Weekend Carnivore

Who doesn’t love pizza? I sure know that I do but ordering takeaway pizza is just a no no on my diet. When I have a lot of time on my hands, I am not adverse to trying making a homemade pizza dough recipe. Truth is though, I rarely think that far ahead. Even if I did, a homemade pizza dough recipe is still going to have more calories than I am likely to have spare.

Sun dried tomato and olive tortilla pizza recipe

Lately, I have been indulging my pizza craving moments by throwing together quick and very easy tortilla pizza recipes. It really is as simple as using a tortilla in place of the normal pizza dough and piling it high with the cheese and toppings of your choice. They are so easy and simple to make that I have taken to having them instead of a sandwich for lunch. I suppose, really they are an open faced sandwich or a an inside out quesadilla anyway.

You really can put just about anything on them and make a whole new tortilla pizza recipe each and every time. They are great for anybody following a vegetarian diet because the pizza topping options really are as varied as the types of vegetables you can find.

My recent favourite topping combination for my tortilla pizza recipe is sun dried tomatoes and a mixture of green and black olives. If I use reduced fat mozzarella I can pile those olives high and not worry too much about the fat. It is all good fat anyway, right?

Sun dried tomato and olive tortilla pizza

Tortilla pizza recipe

Ingredients:
1 flour tortilla
1 tablespoon pasta sauce
1/3 cup reduced fat shredded mozzarella cheese
1/3 cup sun dried tomatoes in oil, drained and roughly chopped
1 1/2 tablespoons green olives, sliced
1 1/2 tablespoons black olives, sliced

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 400F/Gas Mark 6
2. Put the tortilla on a baking sheet and spread with the pasta sauce.
3. Scatter the cheese evenly over the tortilla.
4. Put the sun dried tomatoes and olives all over the top of the cheese.
5. Bake in the oven for about 5 minutes until the cheese melts. Watch it very closely during this cooking time as it can very quickly go from golden and melted to very burnt.
6. Put onto a plate and eat sliced into pizza style slices.

Serves: 1

Hello, my name is Sarah Jayne and I am a hummus addict! Seriously, I can’t get enough of the stuff. If I had the choice between really good hummus and chocolate, I wouldn’t have to think twice about snatching the hummus out of the hands of the person asking such an odd question. However, until recently, I have usually been guilty of buying hummus from the store rather than trying my hand at making my own hummus recipe.

Just like with the pesto the other week, I just always thought it would be too complicated for me to learn how to make hummus. Once again, I was wrong. I stumbled onto an easy hummus recipe that I really love because the base recipe doesn’t even use olive oil. Which means that I don’t feel at all bad about using tahini on my diet. It is such an easy hummus recipe that ever since my discovery of it, I have been playing around adding all sorts of things to it to come up with new hummus recipes.

Lately, I have also been “suffering” from a bit if an olive addiction. The little green and black gems have been finding their way into just about every meal I put together. So, when it was time to put together my latest hummus recipe I couldn’t resist the temptation to throw in some olives and see what happened. I also had a bunch of fresh coriander – cilantro for our American friends – that needed to be used. So, I threw that in too.

Boy did this turn out to be a seriously yummy hummus recipe! So, good that I simply topped it with a couple more olives (told you I am addictive) and ate it with warm pitas and made that my entire lunch!

Coriander and green olive hummus recipe

coriander and green olive hummus recipe

Ingredients:
1 (400g) can chickpeas, drained but the liquid reserved
1/4 cup tahini
3 tablespoons lemon juice
2 cloves garlic
1/3 cup fresh coriander
1/3 cup green olives, pitted
freshly ground pepper, to taste
sea salt, to taste

Directions:

1. Put the chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice, garlic, coriander and olives into a blender or food processor. I use my mini chopper to make it extra easy.
2. Blitz in short bursts, pushing the mixture down when needed until everything is combined.
3. Add a little bit of the reserved bean liquid and blitz again. Add more if you need more to get to the hummus texture you desire.
4. Serve in a bowl topped with olives.

Serves: 2 to 4 (or just 1 hummus addict like me!)

The morning before I go grocery shopping it is never certain I am going to have any of my normal breakfast foods still kicking around. On these days, my breakfast choices can get more than a bit experimental. Usually, I take a look at what odds and ends I have left over from the last week and attempt to put together a vegetarian breakfast recipe that can hopefully claim to be at least a bit healthy.

