Capsicum pastry rolls and peperonata recipe

This is one of those creations that happened while using up leftover vegan pastry and a bit of peperonata I had in the pot. The resulting dish was so pretty and delicious that I decided to share it,

Capsicum pastry rolls

Yu must use some cooked capsicums (bell peppers) for this recipes, and I had some peperonata ready:

Peperonata

2 yellow capsicums

2 red capsicums

1 green capsicum

1 garlic clove

half carrot

1 small celery stalk

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil (plus more to drizzle at the end)

A little water

salt to taste (if the capers are not too salty)

chopped Italian parsley and fresh basil leaves, plus a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil to finish

Wash and cut the capsicums into thin strips. Peel the garlic and cut into two. Wash and chop the carrot and celery into small pieces. Heat the olive oil in a pan and sauté the vegetables, then add the a little water and salt. Cover and simmer on the lowest setting for 45 minutes to one hour, stirring from time to time, and adding more water if necessary. Adjust with salt at the end, if necessary, and finish with some freshly chopped parsley, fresh basil and another drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.

I then used some of the capsicum strips for my pastry rolls: I cut the vegan pastry sheets in long strips and place a thin strip of capsicum on the border of each pastry strip (see photo) and then rolled it up.

To keep the rolls nice and round I place them in a mini-muffin pan, and used some mini-cupcake cases. I sprinkle the top with salt and dried herbs and baked everything at medium heat until the pastry was golden and puffy. Serve hot or cold.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Macedonia di frutta

Strawberries, nectarines, pears, blueberries and kiwi fruit, a drop of lemon juice and some coconut water. No sugar. 

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Melanzane fritte (fried eggplants) and photos of peonies

I love fried eggplants, on pasta, on pizza, in a panino, as a side dish… or just by themselves, they are so versatile! Just cut them very thin (I use a bread knife) make them sweat with salt for an hour, rinse them and pat them dry. Fry them a few at the time with plenty of olive oil and a clove of garlic. Drain on kitchen paper and sprinkle with salt. Serve or use as required.

And now a few photos of peonies - now in season!

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Sugar Christmas decorations

On Sunday we had the Dante Alighieri Society Xmas Market (Mercatino di Natale), and I made lots of sugar decorations for sale.

Ideal for 'baby's first Christmas' trees, sweet pastel colours, they can be used for Christmas cards too!

White and hand painted with a thin brush

Chocolate fondant, they smell great!

Green and silver for the trees

I used fondant (white, chocolate, red and green), corn flour, cookie cutters, food coloring (not cochineal!) and a thin brush to paint. We sold the lot!

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Sugarcraft: how to make a tin rose bud in under 30 seconds

I found this 'old' video (almost 3 years ago) of Arantxa making more sugar roses, this time tiny rose buds! They are so simple yet they look great!

Vegan sushi without nori

There are a lot of traditional vegan sushi rolls already, like kappamaki, kampyo, takuan, inari-san, and the famous avocado rolls, but sometime is fun to make more varieties, especially since Arantxa received   kit to shape sushi rice shapes from Japan, ready to be topped! And for topping we used some carrots  slices cooked with soy sauce and mirin and topped with seaweed (vegan) caviar, and some mushrooms slices sautéed with a little vegetable oil, soy sauce (or Tamari sauce for gluten free) and lemon juice. Well, it was truly delicious!

But for even more amazing vegan sushi recipes, and how to cooke the rice, click here and here

and here and here

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Oyster mushrooms with lemon soy

When asked what is my favourite vegetable sometimes I reply that it is a fresh porcino mushroom (boletus edulis), and I say this knowing very well that mushrooms do not classify as vegetables... they are fungi, neither fruit nor vegetable. But no one in New Zealand ever asks me what is my favourite fungi (they do in my village in Italy, for sure), only what is my favourite vegetable, and mushrooms are usually defined as a side vegetable (even eaten at breakfast! This thing still puzzles me).  

The fact is that to me mushrooms rarely take the place of a side vegetable, but they tend to be the main player: pasta with mushrooms, risotto with mushrooms, polenta with mushrooms, mushroom fritters, mushroom burgers, mushroom dumplings, stuffed mushrooms...

 For a vegetarian they substitute meat, and in the old days in my mountains in Italy they used to be called carne di bosco 'meat of the woods'.

We never bought mushrooms when I was a child, they grew all around us and we just foraged. We also dried them for winter, or preserved them in olive oil (more rarely, mushrooms may have been abundant, but olive oil was expensive). 

