Vegan MoFo #20 – Quince Jam

There’s a lot of fruit in our garden. But quinces seem to grow best and are one of those things that don’t get eaten by birds in 5 seconds. It’s too bad this fruit is not that well-known. I’m happy to see that there are plenty of recipes around on the internet.
However, we decided to make a simple jam. Or should I say, my mom decided to make a simple jam. It wasn’t the first time we made quince jam, but my idea to add agar agar was a hit. Often is said that agar agar has a temporarily effect. But I think that the effect stays because the jelly is put into glass bowls immediately after boiling. Fact is that the jelly turns into a real jam if you add agar agar. And the big plus is that you have to use a whole less sugar!

Quince Jam

3 l quince juice
1,5 kg sugar
juice from 3 lemons
25 gr agar agar powder

The above ingredients give you the ratios. I don’t exactly know how many kg of quinces you need to obtain 3 l. The best thing you can do is measure how many liters you have left after cooking your quinces.

Wash the quinces and rub the fuzz off the skin.
Slice them in thin slices. You can leave everything: the skin and the core (they have to go through a cheese cloth anyway).
Put them in a big pot and add water ’till the quinces are covered.
Bring everything to a boil, occasionally prick them with a fork to see if they’ve turned soft. When they’re soft you can put them off the fire and leave them to rest for a night.
The next day you put the paste in a cheese cloth and press very well so that it releases all moisture. You add the sugar and bring everything back to a boil. You can taste with a spoon, let it cool off and add the lemon juice if you think it’s too sweet. Add the agar agar and let it cook for a few minutes. Regularly stir so that it doesn’t get sticky.
Pour the hot jelly in glass jars, screw the lid on, put the pots on their heads and let them cool.
A few hours later, you will notice that the thick liquid has solidified and become a real jam.

Personally I think that the juice from quinces is pretty sweet, that’s why we add some lemon juice. Just have a taste if you’re not sure!

Vegan MoFo #19 – Weekly Favorites IV

Call me a happy mofo! I didn’t think I would make it to twenty posts (and I know I’m not there yet, but we’re at 19.. I’ll get to those 20). It may be the last sunday of the month, but it is not over yet. Be prepared to receive some other posts next week!

Today we’ll keep up with all the deliciousness that has been shared in the past week.

Plantaardigheidjes does not dissapoint with this Tempeh Chili! In this cold and cloudy weather I long for warming meals and snacks, so this dish sounds perfect to me. Just like the Apple Pie Pudding from Lipstick and Lemondrops!
Just like Indian food, the Ethiopian cuisine is nice and spicy, like this Misir Wat (red lentil stew).
I could eat pasta every day, so spaghetti with lemon, arugula and pistachios seems like a nice variation.
I would like this spice cake as breakfast, snack or dessert. Thank you.
This post does not only make me long for Vegan Pie in the Sky, I have a huge crush on all the pretty dresses from this lady.
The Vegan Crew’s olives and sundried tomato puffs sound divine. I love bread with ‘something in it’.

I can go on for a bit, but I suggest you take a look at my Pinterest for more deliciousness.

Last week on The Green Cuisine:
#16 – Recipe: Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies
#17 – Recipe: Mini-Bread-Pizza’s, or: what to do with leftover bread?
#18 – Recipe: Apple Nut Cake

Please share your favorite recipes or your Pinterest!

Vegan MoFo #16 – Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies

I like to bake in the weekend. Pie, (cup)cakes, pancakes, waffles, and cookies. J. prefers to help when it’s cookies. For some it may sound a bit civil, a young married couple baking cookies together. But we think it’s fun and cozy.

Last sunday we were creative. Or… ‘accidentally creative’, after making a mistake, we experimented and it was a hit!

Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies (based on Chocolate Chip Cookies from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar)

1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup brown sugar 
1/2 cup melted butter (Alpro or for the US: Earth Balance)
1/2 cup hazelnutmilk
2 tbsp ground flaxseeds
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 cups oatmeal
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
2/3 cup pure chocolate chips 

Add the sugar and melted butter in a bowl and mix till it’s emulsified.
Mix the hazelnutmilk, flaxseeds and vanilla extract in.
Add the baking soda and oatmeal.
Sift about half the flour in and add in bits, it’s possible that you need less then the full cup (you will notice if your dough becomes to dry).
Mix in the chocolate chips.
Preheat your oven on 185°C.
I like to make little balls from the dough and flatten them between my two handpalms.
Drop the doughy cookies onto baking sheets lined with parchment paper.
Put the cookies in the oven for about 12 minutes. Let them cool on a cooling rack.

