Mexican rice

 

We have a local street food festival this weekend! I’m excited to see what kind of food is on offer and hope that there are many veggie and vegan options. I’m definitely ready to eat. It’s a bit cloudy today, but it may not rain and it’s still quite warm. Yesterday it rained all day long.

Mexican rice is one of my go-to dishes. It’s nutritious, delicious and cheap and easy to make. I made this one with black eyed peas, sweetcorn, chilli, tomato purée and basmati rice. It was served with own tomatoes from the greenhouses and fresh coriander.

Have a nice weekend!

Your VegHog

Tomato and coconut pilau rice

 

Pilau of pilaf rice is something that I don’t make often enough. It’s nice every time, but somehow it’s not one of my standard dishes. Now I made this slightly different tomato and coconut pilau using Meera Sodha’s Summer pilau with tomato, coconut and cashews recipe as inspiration. I changed some details, but the dish was very similar. I liked the combination of tomatoes and coconut very much. I also added some coriander oil drizzle on top for some additional colour and flavour. Follow the excellent recipe to make this tasty dish yourself.

Your VegHog

Lebanese rice, tahini cauliflower and roasted carrots

Finally it has been a bit warmer and sunny, but I've been quite busy this week, as usual after returning from holiday and therefore unable to really enjoy the weather. I will probably only be able to take a closer look at my holiday photos on the weekend, some of which I'm keen to share with you. So don't worry, there will be something more about the holiday sooner or later. Today's post is just a quick meal recommendation for nice vegan feasts.

This dish and similar ones have been great favourites of mine this past winter and I'm probably going to continue to cook them in the spring as well: Lebanese rice with vermicelli served with a tahini cauliflower bake. This time I also added some roasted carrots to the dish and also a roasted garlic head. It was really very very nice.

I have already posted similar recipes previously, so have a look here for the Roasted cauliflower in tahini sauce and here for the Lebanese rice with vermicelli. What do you think, is this something you would like to eat? Believe me, it's very tasty and yet simple to make!

Have further a nice week!

Your VegHog

Rice and beans

I will start The VegHog's Cheap Eats Week that I announced yesterday with this tasty recipe of rice and beans. It's very cheap to make and very nutritous. It was even more convenient for me to make, as I had some left over rice from the previous day that I didn't want to go to waste. This dish is vegan and can be had in several different variations, the bean sort can vary, sweetcorn is optional and dried beans are also okay to use. This is also an excellent dish when you want to loose a little bit weight without compromising on nutrition: the combination of pulses and grain provides all the essential amino acids, just like dairy. It's also so filling that you don't have to eat huge amounts at a time. This recipe should make fairly proud portions for four people.

Ingredients

200 g rice

2 onions

4 garlic cloves

1 tbsp vegetable oil

1 can black beans

1 can sweetcorn

All seasoning to taste:

Salt

Ground black pepper

Ground cumin

Ground coriander

Smoked paprika

Chilli flakes

Tomato purée

Method

Cook the rice separately.

Chop the onions and garlic and cook them in vegetable oil until soft.

Add the beans and sweetcorn and the seasoning.

Let simmer for a while together and serve.

Enjoy!

Your VegHog

Arabian nutty rice

This recipe has recently become one of my favourites. It's a spicy Arabian nutty rice, a Saudi Arabian national dish, and I found the recipe in A Lebanese Feast of Vegetables, Pulses, Herbs and Spices by Mona Hamadeh (p. 196-197). It's quite a simple yet very tasty recipe. 

I altered the recipe in the book slightly, so here's my version of it. Actually when I made this for the first time I accidentally doubled the amount of the spices, but even that didn't seem to hurt.

Ingredients

350 g rice

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

2 carrots

1 red bell pepper

1 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tbsp Lebanese spice mix

1 tsp ground cardamom

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp salt

½ tsp ground black pepper

100 g almond flakes

50 g cashew nuts

30 g pine nuts

Method

First of all some of this Lebanese spice mix is needed that I have previously posted.

Soak the rice in water for at least 30 minutes.

Chop the onion, garlic, carrots and bell pepper.

Heat the oil in a saucepan and start cooking the chopped onion and garlic. Cook for a few minutes and add the carrots and pepper. Then also add the spices.

Drain the rice and add it to the pan, cover with water and simmer under the lid.

In the meanwhile toast the nuts and almonds in a frying pan with a little oil.

