Dhosas are those fantastic huge, crispy pancake things that you wrap around curry. So good and naturally vegan and gluten free too! The batter is very lightly fermented – I like to think of them as a sort of Indian equivalent of sourdough bread. I do admit they take a bit of preparation and you do need a good blender but they’re totally worth it, trust me.
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If you’re after a refreshing drink to get you through a long afternoon this is the one. Serves throughout south east asia, you can imagine how refreshing this is in the heat and humidity. You’ll need a tea-bag or two of your favourite tea (for us that is lady grey, it’s milder than earl grey but nice and floral and interesting), a little sugar, a couple of lemons or limes (whatever you have on hand) and a sprig of mint if you’ve got some in the herb garden. Brew your tea in hot water and add a little sugar (to taste). While the sugar dissolves and the tea steeps, squeeze your lemons or limes. Don’t worry about the pips, they’ll sink to the bottom anyway so you don’t need a fancy squeezer or anything. If you’re feeling fancy you can peel of a few bits of rind to add to the drink with the mint leaves to make it fancy. Pour the citrus into the tea and add plenty of ice to make it nice and cold and finally garnish with your mint and citrus rind. It’s really that simple! For this curry you’re going to have to find some curry leaves. You can usually get them at fruit and veg markets and some super markets. We’ve found the dried variety is pretty bland but if you can get them fresh you’ll thank yourself later. Curry leaf trees are pretty easy to grow too – head down to your local nursery and see if you can get one to pop in the herb garden. They grow like made during spring, summer and autumn, and if you prune it well you’ll end up with huge harvests once it’s a year or so old (and plenty before then too)! It’s not a Mexican feast if you don’t have some guacamole, salsa or sour-cream involved! Here are our favourite, and simple, recipes. Salsa You really don’t need to get too complicated when it comes to salsa! It’s ok to substitute ingredients or leave some out depending on what you’ve got in your fridge. I am not claiming that there is anything even slightly authentic about this recipe or that it is in any way true to it’s Mexican roots. However, as I’m not sure there were many coeliac, vegan Mexicans back in the day, I think we can just call it the product of culinary evolution. A delicious, healthy product of evolution. To make proper tortillas you need special lime treated corn flour and a tortilla press. This recipe is a fair bit more simple. If you don’t have chickpea or millet flour, don’t worry, just use the full 2 cups of plain flour – the other flours just add a bit of extra chewiness and depth. Sushi is one of those things that can tend to divide people. It’s fishy, and even if it’s not fishy (in the case of vegetarian or chicken filled sushi), the seaweed wrapping has its very own fishy taste. While we quite like our vegan sushi (especially when doused in enough pickled ginger and soy sauce!) but we’ve also found a way around the fishy taste for those days when we’re in a not-so fishy mood. Sushi essentials: Sushi rice – it’s nice and sticky. We have made sushi with our favourite brown basimati rice in the past and it works, it just won’t made quite as firm a roll. Sushi seasoning – for seasoning the rice. If you can’t get any you can just dissolve a little sugar in hot water and add some vinegar and salt. Soy sauce – gluten free in our case. Pickled ginger – it just isn’t sushi without pickled ginger! Wasabi – again, it’s not sushi without some wasabi. Yaki Nori, or for our not-so-fishy (and not-so-authentic) sushi, vietnamese rice paper. This stuff is so easy it almost makes itself and so delicious everyone will want to eat it, all the time. It’s GF, vegan and waaaay better for you than shop bought toasted muesli. Get amongst it! ¼ cup honey ¼ cup olive oil or Nuttlex or other vegan spread 2 ½ cups buckwheat groats ½ cup sunflower seeds (hulled) 2 cups puffed rice I don’t want to exaggerate but shop bought vegan yogurt can be one of life’s greatest disappointments. When I first saw it for sale I was a little bit surprised by the cost but I decided that taking out a second mortgage and selling my first born child into slavery was ok because…yogurt. So, I threw it into the trolley and hurried off home with my prize. Only to discover that it tastes like blended up shoes with a side order of insecticide and artifical sweetener. They say that the best way to get over getting bucked off a horse is to get right back on, so since that devastating moment I’ve tried pretty much every brand of vegan yogurt that I can buy. And while some have been pretty good (thank you coconut yogurt) they are generally rather underwhelming. Our journey into making vegan yogurt has so far been paved with coconut cream and we have left behind us the ghosts of failed batches, though their memory lingers on. But fear not, gentle reader, for you can learn from our mistakes and hopefully in no time you too will be whipping up beautiful batches of dairy free yogurt. |
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