Food Porn.

Last day of MoFo, and I'm sitting on a train from Helsinki to Vaasa, Finland. I've been traveling since six this morning, so I have nothing food wise to show you. I'm eating Finish sour dough rye crackers and chocolate.

So, MoFo is over by tomorrow and my last post is pretty much a disaster. Old Food Porn again! I promise to make it up to you soon. But I will say this before you go on drooling over the sweets in the photos, I made it! I posted every day of MoFo and you guys have been commenting. It means a lot to me, I never thought this blog thing would be succesful, but I think I'll keep blogging from now on.

Happy last day of MoFo!

Peanut Butter Cookies.

Banana Split cupcake, cake variation, from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.

Soft vanilla buns and chocolate biscotti.

Swedish cheescake, like the one here.

Chocolate pralines filled with coconut and lemon.

Food Porn

Spanish Omelette from Vegan With A Vengeance. This was one of the first thing I made when I got that book, why havn't I made it since?

Lemon Thyme Quick Bread from Have Cake, Will Travel!

When I bought Veganomicon, my mother made me the pine nut lasagna.

Chocolate Cake with Sacher Torte variation, from Have Cake, Will Travel!

Coconut Lemon Bundt Cake from Veganomicon

D.I.Y Seitan from scratch!

When I became vegan, I read about something called vital wheat gluten, and started to search frantically for it. I found it, but only at the health food store, and it was crazy expensive. This was more than 4 years ago, and last I checked, the prize was even higher. I've bought it a few times, and I really love it. Chickpea cutlets, black bean burgers, sausages, seitan, it's all possible with the magic gluten flour. Unfortunately, I'm not rich, and I also hate spending money on over-prized food, so I didn't buy it very often. Here, it's non existent.

I refuse to be seitan-less though. With no tofu or fake-meats in the stores, we fall back on seitan when beans and lentils seems a bit boring. Luckily, Martin is a veteran seitan maker, or as veteran you can be when you are no more than 20 years old. A little more than a year ago, we were visiting his friend who lived in Düsseldorf, and that's where I was thought to make seitan from scratch. We had to buy a big blue bucket to knead it in, since the sauce pans in his home were to small. But we made it through, and since then, I've made it that way my self.

I wrote you a guide on how to do it, with pictures to go with it. It's really super simple, give it a try!

 Mix flour and water. I used 2 kg wheat flour and 1200 ml water, but it may very depending on your flour.

Knead it until it comes together nicely.

Let it take a bath for 2-12 hours.

Time to start kneading! Place the bowl in the sink.

Knead it with running water, and change it when it get's to white. You will soon notice how the gluten begins to show.

Half way there! At this point, the dough might not hold together very well. Don't worry, just hang in there!

Done! All the starch is gone and you are ready to boil it.

Cut it up in smaller pieces.

Let it simmer in broth, soy sauce, onions, garlic or whatever floats your boat.

After 45-60 minutes it's ready, it will be quite firm by now. Let it cool in the broth, and use it for whatever you want to!

Mihl's Swirly Cinnamon Bread

 

This is what it looked like outside when I woke up today.  It had been snowing all night, and since there's no ploughing or sanding here on weekends the whole village is covered in snow. Beautiful, isn't it? Unfortunately, it has been incredibly windy all day so being outside was kind of hell on earth so I stayed inside most of the time instead. And what's better do to then than baking? Yesterday, Mihl on seitan is my motor wrote about a cinnamon bread with no less than 6 swirls in it! I knew I had to make it. You'll find the recipe here!

The dough.

Flattened and spread with the filling.

6 rolls of goodness.

Out of the oven. I clearly have some things to learn when it comes to assembling, cause the top roll just fell off.

LOOK HOW PRETTY IT IS!!

It tasted almost like cinnamon rolls, do I have to say that's a good thing?

It cleared up for about 5 minutes in time for sunset, then the weather went back to Mordor-style again.

Summer.

Today I have nothing to write about. I made a gingerbread house, which I have no intentions to post about here! For lunch we had leftovers, and for dinner I've made a chickpea pie, but since it's dark at 4 pm here (!) I refuse to take some crappy picture of it, because it's beautiful and deserves better. So I'll share that with you tomorrow. But what I will share with you today is some photos of great food from this summer.

