Summer nights: Two tarts, two pestos, easy dinner

Here's two different tarts with two different pestos as a base. Plus a recipe for vegan potato salad which isn't too late to change your summer. This post is dedicated to a friend of mine who has served as inspiration to me over the years to follow my own heart, and who told me yesterday she is going to try a vegan diet- I hope it goes really well! Xx

Grilled courgette, pepper and onion tart with spinach and garlic pesto
Serves 4
Ingredients
1 medium courgette
1/2 white onion
2 small or 1 medium red pepper
2 handfuls of spinach
Olive oil
2 garlic cloves, chopped small
Juice 1/2 lemon
Seasoning
160g Jus-roll Puff Pastry (half a pack of pre-rolled pastry)
10g plain flour (to aid rolling out)
10ml soy milk

Preheat the oven to 180C. Grease and line an oven tray or dish for your tart and set aside.

Chop and prepare the courgette, onion and pepper so they're ready to use as toppings and set to one side. Remember to keep things like courgettes thinly sliced so they will bake easily and won't weigh down the tart with juice.

Using a hand blender or mixer, blend the spinach, garlic cloves and olive oil into a fine paste, adding lemon juice and seasoning to taste. (This smells AMAZING when it's just been done. I nearly stopped cooking and just ate this for dinner.)

Roll out the puff pastry onto the tray (you may need a little plain flour to aid this, especially in hot weather!) and add on the spinach pesto straight on to the pastry. Then top with the vegetables, a little more seasoning or maybe some more olive oil. Brush the edges of the tart with soy milk so it will brown and place towards the top of the oven for around 20 minutes.

Tomato, onion and caper tart with basil pesto
Serves 4
Ingredients
4 ripe onions
1/2 white onion
2 tbsp capers
Handful of basil leaves and stalks
Olive oil
Seasoning
160g Jus-roll Puff Pastry (half a pack of pre-rolled pastry)
10g plain flour (to aid rolling out)
10ml soy milk

Follow the directions as above, using tomatoes and onions as the toppings. For the vegan pesto, blend the basil, olive oil and seasoning together, and add anything extra to taste. I left out the garlic as I thought there were enough flavours with the onion and capers- but by all means add it in if you feel like it.

Amelie's potato salad
Serves 4
Ingredients
200g potatoes, chopped into quarters and boiled
Seasoning
100ml soy cream
Handful of dill, chopped

Boil the potatoes in salted water and drain. Once they've cooled a little, mix in the soy cream and dill, and serve with plenty of salt and pepper.

Beetroot hummus with charred dippers

It's way too hot to stick anything in the oven right now, so instead I'm not ashamed to say I fantasized about beetroot hummus for most of Tuesday.

Beet hummus is a great way of brightening up some aperitifs or grab-and-go dinners, and is much lighter than regular hummus so you don't need to worry about filling up before a show-stopping main course. The deep pink shade of hummus coupled with the oily wrap dippers make a perfect understated entrance for guests and is refreshing enough to serve mid-heatwave.

I would team this with some giant green olives on ice and some herb toasted almonds, or just a few cold wheat beers and plenty of the dipper wraps pictured above and below.

Makes enough for four as a dip

Ingredients

4 beetroots, peeled and cut into quarters

1 tin of chickpeas, drained

2 garlic cloves, chopped small

1 tsp ground cumin

2 tbsp tahini

Juice of one lemon

Seasoning

Olive oil to taste

Plus flour wraps to serve

Boil the beetroot in salted water until they are soft and can be pierced with a fork. Once cooked, chop into smaller pieces to make it easier to blend.

In a large mixing bowl, add the chickpeas, garlic cloves, cumin, tahini and lemon juice, along with the chopped beetroot. Using a hand blender or mixer if you have one, blend until smooth. The consistency will be lighter than normal hummus, so don't be worried if it isn't as thick. Add olive oil and seasoning to taste once you've blended, and set aside.

For the charred dippers, use a griddle pan to fry flour wraps on a high heat with olive oil for a few seconds (about 10) on each side. Then chop into quarters or eighths and get scooping!

