Eat Your Greens September Round Up

Here comes the September Eat Your Greens round up, and it's looking good and green! I thought that there was a wonderful variety of dishes shared again with the challenge, and I would really like to try each one of them.

Helen from Roast Chicken and Country Walk blog shared a Carrot and courgette salad. The salad contained roasted local courgettes, fresh carrot, spinach, watercress, rocket and tomatoes. I especially like the fact that the courgette pieces are roasted, which is always nice in a fresh salad. This salad would go nicely on the side of so many dishes.

My Eat Your Greens co-host Shaheen from Allotment 2 Kitchen posted a vegan dish Cajun Black Eyed Peas with Summer Vegetables. The seasonal courgette is the green in this dish, and it also contains a lot of other summer vegetables like sweetcorn and peppers. It's a comforting looking spicy bowl with cajun seasoning, chilli and black eyed peas. I would happily scoff this bowl of food.

Johanna from Green Gourmet Giraffe shared a recipe for vegan Cauliflower ceviche tacos. This plate looks so beautiful, and as a fan of veggie tacos I would really want to try these. There are plenty of greens in them: green capsicum, chives, parsley, lime juice and avocado. Johanna has been taking part in Vegan MoFo, Vegan Month of Food, in September and has shared some amazing vegan creations along the way, so it's worth to have a browse in her blog.

Sharon from Not just a load of lentils blog submitted a creative Green Shakshuka recipe. This recipe has so many greens in it, it's incredible. There are leeks, celery, green beans, green capsicum, spinach, spring onion, swiss chard, mint, parsley, rocket and green olives. I've never had shakshuka, but this one looks so tempting that I will have to try to make it.

My own contribution was a recipe for Savoy cabbage roulades. I made vegan Finnish style cabbage roulades from savoy cabbage by adding black treacle on top for some sweetness. The filling was a savoury rice and lentil mix spiced with a new Cabbage Karma spice blend.

Thank you everyone so much for your tasty and healthy contributions! I look forward to seeing you in October, when Shaheen will be hosting the challenge.

Have a nice Sunday!

Your VegHog

Savoy cabbage roulades

There have been so tasty looking cabbages around lately, so I started craving for Finnish style cabbage roulades. I chose a savoy cabbage for the nice green shade, but normal cabbage works perhaps a bit better in this recipe, as the savoy is thinner and then tends to crisp more in the oven. It depends on your preference. The twist in this dish is that the roulades are brushed with black treacle and then baked in the oven.

Another inspiration for this dish was Danish food writer Ditte Ingemann's new organic spice blend called Cabbage Karma, which I wanted to try in a dish. It's a really fragrant spice blend containing coriander, fennel, sumac, garlic powder, black pepper and lemon thyme. I think that it was a wonderful addition to this dish, and I will try it in other cabbage dishes as well.

Here are my vegan savoy cabbage roulades.

Savoy cabbage roulades

Ingredients

1 savoy cabbage

1 cup rice

½ cup beluga lentils

½ cup green lentils

2 carrots

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

Vegetable oil

1 vegetable stock cube

Fresh thyme to taste

1 tsp salt

1 tsp ground black pepper

Cabbage Karma spice mix to taste

4 tbsp black treacle

Method

Cook the rice and lentils, and chop in the meanwhile the carrots, onion and garlic.

Cook the carrots, onion and garlic in oil until soft, and then add the lentils to the mix.

Season the mix, and also fold in the rice.

Let the filling cool down slightly.

Remove the cabbage leaves from the stem, and blanch them in boiling water for a few minutes until they are softened.

Fill the cabbage leaves with the rice mix and roll them into roulades. Place them in an oven dish and brush with black treacle.

Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes at 180 C.

You can serve the roulades as a side with all kinds of dishes. I served them just with some salad on the side.

This is my September Eat Your Greens recipe, which I'm hosting together with Shaheen from Allotment 2 Kitchen. The round up with all September recipes will be up on Sunday.

Have a nice weekend everyone!

Your VegHog

Trip to Germany

I travelled to Germany on business a while ago, and I wanted to make a quick post of some of the meals I had there. I went to Hannover and Osnabrück in Lower Saxony to be more precise.

Some of you might know that I lived nearly ten years in Germany. I studied at the University of Cologne, and had some of the best times of my life there. I sometimes miss Germany, and now I hadn't been back for a couple of years before this trip, but it still always feel like coming back home.

I was especially keen to see how the vegan and vegetarian scenes have developed in the meanwhile, and of course there has been great progress. The offering of vegetarian products in supermarkets is very versatile, and even the most traditional restaurants tend to have a few vegetarian and even vegan options on their menus. There were also several purely vegetarian or vegan restaurants and cafés in the area. I wish I would've had time to visit all of them.

This time I went for some more traditional comfort grub in a brew house, like Spätzle egg noodles with cream and cheese. Here are some of the dishes I had during my trip. I must say that I have also missed those prices, eating out was so cheap there and the portions were huge! 

So this is the enormous Spätzlepfanne I almost managed to eat fully. It was so tasty and creamy with those crispy fried onions on the top.

 

Here are some scenes from downtown Osnabrück.

 

I had to return to the Rampendahl brew house on another day for their excellent beers and to taste the mushroom loaded baked potato, which was just amazing.

