"Mmm. Food." tries Vegan!

I'm a big believer in chocolate and butter and sugar. That's how the world goes around.

But my favourite type of thing to eat? Grilled chicken breast on top of a hearty fattoush salad. Broiled teppanyaki-type fish with wilted greens and rice. Nutella.

I absolutely love light, healthy food, cooked with the freshest of ingredients and minimal cooking techniques. I abstain from posting these from the blog, because my Stats-meter always shows heavy leanings toward Falooda and Chocolate Biscuit Cake.

Even then, if the dish is good enough, I will break my own rules and post it for the world to see. Case in point: Oven Roasted Chickpeas, Muhammara and Garden Pesto Pasta.

My family is another whole story... they don't go a day without eating poultry, meat, fish or worst-case scenario, eggs. And I go rogue. I make Vegan food.

You heard me. Vegan. No meat. No eggs. No dairy. No honey, even!

The sister-in-law said even "poor" people didn't eat this way... and that she wasn't brought up eating "this type of food". The brother said he was 99.99% sure that it was unlawful to shun all that God made rightful (Muslim men love bringing up religion when it suits them). On a side note, annoyingly-ignorant match made in heaven. I told them that I wouldn't be offended if they didn't taste, and that I'd make enough only for me and my health-freak of a mother.

So for today, I give you a savoury dish and a dessert... the tiniest steps you can take into Vegan-dom. There are plenty of amazing, exclusively Vegan food blogs like Chocolate-Covered Katie (from where both recipes du jour have been adapted from) and Oh She Glows. However, if you're hesitant about starting with Chia seeds and Virgin coconut oil, these two dishes could be your happy crutches into the land of all things Vegan.

The first is my excuse for Nutella. I'm a Nutella-holic. I make my own from peanuts. I buy bottles of the stuff from a whole-sale retailer. No lie.

The second is an Italian spin on Hummus. Pizza hummus! I had to add Parmesan cheese and de-Veganise it, but that's just me.

Chocolate-Banana-Peanut butter fudge:

Ingredients:

2 tbsp peanut butter
2 tbsp cocoa powder
2 tbsp coconut butter (can substitute with extra peanut butter)
80 g over-ripe banana
a pinch of salt

Method:

If you want to make your own coconut butter, just whiz around 3 tbsp of freshly grated coconut in the mixie/food processor until it forms a smooth buttery/chutney-like mix.

Add the peanut butter, salt and cocoa powder, and blend some more.

Add in the overripe banana, and give it a final blitz.

Taste the mix, to see if you'd like a teensy bit of brown or white sugar.

Pour it out into a bowl and freeze until firm. You can also refrigerate and eat it like frosting/Nutella.

Pizza Hummus:

Ingredients:
1/2 cup garbanzo beans, drained (chickpeas that have been soaked and pressure-cooked)
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese (sub with nutritional yeast to keep it Vegan)
1 cup cherry tomatoes (or regular)
2 cloves of garlic
1/2 an onion (un-chopped)
1/4 tsp dried basil
2 tsps tomato paste/ketchup
salt and pepper to taste

Method:

Microwave or boil the tomatoes until the skin bursts.

 If you're microwaving, poking all over with a fork prevents them from splattering out.

In a medium sauce, heat the olive oil. Add the peeled, deseeded tomatoes, half an onion (unchopped) and the garlic with some fresh basil (if available).

Let it stew on medium heat for around 15 minutes.

Once this has cooled down, remove the onion. Blitz the rest of it in a mixie/food processor, along with the ketchup. Add in the chickpeas/garbanzo and blend will until no chunks remain.

Add in the dried basil and the cheese and give one final whirl. Taste it.

Add more olive oil for richness, extra salt, pepper and ketchup to taste. You might need more of the "pizza sauce" if the consistency isn't that of hummus.

Serve with crackers or veggie sticks.

My sister-in-law, the veggie-hater, ate the whole bowl, albeit with plenty of extra shaved parmesan.

My brother nearly cut his hands trying to get the last bits of the Chocolate-PB fudge out of the mixie cup.

I'd be more smug about the whole thing if they had bothered to save me some.

Valentine's Day Special #1 / No-bake fudgey Chocolate Peanut-butter cookies.

