Just for the looks

We are huge fans of Asian cuisine and we were in Siem Reap, Cambodia back in 2010 doing an amazing cooking class (see link below) which I can highly recommend, basically you go to the market with the Chef, get a stack of food and come back and cook an entree, main and dessert from Cambodian cuisine and then you eat until you are so full you have to be rolled home.

http://www.angkor-cooking-class-cambodia.com/html/index.php

Anyways, where was I?  Oh yes, Meatless Monday.  So Fresh spring rolls was one of the things we made at this cooking class. Unfortunately 4-5 years later my memory didn’t serve me so well but I figured, hey, lets just chop some vege’s up in thin slices, add some sauce and wrap!  Luckily for me this formulation worked well!

“Recipe”:

Examples of things to put in the wraps are bean sprouts, carrot, cabbage, tofu, capsicum, onion, courgette, coriander, vermicelli to fatten it up and the list goes on.  For the sauce I made a hoison, soya sauce and oyster sauce mix with some garlic thrown in.  Rice wraps you can buy from any regular supermarket or asian supermarket and all you need to do is well these in some warm water, place your ingredients in the middle and fold it up like a little baby going to bed.  Sauce is for dipping before eating or you can put it in the wrap with the veges.

Valcom Asian Rice Paper 22cm

Tips:

Warning: this gets messy, these rolls aren’t glued together with super glue so maybe don’t make this for someone you are trying to romantically woo over!  You will also notice the final picture is 1 single roll, one hazard of this meal is that it takes time to make, you get really hungry and devour the food before remembering you should be taking a photo!

Another white lie

I actually started MM somewhere between 6-12 months ago and took pictures after each meal so I have a whole bank of these which will go up.  Sadly,  I didn’t pay much attention to the order but I’ve decided that that doesn’t much matter as I don’t think my vege culinary skills have improved over this time!

Let’s start with Vegetarian Pizza, this was one of the first things we made because lets face it, you don’t have to do much thinking with pizza.  X Toppings + Sauce + Cheese = GOOD! and it was good! We made one roast potato, sundried tomato and courgette pizza; and one roast kumara, avocado and leek pizza. I know what you are thinking: “jeez there is a lot on those pizza’s”.  Masterchef would tend to agree, pizza’s look much better with minimal toppings but we weren’t out for looks, it was all about cramming everything on we wanted to eat.  NOM NOM NOM.  For the sauce fans I believe we had a periperi mayo on the Kumara pizza and a tomato salsa on the potato pizza.

It’s surprising that we haven’t reprised this one actually – super easy and you can make them to taste with what ever toppings you like.  I can highly recommend pine nuts too if you can stomach paying 1GAZILLION dollars per kg for these.  Overall Vege Pizza = 8/10, loosing 2 points because Pizza is an easy cop out for a Vege dinner!

Ps. If you like a good old recipe and want to try something different:

http://vegetarian.about.com/od/vegetarianpizzarecipes/tp/Vegetarian-Pizza.htm

Why Meatless Mondays?

When I decided to start Meatless Mondays (MM) I don’t think I had ever cooked a total vegetarian dinner in my life except maybe when I was super lazy (cough hungover cough) and just ate seasoned wedges for tea.

Why would I do it? Well I’ll tell you why I didn’t do it, certainly not for any health benefits or to try and loose weight or to save money – good because none of that occured.  I did it for the environment.  That sounds pretty cliche but I’m serious: even though I’m just person and it’s just one day, it’s a start.  A start to reducing intensive resources sunk into farming and a start to reducing greenhouse gases.  You’ve got to be in to win as they say in lotto and I’d like to think I’m in for fighting global warming.

Homepage

Now, one teeny lie I told.  It’s not really “I”, me, myself, “I” have help of a husband.  If I’m 100% keen on MM I’d say he is about 50% and that is 50% guilt from my global warming lectures.  But he makes some of the meals and eats them……the enjoyment of them is another story!

So lets start!