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.

Phở.

props to my favourite domestic photographer and ex-housemate, caitlin molloy for snapping this pic in melbourne's footscray.
May the seed of your loin be fruitful in the belly of your woman

After lots of tom-foolery and suddenly deciding that we were hungry RIGHT NOW, it was concluded that Alex and I should partake in a meal that we've both only previously had part of a couple of times and had never made before. I had bookmarked this recipe from Cathy's Gastronomy blog before I moved to Sydney (and was living within shouting's distance of Footscary, sigh!) let it completely slip my mind until last night.

Totally forgetting having been told by my other ex-housemate Riva that this was a hard dish to attain authenticity of (and maybe she would find this attempt of Phở to perhaps be an insult), we went ahead. I made a couple of changes based on what we had around us/didn't have/it was too late to go to the asian grocer to attend to/woolworth's had run out of stuff, but damn if I didn't fool myself into wanting to dive into this beautifully subtle broth.

I onlh took a coupla quick outta-focus snaps before the batteries ran out and my tummy started calling child protection services for neglect.

So an editted version of the original recipe looks like this: (for extra laziness I have literally copy+pasted the recipe from it's original source, cutting out and adding what we did and didn't do!)

For broth

• 1 leek (leaves only)
• 1 brown onion
• 1 chunk of fresh ginger
• 5 star anise
• 2 Massel Chicken-style stock cubes.
  
• Water
• Soy sauce (Tamari for no Belly-drama!) to taste
  
• Sugar also to taste.

Heat water (about 10-12 cups, depending on how many your serving) with chicken stock cube in a medium-sized soup pot, leaving enough room for the ginger, onion and leek leaves.

Remove the outer layer of the onion and add it whole to the broth. Leaving the skin of the ginger intact, chop off the nubs and bruise using a mortar and pestle. Add to broth. Separate the leek leaves from the stems and add them to the broth along with five star anise “fruits.” Let the soup boil on high heat for 45 minutes to an hour, or until the onion and ginger have softened.

Once the onion and ginger have softened, discard the leek leaves. Add seasonings of soy sauce and sugar to taste. Continue to cook on medium heat for an additional 15 minutes.

For “meat”

• Vegetable oil
• 1 leek (stem only)
• 1 zucchini, sliced into circles
• 1 green capsicum, chopped into strips
  
• 8 oz. sliced mushrooms (any variety)
• Soy sauce (Tamari!)
• Black pepper
• Dried chilli flakes
  

While the soup is boiling, thinly slice the leek stems and chop the mushrooms and zucchini.

Saute the leeks with vegetable oil in a medium-sized pan until golden. Add the mushrooms and zucchini to the leek and oil mixture. Season to taste with soy sauce, chilli and black pepper.

Get your lover/partner/best friend/housemate/some guy you see to pull a puss face pose and enjoy.

Grab a bowl and fill it with noodles (banh phở - fresh flat rice noodles preferable) and the “meat” mixture. Pour some hot broth on top. To garnish, add fresh or steamed bean sprouts, onions, cilantro, lime juice, herbs (basil, saw tooth herb, etc.), hoisin sauce and chili sauce.

Taro Taro Taro

I'm not going to make excuses for not blogging.

Alex and Damian celebrated their birthdays at Coogee beach and I made a couple of offerings, one being a baked tofu cheesecake, and the other a HIGHLY experimental Taro Banana Coconut cake with Raw frosting (the cake was sugar fest. an absolute sugar fest).
Other food-gifts were vegan Honeycomb made by Kathy, a tofu and asparagus Toss by Louise and Alex made a soba noodle salad. Delcious.

