So I'm going to write about a few things on this post. Once again, I regret that most of my photos are taken on my phone, so pretty bad quality!

Pesto Pasta Bake

I've posted about this many times before, but I can't get enough of it. I just made a big one for work lunches. I've started an internship and working smack in the middle of town on Suffolk Street. I have all the best food places right on my door step. I went a bit overboard on the first week and burnt a hole in my pocket. Blazing salads right around the corner, so expensive but so hard to resist. So from now on it's packed lunches.

Pesto pasta bake has been a favorite so far to bring in, so far. Roasting up lots of red peppers, sweet potato and whatever vegetable and stiring it in with whole grain pasta and home made pesto. The roasted vegetables are so tasty and sweet. I sprinkle a little brown sugar on top of them to bring out the sweet flavours more.

I bought some nutritional yeast during the week to add into my pesto and It tastes great. I had read about it's almost cheesy taste.

I sprinkle the top with Cheezly mozzarella after, along with bread crumbs. I have grown to love the cheese.

I want to use the pesto mix it up with baby potatoes and bulgar wheat too. Yum Yum.

Shepardless Pie

Here is a picture of a shepards pie I made. It had puy lentils and veg in a tomato sauce. It tasted alright but It needs work. At least it's full of goodness. The family liked it anyway. I'm thinking of adding cheese on top along with mashing some sweet potato into the mash.

New Alpro range

I came across Alpros new Hazelnut and Almond Milk. It was on special so I went with the Hazelnut. It tastes great and I way prefere it to soya. Tastes alot like normal milk, I find. It has a great nutty and kind of chocolaty taste. It tastes absolutely great with cereal. I plan on buying this from now on.

Blazing Salads

As I mentioned before, I have to stop myself going to Blazing Salads. Costing a good 6 euro to fill a box up. It tastes sooooo goood though.

Our orange lunch

I cooked a load of food for my friends 21st during the weekend. I made us a little birthday lunch involving sweet potato wedges and cous cous. :)

Cookies

Same cookies I have posted about many times before because they are SO GOOD. These are triple chocolate ones. Dark chocolate, vegan white chocolate and the cookie it's self is chocolate. Delisssh.

And this! Orange chocolate spread. I love orange chocolate. It tastes just like terrys chocolate orange. I picked it up in Nourish on Wicklow street. Highly recommended!

London Trip and Vegan findings

I went to London for a couple days and 1 night this week. I was really excited about all the vegan restaurants in London. We were stuck for time and only made it to one though.

We came across The Whole Foods Market on Kensington High street. It was huge inside and we had a quick look. It was so exciting when I found a load of vegan baked goods and food in general. There was so much! I picked up 3 cupcakes made by Cat and the Cream. They came in little containers so I could bring them home. They were a bit pricey but when do I ever come across this! They got a bit bashed around so excuse the messy pictures.

There are Pret A Mangers everywhere in London. They are great for vegans too. They always have a vegan salad and soup. The items are labelled Vegan too. They are accommodate for vegis too really well. So many options. Last time in London we fell in love with the sweet potato and feta hot wrap.

So the vegi restaurant we made it to was Beatroot on Berwick street in Soho just off Oxford Street. Nice and Central. I really enioyed it here. You got loads for your money, so many vegan options and friendly staff. You pay 6.60 pounds for the big box and it's filled up. They really pilled it up and you got your moneys worth. They had little sausage rolls which tasted unreal. I wish I got more. There was butternut squash curry, lasagne and loads of salad.

I also got a blueberry muffin which was lovely. I could only eat half and I had the rest for breakfast.

Recent food

I am constantly taking picture of food on my phone. Everything is a bit mixed up so instead of doing a load of separate posts I thought I'd throw them all into one.

I went out to the Happy Pear today for Lunch. I went for the pitta and salad. I didn't know the pitta had goats cheese in it though so I had to take it out and eat around the left over bit. I had a lovely coffee and vegan choc fruit and nut tiffin slice. I also love going to The Happy Pear.
I had another attempt at cupcakes but with another recipe. I used the Vegan cupcakes take over the world one. I didn't have all the ingredients really though. It required corn starch but I assumed that's corn flour. It made the cupcakes taste like corn flour though. They were alright though. Still not there yet. The icing was good though!

