Cook Salad

On days where I need lunch RIGHT NOW and I am depending on not going out to the shops to pick something up, I cook a salad.

My housemate louise, who is also a vegan, went through a stage earlier this year of refusing to call a cooked salad a "salad" or many other "salad" things, she was avoiding using the word in protest of the stereotypical view of veganism and vegan food, can't make friends with salad, etc.
I believe the term she used to replace salads was "throw-together". Alex had a field day with this on louise, calling everything salad, left right and centre.

I wonder if anyone else feels similarly about the word salad and the normal feelings about how omni-folk (muggles) put on vegans/vegetarians from stereotypes of low food choices and stuff? Do people still even think that all we can eat is salad or rice or whatever? I've never been picked on in such a way because of my veganism, but my friend Tim (who is a very proud vegan) has joked at me that because I'm a gluten free vegan, all I can eat is lettuce...

I like cooked salads because they're fresh and warm at the same time, and because I'm generally a bit wary of raw food and undercooked food (this is a childhood pickishness thing, I guess).
This one is steamed pak choy, steamed oyster mushroom, crispy spicy salt and pepper tofu, green chilli, kim chi (home made for our house by my beautiful friend Jackson!!!) with a miso-mayonaise dressing that i spilled on one of my best dresses!

This was the first time I got to take a photo of a meal I've whipped up for a while/been bothered to.

This was the first time I'd cooked oyster mushrooms, I really really love them and their special taste and texture. I put them in pho a couple of days ago and it woked a treat! I really should experiment with enoki mushrooms soon.

What are your favourite kind of mushrooms and how do you like to use them?


ps: of course i know this isn't a salad but when it's lunchtime and i think I'M GOING TO MAKE A SALAD, i generally end up cooking something like this. don't judge me, i just like cooking delicious food, ok.

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