Vegan, gluten-free peanut butter and oat cookies

I have a perpetual problem with making vegan and gluten free cookies. Rice flour, or the Doves GF flour that I normally use in cakes makes biscuits too dusty and crumbly, It’s difficult to achieve that gooey effect that’s so great with non-GF cookies. I found a recipe on a wonderful blog called Paint and Tofu for peanut butter, chocolate and oatmeal cookies but they weren’t gluten free. I’ve adapted the recipe a little, but full credit goes to this wonderful recipe on her blog. It really is a brilliant recipe, and all I’ve done is tweak it to make all you coeliacs out there happy too.

Ingredients

Half a cup of crunchy peanut butter

One cup of GF (Red Mill) rolled oats

One cup of GF Doves plain flour

Half a cup of soya or almond milk

Half a cup of muscavdo sugar (this makes them a little chewier with a slightly more caramelly flavour

Half a cup of vegetarian granulated sugar

A third of a cup of sunflower oil

A pinch of salt

You can add some grated dark chocolate to this, or, if you have them dark chocolate chips. I chopped up 1.2 a bar of chunks of Morissons cooking chocolate (87p) and whacked them in, but it’s made it a little rich. Chunks of fresh apple would lighten this.

Method

First, mix all the wet ingredients together including the peanut butter.

Add in the flour, oats and chocolate. If the mixture is still too wet, add a little more flour.

Grease a baking sheet, turn the oven’s temperature to 180 degrees and roll into balls. Flatten balls with the back of a fork. They don’t grow so you can fit them snugly next to each other.

Bake for 8-10 minutes. Don’t cook for any longer. You want a cookie, not a crisp. They’ll be gooey on the inside, and, best of all, there’s no egg so you don’t need to cook them through to ensure edibility.

Leave on the tray for a minute or two after you’ve got them out or they’ll collapse and then stack up on a plate and serve.

Brixton’s super Franco Manca

Cheese not included

Gluten makes me die inside. But there are some days, such as this one, when I just decide to eat it. My run was cancelled because of the rain (each time I stepped outside a deluge started) so I had to go and work out indoors in the gym, and I didn’t have a phone so I missed my friend who I was meant to be having coffee with, and my plot was stagnating in my book. It was one of those days when I wanted to eat something really unhealthy to make me feel better. Normally, I head to the taco place in Brixton village for a double helping of corn (gf free) tacos, guacamole, super spicy sauce and stewed spicy mushrooms. But en route today I went past Franco Manca’s and noticed that there wasn’t a queue. I did a double take. 

Franco Manca sells the best pizza in London. Or so I’ve heard, because I can’t eat pizza. I can’t eat the dough and i can’t eat cheese. But every time I’ve walked past it, I’ve stared at people’s plates salivating. When I didn’t have allergies I stayed for a while in Naples and got used to picking up a slice of cheeseless pizza the size of my head wrapped in paper for lunch and letting it sustain me for the rest of the day. This pizza indeed looked excellent.

I noticed the menu offered a true Neopolitan option: just a great tomato sauce with garlic and oregano. Screw my stupid allergy I though and took a seat inside with my boyfriend. I placed my order, asked for extra olives, and waited for my pizza to come. As soon as it came, I cut the crust off and handed a halo of dough over to Sam whose eyes lit up. At least that was some of the gluten taken care of. 

But then I dived in. It was a big pizza, and for £4.95 it was glorious. Truly, the best pizza I have ever eaten in England. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that it was the first non-GF pizza I had eaten in 18 months, but the garlic and the tomato were just tangy, sweet and wonderful all in one. What made it brilliant of course, was the sourdough base. The sourdough that is currently causing severe cramping. But it was worth it and I don’t regret a bite. 

The pizzas are simple, but there is a generous bottle of garlic oil and another of chilli oil on the table which added extra heat to the plainness of the pizza. But really, these were unnecessary. The slightly bitter sourdough with pockets of burnt dough from the pizza oven complemented the piquant, fresh tomato. It was a match made in perfect, unadulterated heaven and I was sad when I finished it all.

