Pulled oats with Thai flavours

Last month I wrote about a new Finnish protein product, Nyhtökaura – Pulled Oats, and now I have another vegan recipe to share with you that was made with the kaffir lime, sesame and ginger flavoured Pulled Oats. I made a Thai green curry type of a paste with nice coconut creamy jasmine rice on the side and added some carrots and spring onions to the dish. This was a very good dish, the Pulled Oats got the seasoning they needed and I really liked the rice with it. I only wish I could have the Pulled Oats more often. Maybe next time at Christmas.

Ingredients

Paste

2 garlic cloves

1 large green chilli

2 cm fresh ginger

3-5 kaffir lime leaves

Handful of Thai basil leaves

Handful of coriander leaves

Other ingredients

2 carrots

3 spring onions

1 onion

250 g Pulled Oats with kaffir lime, sesame and ginger flavour

Splash of soy sauce

Vegetable oil for frying

1 cup jasmine rice

160 ml coconut cream

1 garlic clove

0,5 cm fresh ginger

2 dried lemongrass stalks

1 tsp palm sugar

0,5 cups cashew nuts

Method

Grind the paste ingredients into a smooth paste.

Cut the carrots into short sticks and the spring onions into rings. Chop the onion finely.

Start cooking the carrots, spring onion and onion in a hot pan. After a while add the Pulled Oats and soy sauce. Finally add the green curry paste and cook some more.

Cook the rice and in a separate pan infuse the coconut cream with the finely chopped garlic and ginger by simmering at low heat. Also add the lemongrass stalks, palm sugar and coarsely chopped cashew nuts. Remove the lemongrass stalks before serving.

Serve the Pulled Oats and vegetables with the rice and enjoy.

Your VegHog

Canterbury

I'm still returning to my holiday memories on this gloomy rainy day, as I started sorting out my photos. Towards the end of our holiday in August, we went to Canterbury in Kent for a few days to attend a wedding. I've been there a couple of times before, but now we had more time to explore the town. My partner went to the university there, so he was my guide. The weather happened to be really lovely while we were there, which was extremely lucky and we had such a nice time.

Canterbury is a very pretty historical town and of course the great centrepiece is the Canterbury Cathedral. We stayed at a quaint Medieval hotel just by the Cathedral gates. There are many beautiful buildings, canals and parks and the town is quite vibrant yet somehow calming.

My favourite place in Canterbury will have to be The Goods Shed by the Canterbury West railway station. It's a farmers market, food hall and restaurant and a nice place to spend some time in. I bought some seriously good local vegetables and Kentish cider to take home with me. They also had a craft beer bottle shop and bar, which happened to have one of my favourite beers from Copenhagen on tap, lucky again!

Here are some of my photos from Canterbury. I hope you like them.

Vegetable garden pasta

The summer holidays are over for now and returning to work has been fairly painful as always. But the good thing is that I still have loads of veggies to harvest from my balcony and can make fresh weekday meals with them, like this humble vegetable garden pasta dish. All veggies in this recipe are home grown by me apart from the onion and garlic. I really like my flat summer squashes or courgettes this year. They look cute and make a nice addition to many dishes. Same goes for the chillies. It's an incredibly satisfying feeling cooking with mainly own produce. Late summer is so great going over to my favourite season autumn!

Have a look at the recipe below.

Ingredients

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

1 red pepper

2 small pattypan squashes

2 small chillies

4 tomatoes

Olive oil for frying

Salt to taste

Black pepper to taste

Fresh basil leaves

Fresh courgette flowers

Grated cheese for sprinkling on the top

300 g fresh regular and spinach strozzapreti pasta

Method

Chop the vegetables into small pieces and cook them in olive oil in a hot pan for a few minutes. They should be a little bit cooked, yet still firm. Season the mix with salt, pepper and basil.

Boil the pasta until al dente and combine it with the veggies.

Sprinkle the fresh courgette flowers and cheese on the top and enjoy.

I'm sharing this recipe with Chris at Thinly Spread blog and the Pasta Please! cooking challenge.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Your VegHog

Pea pie

I'm enjoying fresh garden peas one more time as a side to this dish. Probably there will be a few more times still this late summer, but not sure if they'll make it to the blog. This time I made potato mash covered pies from dried pea and broad bean crushes, which are basically just dried pulses crushed with a food processor. In Finland you can buy both products in that texture, which is very handy for different veggie burgers and sauces. They were really nice in a veggie style Shepherd's Pies like these as well. I'm quite thrilled that the proper pie season is here soon, as then I can fully enjoy savoury pies all the time! Here I presented the pie with a bit lighter sides of fresh peas and lettuce to make it a more suitable late summer dish.

Ingredients

1 kg new potatoes

50 g margarine

1 cup dried pea crush

1 cup dried broad bean crush

2 carrots

2 onions

4 garlic cloves

2 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tsp vegetable stock extract

1 tbsp liquid smoke

Splash of dry cider

Sprinkle of salt

Sprinkle of ground black pepper

Method

Cook the potatoes and mash them with the added margarine, salt and some of the potato cooking water.