BBQ sessions: Sweet potato and lime falafel with plantain and lime and coriander hummus

The only thing funnier than British people moaning about the heat is British people moaning about moaning the heat. Rest assured, this blog is a no-moan zone. Why moan when you can eat falafel?

These sweet potato and lime falafels are uber easy and perfect for making in advance for a BBQ. They also use a lot less flour and oil than other versions that are fried. They're very soft when straight out the oven, but leave them for half an hour or so to cool and they firm up, and proved the perfect summer accompaniment to my packed lunch! Heck, they survived a 7 mile cycle into work- these things are a falafel miracle.

Makes enough for four servings

Ingredients
For the falafel:
1 large or 2 medium sweet potatoes
1 tsp ground cumin
2 garlic cloves, chopped small
1 handful fresh coriander
Juice of 1 lime
100g plain flour
Seasoning
1 tbsp oil

Heat the oven to 200C. Wrap the sweet potatoes in kitchen roll and microwave for 8-10 minutes, until they are cooked the whole way through (you can check with a fork). Allow to cool for a minute or two before taking off their skins, which you should be able to do with your fingers.

Add to a large mixing bowl with the cumin, garlic, coriander, lime juice, flour and a little seasoning, and mash until smooth. Using a teaspoon, shape the potato mix into falafel-sized balls, I usually get around 16-20 out of a batch. Depending on the consistency, you can add a little oil to make the mixture wetter, or chose to leave it out.

Place on a greased oven tray and bake for around 30 minutes. They are very soft whilst baking so I would resist the temptation to try and turn them and just let them cook through.

While they are cooking, slice the ends of the plantain and vertically score one side of each from tip to top. Wrap up the plantain tight with foil and stick it towards the bottom of the oven, to cook alongside the falafel, or prepare now and save to cook on the BBQ.

For the lime and coriander hummus, follow this Guac & Roll hummus recipe, but  instead of lemon juice, pomegranate seeds and paprika, add lime juice and stick with the coriander.

The falafel and plantain should be ready at the same time, so either allow to cool and pack up for a BBQ or begin stacking into pitta breads for a quick, light lunch in the sunshine, sans moan!

Superhero food: Roasted hazelnut, pomegranate and radish salad

Radishes make me really happy. There, I said it. I love the colour pop, I love the spicy crunch and I love their tree-trunk pattern. They're also a great source of that infamous vitamin B6 everyone keeps asking me about. I teamed up them with hazelnuts, which are also rich in protein and a load of other B vitamins, but mainly because I love the taste of hazelnuts that lingers between sweet and savoury, which is made even more apparent when toasting. Pile 'em on fellas and get crunching!

I made this salad for brunch with soft polenta, roasted mushrooms and grilled tomatoes. I also added some pomegranate molasses for a dressing but I think it works just as well left plain and extra refreshing.

Makes enough for four as a side dish

200g hazelnuts
1 handful of radishes
2 inches cucumber
Pomegrante seeds from half a pomegranate
Different types of salad leaves

In a dry pan, toast the hazelnuts on a low heat for about 3-5 minutes. You'll know when they are ready as they will start to brown and you will be able to smell the oil from the nuts toasting.

Keeping an eye on the nuts, slice the radishes and cucumber and arrange with the salad leaves. Sprinkle the pomegranate seeds on top.

Roughly chop the nuts- leaving some whole, and place over the salad, mixing a little to make sure all the good stuff doesn't roll to the bottom if you're using a salad bowl.

Serve with warm polenta, juicy mushrooms or just the pomegranate molasses for a tasty wake-up call.

Gazpacho sweats and sangria withdrawal

A staple Catalan diet (maybe) of sangria and gazpacho

Hey, I'll admit it, I wasn't holding out much hope for an easy vegan ride in Barcelona. Considering Spain ranks as one of the highest meat consuming countries per capita in the world, I figured it would be paprika crisps, watermelon and black coffee most meals, if my (admittedly brief) stays in Poland and Italy were anything to go by.

So you can only imagine the relief that began to seep in after a few days in Barcelona and at Primavera Sound. There's stuff vegans can eat here! People know what that word is! There's VEGANAISE!! By the time I left Spain I'd tried more vegan food than I had ever imagined I would and have basically never eaten better on holiday. Scotland was more difficult. Who am I kidding, central London is more difficult.

