Chocolate Pudding Parfaits

I am really loving holidays (ok, so I didn't work too much last year, but technically it is holidays for me. I'll be working my butt off this year hopefully). So much time free allows me to make and bake and I am spending a heap of time in the kitchen.

For my first recipe out of my new book, Vegan Planet by Robin Robertson, I made Chocolate Pudding Parfaits. So rich and so good. A decadent dessert!

Tahn

My day in food

Breakfast! I discovered this Chocolate Avocado Pudding from Green and Crunchy (loving this site - still got so much to find!). Actually, it was more like brunch (about 10.30am) by the time I got to eat it.

Lunch. Tweenie and I found these section plates at the cheap shop next to La Panella (so sorry, world, for the plastic but I have found it tricky to locate stainless steel ones and the price was just right for me - about $2 each). Lunch consisted of left over pineapple, a spoonful of nut butter (ya know, I actually HATE peanut butter - even the smell - and refuse to make PB sandwiches for YM because of it, but this is soo very delicious), a mix of seeds, goji berries and dates and a sandwich of eggless egg salad from The Vegan Table which was yummy.

After school snack. Green smoothie. This one consisted of a few beetroot leaves and stems, water, ice, a couple of peaches, a couple of pears, cacao powder, freshly ground LSA(home made), 1 blood orange &  2 navals, and coconut. Thick, gluggly and delicious.

Dinner. Tonight's dinner actually consisted of left overs - choice of yesterday's lunch of cauliflower soup (sooo good!), or an Ethiopian Stew both from Vegan Lunchbox (last night's dinner of Ethiopian Stew also had Injera Bread - although I had no teff flour, so used plain- but none left today as it was awesome and eaten all up!). Before we all helped ourselves I was flicking through the internet (Planet VegMel) and copied the Tofu Balls from It Will Taste Better Tomorrow's post today (I'm going to try your couscous one day too, Amanda!). They looked delicious on her post and I thought- I have everything to make that, I'll give it a try. They WERE delicious! I actually just dipped a few balls into some sweet chilli sauce...mmmmmm. Next time I will try it with spaghetti and sauce (my  kids love this!) and may put the rest into sandwiches tomorrow. Just a hint though, squish them into balls rather than trying to roll them. The original post is from PPK.

Dessert. We made these last night. We blended some fruit up and poured it in and froze it. Now a confession on how foolish I am! I have never eaten cherries before but yesterday I found a nice looking batch at Aldi (all their fruit and veges are so cheap but they are FULL of packaging!) and decided to try them to put into our smoothies. Little did I know that they required de-pipping and I just blended them up straight! Needless to say, we were picking out small chopped up cherry pips from both yesterday's smoothie and today's fruit icipole.

Lesson learned!


Tahn

Silverbeet Pizza and Chocolate Banana Mousse

WTF?? Is it midnight? Am I sick? How come I'm posting so early??

Actually, I'm not really sure why I am able to post so early today, as opposed to other days when it is almost midnight before I get a chance to write.
I'm just extremely happy that I can!

So earlier in the day I made some basic pizza dough and left it to rise. I found a recipe for swiss chard, onion and tofu pizza to use up the silverbeet I had. The recipe combination sounded weird, but I thought I would give it a go anyway.

The recipe requires the pizza bases to be pre-cooked for 15 minutes but I don't recommend this. Have a look why:

Mine blew up like a balloon and here in this photo I have removed the top and now it looks like a pizza bowl! Luckily I had two lots and I pre-cooked the other one for only 5 minutes.
The rest of the recipe was really easy. I like how it turned out. The kids enjoyed it also. It's a very interesting way to use up silverbeet!

Before I made the pizzas I made this Chocolate Banana Pudding. It needs about an hour in the fridge. It requires 2C of silken tofu. So after I picked up the kids from school we walked to Woolies (well, Safeway, but I'm from W.A and some things you just hold on to!) to pick up 2 pkts.
So I stick one packet into the blender, all fine and dandy. Then I go to put the other one in and it looked like this:

It didn't smell too good either! And it was FULL of water! Its expiry date wasn't until the 25th of November! This is definitely not right, is it?
Anyway, I chose not to add it to the blender, so our dessert only had about 1C of silken tofu. And lazy me didn't scrape down the sides of the blender and a lot of the cocoa was still dry on the sides. I didn't mind, though. I thought it probably balanced out the lack of tofu.

Tweenie and Baby had a couple of tinned mangoes on top. It was delicious and I would definitely make this dessert again. It was so quick. About 3 minutes!

I'm feeling a little better today. I did manage to get up and at 'em, although it was a bit later in the day. I organised for a real estate agent to come around and appraise my house for renting and I have another coming tomorrow morning. It's an exciting, yet nerve-wracking time for me. I know I have made the right decision but...

Tahn