ChocNana Bliss Balls

I got a new food processor today and I am stoked, it means I can finally make all sorts of awesome new treaties! Its first job: bliss balls. 

I have found various recipes that I like on the intertubes, but I decided to wing it today, not something I normally do when I haven't ever made something before. So I came up with ChocNana Bliss Balls. I realise banana might be a little odd, and you can totally leave it out if you want, but I had it lying around after my little dude decided he wanted one and then promptly decided that actually he didn't! *facepalm* So I just whacked it in too. 

SJ's ChocNana Bliss Balls

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of pitted dates (mine were pretty dry, so I soaked them in boiling water for about 2 minutes)
• 1 C rolled oats
• 1 C raw nuts, I used cashews, but whatever you want
• 1 banana
• 1/2 C coconut, I used moist flakes, plus extra coconut for rolling, I used dedicated. 
• 2 Tbs vanilla protein powder, optional
• 1/4 C cocoa

Method:

1. In food processor roughly chop the nuts and oats.
   
2. Add and chop the dates, banana and coconut. Scrape down the sides of the bowl as required.
   
3. Add protein powder and cocoa. Mix until everything form together in the bowl.
   
4. Scoop out tablespoons of mixture and roll into balls. Roll the balls in the extra coconut or you could use extra cocoa or chopped nuts.
   
5. Place balls in an airtight container and leave to firm up in the fridge for one hot before eating. Store in airtight container in the fridge for about 3 days. 

For a GF option take out the oats (or use GF oats) and use extra nuts.  

I popped the recipe into My Fittness Pal and here is an approximate nutritional analysis from the mix. My mix made 17 balls. 

Approximate nutritional value per ball based on 17 balls.

Banana Wholemeal Pancakes.

"I wanted to wake up and want pancakes for breakfast." That's what I told my hubby, he replied with a suitable quizzical expression and then asked "What's it like being you?" whilst patting my shoulder in a patronising fashion. Fair call really, I am quite odd! 😝 

When I saw a had some VERY overripe bananas I decided I should couple them with my idea of wanting pancakes. I jumped onto taste.com.au and checked out a recipe that needed modifying and here is what I came up with.

Ingredients

1 ripe banana

1 1/2 cups wholemeal self raising flour

1 1/2 cups soy milk

1 1/2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar

1 1/2 tablespoons of rice syrup (or your fave honey substitute)

2 'eggs', I use "No Egg"

Method

Sift flour into a large mixing bowl. It may seem silly to sift wholemeal flour, but I do it to aerate the flour and then I add the bran back into the bowl. Make a well in the centre of the flour.

Add vinegar to soy milk and set it aside.

Mash banana in another mixing bowl or large jug.

Prepare egg replacer. 

Add egg replacer, soy milk and honey substitute to the banana and mix well.

Pour the wet ingredients into the well in the flour and and whisk until smooth. Set mix aside for 10 minutes.

Heat pan and cook as you normally would, about 1-2 minutes each side, depending on how hot your pan is. Just like regular pancake cooking, watch for the bubble to appear on the surface, but be aware that this is a bit of a dense mix so it doesn't bubble very much.

I used Nuttelex to cook them in after my first few got burnt when I used cooking spray. The Nuttelex worked very well! 

These are good hot or cold (that's how I am eating them today for afternoon tea). Serve with jam, yoghurt, ice cream, extra banana, berries, drizzled with honey substitute, or just eat them plain like I do.

Enjoy (:

Another long time between posts!

OK so yet again I have been busy as all hell! I started 2 new jobs in as many days and LOVE them both! I am SOO much happier than I was when I was working at the shelter. I have now returned to veterinary nursing and also started teaching animal studies at TAFE. Both of these jobs keep me really, really busy and I have been putting in A LOT of long hours at nights and on my days off to keep up with my workloads. Seriously not at all complaining, I never thought you could really be truly happy at work, but now I know you can! (:
AND a week ago my sister, brother-in-law, niece and nephew moved down to Tassie as well, they join my folks in muscling in my mine and hubby's "territory", at least the live like 40 minutes away!!!

So with all of this wonderful craziness going on I have really not had time to cook, let alone blog! Thankfully though hubby has kept my belly full as until last week he has been unemployed since Christmas, just one of may casualties from the Tasmanian state government not being able to budget properly. Luckily he now has a part-time job at one of the local collages, which is awesome because it it super close to our house and he's only entering his 3rd teaching year and and we expected about another 7-17 years before he got such a position. So, yay for us, we both have income, something really handy when you have a mortgage! And him only being part-time (at this stage) means I still get a house-hubby for half the week, SCORE!! :-p

We were, however, able to take a mid-week weekend recently to Melbourne. It was awesome, I had never been before and really I had never before had any desire to go to Melbourne, why would I when I had previously lived 1-3 hours south of Sydney? Plus Canberra, believe it or not, had plenty of advantages, and after they got a DFO there was even less reason for me to care about Melbourne!
So what was the reason for this life-changing (stay tuned) trip?

SYSTEM OF A MOTHER EFFING DOWN!!!!!!
At Rod Laver Arena

Oh man I loved this gig, I was head banging like I was a good 10-12 years younger than I am, and even though I'm only 28, I found out the next day that I was WAY out of practice for such activities! I didn't care though, I also didn't care that I screamed and threw my right arm around so much that I was barely audible and my shoulder was competing with my neck for sympathy! 

Now it wasn't just  SOAD that had me all excited, since going vegan I have wanted to visit Melbourne, and in the end I was actually getting more excited about food than I was the band! This was actually the 2nd time I saw SOAD, but only the first time that I had gone to Melbourne, and as a vegan at that!
A couple of days before I left I asked "the Facebook vegans" where I should go for meals and to stock up on vegan junk food to bring back.

I was directed to some great places, THANK YOU to everyone who made suggestions for me, including one of my fave places in Melbs: 

The Radical Grocery Store

I spent $100 here on junk such as Dandies, various Bonbarr chocolate bars, jelly, toffee, coconut ice, tofutti cuties, AND:

Mister Nice Guy Cupcakes
This was a Peanut Butter Cup and it was SOOO moist and chocolatey
and peanut buttery!!

I also ate at Enlightened Cuisine where we had:

Crispy Duck with Plum Sauce.

And

Kung Po Lamb.

AND on my way back to my plane I made my way to Chan House where I had:

"Honey" "Chicken" with Steamed Rice and Veggies.

We also visited the Australian Centre for the Moving Image which was really great AND FREE! Well worth a look if your hanging out around Federation Square.

But I think the place that got me more excited than ANYTHING else was visiting Lord of the Fries my new favourite place on earth, SERIOUSLY, I'm even spearheading a campaign to bring them down to Tasmania, not just for me, but we NEED more veggie choice down here!
LOTFs was my first stop on my whirlwind trip and then I had breakfast there the next day for breakfast as well. 

This was my breakfast meal, a big original burger and fries with vegan cheese and gravy
I have recreated these fries a few times over the past few weeks with
Redwood's cheezly and Redwood's vegetarian gravy, YUM!!!

Nuggets, onion rings and fries munch box with BBQ sauce .

Mini original burger

The best OJ I have ever had!

Now I can't wait until the next time I get to go to Melbourne, and I plan on spending more than 36 hours there!

Stay well,
Love SJ (:

It's Monday and I still Have 2 Days of my weekend Left!

On Saturday I blogged about the awesome weekend I was planning and the amazing tofu scramble I was loving for breakfast. I loved it so much that I planned on having it for breakfast on Sunday as well, but instead I got too busy cleaning my house before my family came over to worry about a silly little thing like sustenance!
Apart from the great flavours, and not actually tasting like tofu in the end, I figured out through Saturday just how fantastic HIGH protein meals are. I ate my breakfast at around 10 am and didn't even feel slightly peckish until 3 pm!
So I decided to get up and do it all again, only smaller this time, simply because I had a massive craving for a veggie dog for breakfast, bad I know!
So today I changed things a little, I made my scramble the same, but this time added kale, thyme, chives and oregano, I nearly added onion, but I didn't feel like crying this early in the morning! Also instead of toast I wrapped it in a flour tortilla and spread on some Tofutti, Better Than Cream Cheese.

It was even better today. I never liked cream cheese as a spread before I was vegan, and now I love the Tofutti stuff!

And after having had 2 boxes of chocolate soy milk, a veggie dog and a scramble wrap, I don't want to eat for the rest of the day!

Who am I kidding? I'll want a late lunch then dinner for sure! :-P

A Weekend at Home!

I normally work on Saturdays, but this week I swapped my shift to help out a friend, which means I get FOUR whole days at home!!
At the moment I am thoroughly enjoying Rage, especially because it's very Hip-Hop heavy today. I'm also loving the fact that I had time to make a totally KICK ARSE breakfast of tofu scramble, not the prettiest thing to eat, but DAMN it was good!!
The rest of my plans for this wonderfully long weekend are gardening and FINALLY setting up my little veggie/herb garden, AND going to the shelter and picking up a little of baby foster kittens. Also catching up on all of my forgotten blog posts, AND LOTS of cooking!! 
Seriously, could it get ANY better?! Well I will also be popping down to the Evandale markets and catching up with the folks and my Grandmother who is staying with them this week as well, so a totally jam packed awesomeness-filled few days, WOOT WOOT!!