We stayed in the centre of Barcelona where things like soy milk, plain pasta sauces and a lot of gorgeous fruit are easy to come by. The Turkish shops sell falafel wraps until the small hours and a lot of the bars will bring you a selection of vegan tapas dishes if you ask extra nice.

Espinacas a la Catalana, or, the best spinach you've ever tasted

But even when we ventured into the mountains- an hour's train ride out of Barcelona, we were able to make up a huge vegan, gluten free picnic with some of the most delicious food I've ever tasted- a tray of Catalan spinach cooked with olive oil and pine nuts was so rich we had to pretty much roll back to the cable car and down into the valley.

But it was the vegan food stall at Primavera Sound that changed EVERYTHING. I ate vegan brownies whilst watching Deerhunter, a vegan thali at 3am before Hot Chip and veganaise with (not so hot) chips at pretty much every opportunity. I would probably have eaten my way through the entire stall if we'd stayed any longer.

¡Muchas Gracias Spain! 

Notes from a vegan picnic

At the start of the month Amelie had a picnic to celebrate her birthday and it was a BONANZA. I was running preeeety late by the time I got to the park, having decided to make homemade pizza and guacamole with pomegranate seeds half an hour before the picnic started. But it didn't matter- there was a feast to get through...

Amelie and Ruth had made falafel, potato salad with purple potatoes and vegan soy cream, homemade hummus with homemade tahini (mind blown), hard lemonade (it involved gin) and a whole lot of other stuff I can't remember, probably because of the hard lemonade. Joe and Becca made some amazing cous cous salads and an aubergine and tomato sort of stew with so much olive oil it was the richest, tastiest thing I think I've ever eaten at a picnic.

We finished with a gluten free, vegan birthday cake made by Ruth. Happy belated Birthday Amelie!!

Sodo Pizza Cafe, Clapton

Maybe I'm just a bit too accustomed to the downers that hit after every Domino's, but Sodo Pizza Cafe on Upper Clapton Road ticks all the boxes, along with boxes I didn't even know needed ticking. Delicious crispy-based pizza, attentive, straight-forward staff, no weird table booking codewords and the ability to get your cheese replaced with something else if you're ordering vegan.

On top of this there's gorgeous homemade ginger beer, table water ALL the time, some of the best beers London has anywhere (Kernal, London Fields Brewery) and salad leaves and vegetables supplied by Hackney-based Growing Communities (who you can read more about here). A glass of homemade tiramisu went down pretty fast with my parents too, just saying.

Paprika, pomegranate and lemon juice hummus

"But what do you do for protein?"

I've never made hummus before. It might sound ridiculous considering I eat chickpeas nearly every day now, but I always thought it was slightly more complicated than it was, a little bit trickier, a bit more expensive. In actual fact all you need is a reliable hand blender (no explosions please), some chickpeas, a bit of tahini, and anything else you want to flavour it with.

Naturally, I went a bit overboard for my first attempt, so added pomegranate seeds, paprika, pomegranate molasses, coriander and lemon to mine, but it might be better to focus on just one of those flavours. This batch of hummus lasted precisely 2 hours in my flat, so I guess the proof was in the total lack of leftovers!

Makes enough for 4
Ingredients
2 tins chickpeas, drained
2 garlic cloves, chopped small (if using a hand blender, or just crushed if using a larger blender as this will be able to handle the harder work)
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 pinch of salt
1 large tbsp tahini paste
2 tbsp water
Juice 1/2 lemon
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp paprika
Seeds of half a pomegranate
Handful of chopped coriander

Pour the majority of the chickpeas into a mixing bowl, holding back a small handful or so for serving. Add the garlic, cumin, salt, tahini, water, lemon juice, olive oil and paprika, and mix with a spoon just to get the liquid stirred in, before mixing with a hand blender.

Add more lemon juice, salt, olive oil, to taste, and then stir in a few pomegranate seeds to flavour the hummus. It should be a firm mixture, but looser than a paste.

To serve, top off with the rest of the pomegranate seeds, whole chickpeas, pomegranate molasses, coriander and a little more lemon juice.


