Polenta chips

This weekend has been very good so far. We went for a long walk at the harbour yesterday. It was cloudy and drizzly, but not too bad altogether. We ended up at a new beer release in one of our favourite bars. The new beer was a Belgian style cherry and vanilla beer, which was such a perfect choice for yesterday. Today I need to do food shopping for next week. I know, it's not so great to do it on a Sunday, but next week will be busy again, so it's best to get it out of the way. The shop we are planning to go to is just next to our local park, so it will also be a nice stroll through the park.

I had this unopened bag of polenta in my cupboard for a while. I like polenta, but it's not part of my usual basics, so that's why it was left for a while. I suddenly remembered that polenta chips would be great for a change and decided to make them. They are really easy to make and you can customise the seasoning as you like. I served my polenta chips with a tomato dip, veggie cheese Schnitzel and side salad. It was a good combo.

Polenta chips

Ingredients

650 ml vegetable stock

1 tsp salt

½ tsp ground black pepper

1 tsp dried wild garlic

1 tsp garlic powder

125 g polenta

Vegetable oil for frying

Method

Heat the vegetable stock and season it with salt, pepper, dried wild garlic and garlic powder.

Cook the polenta in the vegetable stock until done.

Spread the cooked polenta evenly on a lined roasting tray and let it cool. Chill it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

Cut chips from the polenta and shallow fry the chips in vegetable oil until they are crispy. Tap any excess oil off with kitchen roll.

Serve with the sides of your choice.

Your VegHog

Polenta Chips

The moment I heard about polenta chips, I was fascinated by the concept. I don't have many experiences cooking with polenta or even eating it, but I've always enjoyed it when it was around. The thought that it would be the ingredient for some slightly naughty chips was just too much to resist. So I had to cook some polenta chips.

Couple of weeks back Felicity Cloake's article How to make the perfect polenta chips was published on the Guardian and that was the definite sign for me to try to cook them. I was most nervous about getting the texture right, but it actually turned out very easy to handle. Felicity, as always, consulted several different recipes in order to find the best combinations, and I adapted my recipe from her version following it pretty closely. I made a tomato-chilli dip to go with the chips, which was a good combination.

Polenta Chips with a homemade Tomato-Chilli Dip

Polenta Chips

650 ml vegetable stock

1 tsp sea salt

125 g + 50 g polenta

50 g vegetarian pasta cheese (veggie parmesan)

Vegetable oil for frying

Cook 125 g of polenta in the vegetable stock until done and mix the grated cheese in.

Spread the mixture evenly into a lined roasting tray and let it cool. Chill it in the fridge.

Cut chips from the polenta and coat them with the rest of the uncooked polenta.

Shallow fry the chips in vegetable oil until the coating is crispy.

Tap any excess oil off with kitchen roll.

Tomato-chilli Dip

200 g vine tomatoes

1 garlic clove

1 red chilli

Olive oil

1 tsp smoked chilli paste

Cook chopped tomatoes in olive oil until most excess liquid has cooked off.

Add finely chopped chilli and garlic into the pan and let simmer.

Season the dip and purée.

Enjoy the chips with the dip!

Your VegHog

 

Vegetarian Fish & Chips

It's time to transform a classic British dish into a vegetarian version. Vegetarian fish and chips, what an earth, you may think! Well, my version doesn't have much at all to do with fish, but I still wanted to keep the name of the traditional dish. I used Halloumi cheese as fake fish in this recipe and it actually worked out rather nicely for the taste, texture and looks. It was rolled in my special cider batter before deep frying. I served my fake fish with very chunky hand-cut oven-baked skin-on chips (wow that's many hyphens, not sure, if they are all really needed!), peas and spicy chilli mayo.

Here's how this dish came together.

The chips:

2 large baking potatoes

Vegetable oil

Smoked paprika

Salt

Cut the baking potatoes into chunky chips, brush them with vegetable oil, sprinkle with smoked paprika and salt and bake in the oven until done.

The veggie fish:

250 g halloumi

Vegetable oil

Wheat flour

Smoked paprika

White papper

Bicarbonate of soda

Dry cider

Cut the halloumi into thin slices and cook them in vegetable oil on both sides until golden brown. I really wanted to add this step, as I don't fancy undercooked halloumi, it always needs to be properly cooked for me.

