Sleepy Sunday - Bean Potato Cakes

Today, I've had my first vegan mofo disaster in the kitchen! It had to happen today of all days too! I only had a small window of opportunity this morning to create another 'Sleepy Sunday' dish and I was all up for it. But I only had an hour tops to create something. We were going to Mum & Dads to celebrate my sisters birthday with a family meal, which I was really looking forward to it. But more about that later.

After checking my cupboards and fridge I came up with what needed using up more than anything and then figured out what I was going to do with it. I had some potatoes that had started sprouting and some runner beans which I'd picked earlier in the week that needed using up. I knew that the dish would have to be potato based and decided on a bean and potato cake. Easy heh?

This morning was a cold one and although the weather report was better for later in the day I needed warming up and what better way than to use some heat in your food. 

After mixing all my ingredients together I had a quick taste before the 'cakes' were formed and put in the oven, it tasted good and I had high hopes. That, my friends, was too good to be true and as soon as I opened the oven door my heart sank. I just had a tray full of gloop!

After re-forming the cakes, turning them over and returning to the oven I kept my fingers crossed. When I next opened the oven door I didn't have a tray of gloop just 5 blobs of gloop!

I will remake these again as they tasted so darn good but next time I might try adding a flax egg, adding flour, replacing the cheese with nutritional yeast or baking them in metal rings. The vegan cheese had melted causing the 'cake' to be a soggy mess. Here is what NOT to do!

Ingredients - Serves 5-6
400g potatoes
215g Spicy refried beans
180g Runner beans
80g Vegan cheese
2 Tsp Balsamic Glaze
Salt & Pepper

Method
Peel the potatoes and cut into cubes, the smaller the cube the quicker the cooking time. One cooked, drain and mash.

Add the tin of refried beans and mash again.

Whilst the potatoes are cooking, top and tail the runner beans and cut into small pieces. Add to boiling water and cook for 3-4 minutes, until a knife can pierce them but still leaves a bit of 'bite'. Drain the beans and add to the bean and potato mash along with the cheese.

Fold the mixture so everything is combined, then add salt and pepper to taste, and add the balsamic glaze. I'm using this quite a bit in my cooking recently but I find that it just perks up a dish and gives a tangy like flavour. Give the mixture another good stir so that everything is well combined.

With wet hands (maybe I should have used flour hands) form the mixture into 'cakes' I made 5 fairly big cakes but you could easily make bigger or smaller 'cakes'. Bake in a moderate oven for 15 minutes and flip the 'cakes' over before returning to the oven for a further 15 minutes.

I didn't take a photograph of the tray of gloop, I was frantically trying to recover the dish to worry about taking photos! But after reforming the 'cakes' they looked like this.

Bake for a further 15 minutes and after the second bake in the oven the 'cake' didn't look too bad.

Serve with baked beans or fried mushrooms. I served mine with beans as I'd used all the mushrooms up in yesterdays dish. But they would have tasted good with fried mushrooms.

After the 'cakes' had cooled the vegan cheese had solidified and you could pick them up as the were fairly solid. I'm guessing that once heated up they will return to gloop, ha ha ha. Must try harder.

I ran out of time to post this 'not to be tried recipe' this morning, so it's a little late in the day. We had a fantastic time round Mum & Dad's celebrating my sisters birthday and I was spoilt rotten. My sister had made me sweet potato balls (similar to falafels but no chick peas in sight) which were mighty tasty especially with a sprinkling of mint sauce on them. Hopefully my sister will give me the recipe, but like me she cooks from the heart and doesn't tend to write everything down. Perhaps she should start a blog to record her recipes, it's worked for me. For dessert my sister had made two apple and black current tarts, one vegan just for me. She tells me she made the pastry out of olive oil and I must say it was the shortest shortcrust pastry I've ever had. I was stuffed after my main meal so I only had a little bit, but I've brought some home to enjoy and she is going to freeze the rest for me.

Tune in tomorrow for the last day of vegan mofo, till then bye for now...................

Sleepy Sunday - Green Bean, Mushroom & Cherry Tomato Pancakes

Sleepy Sunday in my eyes is all about having a lie in and chilling NOT being jumped on at 6:00am by a dog possessed! I'll let Marco off this once as he's not been very well, although the sweet potato seems to be doing the trick, well, either that or the tablets from the vet!