And now for a bit of an apology for my absence:

What do I do for protein? I find it one of the strangest questions anyone can ask once you've told them you're vegan. There's a lot  more questions I'd expect- and yet 80% of the time, it comes back to this strange, peculiar obsession with protein.

Obviously, I know why people are concerned about protein- in general. I get that. I don't understand when they can hold a conversation with me and I am alive etc, why they would ask it, apart from the fact that it must be a total knee-jerk reaction, and maybe they just don't care about anything beneath asking a question back to a reply they didn't expect. Who knows. In any case, my inability to give that question a proper answer recently led to a mini hiatus from food blogging. I found myself with nothing to say apart from "Well, I eat chickpeas, everyday." Which is the truth, but it felt pretty limp in reply, especially after being told by someone I met 40 minutes beforehand that I was "unhealthy" and "selfish" for being vegan.

I didn't know how to reply, because I made a decision around a year ago not to be someone that reels off statistics when people start cross examining a vegan diet. I think if people haven't looked for those figures themselves, they become very easy to block out. I managed to do it for 22 years. In my month away from Guac and Roll I wanted to do more research, question whether writing a food blog was really the best way to start a conversation on veganism. I read a lot more studies, watched more documentaries (we need to talk about sugar, btw) but in the end, I came around full circle: I love sharing the recipes I've discovered, talking about them with friends in the park, researching where those recipes come from and adapting them to suit a vegan or vegan and gluten free diet.

There are plenty of vegan diets that are unhealthy, just as there are many, many, omnivorous diets that are also pretty unhealthy. Guac and Roll isn't ever going to be a call to arms, but hopefully something a lot more subtle.

To combat an endless winter

I must apologise. While searching through the archives of Guac on the hunt for a curry recipe I realised just how long winter has held centre stage here. Don't get me wrong, I love comfort food and hunkering down for the night probably a lot more than the next person, (got the personal best of six roast dinners in seven days to prove it) but I think my capacity for stodge has reached its limit.

Here's a lunch or even brunch to add a little colour to the end of the coldest March in more than 50 years. This salad is warm, filling and perfect for anyone totally sick of porridge. The garlic in the spinach and herb pesto is left raw so it really comes through against the lemon juice, cutting through the giant cous cous and the olive oil. You could make a more traditional pesto with basil leaves and pine nuts, but basically it was too cold and windy for me to leave the house so I went with something different! 

-One last thing- don't bother with sourcing giant cous cous from the posh bit of the supermarket- if you have any newsagents with a good food section or local shops they will usually sell it in packets at around a third of the price. 

Giant cous cous with spinach pesto, grilled tomatoes and puy lentils

Serves 2 for a big lunch

Ingredients

150g giant cous cous

Olive oil

1 handful spinach leaves

1 spring thyme

2 sprigs of parsley

Seasoning

1 garlic clove chopped small

Juice 1 lemon, half for the pesto, half for serving

2 tomatoes, chopped in half

2 inches cucumber, cut into slices

1 spring onion, cut into slices

125g cooked puy lentils 

In a medium pan on medium heat, gently fry the giant cous cous for about 60 seconds in olive oil, until it just begins to sizzle. Then pour in around 300ml of cold water and let it cook for around 15 minutes.

In this time you can make the pesto: in a small pan heat the spinach with just enough water for it to cook in, and take off the heat the minute it's wilted down. Drain the water away, and now blend the spinach in a jug with a handblender, a mixer or even a pestle and mortar, with the leaves from one sprig of thyme, 2 springs of parsley, plenty of salt and pepper and the garlic. Add about 2 tablespoons of olive oil and half the lemon juice and check the seasoning. 

Give the cous cous a stir to make sure it isn't sticking to the pan, then either grill or fry in a little oil the tomatoes with plenty of black pepper. While all this is cooking you can chop the cucumber and spring onion ready for assembling the salad.

Once the cous cous is ready turn off the heat and add in the pesto to the pan so it takes on some of the flavour of the pesto at the very end of its cooking time. Then add the puy lentils and check the seasoning once more. 

Assemble on a large plate with the roast tomatoes, cucumber and spring onion on top, with any extra spinach leaves or olive oil for serving. 

