Dinner (Italian)

Last night, I made dinner for David.  A proper, three-course, Italian meal, with wine and mints afterwards.  All totally vegan, and all fairly easy, since I am a Lazy Cook.

The starter was cheesy garlic bread.  I went for Bella Italia style, rather than pizza hut.  That is, soft breadsticks rather than toasted slices of french baguette.  All recipes will be in later posts, to keep things neat, but I'll come back and link.

The main course was lasagne, with garlicky baked fries (using the purple foodies' recipe) and a salad consisting of pre-mixed salad leaves and some baby tomatoes.  I had salt and pepper grinders on the table.  These are new!  I've had the salt grinder for a while, but I bought the pepper one with the other ingredients.  I also tried my cider vinegar with it, which went really well with the salad leaves.  I'd never actually tried it before, although I've had it for a while - I use it to condition my hair and make cakes.

The lasagne was tricky, at first, but then surprisingly easy.  I googled a lot of recipes for lasagne and vegetarian lasagne, to get an idea of how it was made.  They all seemed really complicated, so I ignored them and made one up.  It tasted amazing.  The garlic fries came out really well too, especially for a first attempt.  I served them with a McDonald's Sweet Chilli dip which I got with some onion rings (vegan incidentally - it's a tempura batter, not a chip-shop batter), decanted into a little pot.  It went really well, but next time, I'm thinking guacamole.  I think the creaminess will work.  Or, I could probably make some kind of garlic-herb dip using tofu.  I know you can approximate Dominoes garlic and herb dip with mayonaise, mustard, garlic and parsley - I wonder if I can sub in silken tofu for the texture of the mayonaise?  Maybe some onion powder or something instead of the garlic?  Almost every part of this meal involved garlic.

For dessert, I got a tin of pineapple chunks, added a bit of boiled water and chopped strawberries, and set it with agar agar.  I cut it into chunks, and put this in a bowl with some fresh chopped strawberries and raspberries, and served it with coconut milk flavoured with vanilla and icing sugar.

Finally, I got a few pieces of Turkish Delight, from the Cranberry stall in the Bullring.  These weren't cheap - they were £1.39 for 100g, which worked out to about thirty pence each.  Incidentally, real Turkish Delight is vegan, but the cheaper stuff uses gelatin, and isn't.

I got two pieces of mint (actually, David did), and two of rose, and sliced them up on a little plate.  There was also Spanish chocolate.  And wine.  David chose the wine, because he's good at that.

Oh, and I made flapjacks the other day, and a berry-flavoured protein shake.  I may post those up as well, depending on time.