The lovely people from Redwood Foods sent me some of their new products to try. I love this company to bits but one of the things I love most is they don’t sit still – they are always coming up with new ideas. Invariably, this means that sometimes products do get withdrawn too – the bacon Cheezly which always seems so popular with Americans and Canadians is the latest casualty.

I would generally always prefer to make pizza myself, but like everyone there are times when I’m too busy to cook or just want to throw something in the oven, and a widely available vegan pizza is an excellent answer. Getting in late from football last night after a weekend away was a great chance to try them.

The pizzas are available in 3 flavours – cheese and tomato, ham and pineapple and meatless feast, and cost £2.79, £2.99 and £3.19 respectively. My first instinct was that they are very small. I am a very greedy person, especially where pizza is concerned, and can easily eat a large pizza on my own. These would be a snack for one greedy person like me! We ate all 3 between the two of us without much difficulty.

I gave these the minimum time suggested in the oven, 10 minutes and they definitely didn’t need any longer. I tried them as they came first, then added some shredded basil to the cheese and tomato, and a drizzle of chilli oil to all 3 – I do that to almost any pizza I eat.

We both very much enjoyed these pizzas, and Matthew, who eats dairy, said he would buy one of these if he was on his own rather than get a dairy one. I liked all 3 of them, and I would never normally consider buying pizza with pineapple on. The pineapple isn’t very strong but the pizza had a lovely juiciness that the others didn’t. The meaty one was probably my favourite; it has a slightly spicy crumbly beef on which I don’t recognise from any of the existing Redwood meats.Obviously all 3 varieties use Cheezly and it’s nice and melty.

If I had my choice I would prefer to pay more for a bigger pizza, but that’s just my greed. I’d also prefer a slightly thinner base, but I’ve always preferred very thin crusts on my pizzas. These pizzas are not a fancy gourmet product with stonebaked bases – they are rather an everyday product but an extremely tasty and convenient one. I think they would be popular with children too. I have only once seen vegan pizza to buy in a shop in England, but I didn’t try it, so I don’t have anything to compare it with. But I would definitely buy these again and recommend them.

I’ve mentioned Denis Cotter’s cookbooks before. I was a big fan of them before I went vegan, and there are quite a few vegan recipes in them, as well as some very easily veganisable ones.

Due to a shopping list duplication mix up, I had a big bag of watercress to use up and was wondering what to do with it. I remembered this risotto from dairy eating days, and it coincided nicely with Kip kindly sending me some of the new Cheezly parmesan to try. This is a basic and easy risotto recipe, but using red onions and loads of watercress makes it a bit unusual. It also has some oyster mushrooms flash fried with parsley on the top, which add texture and richness to the dish.

I love watercress, especially English watercress, but it seems to have been usurped in recipes by the trendier rocket, which I don’t quite understand. This risotto is a great way to use it. The Cheezly parmesan is much softer than the dairy equivalent, but has a great bite to it and I will buy it in future.

This recipe blew me away while I was testing for Hearty Vegan. Matthew isn’t a fan of sweet potatoes, so when he was away recently and I had some time to spend cooking just for myself, I knew what I’d be making.

If you make all the components (and you definitely should), this is a bit time consuming, but you can stagger the stages so it isn’t all last minute. You’ll bake, then bread and fry the sweet potatoes and serve them a fennel marmalade, aoli and the sweet peppercorn coleslaw. The sweet potato breading and the aoli both contain Old Bay, which is one of my favourite things, and the sticky sweet fennel goes so well the black pepper in the coleslaw.

There are lots of recipes I absolutely adore in Hearty Vegan so for one to emerge as my favourite it has to be very special. And believe me, this is.

I want to start this review by saying that I know lots of people don’t like to shop in Tesco, for various reasons. I respect those reasons, but I generally like to support vegan product lines owned or sold by non vegan businesses, as it shows demand. I also think that a huge store like Tesco stocking such a wide range of dairy free products will reach people who would never think of going in health food shops or ordering online.

