Vegan Cashew Pancakes

There is a bit of pre-preparation required for these. You need to soak cashews in water, and whizz them up in a blender to make cashew milk; you need a nut milk bag to separate the milk from the cashew pulp and you need the willpower to be bothered to make the effort. Or, you can always omit the cashews altogether and just use soy milk instead, which I do sometimes!

Step 1 - Cashew Milk

Soak 1/2 cup of raw cashews in water for at least a few hours (cashews soften up pretty quickly), then drain the water off and place cashews in a blender. Add 1 cup (250ml) of fresh water and blend to a paste, then add another 2-3 cups (500-750ml water) depending on how thick you want it to be and blend again. Use your nut milk bag and strain the cashew milk into a large jug or bowl, squeezing out as much liquid as you can. Keep the pulp in the milk bag as it goes into the pancakes.

Step 2 - Pancakes

// Ingredients
1 cup plain flour
Pulp from cashew milk prepared earlier
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup cashew milk prepared earlier
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon maple syrup
Coconut oil for the pan

// How to Make
Combine flour, cashew pulp, baking powder and salt in a bowl and mix. You need to squish the cashew pulp around to mix it in.
Add cashew milk, vanilla extract and maple syrup and mix to combine, making sure to get any lumps out.
Heat a pan over medium heat with a little coconut oil, then add pancake batter to the pan in batches - however big you like your pancakes to be. Cook for 2-3 minutes or until bubbles appear on the surface then flip and cook for 1-2 minutes on the other side. Repeat with remaining batter until all pancakes are made.
Serve with fresh fruit, maple syrup or whipped coconut cream.

Enjoy!

Simple Things: Homemade Almond Milk

I stopped drinking cow's milk some time ago now, long before any thoughts of a vegan diet were seriously floating around in my head. My body just started telling me, very clearly, that cow milk was not good for me. Noticeable tummy pains after I drank anything with it, and a growing icky feeling at the thought of using it. And it wasn't even the first time that had happened, I had gone off it previously but ended up drinking it again, for convenience I suppose.

So I have tried plenty of alternatives to the standard cow milk that are available. I'm not so keen on soy milk, rice milk seems to me to be water with a hint of white and almond milk was definitely the best option for me but again, watery and loaded with additives. And then when I got my hands on the My Darling Lemon Thyme cookbook, I read the recipe for almond milk and just knew I had to try making my own. But that was quite a few months ago now, and I have to admit that complacency had set in and I was stuck on supermarket almond milk. This despite having a nut milk bag and nuts in the cupboard. And a blender.

Anyway as happens with these things, necessity is what forced the change. After a big day out, a late afternoon at home, scrambling to get dinner sorted, a tired and cranky toddler, a tired and cranky me, no almond milk in the house and knowing that I would be needing the milk in the morning, that's what finally drove me to do it. And goodness me, it was so ridiculously easy I don't know what I was procrastinating about all that time. That's often how it goes, right?

It was incredibly easy - just soaking a cup of almonds in water overnight, draining it off in the morning and blending it up with another 3 cups of fresh water in the blender, then squeezing it through the nut milk bag and into a jug. Pretty easy. But the part that I love the most is how amazingly good the milk was (is). So creamy! So fulfilling! So satisfying! It made our rice porridge so incredibly smooth and creamy, and my chai tea was all kinds of good, and my sometimes evening treat of a small cacao drink is now the creamy smooth drink I was dreaming of - just no comparison any commercial nut milk. And even the added bonus of all the almond pulp for adding to our porridge and in our baking.

Of all the changes I have made over the years to increase my self reliance and reduce my reliance on supermarket chains, this is a big one for me. I've always found the homemade products to be superior to the commercial product, but the extent of the difference between homemade almond milk to commercial almond milk is just - huge. I don't know how else to say it.

I've been looking and looking for a milk this good for so long, and all that time, I just needed to devote about 10 minutes to the process and I could have done it myself. And now I know. I can't tell you how much I enjoy drinking it, it feels so decadent and now it's become my new normal. And on the cost side of things, I did crunch the numbers a little while back as I thought it would be hugely expensive using all those almonds, but I worked out that over a week, it would cost me about the same to make my own as to buy a commercial product. Plus, the bonus of spending less on buying almond meal for baking is a big factor for me, as I bake gluten free and almond meal features in pretty much everything I make.

Do I sound like I'm raving on about how good it is? I am! It is that good!

Have you ever tried making any nut milks or any other kind of milks at home? What was your experience with it? I'd love to hear.

Simple Things: Ditching Tinned Foods

When I first became vegetarian, quite a few years ago now, and even before actually as I rarely cooked with meat at home, I was heavily reliant on buying tins of pulses - just the basics, kidney beans, lentils, cannellini beans, chickpeas. And I'm still pretty reliant on those basics, although with a few more thrown into the mix these days, but I have managed to ditch the tins. It was something I thought about so often at the time, looking at just how many resources were used in the processing and manufacture of the food (manufacture of food, it just sounds wrong) - the waste of so much aluminium, the big factory where they would have been produced, the logistics of transporting them from factory to supermarket. It's huge.

I'm not fully there with being able to grow my own everything (not even close, lets be honest) but at the very least, I now only buy dried pulses and do the preparation of them myself. I was always put off by the part about 'soak beans overnight' when I was thinking about what to make for dinner, to eat right now. Obviously soaking beans overnight was not going to be an option, but a tin of beans was quick and convenient and that's exactly what I got by on for a long time.

It really wasn't until I started doing menu planning, when I had a little baby and was trying to establish some rhythm to my days, that I got into the habit of being able to prepare beans and pulses ahead of time. And there was some experimentation about learning how to cook them just right after the soaking, which was easy enough, but still took it's time. It's all a process though, and a few more years down the track I'm very confident now in my bean soaking and cooking process. These days I tend to just make up a batch, not too big but enough for a few meals, and pop the extras in the freezer for when I need them. So I still have the convenience of having beans ready for a quick meal when I need them, but without the tins (or the factory processing, at least not for the cooking part).

It is such a very simple change, to be able to move away from buying tinned foods to preparing from scratch with dried pulses, but the place where the change is truly made is in being organised - organised with a weekly meal plan, organised with having enough dried pulses on hand for your needs, organised with actually soaking and cooking them ahead of time. For all of it's simplicity, it took me years to actually make the change.

This is my very simple way of preparing dried pulses. Soak a quantity of pulses in a saucepan with a lid, for 8 hours or overnight (usually on the bench or in the fridge if it's hot). If I'm not organised and pushed for time I will sometimes cut that down to 6 hours instead of 8. Then simply drain the soaking water, replace it with fresh water and pop it on the stove. Bring to a boil then simmer on very low heat for an hour or so, and test when you think they might be done. You might need to top up the water if it gets a little low. Then simply put into freezer-safe containers and freeze them, or use them in cooking. Done! How easy is that? I really love the very slow cooking aspect to this as well, mine always turn out nicely when cooked very slowly.

No more tins, no more super heavy shopping bags to lug around and it's easier to get a wide selection of pulses, and often organic, when they're dried (if you have a good health or whole foods shop nearby). My last area to make the change away from tins (well two actually) is tinned tomatoes, I am still caught up in that cycle but looking to make changes, and pet food. Cat food in particular. But, a step at a time when transitioning to simpler living. Changes that take time to make are often the ones that last, and every little change helps.