MiniMonos Meatless Meal: Cheater's fajitas

Yes, I cheated with the MiniMonos Meatless Meal this week.  I didn't cook this lovely looking dinner.

Last night instead of our usual vegetarian low carbon-impact Thursday meal, we were invited out to a restaurant for a friend's birthday.  So instead of constructing dinner at our family table, we built fajitas with our friends instead. Our poor friends had to put up with me taking way too many pictures of their rapidly cooling meals, while I apologised and my husband gave them a long-suffering-she-does-this-every-Thursday eye-roll. 

I begged the restaurant to share their recipe but they weren't wrapped with that idea, so here is the closest vegetarian fajita recipe I could find to share with you, from Heatherreneehopkins at Group Recipes

Tortillas

For the Fajita Mix:
bell peppers
onions
tofu (optional)
olive oil
hot sauce
lemon juice
cayenne pepper (optional)

Optional Extra Toppings:
Shredded Cheese
Cilantro
Chopped Green Onions
Tomatoes
Salsa
Avocado

In a wok (or some other pan if you don’t have a wok) grill some sliced bell peppers (either ones you slice yourself, or you can buy a bag of sliced bell peppers in the frozen section at the store) and chopped onions, (Optional: tofu cut into small squares or meat, if you want to). Grill in some olive oil (Pam has a new olive oil spray that’s cool) and a dash of hot sauce like cholula or tapatio.
After it is grilled, toss on a dash of lemon juice and some cayenne pepper if you want it a bit spicier.
place mixture in a tortilla.
Top with whatever you want....I like shredded cheese, cilantro, green onions, and chopped tomatoes or salsa and bits of avocado or guacamole, and pour your favorite hot sauce (my fave is cholula) on top.
Wrap the tortilla and enjoy.....and you WILL enjoy it because it’s YUMMY
(For a simple guacamole, mash ripe avocados with cayenne pepper, lemon juice, salsa, and a dash of hot sauce)

The verdict

Quite frankly, if you're enjoying good food with great people you can't go wrong. Fajitas are a great meal to share and we all really enjoyed them.  I hope this recipe is as good as the ones we had -- if you make them before I do, let me know!

 

MiniMonos Meatless Meal: Build-your-own pasta dish

This week our son is staying with his Grandmother.  Husband and I are really enjoying our week as a couple, but can’t help our frequent missing-our-boy pangs.  So tonight for our MiniMonos Meatless Meal, which we’ve adopted every Thursday to reduce our household carbon footprint, I’m going to cook us a big comfort pasta.  I want to make it fresh and healthy with herbs and stacks of greens (no child to fussily pick them out) but warm it up with roasted bell pepper, parmesan and toasted pine-nuts.  As per our Thursday night tradition, even though it’s just the two of us, the plan is to assemble our meatless meal at the table.

The building materials:
Pasta - I used spaghetti
2 tsp olive oil

1 clove fresh garlic
½ cup fresh mixed herbs - I used italian parsley, thyme, basil and a touch of mint
1/4 cup olive oil
Salt and pepper

1 red bell pepper
2 zucchini
1 bunch of spinach
1 avocado
¼ cup chopped scallions
¼ cup pine-nuts
Shaved parmesan to sprinkle on top

The construction:

Cook the pasta in boiling salted water according to the packet instructions. Drain and swirl with 2 tsp olive oil to keep the strands separated. While the pasta is cooking, prepare the following:

    •    De-seed the bell pepper, cut into flat slices, coat with a little olive oil and grill in the oven
    •    Rinse herbs and put into a food processor with 1/4 cup olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper
    •    Brown the pine-nuts gently in a fry pan
    •    Stir-fry the zucchini
    •    Steam spinach until wilted
    •    Cut avocado into ½ inch chunks   

The verdict:

We folded. With our son absent, we took liberties with our normal Thursday tradition. Instead of taking time to create construction masterpieces at the table, I threw both our meals together quickly at the bench. We didn't discuss the best or most fun assembly process or compare meals to decide which one to photograph. And we slobbed it, eating them on our laps watching TV. Naughty. Bliss.

Despite the fact that halfway during the meal I realised that I had completely forgotten the avocado, the pasta was good.  I have in the past often made this dish with smoked chicken, but we agreed that it tastes fresher without the meat.