Here in NZ only very occasionally I find field mushrooms, more rarely porcini (it happened in Christchurch once long time ago and I was the only one who ate them, everybody else watching me to see if I was going to die a painful death from poisoning). 

As far as commercial varieties go, I use plenty of dried mushrooms (both porcini and different Asian mushrooms) and the usual button and portabello mushrooms that you find at the supermarket. Fortunately in recent years the interest in more 'exotic' types of mushrooms has increased and now you can find some types of fresh Asian mushrooms too, especially in Asian stores. So I was delighted when Meadows Mushrooms presented the members of the Guild of Food Writers a pack of lovely oyster mushrooms. I love oyster mushrooms and hope to find them in my local supermarket soon!

The only thing I did with these beauties was to put them in the skillet with vegetable margarine and sauté them on both sides. To make mushrooms easy to digest you need to cook them in a way that they 'loose' water, this is important with foraged mushrooms, if there is a toxic one in you mix making it 'loose water' made it edible (or lowered the risks of tommy ache). Button mushrooms and other varieties can be eaten raw, but personally I prefer them cooked. Of course if a mushrooms is deadly this cooking tip is useless, no matter how much you cook it, but this is not a problem we are facing with commercial varieties!

So, but back to cooking edible mushrooms: let them loose water, yes, but remember that generally mushrooms should not be cooked for too long or they will lose flavour too. So as soon as these oyster mushrooms looked ready to me (a few minutes) I added a drizzle of Japanese soy sauce and some lemon juice. Add more margarine too if you like, for a bit more fat, juice and taste. Serve piping hot on a bowl of plain short grain rice, drizzling the juices on top. 

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Japanese Vegan bento with tofu and eggplant

Leftovers from Japanese dinner make good a bento (lunchbox). Here from the bottom right there is tofu, pan fried with vegetable oil and sesame oil, then finished with soy sauce (gluten free, use tamari) and lemon juice. The Asian eggplants had a similar treatment (minus the sesame oil): at home we just love the soy sauce + lemon juice combo! Next to it some seaweed salad, this was bought ready made, something that I would happy do more often if I didn't think that they overdo it with artificial colouring! But I love seaweed and you can use the dried types - dried wakame soaked in water will make a nice salad. Finally there is leftover rice, topped with vegetable, nori and sesame seeds furikake (Japanese seasoning for rice, look for it in Asian stores, and choose the one without fish or other animal products).

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Halloween Vegan Sushi - just a few ideas

There are plenty of Sushi rice recipes on this blog, so I won't repeat myself, and if you never made sushi just click here and you can find all the different ways to prepare rice and create vegan sushi, norimaki and onigiri (rice balls). 

So just follow the basic or your favourite sushi recipes and just apply these cool Halloween variations! I used lots of seaweed, nori, seaweed salad and a Japanese dried seaweed that looks like the wrapping of a scary mummy. You can find everything in Japanese shops :-). The skulls and pumpkins are made with Takuan (pickled daikon), the zombi eyes with asparagus, the 'slime' with avocado and seaweed salad, and the details with cut nori.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Baby cavolo nero, banana, spirulina and natural apple juice

And the smoothie today is:

Baby cavolo nero, banana, spirulina and natural apple juice

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Celery, mango, coconut water smoothie

Smoothie of the day!
Celery (add a few leaves), frozen mango cubes, coconut water

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Baby spinach, kiwi, coconut water smoothie

I am addicted to my new Nutribullet, made many smoothies so I'll post a few of my favourites in the next few days, starting with: 

Baby spinach, kiwi, coconut water

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Peperoni e salvia fritti - fried capsicums and sage

Red capsicums are so nice fried in olive oil, and then sprinkled with a little salt… this time I tried a different pairing though: sage! And it works really well. Of course I really like fried sage, so I guess that that help. (In the background I have some fried eggplants, but you all know how to make that right?) :-)

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Easy to make hazelnut milk and instant vegan Nutella

Now that I have a nutribullet I am trying all sort of experiments, and this is my first nut milk.

I used toasted hazelnut, but I guess that if you are into raw food you can use raw hazelnuts. I like toasted hazelnuts though, and a rinsed mine with water to remove as much as i could of the brown skin.

Then I added a bit of water, about twice the amount of the nuts. A quick blend and here is the result!

I passed the milk through a sieve, it tasted great but a bit grainy, so I passed it again using a fine cotton cloth (a clean handkerchief would work).

The ring from the nutribullet jag is ideal to keep the cotton in place while the milk is filtering though!

