Hotdogs – Vegan Student Style

Looking after yourself is really important as a student, but sadly, time and money gets in the way for a lot of students.

Veganism is interesting financially, as it’s so variable. You can live dirt-cheap as a vegan, eating bulk lentils and veggies from the saturday/sunday market. On the other hand, in New Zealand, although the vegan market seems to be expanding, the vast majority of mock meats and non-dairy milks are more expensive than their dead animal counterparts.

I try to have one exciting meal a week; something like a $7 Ethiopian meal with injera bread from the Saturday market, or pies with curly fries and a milkshake.

I had this glorious hotdog on Monday, before my physical chemistry test. It has the benefit of being reasonably cheap (sausages are $1 each and I only need 2-3), but super super quick and amazingly tasty. It is Fry’s Braai sausage, fried red onion, tomato sauce, American mustard and Edmonds Dijonnaise (sandwich mayo, which is vegan!). The flavours complimented each other perfectly.

You put the sausages in the sandwich press and turn them twice in about 8 minutes. It’s much better than the frying pan because it’s convenient, and they always cook in the middle, despite being prepared from frozen.

Grilled Bok Choy

Hello. My brick phone broke, so I replaced it with a smart phone (RIP brick phone). The plus side of this, is that now I can make more website posts with the convenience of phone photos (but excuse the low quality).

Do you like bok choy? I usually do, but getting enough greens has been a struggle for me. I think part of me resents salads (and soup) for being such stereotypical vegan food. So I gorge on pizza and pie and decadent desserts with whipped coconut cream. Take that, vegan stereotype!

I had chips and beer this afternoon. So instead of doing what I normally do when I get pies (having kumara chips or curly fries as a side), I decided to grill bok choy. Not because there’s anything wrong with having chips twice a day, but because I am a fussy eater so I wanted more variety for my food for the day.  I’m not gonna go all encouraging obsessive eating habits on you now. Vegan should be fun and delicious! But, if you’re interested, bok choy has a decent calcium content and is absorbed well (ps ily Ginny Messina and Jack Norris). Perhaps I can use this as justification for my excessive dumpling laksa consumption from Aunty Mena’s (“it has bok choy, it’s for my health!”).

I’d never grilled bok choy before, but decided to give it a go because many months ago I has a very average meal at the Southern Cross, and the grilled bok choy was the star. They have a really nice strawberry loaf, but I try to stay away because my sweet tooth makes every vegan dessert a source of constant temptation.

I was really winging it, so I can’t give the exact recipe, but it’s probably hard to mess up.

Seasonings:
1/8 cup balsalmic vinegar
1 clove garlic
2 teaspoons sweet chilli
1 tablespoon olive oil

Cut 2 bok choy (bok choys?) in half or quarters. In a bowl, combine seasonings, and then coat bok choy in them. Grill on low heat, covered with tin foil for around twenty minutes, til the sliced section is blackened, and the top side is soft/cooked. If the leaves start to get dark, you can place some tin foil between the leaf part and the grilling side. Check bok choy regularly.

The Perfect Vegan Whipped Cream

Brumbys sells vegan jelly donuts. But, being the gluttonous person that I am, I thought they were incomplete without a generous helping of vegan whipped cream (as was my iced chocolate).

I have discovered the perfect vegan whipped cream. It requires a cream whipper and nitrous oxide chargers, which I purchased from Stevens. The cream whipper was on sale for $60, and chargers were about $1.50. I’d wanted the cream whipper for ages, so I spent some of my first paycheck on this. There is no regret. Not only was whipped cream from a can one of my favourite foods (if you can even call it that!), as a child, but I have also loved coconut cream for many, many years.

After trying about 6 times to get the recipe right, I discovered that using Family Choice coconut cream, in addition to soy cream, gives the perfect consistency – not so thick that the gas molecules cannot penetrate, but with enough fat and thickness that it will whip.
But, you NEED to start with a really full-fat coconut cream in order for the whipped cream to be stable – you can test it by shaking the Family Choice coconut cream, and if it makes a sloshing sound it is not suitable/too thin. There seems to be some variation in coconut cream thickness during certain parts of the year.

Ingredients
2 cans Family Choice coconut cream, refrigerated for 8 hours
1/2 a container Alpro soy cream
1 Tablespoon maple flavoured syrup

Blend the coconut cream in a food processor til smooth. Add soy cream and maple flavoured syrup. When mixed through, transfer to chilled cream whipper. Inject nitrous oxide cartridge, and shake. Add whipped cream to everything: donuts, iced chocolate, banoffee pies… and be in vegan heaven!

2 Ingredient Vegan Ice Cream

I’m happy to say I’ve finally cracked the code to getting a creamy, rich vegan icecream without icy bits, when just placing it in the freezer and leaving it there overnight. I enjoyed a very unhealthy dinner tonight of blueberry pancakes – à la mode.

This recipe is dedicated to all those coconut lovers out there, and also those with a love for insanely quick recipes. If you want creamy coconut ice cream, look no further. This is not a health food recipe, but I’m a firm believer in indulging in desserts like these on occasion. It’s especially student-friendly, being quick and with easy, affordable ingredients.

Ingredients:
Family Choice Coconut Cream (must be very thick; if you shake the can it doesn’t slosh around)
Sweetened Condensed Coconut Milk (can get from Moore Wilson’s)

Refrigerate can of coconut cream for around 6 hours.

Open with a can opener and scrape the solid coconut cream out and put into food processor. Leave the water (you can use it to make smoothies or something). Open the can of sweetened condensed coconut milk. This is very sweet; if you want a moderately sweet icecream only use about 1/2 a can, scraping the thickest part out. Otherwise (if you have a giant sweet tooth), go nuts and chuck the whole can in. Process til smooth, then put in a freezer-friendly container and freeze overnight.