Louise once said she was going to have an "extreme pot luck" where guests would be invited to cometo dinner and bring a dish that used either unconventional ingredients or methods or otherwise seemed kind of pointless. (Her example was a savory 'jellybean pie').
This cake may not be unconventional (it is based off of a Hawaiian recipe list I found whilst trying to figure out what to do with the taro) it was unexpected.
Flour free, lots of waiting for our frozen taro to get to mashing state, not sure whether or not we were cooking it right, also mentioning the idea of the cake to a few people tweaked some "huh?? wtf?" reactions to the concept.

Conceptual cake. Woah. Think about it. Cake concepts. Cake, as a concept. Fuck. Heavy.

Taro-Banana Coconut Cake

• 2 cups. hot peeled and cooked mashed taro
  (we used two pieces of frozen fresh taro that alex got from a asian supermarket. these took a while to cook until mashing state - its ready when kind of purpley)
• 2 bananas, mashed
• 1/4 cup melted nondairy margarine
• 1/4 tsp. each ground nutmeg and cinnamon
• 1 cup dessicated/shredded coconut
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 cup nondairy milk
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

Grease a shallow cake pan (we used a loaf tin, but this would make a lovely round cake. it may help to put this off until you've completed making the batter so you know what sort of volume you're dealing with. this cake doesnt rise, so if it's shallow it'll cook more thoroughly. i feel that the loaf tine depth was why we had a very moist cake, which we enjoyed a lot).
Preheat the oven to 180c (350f i think!).
Combine the hot taro with the melted margarine, mashing again as you work the two into each other.
Add the coconut, bananas and sugar, mix in well.
Then the cinnamon, nutmeg, milk and vanilla, beat all together for about a minute. We may have done a better job if we used an electric mixer but we don't have one Also it was 1am.
Pour into cake pan and bake for 45 minutes to an hour (or until firm).

I made a Raw "whipped cream" icing (my first time using a piping bag. didn't win) using the cream section of this recipe.
I have a lot of opinions about the whole 'raw-food' thing, so I got scoffed at by Louise and Al when making this recipe because I've had a history of scoffing at raw food (well. not the food, but diet. I am scared of cults) but as I used maple syrup not honey (for true-to-vegan purity) it became a cooked food because maple syrup is not raw!! Yay, I win, etc.
Fucking delicious, by the way. Made for good ice cream when kept in the freezer, or like a yoghurt with cereal the next day. Whee.

The post-digestion swim in Coogee was amazing and we did some great explorations into the rockpools, hanging out with hermit crabs, bigger crabs, molluscs and tiny fish.

POST SCRIPT: Pip keeps getting me to mention if the recipe is any good, because apparently the inclusion into my blag doesn't actually promise that it is a good recipe and you should try it.
THIS IS. Also, you'll note that my blagging is very sporadic and this is generally because I can't be bothered writing a recipe out for something I only kind-of enjoyed eating.
I enjoyed this cake, Alex enjoyed this cake, everyone at the potfuck enjoyed this cake (albiet, not as intensely was the enjoyment as my tofu cheesecake, but still, people did surprise faces and happy faces for this cake).
ALSO: I have no plan on sticking the "air-humping" tag onto just any ol' recipe, willy-nilly.
NILLY.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxox

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.

Banaspberry Pancakes

Gluten freedom is hard to have, hardest when it is forced upon you and you don't really want to accept it (in my case), but also half but also very brave to take on as possibly a sympathetic arm around a shoulder (in Alex's case when we cook together). There's a lot to consider and when you throw veganism into the mix sometimes its sort of like "why bother?".

we shall perservere.

Because that's what you do, y'know. Just go with it. Options keep opening up to people with gluten intolerances, more cafes and restaurants are providing alternatives, some have tkaen the option of not charging extra to provide for those who have dietary requirements and that is pretty awesome. Once upon a time, pancakes that I could eat (gluten free and vegan and not disgusting, thanks) and enjoy eating seemed quite far-fetched and a lot of wasted batter were chucked in attempts to make something that might do for particular cravings, at whatever hour of the day. For some reason, this seemingly simple dish baffled us. Was it because of the gluten free? Was it because of no eggs? we couldn't figure it out.