I got one glass, but where is the photo? Ops, Arantxa drunk it all at once! Max and I just had a taste. The hazelnut taste was great! Plus there was quite a bit of hazelnut paste left over. 

Instant Vegan Nutella

Place the hazelnut paste in a bowl or jug with a few block of dark chocolate, place into a saucepan with some water and bring to the boil to melt the chocolate. Stir. Done.

The resulting chocolate spread has a lovely gianduia flavour (cocoa and hazelnut) but it definitely feels low fat, and it is not too sweet either. Really lovely, and so easy to make!

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Asparagus, spinach and onion weed soup

This soup is vegan and gluten free, and makes use of those onion weeds that grow everywhere in Auckland in spring. Forage the onion weeds from a safe and clean place and wash well. The bulbs are fat and delicious just like spring onions (plus they are free!) and you can also eat the stems, leaves and flowers. 

Chop the bulbs, stalks and leaves of a bunch of onion weed and one bunch of asparagus, sauté with a drop of olive oil until fragrant, then add 1 l of vegetable stock and one big potato, peeled and finely sliced. Simmer until the potato is mushy and then add one cup of baby spinach leaves. Blend with an immersion blender and bring back to the boil for one minute. Adjust with salt and pepper and serve, decorated with onion weed flowers.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Instant mango and coconut yogurt vegan ice-cream, and how to make more coconut yogurt from you bought jar to save money!

I have tried a couple of brands of coconut yogurt and it is quite nice, although I am not sure 100% if I can call it Vegan. One of the two labels it as Vegan, but the live bacterias (a part from being 'live', if you see what I mean) could come from dairy products, as usually lactobacillus originally do… so if you know more about it just tell me, I really like to find out!*

Another thing that I have noticed is the price of coconut yogurt… so expensive!!! Around $10! So before finishing the second jar I have filled it up with a can of coconut cream (only about $2.50) and after two days in the hot water cupboard followed by two days in the fridge I got my own coconut yogurt (albeit a bit more runny than the bought one). I am trying the second lot with a thicker coconut cream and I'll let you know if it works.

The ice-cream

One cup of frozen mango

Half a cup of coconut yogurt

Blend with immersion blender

I am glad I remembered to take a photo before they gulped it all up: it was delicious!!

And of course it could count as sugar free, gluten free, and possibly raw vegan*.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Tomato tofu with vegetables and noodles

I learned to cook tofu with tomatoes from a Taiwanese friend 13 years ago, and I still remember thinking then how odd the pairing was… until I tasted it! Yes it works, and it is great! 

Heat some vegetable oil in a pan then add some fresh chopped tomato.

When the tomato is starting to mush add the tofu (use a firm type), cubed. Sauté on all sides then add two tbs of soy sauce (I use Japanese sou sauce). 

Add some green vegetables for colour (I use some pak choi), and cook for a few more minutes.

Boil the noodles, drain and add them to the pot, stir well with the tofu and vegetables.

Sauté the noodles for a few minutes, then add chopped coriander and chopped onion weed stalks (my Taiwanese friend would not have done that as she was a Buddhist vegetarian and ate no garlic, onion and chives, so I guess no onion weed!). Stir a bit more then serve, decorated with onion weed flowers.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Coconut and Lavender Agar Agar, like a Vegan Panna Cotta or Biancomangiare

I like to use lavender for desserts, but the flavour has to be delicate, not too overwhelming. 

Ingredients: 

one small bunch of Lavender

3 tbsp caster sugar

1x400ml can coconut cream +

same amount in boiling water to rinse the can

1 tsp agar agar

to serve: blackberries and lavender

Pick the lavender from the garden and make sure it is clean, or rinse lightly and pat dry with a clean tea towel. Put in a container and cover with the caster sugar. Put a lid on and leave for 2-3 days. The sugar will absorb the aroma of the flowers. 

 Place the coconut cream in a pot, fill the can with the same amount of boiling water to rinse it and add into the pot. Remove the flowers from the sugar (it will be crumbly and moist) and add it to the mixture. Add a tsp of agar agar and bring to the boil stirring constantly. You can add a few petals of lavender if you like, but don't overdo it - not everyone likes to find 'bits' in such a smooth pudding. Fill 6 individual jelly moulds and let them set. The container with the lavender and sugar still had some sugar around the sides so I put the blackberries there for a few hours to marinate (with the lavender also) and get a bit of juice! I serve them alongside the tipped agar agar, which tasted a bit like young coconut flesh and with a subtle but distinctive lavender flavour.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©