It’s not a bad location either. It’s in the arcades closest to the tube, which is one of the reasons the queues are so vast. Everyone in the restaurant other than me seemed to be on a gay first date, and the man behind me was boasting about how he was dating Eddie Izzard, which seemed unlikely seeing as Izzard claims to be a “lesbian trapped in a man’s body.”

Nevertheless, anybody who took me to Franco Manca’s to eat pizza would certainly get a second date. Super. And for a budget conscious vegan, a fiver for a gigantic pizza was just wonderful and so worth the stomach agony brought on by the sourdough. 

Oops. 

Mediocre vegan offerings at Thai Square

Thai Square at South Ken

I’ve never been to Thai Square before because there are lots of places near to where I live that serve incredible Thai food. The Thai Cafe in Pimlico serves one of the best and most authentic Khao Pod Tod (Sweetcorn cakes) this side of Bangkok. Closer still is Khao San in Brixton which comes with this stonkingly good review by Mr Jay Rayner himself. 

But I found myself at the Victoria and Albert museum, checking out the Jameel Prize in the Porter rooms (an exhibition that celebrates contemporary Islamic art. Because Mohammed (pbuh) can’t be depicted, the majority of the entries are of rugs woven with geometric patterns or calligraphy. As a non arabic, non-rug owner, I didn’t find it massively appealing). The problem with going to this exhibition around lunchtime is that one of the pieces on display was some geometric floor tiles made out completely of Middle Eastern spices. The smell of cloves and turmeric made me so hungry that I had to rush around the space and head out to find food immediately. The problem with the V&A is that it’s in South Kensington and anybody who knows South Ken knows its a place devoid of nice and cheap places to eat. It’s a choice between chains and godawful cafes at the lower end of the scale, with a few extortionately priced michelin establishments thrown in for the wealthy. 

I’d normally head to Comptoir Libanais for a bowl of hummus and some salad, but it was raining and the queue was snaking metres out of the door. 

I was with my boyfriend and we were both starving because we’d been on the river racing in our rowing club’s Christmas races and drinking mulled wine since 7.30am. We ducked into Thai Square, optimistic that there would be a VG, GF choice or two.

We opted for the 8.95 lunch option. For meat eaters, this was quite a generous lunchbox of a miniature floury sweetcorn cake, tiny spring roll, some stir-fried vegetables, steamed rice, a heaped helping of chicken green curry and a bowl of lemongrass and mushroom soup. I got the same, minus the chicken. Furiously, I had to pay £1 extra for some tofu, which made no sense to me at all. 

The soup was wonderful. The clear broth tasted strongly of ginger and lemongrass, but the lemon flavour was too overpowering. The tiny starters were claggy and tasted the same as the spring rolls I bought in bulk from the freezer section of my local Chinese supermarket. Accompanying this was a stack of stir-fried veggies, which reminded me once more of the depths of my freezer’s frozen vegetable collection. The green curry sauce was ok, but a bit watery, and the helping of rice was generous. I left half of it.

The highlight of the meal was both the price and the soup. For 8.95 in South Ken, you couldn’t hope for much more. But the website lauds itself as ‘the best Thai food in London’. It’s not, it’s really not. Go there if you have to, but not because you want to. Go to the places I suggested at the start of this article or make your way to your local Thai place. This ranks among the worst in terms of quality, but the best in terms of sheer quantity. So, swings and roundabouts.

There was a huge amount of food, and it fortified me enough to go and check out the medieval door arches in the permanent gallery back at the V&A. I know, I know. How cool am I?

Bring in the Christmas cheer with GF, DF mince pies!

The last mince pie, at work

One thing British supermarkets have been able to get right is the production of GF, DF mince pies. Even Morrisons have their own version, although I still swear by Hale and Hearty’s (stocked at posh shops) selection of mince pies. Clearly conglomerates are saddened that their allergy ridden customers might have to miss out on Christmas-the rest of the year they’re pretty happy showering us with horrific rip-offs of bread and Bakewell tarts.

Even though I’ve bought at least seven trays of supermarket mince pies over the last few weeks (Yes, mince pies are the culinary highlight of my year, every year), it’s still better to make your own.