Once the rice has cooked, add the nuts to the dish and enjoy!

Your VegHog

Mexican style rice

I have been wanting to make a Mexican style rice for a while now and finally got around to it. I added a bit more vegetables to it than normally necessary, but I thought that it was very nice and perfectly good as a standalone dish. This dish is made a lot like a rice pilaf, so that the rice cooks with the vegetables and spices and absorbs all the lovely flavours. I added a subtle spiciness to the dish.

Ingredients

1 onion

3 garlic cloves

300 g tomatoes

2 romano peppers

1 can black beans

1 can sweetcorn

Olive oil

Vegetable stock powder

Salt

Chilli flakes

Ground coriander

Ground cumin

1,5 cup brown rice

Tomato purée

Fresh coriander

Sourcream (optional)

Method

Chop the onion, garlic, tomatoes and romano peppers finely and start cooking them in olive oil.

Add the black beans and sweetcorn to the pan followed by the spices and mix for a couple of minutes.

Then also add the rice and cover the mix with water and let simmer until the rice is cooked.

Towards the end add the tomato purée and fresh coriander. Taste the seasoning and add anything that's needed more.

Serve warm with some sourcream on the side or keep it vegan.

Enjoy!

Your VegHog

Lebanese rice with vermicelli

Howcome did I never thought of this, to combine rice with vermicelli? It's so simple, but so good. Instead I had to detect it in my recent favourite cookbook: A Lebanese Feast of Vegetables, Pulses, Herbs and Spices by Mona Hamadeh. There is a recipe for Lebanese Rice with Vermicelli (p. 264-265) in the Basic Recipes section. I have often eaten this combination in koshari, but making it as a side to a lovely Lebanese vegetable dish was new to me. It turns out that in Lebanese cuisine vermicelli is very often added to rice. 

To make this rice, just take a nice rice, like the mixture of a few rice sorts that I used here or healthy brown rice. Put the rice (about 250 g) into a saucepan with little added salt and cover it with water, just about 1 cm above the rice. More can be added, if needed, but this method should keep the rice fluffier. The Lebanese don't seem to like sticky rice very much. Simmer until the rice is done.

Simultaneously break the vermicelli (about 70 g) into about 1 cm long pieces and fry the pieces quickly in hot oil until they turn golden brown. This happens very quickly. Remove the oil and put the vermicelli in with the rice and cook there until the rice is done.

I scattered some fresh coriander on the top and it looked like an attractive side dish. I will soon post also the dish that I served this with, but I think that this rice could also be a stand-alone dish.

Your VegHog

Pea and carrot pilaf

Time for a solid weekday cooking with ingredients I happened to had and had to cook in order not to waste them. Cooking is a creative process and I also hate to throw vegetables out, so I always try to utilise everything and make up dishes, if need be. It's a good thing to do especially before the weekend, as there will probably be some eating out or fancier dishes then. I had these great fresh garden peas in the pods and thought they would be a good ingredient for a vegan rice pilaf type of a dish. So then I created this pea and carrot pilaf.

I'm sharing this recipe with Shaheen's vegetarian cooking challenge Eat Your Greens for this month. She is a fellow vegetarian blogger and has a wonderful blog called A2K - A Seasonal Veg Table. Do check it out, if you don't know it yet! I realised that September is drawing to a close (!) and that I should quickly post a greenish dish to participate. So here's my pilaf recipe, have a look how I made it.  

 

Ingredients

1 cup fresh garden peas

1 romano pepper

2 carrots

1 onion

2 garlic cloves

200 g rice (mix of brown basmati, red camargue and wild rice)

2 tbsp vegetable stock powder

Ground cumin

Thyme

Salt

Ground black pepper

Method

Remove the peas from the pods.

Chop the romano pepper, carrots, onion and garlic finely and start cooking them in olive oil.

After a while, add the rice and peas followed by vegetable stock powder and water to cover it all.

Let simmer until the rice is done.

Season to taste and serve.

So easy and good, enjoy!

Your VegHog

Rice and soya pasties

Lately I have been thinking more about my grandmother's tasty food again, or actually when wouldn't I think of her or her cooking. Now a sudden food memory from my childhood and youth came up, about small rice and mince pasties that were normally served as savoury canapées at parties and gatherings. It's possible that they were sometimes also made for just regular days. I of course wanted to create a vegetarian version of these pasties to briefly return back to the past. I started simple, but I hope that one day I can maybe get close to my grandmother's tasty creations. Here is one basic recipe how such vegetarian pasties can be made, but no doubt that I will be posting similar recipes again.