Gooseberries from my mothers garden.

Loads of fresh fruit bought at a local market in Turkey.

Chocolate Orange Marmalade muffins from 500 vegan recipes.

Waffles with ice cream and jam.

Beet root salad with pumpkin seeds and soy nuggets on the side.

Blueberries straight from the forest.

Ice cream cones!

I, as most people, love ice cream. In Sweden there's some different brands of non-dairy ice cream available in most super markets, and even though it's not exceptionally good, it's ice cream. Up here on the Faroe Islands, it's a bit harder. Over all, I think there's also a lot less dairy ice cream than in Sweden. And non-dairy is RARE. To say that it's non existent would be a lie, but it's not very easy to get hold of. There is one supermarket that have Italian rice ice cream in cones but they are ridiculously expensive, so I would never be able to let go and buy it. The same store sometimes have the soy-based ice cream that is the most common one in Sweden. I've seen it twice, but the thing is that the supermarket is more than 1 hour away from our home, so it's not always that convenient to buy from there. And the times it would have been, it wasn't in stock.
 

Today we went to a nearby village to take a walk there, and realized that they had the same supermarket as the one previously mentioned, but a bit smaller. And in there, we found both dried figs on sale and soy ice cream!

So we went home, and I made ice cream cones in the wafer iron. I've never had home made ice cream cones before, but let me tell you, they were even better than the ice cream.

Piyozli qatlama, Uzbek layered bread with onions.

Martin loves everything connected to central Asia. He can spend hours reading about the countries and dreaming about going there, and one country he seems especially attracted to is Uzbekistan. So when thinking about what to make for MoFo I did some research about the Uzbek cuisine. After some time, I found an awesome blog, written by Malika Sharipova, who lives in Uzbekistan. The blog is mainly about traditional dishes and there's A LOT of recipes. She's an omni, so it's naturally a lot of meat since the cuisine is very meat based, but there's a lot of veg*an recipes on there, or recipes that could be veganized very easily. The recipes are very informatively written and pictures to go with them.

I had planned to do a 3 or 4 course dinner with all Uzbek food, but I never got around to it. I'm sure I will make more recipes some other time, but today I settled with one. This bread looked like something I had never seen, eaten or made before, but still very simple and basic, so I thought I'd give it a go. It's called Piyozli qatlama, and is basically a very simple dough filled with fried onions, and pan fried. You'll find the recipe here!

The recipe was very easy and quick to make, and turned out GREAT. Martin was really enthusiastic and I had to agree, it was super! I will definitely make it again, and experiment a bit with different fillings.

Candy and a birtday cake!

 

Two weeks ago, I won my first giveaway ever at Miso for Breakfast. She's hosting awesome giveaways every day! How amazing is that? I won a copy of The Vegan Girl's Guide to Life, and started waiting restlessly for it to arrive. It still hasn't. I really hope for it not to be lost somewhere in the gigantic postal system, and keep telling myself it's just taking it's time. 

Only a week later, I won again but from Vegan in Brighton this time. This package arrived today. It's a lot closer distance for a package to travel, so I guess that's why it came earlier. Anyway, I'm so happy. I won candy! White chocolate (which can NOT be found here) and a dark chocolate with pumpkin seeds and hemp oil, and a beautiful box with some lemon sherbets.

 I've never even heard of something called "sherbets" before this was in my hand, so I was excited to try one. Look how cute the box is! The sherbets turned out to be a hard candy with lemon flavour, and oh my did they taste good!

I haven't tried the chocolate yet, but I'll let you know how good it was when I have.

As if that's not enough with sweet stuff, here's a cake too! One of my friends I have hear turns 16 on Sunday, so we wanted to celebrate her sometime this week. To make it a little extra more fun, we turned it into a surprise. We said she needed to come here so that we could plan some activities for the organisation we are working for (and she is the president of) but instead of a boring meeting this cake is what welcomed her! I also made here a recipe zine with some of my favourite vegan recipes which I hope she will enjoy! The cake is a chocolate cake with chocolate pudding between the layers, and topped with lemon butter cream turned pink with food colouring.