Vegan Savoury Pain Perdu

When my children were little I used to make them a concoction we called Eggy Bread. It differed very slightly from the dish generally understood by that name, not because it was vegan - it wasn't, we were only veggie in those days, but because the egged bread was sandwiched together with marmite.

I liked this a lot, and it was a great way of rendering slightly tough old bread more tender for little mouths and teeth to cope with but as they grew older they eschewed it, as it were, and we stopped having it. Then I took the step I'd been aiming for all my life and went vegan, so that was that.

Of course, like nearly everything else that is cooked, the naming can get you into a lot of trouble. Many people would call this French Toast and who am I to challenge them? But my mother, who wasn't a fan of eggs, made plain buttered toasted sandwiches and then opened them up and called it French toast, so I'm not comfortable with that as a title; it sounds wrong to my inner child. Brits understand Eggy Bread very well, but this doesn't have eggs in it so I'd rather I didn't call it that. The French have a similar recipe to eggy bread for their Pain Perdu and at least that doesn't reference the eggs in the title. Since I'm in France I could use that. But the modifications would make a Frenchman swallow his beret. I cannot tell a lie and this rather long and rambling paragraph is why the post is called Vegan Savoury Pain Perdu!



Make some marmite sandwiches with thinly sliced bread. If you hate marmite then substitute at will. Miso might do it for you, yeast pate, nothing at all. You could use jam but I'd suggest you leave the nutritional yeast out of the dipping mix if you want to do that. You don't need margarine or extra spread as the sandwiches will be fried.

Make a dipping mix of 25g chickpea (besan) flour, 10g nutritional yeast flakes (about a large dessert spoon) and 100ml non-dairy unsweetened milk. You need to mix the dry ingredients and then very slowly add the liquid, mashing down the lumps as you go or it becomes unpleasantly gribbly and will leave little bits of unmixed flour all over your breakfast. You want a smooth, fairly liquid batter.

Heat a frying pan with a splash of neutrally flavoured oil i.e. don't use the Extra Virgin Olive oil.

Soak your sandwiches in the dip, one at a time on both sides and then put them into the hot pan. Fry until golden on the first side then turn over and repeat for the second. They shouldn't stick but you might have to be gentle when easing them up.

Eat immediately. The sweet or plain versions could have extra syrup poured over but the savoury ones need nothing at all apart from a strong cup of coffee to accompany them.

Saf - Restaurant Review

On a recent trip to the UK my son took me for lunch at Saf, a vegan, mostly raw, restaurant in Shoreditch, London. It was opened quite recently with a good deal of marketing hype and is part of a small international chain. They describe their offerings as a plant-based, botanical menu using pure organic ingredients and claiming to avoid all artificial processing.

I could, quite easily, raise some issues with that description since the processes they put their foodstuffs through before serving them are quite definitely not natural in any respect but I'll allow their intention is to serve food with as many of its intrinsic nutrients intact as possible and leave it at that.

The restaurant is easy enough to get to if you're comfortable with the tube, not the most attractive area of London but possibly the next place for a bit of gentrification. The premises are clean and cool, stripped and modern in appearance. There is a disabled toilet on the same level as the dining area but other toilets are downstairs. On a Thursday lunchtime it was nearly full which can't be bad.

The menu is quite varied although the naming of dishes can be confusing. This is a raw vegan restaurant and finding dishes labelled nachos, lasagne, even Boursin (as in the French cheese spread) is confusing and not particularly helpfully descriptive. As we were there for lunch the menu was slightly shorter than the dinner version but not hugely different, just a light emphasis on more snacky offerings.

Friendly waitresses found us menus and brought tap water on demand. We had some cocktails. I didn't much like my shiso ginger lemonade one but my son's was quite tasty. Unfortunately I've forgotten what it was! The waitresses are helpful and will explain the food to you if you need it, so don't be shy to ask.

We were both starving when we arrived and gobbled down our starters before remembering to take pictures. To begin we had the Nachos and the Boursin Trio. The nachos were dehydrated crackers and the toppings with them a pleasant enough salsa, rather nice guacamole and something that tasted strangely like the cheese spread that comes in tubes. Our opinion was divided over it, but I think we came down slightly on the dislike square.

The Boursin Trio was just three flavours of cashew cheese, red pepper, olive and herby served with some more crackers and garnishes. Everything looked very pretty and it was lovely to be in a vegan restaurant with no worries about what was lurking in the food but this starter wasn't outside of my experience in any way and so, probably egotistically, I spent a while wondering how I would have made it better!