Ingredients

½ cup brown rice

1 vegetable stock cube

½ cup dried soya mince

1 shallot

1 garlic clove

1 tsp olive oil

Salt

Ground black pepper

Smoked paprika

500 g puff pastry

1 egg

Method

Cook the rice with the vegetable stock cube and prepare the dried soya mince according to the instructions on the packet.

Chop the shallot and garlic finely and start cooking them in olive oil. Add the soya mince to the pan and season.

Mix the rice into the soya mince mix and let it all cool down.

Roll out the puff pastry thinly and beat the egg. Cut small circles or triangles from the pastry and fill the other half of each with the soya and rice mix.

Brush the edges with the egg wash and close the parcels with a fork. Brush them with the egg wash on the outside as well.

Bake at 180C for about 15 minutes until the pasties are golden brown.

Enjoy warm, or they are good even cooled down later.

Your VegHog

Lebanese Dirty Rice with Halloumi

I have already published the recipe for Lebanese Dirty Rice here and it has become one of my favourites that I cook quite often. It's a simple yet tasty dish and also very cheap to make. 

So this week's cooking plan started with Lebanese Dirty Rice. I served fried halloumi slices with it and cut a couple of corners with the fried onions by using the ready made Ikea ones. I used puy lentils and brown rice as the main ingredients. This is a comforting choice for often so bleak Mondays and you'll get a healthy and nutritious start to the week. If you leave the halloumi out, the dish is vegan.

Roots & Rice

This recipe is by Nigel Slater and published in the Guardian. It's simple, vegan, light, cheap and perfect for a weekday. It contains root vegetables combined with rice and onions. I must admit that I never before reading this recipe thought of combining root vegetables with rice. Somehow it just didn't belong to my regular cooking ways, but I got curious once I saw this recipe and tried it out. I also haven't been cooking much rice at all lately, so even that makes a welcome change.

I think that this was a rather nice dish, even though I left the beetroot of the original recipe out, which makes my variation a bit paler, but it was still very tasty. Otherwise I followed the recipe pretty closely.

This dish works either as a stand-alone dish, or served on the side in fashion of a pilaf rice. I think just a fresh salad, pomegranate seeds and little halloumi would be great with this.

What do you think of this dish?

 

Lebanese dirty rice

Adapted from the New Feast (p. 194-195) by Greg and Lucy Malouf

Some weeks ago I wrote a post about my newest vegetarian cookbook the New Feast by Greg and Lucy Malouf and now I cooked my first dish from it, the Lebanese dirty rice. It's a traditional Middle Eastern dish and I would love to hear from local people (or from people more experienced in this style of cuisine) how you usually make this dish. Please comment in the box below, if you have any experiences with such dishes. And obviously you can also comment, if you don't! The recipe was also published as an edited extract here. First I was very surprised by the lack of different spices, but when I ate the dish I realised that nothing else was needed. This was such a simple and beautiful dish and I think it will become a regular in my kitchen. The fried onions are just amazing!

I made some adjustments according to what was in my cupboard. I replaced the small black lentils with green lentils and the long-grain rice with brown rice. I also added one tablespoon of vegetable stock powder to the lentils when they were cooking. Otherwise I stuck more or less to the original recipe, but the below one is my version of it. I doubled up the ingredient amounts as well as I wanted to have a huge dish (feeds about 4 adults), but feel free to reduce the amounts if you prefer.

Ingredients for the rice

2 onions

4 tbsp olive oil

80 g green lentils

160 g brown rice

1,5 – 2 litres water

1 tsp ground cumin

Dried rose petals for the presentation

Ingredients for the fried onions

2 large onions

6 tbsp cornflour

1 tsp ground cumin

Vegetable oil for deep/shallow frying

Method

Chop the onions for the rice finely and rinse the lentils. Start cooking the chopped onions in the olive oil until soft. Then add the lentils and about one litre water. More water will be added later. Let cook under lid for about 20 minutes until the lentils are almost done.

Then add the rice and little water if needed. Let cook for further 30 minutes. It can take longer with the brown rice. The goal is to cook both very soft so that the lentils stain the rice and make it dirty as described in the title.

