Mighty Vegan Veggie Fox Millet Pulav ( Demolish your Veggie Quota)

So Many Veggies. So Many Feelings

This is for real my 6th post in January, and the damn month is not even over. I am on a blog binge, and it's likely to end at some random time you least expect it. So make merry with my sort-of-amazing vegan recipes now.

Remember how I am supposed to be off rice (and all other shitty carbs and sugary sweet things?) Yeah, so it's fox millet time. Shilpa, our friend, (and founder of Jus'Amazin, plant based treats) brought in some millet salad today, and told us she makes pulav/biriyani with it too. Aha, what a great slip of tongue, had she any idea I would go right to it and make some the very same night?

So I thought, let's get a crap ton of veggies in while we're at it. Because, you know us vegans don't get enough protein (there is plenty protein in vegetables, FYI)

So all you need is your standard masalas, some fox millet (easy to get these days in a bunch of stores), and all the veggies you can find in your fridge. It's nice and spicy, and I added mint and coconut too for a little bit of a south-indian twist.

Here's What You Need

1 cup fox millet

1 green pepper (capsicum)

1 onion

2 tomatoes

1 carrot

1 cup chopped spinach 

1/2 cup frozen or fresh peas

small punch of mint leaves

small bunch of cilantro (dhanya)

3 green chilies (less if you're a wimp)

6 pods of garlic

2 inches of fresh ginger

1 packet of your favorite ready-made biryani masala (I used Shaan bombay biryani)

1/2 cup fresh or dried coconut

1 teaspoon turmeric

1 teaspoon chili powder

6-8 pepper corns

2 pinches of mustard seeds

salt to taste

1/2 cup coconut milk

cooking oil

How to Make

Like hell I was going to experiment combining the masala and fox millet in one pot the very first time I used millet. So we did things separately to avoid an  epic fail. 

First you gotta add your cup of fox millet to about 11/2 cups of water and open cook it. You might need a little more water after the first 10 minutes of cooking. You'll need to cook it for about 20 min. 

Cooking them millets

Blend your ginger and garlic with a little water to make a paste. Now blend half the cilantro with your chilies and mint and make a green paste. Chop all the rest of your veggies.

In a pot, add two table spoons of oil. Add mustard seeds and peppercorns and then the fresh ginger-garlic paste. Now add your onions and fry for a couple of minutes. Add tomatoes, stir, then pour the green paste over it and mix. Now is a good time to add your packet of biryani masala, chili powder, turmeric, and salt. Mix it all up. Add the rest of your veggies (peppers, carrots, peas, spinach, or whatever you decided you want to use) and mix. Add your coconut milk and fresh/dried coconut. It should be a nice thick spicy gravy with veggies. Add a little bit of water and keep letting it cook. 

Once your millet is ready, spoon it into the gravy mixture and mix well. Let it all be in one pot now on low flame for 3-4 minutes. Serve in a bowls with some vegan peanut curd or sneak in some chips or something crunchy with it ( I won't tell)

Dinner is done!

Now go tell your veggie quota for the day what's up. 

That's right! You ate all you veggies. And it was delicious. 

Till next time!

Raw Cashew Cheese Pizza with Tomato -Coriander Sauce (Vegan from Scratch, baby!)

The art of Vegan Pizza making

Wassup Cats!

Because it's the weekend and I had one of my classic monthly migraines, I was stuck in the house all day. In the middle of peppermint -oil head massages and painkillers, I thought it'd be the perfect time to make pizza from scratch.


The vegan twist here is using raw cashew cheese. You can make a more melty-vegan cheese, but I prefer this, because really there is no vegan mozzarella that really tastes good.

You need a bit of patience for this, because we're making dough from scratch, but the crust will be chewy-tasty, yum! You also need to make the dough at least 2 hours (for it to rise) before you can make this. Pizza dough is fairly easy to make, you just need bakers yeast that's easily available in the market. This recipe is flexible, because you can use what toppings you like. You can also make the raw cashew cheese without nutritional yeast (which is impossible to get in India, you need to fork over major moolah to import it). My mom visits india every few months, so I have a constant supply.


Ok so let's go!

What you Need

for the dough

2 cups flour

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon sugar

1/4th cup olive oil or peanut oil (or regular)

1 teaspoon bakers yeast

3/4th cup warm water


for the coriander-tomato sauce 

3 tomatoes

1 handful of fresh coriander leaves

2-3 green chilies

2 teaspoons Italian seasoning

1 teaspoon chili flake

1 teaspoon salt

1 black pepper

3 pods of garlic

a dash of olive oil (or regular)

Stuff in the sauce

for the raw cashew cheese

1 cup cashews (you can soak them for 20 minutes or not, never made a difference to me)

3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons nutritional yeast (optional)

2 teaspoons salt

2 teaspoons jaggery (or sugar)

Some pepper

Any other spice/seasoning you'd like to add


Toppings

It's up to you. I used:

chopped onions, mushrooms, broccoli and tomatoes

So it's a green pizza sauce, shoot me

How to Make

You have to make you dough in advance. In a bowl add you flour, salt, sugar, and yeast. Now make a well in the middle and pour warm water (I zap it in the microwave for 45 seconds) slowly, along with the oil. Then mix with your fingers. You'll get an uneven, wet sticky mixture. Now on a flour-powdered surface start kneading the dough for about 8 minutes. The dough will come together, become smoother and bouncy. You know when you're done kneading when the dough becomes a bit like memory foam. Basically, when you tap the surface with your finger, it starts to come back to form.

