Hungry breastfeeding vegan. Eat the rainbow!

Quinoa and broccoli burgers

Sometimes when I'm trying to get back to sleep after doing a 3am feed I find myself thinking about creative projects or blog posts I wish I had time to write. Other times I think about food.

Last night I dreamed up these quinoa and broccoli patties served in a sesame bun with lettuce, tomato and mango chutney. And today I made that dream a reality - with the help of my partner, who fried the patties and assembled the burger while I fed our baby (they're a bit clingy today after getting their 8 week vaccinations).

Ingredients

2 cups cooked quinoa

2 cups cooked broccoli, chopped small

4 cloves garlic, fine chopped

1 onion, chopped

1 tbsp brown miso paste

1 tsp coriander seeds

1 tsp cumin seeds

1 tsp black peppercorns

1 tsp vegan boullion powder

1 cup gram flour

1/3 cup tapioca flour

1/3 cup almond flour

Method

Blitz the broccoli and onion in the food processor until finely chopped, but before it turns to mush. Grind the spices, and stir everything together to make the burger mix. Add the almond meal and tapioca flour, and sieve in gram flour until it's the right consistency. It should be sticky enough to hold together, but not as solid as cookie dough.

Cover a board in sieved gram flour. Make a ball of burger mix and flatten it, then prep the patty by sieving gram flour on each side and knocking it off until it's coated enough to pat from hand to hand. Fry on both sides in oil until brown. It'll take about 25mins to cook through, so turn the heat down and let it sizzle away.

I had mine in a sesame bun with chopped lettuce and coriander leaf, and a dollop of mango chutney. My partner had theirs with Dijon mustard, and their mum had hers with a smear of miso.

Roasted pepper and tomato pasta

Ahh, nightshades. I didn't even know what nightshades where until I fell in love with someone who's allergic to them. Turns out bell peppers, chilli peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, aubergine and physalis are all part of the same plant family - the same family as tobacco and deadly nightshade - and they're poisonous to some people. These plants all have shiny, brightly coloured fruit - and they are delicious.

My partner and I like to share food, so I don't get the chance to eat nightshades much unless we're eating out. But we recently started getting a weekly veg box, which has a potato free option, but not a nightshade free one. So I've been accumulating tomatoes and sweet peppers that came in the veg box. I decided to turn them into a roasted pepper and tomato pasta sauce.

Ingredients

12 large tomatoes

12 small sweet peppers

2 red onions

5 cloves garlic (I like garlic)

Salt and pepper

Fresh basil (I didn't have any, but it would be great to add)

Method

Heat the oven to 175C. Halve the tomatoes and peppers, and deseed the peppers. Arrange them on baking trays and drizzle liberally with olive oil. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and roast in the oven for 40 mins.

Finely chop and sauté the red onion and garlic. Blend the tomatoes in a blender - I whizzed then quite briefly to retain a bit of texture. Stir together the sauce, the peppers and the onion and garlic mix. I added a shake of tamari at this stage too, but you could salt it to taste instead. Serve with your favourite pasta (I like a tricolore blend of red lentil, green pea and buckwheat pasta) and a grating of vegan parmesan.

I added some chunked Linda McCartney red onion and rosemary vegan sausages for protein, but you could also use lentils, seitan chunks, fried tempeh or your other favourite vegan meat substitute.

I can't tell you how perfectly the tangy fruit acids of the tomatoes complemented the sweetness of the roasted pepper. Delicious at every mouthful!

Tofu scramble

Scrambled tofu is one of those vegan brunch dishes which is so rarely done right. I've had it as part of a vegan fry up in cafés and it's been this sad, dry, plain thing, seasoned with way too much turmeric to make it egg yellow and nothing else. Which is a shame, because I LOVE tofu scramble. When I make it I season it with fresh herbs and whole spices, and load it up with veggies. Like, it doesn't have to look like eggs! It's way more important that it tastes good!

You can put basically any veg in this, the basic thing is to chop them fine enough that they cook through in the frying pan. I really love courgettes in scrambled tofu, but I used our last courgettes in yesterday's Keralan jungle curry (mm, I'm looking forward to eating some of those leftovers for dinner later). This would be great with any leftover veggies like potato, squash, Brussels sprouts, bubble and squeak style. But my mainstays for tofu scramble are mushrooms, courgette, some kind of leafy green, and tomatoes and peppers if you can eat nightshades.

Here's how I made it this morning:

Ingredients

1 block silken tofu

1 white onion, chopped small

2 cloves garlic, minced

4 chestnut mushrooms, chopped small

1 carrot, chopped small

1 tomato, chopped small

Handful of rainbow chard, chopped small

Fresh thyme and rosemary from the garden

Black peppercorns and coriander seed, freshly ground

Vegan boullion powder

Method

Fry the onion, garlic, mushrooms and carrot in olive oil. Once they're cooked, stir in the tofu and mix it well together. Add the herbs, spices, and boullion powder to season.

I fried up the tomatoes separately and added them to my plate at the end, since my partner can't eat them. Yum, tomatoes.

Keralan Jungle Curry

A friend recently linked this Vibrant Vegan ready meal offer. The meals look amazing, but they all contain nightshades, so I can't feed them to my partner. (I love chillies and tomatoes and things, but they are severely allergic.) So I decided to make my own version. I cooked up a huge batch - I'm not sure how well the carrots and courgettes will fare in the freezer, but at least there's enough to do us for a couple of days if we don't mind eating the same thing several meals in a row. Which, when it's this delicious, I do not.

Cooking this took longer than usual due to being interrupted by baby every 15 mins for a microfeed. So maybe the extra slow cook simmering time made it nicer?