If you have leftover sweetened condensed milk, it can be mixed with margarine and brown sugar to make caramel. I’ve used it to make caramel chocolate cups before.

Enjoy with pancakes, fruit salad or whatever tickles your fancy.

Sara Lee Apple Strudel

It’s vegan! I love convenience food, and this is a great vegan dessert that can be taken straight from the freezer and put into the oven. It cost ~$7 at Countdown Karori.

I had mine with alpro soy cream.

Mock Duck Burgers at Monterey

Monterey in Newtown has burgers for $10 on Tuesdays. Their mock duck burger can be made vegan upon request (they swap out the mayo and BBQ sauce for relish). For another $3 you can add chips, which are really nice, crispy chips.

The mock duck burger is really tasty; it’s made with a homemade burger bun, and the mock duck is nice, salty and crispy with a little bit of resistance, but less chewy than most faux meats I have had. It is very very nice, and I would highly recommend it.

Also on the menu is the black bean burger, which I’m sure can also be made vegan but am yet to try. And soda, lots of flavours of 6 barrel soda which I have no idea how I refrained from buying.

Vegan Custard Squares

These things remind me of the chocolate eclairs I would get from Ohakune as a child. I’m not gonna lie, I used to really like those creamy, non-vegan desserts, but vegan desserts aren’t half-bad. The frosting on these eclairs is really nice and creamy, owing to the margarine/vegetable shortening combo (even though I coated it unevenly so the frosting looks funny).

This recipe was adapted slightly from Ruth Mitchell’s recipe. Did you know most puff pastry contains animal fats? This once became the topic of conversation at a Christmas dinner, where my bf’s angry cousin ended up yelling at us for refusing to eat pastry which had animal fats in it. Vegetarian puff pastry is found at most supermarkets in the frozen section, and is even pre-rolled, which is fantastic, because it saves a lot of time and is an even thickness, ensuring you don’t get doughy bits.

1 package New Way vegetarian puff pastry
1 L soy milk (or almond, rice, coconut, etc)
3/4 cup custard powder
3 T vanilla extract
4 T sugar

Icing
1/4 cup vegetable shortening/kremelta (or coconut oil if you want healthier choice)
1/4 cup margarine
2 T cocoa powder
1/4 cup icing sugar
6 pieces Whittakers dark chocolate

Preheat oven to 200°C
Place pastry sheets individually on a baking dish/tray. Poke small holes in the pastry, to prevent it from puffing up a lot. Bake for around 10 minutes, or until golden brown. Remove from oven and leave to cool. When it is cool, you’ll want to put 2 of the pastry sheets into a baking dish with walls, so that the custard has some boundary conditions and so does not overflow.

Put 600 mL of non-dairy milk in a saucepan with vanilla and sugar and slowly heat. Mix custard powder with 400 mL non-dairy milk, and add to the saucepan. Constantly stir on medium heat, and when the custard thickens, heat on low for 2 minutes. Then, start spooning the custard onto the 2 pastry sheets. Smooth out, and place another pastry sheet on top.

Prepare the icing.
Melt 1/4 cup kremelta (or coconut oil). Add margarine, cocoa powder and icing sugar and whip with electric mixer. Melt chocolate, and blend in. Smooth out over the tops of the custard squares with a rubber spatula. Cut into squares when set.

Mushroom Burgers with Foccacia – German Bakery

The German Bakery in Kelburn has quite a few vegan items, including focaccia. They let me have a look through their ingredients book last time I went there, and I was surprised to see a number of dairy and egg-free items, including the beer bread and focaccia.

I absolutely cannot make focaccia, I have tried several times with dreadful results, despite never having problems making other breads. For this reason, I’m so ecstatic about the focaccia being vegan. Focaccia makes for lovely mushroom burgers.

I used to have homemade sourdough with mushroom burgers, and it was the nicest bread I’d ever had, but for some reason or another, after two years the sourdough starter went off, and I was left devastated. When I have more time, I will try to make a new starter, but until then, focaccia is more than good enough as a delicious mushroom burger bun. Large, flat mushrooms are the best to use.

The recipe I based the mushroom burgers off was the post punk kitchen’s Perfect Grilled Portobellos, so I marinated the ‘shrooms in soy sauce, balsalmic vinegar, olive oil and garlic, then grilled them in the oven, and I’m sure they’re much better on the grill, (but cbf, need to save time as a student), and assembled focaccia with lettuce, tomato and avocado.

Vegan Gummy Candy

These are vegetarian & vegan friendly sour gummies, which you can buy from the supermarket (cheaply, too). The only criticism I have of them is their use of the word “popz”.

I did check ingredients for vegan-friendliness, but will leave this excerpt from the wonderful book Vegan For Life, anyway.

Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes with Buttercream Frosting

Vegvuw has a stall at clubs week at Victoria University tomorrow, so some of the members have done some vegan baking to give to people for free, in the hopes of helping to break the myth that vegan food is awful. I made chocolate cupcakes, because they’re no-fuss.

For these cupcakes, I used a chocolate cake recipe from instructables.com

Buttercream frosting is adapted from chow.com, but is actually from the cookbook “Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World”

Buttercream Frosting Ingredients:
1/2 cup shortening/Kremelta
1/2 cup margarine
3 1/4 cups icing sugar
1/3 cup cocoa powder
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

I usually melt the shortening before blending the rest with the hand mixer.

I used a frosting syringe to frost the cupcakes, and topped them with a piece of Whittakers dark chocolate. I got the frosting syringe from a Tala donut making set, which is pretty awesome because you can use it to make vegan doughnuts!