Next week we're back to best behaviour at the table -- do you have any ideas of a MiniMonos Meatless Meal I can cook? I'd love to try it out!

MiniMonos Meatless Meal: the Julia Child version

The other half is having a night out with the boys so I have two girlfriends coming to visit this evening.

After seeing the movie Julie and Julia this week (yes, I know I’m one of the last women on earth to see it) I decided to find a Julia Child recipe which fitted our MiniMonos Meatless Meal theme of being vegetarian and a meal we could build at the table.   Thank goodness that meant no aspic.

Who could forget the sight of easy-on-the-eye Chris Messina playing Julie Powell’s husband, enthusiastically munching bruschetta?  Actually, his eager, open mouthed chomping whilst talking grossed me out on more than one occasion but I must say the bruschetta looked great, even running down his chin (did I mention he was easy-on-the-eye?).   And I’m very impressed that in one day’s shooting Messina had to eat over 30 pieces of bruschetta and he still looked like he was loving it. This recipe I’ve got to try.

Of course one simply can’t have the girls around for Julia Child food without finding out what tipple she was partial to.  I read that Julia: “indulged in reverse martinis -- a glass full of dry vermouth on the rocks -- she preferred Noilly Prat -- topped off with a floater of gin: "I really like Gordon's gin, and it's not too expensive." Julia boasted that she could polish off two martinis made in this fashion.” 

Perfect. Bruschetta with reverse martinis it is, then. 

The building materials:

-    2 cups of diced red, ripe organic tomatoes (in the movie they used heirloom tomatoes)
-    Good olive oil for drizzling, plus 1 teaspoon per slice of bread
-    Handful of fresh basil, torn or sliced
-    Salt and freshly ground black pepper
-    2 garlic cloves
-    Nice cottage loaf of bread, sliced

The construction:

Put tomatoes, olive oil, basil, salt and pepper together.  I knew I’d be rushing home from work and busy so I made it the night before.  I’m interested to see if the basil flavor will seep more into the tomatoes this way.  Or it could just be soggy.  I’ve been itching to throw more ingredients into it – surely a touch of garlic, balsamic vinegar, red onion or pesto?!  I hope it won’t be bland.

For the bread: In the movie the bread was fried, not toasted. Eeek!  I put a teaspoon of olive oil in the pan for each slice of bread and fried it until the oil was soaked up (all too quickly) and the slices were brown on the outside but still springy when I poked them.  The trick to make them garlicky is to slice the garlic cloves in half and rub one on each slice of bread. 

The verdict:

OK, I folded and put a teensy bit of basil cashew pesto in the bruschetta.  It just needed a bit more of a top note. Sorry Julia. Balsamic would have done the same but I figured, heck, if I was being bad, why not throw caution to the wind and go straight to the top shelf of the fridge.  The tomatoes were looking suspiciously soggy but to my surprise, they tasted fresh and we got stuck into the bruschetta with just a little less gusto than Chris Messina. Actually, I take that back -- we did talk and laugh our way through mouthfuls and I know I dribbled.

None of us are martini drinkers so the reverse versions, for us, were eye-watering rocket fuel. They were lovely. Here's cheers to Julia Child!

The mother of all vegetarian pita pockets

 
  
Tonight, for this week's MiniMonos meatless meal, I used a grain called quinoa (pronounced keen-wha).  I hadn’t heard of quinoa until last week and was amazed to read about its incredible history as an ancient Incan crop, as well as its super-nutritional status.  The Incas worshipped quinoa and called it the "mother grain" and it is nutty and yummy, super-easy to cook and packed full of protein. I'm told you can use it in dishes where you would usually cook with rice. I found the quinoa in the gluten-free section of our supermarket.

A couple of days ago I used it in a salad I made for friends and family and despite the fact that we were eating a 5000 year-old sacred super-food that packed a huge punch of good vitamins, protein and fiber, it just tasted like a good ol' barbeque salad. So I’m using leftovers tonight in pita bread pockets, with home-made hummus from a recipe Melissa gave me.

The building materials:

Toasted pita bread pockets, tomato, lettuce, quinoa salad and hummus.  My friend's lovely greek salad from the other night also made a guest appearance.

