This recipe is so simple it’s silly, you chop it all up, roast it for a bit then add the glaze and roast it for a bit longer.  The flavours are amazing though and we polished off the whole lot in one go even though the recipe says it serves 5 (Jim eats enough tofu for 3 in one sitting)!  The notes suggest serving it with a fruity slaw but it’s bloody freezing here so it went over brown rice and worked really well that way.

I will definitely be keeping this one in rotation as the squash is the only thing that I don’t always have in the house.  I think it would work well with sweet potatoes as well, I tend to think of squash and sweet potatoes as being interchangeable.

It’s nice to be reminded that you don’t have to do a ton of work and use 12 different ingredients to get a really tasty healthy meal.

Jim wanted roast potatoes but we’d had them not long before so I sliced the potatoes and stuck them in the oven for a bit of a change.  I put a bit of chicken seasoning on them for flavour along with some olive oil and salt, they’re lovely this way.

The balsamic glazed vegetables were really really nice and very simple.  I will make these again for sure but I won’t boil the kale beforehand.  The recipe calls for it to be boiled with the carrots and then sautéed and it was just too soggy and past it when doing both, I think the sautéing will be more than enough to cook it well.

If you’re a fan of Robin Robertson’s recipes and happen to be on Flickr come and join the Vegan Planet Group and post what you’ve made.  I set it up a while back but haven’t done much promotion for it beyond asking random strangers to join, so come on more random strangers, show us what you’ve cooked from all Robin’s great books!

This recipe is an oldie but goodie and easy one from How It All Vegan.  It’s just tofu, banana, sugar and a few other bits put through the food processor.  Both the boys loved this and it is so easy to make and so much better for them than the pre-packed puddings I tend to be lazy and buy that I really must do it more often.

And this odd lump is the Smoky Mountain Cheese from Vegan Diner.  I’ve literally had the ingredients for this sitting on my kitchen counter for months and months and just never got around to it.  I needed cheese for another recipe I was doing so I decided to finally get around to it and it was as easy as I knew it would be (of course I finally got to making it at a time that I had run out of garlic powder totally so mine is garlicless).

I’ve made some cheeses from The Uncheese Cookbook before and this is very similar in process, process it all together, boil it until the agar is melted and then set it in whatever shape you’d like.

I really enjoyed this cheese and had some in a sandwich as well as in the meal I’d planned it for.  Jim wasn’t keen on it but then he doesn’t like any cheese really beyond the very bland Cheezly or Tofutti spread or slices.  Piggle wasn’t well enough to try any but I’ll make it again sometime so we’ll see what he thinks then!

We enjoy a pasta bake around here and I sometimes if I mix it with pasta and a sauce I can get the boys to eat cauliflower so this recipe had our names all over it.

It’s a really nice mixture of flavours with the cauliflower, nutritional yeast, onion, garlic tomatoes, mustard, paprika, cheese and cashew cream.  Oddly enough once it was baked the flavours seemed more muted than I would have expected and I’m not sure why.  It still had a lovely flavour and reminded me of a dish I used to love as a vegetarian that mixed tomato with cottage cheese and pasta.

The cashew cheese recipe was pretty basic, I made a much smaller amount than the book said as this recipe only needs a small amount.  I had the leftovers of the cashew cream with the leftover pasta bake the next day and it did add a bit more taste to it so I may add a bit more of it next time I make this.

Jim really enjoyed it (he did try and get away with leaving all the cauliflower though) and Piggle liked what he tried but he’s getting over some sort of stomach virus so he’s not been eating much.

As I said, I’ll be making this again and I am more inclined to try a few more dishes from this book now too!

This is Old Fashioned Apple-Raisin Oatmeal from Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker.  Jim wasn’t keen on this but Piggle and I loved it.  Very simple regular ingredients just thrown in the slow cooker and ready when you get up, can’t beat it!

I add a little more liquid to my breakfasts than the recipes call for as I am usually upstairs longer than 8 hours which is the longer of the cooking times for most of them.  It seems to work out fine that way and not much gets stuck to the sides.

Again from Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker this is Breakfast Bread Pudding which Jim was really excited about as it contained french bread and sausages, both of which he adores.  It was a really odd combination though, also involving apples, spices and maple syrup and in the end Piggle was the only one who liked it, so much so he had 2 servings 2 days in a row of it!  I’d like to try some other more savoury breakfasts in the future.

I’ve also made Pumpkin Pie Oatmeal a few times from The Vegan Slow Cooker and Piggle and I adore it.

I read a not so great review of this book, Big Vegan, not too long ago and I have to say that I didn’t agree with it.  I’ve found some lovely things in this book and the recipes that I’ve made have been clearly written and easy to follow.  I must trust it because when it called for me to make my own stock for this soup I didn’t say ‘sod that’ and pull out a mushroom stock cube, but instead pulled the dried mushrooms from the cupboard and got on with it.

The stock part is really easy and I remembered to put a bowl under the strainer and not pour the whole lot down the sink.  So relieved was I that I’d done well that I threw out the reconstituted mushrooms rather than using them in the soup though, you win some you lose some.