A very simple recipe from Tony Weston and Yvonne Bishop's "Vegan: Over 90 mouthwatering recipes for all occasions" sent us on the right trail. Their recipe gave us ideas for a very simple fail-proof formula for the vegan pancake, that is easily transferrable to gluten free flours, if you make the adjustments to liquid and flours as you see fit whilst combining.

2.5c SELF RAISING FLOUR + 2c MILK + SALT + LIME JUICE.

The recipe in the book says to cook them with rapeseed oil but as the idea of that seems just way too healthy for me, I tend to go with a dairy free margarine if I have it around in the fridge. Apologies for being a bit 'tradish'. This recipe makes HEAPS but sent us on our way.
The next trick was getting a handle on how hot the pan should be and how much oil/marg should be on the pan before/whilst cooking each pancake. Go with your instinct and like Pip's said: Remember to give the first pancake to the dog. Them's the rules. Which I don't 100% agree with, maybe because I don't have a dog - but I do have the powers of the deduction required to see what alterations need to be made after the first pancake if it isn't a success. and sometimes I'll eat anything, god damn.
The self raising flour is optional but offers a fluffly pancake and the aeration in the batter provided from the baking powder or bicarb or whatever seems to work in favour for the gluten free flours I use. It's easy to go without, for a thinner pancake, but I'm already using margarine to cook them with, so I'm going to stick with my nostalgia, thankyouverymuch.
I'll make a goddamn crepe when I feel like it, but these are banana and raspberry pancakes for lovers who are not concerned with risking diabetes or belly-expansion.

FOR FUCK'S SAKE:

1 cup buckwheat flour
1 cup plain flour
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
1 healthy pinch of salt
1.5 cups rice milk mixed with 2 teaspoonse apple cider vinegar and left to curdle
.5 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1 overripe banana
and as many frozen raspberries as we thought seemed to be reasonable

Combine flours, Baking powder and salt.
In a seperate bowl mash your banana (the riper, the easier to do this. my favourite trick is to pre-mash the banana whilst it's still in it's skin by gently squeezing it from either side till the firm fruit becomes (he he he) a floppy phallus and then peeling it into a bowl and finishing it off with a fork.
To the banana, add the vanilla essence, curdled milk+vinegar mix and sugar.
Make a well into the flour mix bowl and combine well. Add more flour or milk as you see fit, if necessary. When you're happy with the consistency, throw in the raspberries and fold.

I feel like I need to stress the importance of coverage with the oil base you're using in the pan for this recipe. I've had way too many "scrambled" pancakes to not be paranoid. When melting the margarine into the pan, make sure you're oiling up the whole pan and not just spots. When you're happy with the coverage and the heat of the pan, its time to get to work.
Ladle out the mixture into the pan (I like to see how far one batch of batter can go and do half-ladles of it and tip the pan from side-to-side to spread out the batter), when bubbles start to surface, this is when i start lifting the pancake, so we know it's time to get going.
The second side of the pancake should take about or even less than 2 thirds of the time it took to get the first side cooked, depending on taste and heat variables.
It's good to be careful not to burn the pancakes but too much urgency can weild a mushy inside pancake, which can be tastey but is not what you should be aiming for.

This should make a moist pancake that you can taste the banana from (some vegan banana pancake recipes ignore the flavour of the banana and use the fruit solely as an egg subsitute which I find disappointing) and are completely deserving of the impending heart attacks that Alex and I are likely to suffer from if we keep up the marg/sugar kick. If we hadn't spread the batter on the pan and left them thicker they would have been quite delightful as pikelets, but we were pancaking.

Make your own fucking frittata.

Alex came down last weekend on a last minute decision to absolutely never miss any Ex Spectator show ever, as long as it doesnt mean too much expense, etc. He has (we have, but I don't count cos I live here) been at every Ex Spec show since their birth, and Alex is one for tradition. So 11 hours in transport from Sydney to Melbourne via the countrylink service, and apparently hitting a sheep and getting scared the train had derailed, there he was in Melbourne again.