So my Sleepy Sunday turned into an early rise and I was starving! A quick tour round the veg patch gave me another 100g of purple and green beans. This was definitely the last haul, although there were still a few flowers on the plants, so maybe it's not the end just yet. I decided to leave the masses of runner beans on the plants until later in the day, when I will be ready to make soup for the week ahead. Recipe will feature on Tuesday.

A quick raid of the fridge demonstrated that quite a few things were getting near their shelf life or past their best including some cherry tomatoes. I wondered what I could make with these two ingredients, then I remembered discovering the greatest love affair in food heaven, green beans and mushrooms, so now I had three ingredients.

After some deliberation I decided that I would have a go at making pancakes as I thought it fit the Sleepy Sunday theme quite well. Even as a vegetarian I didn't eat eggs, jut the thought of them turned my stomach so I haven't had pancakes for quite some time. Even oat cakes remind me of eggs and I can't eat them so this was going to be a test.

Ingredients - Serves 2
60g Flour 
10g Soya flour
10g Nutritional Yeast
450ml Almond milk
Olive Oil
100g French green/purple beans
200g Chestnut mushrooms
200g Cherry tomatoes
Handful of basil
Salt & Pepper

Method
First prepare your vegetables by topping and tailing the beans and slicing, quarter the tomatoes and chunk up your mushrooms! Turn your oven on to a low heat, so you can keep your pancakes warm as you are making them.

Put the nutritional yeast flakes in a food processor and blitz until fine. Add the two flours and give the processor another whiz to combine the ingredients. Add 400ml of the almond milk and process to make a smooth batter. Set aside while you make the filling.

Add a little olive oil to a pan and saute the beans for 3 minutes, then add the mushrooms and cook for another 3 minutes. Add the cherry tomatoes and cook until the tomatoes break down about 5 minutes, stirring regularly so the mixture doesn't stick to the pan. Add the remaining almond milk and simmer for another 2 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste and scatter with the basil leaves.

When the filling is almost done, heat a drop of olive oil in a frying pan (non stick is best) and add about 3 tablespoons of the batter. You will start to see little air bubbles in the surface of the pancake and this is when you need to flip it over and cook the other side for two minutes. Remove from the pan to an oven proof plate and pop in the oven to keep warm while you make the remainder of the pancakes, you will get 4 pancakes. Spray the pan with a little olive oil before adding the next batch of batter.

To serve, place a pancake on a plate and top with the filling, then place another pancake on top and add more filling. Enjoy.

These did still remind me of eggs but I did eat them, if I were to make them again I would add more almond milk as I think the batter was a little stodgy for my taste.

On the harvesting front, I have been a lucky girl, this week I have been given free produce too, so not only did I bag a bargain yesterday, but I have been given a bag full of lettuce from my Mums garden, cheers Mum, and I have been blessed by a visit from my gardening angel. After reading my blog and seeing that I was using tinned beans my gardening angel gave me a bag of borlotti beans from her allotment. So I am trying to create a recipe which showcases them. As I need to soak them over night I think this will be a task for next weekend! Thank you my lovely gardening angel.

Sleepy Sunday - Bean Hash

Welcome to the third sleepy Sunday of the month! Boy, time flies when you're having fun.

So far, sleepy Sunday has brought you broad bean pate and stuffed mushrooms, but today were going to fry it up!

After a long walk with Marco this morning across the fields we were both starving when we got home and wet! It's absolutely chucking it down here today, I think summer is over. Neither of us had eaten any breakfast. I just wasn't hungry and Marco's excuse was that he was too excited to go out for a walk!

Once more I raided my cupboards for a tin of beans. I always have tins of beans at the ready, they are so versatile and you can easily make a meal out of a tin of beans! Even if it is baked beans on toast!

Ingredients

2Tbsp Olive oil
1 Large potato
½ Tsp Paprika
Pinch of chilli flakes
½ Onion, chopped
6 Mushrooms, quartered
290g Tin of Borlotti beans
1 Tsp White miso
Salt & Pepper

Method
Dice the potatoes into 1cm cubes. Add 1 tablespoon of olive oil to a frying pan and heat before adding the potato cubes. Fry for 5 minutes stiring regularly, add the paprika and chilli flakes and stir to coat the potatoes. Fry for a further 5 minutes until the potatoes are starting to brown.

Add the chopped onion and fry for another 3 minutes. Next add the chopped mushrooms along with 1 tablespoon of soy sauce and fry for another 3 minutes.

Next add the beans and continue to fry for another 3 minutes before adding the white miso. Stir the miso through the bean and potato mixture making sure everything is coated and fry for another minute.

Add salt and pepper to taste and serve.