Vegan MoFo #13 – Soy’Chili Tofu

I really love tofu. It’s delicious, but it has to be made the right way. That last thing sometimes is a problem, when you get a weak and tasteless thing on your plate, specially in those restaurants who don’t know a thing about vegetarian cuisine. When you make it yourself there’s not a thing you can’t do with tofu. The most important thing is to press it and let it marinade for at least an hour.

There’s hard and soft tofu, soft tofu is handy for desserts and the hard one for savoury meals. I press my tofu between two kitchen towels and some heavy books on top. My favorite marinade is the most simple one ever. A fellow volunteer for EVA (Belgian vegetarian society) used it to marinade her tofu for veggie skewers on the barbeque. It tastes good on the bbq, but I prefer it baked in a pan.

Soy’Chili Tofu
2 persons

250 g Tofu
apr. 5 tbsp soy sauce
apr. 5 tbsp sweet chili sauce

Press the tofu. Cut into 1 à 1,5 cm pieces.
Pour the soy sauce and chili sauce in a little oven dish. The amount depends on your oven dish, the tofu slices should be alongside each other and the sauce should cover all slices well. Always use as much soy as chili sauce.
Let it marinate for one hour.
Heat some oil in a pan and fry the tofu.

Et voila, a super simple but delicious warming recipe. To save some time you can press the tofu overnight and marinade it in the morning, to make it go even faster in the evening. It’s lovely with some spinach and brown rice (and obviously combined with the remaining marinade / sauce;)).

as you can see, I add the leftover marinade to the pan the last minute of baking.

Vegan MoFo #12 – Weekly Favourites

Today, just like last week, I will give an overview of delicious recipes and interesting articles I found through the Vegan MoFo feed. My biggest favourites are up here, and the rest of them you can find on my Pinterest account!

JL from JL Goes Vegan had the amazing idea to put all sorts of vegan (cooking) questions into blogposts. Specially this one about cooking grains and beans in a pressure cooker spiked my interest.
This tofu and broccoli in yellow curry from Plantaardigheidjes looks great, doesn’t it? I’m not a fan of coco, but I’ll find a way to fix it.
This seems like a great tortellini recipe with an original sauce.
You end a dinner party with dessert… and desserts there are plenty! These days an apple cake is no luxury. And after my speculoos serenade it’s no surprise that I’m going to try this pudding from leaves & flours. Since I adore maple syrup and walnuts I would intensely enjoy this ice cream from fuckyeahveganicecream. And last but not least, these lemon and ginger cookies from Fieke!

Actually it is really hard to choose between the overload on delicious mofo-recipes… What I like very much is to study the blogs in different languages and sometimes using google translate to understand some bits. I stumbled upon Vegan Wednesday which is something created by a few German blogs. People can show off what vegan foods they ate on wednesday (even non-vegans). All of the recipes are gathered at Pinterest.

In this second MoFo-week I blogged about pumpkin-paprika soup, rashers from VegiDeli, veganism for dummies, Maya’s seitan croquettes and Dreena Burton’s chocolate-cinnamon cake.

I’m not promising anything, but I hope to post some more recipes next week. It is already clear to me that I should plan ahead next MoFo.
Don’t forget to subscribe to VeggiEmail if you like to be in contact with other vegans!

Vegan MoFo #7 – Pumpkin Paprika Soup

Tis the season for pumpkin again! And at the same time it’s soup-season. The combination of these two makes one hell of a combination! Don’t you just love those rainy, cold evenings in fall with a steaming bowl of soup in front of you? In this soup the first pumpkins and last peppers are used, on top of that it’s hottened with some hot spices.

Pumpkin Paprika Soup (inspired by seitan is my motor)

800 g butternut pumpkin
4 long red peppers
1 sprig rosemary
1.5 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp coriander seeds
8 cloves garlic
1 chopped red and 1 chopped white onion
1 can tomatoes or 500 g fresh tomatoes
1.5 l vegetable stock
1 tsp paprika
2.5 tsp (mild) madrascurry
Pinch turmeric
Olive oil
Pepper
1 tsp cayennepepper

Take a large cooking pot and put it on a medium heat, add the coriander- and cumin seeds. Roast them for two minutes. Put the herbs in a mortar and grind them. Put them aside.
Heat some oil in the pot and add the onions and rosemary, let it simmer for 5 minutes. Add the peppers and let it simmer for 2 to 3 minutes.
Add the remaining ingredients and bring to boil. Boil for about half an hour on a high heat, without the lid so that the moisture can get away.
Remove the pot from the heat and mix with a hand mixer until you have a creamy but finely pureed soup. If you don’t have a hand mixer you can also use a regular mixer.
Tastes lovely with some (garlic)croutons!

