Chocolate Brownies

I’ve never had too much of a sweet tooth, but there are two things I love: good chocolate and good ice-cream. As for the latter, I have found fantastic ice-cream made of rice milk at La Saga. (Un)fortunately the price for a 400ml box is around 8 euro, otherwise I would buy it all the time ;) Good dark vegan chocolate is not difficult to get, my favourite brand available in Belgium is New Tree. Yesterday I have finally dared to try and recreate the fantastic chocolate brownies we had at the Candle 79 restaurant in New York in spring this year. The recipe is available in their cookbook 'The Candle Café Cookbook', which I bought there but which you can also buy online, for example at the Book Depository.

I have to say they taste fantastic! I took some to work today and needless to say, all I brought back home was an empty plate ;)

Miso soup

Today was my first attempt at making miso soup at home. I have found so many different recipes online, all of them listing different ingredients, that I’ve just decided to stick to two of the really essential ones – miso and tofu – and improvise. In the end this is the ingredients list I used:

2 ltrs of vegetable bullion
200g of shiitake mushrooms, sliced
375g of tofu, cut into small cubes
150g of smoked tofu, as above
1 large leak, sliced
2cm piece of fresh ginger, crushed in a garlic crusher
1 bunch of coriander, chopped

1 bunch of flat leave parsley, chopped

A few handfuls of fresh spinach

3-4 tbsp. of miso paste (I used dark barley miso)

Freshly ground chili to season

rice noodles to serve

First put the mushrooms into the boiling bullion, after 3-4 min add all the remaining ingredients, except for the coriander and parsley. Let it simmer for about 10 min and then add the herbs and the chili. It’s a super-fast and super-tasty soup, I’ll definitely be making more of it soon!

Pumpkin stuffed with pistachio, saffron and apricot pilaff

It's not officially autumn yet, but you can already feel it in the air. Even though I was born in autumn, it's not my favourite time of year. I love the colours and the rare days when it's warm, dry and sunny, but at least in Belgium much too often autumn = rain, rain and more rain.. Well, there's no better way to forget about the rain than having some nice warm comfort food. I had never used pumpkin in anything else but soup before, but when I saw the picture of this dish in The Complete Book of Vegan Cooking, I knew I had to make it. It came out even more tasty than expected, a great combination of sweet and spicy.

According to the recipe, it serves 4-6 people. Well, we were only two and my pumpkin weighed about 1.3 kg, still we almost ate it all for dinner yesterday. It was that good!

coconut-peanut chickpeas and vegetables

This is a very simple recipe, that I first made a couple of months ago. Unfortunately it is so good that we ate it before I remembered to take a photo of the vegetable stew served over basmati rice. The last time I made it for some of our non-vegan friends - they really liked it and asked for the recipe - can there be a better recommendation for a dish? ;)

The recipe comes from One Thousand Vegan Recipes by Robin Robertson, one of my favourite cooking books. The serving suggestion in the book is to serve it over basmati rice. Which is what I did and it was delicious! The first time I made it, we didn't manage to eat it all, so I kept it in the fridge and just reheated the next day, it was still great, if not better (after all the flavours have really blended nicely)