Recipe swaps: vegan & scavenger

Two recent swaps I sent off were mmmmm Favorite Recipes - Vegan and Recipe scavenger hunt on swap-bot. As a vegan-leaning vegetarian, I was all too happy to share some of my tried & true vegan recipes, and to receive some other people's in return. The scavenger hunt was also fun, and required each participant to choose recipes from ten of the following fifteen categories:

1. uses leftovers
2. contains no meat
3. is for a soup
4. is for a dessert
5. contains corn
6. was found in a magazine
7. you've never tried
8. is your favorite recipe
9. can be made in a crock pot or slow cooker
10. is for an appetizer
11. contains cheese
12. is for bread or muffins
13. contains fruit
14. is for a dip
15. is really bad for you-but tastes soooo good

I sent only veggie recipes (and my swap partner for the scavenger hunt is also kindly sending me only veggie ones), including the following yummy soup from The Canberra Cook, which is great for winter:

Roast Tomato and Red Lentil Soup

Ingredients

• 1kg tomatoes.
• 1 litre good vegetable stock
• 180g red lentils
• 1 medium onion
• 1 clove garlic
• 1 tablespoon olive oil (or just a teaspoon works)
• 2 tsp oregano
• salt, pepper

Recipe

1. Halve the tomatoes, arrange in a single layer on a deep sided baking dish, roast in a moderate (160C) oven for 40 minutes. They should be well done, but not dried.
2. Gently fry the onion & garlic in the oil until onion is golden. Add the lentils (washed & picked over as needed), stock, tomatoes and oregano. Also add any juices from the bottom of the tomato baking dish. You can slip the skins off the tomatoes at this point if you so desire.
3. Simmer until lentils are done - these are the type that go to mush, not the whole ones. Run through a blender to get a smoothish texture. Thin down with water or more veggie stock to your desired consistency, and add salt and pepper to taste.

The format was sender's choice, and my partners didn't specify whether they wanted cards or sheets or anything, so I ended up printing on to letter-sized paper (by that I mean I printed on A4 and tried to trim it down to letter dimensions...! See this wiki article for more on North American vs the International standard!)

For one thing, I don't know what a standard recipe card size is, and also my recipes were quite long, and there were many of them. Still, I got out some coloured paper and decorated them best I could. Aside from the tomatoes, I also made some more vegetables.... including eggplant, carrot, lemon, peas and spinach amongst others!


It was fun! So much fun, in fact, that I got carried away and decided to make a tomato magnet too... here it is!


It is slightly raised & filled with pillow material. It was the first time I had used blanket stitch, and it works well to seal the edges of flat felt objects! :) The magnetic strip was adhesive but I found that I also had to stitch it on to really stick (luckily it is thin, and the needle pierces it easily).

In the meantime, I need to improve my photography & digital editing skills somewhat!

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• Related post: Incoming: vegan recipes