KABOOM.

I woke up early to make a breakfast for him and meet him at the station because feminism works that way as I have made that same trip a few times and know very well how much you really need someone to be at the other end of your journey, hopefully with a meal. I may not be very good at preparing meals for myself to take with me to school or work anymore but I certainly did a good job of breakfast boxes for Alex and I to enjoy before I had to shoot off to work. I took a photo with my mind.

The picture looks like this: Tupperware container. rocket salad on the bottom (flaxseed oil + mustard dressing), grilled flat field mushroom with garlic, rosemary & thyme, and a scramfu with capsicum. simple, but sustaining.

A good effort for a 5.45am wake up and stumbling around the kitchen pretending I wasn't making any noise. Breakfasts are the best shit.

And because breakfasts are the best shit, (a girl I once lived with only knew how to cook breakfasts so she ate breakfast for every meal) I made us a tofu frittata -after craving for it when my housemate made one using a recipe from VWAV that niether of us actually own-using a sketchily transcribed into note version i found by googling "tofu frittata please" and THE POWER OF MY IMAGINATION. yaey.

And now, using the power of my memory puddle, I give you, A RECIPE! Also thankyou Alex for photo-taking this picture and leaving your camera in Melbourne. This recipe is really basic so i encourage you to out-do yourselves again and again and again and again because there is a whole fucking world of vegetables out there and this recipe will take most. This is what I had written down before I made it

Approx. 500grams of firm regular fotu

1. red capsicum, chopped real small.

1. small onion, minced

3. T nutritional yes.

1. t paprika

½. t turmeric

as much salt as you can handle, and pepper accordingly.

and then i adlibbed some shit i can't remember but also:

1. T soy sauce

(or bragg's, if you got it)

1. big kale leaf, chopped roughly.

(whatever leafy green is fine, really. this is what i had and it was wilting and desperate to be consumed)

Prehead your oven to about 180c. standard. oil up a shallow pan (if you got a cast iron pan, that would be AMAZING and PPREFFERRABBLE) and let that one sit to the side whilst we prep.

Make to-goo with your blender, transfer the slop into a mixing bowl and mix in your dry seasoning. Saute the onion and capsicum until soft, mix into your tofu mixture, as well as the soy/whatever sauce you wanna use. and the greens. slap it into your cast iron what-have-you and let it fap around in the oven for about 20-30 minutes, depending on the power of your oven, and how brown/firm you prefer your food.

Whilst i had the foodprocessor out I made a walnut pesto and mixed some of it with rocket (i am obsessed with rocket. i love it! oh! oh!) and balsamic vinigar on the side. the frittata was a medium size, and half of it each filled Alex and I up very happily.

post script: i re-googled the frittata recipe i stole so that i could reference them.. it came from a mini-frittata recipe byRoxy @ Eat Vegan thanks roxy. you made us happy.

x x

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?

I Promised this was a Food Blog...

And so I've pirated pornography of my own efforts from Phillipa. I hope she doesn't mind (!!!)

During Alex's most recent trip to visit me down here in old cold Melbourne, we invited Pip and Tim to come and eat at my home.
This invitation was partly an act of mischeif and deceit as we're actually quite terrible at ever picking a place that has things that everyone can eat and enjoy without spending too much money/ending up at Shanghai dumpling (the deceit within the invitation).