The day that I came up with this recipe, I really had just about nothing left in the fridge and what was there wasn’t jumping out as working well together. I had once slice of wholemeal bread, one egg and half an avocado. Ack! I decided not to give into defeat that easily though and crossed my fingers as I attempted to make this breakfast recipe work.

You know, it wasn’t bad at all!

I have had a mashed avocado mixture on toast before but usually I would have mashed it with a bit of lemon juice and garlic. I was totally out of any sort of lemon or lemon juice though. So, I reached for some garlic infused white wine vinegar I bought at a craft fair in Wales a few months ago and used that to mash up the avocado. I think I will do that again for another avocado recipe because the slight sharpness of the vinegar worked well with the creamy avocado.

I felt like I needed a bit of something else on top of that toast and avocado recipe. With just the one egg around and not wanting to add a ton of calories onto the recipe, I poached the egg and put it on top. When the poached egg yolk spilled out over the avocado it really was yummy.

Not only did it taste pretty good for a recipe put together with such haste, but all of the good fats going on in the recipe meant that just the one slice of the avocado toast filled me up and kept me full until well into the afternoon. Tons of time for Tescos to deliver my grocery shopping and make lunch so much easier!

Avocado toast with poached egg

Avocado toast topped with poached egg

Ingredients:

1 slice wholemeal bread
1/2 of an avocado
1/2 teaspoon garlic infused white wine vinegar or white wine vinegar and 1/2 clove crushed garlic
1 poached egg

Directions:

1. Put the bread into toast.
2. Meanwhile, scoop the avocado flesh into a bowl.
3. Add in the garlic vinegar and mash until it is roughly mashed and everything is combined.
4. Spread the avocado mixture on top of the toast.
5. Place the poached egg on top and enjoy.

Serves: 1

Every month, I take part on a vegetarian recipe swap over at Recipezaar. The basic idea is that everybody interested in the vegetarian recipe swap puts their name in and at the start of the month you adopt one of those chefs and somebody in turn adopts you. Over the following month you agree to make two vegetarian recipes from that person’s Recipezaar recipe collection. I love this because it is a great way to discover new vegetarian food and you don’t at all have to be a vegetarian to take part. In fact, I think that most people that are involved aren’t actually vegetarians but are just enjoying learning how to cook vegetarian dishes. That can never be a bad thing.

This month, I adopted January Bride. I must have been in a lemon mood because the two recipes I decided to make both had some lemon element to them. The first was the lemon garlic green beans that I blogged about earlier in the month. The second were these amazing Lemon Pepper Nuts .

lemon pepper nuts recipe

If I am honest, when I selected this recipe I wasn’t sure if it would work. I love candied nuts and have had salt and pepper cashews before which I enjoyed. However, lemon pepper on nuts was something totally new.

I am so glad that I tried them though because they were super easy to make – simply put the nuts, sugar and lemon pepper into a pan and heat and then cool down. On top of that, they were just incredibly tasty! There was a background of sweet heat that was perfectly balanced. I am glad I only made the one batch or I would have for sure eaten the whole nut recipe! It is even a vegan recipe so it doesn’t get much better when it comes to snack food recipes.

There isn’t a modern day British celebrity tv chef that doesn’t owe something to Keith Floyd. Most of them, may not share a cooking style with Keith Floyd but if it wasn’t for Floyd and his tv cookery adventures none of them would have the sort of cooking shows they now front. Keith Floyd took the British tv cookery show out from the stuffy studio and onto location.

Evidence of the influence of Keith Floyd’s cookery shows can been seen even in the current tv schedule with Jamie Oliver’s American Roadtrip cooking series. The whole idea of going to another country, meeting the locals and then cooking their own dishes for them is taken directly from the Keith Floyd school of tv cookery.

So, when it hit the news earlier this week that Keith Floyd died of a heart attack, the British foodie community certainly took notice. Normally, you would say that when somebody such as Keith Floyd died at such a fairly young age that it was a shock. However, nobody that ever saw the way that Keith Floyd drank or saw the fat levels in his recipes could be all that shocked that he would have a heart attack. None of which, makes it any less sad.

When two members of the UK Food Blogger’s Association – Back To The Chopping Board and A Slice Of Cherry Pie – started the Farewell Floyd blogging event I knew that I wanted to take part and make a recipe.