For main course we had:


Wrap - I'm sure this had tofu in it but I can't fnd one like that on the menu now



Buddha Bowl

The wrap was good of its kind. The bowl very pleasant. My first bite of the tofu was sublime but then the next one I realised that actually it was just a bit too salty for total enjoyment. I didn't like the rice at all, it wasn't just sticky to eat with chopsticks but almost hard panned. The vegetables were nicely done but the sauce (in the bowl) didn't really seem appropriate and I left it.

Greedy as we are we decided we would have some puddings:


Ganache Tart


Strawberry Coconut Cheesecake

The Ganache tart was really rich and chocolatey. We liked it very much but it came, on this day at any rate, with some lavender sorbet. I'm not sure if this was a mistake but it was horrid, tasting like fabric softener. A disappointment since I've eaten much nicer lavender sweets elsewhere. The portion defeated my son but that's not too bad after a big lunch.

The cheesecake was sweet and toothsome. I enjoyed it, not least because getting a decent vegan pudding anywhere in London can be a struggle and this was a good one. Again the plate decorations and sorbet weren't gob smacking but the overall presentation and balance was pretty good.

We finished with a coffee and the prettiest little cast iron teapot of Redbush tea. Bill for the two of us, including drinks (no wine) and a 12.5% service charge (included on the bill) came to £60. Not cheap but certainly acceptable for a treat. I'd definitely go again.

What Fun!

Now this is something that is really inspiring and interesting, well worth reading and how I'd love to give it a go sometime...

feeding maybelle: A Tasting Menu Inspired by Masterworks of Art

Not vegan, but such wonderful work.

Back to Basics

Tempeh and Oven Chips

Traditionally styled food to make life easy. The chips are a mixture of ordinary potatoes, this variety is Kestrel, and a small sweet potato cut into wedges, tossed in oil, black pepper and chopped rosemary and cooked in hot oven for about 30 minutes. Give them a turn at half time.

I can detect a slightly off putting taste in tempeh so I usually overcome this by a dusting of turmeric powder and a little salt sprinkled over half an hour before cooking. Don't over do it, Mr. S-C said it was bit strong last night but then he can't taste what I do in tempeh.

The glaze was made from homemade 'brown' sauce diluted with an equal volume of soy sauce and a couple of spoonfuls of nutritional yeast. You won't have access to our sauce so substitute HP sauce or your favourite plum sauce for it.

Lightly coat the tempeh cubes and bake in the oven on an oiled tray for 20 minutes or so. Too long and the tempeh gets unpleasantly crunchy.

We served this with some oven roasted garlic and a fresh tomato garnish. It was alright.

Spring onion pancakes

After two weeks of living on crisps and wine I'm beginning to become interested in cooking again. Something that's caught my eye in the webbysphere as a tasty snack is the Chinese or Korean Scallion pancake, oniony, fried and served with plenty of spicy rice vinegary dipping sauce.

The method is almost the same as making stuffed parathas, Indian flat breads which I've been fairly successful with in the past, so I rolled up my sleeves and went back to the kitchen.



What I did was take 230g flour and 150ml warm water. Put the flour in the food processor and add 100ml of the water. Pulse to combine, then add water in tablespoon measures with the motor running until the whole mass forms a soft ball. Remove from the processor and knead for a few moments, you're aiming for a non sticky texture which is soft and pliable. Don't add too much more flour, just enough to stop it sticking to your hands. Form into a tidy ball and set aside, covered to rest for half an hour.

Meanwhile, chop a bunch of spring onions, about 10, finely so that you have 100g or so after preparation.

When it's rested roll your dough into a rough log shape and divide into six parts. Keep the sections covered as you work on each one.

Roll each part out into a circle about 25cm across. I experimented with more oblong shapes which seemed to make more sense from an engineering perspective but it's up to you.

Lightly brush the circle with oil, sesame is best but I didn't have any, and sprinkle your onions all over, then roll up from one edge to enclose all the onions in a long sausage. Make the sausage into a spiral, lightly flatten with the palm of your hand and set to rest while you make the others in the same way.

Finally roll out each spiral again to make a circle about 15cm across. The onions should be enclosed in thin dough and layered against each other.

Fry on a medium hot well greased griddle for about 4 minutes each side. Stack them up when they are golden and fragrant and divide into wedges. Serve with a dipping sauce of soy sauce, rice vinegar and water in equal parts with a little grated ginger and thinly sliced garlic in it. A few rings of a red chili are nice too.



