So, your suggestions sucked, big time! Haha, only kidding, they seemed quite tasty actually but I made something much much better. It’s like an orgasm in your mouth (and trust me you DO want to know what that tastes like!).

Now, hear me out. This recipe is not the simplest ever but it might just be the tastiest god damn thing you have ever had on your plate, and I’m not only saying that because I made it up, it actually is! Served with buttery mashed potatoes and a sauce that’s just to die for, some maple and soy sauce glazed asparagus. I’m in heaven!

Well, are you going to make it?

Awesomest stuffed chard in history:

• a bunch of chard
• 1 dl (½ cup) quinoa
• 2 dl (1 cup) vegetable stock
• 1 bell pepper
• 1 small sweet potato (I have seen sweet potatoes the size of a fist, and ones the size of a small head)
• 1 small onion
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 tsp thyme
• ½tsp marjoram
• salt and pepper

• 1 dl (½ cup) stock + 1 tbsp tomato paste

Turn oven on to 200 C (390 F). Rinse quinoa in hot water and put into a pan, add vegetable stock and bring to a boil. Boil for about 12-15 minutes.

Chop up the sweet potato and the bell pepper and pop them in the oven to roast.

Cut of the leaves from the stems of the chard, reserving the stems. Boil leaves in water for about a minute to make them softer and greener. Rinse the stems and finely chop the nice bit of them, the most coarse bit near the bottom is no good.

Chop onion finely and mince garlic. Sauté with finely chopped chard stems until soft and somewhat transparent. Strain away any excess water and add the quinoa when it’s finished boiling. Take the roasted vegetables out of the oven when they’re ready, this should be about the same time as the quinoa is (they take about 15 minutes). Chop them up a bit more and add to the pan. Season with thyme and marjoram, salt and pepper.

Take a leaf of chard and put about 2 tbsp of filling on it. Roll it up into a compact roll and put in an oven safe dish. Mix a little vegetable stock with a tablespoon of tomato paste and pour over the rolls. Put in the oven for about 20 minutes, covered with tinfoil.

Serve with mashed potatoes and the best damn gravy you know.

ok, I know I asked for mangold recipes in my last post but what I meant was;

Does anyone have any good chard/swiss chard recipes to share? I bought some and I’ve never had it before. I need to know you favourites!

Ok, so I’m off to work in a couple of minutes but first I really wanted to post this mosaic of what I’ve cooked lately.

It’s actually just two things. A strawberry mousse cupcake that Alex has been eyeing lately, he gets news from Peta2 and the vegcooking blog and this was one of their recipes of the week. He’s a sucker for pink sugary things so we agreed on making these together. Together, however, means that I do the baking and he does the eating. (I know her cupcakes are prettier, but don’t you dare get bitchy with me, this is my second cupcake frosting ever!)

The other thing I made lately was this pink beetroot pie. Alex claims beetroot pie is his favourite so I make it fairly regularly and it’s always soo good. This time one of my friends came by for dinner and we all enjoyed this pie with some salad on the side. The filling is just pickled beetroots cut in pieces, leek, red bell pepper, salt and pepper and some thyme. I mixed some tofu with some soymilk, cornstarch and nutritional yeast and then threw in some more beetroot and blended that with the rest to make it lovely and pink.

Yesterday we went out and bought 4 bags full of lovely produce so we can finally COOK again. The fridge has been very empty lately and I’ve been feeling uninspired but now I can’t even wait. I bought mangold /CHARD!(i’ve never tried it before) so if you have a favourite recipe, please share! I have no idea what to do with it.

1. Strawberry mousse cupcakes, 2. Beetroot love pie, 3. Love pie, 4. Strawberry mousse cupcakes, of love!

Alex has been a vegetarian for a year today. Last year on this day he had a fish and chips (in Sweden no less!) and then decided that he was going to give up on eating animals. Go him!

Happy anniversary snygging!

I finally updated my blogroll. It was about damn time! I’ve been dreading it because it’s such a hassle, but going through my RRS reader I realised there about 25 more blogs I ALWAYS read than what I have listed in my blogroll. Well, the tedious task of adding them to my blogroll is finally complete. All of my listed links are blogs I visit every time there’s an update, I might not comment on everything (seriously, you haven’t seen me in the morning going through unread posts looking like a ghost?) but I love them all sooo much.