Baked beetroot with pistachios and green lentil salad

As much happiness as a jar of pickled beetroot can bring (I've been known to bring my own beetroot to barbeques so I don't have to share), their flavour alone, just baked in the oven with a bit of seasoning, can be just as moreish. I added a green lentil salad and spiced potatoes to make a huge mid-week dinner, easily enough for two lunches the next day, by which time the pistachios have taken on a bit of the beetroot dye and the lentils have soaked up even more of the garlic and onion flavours.

Ingredients
300g beetroot, peeled and chopped into discs
200g green lentils
1 onion, chopped
3 galic cloves, chopped
1 leek, chopped
Salad leaves
Olive oil
Seasoning

Pre-heat the oven to 220 degrees celsius, and lightly oil and season a baking tray. Place the beetroot on the tray and bake for around 30-40 minutes. You will need to turn half way through to make sure one side doesn't dry out.

Follow packet instructions to prepare the green lentils- you will probably need to boil them for around 10 minutes.

While this is happening, heat a little oil in a pan, and add the onion and garlic and let sautee for around 5 minutes so it all reduces. Once the lentils are ready, add these to the pan, along with plenty of seasoning as the lentils will often be quite bitter. You might want to add a little water or oil to stop the lentils from sticking as they heat through. When the lentils have reduced down, add in the chopped leek and cook slowly until the beetroot is ready.

Plate up with the salad leaves and pistachios, which will add a great texture to the soft lentils and leeks. I served with some lightly roasted curried potatoes, or this would be great with rice or cous cous.

Home cooking

Christmas dinner seems to be one of those last remaining bastions of meat eaters. From what I can gather it's a meal a lot of people couldn't imagine without meat. This post serves to answer one of my favourite questions when people find out I'm vegan and ask in horror: "But what do you eat for Christmas dinner? How can you not eat pigs in blankets?!"

For the third year in a row my family let me cook Christmas dinner. Previous years have involved gin-infused sorrows over celeriac, raw sweet potato and trout turned an awful shade of pink thanks to some wayward beetroot. This year, I guess after cooking with so many amazing seasonal vegetables all winter, I decided to pare everything down and just focus on some great flavours, like cranberry, sprouts, apples roasted in rosemary and mashed butternut squash. There was so much more I wanted to try out, but I ended up just choosing a few recipes I'd already cooked loads over the past few months (as you can see from December's blog roll) and could handle after four of my brother's lethal mojitos.

I guess I'm pretty lucky that the rest of my family let me hijack Christmas dinner once more- and other families have a lot of traditions that won't get changed by someone being vegan. My Dad also cooked vegetarian toad in the hole for the rest of the family, and my Mum went to town on some crazy puddings that never seemed to stop coming out the oven.

This was my first Christmas as a vegan, but it wasn't hard, it was easy. Yes there were no chocolate coins or mince pies, but I also ate about five more roast potatoes each time someone else had a slice of Yule log. I think if you know eating a vegan meal alongside everything  your family holds dear for Christmas dinner is possible, it's another brain hurdle that suddenly isn't so hard to get past, and not really all that hard to imagine. I hope you all had an amazing Christmas!

Super-warming sweet potato, red lentil and chickpea soup

Back from a blustering three-hour bike ride last week, my boyfriend went out to buy the best loaf of bread he could find, whilst I gathered everything tasty in the kitchen into one massive pot. Seasonal, ridiculously filling and warming, this sweet potato soup would make a perfect low-key Sunday lunch- add the spiced soy yoghurt and some warm sour dough bread if you've got hungry friends in tow.

Makes enough for four servings

Ingredients

One sweet potato, peeled and chopped

1 potato, peeled and chopped

1 large onion, chopped small

200g red lentils

1 tin (drained) chick peas

Pinch cayenne pepper

Pinch of paprika

Pinch of tumeric

Around 300-400ml vegetable stock

One chili, chopped small

Handful of coriander, roughly chopped

Seasoning

Few glugs of olive oil

To serve: warm bread and soy yoghurt topped with any remaining coriander and cayenne pepper.

In a large pan, sweat the onion for a few minutes, before adding in both types of potato. Add in the red lentils, chili, spices and seasoning, and mix so all the flavours can begin to combine. Pour in the vegetable stock and allow to simmer for around 20 minutes.

