Sautéing Vegetables and Cheat's Vegetable Soup

Firstly; sautéing is tricky. Or rather, it's deceptively simple. I'm not quite certain about the difference between sautéing and frying, to be quite honest.

That video helps a bit, but I'm still not positive I understand the difference.

Google to the rescue! Apparently, the difference is;

In shallow frying, the food is turned with a palette knife or egg slice; in sauteing, the pan - which is sometimes covered - is shaken so the food 'jumps' (the French verb sauter means to leap).

That link also tells us that the oil chosen lends its flavour to the finished product. Vegetable oils have very little flavour, but apparently olive oil will give a more distinctive taste.

Anyway; cheat's vegetable soup.

Ingredients

• 1 Cup of Chopped Vegetables (I used Tesco's 'vegetable soup mix', which includes small pieces of carrot, leek, parsnip, and celery).
• 1 Vegetable Stock Cube (Quixo's, from Aldi, are vegan, but are so, so salty.  Do not add salt, seriously.  I need to find another kind, or start making my own vegetable stock).
• Oil, for sauteing.  I used vegetable oil this time.

1.  Sauté the vegetables in oil for a few minutes.  Go on, just slosh it on in there (incidentally, my skin is starting to respond to the treatment of adding oil to everything.  Joy!).  As the nice gentleman in the video says, the oil will reduce a fair amount.

I used a different pan so I could do a few vegetables at a time, in case it went wrong, but it would be a lot easier to use the same one.  However, that may be a bit heavy to keep in motion, so you'd have to use a spatula, which, technically, makes it shallow-frying, not sautéing.  The More You Know!

2.  Add 2-3 cups of water to the saucepan.  I'd go for two, it depends on liquidy you want it.  Remember that the water will reduce, and that you can always add more.

Bring to the boil, and add a stock cube.  Let simmer for 10-20 minutes, or until the vegetables are soft.

3.  Serve with bread.  And possibly fortified rice milk, if you've yet to hit your dairy substitutes for the day.

I'll post up a non-cheat's version when I feel like chopping my own vegetables and making my own stock, honest.

Fat

The journey to Aberdeen was fine, foodwise.  I didn't even eat half my sammiches.  Scotland itself was full of delicious teenage angst, forbidden fruit, and romantic moments which can never go any further, but which left some of my favouite memories of 2010.

Anyway.  My hair and skin have been really dry recently, and I posted on a couple of forums about this.  One person suggested that I might not be getting enough fat.  I'd already been writing down what I was eating, since I'm trying to stick to Canadian Nutritional Guidelines, and cut down on my carbs, so I looked over the list, and figured out that I wasn't getting more than 20-30g of fat a day.  Not nearly enough, considering I need something like 60-70g a day.

I was a little surprised at this, but probably shouldn't have been.  I'd cut dairy and meat out of my diet, which are the two major sources of fat (and the reason most people get enough).  Without them, it becomes trickier.

So, I went out earlier, and did some shopping.  I bought an iPhone first, so this next bit will be filled with pictures.

Hi there.

In tescos, I bought some fresh salad leaves (two bags of mixed leaves, one of green), two kinds of salad dressing - I've never tried salad dressing before - some pine nuts, and some other stuff. Some Innocent Smoothies (I was looking for veg pots really, but couldn't be bothered to keep looking after the staff had steered me wrong twice), and some rice chocolate bars. Oh, and some more soup. It's ridiculously salty, but it's good. Oh, yeah, and some veg that was half price. A pack of mangetout peas, carrots, broccoli, and baby corn, and some "winter soup vegetables", which are basically chopped spring onions and baby carrots and whatnot. I have plans for those, to be detailed at the end. Anyway.

Look at me, being all healthy.  You can barely see the chocolate hiding under the lettuce.

When I got in, I made a salad. I mixed together about a cup of green leaves with another cup of the mixed salad leaves, added two tablespoons of pinenuts, and doused the lot in three tablespoons of french dressing. In retrospect, this was a tad too much. It was pretty good though.

Also pretty good; Wetherspoons sweet potato, spinach, and chickpea curry. Ask for extra poppadums instead of naan bread, and it's totally vegan.  See?  Only £4.99 on Thursdays, too, with a drink.

Going back to the sweet little salad, I figure I can take those to work, in that little tub. Two cups of loose salad leaves amounts to one portion (well, it's somewhere between one and two cups for a portion, but I prefer to round up in this case), and I have a tiny little jar around here somewhere that should hold about 30ml of salad dressing, or two tablespoons. That would be nice to take to work, a little tub of salad with dressing. Incidentally, I got the tiny little tub from Boots; it's designed for people to decant make-up into, when travelling. They have a whole range, and they're so handy.