Cook the pea and broad bean crush as per the instructions on the packet.

Chop the carrots, onions and garlic finely and cook them in oil for a few minutes.

Add the cooked peas and beans into to the pan and season.

Place the pea mix into the bottom of one large oven dish or into several smaller ramekins and cover with the mash.

Bake at 180 C for about 30 minutes.

Enjoy!

Your VegHog

Mozzarella and pickled beetroot sandwiches

For this breakfast recipe I used the beetroot and carrot root vegetable bread, which you may have seen in my foodie shopping from Finland post. However any bread is good here, even just regular slices of toast. I decided to add a little bit more beetroot to these breads by pickling thin beetroot strings. I let them pickle overnight, but I'm sure a shorter pickling time would also be fine.

I absolutely love the look of the vibrant beetroot. I never want it to be a dominating flavour, but in small doses it's great, almost as seasoning. I enjoyed these breads very much and they made a nice change to my regular breakfasts.

Ingredients

1 sweet beetroot

4 tbsp white wine vinegar

1 tsp sugar

½ tsp salt

Sprinkle of ground black pepper

250 g mozzarella

Handful fresh rocket

1 small garlic clove

4 slices of bread

Method

Cut the beetroot into spirals. Briefly heat the pickle mix for the beetroot and leave it overnight in the pickle. I'm sure you can use these earlier, if you don't want to wait overnight.

Slice the mozzarella and cut the garlic clove in half.

Toast the bread slices and rub the cut sides of the garlic onto the bread.

Fill the breads with rocket, mozzarella and pickled beetroot and enjoy!

Your VegHog

Smoky pulled jackfruit wraps

I've been admiring jackfruit recipes on the internet for quite a while now. Especially the recipes by my blogging colleague Shaheen have inspired me to cook with the curious fruit. Recently I made an online order for four jackfruit cans and can hopefully cook a variation of dishes with them. My first attempt were these spicy and smoky pulled jackfruit wraps, which are vegan. I didn't follow any recipes for this, I just wanted to cook jackfruit in a Mexican style dish. So I invented as I went along. It took quite a while to get the jackfruit into the correct chewy texture, and I'm sure I could've cooked it even longer. Then the sun went down on me and the photos are a bit dark. Sadly I had to realise that we had entered the season of the darker food photos.

Here is my first ever jackfruit recipe anyway, for many more to come!

Ingredients

280 g / 1 can jackfruit

1 large onion

4 garlic cloves

1 chilli

Vegetable oil

Splashes of liquid aminos

Splashes of liquid smoke

1 tsp vegetable stock extract

140 g / 1 small can sweetcorn

1 tsp smoked chilli paste

1 red bell pepper

Few leaves of gem lettuce

Wholemeal tortilla wraps

Chilli ketchup or mayo

Method

Drain and rinse the jackfruit.

Chop the onion, garlic and chilli finely.

Heat oil in a pan and start cooking the onions there.

Soon add the jackfruit pieces and splashes of liquid aminos and liquid smoke. Also keep adding a little bit extra water with the vegetable stock extract and let simmer until the jackfruit starts darkening and pulling itself apart while the harder bits soften.

Once the jackfruit is nearly done, add the garlic and chilli to the pan and cook some more.

Add the sweetcorn and the smoked chilli paste and let simmer for a while until the flavours have blended and when you think that the texture is right.

Add more seasoning to taste, if needed.

Assemble the wraps by adding the lettuce and bell pepper as the fresh ingredients and combining them with the jackfruit and corn mix.

Season with a chilli ketchup or mayo and enjoy.

Your VegHog

Char-grilled summer vegetable pizzas

I haven't made pizzas at home for a while, which is weird, because they are quite easy to make and always tasty. Now the seasonal vegetables tempted me to make a pizza with them. I bought these beautiful summer squashes and stripy aubergine at a farmers' market and wanted to use them in some nice dishes. The tomatoes came from my own balcony. In my local pub I can get this wonderful char-grilled vegetables pizza and I kind of got my inspiration from that to make these pizzas.

Ingredients

Pizza dough semi-spelt-wheat for 4 crusts (similar recipe here) 

Toppings:

1 pattypan squash

1 aubergine

200 g cherry tomatoes

1 garlic clove

Fresh basil leaves

Mozzarella

Method

Make the pizza dough first and while it's rising, chop up the toppings.

Slice the pattypan squash and aubergine and char-grill them in a grill pan on both sides until they have grilling marks.

Cut the cherry tomatoes in halves and chop the garlic finely.

Grate the mozzarella.

When the pizza dough is ready, roll it out thinly and cover with the toppins.

Bake at 250 C for about 10 minutes or until done.

Enjoy!

Your VegHog