Our meat-free month: day 19 + 20

Last weekend we had the most lovely food all weekend – and, obviously, all meat-free.  We had Mr Rigg’s parents over for lunch on the Saturday so it was quite a challenge for us to come up with something we thought they would love, as they both really enjoy meat and fish.  We decided on a curry feast and some little nibbly bites to start.  Then on Sunday we seemed to eat well, or at least what I would consider to be eating well.  See what you think.

Saturday 28th January

Beluga lentil crostini.  It’s always nice to do something a bit special when you have guests, so we made these little tiny nibbles, a lovely recipe I’ve been wanting to try from 101 Cookbooks.  They are small toasts topped with a goat cheese and herb mixture – utterly scrumptious!

Now the pictures get a bit less lovely as I was testing out my new phone and rushing to get everything out!

We made Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals vegetarian Rogan Josh curry – it’s got butternut squash, cauliflower, spinach and chickpeas in it and is utterly delicious – one of our favourite meals to cook.  From the same meal in the book we also made the lemon pickle (I thought it was disgusting, but everyone else said it was quite nice in small amounts with everything else) and carrot salad (I leave out the almonds and don’t add much chilli).

We bought some chana salad (a spicy chickpea mixture) from Unicorn Grocery, and served it with a bowl of yoghurt, rice, and hot naans and chapatis bought from the grocery shop next to Barbakan – so they were really good quality.

It went down really well with my in-laws, so much so that Mr Rigg’s mom is going to buy Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals as she loved the curry so much.  I must say, that the carrot salad is utterly delicious with the curry and naans – it’s lovely and fresh and zingy with the ginger.

Here is Mr Rigg and family looking very cheerful at our meat-free curry feast complete with cheerful spring flowers on the table…and yes, that ‘table’ is an old ledge-and-brace door on trestle legs, one of the best ideas we’ve come up with for seating lots of people for dinner…

For dessert we made raspberry jam frangipane tarts, also from Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals, which were so delicious – and I’m not really a pudding person.

We had an almost disaster with the pastry cases, which rather than buying pre-made ones like the recipe suggests, I decided to buy ready-made all-butter shortcrust pastry from Waitrose and make my own tart cases.  However…this is what they looked like when they came of out the oven (we had popped baking beans inside)…

Doesn’t look much like shortcrust pastry to me.  Thankfully we were able to rescue them, but I’m not sure I’ll be buying shortcrust pastry from Waitrose again.

Sunday 29th January

Breakfast of oyster mushrooms and fried egg on toast.  Beautiful oyster mushrooms, pulled apart (I find this works really well and much easier than chopping) into smaller pieces and fried in lots of butter until going golden, piled on top of buttered toast and with a fried egg.  This was a lovely meat-free way to start Sunday.

Lunch was homemade miso soup with noodles, tofu, peashoots, spring onions and chopped coriander.  I was sort of following this recipe from 101 Cookbooks.  We made our miso using a jar of Clearspring brown miso paste, mixed into boiling water – I love how the miso when it settles moves through the water in billowing clouds.  The tofu is not something we usually have, but I got it in a goodie bag from a local food conference I went to so wanted to try it out – I cut it into small cubes and then popped it into the hot miso.

The noodles we used were rice noodles, although I would have preferred to use soba noodles, but I had forgotten to buy any.  You just pop the cooked noodles into a bowl, pour over the miso and tofu, then top with sliced spring onions, chopped coriander and a handful of peashoots (the 101 Cookbooks recipe used watercress but I couldn’t find bagged watercress without other salad leaves mixed into, so went for peashoots instead).

Then we made chocolate milkshake in the evening as we had rather a lot of milk that needed drinking.  We just blended chocolate ice cream and milk until frothy.  We don’t have a fancy blender, so we just popped everything into a large, tall glass jar and used the hand blender to blitz it up.

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