I came across these in Dunnes Stores and HAD to get them. Orange chocolate is a favourite. They tasted really good.
Here is a salad with a Good Life nut cutlet burger. I love them and they are so quick to cook under the grill.

Linda McCartney sausages. Last week people kept mentioning breakfast rolls and I was craving sausages and beans so bad. I made this for lunch a couple times and really hits the spot. It's a nice change from salad. The sausages are so tasty and only take a few minutes under the grill.

And this is my usual lunch while at home. I eat so many falafels but I don't know what I'd do with out them.

I made more cookies recently with the usual recipe. I guessed the measurements this time as my scales was broken. I added some chocolate powder into the mixture to make double chocolate cookies and oh my god they are dangerously tasty. I eat them all :/. The trick is to almost under cook them and then let them set and you get an extremely chewy cookie as the all the sugar sets but doesn't harden from being heated.

And another 'The Counter' post. As I've said before it's a great place to go for dinner when with non vegis and it's cheap and sooooooo tasty. This is the vegi burger in a bowl with various toppings such as avocado, roasted peppers and grilled pineapples. And you NEED to get the sweet potato fries.

And this is the falafel wrap from Gourmet Burger in Dun Loaghaire. It is very very tasty. It's vegan but you just have to ask for no Harisa. I get guac instead. It is so yummy when they grill the wrap after. It comes with rosemary chips!

Puff Pastry- Samosas and Jam puffs.

I have used puff pastry a few times this week. And it's vegan!

So first of all. I made samosas for dinner tonight and they turned out great. Usually they would be made with filo pastry but the puff pastry is a lot easier to use. They turned out extremely good. I had never made them before. To make the filling, what you need is ( I don't give any mesaurements really as you can have as little or as much as you want:

But aproxameltly:

-A good handful of diced butter nut squash

-A good handful of diced carrots

-'' '' '' red onion

I baked these together in olive oil until soft.

Meanwhile:

-Blanche a handful of chopped cauliflour, Peas and pea string things.. (?) hah

- Chop some chilli and a few mushrooms and spinach.

-In a sauce pan add oil, 2 teaspoons of curry powder, 1 teaspoon of coriander and cumin seeds.

When the carrots, onion and squash are finished cooking, add everything into the saucepan and stir for a while until everything is coated.

I had falafels and some left over veg curry so I broke up some falafel into it and added a couple teaspoons of the curry to moisten it up.

I cut out about 4 large diamond shape in the rolled out pastry placed some of the mixture to one half and then folded over. Then wet the pastry a little and popped into the oven for about 20 mins.

And for the left over pastry!! Squish it all together and roll it back out flat. Cut little triangle and circle shapes out and fill with jam or chocolate or jam and peanut butter. These tasted so good!

A couple of Avoca soups.

I've had these two Avoca cookbooks for quite some time. I got the most recent one last year off Chris ( http://www.tootiredtodrivehome.blogspot.com/ ) and I've only used it once before but I used one of the soup recipes yesterday. The book is divided into seasons. Within each seasons there are soups that can mostly made vegan! There is also a vegetarian section too which is great.

I made a roast pepper and tomato soup from the first cookbook. This tasted really good. I added some ingredients like basil, chilli and garlic!

2 red peppers roasted until soft

2 onions chopped

1 litre of veg stock

2 cloved of garlic

1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon

some tomato puree

1 tin of tomatoes

thyme

basil

salt and pepper

About half a chilli.

So I roasted off the peppers and meanwhile, I fried off the onions until clear, added the garlic and sauteed for about a minute. I then added the tinned tomatoes, veg stock, cinnamon, tomato puree, thyme, basil, chilli and roasted peppers when they were done. Cooked for about 2o mins and then pureed. However, this only made about 3 bowls, so if you are cooking for more, double the recipe!

I also made the root vegetable and squash soup from the newest book. I wasn't to into this as the parsnip really took over.Not a big fan of parsnip in soup.

