Rose hips are living in the ice age, too.

Lime Meltaways

Made Lime Meltaways. Were delicious!

300 g margarine (Alsan)
70 g powdered sugar
lime zest from 4 limes
60 ml lime juice
1 tbls vanilla extract or vanilla sugar
550 g flour
50 g starch
1 tsp salt

Mix margarine and sugar for 5 minutes until mixture turns white and fluffy. Ad zests, lime juice and vanilla, then gently stir in the flour. Don't knead the dough for too long!

Divide dough into four parts, form rolls and put them into the fridge for at least one hour.

Then just cut slices from the rolls and bake for about 15 minutes (gas mark four). 

Mix powdered sugar with a little vanilla sugar and roll the still warm cookies in it.

They taste the best after 2-3 days in a cookie box.

Filled bell peppers with cream chard.

Fry one finely chopped red onion with 3 cloves of garlic in a little oil until they're soft and translucent but not brown. Add soaked and seasoned minced TVP and 2 chopped carrots. I seasoned the TVP with salt, pepper, paprika, lime juice, vegetable broth.

Fill the bell peppers and put in a casserole. I mixed the leftover filling with pureed tomato and water and put it around the bell peppers. Bake in the oven for about 25 minutes. The bell pepper should be soft but still slightly crispy.

In the meanwhile cut chard into pieces and first fry the white bits, add a little water to steam. Then add soycream and green bits of chard, season with salt, pepper and 1 teaspoon mustard. Cook for about 10 minutes.

Serve bell pepper with the cream chard, it all fits perfectly together and was both beautiful and superdelicious.

Favourite sushi.

Avocado maki, wasabi, shoyu, inari-zushi and edamame in ponzu sauce (shoyu and lemon juice).

Raspberry turnovers.

Frozen puff pastry. You can fill it with almost everything, throw it into the oven and what comes out is deliciousness.

For these bleeding birds thaw the puff pastry rectangles a bit, then put a few frozen rasperry on each, sprinkle it with sugar and cinnamon, fold and seel it. Mix 2 tablespoons soy milk with 2 tablespoons sugar and brush turnovers with, cut stripes into the dough or use a cookie cutter. Then bake it for about 15 minutes.

Spaghetti Squash!

Another recipe in the "looks bland - tastes terrific"-category. And it's pumpkin and sqash season. And oh, I love the word squash. Sounds (and looks) more like a noise than a vegetable. Squash! Squashsquash!

This.....is a spaghetti squash:

I halfed my spaghetti squash and cooked it for 30 minutes unpeeled in very salty water with bay leaves. 

 After cooking it looks like this:

 

Now you can scrap out with a scoop the squash seed first and then the good part - the "spaghettis". The taste of this squash is quite neutral so you can use any hearty sauce you would use for pasta. I made it this time with a great creamy coconut-sauce with eggplants and sweetheart cabbage.

While the squash (!) is still cooking, cut eggplant into cubes, mince the garlic and fry both in 1 teaspoon oil, then add a little water, just to cover the eggplant.

Cook eggplant for about 5-10 minutes until almost all the water has gone. Cut the sweetheart cabbage into small pieces and add with another little water to the eggplants. Cook for 2 minutes, then add either coconut cream (liquid) oder a bit more water and the creamed coconut I used. It's a firm block as you can see in the pictures above, I used 100g and it melts in the hot water. I spiced this with vegetable broth, salt, pepper, a hint of curry. Cook all things together for another 5 minutes, then add fresh cilantro leaves. Serve with the hot squash spaghettis. (My squash was good for about 4-5 big portions altogether). Squash!

Coffee-Pecan-Brownies.

Coffee, chocolate, nuts. Great combination.

- 2 cups flour

- 1 1/2 cups sugar

- 3/4 cup cocoa

- 1 teaspoon baking powder

- 1/2 teaspoon salt 

- 250g margarine

- 3/4 cup soymilk

- 1 espresso (still hot)

Mix dry ingredients well, than add margarine. If these are really good mixed first add the still warm espresso and than soymilk.

Spread the dough on a baking sheet, and put one pecan nut for every brownie onto the dough. Bake for 20-25 minutes, gas mark 3.
Let them cool for  at least 10 minutes before cut into pieces. Store in an airtight container and be patient: they're waaaay better the next day and as luscious as brownies have to be.

Chocolate Chip Cookies.

