Ingredients
300g blackeye beans
170g tub of salsa
100g tinned sweetcorn
1 green pepper
1/2 tsp chilli
4 tortillas

Method

• Mash up the beans with a fork
• Dice the pepper
• Mix the mashed beans, salsa, sweetcorn, pepper and chilli together in a pan
• Heat the mixture for 5-10mins, until it’s really hot
• In the meantime, warm the tortilla in the oven or in a big shallow pan
• Spoon a quarter of the beany stuff into the centre of each tortilla and wrap it up

These were surprisingly sweet and spicy! And very filling too, although that might have been just because the tortillas we used were pretty big. I’ll be trying this recipe again with smaller wholewheat tortillas and a spicier kind of salsa – but if this meal becomes a regular lunch in our house, I’ll need to learn how to make my own salsa otherwise it’ll bankrupt us!

(The meal kind of ended up looking like a face, with mushrooms for eyes – thankfully we were able to cover those accusing fung-eyes with the other halves of the bread rolls before eating them!)

After reading about grilled portobello mushrooms in the Vegetables section of Veganomicon, I decided to give them a try. I love grilled mushrooms on pizza, but I’ve always shied away from cooking mushrooms myself because of the various warnings I’ve heard about not washing them before cooking. I’m still a little nervous about whether wiping them off gets the mushrooms really clean or not, but I guess they must have been okay since neither Alex nor I got food poisoning!

Anyway, the mushrooms tasted great, but I think I prefer them small and sliced rather than huge and whole. We served them with Cajun Fries from Vegan with a Vengeance, which were lovely – I bought paprika and cayenne especially for that recipe, so I’m really glad we liked the spices!

This tangy potato dish is based on the Patatas Bravas on Fatfree Vegan Kitchen. I simplified the recipe a bit, since I didn’t have all the ingredients in stock – my version is basically just roasted red potato cubes with a spicy sauce made from tinned tomatoes and red onion, plus plenty of paprika and cayenne. We served it with some nut & blackeye bean burgers, and plenty of drinks to quench the peppery fire!

Ever since I started baking vegan cakes, I’ve been looking for the perfect carrot cake recipe. I’ve tried several, and they were all delicious, but each one was more like a spiced fruit cake than a carrot cake. This Light Carrot Cake recipe from Parsley Soup (where I seem to finding all my favourite recipes these days!) is just what I’ve been looking for – moist, sweet and chewy, with nothing to obscure the flavour of the carrots. Lovely!

These are the Banana Wheatgerm Muffins from Veganomicon – pretty much the best muffins I’ve ever made. They turned out wonderfully even and golden; not pretty in the way that cupcakes are pretty, but very cute in a rugged, hearty kind of way! And they taste great – the banana flavour is nice and strong, and the wheatgerm is chewy and satisfying. Very tasty indeed!

The other thing I like about this recipe is that the ingredients are fairly simple and basic, so I’ll be able to make them regularly without having to buy a lot of special items for it. The only slightly unusual ingredient is the apple cider vinegar used to curdle the soya milk; it’s a bit expensive, but I bought a bottle of the stuff a few months ago for a cupcake recipe (I think) and have been wanting to use it up ever since. So these muffins will probably make a regular weekend appearance at our house!

These lovely chunky burgers are based on the Bean Burgers recipe from Parsley Soup, with the addition of a bit of my beloved wheatgerm in place of half the breadcrumbs.

We oven-baked them for 30mins rather than frying them, then served them with spicy parsnip fries and Hovis granary bread rolls – delicious!

I love bran muffins, they’re perfect for those times when a flimsy little cookie just won’t do! I’m a big fan of bran breakfast cereals, particularly Sultana Bran, so I’ve been wanting to make sultana bran muffins for ages. These have a generous helping of apple sauce and cinnamon too, so they’re sweet, substantial and spicy!

Ingredients
75g flour
25g wheat bran
1 tsp ginger
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp baking powder
50g sultanas
150g apple sauce*
200ml apple juice

Makes 8 medium muffins or 6 big muffins

Method

• Preheat the oven to Gas Mark 7/475°F
• Mix the flour, wheat bran, ginger, cinnamon and baking powder together in a big bowl.
• In a separate bowl or a jug, mix the apple juice and apple sauce together.
• Add the liquid gradually to the dry stuff and mix well.
• Add extra apple juice if the batter isn’t runny enough (or water, soya milk, whatever liquid you like!)
• Spoon the batter into greased muffin tins (you can pile it quite high, since these don’t really rise very much)
• Bake for about 25mins (or until a toothpick comes out clean)
• Leave to cool in the muffin tins for about 10mins, then transfer to cooling rack

* I used apple sauce with added sugar – so if you’re using the unsweetened kind, you might need to add some sugar/syrup or extra fruit if the apple juice doesn’t sweeten it enough for you.

The darker cookies in these photos are the Chewy Chocolate Raspberry Cookies from Veganomicon, and the lighter cookies are basically the same recipe but with strawberry jam instead of raspberry and with the cocoa left out.

The chocolate cookies are wonderfully rich and chewy, with a bit of a crunch to them around the edges. The almond essence in the recipe gives them a bit of a bakewell-ish flavour, which inspired me to make non-chocolate versions with strawberry jam. If only I’d had some cherry jam as well! (And some lime, some pineapple, maybe some apricot… Let’s face it, I would’ve been baking jam cookies all day!)

I couldn’t resist making a few of the strawberry ones into thumbprint cookies with a little blob of jam on top. They needed an extra 5 mins or so in the oven and took absolutely ages to cool down enough to move from the baking tray to the cooling rack, but they were definitely worth the extra effort – in fact I think they tasted even better than the plain strawberry cookies.

Back when I was vegetarian, I bought one of these Dalek Cookie kits to simultaneously indulge my love of robots and my appetite for cookies. Thankfully I remembered to keep the dalek-shaped cookie cutter, and these lovely vegan gingerbread daleks are the result!

For the gingerbread itself, I used this recipe from Parsley Soup, which tasted great. And to finish them off, I used some little dots of white icing to be the daleks’ spheres. Lovely!

Now I’m on a mission to find some reasonably priced vegan chocolate chips to use instead of icing next time…

Ingredients
600g blackeye beans
400g tinned chopped tomatoes
150g wheatgerm
150g mixed chopped nuts (peanuts, walnuts, almonds)
150g smooth peanut butter
About 25g wholemeal breadcrumbs for coating

Makes 8 big burgers

Method

• Preheat oven to Gas Mark 5/375°
• Whizz the beans and tomatoes in a food processor until the mixture is fairly smooth
• Scrape the bean-tomato mixture into a big bowl
• Mix in the chopped nuts and peanut butter
• Add the wheatgerm a little at a time, until the mixture looks around the right consistency to shape into burgers
• Put the breadcrumbs in a bowl big enough that you’ll be able to fit one of your burgers in it
• Grab a small handful of burger mixture and roll it into a ball, then squish it down into a burger shape
• Roll the burger around in the breadcrumbs until it’s coated in them
• Put the burger on a greased baking tray
• When all the burgers are rolled and coated, bake them for 30-40mins (slightly less or more depending on how thick you made them)

Gorgeous! For me, the wheatgerm is what really makes these burgers special; I’ve tried the recipe before with less wheatgerm and with kidney beans instead of blackeye beans, but this variation is the best. The burgers are thick and satisfying, like a big hunk of granary bread – which is what we served them in, making this probably the most filling vegan meal I’ve had so far!