforest walk and we gave them an assortment of tea and bread and chillies. We really should have taken photos of the camp site and the treepunx but it didn't happen. The campsite was attacked by a group of loggers earlier this week but as far as i know, camp flozza is still going on. a logger kicked one of the punx in the head and a part of the blockade was hit with sledgehammers.. nb: Camp Flozza is still going at this point and will celebrate it's 2 years of peaceful community protest next saturday!

day 3 - After our rainforest walk, we drove (forever!) around lake st clair and through the national park and ended up in the (very incestuoous, but also helpful) Queenstown to park and sleep the night. They sold fools gold in the petrol station we stopped at which reminded me of being a kid and loving fools gold! There was nothing to do in Queenstown so we got right out of there and drove north and into cradle country.
We didnt do any of the national park walks and stuff becuase those cost money but we walked around and it was really lovely. it was the first day of sunshine we got in tassie and so we were pretty stoked. Lots about the lodge and also heaps of other stuff about tasmania reminded us of twin peaks, creepy and beautiful, lots of beautiful dutch houses and stuff.. heh.
We kept going and ended up in Wynyard, and it was just before the Tulip festival so there was tulips everywhere in the township and we went to see the tulip farm and looked out at the bass strait. we then drove to stanley to see the nut, which is basically uluru, but wet.
Stanley was a really beautiful town parked at the very base of the nut and was tiered, it made driving around the town really cool but also kind of confusing. and we saw penguins (dodgy dark photo with white marks. some of the white marks are penguins) and bunnies! there were lots of bunnies whereever we wanted there to be penguins. heehe. we slept in Wynyard.

day 4 - We drove from Wynyard to Launceston, where the museum has the science centre inside and it is free and there was a really cool exhibition on fungus and lichens and moss and stuff. cooool.
And we went to cataract gorge which was ENORMOUS and AMAZING and IN THE MIDDLE of launceston. We climbed a mysterious way along the side of the gorge (we didnt go through it because we didnt wanna pay for parking!) and found an AWESOME hydro-electric house that'd been run down. we have lots of photos of that.

Most of Tasmania's electricity comes from either wind or water. there were lots of water mills and a big wind farm that we didnt go to. yay natural resources! We then drove from Launceston to the east coast and watched the sun set over coles bay, mt freycinet and the hazards. ti was beautiful. We slept at a coastal town caleld Bicheno (we kept saying 'Bitch-no' because we're gangsta)

day 5 - in the morning it was hot so we went to 9 mile beach which is beautiful and overlooks oyster bay, such beautiful white beaches and crystal clear water!! the water was FREEEZING so we just sat there for a while.
We then drove straight down to hobart to have a geeze at the salamanca markets (boring! couldn't find them veeg pies you bloggers raved about) and went into the huon valley and looked at the APPLE MUSEUM. amazing and creepy! yay, I bought two cook books - one full of apple recipes and one full of pumpkin recipes.
I feel like the apple cookbook should have been called "WHAT TO DO WITH ALL THESE GOD DAMN APPLES", seeing as I think that almost every residence in the Valley either had an apple tree (in beautiful blossoming this time of year!) or was right next to an orchard. We were given some apples for free (this is actually the only time we ate apples during our trip) with purchase, score, they were wonderful apples.
we slept in a nice little bay past franklin. we slept for about 12 hours.. quite tuckered out, i'd say!

day 6 - we woke up and cleaned the van on the inside and then drove to a model village in the town of glen huon. the village was built by frank & betty clarke over the past 20 years and was brilliant. you could go into the big shoe (at the back in this photo)and see the little old lady who lives in it and there was all these bells in the churches and children singing and there was a crooked man in a crooked house and a sculpture of an aboriginal spearsman(not very politically correct) and a teepee and at the end we stuck our heads in the applehead thingy. Back through Hobart we stopped at the Royal Botanical Gardens which was beautiful and informative but I think I was probably too hungry to enjoy it.

we then drove to dodges ferry and sat by the beach which was lovely and then cleaned the rest of the van and flew back to melbourne and slept forever.

we used the standard campervan offered by devil campervans (pictured - ours was yellow) we had a devil of a time. bikini babes were not included.

the end.

PS: AM I THE ONLY PERSON WHO ALWAYS MISREADS THE WORD 'POTLUCK' FOR 'POTFUCK'. ALSO WHENEVER I GO TO WRITE 'POTLUCK' I INSTINCTIVELY START WRITING 'POTFUCK'. CAN SOEMONE PLEASE SHOW ME WHAT A VEGAN POTFUCK IS? DOES IT HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH CAKE FARTS?