So with that out of the way, I was delighted when Tesco very kindly agreed to send me some of the range to try. When I said earlier that it’s a wide range, I wasn’t joking – lots of different flavours of yoghurt, crème caramel, vanilla and chocolate puddings, jellies, a whole load of different milks, margarines, hard and soft cheeses and more. They haven’t done this on a small scale; it’s big. Some of the products are clearly made by other companies – the cheese is instantly recognisable as Sheese and some of the milks are made by Alpro.

As you might expect, I liked some products better than others. I’m not going to review every single product – and there some I haven’t tried yet – but I will highlight some of what I liked and what I didn’t.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Sheese; it has a strange chemical taste which I can’t get past, but I know a lot of people who do like it. This new Tesco version melts well. I quite like the white version with very spicy food but as yet am not keen on the orange one. I haven’t tried the soft cheeses yet but I remember liking the chilli Sheese when I tried it at a vegan festival once.

The yoghurts are very nice indeed – my favourite was the cherry which had big chunks in. I would take a trip to Tesco just to buy the natural yoghurt which is much needed since Alpro for some inexplicable reason started to make theirs taste like vanilla pudding. The new Tesco one is great in both sweet and savoury dishes. The crème caramel isn’t anything like a home made one, but compares very well to the dairy equivalent sold in supermarkets.

The soya milk is too beany for me, but the hazelnut and almond versions were a pleasant change on muesli and in hot chocolate. The margarine is fine, very similar to Pure, it could perhaps be made by the same people, I’m not sure. The little long life puddings in chocolate or vanilla are tasty and would be fun for lunch boxes, but need a tactical approach with the straw to get all of it out of the packaging!

Overall, I think this is a great move by Tesco. The range isn’t in all stores but it is in quite a lot and I imagine if it sells well it might move to more. There are plenty of people with allergies or who are vegan curious who might be tempted to try dairy free versions if they are available where they do their normal shopping. Well done Tesco!

We’ve moved to Spork Fed for the next round of Vine and Dine. I’ve only made a couple of things so far and I’ve not been blown away by either of them so I’m glad to give it another go.

I chose the beer battered tempeh for our first go. I have no idea what this is doing in the appetizer section but there’s almost nothing that can’t be improved by frying so I thought that if any recipe would win me over it’d be this one.

I started having problems straight away when the recipe called for 2 packages of tempeh without specifying package size. I hate recipes that do this as package sizes quite often vary. A quick check on Twitter told me that they are generally 8oz, which is what I had, so that was OK, and after that it was all plain sailing. I made half of everything for 2 of us. This made a large amount and would have served 3 comfortably but we ate it all. Like almost all batter recipes I’ve ever made, there was plenty of batter left at the end. I could probably have used a quarter of the batter recipe and still had enough.

I’ve beer battered many time before but never used tempeh. I thought it worked brilliantly and was a very good texture indeed. The tartar sauce was also a complete success, especially cutting through the greasy batter. I went the whole hog and served it with some chips and also some mushy peas. Incidentally if you ever see a recipe for mushy peas that uses fresh or frozen green peas then shun it immediately as proper mushy peas are only ever made with dried marrowfat peas. I think they’re probably a UK only thing and I got mine from the chip shop; I’ve never tried to make my own as I only eat them with batter and that’s a habit I could do without getting into!

This would definitely not be a regular meal. I had to roll around the sofa moaning gently after I’d eaten it because I was so full – but it was a delicious treat and a perfect antidote to all the “fat is evil” blogs that are scaring people at the moment.

Here’s Matthew’s wine report (I was sorely tempted to use my editorial powers here but I didn’t!):

Liz’s white wine horizons are not wide. In fact they are more accurately described as tunnel vision. Basically, if it isn’t as sour as a grapefruit and sharp as a lime, then she prefers new world Sauvignon Blanc. Since we are on the topic, this means we keep Vintage Roots going virtually single handed with the quantities of their Adobe SB that are quaffed in the Wyman household. In the unlikely event we were dining in the kind of restaurant where the wine list comes in several volumes, she wouldn’t trouble the sommelier for long trying  to choose the exact correct vintage white burgundy to have with the fake chicken. So what to drink with tempeh mock fish and chips? At last an opportunity for experimentation with her white wine taste buds. We decided to go local and organic, with a Sedlescombe 2010 dry white, from East Sussex, yours for 1195 English pennies, also from VR. Have you tried any of the really super whites coming from this part of the planet? This one was spot on with the food, just slightly off dry but a good sharp acid to stand up to the tartare sauce. Apparently the grape varieties are Solaris, Rivaner and Bacchus. Any fellow scifi buffs will understand the full weirdness of quaffing something called Solaris. And don’t you think Bacchus is a superb grape name that should be encouraged? You would do equally well with the other English wine VR stock, the Horsmorden white, which is drier and a bit more chalky than the Sedlescombe and equally moreish, and the complete absence of fruit other than citrus means you might even tempt Liz into a glass.