Last night I found a jar of vegan, GF mincemeat in the supermarket (for my American readers this is a mix of currants and wintery spices). My boyfriend and I knocked up some sweet pastry, put a spoonful of mincemeat in each, added a lid and whacked the little pies in the oven.

The house smelt curranty and christmasy all evening and I went to sleep with the smell of nutmeg, allspice and pastry in my nose. However convenient it is to buy a tray of mince-pies, nothing can beat the buttery-style pastry of these sweet cakes.

I wish I hadn’t eaten the one I brought in for an afternoon treat for pudding!

Ingredients:

50g Gram Flour

120g of Doves All-purpose GF flour

50g white sugar

120g soya margarine

Method:

Heat oven to 180 degrees.

Mix together flour and margerine until texture of fine breadcrumbs (if the crumb is too large and feels sticky add more GF flour)

Make a small well in the mix and break an egg into it, add 1 tablespoon of water and mix together before mixing into the  crumb.

Add small amounts of water/flour until you have the consistency of pastry. Wrap in clingfilm and place in fridge for 30 minutes.

Grease shallow muffin tin using soya margarine.

Roll pastry out (I do this on a piece of clingfilm as it tends to stick to the worktop and this means you can lift it up easily.)

Cut circles out and press into tray, bake blind for ~5-10 minutes (Pastry should still be pale but firm)

Fill with mix (1tsp of mincemeat should do)

Cut smaller circles and place on top: I use a small amount of soya milk around the edges to help seal pastry lid.

Pierce top of each pie to prevent explosions

Bake until done (normally about 15 minutes or until pastry is brown)

And there you have it. Beautiful mince-pies. Dust wit icing sugar for desired beauty. Merry Christmas from my work desk folks

Double layer delicious dairy and gluten free chocolate cake

This cake is towering, moist and insanely chocolately. But, it isn’t a moist desert. Rather, it is a slab of cake to have at tea-time, a desk-based treat or something to take round to your friend’s house when they have a party. It’s an everyday chocolate cake-extremely easy to whip up and relatively cheap too.

For the best moist,DF and GF  desert cake (and it’s cocaine free, I promise), check out this: Nigella chocolate cake

For mine, which is cheap and quick, see below:

Ingredients for cake

2 cups of sugar

2 cups of soya milk (or almond milk, or whatever you prefer)

2 eggs

2 cups of Doves self-raising flour

a dash of lemon juice

Vanilla essence

1 1/2 cups of oil of your choice (I used sunflower but a light olive oil is also tasty)

A cup of good quality dark cocoa powder ( I used Green and Black’s but I’m sure Bourneville is fine)

 

Ingredients for “buttercream”

1 cup of icing sugar

1/2 a cup of cocoa powder

3/4 cup of soya margarine (or alternative vegan butter)

A dash of vanilla extract

Method:

1. Beat the eggs, sugar and milk together

2. Add the flour slowly, beating as you go. Add the cocoa too.

3. Add a few drops of vanilla essence and lemon to the mix. The lemon helps it to rise.

4. Divide it into two greased springform baking tins and put in a hot oven (set to about 180). Cook for 30-40 minutes or until the point of the knife comes out clean.

5. When the cakes have cooled down, beat the buttercream ingredients altogether and sandwich the two halves together.

6. if you’re feeling truly decadent, melt some dark chocolate and pour it over the cake. I just sprinkled icing sugar and cocoa powder over it, but it would certainly make it moister.

 

 

Yalla Yalla-still pretty tasty

The owners of the restaurant clearly anticipated the speed at which their waitresses would work when they named their London-based mini chain Yalla Yalla-in arabic this means hurry up! The food takes a while to arrive, and the waitresses eye customers up lazily. There is no anticipation of what the customer might need. We sat without menus for several minutes only to be brought a bill; another time when we wanted the bill the staff seemed to flick their heads away whenever we tried to catch their eye. “Yalla yalla” is certainly what I’ve wanted to cry many a time, but luckily, the food is almost always worth it.

