Veggie Brunch - St Kilda Style!

This is actually a 'bonus' post and completely unrelated to my ongoing Quorn Cookbook shenanigans...


On a recent trip to Melbourne we had the most AMAZING veggie brunch in fabulous St Kilda and it inspired me to recreate it at home. The nice thing is that this is actually so amazeballs I think even meat lovers would not particularly notice that it is distinctly meat free! 


As it is a bank holiday in the UK today I decided this was the ideal day to try this brunch recipe out, brunch is massively underrated in this country in our opinion and I love the fact that the Aussies just embrace this whole culture of going out for breakfast / brunch and make a big thing of it.


Anyway, this is what the finished brunch looked like:

And here is my husbands version without the egg and with extra beans:

On this second photo you can also better see the mushroom and spinach dish which is something we picked up in St Kilda, I have recreated this by spraying a frying pan with low cal oil, frying off one clove of crushed garlic and then adding sliced chestnut mushroom and slowly frying before adding a couple of handfuls of spinach and a small amount of salt. The result is this lovely veggie side dish which fills out a meat free breakfast.


You will notice I have used quorn sausages and bacon slices here but in the main this was to appease my husband and they are not really needed. For me the key to this breakfast is excellent scrambled egg (olive oil is the secret apparently), griddled halloumi, toasted slices of ciabatta, the mushroom/spinach combination and the beans, what more do you need!?


Very enjoyable and proof positive that meat is not actually necessary to enjoy a hearty brunch.

Quorn Vegetable Mince Curry

44/70 


Time for another curry from the cookbook, this one (Vegetable Mince Curry) I have to admit I kept flicking past in the book and pausing for a second to consider before dismissing it out of hand due to the 'mince' element. Mince?! In a curry!? I was not convinced....


But, I decided it was high time to give it a bash and as we are now around two thirds through the book I am having to stop discounting recipes which did not immediately appeal and start just cooking them!


So, this one is very quick and easy and, dare I say it, a bit of a cheat as it involves a jar of curry sauce. The recipe suggests that madras works well and accordingly I had chucked a jar of the same into my shopping trolley a few weeks ago in order to attempt this. 


There is a certain amount of actual 'cooking' involved despite the jar but on the whole this is a convenience meal. And actually a pretty darn nice one! All you do is cook off some chopped potato and cauliflower in a pan of water for 8-10 minutes until virtually cooked, heat the curry sauce in another pan (I used a wok and was glad for it, there is way too much sauce to successfully use a frying pan) and then add the cooked potato/cauliflower and 300g quorn mince and simmer for 10 mins (I had to add a half jar of water in order to do this).


After this has simmered you chuck in 175g of frozen veg - the recipe specifies peas but I had none and therefore used mixed veg which worked perfectly well - and fresh spinach. Once this has heated through enough to cook the veg and wilt the spinach it is good to go.


Here it is cooking off towards the end:

  
And here it is served:

We actually really enjoyed this recipe - although I do think a jar sauce is a bit of a cheat. Also, the points total of this dish will depend on the points within the jar sauce so you will need to amend your points total as necessary - for info I used Aldi's Bilash Madras sauce.


Based on this sauce the points values per portion (based on it serving 4) is 7 broken down as follows: quorn mince (2), potato (2), sauce (3). Obviously serving with rice/naan then adds points but this still makes it a fairly low point choice overall.


It actually makes massive portions too as you can probably see above, you could easily get 5 rather than 4 portions out of this recipe. The curry itself is lovely and I agree that madras strength works well with it, I have never tried a mince curry before but I definitely will again based on the success of this one.


We gave it 8/10.

Quorn Sausage & Crushed Potato Pie

43/70

This is the final recipe from the 'Little Chefs' section right at the back of the recipe book and as such it is a pretty simple recipe designed to appeal to cooking with kids. Right up my street when I am knackered and hungry then!

This is a brilliant recipe which also gives plenty of scope for tweaking. Effectively you just cook off the sausages (which I oven baked with a spray of low cal oil rather than frying) then saute the onions, tip in a tin of beans and some seasoning (ketchup, brown sauce - I added a splash of balsamic vinegar in lieu of the brown sauce) whack it in a casserole dish and top it with some cheesy mashed potato.