This was an interesting pick by Vegan Aide. The recipe is so simple that it relies on the flavour of the shrimp and there didn’t seem much room to play with it. I’m sure that others will have picked less obvious substitutions for the shrimp but I couldn’t really see past tofu. Actually, that’s not quite true. I did think of using oyster mushrooms but couldn’t get hold of any. Tofu it was then. But how to cook and flavour it?

There’s a recipe for “crab” mashed potatoes in the second Horizons book. I know that crab and shrimp are completely different things but since it’s 25 years since I ate either I wasn’t going to let a small detail like that bother me. Using this recipe for tofu gave me a different cooking method too. The tofu is cubed finely and tossed with diced onion, green pepper, tomato, garlic, Old Bay, white wine and olive oil. I also added some kelp powder for extra fishiness and chilli flakes from the Tyler recipe. It’s then baked for about 10 minutes and you’re left with firm cubes of tofu in a lovely juicy liquid.

I cooked linguini and then tossed it with all the tofu mixture, chopped parsley and dill, lemon juice and a bit of margarine.

I suspect that this is nothing like shrimp. I’ve had vegan shrimp in chinese restaurants and although it always looks great it tends to be a bit rubbery. That certainly wasn’t the case here, with lovely juicy tofu and a salty herby buttery sauce. I really enjoyed it and thanks VA for the great pick. Can’t wait to see what the others do on Tami’s website.

There are certain ingredients that my husband refuses to eat under any circumstances. No amount of disguises or careful spicing will help or get him to eat sweetcorn (or parsnips, or sprouts). So when he’s away I try and get my fill of those ingredients because I can’t cook with them otherwise.

I’d had this recipe bookmarked from Voluptuous Vegan for ages but didn’t have the right combination of both time alone and plenty of time to cook. This wasn’t a difficult dish to make but it had a few stages – making chile paste, marinading tempeh, making the sauce, the relish and the parsley lemon rice. It was a nice project for a Sunday alone and was well worth the results.

The sweet relish was a perfect foil to the spicy rich baked tempeh. Half of the corn is pureed which thickens it up wonderfully without any flour or cornstarch. The sauce for the tempeh is spicy with homemade chile paste, herbs and spices and would be a great vehicle for anyone who is unsure about tempeh.

I loved this dish and it’ll definitely be on the list for next time I’m left to my own devices.

I need to learn not to be too organised. I got ahead of myself and made this so long ago that neither of us can really remember much about the food or wine. Or, we could get properly organised and make notes at the time and not rely on our ageing memories. Shall we try that next time? I also tried to use a new bit of technology to blog with and clicked the wrong button so my first attempt to write this up got lost. This isn’t my finest blogging hour.

I do know that this tasted fabulous. As usual with her recipes, Bryanna gives plenty of options so it’s very flexible. I used a combination of homemade seitan and smoked Vegusto Luncheon Roll for the meat, and a mix of portobello and chestnut for the mushrooms.

Cassoulette is a lovely comforting dish, chock full of beans and vegetables in a herby red wine sauce. This was a great dish to make ahead because it needs at least an hour in the oven, so you can prepare everything in advance and just sit back with a glass of wine when you’re ready to eat. I threw some garlic bread in the oven so that we could mop up the juices.

And talking of wine, we had a fabulous bottle of French red which went superbly well with the meal. We can’t find any trace of it so it must have been recycled by mistake. We’ll certainly make this again so I’ll try and report back with proper info next time, and sorry for the stupidity.