Quinoa Salad

1 cup quinoa (boil for 12-15 minutes as per packet instructions. I used vegetable stock instead of water)
Once the quinoa is cooked, you can pretty-much add whatever takes your fancy. I diced finely and added: 

1 red bell pepper, grilled
1 yellow bell pepper, grilled 
1 avocado
1 tomato
2 scallions
½ cup cooked spinach

I also threw in a handful of toasted pine nuts, some crunchy bean sprouts and a nice dressing (lemon and herb piri piri)

Hummus

1 can of chick peas (garbanzo beans)
Splash of olive oil (or 1 tbsp tahini)
Garlic (optional - I did!)
Paprika, chili, sundried tomato, sesame seeds - any of these, all optional. (I used the first 3)
Lemon juice from 1-2 lemons, to taste
Salt & pepper
Water if it is too thick (add last)

Put into a bowl and mush with a hand blender or put into food processor and whoosh. Taste, add lemon juice and water until it is the consistency you like.

The construction:

Toast the pita pockets and fill at the table! 

The verdict:

My husband wisely went out for the night. I thought it tasted good, but overstuffed my pita bread and paid for it dearly -- well my blouse, jeans and the floor did.

I thought it would be a bit salady for the 7-year old son but he said he liked it, after picking out the cucumber, adding masses of grated cheese from the fridge and a huge squirt of barbeque sauce. Well. Ok. At least he didn't add a left-over pork chop.  

Meatless Supper Club week 8: Corn fritter hamburgers

The last week of EnviroMom’s Meatless Supper Club has come around so fast!  It’s been wonderful to be part of something which so closely reflects our values at MiniMonos -- demonstrating our care for the environment, swapping ideas with like-minded parents and involving kids in a way that’s fun!  A big thanks again to Renee and Heather from EnviroMom for inviting us to be involved.

Tonight I was supposed to make tofu burgers.  Except that half an hour before I made them I realised the tofu was supposed to have marinated overnight in some yummy concoction. Oops. So my  husband (bless him) decided to experiment with corn fritter hamburgers instead.

I don’t want to make my fellow Meatless Supper Clubbers jealous…but I’m going to.  It’s nearly summer here, down-under. So although we didn’t slap a prawn on the barbie, we did cook the onions, eggs, and fritters on the barbeque. It was lovely cooking outside. Sorry.

The building materials:
Corn fritters:
¾ cup plain flour
1tsp baking powder
1tsp sugar or runny honey
1 large or 2 small eggs
1 tin creamed corn
salt/pepper

Put all dry ingredients into bowl. Add the corn and eggs and mix. If using honey, add it now -- the mixture should be quite thick.  Heat oil and add spoonfuls of mixture into a pan or on the grill, frying until bubbles form or until golden, then flip.

In addition to the corn fritters, we used spinach and cashew pesto (yum), avocado, fried onion, lettuce, tomato and fried eggs (free range, with lovely, runny yolks). 

The construction:
Assemble the burgers the way you like them! 

Here's the 7-year old version:

The verdict:
It was fast, fun and involved the whole family. I actually preferred this vegetarian version to ground beef hamburgers and it got the “Yep, we’ll have that again” from the boys.

We've decided that we enjoyed the Meatless Supper Club so much that we’re going to continue constructing veggie meals each week! I’ll also keep blogging about the outcome, which means that Heather and Renee’s mission was accomplished in at least this household: One meatless meal a week, one family at a time. Yep, we’ll have that again.

YUM! Look what we had for lunch today at MiniMonos!

We were super-lucky to be treated to a gorgeous lunch made by Earthwise Gourmet, who specialize in traditional, organic, small batch crafting of health-promoting foods.  In their words: “Using ancient wisdom and philosophies of cooking and preparation from the world over, our food and drink are teeming with natural, nutritive value”.

  And we were impressed!  It was a luxury experience that we felt virtuous about eating.  The Five Alive Raw Seed Crackers were crunchily tasty, the dips were creamy and rich and the quinoa salad I could eat all day!  We just didn’t feel like we were eating food that was “unlocking and releasing predigested amino acids that increased nutritional value exponentially”.   It was just, simply, scrummy.  Earthwise Gourmet’s home-made Kombucha, fermented from Yunnan full leaf black tea was a deliciously refreshing drink to accompany the meal, full of complex flavors.  And the simple, organic Devine Goddess Fudge was to-die-for-heavenly. 

