Mushroom Pie

Autumn is here and that means only one thing: pie! With that in mind I thought I’d share one of my old pie recipes with you. Instead of going for creamy, I’ve gone for a super savoury rich sauce which will have your taste buds dancing on the ceiling.

Let’s get the ingredients sorted:

  • A tablespoon of all purpose flour
  • A tablespoon of corn flour
  • Two carrots, peeled and diced
  • One onion, peeled and diced
  • One stick of celery, diced
  • Pre-rolled puff pastry (I used Jus Rol.)
  • Vegetable stock (I used a tablespoon of paste.)
  • Salt & pepper to taste
  • Two different types of mushrooms. (I used chesnut and dried shitake.)
  • Vegetable oil
  • 5 bulbs of garlic, peeled and diced
  • Tablespoon of dried parsley

Let’s get going:

Chop and mix the mushrooms. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add the vegetable stock and all purpose flour. Heat some vegetable oil in a pan and add the mixture. (The picture below is before I added the flour and mixed.)

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Stir fry for about three minutes, or until mushrooms are soft. Remove the mushroom mixture from the pan and place in a bowl of about 250ml of water. This will create a lovely rich stock.

Now place the onions, garlic, carrot, parsley and celery into the pan, making sure you scrape up all that lovely flavour left by the mushrooms. Add the mushrooms and stock back in. Mix everything together and then add the corn flour, mixing continually. Turn the pan right down, cover and allow to simmer for 15 minutes.

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Check on the mixture occasionally to make sure it has not become too thick. If it has, add some water and stir.

Once the carrots and celery are nice and soft, take the pan off of the heat and allow to cool.

Roll the pastry out and cut into shapes larger than the dishes you plan to use. Heat the oven to about 3/4 of top heat. Fill the dishes and cover the mixture with the puff pastry. Don’t forget to poke some holes in the pastry to allow steam to escape.

After 20 minutes in the oven, your pie(s) should look like this:

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Serve with green beans and mashed potato. Enjoy as a small pot pie or a a huge slab of deliciousness.

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I hope you enjoy this recipe. It’s one of my favourites!

Frankie 🙂

Sticky Lemon Mushrooms

If you’re looking for an easy week night meal that takes about 30 minutes, this is the dish for you.

It’s full of intense flavour and you can add bits to it to bulk it up if you are extra hungry.

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Ingredients

2 tbsp vegetable oil

1 whole pack of mushrooms

1 tsp of Chinese five spice powder

2 tbsp plain flour

A thumb sized piece of ginger, shredded

250g of sugar snap peas or mangetout

2 spring onions, sliced

Then for the sauce:

3 lemons (finely grated rind and juice of 2, 1 thinly sliced.)

1 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp liquid vegetable stock

2 tbsp of golden syrup

2 tsp cornflour, dissolved in 1 tbsp of water

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1) Make the sauce. In a bowl, mix together all the sauce ingredients, except the lemon slices, then set aside.

2) Heat the oil in a wok or a frying pan. Season the mushrooms to your taste and sprinkle with five spice and flour. Brown the mushrooms in the pan.

3) Add the ginger, mangetout and spring onions and sizzle for a few minutes.

4) Finally add the sauce and lemon slices and mix for 2/3 minutes until the sauce starts to thicken.

Serve over white rice. Enjoy! 🙂

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What I Ate Sunday

Today has been a really productive and non-stressful day and for the first time in what seems like forever, the sun was out. I woke up at around 07:15 but didn’t bother to get up until 08:30 due to having lots of snuggles of felines, a large white woof and a beardy man times. I left the bearded one in bed and made an epic smoothie, which subsequently I spoiled him with in bed.

This is a banana, mango, spinach, peanut butter and raw cacao powder smoothie. It tastes like a peanut butter and banana milkshake.

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That did me for the whole morning because it was so filling, however on return from our 6k walk with Bailey Woof I was getting a tad hungry so I made a wholemeal spinach and pasta “cheesy” bake with a cucumber and tomato side salad.

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A little while after this we hit the gym where we lifted some seriously heavy shit. I needed a protein hit after that so when we got home I rustled up some cashew nut cheese on some wholemeal sweet onion crackers.  (I’ll be posting a recipe for this soon.)

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For dinner Mykey made a kale, bean, mushroom, spinach and breaded tofu stir fry which totally hit the spot.

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So there you have it. Simply, tasty and healthy vegan food. 🙂

Mushroom Pate

The Facebook group, “What Fat Vegans Eat” has spoken so here is my famous mushroom pate recipe. So far served to Mykey, Herts Vegans and probably quite a few others after this post.

When I made this for my Christmas spread blog, I added dark ale and it tasted divine and for the Herts Vegans potluck, I substituted the dark ale for extra mushrooms and garlic and it worked just as well.

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Ingredients:

1 whole pack of mushrooms (will make two ramekins)

8 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed

2 red onions, peeled and diced

2 table spoons olive oil

1 table spoon of vegan butter

A teaspoon of herb of choice. (First time I used dill and the second time I used parsley)

Salt

Pepper

2 table spoons of dark ale (optional)

 

Method:

Heat a pan with the olive oil and literally put all of the ingredients in that pan straight away.

Cook whilst stirring every couple of minutes for about 10-15 minutes.

Leave to cool for 5 minutes and then place in a blender.

Blend until it resembles a chunky paste. Taste test and add more salt etc if needed. I’d also recommend adding some more olive oil here just to make it extra creamy.

Enjoy with toast, crostini, soya cheese or homemade wholemeal bread….or take to a potluck with some peanut butter cookies! 😉

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