Once the potatoes and red lentils are cooked through, take off the heat and blend with a hand blender or food processor. Now add in the chick peas and half the coriander (saving the rest to garnish on top or to mix in with the yoghurt), season to taste, and serve up.

P.S. If you're on Pinterest, pop over to the Guac & Roll page, where I'll be pinning lots of the recipes I come across, along with plenty of my own photos and works-in-progress from the blog. (Makes for perfect browsing with a big bowl of sweet potato soup too!)

Homemade rosemary plait bread with vegan potato and leek soup

When I was 14, I circulated a petition around an entire school assembly. It wasn't for a change in uniform or longer break times or whatever- it was because I wanted soup for lunch. In the days before Jamie Oliver's coup of the nation's canteens, when Turkey Twizzlers roamed free and the vegetarian option was a spoonful of cheese, I worked out the mark-up on soup would be through the roof for someone that did it properly, and went to see the head chef of school dinners to ask why he didn't. He told me he needed 30 signatures from me, "real names" of people that would actually eat soup for lunch, and then they would think about it. I delivered 207 to him the next day, and soup made its much-awaited debut on the school dinner rota the next week. Unsurprisingly, it was gross: industrial-sized packet soup thinned down with boiling water served in polystyrene cups. In retrospect, I should have just made and sold my own.

Good soup is easy to get right, and here's a recipe I would have used to feed the masses at lunchtime- the bread is fragrant and just the right amount of stodginess to mop up the naturally creamy potato and leek soup.

Makes enough for six

Ingredients
For the soup
1 onion, chopped
6-7 medium potatoes, peeled and chopped
3-4 leeks, washed and chopped
500ml vegetable stock
Salt and pepper
Few glugs of olive oil

For the bread
Sainsbury's Crusty White Bread Mix
Few sprigs rosemary
Olive Oil
Warm water

The bread will need to prove so start by following the instructions on the packet for the bread, adding in the rosemary as you knead it.*

While the bread is being left to rise, begin the soup by sweating the chopped onion in a large pan with some olive oil for about three minutes. I always add the leeks first as I like them to fry a little in the olive oil to start to bring out their flavour. Now add the potatoes and stir through with the oil, onion and leeks, before adding 500ml of vegetable stock. Allow to simmer.

At this point it will probably be time to knock back the bread and knead it again. I chose to do a plait as my bread tin is currently being used to store a vegan haggis (!?) but I think the crusty mix would also work well as individual rolls.

Following the instructions, allow the bread to prove once more and turn the oven on to preheat at the required temperature. Once the bread is ready and in the oven, blitz the soup with a hand blender and season to taste. I love eating the bread almost scolding hot, with lots of pepper to contrast the leek flavour. Lunch for under £3 for 6 portions, and no petitions in sight.

*I feel a major pang of shame writing the words 'follow the instructions'... I am working on some of my own bread recipes from scratch, I promise, just not on chilly, hungover Sunday mornings.

Nut roast alternatives: Vegan haggis

Mark: Mmmm. Why toast when you can roast?

Jeremy: Another roast? That's the third today.
Mark: What's nicer than a roast?
Jeremy: Yeah, but, chain-eating roasts?

I'm not quite at chain-eating status yet, but with sooooo much amazing autumnal produce from Growing Communities, there seems to be enough food for at least three ginormous roast dinners every week. I'm not complaining, after all what's nicer than a roast? 

At the start of Autumn my friend Jenny suggested I tracked down some vegan haggis to try with a roast dinner. I haven't come across any in a shop yet, so instead, I've been working on my own recipe. Despite not having any of the traditional meat products in it, this haggis recipe is perfect when a nut roast just won't quite cut it, and I can confirm it also tastes amazing alongside tatties and neeps.

It's essential to watch The Life Aquatic while cooking Sunday lunch.

n.b. the ingredients list does look almost Ottolenghi in length, but most of these things will be hiding in your kitchen supplies- feel free to change the nuts or beans to ones you have in- the Vegetarian Society recipe I based this on asked for hazel nuts instead.