As for love, and veganism; you guys rock. Sometimes it might feel like you’re not making much of a difference in the world. I often get the feeling that my food choices aren’t doing anything to help the world and the animals and maybe you feel the same sometimes, but trust me, you DO make a difference. When I started this blog I had no thoughts of ever going vegan. I liked my cheese and my eggs and my milk, damnit! And nothing was ever going to change that. Now, a couple of months later we’re in the middle of this process to veganize our lives and it’s going wonderfully. We’re not completely vegan (I still have dairy and eggs when eating out or at friends houses) but almost all of our food at home is. There’s this bottle of caramel sauce that isn’t, a pizzakit in the fridge that has eggs and a couple of baking mixes with both eggs and dairy but other than that we’re pretty much good. I have several shoes made of leather still (and those are from way before I was even vegetarian) and a few items with wool and I will continue to use them until they need replacing. We tried our first vegan cheese today, I made a block of Swiss Cheeze from the Uncheese Cookbook last night before going to bed and we had it on sandwiches this morning. It’s good!

Ok, now to some random foodporn that’s been on my flickr being all forgotten about for a long time. (If you have seen them before, tough luck :D) . I just feel my posts look so naked when there’s no picture.

Yesterday was a lovely day. Alex and I went to Malmö with a very good friend to eat at the festival, spend money on nice jewellery and to shop and hang out at Aphuset. We got to meet Björn from Vegankrubb and tried some fake salmon with two different sauces. Maria and I agreed that vegans are sexy (in a totally platonic way of course). The fake salmon was absolutely delicious and we ended up buying some to make at home. My friend Maria was amazed at the store, it’s kind of like a supermarket but with vegetarian, vegan and organic food, and she ended up buying a bunch of stuff. We bought some of the things we normally do plus some really tasty sweets.

Anyway, the day was great with good food. I had a very tasty vegan lemon masala burger (the malmö festival is like manna from heaven for us veggies!)

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Now, on to what this post was REALLY supposed to be about. Vegan thumbprint cookies, Sweden style. I’ve always been a lover of cookies and going vegan isn’t going to change that. Luckily, many of the classic Swedish cookies use no egg and so the other non vegan stuff is really easy to replace. This is a recipe that’s incredibly simple and veganizing it is so easy.peasy you don’t even have to think. I’ve looked at a couple of vegan thumbprint cookie recipes online, but most of them are nothing like these ones (for one, they have at least 10 ingredients, this one has only 5, they also have loads of complicated and hard to find stuff in them). These cookies are quite possibly my favourite of the ones from my childhood. they’re sweet, they melt in your mouth and they look good too. Plus, they’re easy to make.
Swedish jam thumbprint cookies:

• 450 ml (just under two cups) flour
• 100 ml (just under ½ cup) sugar
• 200gr (7 oz) vegan margarine
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• raspberry jam

Turn oven to 175 C or 350F. Cream sugar, margarine and vanilla extract together. Mix in the flour and work into a dough ball. Fridge the dough for about 20 minutes. Roll the dough into about 30 little balls about 2 cm in diameter (or about an inch), flatten them a little and put on parchment paper on a baking tray. Make a little thumbprint in them (make the print bigger for more jam!) and fill them with some jam. Bake in the oven for about 15 minutes until they’ve turned just a little bit golden. Enjoy with some coffee in the company of good friends. Makes about 30.

I love you people. Your recipes saved my night! We had people over for dinner (for no other reason than the fact that I love cooking for people!) and I decided I’d use some of the recipes I’ve been bookmarking for using sometime. So.

First of all, Celine is a genius. You really are. You’re my hero and I love you. I made the tomato soup and the cheesy crackers today and wow they were awesome. My mother was given some of all the food as a ‘dinner’ box and she phoned me up immediately saying it was ‘the best tomato soup she has ever had’. Hah, success! I should have lied and told her that I made up the recipe myself but I told the truth like the sucker I am.

For the main course we had black bean and walnut burgers. Lindyloo posted about them a while ago and I had just made a huge batch of black beans that were just waiting in the freezer. We served our burgers with two types of dressing. A pesto dressing (best home made pesto ever) and a garlic parsley one, lettuce, onions and tomatoes.

And finally for desert, the best damn vegan brownies in the universe. Vivacious Vegan posted about them and I knew I had to try them. We ate the whole batch with soyatoo cream and some soy ice cream and everyone agreed they might be the best brownies ever made.. ever!