Vegan Pesto

I've been making this a fair bit. It's really so simple and also so yummy.

I add:

-Semi-sundried tomatoes

-Rocket/Spinach

-Cashew nuts (pine nuts are insanely expensive)

-Chilli

-Salt and Pepper.

-A couple cloves of garlic

And all into the food processor. I have some Basil in the fridge so I will make some tomorrow for my dinner.

Lemon Buttercream Cupcakes by Sweet Vegan

So I finally got stuck into these cookbooks. I've only managed one recipe so far and that's the Lemon Buttercream Cupcakes from the book 'Sweet Vegan' by Emily Mainquist.

So first of all, I found the mixture to be extremely doughy. They were like bread like and not as sweet as I would of liked them to be. I guess as the recipe calls for brown sugar. Can anybody tell me if it's essential to use brown sugar as the majority of recipes use it. I would like to maybe half it and replace one half with caster to make them a bit sweeter. As for the doughy concern, I guess it's down to the use of 390g of flour! That's a lot. I think next time, I am going to half the recipe.

I found the butter cream to be lovely but didn't use the one given in the recipe as it involved 225g of butter, and thats' way to much! So I stuck to a previous one I've used. I used soya butter and it tasted grand!

And of course, I ate the majority of them!

ps. If you have any recipes that result in light fluffy cupcakes, PASS IT ON!

What's good.

Devonvale 

So today I discovered this bar. What grabbed my attention was the vegetarian society approved logo on the packaging on all of the bars. So I thought maybe some would be vegan. I first saw the range of these bars today in the Bus Stop Newsagent on Grafton street. I only looked at a few and none of the ones were vegan. However later on I was in the cost cutters on Aungier st and saw them again. I picked up the raspberry crumble and it said Vegan so yay! And it tasted sooooooooo delish. The pastry tasted so familiar. It was certainly delish and I plan to stock up next time. On the website , it says that the Apple and Blackcurrant and the Rhubarb crumble are also vegan. As well, a number of their flapjacks. So, I hope to see these around more.

The Counter, Dublin.

The counter are a custom build burger place located on Suffolk street in Dublin and in Dundrum. I have eaten here many times. They have sweet potato fries that are unreal. They also have a vegan option, a veggie burger which is really tasty.

You can choose:

-the size of your burger

-if you want it in a bun or in a bowl with salad (can choose type of bread and type of salad)

-type of cheese

-toppings (up to 4 and have a very wide range)

-sauce (again wide range)

Here is a picture of the menu, you tick it all off yourself. http://www.thecounterburger.com/menu/

If you're vegan, the burger in a bowl is vegan and none of the buns are vegan.

It is reasonably priced too. So just another vegan option in Dublin!

My first vegan Christmas.

...wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. For once, I didn't feel horrible and unhealthy from the copious amounts of chocolate. So no weight gain what so ever!

As I said previously, I went to Cork for Christmas, down to my Aunt's. It was a long drive down and a very long and squishy one on the way back (4 people+2 dogs and a flat tyre on the m50). I didn't have my digital camera with me so all my pictures were taken on my phone. I had a surprisinly delicious dinner anyway. My aunt made me roasted sweet potatoes and gave me a lesson in roasting. I also had falafel, peas and roasted potatoes. As plain and boring as that sounds it was really tasty when put together with some gravy and ballymaloe country relish.

For dessert, My aunt had gotten me a slice of Natasha's Living food Raw Coaco Orange Ganache Tart. It's 4 euro for a small slice but was so worth it! It was so creamy.

I received 3 vegan baking cookbooks for Christmas.

I had picked out 'Sweet Vegan' myself for my mum to get me. I choose it mainly due to the fact all the recipes are in grams. I really don't trust my cups to grams conversions. Different sites have different calculations! I have marked out all the reicpes I want to try.

However.. a lot of the recipes have ' unprocessed cane juice'.. or un processed cane sugar. I've asked around a few health shops and they have no idea what I am talking about. Does anyone know where to get some??

And Jesse got me Vegan Cookies-Invade your cookie jar and Babycakes! They both have amazing looking recipes and are lovely books. Once my exams finish, I will get stuck in.