Bukkake effect imminent.

Incidentally, that's what I wanted the innocent veg pots for. Partly to, y'know, eat them, and partly to reuse the containers.

Speaking of reusing containers, I've also been having trouble hitting my calcium intake. Going by Canadian nutritional guidelines again, an adult female requires two portions, which, in fortified rice milk, is 500ml, or two portions at 250ml a portion. I found an old plastic 500ml bottle, filled it to the top, and managed to drink the lot - with my salad - without noticing.  Which is an improvement, because if I'd tried that with cow's milk, I'd have been very sick.

As well as the salad dressing, fried food tends to be higher in fat, though I gather this is less good fat and more bad fat.  It's probably still worth being unafraid to fry veggie burgers, since they tend to be fairly dry anyway.  Nuts are good too - peanut butter, for instance, is almost half fat.  Avocados, too - I'm going to have a go at making guacamole.

Got milk?  Fortified with calcium and B12.

Now, for my plans.  Every month, I'm going to make a three-course dinner for myself, or for whoever else I feel like inviting.  A starter, a main course, and a dessert.  I want a different vague theme each time, and I want to make things that are new to me.  I don't want to get stuck in a rut.

This month, I'm going to go with a vaguely English winter theme.  The other day, I went to The Shepherd's Rest, and they had this amazing vegetable soup.  It was the soup of the day - which, I gather, is whatever the chef feels like making - and, presumably involved saute-ing the vegetables in vegetable oil, before adding them to vegetable stock.  Just a guess.  It was good though, and I plan to recreate it as the starter, along with freshly baked bread, ie, par-baked rolls from Tesco.  I can bake my own bread, it's just a pain. The entire process of baking bread is evil; there's the whole heating and multiplying thing, and then you have to pummel it, and it breathes, and pushes back, and then you kill the whole thing with fire and it's all right. But, anyway.

Dessert will be chocolate fudge cake - that is, a recipe for chocolate cake nicked from Chef Chloe, coated in Becky Crocker's Fudge Icing (once I've checked what "may contain traces of milk", when the ingredients list is fine, actually means - I suspect that it was made using equipment which is also used for products containing dairy, which would be fine by me).

It's the main I'm finding a bit tricky.  I'm thinking mashed potato with some of that french dressing on it - all tangy, and creamy, and oily, and garlicky, yum.  Plus, some of those mixed vegetables, the broccoli, mangetout peas and so on, with a green salad.  And what else?  Perhaps some kind of nut roast, or a new kind of seitan.  I know Holland and Barrett sell vegan seitan mixes and things, but I always think I could do so much better by myself.  And they tend to be expensive (much like those veg pots).  I'll have a think about it, as well as a think about future themes.

Oh, while in Scotland I also snacked on stuffing sammiches.  That is, stuffing mix (the kind that you add water to), spread out flat on a plate, and cooked in the microwave (the intructions are on the paxo mix box itself).  Then put it between two slices of buttered toast.  Et voila.

You could try adding cranberries or seitan to that, but I kind of like it by itself. Weirdly, I can also imagine it going well with some kind of cooked slices of apple, if they were all soft and yummy. Might try that myself.

Marmite and Onion Roast Potato

This recipe isn't quite perfect yet, but the first try went pretty well.  I'm trying to recreate the taste of cheese and onion crisps.

I basically made my cheat's roast potatoes, only using the margarine/marmite mixture and onion salt.  There's an odd kind of beef gravy flavour on the bits where there's more marmite mixture than onion salt, but some are just perfect.

Easy Garlic Bread

Garlic bread is quite easy.  My method is as follows.

English Muffins (1 per person)
Butter Substitute (I used Pure dairy-free sunflower margarine, but up to you).
Powdered Garlic
Flat-Leaf Parsley (that is, the tiny little leaves chopped in a spice jar.  You could also use powdered parsley or fresh parsley).

1. Slice the English Muffins into fourths (lengthways).  This bit is optional.
2. Mix the garlic butter in the following proportions; 1 tablespoon "butter", 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder, 1/4 teaspoon parsley. 
3. Spread the butter onto the english muffins.
4. Put under the grill and toast until the butter is all melty and nice.

You could also just microwave it for ten seconds.

I like to add fake cheese.  Grate/slice it on and nuke it in the microwave for a few seconds so it melts properly.