Make the batter by whisking flour, smoked paprika, white pepper, bicarbonate of soda and dry cider together into a smooth, but not too runny, batter. I can't really give the amounts here, as I just mixed it all together and it seemed to be the perfect texture. You can add more flour or cider, if the texture isn't quite right. The bottomline is that it should easily coat the halloumi for deep frying.

Heat enough vegetable oil in a deep pan so that it will cover the halloumi slices. Coat the halloumi slices with the batter and put them into the hot oil. They should get golden brown and crispy fairly quickly. Then transport them onto a kitchen roll to tap off any excess oil.

The sides:

Gran Luchito Chilli Mayo (this added a nice spicy kick to the dish)

As many frozen peas as you want to eat, cooked with a little butter, marjoram and salt.

And this was it, very tasty, a very good option for the traditional fish and chips! Have a great weekend everyone!

Your VegHog

Kabocha squash fritters

Happy New Year dear Hoggers!

I wish you all a successful year 2014, and hope that we can continue sharing and discussing vegetarian cooking here! I'm very grateful for the last year, which was also the first year of this blog, and was happy to see so many people reading this blog and commenting on my recipes. So I'm highly motivated to keep posting my recipe experiments in this new year as well and of course keen on improving my vegetarian home cooking. I hope to see you along the way!

If you have read my blog before, you might know that I absolutely love veggie burgers. I have decided to start the year off with a new veggie burger recipe. I used orange kabocha squash as the main ingredient of these fritters and served them with homemade seed rolls and hand-cut chunky oven chips. Kabocha is a sweet winter squash and well worth trying.

Ingredients

1 small kabocha squash

1 large onion

1 cloveless garlic (or 2-3 cloves of regular garlic)

1 cup dry soya mince

1tsp vegetable stock powder

Little fresh thyme

Little fresh parsley

2tsp nettle salt (or herb salt)

1tsp black pepper

3 eggs

2-4tbsp rye flour

Vegetable oil for frying

Method

This is how you can make these easy squash fritters. First of all soak the cup of soya mince in 1,5dl water with added 1tsp vegetable stock powder so that the soya gets hydrated. You can also add a dash of olive oil. After the soaking remove any excess water.

Quarter the squash and remove the seeds, but there's no need to peel the squash. Grate the squash pieces with a cheese grater.

Chop the onion and the garlic very finely and mix them with the soya and grated squash. Season the mix with the fresh herbs, salt and pepper, and also stir the flour in.

Then also add the eggs and mix it all into an even and fairly firm paste. Add only 2 eggs if the squash is quite small, and you can add more flour if needed. The mixture needs to be firm enough to stick together when shallow-fried in oil.

Heat a generous amount of vegetable oil in a pan on a medium heat. Shape small fritters from the mixture by basically just dropping a suitable amount of it straight into the pan and then shaping it a little bit into a round form. Then fry the fritters on both sides until slightly crispy and golden brown on the surface and fully cooked throughout. This takes 5-10 minutes per side depending on the heat of the pan. When you have removed the fritters from the pan, remove the excess oil with kitchen roll.

Serve them warm as suggested above or combine with any tasty bun and salad or cheese and enjoy with beer or cider. These fritters can also be fried and re-heated quickly whenever needed.

Stay hungry this year also!

Your VegHog

Pearl barley and porcini Schnitzel

Guess what? It's veggie burger time, and that always means good times for me! Today's burger Schnitzel is a mushroomy one paired with healthy and earthy pearl barley.

Ingredients

15g dried porcini mushrooms

150g pearl barley

1tbsp vegetable stock powder

2 garlic cloves

1 onion

4tbsp barley flour

1 egg

Ground black pepper

Nettle salt

Vegetable oil for frying

Method

Soak the pearl barley overnight in water. On the next day boil the pearl barley in water with added vegetable stock powder for about one hour until tender. Drain the pearl barley and remove all excess fluid.

Chop the garlic and onion and crush the dried porcini. Soak the porcini for about 30 minutes. Mix all these ingredients with the pearl barley.

Add the flour, egg and seasoning to the bowl and mix carefully. The mixture should reach a fairly firm texture so that the Schnitzel hold well together. Shape Schnitzel of the mixture.

Heat vegetable oil in a frying pan and fry the Schnitzel on both sides until they are golden brown.

Serving suggestion

Serve the Schnitzel with smoked pepper hummus, potato flatbreads and sweet potato oven chips on the side.

Stay hungry!

Your VegHog