Unfortunately they didn't turn out quite as toothsome as I had hoped, so the recipe is not a sure fire winner, more of a starting place that we can all move on from together.

The problems were that the onions burst through the very soft dough - two ways to help that would be to chop the onions more finely or to knead the dough longer so that the gluten develops better. I also wondered about briefly softening the onions before stuffing the breads although I've not seen any reference to this in the recipes I've researched.

The dough didn't stick together very well in the spirals so that they were tending to unravel on the griddle - too much flour when rolling out probably.

The end result was a little bit tough and not very flaky; this was a combination of all the problems above. The dough was a bit soft, over floured and the onions too large so that a long cooking time was needed. I also think I didn't use enough oil because I was trying to be healthy! Never try to be healthy with an ethnic food if you want to keep the proper character, enjoy it with full fat but don't eat it very often.

Don't hate me

I'm a very judgmental person and regret it...

Please don't hate me because I've not posted for a while. There are reasons, good reasons perhaps, but whatever, I feel guilty for not keeping up with posts and guilty for whinging about it, because when others do this it makes me a tiny bit irritated.

Back soon I hope. I'm still reading, just not talking very much.

A load of balls

Tonight's dinner was such a failure that I really didn't want to share it but decided in the interests of painful truth and transparency to admit that once in a while I make a small error, sometimes, maybe, a bit.

If I were to tell you how I made these I'd have to kill you but if you're determined to have a go set your search engine for Bondas, for it was these delectable treats I based my disaster upon. My advice? Don't try to use up leftovers, it'll only end in tears.

However, having made my supper I ate it and what made that possible was the coating of sweet spicy tomato sauce I poured over the deep fried lumps while they were still hot.

In fact, I've spent a long time working on this sauce or ketchup or even, if you like, tomato jam as part of the autumn task of preserving the tomato crop for winter.

It's a lot of work for a scant 800ml* of sauce but the flavour is good. If you have a lot of tomatoes, or they're cheap at the market give it a go. You have only most of the day to lose.

Sweetly Hot Tomato Ketchup.

2kg tomatoes, green stems and bad parts removed.
25g or so fresh ginger root, grated.
4 or 5 cloves
Cinnamon stick, about 4 cm.
Dried red chillies, to taste. I used three.
4 cloves garlic, crushed.
15g salt

250g sugar (white is fine)
250ml 6% vinegar (I used a red wine version because I'm in France but white malt would do)

Put everything except the sugar and vinegar in a pan, put the lid on and bring to a simmer over a gentle heat for 45 minutes or so. The tomatoes will release their juice and cook in it. Allow to cool with the lid on the pan.

Run the whole lot through a mouli or food mill (or press through a fine sieve) to remove the tomato skins, lumpy bits and spices. You will have a quantity of thin, flavoured tomato juice.

In a cleaned pan, put the juice, sugar and vinegar and bring back to simmer. Stirring frequently, allow to reduce until the spoon leaves a short lived clean line on the bottom of the pan after a straight stroke. The sauce should now be about the thickness of ketchup. This may take a couple of hours or more. If the heat is too high and your attention is distracted it will probably burn. Bottle into hot sterilised jars and seal with vinegar proof lids immediately. Should keep for a year but probably won't as it gets eaten very quickly once opened.

* It might not have been quite such a meagre yield had I not raided the pan to douse my Bondas, but a girl has to eat.

Trio of Beetroots

A starter trio of Roasted Beetroot Salad en Croute, Tower of Miso Infused Potatoes and Beetroot and a Chilled Borsht Shot.

Not really sure how to write up tonight's exploits. This is served in restaurant style although not, perhaps, to restaurant standards. More difficult than the cooking the presentation was hampered by issues of lack of equipment, no cutters for the stacks, a lack of filtration for the soup, even plating up was difficult with a limited range of plates picked up from junk shops and remaindered stores.

But in the cooking I should have liked to have infused the potatoes in their miso/malt syrup marinade sous-vide (this is something I've never done and am never likely to have the equipment to do) and for some inexplicable reason to do with not getting fryer smells in my hair I chose to shallow fry the croute, a bizarre decision that did nothing for the food.

Finally, food like this demands an audience. Although I tell myself the practise is good for me and the skills will be reusuable it's harder to keep standards high without a sour faced critic waiting at his table for the morsel that will melt his heart. I need to be somewhere to cook for people.