A startlingly good option for vegetarians, Yalla Yalla is one of those perpetually popular Soho institutions that appeals to vegans, meat-eaters, students and the wealthy. 

Yalla Yalla is based on Beirut streetfood; expect houmous, falafels and lots of parsley. What’s so wonderful about Yalla Yalla is that all the staples are elevated, making even a plate of humble humous a delight to mop up with the free rounds of flatbread which accompany the meal. 

A smoky baba-ghanoush is scattered with sweet red pomegranate seeds and a rich, top-quality olive oil is drizzled generously on top. The humous is also accompanied by the beautifully savoury oil and has a refreshing layer of tangy, parsley leaves. 

Even the falafels arrive with slices of red onion: the sweet sesame balls contrast beautifully with the sour onion slices.

However, the waitresses aren’t the friendliest. They look harassed and even at 8.30pm, want us out. A queue is forming outside, they say. They clear our plates before we’ve quite finished picking the pomegranate seeds out of the bowls and sucking the flesh off them. 

My companion mentioned how wonderful and crisp the halloumi was: “It lacked the chewiness, the slipperiness that you come to expect with halloumi.”

Best of all, the meal finished with a glass of apple, mint and ginger lemonade. It was a super, green palate-cleanser and one that back in July I had found myself craving in the hot weather.

Some places lose their appeal a few years after they open, but Yalla Yalla has only grown in interest for me. It is a light, refreshing meal set in a wonderfully bustling, if slightly chaotic small restaurant. 

 

Read other reviews here-to summarise, I’d go with the simpler items on the menu as they hit the spot far better than the elaborate, meaty dishes seem to. Another win for the veggies among us!

Terrible (The Telegraph)

 Mediocre (Time Out)

 Good (London Eater 

Mother Bhumi’s Pakora/Bhaji street van

This picture does not do this stall justice, but the crispiness is just wonderful for alleviating any sunday hangovers

I lived for a month or so in the heart of Dulwich, and to escape the boringness of living in the heart of Dulwich I used to frequently walk to Brixton. This took me through Herne Hill, a place I’d heard of only because the train to Dulwich stopped there. For anybody who hasn’t ambled around south London on a cold sunday afternoon and couldn’t tell their Balham from their Clapham, Herne Hill is squeezed between Dulwich, Camberwell and Brixton. It’s quite swish: Brockwell Park is full of jogging yummy daddies with big running prams and children dressed head to toe in Cath Kidston. Next to the park is Brockwell Lido, a large outdoor, yet unheated swimming pool.

Luckily, whoever decided to renovate the lido also decided to add an indoor swimming pool and hydrotherapy “suite”, which makes the whole package more attractive.

Alongside this rather snazzy park and snazzier leisure centre, Herne Hill has a pretty substantial food market. Out in force on sundays are stalls piled with autumnal squashes, sourdough loaves and cake. Lots of cake.

It’s well worth a browse, if only to sample the wedges of bread that sit next to tangy chutneys and tart marinades. But if you’re passing, make sure you detour to Mother Bhumi, a street food van serving up the best pakora I have ever eaten.

Best of all? It’s all gluten, meat and dairy free. They grind their own flour, add their own selection of spices to the batter and fry up the veggies right there in front of you, which means they’re all still crisp and fresh and hot. One of the downfalls of Brick Lane and Euston – where the biggest predominance of shops selling bhajis sit in central London – is that everything is fried earlier in the morning. This means droopy pastry and chilly fillings. Nuh-err.

As well as the battered vegetables, customers can choose between the mild, hot and hotter mango chutneys and lime pickles to complement their pakoras. This is such a great snack for cold November afternoons that I can’t recommend it enough if you find yourself down south on a sunday.

And the man at the helm, who may or may not be called Ed, is lovely too.

As well as being a pleasant (if slightly pretentious) local food market, the stalls are community focused and some, like Mother Bhumi, offers up some truly gorgeous portions of unfussy, tasty, un-greasy, flavoursome snacks.

Wonderful.

£3.50 for a small selection with two dips.

£6 for a large box. 

