Blissful Chef inspired Mac´n´cheese

The sauce I make in this blogpost is a modified version of a recipe from one of my favourite vegan bloggers, Christy Morgan aka the Blissful Chef.  I should note that I made a double batch (that is four servings) and I didn´t bake the dish in the oven after mixing the pasta with the sauce. The sauce tasted amazingly much like the good old cheese sauce of pre-macro days, so if you are craving cheese, definitely give this a try! 😀

Cook your pasta (I use corn pasta) and save one cup of the cooking water. Whisk the cooking  water together with a cup of rice milk (or other vegan milk), one cup of nutritional yeast, 2 tbsp of starch (I used kuzu) diluted in a bit of milk, 2 tbsp shoyu soy sauce, 2 tsp natural organic mustard, 2 tsp white (shiro) miso and some dried garlic powder. Then heat 2 tbsp of oil in a cast iron skillet or pot and whisk in 5 tbsp of brown rice flour. After a minute or so whisk in the prepared sauce, stirring continuously until you get a rather thick creamy texture. Mix sauce together with cooked pasta and vegetables – as you can see in the picture, I used blanched broccoli, and on the plate I sprinkled the dish with some smoked paprika powder.

Cumin flavoured seitan and glazed sweet and sour beets

I just love how the colours combine in this dish, so elegant! And the seitan tempura is rich enough to satisfy even those who think macrobiotics is a very bland tasteless diet.

For the tempura I covered the seitan chunks in a batter made of wholewheat flour mixed 50:50 with organic white flour, water, a pinch of salt, a pinch of aluminum-free baking powder (adds extra crunch) and the secret ingredient – cumin powder. Add as much as you think is suitable for your condition and tastebuds 😀 The more you add, the more tasty the seitan will be, of course, but don´t go overboard. The batter should not be runny so that it doesn´t slide off. Deep-fry each piece in hot oil and place on napkinks to soak excess oil.

For the glazed beets cook sliced beet (or bite-sized chunks) slowly in a small pot on a low flame with water to barely cover and a good pinch of salt. Towards the end season with mirin (rice cooking wine), ume plum vinegar and rice vinegar, the beets should be a bit more tart than sweet. Mix a spoon of kuzu starch in a bit of cold water and add at the very end, while stirring to prevent lumps, be sure to let the kuzu boil for a while and thicken.

I served the meal with a pressure cooked rice/barley mixture with gomasio and quickly water-sauteed greens (curly cabbage and white cabbage with some salt and dried oregano to lightly flavour).

A more macrobiotic plate again…

I don´t  post so many of the neat grain-vegetable-legume macrobiotic plates anymore, but here´s one of them, all nice and balanced and colourful 🙂

-Pressure cooked rice with sweet rice and gomasio (currently we have sesame and flax seed about half and half, in a 1:16 ratio of salt to seeds)

-Oil-sauteed daikon, carrot, onion, leek, cauliflower and cabbage with one part of rice vinegar and two parts of shoyu soy sauce to season

-Oven roasted pumpkin sprinkled with salt and dried thyme

-Black beans from Hokkaido seasoned with a tablespoon of shoyu soy sauce, a teaspoon of rice malt, cooked with a few finely chopped sundried tomatoes and organic corn kernels from a can

Homemade falafel

Falafel is one of my most favourite foods, something so deeply satisfying and reminding you of your sweet junkfood past, yet it´s very macrobiotic at the same time! 😀 Ok, not if you eat it three times a week, as it´s still deep-fried food, but once in a while…after a long walk in freezing weather like today….

It´s also really simple, as long as you don´t forget to soak your chickpeas overnight (or at least for a couple of hours, I think 12 hours is a good bet though). I soaked 100 g of chickpeas in a double amount of water, drained them and then added the rest of the ingredients: a bunch of parsley leaves, 1/4 tsp of salt (next time I will use 1/2 tsp probably), 1/2 tsp paprika powder, 1/2 tsp cumin powder, a tiny pinch of chilli powder, one (or two) garlic cloves and one small roughly chopped red onion. Usually there are also fresh coriander leaves in the recipe for falafel, sadly those are not available here at this time of the year, if you want good quality and not supermarket vegetables…Put all in a big bowl or pot. And now comes the tricky part: making a rather smooth paste out of this bunch of ingredients, using an immersion blender. It actually works, but you have to have a bit of patience, move with the blender up and down and let it rest every now and then so it doesn´t overheat. It definitely worked better than in my big blender which would need water to run, but the immersion blender strangely enough doesn´t :-p Then let the mixture rest for a few hours (I´m not sure why, but more people told me this, so I guess something magical happens!). Later on, heat up your deep-frying oil and create about 3-5 cm in diameter large balls, adding breadcrumbs to the mixture if needed. My mixture was too thin so I added some glutenfree crumbs. Fry until dark brown, otherwise the inside will not be done enough (remember – it´s just soaked and not cooked chickpeas).

