Veggie Sausages

These are lovely veggie sausages and tasted really yummy. The recipe is for 8 sausages and takes about 45 minutes - taken from Annabel Karmels wesite here.  I was impressed how easy they were.

Ingredients:

• 175g sliced white bread
• 25g butter
• 1 medium onion, finely chopped
• 175g courgette, grated
• 150g Cheddar cheese, grated
• 1 egg, separated
• a little salt and pepper
• vegetable oil for frying
• flour for your hands

Method:

Tear the bread into small pieces and shred them in a food processor or with a blending stick in the little "herb blender" until they become fluffy bread crumbs. Try and squeeze as much liquid out of the grated courgette as possible (it will make the courgette look rather squashed). 

Melt the butter in a frying pan and saute the onion until soft. Add the grated courgette and cook for roughly 3 minutes or until soft.

Add the graded cheese and 3/4 of the bread crumbs and mix the egg yolk and salt and pepper under. 

The mix will be quite hot so you may need to wait a little bit until you can shape it into 8 sausages. Best way to do it is flour your hands before trying to shape them. Either dip them into the whipped white of the egg or use a brush to coat the sausages in the lightly beaten egg. 

Roll each sausage into the bread crumbs (I had to really press them on, they wouldn't just stick). Fry in a frying pan until nice and golden. 

According to Annabel Karmel's recipe these only take 7 minutes to prep and 17 to make. However, I found that unless you're master chef quick with grating cheese, courgette and whipping all the ingredients out of the cupboard in no time, it takes closer to 45 minutes by the time you'll be serving them.

Our sausages vs Annabel Karmel sausages. I need a little more practice but think I did ok

We all enjoyed the vegetarian sausages as a family meal and I will definitely cook them again. If I were to change anything I would use less cheese (although the cheese binds the ingredients as much as the egg), and even add more little bits like sweet corn or tiny bits of red pepper. Time to experiment!

Veggie Rissoles

by Anna
cooked by Anna and Jaime

Boy these were yummy little things! Highly recommended.

Another recipe  taken from The complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner. 

These were great. Not only did they actually turn out like the recipe suggested, they were also a fab finger food for the wee vegetarian. It actually kills me not posting the recipe....

On her website I found a veggie burger recipe which isn't all too different from the rissoles. I will try it next week.

Rissoles with salad

Hands on

Busy cooking

It seems we are too busy cooking to update our blog: recipes we have tried, tested and amended and for ever cleaning that patch under the high chair seems to have chewed up a lot of our time. We now have a backlog of photos to post and things we wanted to write about. Well, rather than stagnating, we will just keep posting as and when. If there happens to be some spare time, we will revisit the "to do" folder.

Busy eating

We've been getting a bit more adventurous with our veggie baby cooking. Not only do purees start feeling a little bit boring but it's time to get hands on. Finger foods have always been high on the "yes please" list, and with the monkey clearly wanting to get his hands dirty there is no denying it: Our baby is growing up and wants to start exploring grown up stuff. NB We do not throw food against the wall - he's not got that from us. Just sayin'.

Pancakes

Yesterday I made these lovely pancakes for the monkey. No difference to "grown up" pancake recipes, really. Just leave the refined sugar out. We added a tiny bit of maple syrup so it wasn't too dry. The recipe suggested fruit to go with it, but we didn't have anything more suitable than some pieces of pears. Doesn't look quite as exciting in our photo as it did in Annabel Karmel's cookbook but I guess we don't have a food photographer on standby, so excuse us ;) The veggie baby liked the pancakes but didn't quite eat enough so we ended up making a small portion of baby porridge to supplement.

Yummy pancakes with a drop of maple sirup

Risotto

For dinner it was time to cook again (after lunchtime was a case of feeding the monkey some leftover roasted veggies with pasta). Although the photo clearly isn't doing this recipe justice, it smelled and tasted superb. Oh and did it go down a treat? It sure did. Recipe again from Annabel Karmel's cookbook although we took some liberties with it.

Ingredients are
basmati Rice
tomatos
grated cheese
pumpkin
splash of maple syrup
mixed herbs
teeny bit of salt

I am not keen on going high on sugar, but because it tasted a tad too bland we added herbs, salt and maple syrup.

Pumpkin tomato risotto - WINNER!

That's it, baby. More updates soon.

Veggie week

A busy baby week...

We've had a busy baby week - doesn't every parent? Scheduling all those extra cooking sessions really is a labour of love - but then, isn't all of parenting?

This week our monkey enjoyed a variety of dishes. Some went down better than others.

 

Hummus

We left the chickpeas soak for aaages, as in over 24hrs, so they were nice and soft for blending. Luckily we have a kick butt juicer which doesn't just juice but can also blend. Hummus definitely didn't make it to the favourite list (yet). A bit of rice cake helped get it down easier and we ended up mixing it under some avocado the next day when it was lunchtime.

Recipe was taken from Baby & Child Vegetarian Recipes by Carol Timperley

Moshed chick peas

Hummus with rice cake

Baby Tapas

The following day we hadn't cooked a new meal for lunchtime so decided on some quick 'tapas'. White bread with some unsalted butter, avocado blended with pear (with lots left over for the next day) and a strip of cheese to munch on. We covered plant protein with the chick peas, animal protein with the cheese and that healthy fat for growth with the avocado dip. Pear added extra vitamins. Yum.

The veggie baby enjoyed the various textures – as did the cat who took a good sniff at whatever landed on the floor

Cauliflower with cheese sauce

This is a really easy recipe. Basically you make a roo (bit of melted butter, few spoons of flower mixed in until it's a nice "lump"), add around 170ml of milk and stir until it's a nice white sauce. Add some grated cheese and add to whatever steamed or cooked veg you've made. We used cauliflower but have also added this to potato, courgette, broccoli or mixed veg. Blend it for a really smooth consistency or use a potato masher for a bit more texture.

Cauliflower with cheese

This is an absolute favourite with the monkey. He kept asking for more and more. In fact he didn't leave much over to put aside for another day. Success.

Quinoa pasta with Napolitana sauce

A friend of ours had just returned from Cypress where her family is from. She brought back some olive oil which her grandmother had made (in fact, our friend had helped hand-pick the olives the previous year). This felt like the perfect dish to add that extra special splash of olive oil.

This is another recipe taken from Annabel Karmel's book (see resources or previous posts). Quick and easy to cook, it was a dish we all ate together by quadrupling the original recipe. A glimpse to what it will be like going back to cooking just the one family dish. We like it.

The only thing we didn't take into account was that the pasata had added sugar in it. In future we will make our own or find "plain" pasata.

Chopping carrot, onion, garlic... our friend's hand made olive oil and the family table. We had to cut down the quinoa spaghetti a bit for easier eating. 

Lentils all the way

Today we're having lentils. Lentils are great - so versatile and full of protein.

The recipe we used for the monkey was taken from Annabel Karmel's New Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner (have a look here).  


We don't want to breach copyright, hence no exact recipe. 
However the ingredients are: onion, celery, vegetable oil, carrot, split red lentil, sweet potato and homemade veggie stock - and it is a quick and easy recipe.

Our veggie baby loves this lovely lentil stew (admittedly we've cooked this before, but we only started our blog now, so we thought we may as well revisit) and kept asking for more - mouth wide open.

Meanwhile we cooked ourselves a nice "Indian red lentil soup" from the 30 Minute Vegan (have a look here). Happy veggies.

Cooked by Jaime, posted by Anna