Fantastic vegan spread

Here's a selection of some of the food that was at the most recent Vegan Cake & Chocolate Appreciation Society meeting i went to. We meet once a month in the Brighton area, anyone is welcome, they just have to bring vegan food. This time we met in Shoreham by Sea with around 15 people, a really friendly mix of people with a fantastic variety of food! There was coffee & walnut cake, chocolate muffins, shortbread, g/f nuts about chocolate cake, chocolate dipped strawberries, pumpkin seed bread, sweet rice salad, pies, anti pasta kebabs, curry, g/f lentil roast, soup, welsh rarebit, crisps, salads and more. The nuts about chocolate cake was AMAZING! It made me think of chocolate gateaux and like a gateaux it was incredibly moist which i've found can be missing in many gluten free cakes. Rachel the cake maker informed me that one of the ingredients was courgette which really surprised me! Another great cake meeting with a great group of people and wonderful food.

No effort food!

Lazy food was the aim of the day! Both Jon and i were feeling run down and just couldn't be arsed to do any cooking! So we decided to treat ourselves to some microwave curries from Infinity Foods in Brighton. We had Great Nineveh Malaysian split pea curry with roasted beetroot, along with Chaula's aloo mutter potato peas in a mildly spiced sauce plus a bag of Co-op's microwave basmati rice.

I'm uncertain if i've ever eaten Malaysian food before. I have to confess that i generally only eat beetroot when it's pickled out of a jar! Initially i found the roasted beetroot in the curry a little odd but i think this was just because it was a new flavour to me. The more i ate, the more i enjoyed it, the curry was very tasty and was easily the best of the two curries. The aloo mutter curry was nice but nothing special, it wasn't helped by sharing a plate with the Malaysian curry which was especially good for a ready meal.

Chunky oven baked ratatouille and pasta

Roast vegetable & tofu ratatouille with gluten free pasta. Unfortunately this meal was a bit of a disappointment. The roast vegetables really needed more flavour added (i'd used lemon juice, dried basil, black pepper and olive oil) and i think if i was to use tofu for this meal again i'd probably use one that was flavoured or marinate it before adding it to the roast. I used two types of pasta (vegetable rice spirals and corn & vegetable shells), they were the same make (Orgran) and the same length of time to cook, so i cooked them in the same saucepan. Mistake! The spirals softened far quicker than the shells and so by the time the shells were cooked, the spirals were soggy! Definitely room for improvement if i cook this meal again!

Gluten free lentil tastiness!

Now i have to admit that lentil roast doesn't exactly sound the most exciting food..admittedly i'm not always the biggest fan of lentils but this was really very tasty and pretty easy to make. It's from Liz Cook's 'So What Do You Eat' cookbook (the ingredients are olive oil, 350g red lentils, 25g marg, 4tbs lemon juice, 4tbs tamari, 4tsp cumin powder and stuffing: 2 large onions, 4 cloves garlic, 100g mushrooms, 100g wholewheat breadcrumbs, 1tsp dried sage, bunch fresh parsley), only i didn't have any sage, used dried parsley instead of fresh and replaced the wholewheat breadcrumbs with Orgran all purpose crumbs. This was the first time i've used these crumbs and was really pleased with the result. Using them meant that the entire dinner was gluten free. I served it with roast potatoes, roast vegetables, stir-fried spinach and balsamic mushroom & onion gravy. Jon who usually has something wheaty with his meal and mostly avoids lentils said he enjoyed this and would even have it again..he seemed surprised by this! Definitely a successful meal!