My warming, spicy dal-stew

This isn’t a very appetising photograph, so to make up for it, I’ve also added a picture of my 11 week old kitten underneath

Neko, sleeping on the chair behind me while I was writing

This dish is a bastardisation of a variety of different cultures, I’m sure. It doesn’t promise to be authentic to either South Indian cuisine, or 1960’s vegetarian hippy cuisine, but it does hit the spot very nicely when London’s weather threatens to drop below -4 degrees Celsius. Jesus, London, won’t you brighten up a little?

I find as it gets colder, I get hungrier, and there’s nothing worse than being fat, pale and cold. So I like to make something that tastes good, but also something that fills me up so if I’m still peckish I can eat more of it and not worry too much about it. Luckily, with the lentils, a bowlful of this will usually do me just fine. Add rice or a naan bread, and you’re going to be full beyond belief. Like I said, the perfect winter warmer, just made for eating and then crawling under a thick fleece rug to hibernate somewhere. You’re welcome. 

 

Ingredients

Thumb of fresh ginger

2 garlic cloves

1 mouse-shit spicy green chilli

Whatever spices you have to hand. I use a teaspoon of cumin, garam masala, turmeric, ginger, ground corriander seeds and cinnamon

1 onion

1 big carrot

Whatever other veggies you have to hand-I find green beans and courgettes work well

1 can of tomatoes

1 can of coconut milk

A big handful of split peas and a big handful of lentils (your choice what colour. If no split peas, add more lentils)

(if you have it, a handful of fresh coriander and some pumpkin seeds crisped up with soy sauce)

Mango chutney if the feeling takes you

 

Method

Heat a little oil in the bottom of a deep pan and add the chopped up ginger, garlic, chilli, onion and spice mix. Turn the heat down and allow it to cook for 5 minutes. When it dries out, add a splash of cold water to make a kind of spice paste. 

Add the chopped up carrot and other veggies. Stir and then add the can of tomatoes and can of coconut milk. Mix and then add the lentils and split peas. 

Add 200ml more of water-the lentils will absorb a lot. Bring it to the boil, then turn the heat right down and leave it to simmer. The joy of this is that it works as a slow-cooker dish, or it will be ready in just 20 minutes depending on how hungry you are. I usually leave mine for an hour, just because the flavours all mix together wonderfully.

Just before serving, fry up a handful of pumpkin seeds with a splash of soy sauce so they become crisp and sticky. Keep moving them around the pan so they don’t stick. 

Serve hot, scatter a handful of fresh coriander, a dollop of mango chutney and some pumpkin seeds and stir it all together. Bliss. 

Guacamole, sweet potato wedges and spicy salsa

Add some crisps and vegan sour cream to turn your lunch into a party snack

Yesterday I mentioned the gnarly sweet potato that I found in the recesses of a cupboard. It’s been there for weeks, possibly months, but my boyfriend reassures me gloomily that it’s still edible.

My subconscious probably hoped that if I left it there long enough it would sprout and make baby-sweet potatoes. Then I realised it would just go mouldy. I decided to take a forward step.

I resolved to cook it, hack off it’s weird growths and try to make a tasty lunch.

 

Sweet potato wedges with guacamole and salsa (serves 2)

 

Ingredients

One sweet potato

Avocado

Red onion, chopped finely

Juice of one lime (or from a bottle)

Two fresh tomatoes

Handful of fresh coriander

One green chilli, sliced finely

Salt and pepper-to season

 

Method

Slice the sweet potato into wedge shaped pieces and them on a tray, drizzled with oil (rapeseed works best, but Value sunflower is also fine). Grind some salt and pepper over the top and place in a hot oven (180 degrees) for about 45 minutes or until tender.

 

While the potato is cooking, peel and chop the red onion and halve it. Put half on one bowl. In this bowl, add the avocado, half the chilli, half the chopped coriander, a generous squeeze of lime and more seasoning. Mash together, so it’s chunky, but not pureed.

 In another bowl, finely chop the tomatoes and add the remaining onions. Squeeze the rest of the lime in, the rest of the coriander, half the chilli, season and then mix it all together.