In the meanwhile slice the onions for the topping into this strips and soak them for about 15 minutes in salt water. After that drain them well. For the coating mix the cornflour and ground cumin and roll the drained onions in there. Heat vegetable oil in a pan and deep fry the onions until they are crispy.

Serve the rice with the onions and rose petals on the top and enjoy! I found this pheomenal even cold the next day. What a great dish! I'm going to make this again next week, as it's also very cheap and I should always have the ingredients for it in the cupboard.

Have a good week everyone!

Your VegHog

Vegetarian sushi cubes with crispy tofu and glazed pumpkins

My newest small kitchen gadget, the Rice Cube, inspired me to make this dish. It turnes vegetarian sushi making into pure enjoyment! I have the feeling that you will be seeing many food cubes in my presentations in the future. My partner is more the sushi cooking type, but he has shown me his methods, and now I'm ready to publish a vegetarian sushi post.

I have been wanting to try more crispy tofu methods for a long time and have been contemplating what to combine with it. I thought that it would be good with a sushi style dish.

I also wanted to include a vegetable on the side, and pumpkins and squash suit well this combination. I had two munchkin pumpkins that I glazed with a teriyaki style glaze.

Crispy tofu

400 g tofu

1 tsp groundnut oil (for roasting)

1 tbsp mirin

½ cup semolina

3 tbsp groundnut oil (for frying)

Remove the excess liquid from the tofu and cut it into cubes. Brush an oven dish with groundnut oil and place the tofu cubes there. Bake them at 150C for one hour or more until you are happy with the firmness of the tofu cubes. The intention is to make them nice and dehydrated with a crispy surface, but still a soft middle.

After the baking, roll the tofu cubes in mirin and then semolina and fry them briefly in hot groundnut oil.

Glazed pumpkins

2 munchkin pumpkins or one medium sized pumpkin

1 tbsp groundnut oil

50 ml mirin

50 ml soy sauce

2 tbsp toasted sesame oil

3 tbsp maple syrup

1 tbsp miso

Cut the pumpkins into small wedges and remove the seeds. Brush them with groundnut oil and roast for about 30 minutes at 150C.

Make the glaze by carefully mixing mirin, soy sauce, toasted sesame oil, maple syrup and miso. Pour the glaze onto the pumpkins and roast them until the glaze has thickened and coated the pumpkin wedges. Stir them occasionally during the roasting.

Sushi cubes

1 cup sushi rice

1 ¼ cup water

1 tbsp brown rice vinegar

1 tsp sugary water

¼ tsp salt

1-2 tbsp green nori sprinkle

A few strips of sushi nori

Soak the rice in the water for 30 minutes and then simmer it for about 10 minutes until the water has absorbed. Drizzle some brown rice vinegar to it to taste and also add little water with dissolved sugar in it and a sprinkle of salt. Let it cool.

Shape cubes from the rice. I added green nori sprinkle to one half of the rice and wrapped nori strips around the plain ones.

Serve all components together. They all taste cold as well, but it's also nice when the tofu and glazed pumpkins are warm. This is also a great lunch for the next day.

Your VegHog

Vegetable chili

A spicy chili made with a variety of vegetables is a great dish, especially for this time of the year. It doesn't require much technical skill, you can just let it simmer and only need to remember to stir sometimes. I used black beans as the main component, and to make the chili even simpler I chose to use the canned ones. I like to serve my chili with rice to get a neutral taste to balance the spiciness out.

This is how to make a vegetable chili.

2 bell peppers

4 onions

2 cloveless garlics

800g black beans (2 cans)

140g tomato puree

450g santini tomatoes

1 yellow chili

Juice of one lime

Fresh coriander leaves

2tsp paprika

2tsp cumin

1tsp cocoa powder

1tbsp vegetable stock powder

1tsp salt

Olive oil

100g red leicester cheese

1 cup rice

First of all chop the bell peppers, chili, onion and garlic and heat some olive oil in a suitable large pot. Fry the onion until soft, then add the garlic, chili and peppers and fry for another minute or two. Add the cumin, paprika, cocoa powder, black beans, tomato puree and tomatoes to the mix.

Let it simmer under the lid at moderate heat for about 20 minutes and stir occasionally. At some point start boiling the rice as well.

Season the chili with the juice of a lime, vegetable stock powder and salt. Taste to check whether the seasoning is right for you.

When the chili is almost done, add the fresh coriander leaves and the grated cheese. Serve hot with the rice.

Stay hungry!

Your VegHog