Today's mood

Today's mood is as grey as the weather and requires pancake therapy! Nothing makes the day sweeter & brighter than a pile of pancakes: first I make some with cheese and tomato filling, then add a little bit of sugar in the dough and prepare some sweet ones :) Mmmmh!

It's also very inspiring how many different recipes there are..in almost every country I have ever been to, there's some pancake speciality!

Spicy rice noodle soup

A windy rainy day, a perfect soup day! I thought of cooking oriental noodle soup, because I bought a pack of Thai rice noodles two days ago. Since eating alone is rather boring, I invited my flatmate to join for a spicy oriental soup :) I was actually thinking about doing a Japanese style recipe from Joanna Farrow's 30-Minutes Vegetarian, but didn't have black bean sauce and didn't feel like looking for it..this is an easy recipe, contains whatever you can find in your fridge :)

I followed the instructions of a noodle soup on the website of International Vegetarian Union. Besides recipes they have a lot of information about vegetarianism - good to learn something new, e.g. how to say in Bahasa Indonesian that I don't eat meat, chicken nor seafood (Saya tidak makan daging, ayam atau makanan laut).

When trying to pronounce that, I take a second plate of the spicy soup!

For 2-3

1 onion
2 garlic cloves
(a bit of ginger)
1 tbsp chili paste or fresh chili
1 tsp sesam oil mixed with a drop of ordinary cooking oil

carrots chopped to small toothpick sized pieces
cabbage cut into small stripes (easy to do with a cheese slicer)
tofu (I used approximately 150g of cold-smoked tofu)
vegetable stock powder (preferably without natriumglutamat)
1 tsp brown sugar
rice noodles
water



Chop onions and garlic. Chop also other vegetables and tofu before starting to cook so that you don't burn anything (happens sometimes in hurry!). Fry onion and garlic for a moment, add tofu. After tofu has got some colour, add the vegetables and chili paste and fry for few minutes more. Add water, vegetable stock powder and sugar, let simmer for some time. Add noodles and boil on a low heat until ready and spice with salt, pepper and whatever you like. Garnish with roasted peanuts or cashews, or with few coriander leaves.

I used Thai rice noodles, that need 10 minutes of cooking, but I guess other noodles would do the trick as well. You can also add e.g. bell pepper or zucchini in the soup if you have them at hands. Next time I'll add less chili paste (not everyone is as addicted as I am!) and maybe a drop of soy sauce. And one day I'll also master delicacies like Thai Tofu & Noodle Soup :)

Lasagna with soy and zucchini

I cooked this lasagna quite while ago, but now eventually I'll update it here :) It's very simple and quick to make, and you can prepare it even if you have only one kettle - well, you need two kettles and a bit more time & effort for making the tomato sauce and bechamel sauce for the more traditional Italian lasagna :) This isn't traditional, maybe not even so Italian, but still worth trying!

I usually prepare the tomato sauce for vegetarian lasagna with soy or TVP which is very practical to use and adds some more protein to any vegetarian sauce. Also in this recipe I have used dark crushed soy.



For the sauce:

1 onion (or two if you really like onion)
3 garlic cloves
1 tbsp olive oil for frying
2-3 dl soy (or other TVP)
6-7 dl water or vegetable stock (I just added 1 tbsp of organic veg stock powder)
200 g soft/processed cheese (that melts well)
spices as basil, thyme, rosemary, black pepper, salt

zucchini (around half a kilo)
lasagna noodles
parmigiano cheese


Chop the onions and garlic and fry them in olive oil.

Add the soy and some water, let it simmer for some time and add more water if needed, and the spices. If you don't know how long to cook TVP, check on the package.

When the soy is cooked, add the cheese and let it melt into the sauce.

In the meantime chop the zucchini into pieces or slices and lightly oil a lasagna baking dish.

Lay some sauce and pieces of zucchini at the bottom, cover with pasta and repeat until the baking dish is full. Add the rest of the sauce on top of the dish and sprinkle some grated parmigiano on top of it.

Bake in 225 C for 40-50 minutes. Enjoy with some green salad :)

Apple pie has got some new fans!

I made this very same pie again last week for some foreign guests and they seemed to love it as well..this time I put more apples, because I had got a huge bag of them from a friend and I couldn't eat all of them. One of the new fans of this pie said that I will be get to a good marriage, so let's hope that this pie works wonderfully on some innocent, unmarried guy ;)