1. best vegan brownies ever, 2. Tomato soup with cheezy stars, 3. Black bean walnut burger, 4. Cookie loves soyatoo cream

Tomorrow I’m preparing food for our picnic and theme park visit on Saturday. I’m in charge of baking bread, making pancakes and cookies, making marinated bean salad and some ribz. Busy busy days! Also tomorrow, going to malmö to eat veggie food at the malmö festival and visiting astrid and the monkeys to see if Björn at Vegankrubb is any good at cooking ;D.

As I’ve told you before, we’re slowly veganizing our life. It’s going well! I’d say that about 90% of all the foods we consume at home are vegan and we’re trying our best when eating out as well. My friends are catching on and are trying to feed me vegan food when we see each other. A couple of days ago two friends and I had dinner together to discuss life, men and our upcoming trip to a theme park. They made the main course and I made the dessert.

Everywhere I look now people are making upside down cakes. I didn’t want to be any worse than them (and also I still have loads and loads of plums) so I made us an upside down plum cake. It was delicious! We ate it with ice cream (not vegan) and everyone agreed that I am a baking genius (goooooo me!). The recipe is adapted from one a found here.

Upside down plum cake:

• 10-20 plums (depending on the size, you want to cover the bottom of your cake tin)
• 2 tbsp brown sugar

• 250 ml (1 cup) flour
• 3 tbsp soy flour
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 cup sugar
• 160 ml (2/3 cup) soy milk
• orgran no egg replacer 2 whites (2 tsp egg replacer and 2 tbsp water)
• 80 ml (1/3 cup) golden syrup
• 1 tsp vanilla extract (or if you’re Swedish, you use the powdered version and put it in with the dry ingredients)

Heat the oven to 175C (350F). Rinse the plums, cut them in halves and remove the pith. Cover the bottom of a cake tin (one with removable sides)  (22cm/9in)  with plums. Take them out again and sprinkle them with brown sugar. Let sit for a while. Spray the cake tin with non stick oil.

Combine flour, soy flour, baking powder and salt in a bowl and stir them. In another bowl whisk together the soymilk and the sugar for a few minutes, until the sugar has partly dissolved. Add the other liquid ingredients and stir together. Mix the dry ingredients into the wet and stir together.

Put the plums into the cake tin, cover them with the batter and out into the oven for 35-40 minutes. When the cake is done loosen it immediately and invert it onto a plate. Serves a small bunch of hungry people!

It’s summer! Lovely fabulous summer. Despite being ill (and also somewhat crazy) I decided a couple of days ago that I needed someone to give me plums. Ask and ye shall receieve; I have enough plums to feed a small country. One of my mothers friends has a plum tree and he was kind enough to give us a small part of his harvest. I also have plenty of tasty Swedish apples bought in the apple orchards of south Sweden, some apricots (for that marmalade I made a few days ago that my mother just loved) and a very big summer squash of some sort (maybe crockneck, I don’t know)

I have spent the entire day in the heat of the kitchen, making jam, marmalade and plums in vanilla syrup. It’s horrendously hot and humid and I’m ill so maybe this wasn’t the best decision I’ve ever made, but it’s a very delicious one.

I still have more than two thirds of the plums to go. I think I’ll make some more jam, and some marmalade maybe.

1. Plums in vanilla syrup, 2. white rose, 3. An abundance of fresh produce, 4. Plums in vanilla syrup

Plums in vanilla syrup:

• 1 kg (2 lbs) plums
• 1 stick of vanilla
• 8 dl (3 cups) water
• 6 dl/500 gr (1 lb) sugar

Cut the vanilla stick in half, lenghtwise. Put in a pot together with water and sugar. bring to a boil and let boil for ten minutes. Cut the plums in half and deseed them. Put in the sugar syrup and let simmer for about 2 minutes. After simmering put the plums in a clean heat resistant glass jar and pour some syrup on top so that they’re all covered. Put lid on, let cool. Keeps in the fridge for about a week and tastes lovely with some soy icecream or in a cake.

Just a minor update to let anybody using IE know I’ve fixed the issue with all the text in the posts being horrendously huge, and a few other minor things. If anyone finds any problems, comment about them here so I can try to fix them. Cheers.