Elettaria

I have a fondness for pasta primavera, i.e. pasta with random green vegetables. I often make it with basil pesto, but right now I'm keen on a middle Eastern version I invented last night. I'm in a very vegetably mood in this hot weather, I've been living on salads and miso soup with tofu, rice noodles and veg, that sort of thing.

serves 2

extra virgin olive oil
probably 1 clove garlic, crushed (I cheated and used garlic purée)
ground coriander
salt
other seasonings to taste e.g. black pepper or paprika, pinch of bouillon powder
1 courgette (zucchini), cut into strips
1/4 to 1/2 of a leek, sliced (depending on how hungry you are!)
handful pine nuts
handful sultanas (I'm sure raisins would be nice too)
big handful fresh spinach, cut up a bit if it's not baby spinach

I used 9 min pasta, and started sautéing the veg at the same time as the pasta went on. Put the oil on, add the garlic and seasonings and then the leeks and courgettes. Stir-fry, stirring regularly. Add the sultanas and pine nuts about 2 min before the end, and the spinach 1 min before the end, as you just want the spinach to wilt lightly. Put onto pasta and demolish.

Today is D's first day of a two-week holiday, for which there is much rejoicing, only slightly marred by his having to go into work today because a pipe had burst and there's no one else in charge around. Anyway, we began on a good note with French toast and strawberries, inspired by jinxremoving's recent culinary efforts. Here's the recipe, simplified from one in Moskowitz's Vegan With a Vengeance.

( Vegan French toast )

The other culinary adventure of note is that I have become rather fond of the Innocent Veg Pots, and have discovered that their Mexican chilli is easy to copy and freezes beautifully. When made with brown rice, you get about ten portions out of it. For those of you worried about freezing and reheating rice, apparently the risks are when you're doing that with catering quantities and not heating it all the way through. If it's a single portion and you're going to nuke it thoroughly until it's piping hot, you should be absolutely fine. I got this from a biochemist who knew her stuff. On checking now through Google, people are generally saying that you're OK as long as you don't leave the cooled rice sitting around for long before freezing it, preferably no more than one hour.

( Innocent Mexican chilli )

I have decided that spinach is the new lettuce. A bag of it turns out to be a surprisingly versatile thing to keep in the fridge - toss a few leaves into miso and vegetable soup, or a tomato pasta sauce - it's madly good for you, and unlike lettuce, it doesn't sog. I am currently devouring a spinach, tomato, avocado, and green-olives-with-chillies salad, and am one very happy camper.

I'm thinking of getting a mezzaluna, as they're meant to be great for chopping stuff. However, I'm bewildered by the range on offer. Should I get a single or a double blade? What size is best? What shape and material is best for the handles? Which brands are good?

Thoughts, anyone?

I'm sure March isn't usually this cold. Nevertheless, despite having had to sleep fully clothed last night, I decided to celebrate the spring that will eventually turn up in my kitchen today. This recipe is loosely based on traditional Jewish Italian dishes from Roden's The Book of Jewish Food, and "loosely" applies to my style of recipe-writing here as well.

Pasta Primavera

Olive oil
Garlic (I cheated this time and used garlic purée, which is vaguely passable)
Lots of green vegetables cut into pieces of appropriate size - today's version used leeks, broccoli, courgette, and new potatoes, but I've also used frozen peas, and seen spinach or artichoke hearts recommended
Pine kernals
Basil pesto (yes, there is vegan pesto, it's by Sunita and is stunning)
Pasta, obviously

For this version, I blanched the broccoli and potatoes (9 min for the potatoes and 4 for the broc), before stir-frying all the veg in suitable order in oil and garlic. The potatoes (sliced) were put in first and got a chance to sizzle happily in the oil, garlic and lots of black pepper. Add pine kernals near the end, then lots of basil pesto, put onto pasta, and wolf down. Makes a fair bit. I've also done versions of this with raisins, pine kernals and lots of garlic, but no pesto.

