Thursday 8 August 2013

Cookbook Challenge Week 32 - Vegan Diner

This week I have been cooking from Vegan Diner by Julie Hasson. I have cooked a few things from this before that have all worked out well so I was quite excited to try some more recipes, fortunately every single one was fantastic and I have had a week of gorgeous food.

Old-Fashioned Tomato Soup - this soup was rich, full of flavour and creamy from using blended cashews.



Grillled Cheezy Sandwich - This fantastic sandwich was made using the Great Smoky Mountain Cheese from the book and was brilliant - a toasted sandwich filled with smoky cheese, onion & tomato:

Sloppy Joes - I have tried a few recipes for Sloppy Joes this year and whilst none stand up to Vegan Junk Food's, this was a really good version - full of flavour and very filling:

Jambalaya - This is another of those dishes that I have never tried before so have nothing to compare it to, however what I got was a spicy/tomatoey dish filled with rice and seitan. And it was great:

Pastrami Style Seitan Roast - I have tried the smoky seitan from this book before which turned out well, as did the pastrami version - it has a great flavour and texture (I may have slightly overcooked mine but it still tasted great):

Quick and Hearty Chilli - I have made this about 5 times now, it is one of my favourite chili recipes. Its indeed quick to made but very very tasty:

And now for the three best -

Great Smoky Mountain Cheese - my forays into vegan cheese making have not been a great sucess until now. This recipe is again quite simple using silken tofu as the main ingredient and although it did have a slightly rubbery texture, from a taste point of view it cannot be faulted. I will be making this again (I may try leaving out the Agar Agar to make a soft cheese instead) and using the base recipe again as well  to experiment with:

Served with hash browns, sausages and scrambled tofu:

Barbecued Ribz - this recipe was outstanding, I have not had a Vegan rib before but these were brilliant. Made with seitan and smothered in BBQ sauce they were one of the best thing I have eaten in months, I will be making them again over the weekend using a Chinese style sauce instead:

Ooey-Gooey Brownies - I made a mistake with the recipe for these and ended up using about half as much sugar as I should, so I expected these to be awful. However even my terrible cooking failed to ruin them. The brownies are full of chocolate chips and covered in a chocolate ganachey icing, and even with the missing sugar were still gorgeous. They were still sweet but not too sweet (being diabetic I'm used to not having too much sugar in things) and had a delightful bitterness to them (reminiscent of a good dark chocolate) which also came from the coffee used in the recipe.
I will certainly be making them again (maybe using the right amount of sugar in future) and they even passed the omnivore tested (all my family loved them):


Overall how did I find this book? Faultless.
Buy it, use it, its wonderful.

2 comments:

  1. The smoky cheese and the ribs are my two favourite recipes from Vegan Diner too! They're so good and that cheese is ridiculously easy to throw together!

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  2. I couldn't agree with you more! I made the cheese again last week leaving out the Agar and it made a gorgeous spreadable cheese instead.

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