The mischeif lies within the following meals we presented to our dear friends,


1. Cocoa Shepherd's Pie. I believe that the revolution is somewhere in the following "recipe".

We used: two carrots, pealed & diced, one onion roughly chopped, two minced cloves of garlic, a healthy handful of sliced cup mushrooms, a tin of diced tomatoes, maybe 500g of potatoes, two cups of TVP, and the following process:
Soak TVP in 1.5 cups (veg) chicken stock (or whatever you've got), tamari, sesame oil, heeeaps of salt & pepper. Sautee Onion, mushrooms, carrots, whatever veg you're keen on in your pie till it makes you happy (the potatoes are for the top, yo.), and through in the (thoroughly drained, no soggy pies please!) TVP.
I use the following combination of herbs & spices: Rosemary, Thyme, Coriander, Cayenne Pepper, le the veggies absorb the flavours and then added the can of diced tomatoes, and let the whole lot brew for a few minutes. I then added 1 cup of instant gravy mix (1 cup produced through the instructions on the packet. not one cup of gravy powder. gross) and 2 teaspoons of apple cidervinegar. And then. Between one and two tables spoons of dark cocoa powder. It looks amazing going in, and smells completely awesome.
All the while we had the potaotes boiled and then mashed with some rice milk, agave syrup and nutritional yeast, s&p, whatever.. I am actually really really shit at making the kind of amazing potato mash that this pie deserves, but i'm working on it.
Slopped the filling into a pie dish (whether or not us use a pastry crust is up to you, i don't because i am lazy, gluten free etc etc but i'm sure puff pastry would work), sprinkled some cinnamon ontop of the 'meat' and dollopped the mash ontop.
Into the oven preheated at 200c for about 20 minutes and oh-boy.

2. Cashew Cheese stuffed Capsicum (with Shredded Broccoli and Gluten Free Risoni!).

Alex's dish is something that he and I endeavour to convert the world to. We first came across the recipe for "Cottage Cheese" in the Easy Vegan Cooking book by Leah Leneman that my father bought for me before I was a vegan (that's some good intuition, dad!). We were intrigued immediately dismissed the scoffing of raw-food type recipes due to the fact that both Alex and I have a great nostalgia for the treat. And I have to make the following disclaimer: THE CASHEW CHEESE RECIPE TASTES ABSOLUTELY NOTHING LIKE COTTAGE CHEESE and if you don't do much to alter the flavour, smells like feet and tastes a little bit like haloumi. But, we actualyl fucking love this stuff. because you can transform it into a really nice stuffing for veggies or put it in salads and stuff. Just don't call it cottage cheese, because no Hungarian would talk to you if you fed this to them with that name.

The basics are: grab a handful (or however much you're game for) and let it soak in room-temperature water for about three or four days. It's ready for processing when you get the courage to eat one of the cashews and it tastes like haloumi. Smash the shit out of it using your food processor and add garlic, rosemary, lemon, mustard, nutritional yeast, whatever 'cheesey' or at least complimentary flavours you want. we mixed this in with shredded broccoli and some gluten free risoni (hoorah for Orgran!) and stuffed them into halves of the skinned char-grilled (stove top) capsicums that Alex so very much enjoys to make and show off. Into the oven after the pie for about 10 minutes and drizzled a bit of Balsamic Vinegar like the proto-gourmets we are.

And for drinks, Pip brought along an assortment of Phoenix's Juices. we split each small bottle four-ways throughout the meal, it was really cute, like we were taste testing each juice. Next time anybody does this, I reccomend the juices be served in shot glasses. Whee!
And I provided hot cocoa made with ginger and coffee bean essence, compound chocoalte and coconut cream.

I announced on the delivery of the cocoa that I would very much like to one day make a cocoa so fucking delicious that the Coco-Loco would cry his egyptian tears and immediately reduce his prices to something more happy. I stand by this argument, and challenge that I put to myself. Fuck working Vegans into a panicky sweat over prices. Fuck $8. Chocolate Alchemist. Whatever*.

*I should note that his cocoas are totally delicious and like, if you're a bit cashed up and in the area with a lovely eye-fancier, this place is totally cool to go on a date to but for someone who gets hot choclate cravings A LOT, I really really really can't justify $8 a pop on something i could have surpassed at home.