Chocolate and Beyond

Recipes: Mushroom & Sweetcorn Cheezy Jackets

It's getting cold and that means comfort food to me. I try to keep my salad intake up once the days start shortening and the nights draw in faster, but I usually make sure something hot is going in my belly too.

In my pre-vegan days, likely a jacket potato laden with a cheese and onion, plus some side greens and sweetcorn, would have been a typical lunch or dinner. And while the cheese craving I used to get has gone altogether (because cheese is actually properly addictive, didn't you know?!), I have recently been craving that kind of 'stodginess' of carbs that this sort of meal would provide.

Anyhow - it occurred to me I could make up my own yummy dairy-free version of  jacket potatoes with a cheezy topping that would satisfy every bit of my comfort food craving for chilly days. And even better, what I have come up with is much more healthy and nutritious.

Recipes: Gingery Pineapple & Melon Quinoa Salad

 

If we had a summer in Britain, then this fruity, gingery and zesty quinoa (pronounced "keen-wah") salad would be the taste of it. While we don't have that much sunshine here, let's make believe while eating this.

Packed with health and vitality, this Gingery Pineapple & Melon Quinoa Salad is extremely versatile. It makes a wonderful gluten-free addition to any buffet table, can be eaten as a filling main course (bearing in mind also that quinoa is a complete protein), and is a good side salad to be had at vegan barbecues.

If you don't know how to cook quinoa, it's pretty simple as it's just like cooking rice, really. You need to put in a double the quantity of water to quinoa, and cook for about 15 minutes (keeping an eye on it) until the water is absorbed and the germ separates from the seed.

Recipes: Vegan Barbecue Chilli Cheese Burgers

We haven't had much of a summer here in the UK, although a few occasional squeezes of sunshine have given us some minor barbecue-ing opportunities. And it looks like we may actually have a hot weekend ahead of us! So these very 'meaty' Barbecue Chilli Cheese Burgers are the perfect food for a vegan bbq, or to make and take to a friend's.

Thanks to the wheat gluten flour, the Barbecue Chilli Cheese Burgers will really hold their own on a grill without any fancy tricks or superglue. And their texture is so chewy and 'meaty' they will definitely satisfy. They just love to be eaten in burger buns with vegan mayonnaise and good old tomato ketchup. Or a tangy tomato relish would be great with them, too, as well as some grated vegan cheddar.

I have been on a quest to make a really excellent vegan burger because once I became vegan, I realised a lot of the commercial veggie burgers I used to eat were no longer suitable for me, since they often contain milk or egg (Quorn, for example, is not a vegan brand as it uses egg).