What you end up with is a satisfying, tasty sort of sausage casserole. The added bonus is that it is also pretty low in weight watchers points so all round this definitely gets the thumbs up from me. Here it is as it came out the oven:

And this is it plated. The portions don't look huge here but they were actually very filling.

I really liked the cheesy mash topping and by using extra mature cheddar I managed to get a pretty cheese-tastic flavour without using too much of it. I would also add in leftover mushrooms or other veggies if I made this again, it would work really well with roasted peppers in it or leftover courgettes. I love the adaptability of it.

In terms of propoints, each portion (based on the recipe serving 4) is 11 points, which considering this is a complete meal is pretty good. This is broken down as follows: quorn sausages (3), mashed potato (4), butter/oil spray (1), cheese (2), baked beans (1).

This is definitely a recipe I will be making again, it is simple, tasty and filling and definitely a winner for us, we gave it a 9/10.

Quorn Egg Fried Rice

42/70


Hello all!


Finally back on board with the blog after time in Australia and then getting over the horrific jet log and over the obligatory 'post holiday blues'. Also after the awfulness that was the sweet potato loaf I feel like it was right and proper to back away from the experiment for a small time and then come back with a bang!


So here we have it....this recipe is from the 'Taste of Takeaway' section of the cook book and it worked very well indeed.


This recipe uses quorn fillets but would actually work perfectly well with pieces too - these are marinated in rice wine vinegar and grated fresh ginger (I suggest for as long as possible, overnight ideally - book only suggests they marinade while you cook). 


I cook a LOT of South East Asian food anyway so used my wok for this and also used my previous experience to ignore the recipe when it suggested that the first thing to do was cook off the eggs in oil until they are 'set but not coloured' like an omlette and then cut it into small pieces. I ignored this for 2 reasons - firstly to avoid the excess oil and secondly because it is entirely unnecessary and you can simply do it later (without needing to cut it up) and it saves time/washing up...as I will explain...


So - really the first thing you need to do is cook the rice so it is ready when you need it in the recipe (sometimes I find the recipes in this book are a bit muddled about effective timings). Then you fry off the marinaded pieces/fillets in a wok or large frying pan with the garlic, spring onion, remaining ginger and the peppers until the pieces are heated through and the veg is stir-fried sufficiently (recipe says 6 minutes). 

Finally you toss in the cooked rice and fresh coriander and stir fry until it is all the same temperature and then you do the egg bit (technical terms!) like so - push all the cooked rice/quorn to one side of the pan and crack the eggs into the space (trust me on this), break the yolks immediately but resist the urge to stir for around 20 seconds then quickly mix back in the quorn and rice and stir fry for around 2-3 minutes.


This is what it will look like - you can see that the egg has made the rice start clumping together.

After this you will have perfect cooked and shredded egg mixed through the recipe. Doing it this way also means that the egg is completely integrated with the other ingredients and will be stuck to the rice like genuine egg-fried rice. This is just the asian way of doing it and believe me, it works and the egg cooks through very quickly indeed.


Here it is served:

In terms of weight watchers points, this is a pretty healthy dish and accordingly scores more points from me in this respect! The recipe serves 4 portions and each portion is 10 propoints, broken down as follows: quorn (2) eggs (1), rice 6, oil (1). 


We really enjoyed this dish although it is neither very spicy or intense in terms of the flavour, it is, however, tasty and easy to make and as seen above, it is pretty healthy too. 


This dish feels more filling than you expect it to be and it should also be noted that although the recipe calls for 300g of rice (raw weight) I only used 240g as I wanted each portion to be 60g for points purposes. I also knew that this was plenty per person in terms of portion size and I can confirm that it works perfectly well for 4 with this weight. If you are not dieting of course, feel free to use 300g for a more substantial meal.


We gave it 8/10 and I will definitely be making this again (maybe with some tweaks to the marinade for a more intense flavour). It is another example of how quorn works so well with marinades.


Enjoy!

Gday

Hello all

Just wanted to say hi as I have been away for 3 weeks in Australia having a whale of a time and accordingly am very behind with this blog.

I will be getting back up to speed asap, I have one recipe to put on already (Quorn Egg Fried Rice) and am hoping to do another later this week (Sausage and Potato Pie).