I had a couple of Greek meals as well during the trip. This one is from Hannover with a tsatziki and bread starter, creamy mushroom bake and feta salad. Once again I couldn't finish it all, as it was just too much. This was also a very tasty meal.

 

Spaghetti squash and halloumi lasagne

It's slowly starting to be autumnal and squashes and pumpkins are making a heavier appearance. I simply love it! Now it's time to make comfort food and spend quiet evenings at home. Today I want to go out to town though, as I have some shopping to do, and then also want to visit a brew house. It seems to be sunny for now, only a bit windy and it might rain later.

I made a lasagne again after a long while, and thought it would be nice with some spaghetti squash and halloumi. It was indeed tasty and hit the spot perfectly. I just made a basic tomato sauce, where I mixed the roasted squash, and then layered it with the halloumi and lasagne sheets.

Here is my recipe, if you would like to know how I made the dish.

Spaghetti squash and halloumi lasagne

Ingredients

1 spaghetti squash

Olive oil

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

400 ml tinned tomatoes

1 tsp salt

½ tsp ground black pepper

1 vegetable stock cube

Fresh basil leaves

250 g halloumi

Vegetable oil

150 g grated cheese

Lasagne sheets

Method

Cut the spaghetti squash in half, brush it with olive oil and roast in the oven until the flesh is tender. You can save the seeds and toast them.

Chop the onion and garlic finely and fry them in a saucepan until soft. Add the tinned tomatoes and seasoning and simmer to a tomato sauce.

Slice the halloumi and fry the slices in vegetable oil until golden brown.

Scoop the spaghetti squash and add it to the tomato sauce. Layer the sauce with lasagne sheets and halloumi and cover the bake with cheese.

Bake in the oven for about 40 minutes until done.

Enjoy with a crunchy salad or crispy bread on the side!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Your VegHog

Summer vegetable sandwiches

Here's just a quick post from me after a busy weekend. We had visitors from England this weekend, so we did some of the touristy stuff. It was great though, as I'm not getting tired of the Copenhagen sites yet, and tried to recommend some of my favourite sites to visit. We went to a couple of museums and mainly just walked around looking at the architecture. Luckily the weather was fairly nice throughout.

We also got to enjoy some nice veggie meals out. It's always nice to get to know new restaurants. But after all this walking, I just want to relax for the rest of the Sunday evening, and I hope that I'll get to post more next week.

Now I'm just posting about some sandwiches that I recently made. These sandwiches contained slices of corn, roasted aubergine, peppers and tomatoes, fried halloumi and fresh pomegranate seeds. They were a bit more unusual than my regular roasted vegetable breads, but they were quite tasty nevertheless, and also looked very colourful.

Have a good start to the new week everyone!

Your VegHog

In My Kitchen in September

It's again time to have a peek into my kitchen. I have new energy for cooking again after the long heat wave. Now I don't have to consider, whether I can use the oven or not.

I was delighted to detect this Le Prickly French rosé wine in one of our local shops. It is fairly priced and has this lovely hedgehog character on the bottles. I stocked quite a few of these bottles.

I went to a business trip to Germany, and brought a few items back with me. Unfortunately I didn't have that much time for shopping, but managed to get some things anyway. I bought Peanuts gift or cookie bags, non-fried raw courgette crisps, Indian curry rice cup ready meal, Kinder Bueno mini chocolates and Bure Korn spirit.

I got some Edgy Veggie products from the vegetarian fair that we recently visited. I posted about it here. We got these easy rice and lentils red curry ready meals and roasted pea snacks. The ready meals are vegan and gluten free. Of course I've known Edgy Veggie under a different name for a long time, as they are none other than Hodmedod's from Britain. I guess Edgy Veggie is their international or new branding.

Here are different market hauls from vegetable shopping trips. I've been a very happy vegetable shopper in this season, as everything looks so tempting in the market.

Here are some quick weekday dishes that I've recently cooked.

Cheese Schnitzels with different sides

Pasta with tomatoes and halloumi

Tasty ravioli with onions

Peas, corn and halloumi dish

Baked breakfast breads with cheese, tomatoes and onion

I'm sharing this post as usual with Sherry from Sherry's Pickings, who is hosting the In My Kitchen blogging challenge.

Have a nice Sunday everyone!

Your VegHog

Nacho plate with beetroot nuggets

I hope that everyone is having a nice weekend. What are you all up to on this fine September weekend? I started the day by reading in bed for a while, then had coffee and breakfast, and am now making myself ready to go to town. We will visit a Vincent van Gogh exhibition today. I like his landscape paintings very much, so it's always great to visit one of his exhibitions. After that I'm not sure, maybe we will go to a local bar for one drink and then withdraw home for a quiet Netflix evening with veggie burgers. Tomorrow there will be a big flea market on our street, so it will be nice to visit that as well.

Now to this dish that I recently made. I do love a good plate of nachos, and I tried to make a slightly different dish from my usual ones. I added beetroot nuggets that I made from that readymade chickpea and beetroot mix for making all sorts of burgers, falafel and nuggets. It's easy to handle and sticks together very well. I also had pickled red cabbage, spicy black bean and bell pepper mix, tomato salsa and cheesy nachos of course. It was a lovely and colourful plate of food.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Your VegHog