Dough needs some love

Cut your dough into two sections. Set aside on a pan with a damp cloth over it for 2 hours or more.

For the sauce. In a blender add tomatoes, chilies, coriander, garlic, seasoning, and a bit of water. Blend into a paste and set aside.

Keep your topping chopped and ready to go.


When your dough has set for 2-3 hours, you are ready to make your pizza! The dough would have become a lot bigger (thanks, yeasty!). Now on a flat surface work with the dough to stretch it out slowly to make a rustic circle. It's ok if it tears, just knead again and slowly stretch out to a about a inch or inch and half thickness.

The imperfect circle

Preheat your oven to 190c

Now set your pizza base on a oven pan, add 2-3 tablespoons of sauce in the centre and spread leaving the edges of the circle empty for the crust. Go ahead and add the topping of choice all over the sauce area. Drizzle some olive oil (or regular) on top and put in the oven for 20 minutes.

All ready for the oven

After your pizza is cooked, take out of oven, and spoon some yummy lumps of raw-cashew cheese on top of hot pizza. Serve!

It's ready to pop in the mouth now!

Perfect for a Netflix binge, eh?

Till next time! Keep it kind. Keep it real.

Bengaluru Special Donne Biryani ( Plus my Vegan Sermon, Yikes!)

Mighty but not Meaty

Ola Leopards!

Here's to a more conscious, kinder, and happier New Year. 2017, baby! Let's make it wicked hot.

If you've been following my posts, you already know the drill: it doesn't matter if you aren't vegan, or vegetarian. Reducing your intake of meat and dairy makes a stand against cruelty. By consciously lowering your intake you are acknowledging one of the most cruelest industries in operation today: subjecting animals to being produced just to they live in cages until they are killed. The dairy industry keeps cows pregnant (by artificial insemination) constantly, so they give out milk around the clock. And their calfs certainly don't get enough to drink. What's more is that they inject cows with hormones,so they produce more (which is painful for the cow, and super nasty for you).

 I turned vegan ( after being vegetarian/pescatarian for 7 years) about 8 months ago. So, I thoughts, why not chronicle my experience of being one in India.

It's lonely being a vegan in a non-vegan world. I don't know any vegans in real-life most of them are on the internet. We live in a non-vegan world, globally we're only 3%-5% of the population. India might have a large vegetarian population, but is very lactose dependent: ghee, milk, curds and butter is in a lot of our vegetarian food. India's population is huge-Ass, but we in all probability don't have even have 10k vegans in the country.

As a vegan, I get eyebrows raised, I get made fun of, and I certainly get unwarranted advice. But I am no evangelistic vegan. Ain't one of them that says the go vegan or call yourself a mass murderer. Humans are fundamentally hypocritical- we have pets, but we eat meat. We think cruelty is bad, but we don't think about our food.  We have cultural ties to food, and the demands for vegan substitutes are so low, that it might seem like a very privileged thing to take up. Most people think that you don't get the right nutrition on a vegan diet. That's a complete myth, and there is enough on the internet to read about that specifically.

I believe any change is good chance. If you can give up meat and dairy one day a week, you are contributing to a better world. We're consuming and consuming, we've lost touch with our food, where it comes from, and what goes on behind the scenes. Sometimes, I don't think the vegan label does us much good, people feel intimidated by it, and get defensive about it (which is why we get all the stupid comments and jokes). And it's not only the non-vegans who create the problem. Some vegans be be downright annoying, holier-than-thou, and dogmatic. After all who is to define the exact rules of being vegan? We could always argue that vegetables kill insects, that india uses animals to farm its agriculture, and that most things we are involved with directly or indirectly abuse animals in some form. There is plenty of infighting in the vegan community precisely because of this, who get's to be 'vegan' enough?  Franky, I could give a rat's ass. Everyone has their own evolution based on their circumstances, privileges, culture, and individual experience. But what we all have in common (if you are reading this) is to be aware of our experience right now, and what we're doing. That's why I think: any change, is good change. Even acknowledging the problem of cruelty is change.


Read up more about the industry. If it moves you, then give up the small things first. Give up leather (there is no good reason you need to actively buy leather). Reduce your consumption of milk. If you are vegetarian, consider trying the vegan diet. The environmental impact is huge. And if this is too hard, support the rest of us vegans by buying vegan products from time to time, it helps us increase the demand in the market, making it more accessible to the mass population.