Vegan MoFo #6 – Weekly Favorites

Since Vegan MoFo, and actually the whole internet, has a huge offer, I decided to put my favorites online. I thought that there weren’t too many things to post since I only had the time to read all the posts of the first mofo day. I thought wrong. There were lots of tasty dishes out there!

Fresh fig cake with fig jam from The Tasty Vegan
Peruvian bean bowl with roasted pepper sauce and fried plantains from Taste Space
Smokey butternut mac & cheese from Manifest Vegan (one that I’m definitely going to cook next week)
Mexican chocolate cake with almonds from Wandering Ladle
Butternut pumpkin enchiladas from Veg Hot Pot
And the last one, my kinda thing: Vegan Egg Salad from Vegan NomNoms!
The full list of favorites can be found on my Pinterest.

It wasn’t exactly quiet around here either:
1. World Veggie Day
2. Kale Chips
3. Lotus Speculoos
4. Artichoke Paste
5. VeggiEmail

Vegan MoFo #5 – VeggiEmail

If you’re a regular visitor to this blog, you might’ve noticed… Next to ‘Home’, ‘About’, etc. there is a new title “VeggiEmail“.

On the first day of this month I promised that there were some new projects coming. VeggiEmail is on of those! I had the idea thanks to another blogger who made a pen pal-project. This focused on the USA and went via regular mail. But the idea to communicate about vegetarianism/veganism appealed to me, so I decided to participate. However, because the postoffices aren’t working at their best, my pen pal never received my letter, neither did I receive his/hers. Too bad! On top of that all I thought I was being a little hypocritical because I don’t take an airplane, but my mail does… That’s when I started thinking: why not via e-mail?!

So, I introduce to u VeggiEmail, where you can sign in and soon your digital pen pal will be presented to u. I understand that some people like to have contact with an international crowd, so I’m hoping that there will be lots of international people who subscribe! I’ve put the same form on my Dutch blog, so I’m just guessing that there will be some Belgians and Dutch people on board. If you want to make sure that there is a mailpartner for you, you can always share this through your blog, facebook, twitter, …

You can subscribe here!
If there are any questions, don’t hesitate to ask via mail or leave a comment.

Vegan MoFo #3 – Lotus Speculoos is Vegan!

Hmmm, at 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon a warm cup of coffee or hot cocoa. It perks me up and gives a good glowing feeling on colder days. And, if I am honest, sometimes some cafeine is more then welcome. For those who love it, there is of course tea, but I’m not big fan of tea. Maybe some chai tea, but that’s about it.
So, a hot beverage, accompanied by a cookie that you can dunk in your drink and almost ‘melts’ in your mouth. Ow yeah.

I love to dunk a speculoos in my hot beverage. And I am so glad that I can still do this as a vegan! Because in Lotus Speculoos there are no animal products at all, so it is vegan. Let’s not mention the fact that there’s quite some sugar in speculoos…

Ingredients: flour, sugar, vegetable oil and fat, candy syrup, raising agent (sodium bicarbonate), soy flour, salt, cinnamon.

Nutrition facts per 100g:
Energy (kcal): 484
Protein (g): 4.9
Carbohydrates (g): 72.7
Sugars (g): 38.1
Fat (g): 19
Saturated fat (g): 8.8
Fibres (g): 1.3
Sodium (g): 0.37

I hope some people will be glad now that they this sweet treat is vegan! Enjoy!

(I don’t know exactly if Lotus Speculoos is available in the US, but if you happen to visit Europe, you know you can eat these cookies!)

Vegan MoFo #1 – World Vegetarian Day

Happy World Vegetarian Day! This day was started by the North American Vegetarian Society in 1977 and a year later the International Vegetarian Union decided to make it a world-wide event. World Veggie Day is here to call for awareness of all the benefits of vegetarianism for the environment, health, world population and animals.

As I mentioned last year, this World Vegetarian Day is the beginning of the Vegetarian Awareness Month which ends at November 1st with the World Vegan Day (since ’94).

There couldn’t be a better day to start with the Vegan Month of Food!
So, I am excited for different reasons:
1. It’s World Vegetarian Day!
2. It’s the beginning of Vegan MoFo!!
3. Things have changed around here!!!

Yes, things have changed. I saw you wondering “The Green Cuisine“… I don’t know that blog?! Well, actually you do (or you don’t if you are new to this blog ), I have changed the name from The Veggie Eco-Life because I thought it was a little bit dull and didn’t exactly describe what this blog was about. I hope you like the new name.
The big change for me is that I started to be a full-time vegan since September 1st, which means happy 1 month-veganversary for me!

Thanks to this change and Vegan MoFo there are fun new things ahead. Ranging from recipes, product- and book reviews and some new projects… Stay tuned!

Of course you can all follow me through different social media: