The first week of #cookbookchallenge - after surviving Christmas in robust health - saw me struck down with a virus that made my chest rattle like the suspension on my beloved Mk 3 Ford Fiesta I drove around in the late 90s.
The New Year also heralded my fourth year of #veganuary (probably another blog post in itself), so I needed something plant-based with recipes easy enough to rustle up between coughing fits and watching festive reruns of Agatha Christie. Which made Dinner, by Meera Sodha an easy choice.
Dinner was my cookbook of the year last year. In fact, it's one of the only books I have diligently followed multiple recipes from. Considering my love of cookery books, I have never found following instructions quite as enjoyable. Probably because I have a short attention span, get distracted easily and am prone to going off piste with the misplaced confidence that I know far more than any chef with their carefully tried and tested recipes....
While there are lots of tried and tested favourites in the book - the potato and cabbage curry, and the potato and spinach curry are great. As is the haggis keema with tattie rotis that I made for Burns Night - I had a crack at a couple of new recipes, The carrot falafel with pink pickled onions; and the sesame and crispy soya mince noodles.
The former were pretty quick and pretty easy. Oven baked, so no perilous deep frying, although you do have to remember to soak your chickpeas well in advance. And my blender lacked the firepower required to get them to stick together, so I painstakingly blitzed batched in the Nutribullet to turn the mixture, that resembled spiced sand, into something with some structural integrity.
The noodles were both quick and easy. I used allotment kale, grown by my wife, rather than spinach; and added some finely chopped mushrooms to the soya mince. But I was faithful to the sauce, which uses tahini and chilli crisp. Vegan stalwarts that can make anything taste good.
I also made what is already becoming a fast favourite - the buckwheat and tahini banana bread. When followed to the letter, it is gluten free and vegan. I didn't have any buckwheat flour, so I used rye, which does contain gluten, and might be the reason it puffed up alarmingly; although it settled down after it came out of the oven.
While it may sound worthy, it tastes delicious. Despite only managing to eat approximately one and a half slices (toasted, with peanut butter, which is really the only correct way to eat banana bread) before the Ewing snaffled the rest.
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