Ingredients

2 onions, sliced

Large chunk ginger, cut into sticks

4 large cloves garlic, cut into sticks

2 sweet potatoes, chunked

4 carrots, chunked

Punnet of chestnut mushrooms, quartered

2 courgettes, chunked

1/4 Savoy cabbage, sliced

1 cup green lentils

1 can coconut milk

Ground spices: black pepper, cardamom seed, cumin seed and coriander seed, turmeric, fenugreek.

Whole mustard seed

Dried lemongrass chopped fine

Tamari

Vegan boullion powder

Fish sauce (optional)

Chopped spring onion and fresh coriander leaf to serve.

Method

Boil the green lentils until cooked, then drain. In a separate wok, hot fry the spices, ginger, garlic and onion. Throw in the sweet potato and carrot, and hot fry. Add the fish sauce (if using) or a splash of water, put the lid on and turn the heat down to medium. Braise until the veg has softened.

Add the mushrooms and courgettes and hot fry. Add the sliced cabbage. Stick the lid on again and let the cabbage soften. Stir in the green lentils.

Add the coconut milk, and season with tamari and stock powder. Give it a stir and let it simmer a little so the lentils absorb the flavours.

Top with chopped spring onions and fresh chopped coriander. I had mine with brown rice cooked with cardamom and cashews for an extra protein boost. I had to eat it in two servings when I got interrupted again to feed, but it's so tasty I don't even mind.

Burrito bean stuffed squash

A real rainbow plate! Based on this Spaghetti Squash Burrito Bowl recipe by Cookie and Kate. We used these cute little round yellow squashes from our weekly vegetable box. The skins were totally edible after roasting and they tasted delicious - sweet, kind of like a cross between a butternut squash and a marrow.

We were out of limes, so I made the slaw with lemon juice instead. It took the juice of one whole lemon before it had the tang I wanted. I also hot fried the cabbage and beans with a little garlic to soften the cabbage slightly and make it easier to eat.

The fresh coriander makes this. I added loads and it could have coped with more.

I served this with roasted skin on sweet potato chunks (I thought we were never going to eat it all, but it turns out you can't have too much sweet potato) and leftover summer fruit salsa which my partner made to go with fried mackerel (#notvegan) last night. I'll have to get the recipe for the salsa from them sometime, because it was the most tomatoey nightshade free sauce I'd ever tasted - sweet and acidic and savoury. I think it had onion and mustard seed and frozen summer fruits and cherries, but I'm not sure what else. Anyway, it went amazingly with the black bean slaw.

The whole plate was delightfully colourful and made me think of harvest festivals, with the yellow squash, orange sweet potato, green coriander and spring onion, and red cabbage. And it was super tasty too!

Warm tofu salad

I love this salad. When we first threw it together I enjoyed it so much we ate it several more times over the next few weeks. I would eat it again right now. It's nutritious, veganish (totally vegan if you omit the fish sauce), gluten free and nightshade free if you want. You can add other seasonings to the tofu and make the salad out of whatever leaves and fresh herbs you like. There's something about the peppery flavour of rocket that works really well though.

We use these tamari toasted seeds in loads of dishes - they're a staple in our kitchen so I'll post the recipe to those separately!

Ingredients:

Lettuce or baby spinach

Cucumber

Rocket

Bell pepper/cherry tomatoes (if eating nightshades)

Cooked brown rice

Tamari toasted seeds

Firm tofu

Garlic

Ginger

Freshly ground spices (coriander seed, cumin seed, black pepper)

Fish sauce (optional)

Truffle oil

Balsamic vinegar

Olive oil

Coconut oil

Method:

Finely slice garlic and ginger. Cube tofu. Fry the garlic, ginger and spices in coconut and olive oil until the oil is aromatic, then add the tofu and fry on a high heat, stirring regularly. Once it's evenly golden brown on all sides turn the heat down and add a splash of fish sauce, balsamic and tamari. Cover the pan and braise.

Spinach and lentil pancakes

Pancakes:

1/2 cup tapioca flour

1/2 cup soy protein powder

1 cup buckwheat flour

1 cup maize meal

1 heaped tsp baking powder

1 tsp fennel seeds, ground

1/2 tsp black pepper, ground

1/2 tsp Szechuan pepper, ground

Almond milk

Filling:

1 onion, diced

1 knob ginger, chopped fine

6 cloves garlic, chopped fine

2 cups yellow split peas, cooked

1 tsp mustard seed

1 tsp black onion seed

1 tsp cumin seed, ground

1 tsp coriander seed, ground

1/2 tsp black peppercorns, ground

1 tsp turmeric

1/2 tsp fenugreek

2 tbsp coconut cream (I scoop the thick bit out of a can of coconut milk)

1 spring onion, chopped

Several handfuls baby spinach

Method:

To make the filling, heat 2 tbsp coconut oil in a non stick pan. Grind and add the spices to the oil. Fry onion, garlic and ginger in the aromatic spices. When the onion has softened, add the cooked lentils and coconut cream and stir. Add the spring onion and spinach. Add salt or tamari to taste, and perhaps a squeeze of lemon juice.

To make the pancakes, mix the dry ingredients, then add almond milk and whisk to achieve the desired consistency. Heat 1 tsp coconut oil in a non stick frying pan. Once the oil is sizzling, laddle batter into the pan and fry. Flip the pancake to cook on both sides.

I was amazed at the consistency of this gluten free, nightshade free pancake batter. So light and fluffy! I ate two of these (inbetween feeding a crying baby) and they were so good. Lunch happens at 6pm when you have a newborn. There's loads of the spinach and lentil mix left too - we might have it with rice tomorrow.