 

PLUS they personally delivered this gorgeous food to our office! After laying out the table using reusable and recyclable containers, Sharon and Warren described the organic ingredients of each dish and how it was made, before leaving us to dig in.  Bliss!

 

You can also find Earthwise Gourmet on Twitter.

Making a Pho without beetlejuice

Tonight, for EnviroMom's Meatless Supper Club,  I tackled a vegetarian version of Pho (roughly pronounced "phua"), a classic Vietnamese soup.

Researching it threw up some interesting facts:

• Apparently it's ridiculous that I could even think of making a vegetarian pho.  One food writer sniffily said that at the very least, it should be made with beef stock.
• Another traditionalist insisted that one can only make a decent pho by sweetening it with the correct species of peanut worm and adding an extract of water beetle pheremone. True.
• The Vietnamese don't mince words when it comes to descibing their meat. Their words for pork and beef literally mean: "kill-pig" and "kill-cow". 

Luckily my family are not sniffy so I gave the tofu version a shot and skipped the worms, beetles and kill-cow.

The building materials:

For the broth...
1 small unpeeled onion, quartered
2 unpeeled shallots, halved
8 garlic cloves, halved
a 1-inch piece of ginger, coarsely sliced
two 3-inch cinnamon sticks
2 pods of star anise
4 cloves
8 cups clear vegetable stock
3 tablespoons soy sauce
salt

For the soup ...
1 pound rice noodles
8 ounces seitan or fried tofu, sliced
6 scallions, thinly sliced (both green and white parts)
about 1-1/2 cups bean sprouts
a good handful of basil, mint or cilantro leaves, left whole
1 lime, cut into wedges
hoisin sauce
sriracha chili paste

To make the broth, heat a large pot over medium-high heat. Add the onion, shallots, garlic, ginger, cinnamon sticks, star anise, and cloves and dry-roast, stirring occasionally, until the vegetables begin to char. Add the stock and soy sauce and bring to a boil over high heat. Turn the heat down to medium-low, cover, and simmer for about 25 minutes. Strain into a clean pot and discard the solids. Taste the broth and add salt if necessary. Keep warm over low heat.

While the broth is simmering, prepare the rice noodles. Place the noodles in a large bowl. Pour boiling water over the noodles to cover and soak as per the instructions.

The construction:

Ladle the hot broth into bowls. Let everyone help themselves to the noodles, fried tofu, scallions, bean sprouts, herbs, lime wedges, hoisin sauce and chili and season their own soup as they wish. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

The verdict:

I thought my husband would be really keen on the Pho and I'd end up making peanut butter sandwiches for our son.  However, despite mega-compliments from hubby as he was constructing his bowl, at the end of the meal he declared it just "alright".  Our son, on the other hand, went back for seconds.  I ate the sandwiches myself, trying hard not to think about peanut worms.

Tuck into easy vegetarian Vietnamese rolls

Now that we're seasoned Meatless Supper Club bloggers, my family now expects and even looks forward to at least one meatless meal per week.  Miracles do happen.

I'm loving the fantastic suggestions from friends and family about meals I can construct at the table -- keep them coming please! A huge thanks also to Heather and Renee from EnviroMom for this awesome initiative. 

This week our family tucked into some vegetarian Vietnamese rolls -- and they couldn't be easier!  It took 15 minutes from opening the fridge door to opening our mouths and stuffing them in.  We ate these as a light dinner but you may prefer them for an appetizer or weekend lunch.

  The building materials:

•  Julienned carrots, cucumber, shallots
• Chopped peanuts
• Sliced avocado, lettuce
• Mung bean sprouts
• Fresh mint leaves
• Peanut sauce, chili sauce, hoisin sauce
• Vermiciili
• Rice wrappers (8.5 inch diameter)

The construction:

Simply arrange a selection of yummy things and sauce on your rice wrapper (not too much!), roll once over, tuck the bottom edge up and finish rolling.

Scoff!  My son, impatient with my camera fumbling, was so keen to eat it that twice I had to screech "NOT YET!!!"  as the Vietnamese roll took on a life of its own and jumped into his mouth.

Yum!