Alright, sermon over. But the preamble also serves well for my next recipe. A lot of people who eat meat are worried about taste and and recreating old favorites. I am no different, I grew up a meat eater and one of my favorite things was biryani. Bangalore has a special local biryani, and you live here, you've either eaten it or seen it all around town: Donne Biryani. Usually made with chicken and small grain rice. The taste, if you ask me, comes from the spicy-delish mix of ginger-garlic, shit tons of coriander, mint, and chilies! 'donne' in Kannada means palm leaves, which was originally the way it was served, in a cup made out of these leaves.

Here's my vegan version using soya chunks and potatoes! It was extraordinarily tasty and spicy! This recipe will serve 2-3 people.

The Taste comes from these cuties

Here's What you Need


3 fresh  tomatoes pureed

2 large onions

2 cups fresh coriander leaves

1 cup mint leaves

3 inches of ginger plus 10 pods of garlic

As little as 2 to as much as 10 green chilies ( I like it super spicy)

11/2 cup small soya chunks

2-3 potatoes chopped ( I cute one potato into 8 pieces)

5 tablespoons biryani masala ( I use Shaan masala/Bombay Briyani masala or Chicken masala)

11/2 teaspoons turmeric, jeera powder, and dhanya powder

Some fresh coriander and chopped tomato for garnish

11/2 cup of white rice

Salt to taste

1 teaspoon sugar

3tb cooking oil


How to make

Puree your tomatoes and set aside. Then blend your mint, chilies, and coriander together with a a bit of water to make your green paste. Blend your garlic and ginger together to make a fresh ginger-garlic paste. Don't use ready-made paste, the taste of this recipe relies on everything fresh. Lastly, grind up your onions too. Now you have 4 pastes : Onion, Ginger-garlic, Tomato, and Green.

Green and Red

In a pressure cooker, heat up 3tb of cooking oil. Add you ginger-garlic paste and fry it for 2 minutes. You can also add a bayleaf to the oil if you want, but totally optional. Now add your onion paste, and fry for another couple minutes.

Pasty!

Soak your soya chunks in a bowl of water. And keep you potatoes peeled and chopped.

Now add green paste to the onion/ginger-garlic paste, and stir. Dump your tomato paste in, and add all the masalas. If your biryani masala doesn't already have salt add some to taste. You might need to use a little salt anyway, since potatoes tend to soak it up. Add your teaspoon of sugar as well now too.

Now add your soya chunks and potatoes, and fry it all together, add a few tablespoons of water, and cook for about 5 minutes. Finally add your washed rice, and stir the mixture throughly. Add 3 cups of water and put the lid on. Let it go for about 3 whistles. Put off the cooker and let it cook with the heat inside. Open, place in a bowl and garnish with more coriander and fresh chopped tomato. Serve with a salad, or with vegan raita (peanut curd is available for delivery in Bangalore and tastes very much like regular curd) Contact Veganarke on their FB page for peanut curd (80 rupees for a litre)

Yeah! Enjoy your vegan donne biryani, and share some with your friends.

<3 Happy 2017!

Have questions about vegan food or being vegan in India? Comment or catch me on FB: Rheea Rodrigous Mukherjee

Vegan Rum Christmas Cake (With dried strawberries, baby)

That's a santa hat covering the coy vegan christmas cake

Ola Bats!

I totally lied. I said the last post was, uh, the last post for 2016. Turns out I totally WON at making bomb-ass vegan christmas cake. You can easily customize this with other fruits/nuts, but this combination was a true winner. It's rich, it's wholesome, it delicious.

Ok so get your santa hats out and let's get started.


What you need

1/2 cup  refined sunflower oil

3/4th cup almond mylk/soya/cashew/coconut

1 cup brown sugar (or regular)

8-9 dried strawberries ( I got them from MK retail) or Fresh (or use dried apricots or any other dried fruit)

1/4th cup walnuts chopped

1/4th cup almonds blanched and peeled

1/2 cup black currents or black raisons

1/2 cup rum of choice

2 cups flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon vanilla

1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon powder

1 teaspoon nutmeg powder

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda (optional)

1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar


How to Make

First put your chopped nuts, currents,and dried fruit in a bowl with the rum Let is soak for at least 30 minutes.

Them nuts and fruits getting drunk off old monk

In a bowl mix your oil, sugar, vanilla, nutmeg, cinnamon, apple cider vinegar, and salt. Whisk well.

Add half of your milk and mix again. Now slowly add your flour and baking powder/soda and mix continuously. Add more mylk to get a very thick but slightly pourable batter. It's ok if it's a little dry, it's a richer cake, but it should kind of lump-drop into your pan. Add your soaked rum-nuts-fruits-currents and mix well.

Nice & Thick now

Preheat oven at 170c

Spoon your batter into a greased loaf pan. Bake for about 40 minutes, but check after 30 to see how it's doing with the classic knife test.

Right before I popped into the oven!

Here's wishing you merry merry holidays and super-amaze-balls 2017!

Till Next Year (For Real) Keep It Real!