As you know I don’t often eat sweets. I don’t have a naturally sweet tooth so I don’t really mind when people from work sometimes bring in non vegan sweets, biscuits and cakes. However, I know that there are many vegans and vegetarians out there who do eat sweets and one of the most common gripes is how difficult it is to find gummy sweets without gelatin in. There are also plenty of people who aren’t necessarily vegetarian or vegan but don’t want to eat crushed up animal bones in their sweets! In my younger days, I did enjoy sour gummy sweets, particularly those cola bottles that were so sour they made your face pucker.

Goody Good Stuff have a range of sweets that don’t contain gelatin. They are all vegetarian and 4 of them are vegan. As well as the gelatin, they don’t have any artificial colours or flavourings and use only natural fruit and vegetable juices. They were kind enough to send me a packet each of the vegan flavours to try, so I decided to share them at work. I didn’t say that they were vegan, but just left them on the table in the staff room at work as we normally do.

They certainly disappeared pretty quickly. Unsurprisingly, I liked the cola flavour the best and ate nearly the whole packet before the other people at work even realised they were there. In general, the peach ones seemed to be the most popular with the others but none of them lingered around for long. No-one commented that they were weird or vegan tasting! If I’m going to eat sweets, these are the type I’d eat more of, and if I had children, these are the sweets I’d be putting in their party bags or lunchboxes.

Goody Good Stuff have kindly offered to send a packet of each of the vegan flavours to one of my lucky readers. To be in with a chance to win, just leave a comment on my blog saying why you’d like to win. UK only please. I’ll draw one out at random on January 30th.

It was my turn to pick FNF this time. I cannot describe the mind numbing fear this induces in me and I understand why Tami tends to delegate the task to others! I spent hours combing the website, rejecting recipe after recipe as too easy, too hard, too similar to something we’ve already done, too reliant on out of season ingredients etc. This time I drew up a shortlist of 5 and asked Matthew to pick one. Emerils’s Bayou Chicken Pasta was the result.

I’ve chosen Emeril dishes before. I’ve never seen his programme but his recipes appeal to me so I was glad to see that Food Network UK have started to show one of them, so I’ve been recording them. I had an extra challenge this FNF – my omni brother was staying with me for a week so it needed to appeal to him too.

I was pleased to find a small pot of Emeril’s essence already mixed in my cupboard which must have been left over from something else. Chicken flavoured seitan would have been the obvious choice but we’d been eating a lot of it so I went for tofu. I could have baked it or dry fried it keep it firm but I actually pressed it and tore it up so some bits were bigger than others. There was nothing scientific about it!

Otherwise, everything was very easy. I toyed with using a home made cashew cream but time was against me so I used a bought soya cream – though less than the recipe calls for. Everything else was vaguely similar but I used more chilli and more essence.

For myself, I could have done without the tomatoes in the dish. I don’t think they added anything and jarred with the other flavours. My brother and Matthew almost fought over the leftovers though, so it went down well there! I enjoyed it a lot and would make it again but I’ll make my own cream next time!

This was our second pick from Candle 79 and another very successful recipe choice. I can’t get tomatillos here but fortunately the salsa in my fridge was made up of similar ingredients to the sauce so I just blended the salsa with some avocado to create a very similar version.

I’m not sure about the average size of guajillo chillies but mine were huge. I also used the chilli soaking water for the water suggested for the sauce, so my sauce had a nice kick to it – not evil hot but nice and balanced. I didn’t serve it with the suggested quinoa because of the corn hater in the house, but rather a tweaked version of the Mexican rice from the first Horizons book.

Obviously, using the salsa was a shortcut but the dish came together very quickly, and just like the first recipe we tried from this book, it tasted like it had needed far more work than it had actually taken.

Once again the book suggested a white wine, and once again Matthew ignored the suggestion and chose red. Here’s what he had to say:

The wine we chose was a Novas Pinot Noir, 2010, from the Casablanca Valley in Chile. This is a terrific basic level new world Pinot, and a great bargain at £8.99 from Vintage Roots, new in the last couple of months. The wine has everything you would expect from wine of this origin and price level: strawberry and other summer fruits, a bit of raspberry and plum, with a little hint of chocolate, medium bodied and completely gluggable. The hint of sweetness that you get with the Pinot Noir is for our money one of the better flavour matches with spicy food like this: sweet and spicy to go with the salty tomatillo sauce and the sourness of the avocado and lemon juice make it a well-balanced wine-food combination. That said, this dish did have a lot of citrus flavours, and any red wine would struggle to some extent. A young one like this had a better chance, but for my money you could get away with whites of similar character also – tofu needing not to be overwhelmed by more full-bodied reds. A Novas Viognier, same price and supplier, with its lime and honeysuckle, would be worth a try.