 Tofu Scramble.

Ingredients:

• 80-100g firm tofu, crumbled, I use Simply Better Foods Organic Tofu.
• 3-4 button mushrooms, sliced
• A good chunk of capsicum, sliced into small/bite sized pieces
• 1 Tbs nutritional yeast
• 1 Tbs American/yellow mustard
• 3 Tbs tomato sauce
• 2 slice of toast, I like Helga's Soy & Linseed bread,, or GF toast.

Method:

1. Prepare ingredients.
2. Heat pan med-high, u may want a little spray of oil just to coat your pan.
3. Toss all ingredients in, cook till mushies are wilted and flavours have infused the tofu.
4. Cook toast, dish scramble on top of it and if you like, as I very much do, have with a glass of chocolate soy milk. 

For anybody who thinks that vegans don't get enough protein, tell them to suck on this, it's 30g worth, that's approx 1/2 your daily protein requirement, HELLS YEAH BITCHES!!

Banana Bread.

This afternoon I have made another loaf of Isa Chandra's Banana Bread. SOOO GOOD!!!
I wanted to share the recipe with you, but with the changes I make to it, which are noted in purple. I make my changes to make it healthier and contain more fibre, I promise that it does not change the flavour at all though!
I like to pop a slice or two in the toaster for breakfast, or just slice and butter some to pop in my lunch box for morning tea.
I also love to pop a slice in the toaster and have it with a nice cup of tea for breakfast.

Wherever possible I use organic ingredients.

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup brown sugar (I usually use muscavado, rapadura, or coconut palm sugar)
• 1/2 cups white sugar (I use raw sugar)
• 1/2 cup margarine, at room temp
• 3 very ripe bananas, mashed well
• 2 cups (plain) flour (I use wholemeal) You could also use gluten-free all purpose flour to have a great GF treat!
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 cup vanilla soy milk, mixed with 1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon (I changed this to 3/4 tsp cinnamon and 1/4 tsp nutmeg)
• 1/4 teaspoon allspice
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 F (180 C). Spray a 8×4 bread pan with non stick cooking spray, or lightly coat with margarine.
2. Sift together flour (I don't do this as I use wholemeal flour), baking soda, salt and spices.
3. [In a separate bowl] Cream together the margarine and sugars. Add bananas, soy milk and vanilla.
4. Add the wet ingredients to the dry. Mix well. Pour batter into pan (I sprinkled a bit of cinnamon sugar on top today as well, YUM! However, as this is quite sweet you may want to just sprinkle some extra cinnamon, 86 the sugar). Bake for an hour to an hour and ten minutes. (60-70 minutes).

Family Time.

Recently I got to spend a long weekend with my Mum and Dad, who currently live in WA, but are in the process of purchasing a property so they can move back to here to Tassie.
As this was the first time I have spent time with my parents since I became vego so, I really wanted to show them how well I eat, as I'm sure they were somewhat concerned.

Sunday night I made a huge lasagne packed full of crumbled lentil-veggie burgers, crumbled tofu, home-made Napolitana  sauce, mushrooms, spinach, onion, carrots and zucchini. Instead of a white/cheese sauce I used lashings of Tofutti "Better Than Cream Cheese" on the top layer I mixed in nutritional yeast flakes with the cream "cheese" which worked really well. The whole meal was fantastic, and because of the crumbled tofu, burgers and lentils it had a great great chewy texture, and the omnivores didn't seem to miss the meat.

Monday, to me, was a bit more of a flop. I REALLY wanted dumplings so I made Vegan Yum Yum's "Pot Stickers" which were a huge hit, just not for me. I also made wonton soup, also not so great to me!

Then there was Tuesday, night of Mexican feasting! Oh, it was SOOO good!! We had oven baked seitan chimichangas, bean chilli, Mexican rice, Orgran cornbread and corn chips. Of course no Mexican feast is complete without cheese and sour cream, yes I have all vegan substitutes thanks again to Tofutti and Cheezly. Also Corona with lime, naturally!

Clockwise from top left: Chimichanga with enchilada sauce and Tofutti sour supreme, Mexican rice, vegan chilli with a knob of Cheezly white cheddar and sour supreme and lastly Orgran corn bread, garnished with a wedge of lime.

As payment for staying in the Chateau Sarah, the folkies bought me 2 AWESOME presents! A waffle iron, my new favourite toy and a huge new recipe book: 500 Vegan Recipes, which I am loving, I just need more time to go through it.

Plain vanilla waffles with sliced banana, agave nectar and Soyatoo soy whip.
This was an AWESOME breakfast!