You can serve on its own or with a side order of baked beans for double beans.

Or mix the baked beans into the hash as I ended up eating it!

Sleepy Sunday - Stuffed Mushrooms

The second Sleepy Sunday of Vegan Mofo and today's recipe is stuffed mushrooms. I haven't picked any beans today, this last week has seen a lot of harvesting. The beans still have lots of flowers in waiting but I figured I'd give the little beauties a day of from harvesting. They've worked hard over the last week or so.

I raided my store cupboards to see what I had lying in wait and I unearthed a tin of adzuki beans, which if I'm honest has been lurking in the back of the cupboard for some time.

First I did a little taste experimenting to see what other flavours worked well with the adzuki beans. I tried maple syrup, agave nectar, black pepper, nutritional yeast, white miso, garlic puree and houmous. My favourite flavour combination without a shadow of doubt was the white miso. 

 I also liked the nutritional yeast so the next taste experiment was to mash 4 beans with a little white miso and nutritional yeast and it worked really well. A sprinkling of black pepper finished it off nicely.

I already knew what worked well with mushrooms and so I set to with a make up as you go along recipe, where you just follow your heart.

Ingredients
4 Portobello mushrooms
50g Red onion (home grown, yes they were only little!)
1 Garlic clove
1 Can of Adzuki beans, rinsed
3 Tsp White miso
3 Tbsp Nutritional yeast
2 Tsp dried parsley flakes
30g Wholemeal/seeded bread

Method
Finely dice the onion and mince the garlic. Saute the onion over a low heat until translucent then add the garlic and saute for another 2 minutes, being careful not to burn.

Add the rinsed beans and cook for another 3 minutes until heated through.

Add the white miso and stir through the beans, next add the 2 tablespoons of the nutritional yeast and stir through again until everything is incorporated. Add a good grind of black pepper and mash the mixture with a potato masher. You're not looking for a completely smooth paste you need some texture. Add 1 teaspoon of the parsley and mash again.

To make the crispy top place the bread, remaining nutritional yeast and parsley in a food processor and process until you have fine breadcrumbs. Transfer to a plate.

Peel and take out the stalks of the portobello mushrooms and very thinly take a slither from the top of the mushroom so it stands without wobbling. Stuff with the bean mixture and top with the breadcrumbs, pressing down firmly.


Bake in a moderate oven for 20-30 minutes depending on the size of your mushrooms.

I didn't have 4 Portobello mushrooms so I put half of the bean mixture in the fridge for a quick and easy supper, later in the week.

Sleepy Sunday - Broad Bean Pate

Right then here goes my very first post of Vegan Mofo 2013 or indeed ever. 

Just to recap Sundays daily theme is "Sleepy Sunday", posts need to relate to Breakfast, Brunch or 'lazin' in bed' snacks. 

As you know I'm blogging about everything bean like as I have a glut of beans; runner beans, broad beans, string beans, purple beans and yellow beans, although these little beauties are far and between and hardly a deserve the labeling of a glut! The snails have taken a liking to these but on the positive side its meant that the little blighters have left my other beans well alone!

So what can you cook with beans that meets today's daily theme? Easy! Fresh broad bean pate on a french baguette, with a large mug of Lady Grey tea, perfect.

From this . . . 

    to this . . .  

This pate is very easy to make and so tasty, especially with the added olives, you really must try it.

Ingredients
100g shelled broad beans
1 Garlic clove
1tsp Lemon juice
5 fresh mint leaves
1 Tbsp Olive Oil
10 pitted green olives
Salt & Pepper

Method
Put the shelled broad beans in a small saucepan with the garlic clove and just enough water to cover them with and bring to a boil. Cook until tender, this will depend on the age of your beans, I only needed to cook mine for 4 minutes. Drain the beans and garlic and stop the cooking process by running cold water over them in a sieve.

When the beans are cool enough to pick up without burning yourself remove the outer skin, which can be tough. If you grow your own and pick the beans when they are young and tender you may get away with this step. However it is habit to me and something I always do, no matter how young and tender the bean is.

Add the beans and garlic to a food processor along with the lemon juice and a splash of water and puree. Add a little olive oil at a time and puree again until you have the consistency you like. You can always add a little more water or olive oil if you prefer a runnier pate. Transfer to a bowl.

Finely chop the green olives and finely shred the mint leaves and mix into the pate, stir to combine thoroughly and add salt and pepper if you require more seasoning.

Delicious!

It was that tasty I even plated up another batch with some salad for my tea!