I have different recipes, most of them with egg-replacer (which I hate, they're a waste of money and totally needless) and other things, so I mixed a few together and made this. It is one of the easiest doughs you can think of! The cookies went crispy but still chewy and I think they're perfect. I had about 75g chocolate chips or so, but you can use up to 100g or leave them out and use something else instead. White chocolate chips, nougat chunks, nuts, cinnamon,...but here is the classic way:

- 1 cup sugar (I used raw cane sugar, very caramelish)

- 0,5 cup margarine

- 1,5 flour

- 0,5 teaspoon cream of tartar

- chocolate chips

Mix together sugar and margarine until very soft. Mix flour with cream of tartar* then add it to the sugar-margarine-mix. Mix very quick, add chocolate chips or whatever you wanna use and then chill the dough for about 1h in the fridge. It has to be very cold and firm, otherwise your cookies will melt into one big ugly megacookie, which is not a good option. This happend to me before and no, it is not tasty at all.

When it's chilled, preheat your oven while putting the cookies onto a baking sheet. I used about 1 big table spoon of dough per cookie. Just roll a ball out of the dough and flatten it only a little bit with your hand, put on sheet. They will spread a little while baking, so don't make them to flat. You can also flatten them with a fork to have patterns on it.

Then put them into the preheated oven and bake for 8 to 10 minutes on gas mark 6. When golden brown remove from oven and let sit for a minute before you move them onto a plate or something.

*I always use cream of tartar instead of usual baking powder. You can use a lot of it in a dough without tasting it.

Cannelloni.

Recently I had cannelloni in a quite quick version. It took me about 15 minutes to prepare and about 30 minutes to bake it. 

The filling was made of

- TVP

- tomato purée

- red bell pepper pesto

- garlic

- salt, pepper

The tomato sauce was made of

- 1 small can tomatoes

- salt, pepper

The topping was a béchamel sauce

- margarine

- oil

- soya milk

- salt, pepper, vegetable broth

- mustard

- dash of lemon juice

I mixed the TVP with salt and pepper, soaked it in hot water and added the other ingredients. If you don't have a vegan red bell pepper pesto just add a little olive oil and maybe more tomato purée or diced fresh bell peppers. Let sit the mixture for 5 minutes til TVP is more or less soft.

Fill cannelloni with the filling, layer in a casserole dish and pour canned tomatoes over it. More salt and pepper and minced garlic.

Then I made a béchamel sauce for topping and baked it with tin foil for 20 minutes, then another 10 minutes without the tin foil.

Blueberry Pancakes. With Cappuccino.

Right now: chocolate ice cream.

Tofutti chocolate ice cream, hmmm. Although I miss sometimes fancy varies of vegan ice cream (like different kinds of ice cream swirled together with caramelized nuts and so on), chocolate ice cream is the best anyway. So what.

Potato-spelt-patties with baby chard salad.

Dressing was made of orange juice, shoyu and soy cream.

Cucumber-Sandwich.

A classic. Sandwich with chive-spread and cucumbers, chilled. A perfect light and lucious breakfast when you're not so hungry due to high temperatures.

Seitan-Gyros with zaziki, carrot salad and cherry tomatoes.

Café Klatsch.

Visit the nice vegan Café Klatsch !They have cakes, ice cream (self made and popsicle), main dishes, sandwiches and everything. Nice people, fancy café with comfy chairs, all in 50s style,  and you can sit outside as well!
Sorry for the blurry tiramisu pics.

 !

No more fights.

Wosch and the neighbour's cat Mikesch. They're still not really friends but it seems they're all right.

The windowsill garden.

Red, yellow and white tomatoes along with parsley, sage and a wild flower which I haven't sown.

Lavender and a little grass for the cat.

Onigiri.

Onigiri (japanese rice ball) with sesame, a snack I made recently. Cute food!

Mustard-dill zucchini and oyster mushrooms with mashed potatoes and beet roots

I really love the dill and mustard combination in a cream sauce. And I love the magenta mashed potatoes!

Cinnamon-Choco-Rolls

Buy chilled puff pustry. Sprinkle it with a lot of cinnamon and cocoa and a little sugar, roll it up, cut into small cute packages and bake it for about 20 minutes. That's it. Eat while they're still warm with a coffee and smile.

Tofu Scramble.

This time with edamame, white mushrooms and sweet-and-sour-chili-sauce.

Tarte Tatin.

Last week I made a real good tarte tatin with apples and pears, I used the recipe from "A Vegan Taste Of France" cookbook (Lisa Maijzlik).

It's really important that you let cool the short crust at least for 30 minutes in the fridge, before you continue processing.

First, put the filling into the cake pan, then  cover with the coasted short crust.

 I sprinkled the cake with cocoa. Quite good together with ice cream or whipped cream or vanilla custard or just with coffee.