The quest  to find a vegetarian Keith Floyd recipe began. If there was one thing that Keith Floyd was not then it was vegetarian. He used bacon drippings in recipes the way that some chefs use salt and pepper. For a moment, I thought I struck gold when I found a Keith Floyd recipe for braised celery. That was until I actually read the recipe and discovered that he cooked the celery in veal stock. I mean – *veal stock*. As if chicken stock wouldn’t have been good enough to take it out of the realm of vegetarian possibilities. He has to go use stock from a meat that most meat eaters in the Western world won’t even eat!

Finally, I settled on having a go at making Keith Floyd’s Welsh Rarebit recipe. Just by reading the recipe over at BBC Food, I felt my arteries harden. Still, I had already mentally committed to it and since my husband is visiting his folks this weekend, I can cook ‘weird’ meals without anybody but me pulling a face.

The recipe called for brown ale, butter, cheese, whole milk and egg yolk. I decided to do my best to make it just a tiny bit more healthy. For the bread, I used Burgen’s soya and linseed bread and since all I ever have in the house is reduced fat cheese I used that in place of the full fat cheddar. I mean, if I was going to use real butter than there was no way I was using full fat cheese too. I also went for skim milk instead of the whole full fat milk.

I don’t drink beer either. Which meant that I had to go across to the shops to pick up a bottle of beer. Me shopping for beer is about as clueless as it gets. I stood there just looking at the beer for ages. The only brown ale I know the name of is Newcastle but they didn’t have any of that. So, I decided just to grab a bottle of Guinness.

The only other real change I made was that instead of normal English mustard, I used some of some beer mustard I bought from Emily’s Jams and Preserves when I was in Wales earlier in the year. It felt apt to use the boozy mustard for a Keith Floyd tribute. Of course, this being a vegetarian recipe blog, I used vegetarian Worcestershire sauce too.

As far as Keith Floyd recipes go, this wasn’t a complicated or overly involved recipe but it still had a lot of fiddly bits. Certainly more than I would normally take to do what really boils down to cheese on toast. Still, it was pretty darn tasty even if there were so many calories in it that I had to make two slices be my entire evening meal.

Here is my somewhat healthier (but not all that much) version of Keith Floyd’s Welsh rarebit recipe.  I think I will use this Keith Floyd inspired cheese fest as my jumping off point to get seriously back on track with my calorie counting and make up for the ton of cheese I just ate!

Keith Floyd’s Welsh rarebit makeover

Keith Floyd Welsh Rarebit Recipe

Ingredients:

1 ounce butter
1oz flour
5 fluid ounces skimmed milk
6 ounces reduced fat cheddar cheese, grated
5 fluid ounces Guinness
1 tsp English mustard or beer mustard
2 tsp vegetarian Worcestershire sauce
salt and pepper
2 egg yolks
4 slices of granary toast

Directions:

1. Make a roux with the butter and flour, and leave to cool.
2. Bring the milk to the boil, then whisk it into the roux. Bring to the boil once again, whisking to ensure that it does not burn and also that the sauce is free of lumps.
3. Add the cheese, beat in and remove from the heat.
4. Reduce the ale, English mustard and Worcestershire sauce. When thick, add this mixture to the cheese sauce. Season well with salt and pepper and beat in the egg yolks.
5. Spoon on to the slices of toast and grill until bubbling. Serve with extra Worcestershire sauce handed separately.

Serves: 4

Glasses up to Keith, whereever he may be!

Most of my temptations to eat meat come when I am out and about in the city. It is just so easy to call in at Subway and grab a sandwich or go for a burger. I know that there are tons of places in London to get a vegetarian meal or snack. The problem is that I can be a real wimp when it comes into going into unfamiliar food shops. I just get really intimidated by the thought of totally messing up the ordering process.

For example, there is a vegetarian restaurant on Berwick Street that I have walked past for years. Nearly every time I walk past the vegetarian takeaway restaurant I do a bit of rubbernecking to try to get a better look. However, they don’t have any signs up out front so I can easily see the menu and then there aren’t any prices on display and so I chicken out. One day I will go in and order, what looks to be, yummy vegetarian food but that day keeps being put off.

With my dedication to trying to eat less meat, I am also trying to push myself out of my comfort zone when I am out and about in London and try new places to eat. Most importantly, I want to keep it vegetarian and as healthy as possible. So, on Friday when I was in Soho all afternoon for one of my rare but treasured cinema marathon afternoons, I decided to go check out what was on offer in London’s Chinatown. I didn’t have time between films to sit down and eat something in an actual restaurant. Plus, going to eat a big meal on my own isn’t really wasn’t what I wanted to do either.