There are sometimes in life when Chocolate becomes a necessity. So much of a necessity that you consider getting a Continuous Ryle's Tube feeding of molten chocolate.

It could be post-breakup, especially when Valentine's Day and celebrity couples of amalgamated nomenclature and your late-teenaged neighbour flaunt their Two-Hearts-One-S***holeSoul status. It could be post-midnight, when all the shops selling candy (of the chocolate, not the substance-abuse variety) are closed. It could be post weddings of grandeur and younger cousins popping out babies; seats of higher-education or topnotch jobs gained. You're truly happy for them, but this gives you a fat nasty dose of Reality.

There's also another females-only situation.

Science recognizes this as the big M. Men may know this as a time in life where you've been forced to lie "you? Fat?! You're painfully skinny!" As for the women, I feel for you. I really do.

Apart from throwing back a couple of Meftal-Spas 500 and drinking black tea and doing your version of pranayamas, this is the only solution I have for you.

Load up on the carbohydrates, banish the bloat-inducing salt.

And by carbohydrates, I mean Sugar. Quite a bit of it. But there's also heaps of oats, peanut butter and milk, so it should cancel out, by the laws of Denial.

These No bake cookies require no oven. They require no eggs. They require no patience. And they taste bloody good. This is the closest I've got to Z's Fantastic Chocolate-Peanut Butter fudge, the ones I used to beg her to make (so good!) and not make (fattening). Of course, she would be outraged at the addition of oats.

This recipe is made out of pantry staples.

And if you close your eyes and add a little more salt, you can pretend these are Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Yum!

No-Bake Fudgey Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies:

(Adapted from Food Network)

Ingredients:

1-3/4 cups white, granulated sugar
4 tablespoons cocoa powder
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup milk
1 cup peanut butter (smooth is preferred, I used chunky)

1 tablespoon vanilla essence

3 cups oatmeal (instant oats)

1/4 tsp salt (optional)

Method:

In a heavy bottomed saucepan, whisk together the sugar, butter, cocoa and milk. Place the pan over high heat.

Bring it to a foamy boil, and let it boil for exactly one minute.

If it isn't nicely reduced and fudgey, boil for 30 seconds more.

Whisk in the peanut butter, vanilla essence, salt (if using) first.

Add in the oats.

If the mix is too runny, you can add a couple of tablespoons of oats. If it's too stiff, thin it out with a teaspoon of milk or peanut butter.

Place scoops of cookie dough onto a sheet of waxed paper or aluminium foil.

It will ideally set in its shape at room temperature, but if you live in Madras, refrigerate!

Things to do with the cookies:

Eat with milk for breakfast.

Eat by yourself in pajamas while watching one of Woody Allen's movies.

Pack them and give to your loved ones.

Invite a friend over and gossip/b**ch/polambify for hours over these.

Or if you have a boring life, you can chase random brats who steal your cookies and run out when you aren't looking.

This is Zaad's happy/hungry face. People say he takes after me.

You can easily halve the recipe and still get at least a dozen large cookies. Which will keep, wrapped in foil, for around a week in the refrigerator in a normal household and three hours in mine. There's just one niggling thought.

Please make it with Nutella and tell me how if it matches up to all my daydreams/fantasies.

P.S.: This post is dedicated to some skinny-yet-strong women:

Rad (who asked for egg-less); for Spica (who asked for more non-NEWT-y recipes); for Anisha L (cupcake liners and making me mildly famous!); for A, who would have eaten it with no regard to "calories-and-crap"; for Z, who made me fudge for the first time and for funding my two-Reese-cups-per day habit (for a whole week); for Sarbee (who likes her chocolate-laden cookies, but has no oven) and for Nigbe (who pretends to hate Valentine's Day, but is a closet romantic and the happiest when true-love stories do work out).

Peanuts, two yu-Mmm-y ways.

First, my posts become erratic (to put in kindly). And now I'm going on a much-needed holiday, which means that there won't be any million-calorie food photos for you to wake up to, for another week. That needs to be made up for. How about two recipes, then?

You know, like on Top Chef. Lamb, two ways, jicama, two ways or whatever. Nothing weirdly exotic, though. Of all the ingredients I could work with, I choose peanuts.

Peanuts. Yeah. That little nitrogenous legume which everyone discards in favour of masala cashews, plump hazelnuts and Irani pistachios, at my household. I'd take peanuts any day. In any and every way.

