Six months of cooking (without posting...)
Where the reader catches up on some of the recipes I cooked during the last six months, before I resume with the previous monthly publication pace.
It’s been six months I haven’t posted. My last post, in January, was split between a retrospective of 2022, and a shy kick-off of 2023 — with the main perspective of planning no changes. While some authors target to write more, I intended to keep Guillaume Cooks Vegan the same; and I actually wrote less. As I now plan to resume with the previous pace of publishing once a month, please allow me another retrospective, to get you excited. Below, I’m looking backward at cherry-picked dishes I cooked since January. No complete recipes, just pictures and a little explanation about what I prepared. Remember, the comment space is yours, so hint me at what you would like to see posted in the coming months.
Disclaimer
I took all these pictures which my smartphone, quickly, without taking much care. Even if they’re colorful, they’re not of the usual quality, and two (at least) are a bit blurry in some areas.
February
Thai delight, with a home-made curry paste
Making a Thai curry paste is easy, and it freezes (and unfreezes) very well. Making a yellow curry paste is as easy as adding turmeric! From time to time, I prepare green, or yellow curry pastes at home, I use some of it, and I freeze the rest. Weeks, or months later, I retrieve the frozen paste, I let it return to fridge temperature, then I cook a delicious Thai-styled dish. In the present case, I gently cooked vegan chicken pieces (industrial, made from wheat and soy), zucchinis, carrots, round and flat green peas, with the yellow curry paste, and additional water. There are plenty of great curry paste recipes on the Internet; this won’t discourage me from sharing mine.
March
Indian delights
This is the kind of lunch tray I like — and it’s mine! I had a small portion of miscellaneous delights from the Indian sub-continent: a delicious naan, tarkari (see my recipe), plain white basmati rice, dal makhani, and my mother’s green tomato chutney. If you don’t know dal makhani yet, it’s a lesser known (in the Western world) dal where black beans (urad, or urid) and red kidney beans are cooked in a light spicy, tomato sauce, with cream, and butter. It’s straight-forward to veganize, and I’ll write about it in a future post about Indian spice premixes I fancy.
Potée
During Winter months, I cook potées. Last year, I shared a recipe of sōba noodles, tofu and veggies cooked in a potée fashion. The present one is a very simple, more traditional potée. I slowly cooked potatoes, carrots, green cabbage, red pepper bell (maybe the least traditional ingredient among others), big brown fava beans, garlic, onions, pepper, and salt. Sometimes, such dishes include a dash of white wine — please, nothing fancy which would rather be drank than cooked! Slow cook suits very well the glazed cast iron pot which had been in my family for decades. Once closed, it traps the temperature and moisture for hours, which allows to cook at low temperature, preserving all flavors. One just has to be patient.
April
Mango acar
I borrowed this recipe from a Malagasy friend. It combines sliced mango and ginger, marinated in lemon juice, which crushed black pepper corns, and spring onions. When I prepare it for me (and only for me), I add Thai red chili peppers, or chopped Habanero. In this case, I didn’t, because I served the mango acar as a side to a vegan yassa chicken, a West African dish.
Chili sin carne
This is nothing but BBC Good Food’s chili con carne, veganized. I definitely want to write my version of this recipe, with all the due respect, and disclaimer regarding where it originates from. As often, I went beyond just veganizing the original recipe. I fine-tuned the quantity of spices, and experimented with different red chili peppers — finally I selected two variants of the same cultivar, which are perfect for this dish. It’s a recipe I like to cook, pretty regularly, for myself and for others. I delighted my brother-in-law with when he visited me, long after he saw me eating this at a get-together I had brought my food to. Even my wife asks for this dish from time to time, including when she visits her friends and it’s her turn to bring dinner.
Indian delights
I rarely eat one single Indian dish: I like switching from one taste to another during the same meal. In this case, I cooked a saag aloo (see this recipe, although I didn’t include tomatoes this time), with vegan chicken pieces in a shahi paneer masala premix we fancy at home (while, indeed, I do not use paneer at all). My wife even calls the latter recipe “awesome sauce chicken”. And she prepares delicious vegan naans, which brought carbs to the plate.
Teriyaki fried tofu
I was preparing to leave home for a long week-end visiting friends, after which I was going to work from the company headquarters in a remote city. This usually calls for checking the expiration date of what I have in the fridge. I diced a block of tofu, and I marinated the cubes in a teriyaki lime barbecue sauce. To be honest, I had used the sauce before, and I knew it wasn’t great. However, I strive to never throw anything, so I would eventually have to finish the bottle. I put the tofu cubes on skewers, which made it easy (a lot) to fry them on four sides into sunflower oil. The result was good, due to the sauce — I definitely couldn’t enjoy it, beyond just feeling it was “okay”. On the other hand, I validated the use of skewers for frying tofu dices on medium heat.