Non-violent Harry Potter pizzas

We’re up to week 4 of the EnviroMom Meatless Supper Club. 10 of us are putting together a store of recipes over a period of 8 weeks by cooking one meatless meal a week for our families. I’m continuing with my theme, attempting to make meatless meals fun for kids by turning them into a construction project at the table.  Melissa gave me her fantastic pizza dough recipe, and my husband led the charge and made the pizzas with our son and two of his friends. All I had to do was to announce that the theme was "Harry Potter character faces", then take photos.  Hmmm…must say a couple of my photos are so shaky they look like I’ve just been hit by the Cruciatus Curse.

Here’s Melissa’s pizza base recipe:

I have been making bread since I was a kid.  This seems like an odd method, but it is fail-safe!  It is made in 2 stages;

1.  In a big bowl (not plastic) - just whack it all in and stir +/- 100 times with a wooden spoon -- I bet 50 would actually do it. The stirring gets the gluten going.  This bit is called the sponge.  It will look wet.

• 3 ½  to 4 ½ c flour (we use a combo of 3 cups white and 1 cup rolled oats (gives a little chewiness) and wholemeal flour mixed together.  You can use all white or all wholemeal or any combo, but there is no gluten in oats, so no more than 1/2 cup!  Note that any flour will do, people think you need something special but plain old flour is fine.
• 1 Tbsp yeast (that's 1 package in US)
• Approx ¼  - 1/3 c of any kind of sweetening (brown sugar, honey etc)
•  3 c water (tepid ie not hot or cold, a little warm is ok)
•  1 egg (totally optional, but I prefer it)

Throw a damp tea towel over it and put somewhere, anywhere (on the bench, in a hot water cupboard, just not somewhere cold or drafty) for ¾ hour or longer.  To be honest I often do this in the morning and deal to it all later. 

2.  Throw in:

• 1 - 1 ½ Tbsp of salt.  Do not omit this, it tastes awful without salt.
• ¼ c or about 2 Tbsp olive oil -- a good splosh. 
• 3 - 4 or so cups of flour (any combo of white and wholemeal).  Put the first couple of cups straight in, then just add the rest as required.

Get your hands in and mush, mix, knead, pound - you cannot get this wrong.  Add the minimum of flour to make a dough that you can knead.  You will need some more flour to stop it sticking to the bench.  Kneading is basically pushing, slapping mashing.  Great kid fun, you can't get it wrong. When you've had enough, make it into a ball.  Slosh a little more oil into the bowl and swoosh the dough around so that it has a thin covering of oil.  Put the tea towel back on top, and leave for 30-60 minutes (or longer but not more than a couple of hours).  Get your child to make a fist and punch the dough in the middle. He or she will laugh, it will "poof" and collapse a bit.

Now grab bits, flour the board (just use the minimum or it will get too dry) and roll.  If you don't have a rolling pin, a wine bottle works!

Turn Oven on to about 180c 350F

Put on baking trays - I put baking paper under them.  Cook!

The reason the Harry Potter theme was chosen is because my son’s favourite pizza is meat-lovers (Eeek!), followed by Hawaiian. I figured that if my husband announced that they were making vegetarian pizzas, his would consist only of cheese and pineapple, with barbeque sauce.  But faces require interesting colors and vegetables – and kids love to be gory and eat the eyes, even if they’re made from olives.

The building materials:  
They used pesto (both tomato and basil), sliced zucchini, black olives, tomatoes, pineapple, mushrooms, red capsicum, mozzarella and caramelized onion.

The construction:
Unfortunately no-one read the last sentence of Melissa’s recipe: “Cook!”.  So the kids built their faces on un-cooked pizza dough.  Luckily it worked out fine.  Melissa wasn’t kidding when she said the recipe was fail-safe.

The results:

Hermoine:

Fred:

And Fred’s twin, George.

The verdict:
My son’s friends were a wonderful addition to the Meatless Supper Club this week. They said enthusiastic stuff like: “Yum! I love pesto” and “Yay! Caramelized onion!”. There was nothing they turned their noses up at -- I’m thinking about borrowing them for dinner, every night for a month.  They all had fun making their faces and the final result was declared “super-dooper delicious”. All olive eyes and capsicum mouths were scoffed, although there was no reason for them to use the zucchini.  Next time we’ll push our luck, bring out the broccoli and try making Incredible Hulk pizzas.