Healthy January salad

 

Let's keep the January posts healthy and light for now. Who knows, maybe very soon I'll be craving heavier comfort food, but this week I've been happy with lighter eating. It has been a very busy week at work, but I've felt more balanced and have had more energy. I'm not sure whether it's the new year's boost, or if a lighter diet can really have such a fast impact.

I very much enjoyed this salad yesterday evening and took the left-overs to work for lunch. The radish and cabbage that I pickled last autumn added a nice punch to the salad. I also added some more filling agents like the quinoa and lentils. My partner looked a bit disappointed first by a salad dinner, but especially the pickles won him over.

This salad contained:

• fresh mixed green leaves
• beetroot cubes
• carrot cubes
• with beetroot coloured quinoa
• puy lentils
• pickled radish
• pickled cabbage

How has your January started in regards to eating? Have you been trying to eat healthier, or even taking part in challenges like veganuary? I could have done veganuary and probably will be eating mostly vegan, but I brought some of my favourite cheese from Finland and already opened the packet, so it's too late for full veganism for me.

Have a nice weekend!

Your VegHog

Fennel and cauliflower Thai curry

After the festive season I mainly want to eat clean and light food, which is often vegan. I also appreciate international flavours very much after the typical roast dinners. I'm sure I'll have more roasts again, if the weather gets seriously cool over here. However yesterday I made a nice fragrant vegan Thai curry to celebrate the long weekend off work. It was a lovely dish and I had the rest of it for lunch today.

Can you believe it that I used fennel in my cooking for the first time? I have of course eaten it sometimes, but it just isn't something I grew up with, so I never bought it. I was inspired to make this dish, after I saw Shaheen's gorgeous recipe for a Green Coconut Soup with Fennel. It looked so nice that I simply had to buy some fennel and try cooking with it.

I thought that fennel would be nice in a Thai style green curry together with cauliflower. I added spinach and broad beans as additional greens and protein. Before I started cooking, I consulted the internet a bit, and found this video: How to cut fennel. That guy surely knows his fennel! So after all of this, I managed to cut and cook my fennel just fine. I was quite keen on it, so there may be many more fennel dishes.

Fennel and cauliflower Thai curry

Ingredients

Thai green curry paste

1 onion

4 garlic cloves

2 cm fresh ginger

1 large green chilli

Bunch of fresh coriander

½ lime's juice

2 kaffir lime leaves

Other ingredients

1 small cauliflower

1 fennel

2 tbsp vegetable oil

50 g spinach

160 ml coconut cream

½ cup frozen broad beans

2 dried lemongrass stalks

Fresh coriander

1 cup jasmine rice

Method

Purée the ingredients for the curry paste.

Slice the cauliflower and fennel.

Heat vegetable oil in a pan and start cooking the sliced cauliflower and fennel. Cook them until they get slightly browned and softer.

Then add the curry paste to the pan and cook for a few minutes more. Also add the frozen broad beans and soon after the coconut cream and the lemongrass stalks. Remove the lemongrass stalks before serving.

Let simmer until everything is cooked nicely.

Cook the rice to serve on the side.

Add the spinach and fresh coriander to the curry just before serving.

Enjoy!

This recipe is my Eat Your Greens entry for January. Shaheen is hosting the event this month.

Your VegHog

Photos from Finland

Happy New Year! How did everyone get into the new year? Did you do anything nice? I spent the eve fairly quietly at home, and not quite realising yet that it's actually the new year.

I spent Christmas in Finland and wanted to share some of my photos from there with you. I just went home this time without any stops anywhere else, as the time was quite limited. There was only a little bit of snow, not quite covering the whole ground, but we still got into the Christmas spirit perfectly fine. It was icy, but not too cold, and I saw a few really nice sunsets.

We had quiet Christmas celebrations just with the closest family members, and did some of the traditions, like daytime sauna on Christmas Eve, rice pudding with hidden almond breakfast (finder of almond can make a wish), lighting candles on the graves of family members who have sadly passed away, watching the declaration of the Christmas peace from Turku... We also tried to tone down the overeating a bit this year and just made some of our favourites for dinner, like a chestnut and squash nut roast, creamy chanterelle sauce, onion gravy, fresh salads and potatoes.

I hope you like the photos.

My Legume Love Affair #102 Round Up

I was really honoured when Lisa from Lisa's Kitchen asked me earlier this year, if I would be interested in hosting the popular My Legume Love Affair cooking challenge. I was of course up for it, and today we can have a look at the recipes that were entered for the challenge in December for the 102th edition of the challenge. I would like to thank everyone so much for taking part, I really loved each and every entry, and know that this was a busy month of cooking for everyone, so I really appreciate your efforts!

So now let's have a look at the recipes.

Janet from The Taste Space submitted an Early Bird Scrambled Tofu that she cooked from a recipe in the book Protein Ninja by Terry Hope Romer. This dish combines chickpeas and tofu with mushrooms and loads of spices like mustard powder, turmeric and ground cumin. It sounds like a very nice comforting dish full of protein and legumes. I'm sure that this will keep you going for a while.