 Your potato wedges will be ready when they are slightly browned and crisp. Take them out of the oven and serve with the guac and salsa.  

Korean food, London: “I say, what!, Bipbambop!”

From the outside Bipbambop looked like any other asian joint between the grotty end of Oxford Street and the swankier confines of Soho. Bare white walls coupled with scrubbed down wooden tables housed urgent conversations between long-distant friends and dating couples, after work drinks and Koreans slurping kimchi in a homesick manner.

The room was bright, clean and unassuming. The cardboard menus on the table gave the impression of a cheap and cheerful cafe, but the menus fare was far from standard. Bimbapbom is apparently a Korean speciality food. It sounds like the sort of exclamation an absurdly posh man would utter had he found out that there was grouse for dinner. ‘I say, bipbapbop!’ he would cry in utmost delight. But this menu was completely grouse free, and was as far from a gentrified dining room as someone who can play the kazoo can call themself a musician. Unlike other cuisines from Asia, Korean cuisine hasn’t yet hit the mass market in the UK. If someone mentions Thai cuisine you think ‘hot, sweet, sour, salty’, Chinese can be ‘sticky, sweet, black bean sour’ and even Vietnamese is coming into its own with ‘hot, sour and clear flavours’.

Korean hits a brick wall for many punters. The only thing I was sure about was that some Koreans use tomato ketchup for flavouring sauces when they’re absent from their homeland. And I only know this because I used to go to school with some Koreans who would squirt bottles of the stuff into their rice and vegetables, presumably to achieve the umami-esque flavour of Korean sauces that also hadn’t broken into UK consumer markets yet either. To be honest, despite the fact that I loved all South East Asian food, Szechuan food and most Japanese flavour combinations, I assumed that I would love Bimbombap and that I would have a whale of a time enjoying new and varied meals from now on.

Bimbabop, named after the popular Korean meal, seemed to be unsure of whether it was a quick eat cafe, a healthfood joint or a stopover for expat-Koreans. The menu offered dishes served in hot stone dishes that when they arrived at our table were so hot that they warmed my legs through the wooden table.

My two dining companions opted for meat based dishes. Sam chose one that would cook his beef in the pot, whilst Tim decided that Korean seafood would be a safe bet. As soon as his arrived, he pulled out a tiny thing with lots of legs, and began to wish instead that he’d opted for the safer beef. I clearly barked completely up the wrong tree by ordering a dish simply entitled ‘nutritious’. I hadn’t gone here to be particularly virtuous with my victuals, yet I was determined to have something that was filling, tasty and for once, didn’t involve tofu.

Because all dishes were served with rice, most of the vegetarian dishes were also vegan, and most of the vegan dishes were gluten free. ALthough the waiter did struggle with the concept of something being gluten free, and seemed to think that gluten was another word for meat and started to point out all of the vegetarian dishes. Super. Bipbambop!

The hot bowl was so hot that as I pushed my brown rice and vegetables around my bowl with my chopsticks they sizzled aggressively on the side of the plate. I can see this way of cooking becoming a fad, but it did nothing for the quality of the food in my dish. The longer I took to eat my food, the hotter it became and the more overcooked were my vegetables. Clearly, Korean people eat significantly quicker than Westerners. The flavours of my ‘nutritious dish’ were not amazing. The server brought two squirty bottles circa 1950s burger joint style: instead of mustard and ketchup, we got hot chilli sauce and miso sauce. The hot chilli sauce was not spicy and instead I just seemed to end up with a sticky bowl of brown rice and cucumber pieces after it had all arrived so beautifully presented. Sam and Tim’s dishes were much more satisfactory, but as yet, I’m no convert to Bipbambop. The flavours didn’t change, it felt like a bit of a chore to get the the bottom of the dish. So I gave it to Sam, who ate it, before exclaiming ‘Bipbambop! This stuff is frightful’.

Apparently mine didn’t quite match up to everyone elses. But, on the basis of squirting ketchup in rice and my experience last night, I’m edging towards the realisation that there is a genre of Asian food that I really don’t like.