I didn’t have farro even though I thought I did so I used wheat grain instead which took a bit longer to cook than the recipe called for.  The only change I made besides that was to sauté the mushrooms before putting them in the stock as I have an aversion to boiled mushrooms.  As I said we used regular mushrooms rather than wild ones too.

We really enjoyed this soup and it would have probably served 5 had I not had to boil it the extra time for the wheat,

These are so easy to make, you basically saute everything and on top of the apples, curry and sprouts there is garlic, herbs and onion.

The taste was lovely and the tables were reversed once again with me being the one eating the majority of something and boys turning their noses up at it.  I’ll get them to appreciate sprouts, I’m determined!

I served them with oven fried seitan (recipe from Quick and Easy Vegan Comfort Food) using seitan from The Fatfree Vegan blog and some mashed potatoes.  Oven fried seitan is always a winner around here.  I’m starting to crave some proper fried seitan though so maybe I’ll make some soon…

I keep seeing all these pesto recipes everywhere and figured I should give one a go.  As I had kale in the fridge and all the other ingredients to hand this one won.

It wasn’t hard to make at all and the pesto was surprisingly fast.  I made half the recipe as that’s all the kale I had and it was plenty with the other ingredients, using a whole recipe would have been too much I think.  I used the same amount of garlic and basil in it though as I’m a big fan of both.

You mix the kale pesto with the pasta (duh!) and some cream cheese and nutritional yeast.  The recipe calls for sesame seeds but I wasn’t in the mood to listen to Jim bitch and complain about them all through dinner and have to watch him attempt to pick them out, life’s too short for that…

The boys both ate this and enjoyed it, funnily enough I was the one who didn’t like it.  I found the kale too strong in flavour and even though I cooked it longer than the recipe said it was still underdone for my tastes.

It’s not often that I’m the fussy one or that a recipe from this book isn’t something I love so I’ll forgive it.

We’ve really enjoyed the previous types of kugel I’ve cooked so I decided to give a new to me recipe a go and it’s another winner.

Vegan With a Vengeance often gets overlooked when I’m pulling out books to look for recipes in.  I had it out for the pizza dough recipe that I have used for years when I was making this menu so it got a look in for a change.  I am amazed at how many things I have made from it and how many things I’ve not made from it!

This was really easy to make and didn’t take too long.  I actually had fresh parsley for a change but omitted the dill as per usual.

I’m never sure what to serve kugel with because it has the starch and tofu in it already plus vegetables but I figured you can’t go wrong with more vegetables!

The boys both enjoyed this as well despite the fact that they say they hate cauliflower.  Apparently it’s ok in a kugel though, who knew?

I was required to bring pumpkin pie to our family’s Thanksgiving dinner which was held on the Sunday after Thanksgiving.  As I was out on the Saturday I made the pie on the Friday and put it in the fridge hoping that it would still be ok 2 days later.

I can’t remember ever making pumpkin pie before.  I’m sure I helped my Mother to do it when I was a kid but pastry was always my older sisters job and I’ve never been much of a pastry maker so I was a little worried about the crust.  I pulled out Vegan Pie in the Sky which had arrived a few days earlier and did the Single crust which came out wonderfully well and was very easy to put together.  I definitely want to have a go at more pies now I am no longer intimidated by pastry (I know there’s no reason to be intimidated by it but it’s like anything you’re not used to doing, a little bit scary).

I considered the VPitS pumpkin pie recipe but decided against it for 2 reasons.  Firstly (actually this is a multi-part first reason!) maple syrup is hugely expensive over here, we’re talking $8 for about a cup of it so there’s no way I am putting half a cup of the stuff into a pie I’ve never tried before.  Also, I don’t think maple flavour has any place in pumpkin pie.  That, however, is probably because it’s not a flavour in the pie I grew up eating, it may be ok, but it’s not how I want my pie to taste.  I could have replaced the maple syrup with another liquid sweetener were it not for reason number two.  I have only ever found agar flakes in the UK.  As far as I am aware agar powder is not readily available and even if it were, judging by the price of the flakes it is not something I could afford (agar is about the same price as maple syrup but of course you get much less!).  I looked for info on agar in the book as the recipe called for powder and I thought maybe they would say I could put it in the blender or something but the only advice it gives on agar flakes is don’t use them at all which isn’t really all that helpful when it’s all you can get.  So, I hit Twitter and Google up for a recipe and found this one by Bryanna Clark Grogan who’s recipes I trust fully.

This was a super simple pie to make.  You just throw it all in the blender and then stick it in your pie crust and bake it, end of story.  Also it says that it needs to sit overnight so I figured that it would last ok for an extra day.  My only annoyance with this recipe is that it calls for 2 cups of pumpkin which is about a tin and a half which isn’t always convenient, luckily I had the leftover pumpkin the freezer from the scones I made.

Everyone at the dinner (the boys and I were the only non-omni’s) loved the pie except Jim which wasn’t a surprise.  We did not like the allspice in it so it has been crossed off the recipe and will never be added to it again as it was overpowering.  Piggle liked it so much he had seconds on the day and took some in his lunchbox the next day and asked if there was any left to take for lunch on the Tuesday!

Just writing about this pie is making me want to go and make another one, the texture was perfect and it was just so much like the one I grew up eating (if you ignored the allspice) it was amazing.

So, I now have a go to recipe for pumpkin pie!