Hope you are all well and enjoyed the good weather which we apparently missed, how come we are home and now it's raining again!? Sod's law!

Sweet Potato Loaf

41/70


Hmmm.


This is most definitely not one of my favourites from the book. In fact, what happened with this recipe was me going hungry because I could not face eating more than half of my portion for tea and then the other half of the loaf getting ditched because neither of us wanted to contemplate it again.


Also, this is a rather complicated recipe in relation to the others in the book, there are a lot of ingredients in it and a lot of 'faff'. Like pre-soaking the bulgur wheat and grating the sweet potato/carrot/onion. 


I thought that once mixed it actually looked and smelled like it was going to be very tasty. This is what it looked like once cooked (I had intended to take a picture of it before I put the mix in the tin but I forgot):

In theory it should be very nice, containing the aforementioned grated veg, oats, bulgur wheat, quorn mince (a minimal amount) and bound together with egg and yeast extract. In reality it is not (in our opinion) particularly enjoyable on any level. In fact it reminded me of my first foray into vegetarianism in the early 90s when all nut roasts looked and tasted like this - dry, bland and uninspiring.


It also takes a LONG time to cook. 45 minutes in the oven had my husband crying out for food after he had run home from work, unfortunately thanks to all the faff involved it took about an hour and a half from start to finish. 


The final instruction was to let it stand in the tin for 5 minutes before turning out and serving but I was beyond patience by and left it for about a minute. Perhaps that is why mine crumbled when I tried to carve it into slices, as illustrated in the below picture of the dish served:

It looks like a pile of veggie stuffing and to be honest that's exactly what it tastes like.


I just did not like or enjoy any aspect of this meal and I won't be making it again. I guess every cookbook is going to have some recipes which just do not appeal and for us this is definitely one of them. 


I do think if you increased the volume of quorn mince, added some chopped dried fruit and maybe used cous cous instead of the (very bloating) bulgur wheat this might be more appealing - but I am still not sure I would want to eat a whole quarter as a portion.


In terms of weight watchers points this is pretty low at 6 points a portion based on the loaf containing 4 portions. This is made up as follows: quorn (1), egg (1), wheat (1), oats (1), oil (1), sweet potato (1).


Despite the low rating and health appeal I do not think I will enforce this on my husband or myself again! We gave it a 1/10 which may seem harsh but reflects how little we enjoyed it.

Quorn & Gnocchi Bake

40/70


This recipe was another pleasant surprise - one which we were not particularly relishing the prospect of trying but which turned out to actually be very nice. I do quite like gnocchi although it can be stodgy and I have had very good and very bad variations in the past. As this again involved a creamy cheese sauce I was also concerned about the calorie content, but it turned out lower in points values than I was expecting.


The quorn in this recipe is fairly minimal and for the first time seems to be more of an additional ingredient than the star of the dish. You can use either bacon or ham (as in the carbonara) and I chose to use ham here, cut into long strips. The sauce is a basic roux/bechamel base which you tip over the cooked gnocchi and wilted spinach before baking for around 25 minutes.


This is what it looked like when I put it in the oven:

And here it is once cooked:

I was a little worried that I ended up making the recipe with large gnocchi, about the size of a quails egg each, rather than with the smaller ones I had intended to. The recipe does not specify either way, just stating 400-500g in weight, but I felt that the smaller version would have worked best. As it happened my online grocery shop substituted the ones I had ordered for these giant ones but actually it worked very well. 


I used stork to make the roux sauce (butter, flour, milk and cheese) as I had no butter in, this meant that it actually came in at slightly lower points values but the sauce worked perfectly well with this substitution so I would do this again next time to save points.


This recipe is very filling and although this served portion may look small it is actually a substantial amount:

One great tip from this recipe was to drain the gnocchi through the spinach (in a colander) thereby wilting the spinach quickly and effectively ready to whack it in the baking dish. I will definitely use that tip again, I am all for minimising washing up!


In terms of weight watchers points, based on the recipe providing 4 portions (which it does), each portion is worth 11 points as follows: gnocchi (6), cheese (2), flour (1), quorn ham (1), butter (1). This is surprisingly low in points for a main meal like this and tastes like it should be more - always a good sign!


We really liked this recipe and I will make it again, I will probably try it with smaller gnocchi to see how it compares. We gave this a 7/10.