One of my favourite cookbooks before I went vegan was “The Flavour of California” by Marlena Spieler. It’s a vegetarian book but quite a lot of the recipes are naturally vegan or quite easy to veganise. The book doesn’t seem to be available anymore so if you happen to see it anywhere for sale I’d grab it while you can. Like lots of my books I don’t look at it very often but flicking through it now there’s lots to make.

One of my favourite ever soups is from this book and I make it reasonably often. It’s easy, hearty, comforting, totally perfect for a cold day and naturally vegan. I made the salsa from the book but if you’ve got any leftover salsa knocking around it’s even quicker.

Serves 4
8oz pearl barley
2oz split peas
5 cups veg broth (more or less, depending how thick you like it)
1/2 tsp ground cumin
3 cloves chopped garlic
2 tbsp olive oil
3-4 tbsp salsa (see below)

Put the barley, split peas, broth and cumin into a pan. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat, cover and simmer until the barley and split peas are tender, around 40 minutes. In a separate pan heat the garlic in the oil and then add to the split pea and barley mix, along with the salsa.

Coriander and lemon salsa
2 leaves romaine or cos lettuce
2 cloves garlic
1 fresh red or green chilli
4 tbsps lemon juice
2oz fresh coriander

Mix all together in a food processor/blender.

I also wanted to remind everyone about the other blog I co-write with my friend Tami. We’re cooking our way through the 2 Horizons books. We started it for VeganMofo but we’re updating it sporadically. I’ve just written about my Christmas Eve starter and I have a fantastic Christmas Day breakfast to come in the next few days. If you make anything from either of those books let us know; we’d love to hear about it!

This is definitely a food blog, but being vegan isn’t only about food. I use vegan products outside the kitchen too whether it be cleaning products, skin and hair care or make up. There are certain brands I use a lot but I’m not high maintenance about them – some are more expensive than others but I use the cheaper end products too, ranging from Superdrug own brands and ELF through to Lush, Aveda and Origins.

I was contacted recently by a new company, Pure Halal Beauty, which is based very close to me in Birmingham. All their products are vegetarian and most of them are vegan. They use natural ingredients which haven’t been tested on animals at any stage.They have a full range of skin and hair care, along with cosmetics and a men’s range.

PHB very kindly sent me a shampoo and moisturiser to try. I have very dry hair and skin so they sent suitable products. I find it very hard to find a moisturiser that can cope with my skin, especially in winter, so I was very intrigued to see how that would work. Usually the products I use on my face tend to be unscented or very lightly scented, but the moisturiser has a strong smell. This was a bit of a surprise to me at first but it smells lovely, like the foyer of a very expensive Indian hotel! It’s very rich and even my skin, which soaks up liquid like a raw aubergine, feels hydrated and lush. The shampoo needs a good shake before use and it’s a bit thinner than the Aveda shampoo I normally use, but I haven’t noticed my hair feeling any drier since I’ve been using the PHB brand.

There’s a 20% offer code on their website at the moment and there are some special offers on there too. Why not give them a try?

I hadn’t had Candle 79 long when Tami suggested using it for Vine and Dine, so I jumped at the idea. After all, one of the ideas behind Vine and Dine is to get more use from our cookbooks as well as learn more about wine matching. I hadn’t made anything at all so it was quite easy to pick dishes to try.

First up was the Panko-Crusted Seitan Milanese. I used home made chickeny seitan I already had in the freezer rather than the version in the book, but otherwise I followed the recipe exactly. The seitan needs to marinade for at least 4 hours, so it does need some planning, but other than that it was extremely easy.

You can’t really tell from the photo but I served it alongside some tagliatelle which I tossed with the leftover marinade and some extra basil and parsley.

We both enjoyed this dish a lot and the results were definitely more impressive than the amount of time and effort I put into it. An excellent first effort with this book.

But now it’s confession time. We did have a very nice bottle of wine with this, but the empty bottle got put into the recycling bin by mistake and neither of us can remember what it was. It was certainly a light Italian red, and was probably bought from the Tanners vegan list but we can’t be any more definite than that. Great shame, because it did go very well with the dish. The book does have suggested wine pairings, which is great to see. They suggest a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc for this, but we ignored their advice. It would have been interesting to try both wines with the dish to compare – I can’t wait to see whether others were more obedient than us!

I’ve been finding it easy to make excuses not to go to circuit training after work during these cold dark evenings, but I’m not using “not enough time to cook” as one. Top Quick Tuesday is back!

This was based on a recipe from Paul Gayler “Pure Vegetarian”. His recipe uses broccoli raab, which I’ve never seen, but I substituted some leftover greens instead. While the pasta cooked I fried some sliced red onions, crushed garlic and chilli flakes in oil. I threw in some cooked and drained greens, a drained tin of chickpeas and then the cooked pasta. Finally I added some chopped basil and mint, stirred it all together and served it up into warmed dishes. I grated some Vegusto Piquant cheese over the top but the meal could easily stand alone without it.