There's something so cheering about all that green. What recipes remind you of spring? Preferably minus any dead animal bits, for the sake of my tender vegan sensibilities.

1. ghost_of_a_flea and I are getting addicted to stuffed peppers. My usual recipe involves rice, sautéed onion, vegemince, bit of tomato, and various different seasonings (last time there were raisins, pine nuts, garlic, and spices that focused heavily on the cinnamon side of things). For those of you who don't know how to stuff peppers, you cook up the filling, slice the top off the pepper as a lid, cut away the seeds, stem and so on, shove the filling inside, plonk the lid on, and stand them in a pyrex dish with about 1/2" water round them, proceeding to bake them in the oven for 20 min or until the peppers are starting to blacken nicely. Any recipe ideas for variations? What other veg are happy to be stuffed? I haven't stuffed an aubergine in years, although I recall it as being a bit more hassle.

2. I had a chap come to the door the other week doing a market research survey on attitudes towards environmentalism in the home. I answered various questions about recycling, light bulbs and solar panels (yep, very likely in a 170 year old B-listed building, where I don't even live on the top floor), and then he came to the question, "Do you think there are too many foreigners in the UK?" Has anybody got a clue what that question was doing in there?

3. My local library directed me towards Calibre, a free audiobook postal lending service for people with sight problems or other disabilities which make it difficult for them to read. This is very cool. You have to tick a box to confirm that you are happy to receive X-rated books, which means anything that mentions the existence of sex at all, as far as I can tell. I mean, I, Claudius is listed as X-rated. And the novels don't even have Patrick Stewart strutting around being a sexy sadist. (No, really, he was hot in the miniseries, and also looked surprisingly like a younger Richard Gere.) Also I've caught them putting phrases like "Homosexual practices" in the book descriptions, which is raising my hackles. It sounds worryingly like a warning.

4. Does anyone know how I could find out what this plant is, so that I may look at other photos of it and turn it into a quilt design?

So, good old Pesach is round again, meaning that I'm trying to cook vegan without any wheat products. I made sushi for the first time yesterday, and it went rather well. The first few were a mess ("let's chalk that up to experience," said catnip_junkie, so we wolfed them), but after that we got the hang of it and made lots of the pretty little things and ate far too much. The accompanying dishes were a bit of a challenge, poor catnip_junkie came back from the library and was greeted with, "Right, I'm still sorting out the rice, you go through my Japanese cookbook and see if there's anything that doesn't include soya sauce because that has wheat in it," but we managed somehow, including making a miso dressing for the salad instead of a standard soya sauce/sesame oil/rice vinegar one, and a broccoli dish that was actually Chinese but never mind. The sushi contained cucumber, shiitake mushroom or red pepper, and I had some picked ginger with mine.

Anyway, there's a Shabbat morning service and study session tomorrow, which means that we're meant to bring lunch, and I'm thinking of bringing sushi since a) it's fab and b) it's good finger food. You're really meant to eat it with soya sauce as a dipping sauce, together with pickled ginger and possibly a few other things. Does anyone have any ideas what I can bring? Something that's easily transportable, bear in mind. I was thinking of making up one batch of sushi with tofu, spread with sesame seeds and put on a layer of pickled ginger, so that it would have a bit more flavour and also look cool (you'd get the green nori outside, then the white rice, then the pink ginger, then the white tofu with sesame seeds lurking). Or perhaps do something else with the tofu: it's really beautiful, fresh, soft white tofu (from a Glasgow company, if anyone's interested). I believe that umeboshi plums can be used in some form, but so far all I have is umeboshi plum seasoning, which is something like vinegar, and not the paste that is more usual. And anyway, what would I do with it? Assuming it's open today, it being Good Friday and all, I have a nice little Chinese supermarket across the road. It's not a huge one, so it doesn't stock the likes of fresh galangal, but there's a decent amount in the two rooms that it does have. Inspiration, anyone, either for sushi fillings or for things that can be eaten with it, like some kind of dipping sauce?

cross-posted to my LJ, jewishvegan and ukvegans