As I was wandering around the side streets of Soho’s Chinatown I spotted this Chinese steamed buns stand.

Chinese steamed buns stand

It struck me that the scene looked very un-London. Which, is part of why I like Chinatown so much because when you go there it is almost like going on a vacation without even leaving London. I also really enjoy trying food from other parts of the world, even if I am a wimp about trying to figure out how to order it. The steamed buns looked really good though and they were being sold for only £1 each. So, I stood back for a moment and watched how other people ordered. It was actually enjoyable watching the person that was operating the Chinese steamed bun stand preparing and cooking them.

Chinese vegetarian buns

I have to admit that I was tempted by the steamed chicken buns but I was a good girl and set my focus on the steamed vegetable buns. Turns out, it is as simple at saying “Could I please have a vegetarian steamed bun” and handing over the money. Of course, I knew that it would be that easy once I actually did it but that it what I get for being a social wimp at times!

I took it over to Leicester Square and found a seat to enjoy exploring my newly discovered vegetarian snack. I grabbed a photo because that is the sort of thing I do and I thought other folks looking to explore new vegetarian foods might be interested.  On the outside, the Chinese steamed bun looks fairly plain and pretty much like a giant steamed dumpling. It is very white and has a springy texture when touched.

vegetarian Chinese steamed bun

When torn open, the vegetarian steamed bun, doesn’t look all that impressive. As you can see, it is simply a bunch of veggies cooked down and then wrapped in the dough that is used to make the Chinese steamed bun. From looking at it, it appeared that most of the vegetable filling was made up of cabbages and other types of greens with carrots and onions mixed in.

vegetarian dumpling filling

I am pleased to that report, that these vegetarian snacks not only passed the test but were down right delicious.  Anybody that loves the taste of green veggies and onions that have been sweated down to the point where they have that slight sweetness will enjoy these vegetarian treats.  I suspect, there is butter involved with the cooking down of the vegetables. So, they probably aren’t vegan friendly but for those of us simply trying to eat less meat they are a delicious alternative when out and about in the city and looking for a quick food fix without reaching for meat. Plus, as they they only cost £1 each they are both tasty and cheap!

I love popcorn and I am always up for trying out a new popcorn snack recipe. It is just a perfect food for when you have munchies but you don’t want to go with the standby of normal greasing snack foods such as potato chips. Plus, it is so easy to mix up the way that you make popcorn so that it turns into a totally different snack recipe each time you make it. Unless you do something amazingly strange to your popcorn, it is pretty much always going to be a vegetarian recipe too!

The most recent popcorn recipe that I have tried is a Lemon Parsley Popcorn which I saw posted by Weekend Cooker. I was intrigued by the fact that I have tried many different types of popcorn snack recipes but had never had either lemon or parsley on it. So, having them together would most certainly be a new taste adventure.

Lemon Parsley Popcorn Recipe

With all of the butter which is used in this recipe, I won’t pretend that this is an especially healthy vegetarian recipe. However, it sure is tasty with the lemon zest really lifting the taste of the popcorn. Plus, it is okay to indulge now and then and it still has to be better for you than that bag of potato chips!

I love it when I learn a new way of cooking an ingredient I have been eating most of my life. Corn on the cob is one of those foods where I never really thought there was much a recipe for cooking it as much as just a method. You boil water, put it in the pot and cook it until done. Then you rub a pat of butter all over the corn on the cob, season and enjoy, right?

That is what I thought until I tried TxGriffLover’s recipe for Mexican Street Corn. Instead of simply boiling the corn on the cob, this is a recipe for grilling corn on the cob. So much goes into the recipe that instead of the corn being a simple vegetarian side dish, it becomes so filling that it could easily count as a quick vegetarian meal or a hearty vegetarian snack recipe.

Mexican street corn

This vegetarian recipe for Mexican street corn, starts just with the basic corn on the cob going under your grill or broiler for ten minutes. While you are grilling the corn on the cob, you move onto the next step of the vegetarian recipes which is making the tasty mixture that goes on top of the corn. You mix together mayonnaise, cheese (I went for the feta cheese option), fresh cilantro, garlic, chilli powder and seasoning. Once that mixture is made, you pile it on top of the corn on the cob.

Then the loaded up corn on the cob goes back under the grill until it is starts to go golden and bubbly. That bit really only takes another minute or so and then you are ready to bite into your vegetarian meal or snack of super tasty Mexican street corn.