Makes enough for four

Ingredients

1 onion, chopped 

Few glugs of sunflower or vegetable oil 

4 carrots, very finely chopped

Handful of mushrooms, finely chopped 

50g red lentils

600ml vegetable stock 

25g mashed, tinned red or white kidney beans 

35g ground peanuts 

35g ground cashew nuts

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 tbsp lemon juice 

2 tsp dried thyme

2 tsp dried rosemary 

1 tsp dried curry mix

200g fine oatmeal 

Salt and pepper

Decide how you are going to cook and serve the haggis- I greased with oil four pie tins, a bread tin, and also some muffin tins, I'd say the pie tins were the perfect size portion. 

Preheat the oven to 190C. In a large pan sweat the onion in the oil for 5 minutes, then add the carrot and mushrooms and cook for a further 5 minutes. Add the lentils and about three quarters of the stock.

With the remaining stock, blend in the kidney beans and add this to the pan, along with the nuts, soy sauce, lemon juice and seasoning. Mix well and cook for another 10 to 15 minutes.

Now add the oatmeal and reduce the heat to a simmer, cooking for 15 to 20 minutes. Keep an eye on the mixture as the oats tend to stick to the bottom of the pan, so add more stock or water if needed. 

Garlic roasted beetroot to go along with the haggis

Spoon the mixture into your chosen tins and bake in the centre of the oven for around 20 to 25 minutes, until the tops go crispy.

The haggis freezes really well and just takes half a day to defrost in the fridge, so if you make extra you can store away for another roast- a perfect excuse!

EDIT

A lunch bunch

Working from home sure does have its bonuses- ridiculously tasty lunches such as this one being a case in point. Cous cous salad, broad bean falafel and hummus all from Sainsbury's, who get extra snaps for their amazing vegan labeling, and bought by my Dad, who gets snaps for spending 20 minutes deciphering ingredients lists in the hummus aisle.

Anyway, falafel aside, here's a few links related to veganism that I've been perusing lately, which are the perfect length for a lunchtime read (i.e. the time of day where it's okay to spill cous cous all over your desk after missing your mouth as you're looking at the screen and not the spoon... good work).

So, what is an ethical vegan? By Sali Owen, or, No, it's not like the time you tried the South Beach diet.

Forget meat – there's a world of vegetarian food out there By Lagusta Yearwood, let's talk tamales yeah?

Food shortages could force world into vegetarianism, warn scientists By John Vidal, looking at a new recipe to feed the future, and some great stats on agriculture for the next person that tells you soy beans are also bad for the planet.

Wahaca, veganised: Black bean soup

Great transitional piece darling. No, but seriously, I started getting cravings for this hearty, moreish-than-thou soup back in August, and now I know it's going to work wonders right through winter. This is a slightly simplified and adapted version of Thomasina Miers' black bean soup. It's quick, tasty and there never seems to be quite enough of it...

Ingredients
Lots of tomatoes- as you can see from the photo above I was lucky enough to get a mix in the vegetable box, but one large punnet should do the trick. Chop into quarters.
2 garlic cloves, chopped
100ml olive oil
1 onion, diced
1-2 tbsp oregano or marjoram
2 bay leaves
2 chillies
salt and pepper
2 tins of cooked black beans
Juice of 1 lime
800 ml vegetable stock

For the salsa:
Handful of tomatoes, chopped
Handful coriander, chopped
1 red/white onion, diced
1 tbsp olive oil
Juice of 1 lime
1 tbsp red wine vinegar/ sherry vinegar
1 tsp soft brown sugar

Heat the onion and herbs in a large pan for around 5-10 minutes, making sure the onion stays soft, before adding the garlic. Cook for another few minutes, then add the tomatoes and chillies and season. Cook for another 5-10 minutes, then add the beans.

Stir the beans in the oil and herbs, then allow to cook for a few more minutes, before adding the stock and lime juice and allow to simmer for another 5-10 minutes so all the flavours can mix. In this time you can make the tomato salsa by mixing together the tomatoes, onions and the rest of the salsa ingredients, seasoning to taste.

Blend the soup to your preferred consistency (I like to still be able to see a few bits of tomatoes and beans in there!), then pour into bowls or mugs, and top off with the fresh salsa.