Finding New Recipes

One of the reasons we've been getting takeaway as much as we have is that I, at least, have gotten bored of the food we've been eating at home.  It's not that it's been bad food at all or that there hasn't been variety in what we've been eating, it's just that it's beginning to feel like we're eating the same stuff for a long time now.  A caveat I should probably add to this is that I don't really like cooking, especially if it takes a very long time or uses a hundred dishes.  This does limit the range of things we cook a little.

I have been looking for recipes that are vegan or at least vegetarian to add to our recipe book. However, most of the recipes I've come across seem to either be about making products that are like meat, such as burgers, or contain ingredients that are kind of pricey and aren't the easiest to find.  This is especially true of most of the vegan cook books I've looked at recently.

So, I'm going to keep searching for recipes online which are relatively quick (around 30 minutes cooking time) and simple, but hopefully lets us try different styles of food from around the world.  Most of the recipes I have come across so far have been Asian and we've been enjoying working our way through those flavours.  However, I think I'll need to do a more specific search to find vegan versions of food from other regions.  It might also be good to go back to the Redwall Cookbook to see what I can bring back from that, I seem to remember us enjoying a few of those recipes.

As well as finding more recipes I also want to see if we can incorporate eating more seasonally into our cooking.  This might be a little tricky and I have to admit I don't even really know what vegetables actually grow when, so that'll require a bit more research (I ended up finding these lovely magnets by Asking for Trouble from Etsy) but hopefully it'll just mean swapping the vegetables in the recipes.  We're doing it to be more sustainable, but I also want to do it so that we can get a better idea about what grows when in case we ever get the chance to grow our own food.  I'm also hoping we can start foraging for some of our food as well and that should give us much more of a connection to what we're eating as well.

I'm also thinking about finding a range of side dishes I can make to add a bit of variety to our lunches and which would allows us to make ourselves a sort of Budha bowl style meal.  I have to admit this might have been slightly inspired by all the kdrama we've been watching recently where they always seem to have yummy looking side dishes with the meals they eat. 

Despite how I feel about cooking I do feel that right now I might have actually given myself more work rather than the less when it comes to cooking.  However, I do think it'll be worth it in the long run as we should enjoy our food a little more and it'll stop us spending so much money on takeaways and eating out which we can then put into our savings.  It'll also teach me more about the other flavours that are out there and that should make my cooking better in the long run, especially when I'm making dishes that are basically me just winging it, which are most of them - I never was very good at following recipes. 

Cooking Redwall: Autumn

Cooking my way through the Redwall Cookbook was another thing that fell to the wayside when my 'I can't be arsed' attitude took over at the end of last year.  Even with all the cute stories that went with it.  So I didn't try as many recipes out of it as I had originally planned to.  There was also a lot more sweet and pudding recipes in the autumn season than I thought there was going to be and I'm not as keen on cooking those.  Recipes I did try, however, were:

Mole's Favourite Deeper 'n' Ever Turnip 'n' Tater 'n' Beetroot Pie

This was basically layers of mashed vegetables with cheese on top.  I did exactly as the recipe said, except change the cheese to a vegan alternatives, and though it was alright it wasn't exactly the most exciting meal I've ever made.  As with most cooking, herbs probably would have helped here, but I'm not sure I'm going to make this again regardless.  I'm just not really a fan of mush.  Sorry Mole.

Bellringer's Reward

Which turned out to be jacket potato with roast vegetables and, let's be honest, where can you go wrong with that.  Despite being a simple dish it was pretty tasty and I'll probably make this again.  Or maybe just add jacket potatoes when I'm doing my normal roast veg.

Brockhall Badger Carrot Cakes

This recipe was actually from the summer chapter, but I didn't make it then as I initially thought it was a cake from the title.  This was very similar to making a hash and was a pretty nice dish.  I added some green vegetables on the side to make it a full meal.  I will probably make this again, but I'm going to try and find a way of making it vegan instead.

Despite not making all the recipes in this cookbook I still really enjoyed it.  I got to break out of the rut I had gotten into cooking and finally try some of the recipes that were in my favourite childhood books.  Obviously they weren't exactly full of flavour seeing as they're actually for children, but there are quite a few that I will make again and I'm even thinking of giving some of the sweets a go as well.  Though maybe not all at once as I'd like to carry on fitting into the clothes I own at the moment.

Eating from the Redwall Cookbook: Summer

This will be a very quick blog as I only cooked one recipe from the summer section of this cookbook.

Hotroot Sunsalad 

This was the only savoury recipe I could find in this season, the rest was either a pudding or a sweet of some form.  I did have to make one change to this recipe as I couldn't find any Jerusalem artichokes, so I swapped them for broccoli instead.  It's definitely not the most exciting recipe I've ever cooked and if I was to ever make it again I would definitely add much more hot sauce to give if more flavour.  However, it's pretty unlikely I'll make this one again as boiling vegetables isn't my preferred way of cooking them.  I always feel you loose all the flavour, no matter how short the cooking time.  It's a shame as this was one of the recipes I was really looking forward to making.  

The other recipes I left as I'm not really into sweets, at least not when it's as hot as this summer has been.  Though I have now noticed that there is one recipe that I thought was a sweet, but looking at it again is actually a savoury so I'll probably just add it to the autumn recipes.  I do think that I will have another look at the sweet /pudding recipes again as the weather gets cooler as that tends to be when I start craving that type of food.  So you may see them cropping up in a later post.  But that's it really.  Now I just have autumn left to go and then I'll have cooked most of the recipes I remember reading about in my favourite childhood books.

Eating from Redwall

 

When I was younger I absolutely loved the stories of Redwall, by Brian Jacques.  They fitted perfectly into my sense of adventure and my love of animals.  I found them again recently when I was doing some decluttering and introduced them to my partner.  Discussing them with him reminded me just how much food written about in these stories and I had a vague memory that there was a Redwall.  A little bit of research showed that this was true and was followed by a bit of searching to find somewhere that had it in stock, which was found and the book is now winging its way to me.

The recipes are separated into the seasons and it'll be interesting to see if the ingredients are seasonal too.  My plan is to cook at least one recipe a week from the season I'm in at that moment, and I'm hoping this will give me a bit more variety in my cooking which has become a little bit stuck in the rut of late.  As the food is mostly made by mice, moles, etc I think that most of the recipes will probably be vegetarian, which means I'm not going to have to make too many changes to them to make them me friendly - always good.

I did try and find a second-hand copy of this, but without much success.  However, I do expect to keep and use this book for many years to come and so I'm not feeling too guilty about the purchase.  I'm actually quite excited about its arrival and I'm hoping it'll help me get back to enjoying cooking a little bit more.  Searching for this book has also shown me just how many more books there are in the Redwall series now.  I see a lot of woodland adventures, with accompanying meals, in my future.