Johanna from Green Gourmet Giraffe cooked Refried lentils with garlic scapes (and zucchini or pumpkin) for nachos. I truly am a sucker for vegetable nachos and this looks and sounds just wonderful. I think that the idea of making refried lentils instead of refried beans is really inspiring and I want to try it too. There are so many possibilities and different vegetable combinations to be had with nachos, it's just great.

Lisa from Lisa's Kitchen, who hosts MLLA, shared a filling South Indian Chickpea, Cauliflower and Potato Coconut Curry. The curry is made with chickpeas, cauliflower, potato, carrot and tomato and has a coconut milk base. It has been spiced with the nicest warming curry spices. I just love this kind of vegan curries and could tuck into this one right now.

Mrs TJ from Salt to Taste cooked a Sorakkai Kootu, which is one of her family favourites and also good as kids' lunch. This dish is made with a bottle gourd, onion, tomato, dhal and spices. This is an intriguing new recipe for me and I would be delighted to taste this dish that Mrs TJ served with a spicy gravy.

Shaheen from Allotment 2 Kitchen shared a recipe for green vegan Welsh Savoury Pancakes - Christmas Crempog Las. First of all her Christmas tree presentation looks just marvellous, and the concept of vegan chickpea flour and spinach pancakes is great. It's always interesting giving local favourites a vegan or vegetarian twist.

My own MLLA recipe for this month was a Butterbean, red pea and lentil curry that I made with several legumes. I combined them with tomatoes and spices to a vegan curry and had some yellow turmeric rice on the side.

Thank you again very much for entering your recipes and reading the post, have a nice New Year's Eve and a happy 2017!

Your VegHog

My 2016 in review

I wanted to collect in this post some of my 2016 favourites from my blog to mark the end of the year. This year has been quite productive in the end, even though I had some quieter times. I hope you like this post.

Cooking challenges

One of the clear highlights of the year were the several cooking challenges that I was able to host and also to take part in. I co-hosted Eat Your Greens with Shaheen for the first year and we will be continuing next year, so that's very exciting.

I got to host My Legume Love Affair for the first time in December kindly invited by Lisa, and the round up of the recipes should be up tomorrow.

Then I had two of my own cooking events: The VegHog's Cheap Eats Week in March and The VegHog's Tomato Festival in July. I fully intend to host these both again in 2017, so hopefully there will be many recipes from you as well alongside with comments.

I was also very lucky to take part in other lovely vegetarian and vegan cooking challenges, so many thanks to the hosts.

International cuisine

Throughout the year I very much enjoyed cooking and eating international foods from all over the world, which got me experimenting more with different vegetables and spices. I have to say that I really am getting better and better at eating spicier foods. Some of my international favourites were these recipes:

Keralan style vegetable curry 

 

Vegan Haggis 

Roasted cauliflower with lentils, freekeh, pomegranate seeds and tahini sauce  

Spätzle bake with mushroom sauce 

Thai green curry 

 

Chilli cheese macaroni balls 

 

Udon noodles with tofu 

Sweet recipes

My regular readers will probably know that I'm not too keen on desserts or baking, but I still sometimes do it. I think that my partner occasionally appreciates some things for his sweet tooth. These sweet recipes were especially my favourites this year:

Blood orange sorbet

Rye rye whisky brownies 

 

Spelt puff chocolates 

Danish style cocoa and rum balls 

New ingredients

I also got to experiment with some ingredients that were new or less known to me, like jackfruit and the new Finnish protein product Pulled Oats. I first ate a jackfruit jalfrezi at a food market and then had to make it myself as well. I was very pleased with the results. I also made a couple of other dishes with jackfruit and they were all excellent, I really like it as an ingredient.

In Finland I tested the new very much hyped vegetable protein product called Pulled Oats. It was nice and easy to cook with, straight from the fridge, and there are so many possibilities where to use it. It's definitely one of my new favourites.

Another novelty for me were black badger peas and red fox maple peas, which are a really handy dry staple to have to make all sorts of protein-rich dishes.

Jackfruit jalfrezi 

Pulled Oats with Thai flavours 

 

Black badger pea hummus 

Dish of the year

I had to choose my Hedgehog porcini ravioli that I cooked for the Hedgehog Awareness Week as the dish of the year. The looked cute, tasted good and created a bit of a twitter storm.

Party of the year

There were a few parties this year, but my own birthday Dino Party will have to be crowned to the best party of the year. There were nice snacks, drinks and excellent company, what do you need more.

Travelling

I was lucky that I got to travel quite a bit this year, mainly to Nordic countries, where my heart is. I spent Easter and Christmas at home in Finland and a couple of weeks in August. I went to Copenhagen in April and to a railway journey to Norway in October. These were all such lovely trips, I wonder where to go in 2017...

This was my brief review of 2016. I'm glad you relived these moments with me. I hope you all had a good year and will have an even better 2017! See you soon!

Your VegHog