The masala pori peanuts sold at the beach? E.coli, Psch.coli. For masala pori virgins, it basically is a disproportionate mix of boiled peanuts tossed with puffed rice, shaved carrots, chopped onions, a handful of furiously red masala, juicy tomato, twist of lime, deftly dropped into a paper cone. Best ten bucks of the day.

Reese's peanut pieces? Salty peanut filling and chocolate. OK, I'm not even going to go into the details, it's a little too intimate for me to share with the world. Not like I haven't been accused of food porn enough. Still. Chocolate and peanut. MMMMM. In fact, I've eaten so many kilos of Peanut M and Ms over the ages that I can't face them any more. At least for the next few months. It's that serious.

Another peanut delicacy is the roasted peanuts you get on the Suburban trains. Women selling various roasted grams, fried daal and peanuts, screaming their wares out to the world. Makes you feel like you're in Sarojini Naidu's poem when your day hasn't involved getting cussed out at and patients dying (aka a rare good day). On a bad day, you contemplate shoving them off the train at the next stop.

For those who don't take the electric train, there's another option. The wholesale merchants who have hole-in-the-wall shops with mechanical weighing scales. We buy our wholesale peanuts, aval (beaten rice), pori, jaggery-candied pori balls from this little shop at Amjikarai and they are just unbeatable.

And while Madras is choc-a-bloc with stores of that kind, other peanut-based goodies are a little harder to find. Like authentic honey-roasted peanuts. And The Peanut Butter factory's Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter.

So I leak the two recipes that have given me such joy. A Nutella-like concoction made out of peanuts that I got from LA Times. And the other is honey-roasted peanuts you can munch on during game nights! Go nuts.

Dark chocolate Peanut Butter.

1 cup raw peanuts
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
3/4 cup powdered sugar, sifted
1/8 teaspoon salt
4 tsps peanut oil (I used Saffola)

1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Line a baking tray with aluminium foil. Spread the peanuts evenly over the sheet. Bake for about 8 minutes, shaking them and turning the tray around halfway.
When they darken slightly, take them out.

It's easier to skin them after roasting. If you're using toasted peanuts, 3-4 minutes is more than enough.

2. In a mixie or food processor, pulse/blitz the cooled peanuts.



Some of it got too dark. Make sure you remove the over-ly burnt peanuts,
even a couple of them can spoil the whole thing!

 Keep pulsing them until the oil separates out. Scrape down the bits that have splattered on the sides of the food processor.

3. Add the cocoa, sugar, vanilla, salt and 2 teaspoons oil to the food processor and continue to process until well blended, about 1 minute.

That definitely needs the extra oil!

Scrape down the sides as needed. You'll notice that it's coming together.

The spread is ready.

If it isn't the consistency of Nutella, you might want to add a wee bit more oil in. Spoon it into a container. Or start eating right away. After the spread has cooled down to room temperature, store it in the refrigerator. It'll keep for at least a week. If it remains uneaten for longer than that, let me know.

Honey roasted peanuts

Ingredients:

1 cup raw, skinned peanuts (I used roasted)
1 tbsp. honey
2 tsp. butter
1/2 tsp. salt
½ tsp. vanilla extract
¼ tsp. ground cinnamon
2 tbsp. granulated sugar

Method:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F or 180 degrees C.

In a microwave safe bowl, mix the salted butter, honey, maple syrup, cinnamon and vanilla. Microwave for 15 seconds or so.

Massage the honey-butter mix into the skinned nuts.

Spread coated nuts on aluminium foil in a single layer.

Bake coated peanuts at 350 degrees F for 5 minutes, then remove nuts quickly and stir them around to even the coating. Bake for another 5 minutes until golden brown. Do be careful, the difference between roasted and burnt is roughly 20 seconds!

Take them out, and pour it into a dry, clean mixing bowl. Sprinkle over the granulated sugar and salt. Taste. Add on salt and sugar more if necessary.

Transfer this to an airtight box and store at room temperature.

So. I hope the chocolate-peanut spread keeps you going for a while. Make the honey roasted peanuts and the corn syrup towards the end of the week. I'll come back and tell you how to make a caramel-brownie-cupcake-love child that tastes freakishly like Snickers.

Au Revoir.