This meal was ready in the time it took to cook the pasta, and it tasted fantastic, so I definitely can’t use lack of time as an excuse to miss exercise again!

This choice was partly from me and partly Tami. She was casting around for ideas and I suggested a muffin, because it fitted in with her new project and because I don’t bake enough and need prodding.

I’m not confident enough to freewheel when it comes to baking, so I cast around the internet for ideas. I was partly thinking that I’d do some version of the cornbread in Veganomicon, because I know I like it, and I found that someone else had already done it.
I added in some bacon bits and smoked paprika to the dry mix, but something went wrong because the mix was not at all the right texture going into the oven. It was much too firm but I couldn’t add more liquid because the polenta had absorbed the rest and was a lump. I didn’t have any more ingredients so I put them in the oven anyway.

I was quite prepared to throw them away and started to look around for something else to serve with the chilli, but they came out not as badly as I’d feared – not a soft moist muffin, more like a rock cake, but edible with a faint hint of smokiness. I wish I’d stuck with my initial preference and done a version of the corn muffins from Vegan Bakesale, but I live with a corn hater. For the frosting, I used sour cream which I flavoured with chopped green onion ends, hot sauce, agave and a few more bacon bits. It was loose so I just drizzled it on top.

The chilli in the background is from Vegan Diner. I hadn’t made this version before and I liked it. It went from a pile of ingredients to being dished up in about 20 minutes, and was a nice tasty dish to serve up with the rock cakes muffins.

I’ve made quite a few things from the Millennium book so it was quite a challenge to find something to make that I hadn’t done before, could get all the ingredients for and didn’t have anything in it that Matthew won’t eat. Luckily this one was already on my list of things to try and Vine and Dine gave me the impetus to make it.

Like most Eric Tucker recipes, it isn’t something you can start cooking when you get in from a busy day at work, but as long as you make a note of all the stages it isn’t too difficult and was a good project for a foggy Sunday.

I made the marinade first and let the tofu sit in it for a few hours. The marinade had silken tofu in and it did feel a bit odd to marinade tofu in tofu, but there were lots of toasted spices in it too! Next I made the chutney so it had chance to cool down. The final parts of the dish are the rice and the oniony vegetables (I chose broccoli and cauliflower). I cooked my tofu on my electric grill while the vegetables were heating through.

I liked this dish a lot in the end. I could taste the cardamom from the marinade and the lime from the chutney above other flavours, but I love both of those things so it didn’t worry me. I served more rice than the recipe suggested but just kept to a few teaspoons of chutney otherwise it would definitely have overpowered.

This wasn’t my favourite ever dish from Millennium but I enjoyed making it and eating it. To quote Matthew: “What kind of idiot picks peach lime chutney for a wine matching challenge?”. Erm, that’d be me and Tami….

Here’s what he has to say about the wine:

This food was a huge wine match challenge, because its character is based on strong hits of a really diverse set of strong flavours: lime, cardamom, saffron, peaches, madras curry. A wine big enough not to be distorted by all of these, but equally smooth enough to glug down with rice and tofu? It had to be new world, since the kind of burgundy that might have stood a chance is way out of our price range for an ordinary Sunday! Liz had the inspired idea of trying the Trentham Estate Pinot Noir, 2009 that had just arrived at the bargain price of £10 in our recent and deeply exciting order of vegan wines from Tanners, our favourite reasonably local wine supplier. While I doubt the wine exists that would set off all the flavours in your typical Millennium dish, this Aussie number from south west New South Wales is a lovely wine and certainly worked well enough with this. Although it’s not so full bodied, it is sufficiently oily and robust to avoid defeat against all bar the lime and vinegar in the chutney, and the sweetness of the pinot works beautifully with the curry spices. It’s a super wine with soft berry flavours and an oakiness that is slightly spicy in itself: I reckon it would do justice to a lot of Asian flavours.

I’d been reading the fabulous Meet the Wikos blog post about hotdogs when I remembered I still had 2 of those very same sausages in the freezer somewhere. I was going to make corndogs but I decided that I’d actually prefer Chilli hotdogs instead. I used the chilli from the same book, Vegan Substitutions. It’s a rather strange chilli, reminiscent of spicy beanfeast (for any UK veggies of  a certain age; a student staple for me!). It’s quick and easy to make because it doesn’t have many ingredients. I wouldn’t want to eat it as a chilli with rice, but it works well in a dish like this (and I made a fantastic breakfast burrito with the leftovers the following day).

I slathered my chilli on a bun, put the fried sausage on top, added some grated vegan cheese and put the whole lot under the grill. Served with chips and ketchup; it was a fabulous meal. I will be making another batch of those sausages soon!