Vegan MoFo Day 26 - Tidy-up Thursdays - TVP for Caribbean patties and "bacon" bits

TVP has been cluttering my pantry for years and although it may not be the strangest pantry ingredient for a vegan to hoard I've included it in Tidy-up Thursdays as I rarely cook with it these days. By the time I came to the decision that TVP wasn't the most exciting ingredient, I had accumulated a few bags of the stuff which I've slowly been working my way through. The final remaining bag of TVP has a best before of December 2012 which doesn't deter me from using it as I don't believe this stuff can go off anyway. 

A handful of TVP recipes were spotted in my exciting new cookbook Caribbean Vegan and following the success of the first meal sampled from the book, I was very keen to give another recipe a try. I picked out some patties (filled pastries) filled with a spicy TVP mince and used frozen puff pastry sheets rather than the home made pastry in the book to shorten the preparation time. The filling was flavoured with a jerk seasoning, onions, garlic, green capsicum, curry powder, Vegemite (yay for an Aussie ingredient) and habanero chillies. I sampled the filling prior to constructing these patties and it almost blew my head off! I'm not shy about spicy food but this was right up there amongst the hottest meals I've made. We still loved the patties even those our noses were running madly but I'll be a lot more cautious when using habaneros in the future.

Another TVP based recipe which has been on my mind to try for ages is TVP "bacon" bits. I spotted this recipe in Vegan Diner where it is credited to Joni Newman, the recipe is also posted on her blog . The TVP granules are rehydrated with liquid smoke, water, salt and optional food colouring (I used beetroot powder) before being pan fried on a low heat until they are totally dried out. The "bacon" bits are very smoky and not quite salty enough for me so I would probably increase the salt next time and possibly add a touch of sweetener as well. I haven't used the "bacon" bits in a recipe yet but have plans for them in the next couple of days.

That's it for Tidy-up Thursdays! I'm not sure that my overflowing pantry has benefited much from these four posts but it was a fun exercise to find new recipes for a handful of neglected ingredients.

Vegan MoFo Day 18 - Worldly Wednesdays - Stopover 31 - Bardados Tofish and cou-cou

My next stopover was in Barbados which was another exciting prospect as the small amount of recipes I've made so far from the Caribbean islands have all been wonderful. The food of Barbados has influences from West African, Indian and British cuisines and their national dish is called flying fish and cou-cou. I wanted to attempt this meal more than anything even though it sounded tricky to pull off. Whilst hunting around for inspiration about how to achieve this I discovered that there was already a published recipe called Tofish and cou-cou in Caribbean Vegan by Taymer Mason. Thankfully I had drawn the four countries that would be appearing during Vegan MoFo prior to the start of September as this gave me enough time to order Taymer's cookbook online.

When the book arrived I flicked straight to the recipe I was interested in and decided that this would be a weekend project as there were several elements involved in making the dish. A couple of Bajan sauces that are integral parts in many of the Caribbean Vegan recipes needed to be prepared first. The rest of the components were a marinade for the tofish, a creole tomato sauce, a sauce to pour over the frying tofu as well as the polenta and okra dish called cou-cou. As I approached the meal in stages it didn't end up being as much work as I envisaged although I'm still glad that I didn't attempt this on a weeknight.

There were a large array of herbs and spices throughout the different elements in this dish but most of these were pantry friendly. Fresh parsley, thyme and basil provided the sauces with flavour along with plenty of onions, garlic, madras curry powder, paprika, ground cloves and black pepper. The only ingredient I had to track down was habanero chillies which are an integral part of Caribbean cooking and one of the hottest varieties in the world. I was able to purchase dried packets of habaneros at USA Foods. 

We have never been fans of polenta so the cou-cou gave me the most angst as I wasn't sure if we would enjoy it and I also wasn't confident about being able to cook it properly. This turned out a lot nicer than any polenta dish I recall and combined with creole sauce it really was quite delicious. This meal was definitely worth the effort and the leftovers were gobbled up enthusiastically the next day. Although I've only had a quick glance through the cookbook there are plenty of recipes in Caribbean Vegan I'm looking forward to making after Vegan MoFo ends.

Did you know?

The Barbabos cherry contains the highest content of Vitamin C of all the fruits in the world. Eating one cherry a day will give you the full daily requirement of Vitamin C.