A Night for Vegan Secret Supper Recipes

Boy it's wild out there tonight.  That Cornish wind is thrashing the rain against the window in quite a temper.  The dark nights already have us turning to comfort food with glee but a night like this makes us want to push the boat out even more.

With this in mind we grabbed one of my many cookbooks off the shelf; one that we really hadn't explored as much as we should have done.  Vegan Secret Supper is a plethora of fancy dishes which belie the simplicity of the preparation of many of the recipes.  Even the titles of the recipes don't pretend to be what they aren't but mostly list the main contents of the dish in a mouthwatering and  simplistic manner. Take our first dish of the evening; Blue Corn Empanadas with Pecans, Black Beans, Mole Pipian, Red Cabbage and Avocado.  Okay granted, Mole Pipian sounds a bit fancy but it's really just a Mexican sauce that uses pumpkin seeds or squash seeds instead of chocolate.  Well okay, I have just realised that Empanadas probably sounds fancy but not to us down here in Cornwall (so by default surely it can't be fancy).  Empanadas are just basically Mexican pasties and we know all about pasties down in this neck of the woods.  

Admittedly we did go a bit 'off piste' with the actual recipe and it had nothing to do with the wine (that would be a slightly different spelling of 'off piste').  We didn't have blue cornmeal for the empanadas for a start so they weren't of the blue variety.  However, the results were pretty much totally inspired by the recipe and very nice too. Bizarrely yes we did have tomatillos in the freezer left over from a stock that my lovely and dear departed dad had grown for us.  

Next up was the Peanut Butter Brownie Cheesecake.  It didn't look anything like the photo in the book but really it tasted too good to worry about that.  Artistic licence was used again anyway as we really hadn't had the fore planning to soak our nuts beforehand.  You have to live in the moment after all surely?  Regardless, our store cupboard was sufficiently stocked to get through the list of ingredients with either the exact ingredient or a likely candidate and the results didn't suffer taste wise.  

Obviously we are not going to actually share these recipes as they are not ours to share. Should you however feel like cosying up with some slightly fancy but relatively easy to make food on a wild winters night, we recommend this tantalising tome of recipes.  It has a habit of making you feel all fancy but cosy at the same time!

To learn more about Vegan Secret Supper and Merida Anderson, the author visit the Vegan Secret Supper website.