May
Japanese-inspired hummus
Okay, the picture above doesn’t tell much. First because it’s of low quality (it’s blurry). Second, because it shows a paste which could be anything. This, dear readers, is my idea of what a Japanese hummus could be. If you remember my post last year in July, Hummus with chickpeas and peanuts, Cajun-flavored, I had explained I bring something special every year for our first barbecue of the season. Last year I had made a hummus where all base ingredients (chickpeas, lemon juice, garlic) were present, but not tahini. This year, I made the opposite: a hummus where the only base ingredient was tahini.
For this Japanese-inspired hummus, I swapped chickpeas for edamame beans, then I mixed them with nori seaweed shredded sheets, the zest of a yuzu, lime juice, garlic, onion, tahini, and spring onions. Let’s be honest: it wasn’t a hit. I believe only two of us enjoyed it — myself included, because I found it so good, and unconventional at the same time, that I loved the experience.
A Thai dish, with plenty of fresh coriander
Sometimes I wonder whether I prefer Thai cuisine over Indian cuisine, because the former is usually quicker to cook than the latter. For this dish, I marinated tofu cubes in soy sauce, garlic, shallots, and fresh coriander. The next day, I cooked them with miscellaneous vegetables (I haven’t noted which ones in my activity log; from the picture I would say green beans, carrots, cabbage), topped with another load of fresh coriander. And to date I still can’t decide between Thai and Indian cuisines.
June
Something which can’t be called tabbouleh
With the heat increasing, few days before Summer, I turned to preparing one of the recipes I fancy for hot days. This is not technically a tabbouleh, as boldly stated by a Lebanese friend, because it includes unofficial ingredients — cucumber, for example. Nevertheless, this makes a perfect, fresh meal. It packs bulgur, cucumber, tomatoes, curly parsley, red pepper bell, mint leaves, garlic, red onions, chickpeas, green pitted olives, and caraway seeds. I filled a large salad bowl in one go, weighing 3 kg once I finished preparing it!
Happiness rice
Even when the weather is hot, I enjoy a good, spicy, flavorful Indian dish. I call this recipe “happiness rice” because it always had the effect of cheering me up. Rice, pulses, red chili peppers, green chili peppers, cumin seeds, curry leaves, ... and a number of other spices, all stir-fried and eventually de-glazed with lime juice. Do you understand why this can only makes one happy — provided one likes such ingredients?
This, of course, is on my to-cook-and-to-publish list. I won’t write more about it here, as you’ll be delighted with the full story — and recipe — later.
July
Poke bowls
Last week-end, we met with our best friends. We went for a short walk across the woods on a hill above our town, then we had Hawaiian poke bowls at home. I forgot to take a picture of the table covered with the numerous containers I had prepared with a lot of different ingredients (we’re still eating the left-overs). Making vegan poke bowls was simple: I cooked Japanese brown rice, I prepared two different tofu blocks, and a lot of veggies and fruits. I diced the first block of tofu, then I marinated it with soy sauce, galangal (a rhizome I already mentioned in this recipe), lemongrass, and fresh coriander; I served it as is, cold. I diced the second block of tofu, then I marinated it with soy sauce, oil, and shichimi tōgarashi; I cooked it in the oven the day before, refrigerated it, then re-heated it in a covered pan on low heat before serving. I prepared red pepper bell (raw, and cooked in the oven), cucumber, mungo bean sprouts, carrots (some grated, others cut into matchsticks), red radish, edamame beans, finely chopped shallots, spring onions, fresh coriander. I served mango and watermelon to add a sweet twist to the poke bowls. We poured dashes of reduced-salt soy sauce, and ponzu sauce. It’s not the first time I mention this ponzu sauce — and certainly not the last time.
Here’s a tip before you go
With the rise of energy price over the past months, I’ve become more cautious — on the edge of reluctance — regarding the use of the oven. Although it’s an electrical oven, and not a gas-powered one, I can identify days I’ve used it on my energy provider daily report. Moreover, my oven has aged. It seems to no longer seal correctly, leaking hot air here, and there. While replacing it is a mid-term option, I’ve tried to maximize its use, by putting in different culinary preparations at the same time. I’ve discovered that even if one smells great, and it perfumes the kitchen, the other doesn’t capture the said pleasant odor. For example, the smell and the taste of a sweet cake didn’t relate to the red pepper bell which cooked at the same time. By loading more efficiently the oven, it sure takes slightly more time to raise the temperature, however it’s a cost-effective approach to nowadays high energy prices.
Welcome back! And what a great 6 months of cooking you’ve had!
Definitely want to see that yellow curry and other Thai recipes, looks delicious! I also like the idea of the Japanese-inspired hummus, will try it out when I get the chance.
Welcome back Guillaume!