I served the falafel with bulghur with raw pink radish and green daikon cubes mixed in (to help digest the fats) and a dip made of tahini, mustard, salt and ume plum vinegar 🙂

“Szeged goulash” with tempeh and polenta dumplings

Szeged goulash is a typical Czech meal, although its name is derived from the Hungarian town of Szeged where I suppose they make something similar 😀 Of course the original goulash recipe calls for meat, but here we use tempeh instead, which pairs so beautifully with sauerkraut!!

This is another recipe inspired by Dagmar Lužná and her macro cookbook, but I did make quite some adjustments.

First sautee a large onion cut into thin half moons in about two tablespoons of oil. Add a pinch of salt and a good amount of caraway seeds and sautee until onion is shiny. Then add about 200 g of sauerkraut and an equal amount of finely shredded white cabbage. Sprinkle with paprika powder to your liking, I like quite a lot of it so that the sauce gets slightly red/brown. Cook for about 20 minutes on a low flame under a lid, the cabbage has to get very soft. Add in cubed fried tempeh (I buy ready fried tempeh from the shop, made by our lovely Czech macro company). Season with 2 tbsp of shoyu soy sauce and 2 tbsp of rice vinegar. At the end mix in approximately 2 teaspoons of corn starch (or kuzu) diluted in a bit of cold water, and let boil for a few  more minutes, so that the sauce thickens a bit.

I served the goulash with store-bought polenta dumplings brushed with oil and baked in the oven until crispy. But you can easily make your own “dumplings” by pouring hot cooked polenta into a shallow dish and letting it firm up in the fridge, just the shape will be different 😀

Pepernoten are here!

Many people asked me to share the recipe for pepernoten which I made last weekend, so here they are 🙂 It´s a typical Dutch treat made especially for Sinterklaas, that is St Nicholas Day. Of course, traditionally they are made with white flour, butter, dark sugar (“basterd suiker”) and milk, mine are naturally a macro version! 😀 It´s actually my own recipe based on reading several pepernoten recipes on (mostly) Dutch websites. I think I came pretty close to the real thing, but there definitely are many varieties of this gingerbread-like tiny cookie!

I used:

250 g spelt flour

3 g baking powder (aluminum-free)

100 g coconut oil

100 g mixture of barley malt and maple syrup (use more maple syrup if you want them sweet, mine are very mild! :-p)

a pinch of salt

3-4 TBSP rice milk (or other non-dairy milk)

1-2 TBSP speculaas spices mix (2 TBSP make for a rather spicy dough, so be careful!)

For the speculaas mix you can either buy “speculaaskruiden” in a shop (in Holland at least…) or make your own blend such as this one:

2 tsp cinnamon – 1 tsp ground cloves – 1 tsp ground cardamom – 1/2 tsp ginger powder – 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg – 1/2 tsp ground aniseed

First whisk the coconut oil until soft and creamy (mine was not liquid because it´s winter and the coconut oil is more solid than liquid, which is fine for this recipe I think, it sort of mimics butter). Add in all other ingredients and mix well with your hands. Knead into a ball. Wrap the ball in plastic and let it rest in the fridge for about half an hour. If you let it there longer, it will be a bit harder to work with, but kneading it again once more will solve this problem for the most part. When the dough is ready, chip off little pieces at a time and roll about 1 cm in diameter large “marbles”. Place them about 2 cm apart on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake them 15-20 minutes on 160°C in a preheated oven, until their bottoms are just slightly browned, I imagine they could burn easily 😀

Before being baked

after baking

I dipped some of my pepernoten in a chocolate dip, but I don´t have exact measurements for that one, as I was experimenting a little bit :-p Basically…I put a smaller steel pot into a larger one full of water, so that the smaller pot was partially submerged in the water (it´s called officially “bain- marie”) and I brought the bottom pot to a gentle boil. In the smaller pot I heated some coconut oil and slowly whisked in cocoa powder, maple syrup, corn starch (watch out for lumps!) and a tiny pinch of salt. The mixture shouldn´t boil but the starch has to thicken. The chocolate sauce should be shiny, smooth and thick enough so that you can dip the pepernoten in it and it doesn´t all drip off…you have to adjust that yourself! 😀

Happy baking!