Vegan Blueberry Corn Pancakes

Sunday brunch in the comfort of our own home.. what a luxury! Cheffy and I, woke up early and lounged around the house for a while, reading and whatnot, until my stomach started growling that is (I am pretty growly myself when I am hungry so the stomach growling is a good indication for dear chef that it’s time to get acookin!). We do all our weekly grocery shopping on a Saturday morning after scouring cookbooks and planning our weekly meals. We try to get all our fruit and veg from the organic farmers market in the city, although this week we were pretty slack, anyway, the point is, that because we were all organised we already had all the ingredients for vegan blueberry corn pancakes, another recipe from Veganomicon.

Blueberry Corn Pancakes
(makes 8 – 10 pancakes)
Veganomicon

Ingredients:

3/4 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons canola oil (any mild tasting veg oil will do)
1 1/4 cup plain soy milk
1/3 cup water
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons pure maple syrup
2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
1 cup fresh blueberries

Method:

Preheat a large non-stick pan on medium high heat. Sift together, flour, cornmeal, baking powder and salt. In a separate bowl, combine all other ingredients. Add wet to dry, mix until just combined, then fold in the blueberries. Do not over mix or pancakes will be tough, a couple of lumps is ok.

Spray pan with cooking spray. Use a 1/4 cup measuring cup or an ice cream scoop to pour out batter into pan. Cook pancakes until brown on bottom and bubbles form on top, about 4 minutes. Flip pancakes over with a thin spatula and cook until bottoms are brown and pancakes are barely firm to touch. Transfer to plates. Repeat with remaining batter, adding more oil to the pan as needed.

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It was a first for this recipe and the pancakes were great. We served them with lemon juice (from the lemon we used for the rind.. no need to waste it!) and sugar sprinkled over the top. Cheffy said he would have liked them to be a bit sweeter – maybe some maple syrup added to the mix would have worked – but I thought they were great as is. All in all a tasty, fast, easy recipe. Perfect for a lazy Sunday at home.. (but I would say that since I just had to take the photos while dear chef did all the work!).

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Naked in Newtown – Breakfast the vegan way.

This morning darling chef and I headed out to try a newly discovered vegan cafe in Newtown. I heard about it on the Happy Cow website (link to the right) which is where I get most of my vegetarian/vegan restaurant suggestions from. Anyway, we are pretty familiar with the Newtown area so we didn’t have a problem finding the place, although the signage left a little to be desired. The biggest sign out front was for ‘Basil’ which is a pizza place. From what I can tell, the cafe is a coffee place combined with a vegan breakfast cafe in the mornings and early afternoons and then a pizza place at night. Seeing the meat-lovers pizza advertised in the same shop where we were eating from an all vegan menu was a little odd but I guess it works for them!

It’s only a small place and there was only 1 other table taken in the place, but it was almost at the 1pm cutoff for breakfast so that could explain the lull. We were seated and given a paper menu with 6 vegan dishes listed, including a ‘morning after fry up’ with vegan sausages and bacon & ‘organic pancakes’ – buckwheat pancakes with fruit and maple syrup. The waitress came by and asked what we would like to drink, Chef ordered a latte – no problem – and I ordered a peppermint tea. It wasn’t on the menu (I didn’t think to look) but instead of asking me to choose something else, the waitress told me she would organise it before running out the front door of the cafe and going upstairs to her flat where she raided her own personal stash of organic peppermint tea! How about that for fabulous service!

Meals ranged from $7 – $16. We both ordered the “Big Aussie Vegan Feast” which came with fried, smoked tofu, hash browns, tomato, organic baked beans, mushrooms, spinach and organic sourdough toast. The meal came out quickly and everything was fabulous, a pet hate of mine is soggy hash browns but these were lovely and crispy! The sourdough was fabulous and seedy – and served with nuttlex – the beans were delicious and the tofu was wonderfully smoky. We will definitely be back to this great little place! Next time I’ll be ordering the scrambled tofu!

And, best of all it is even right across the road from the Vegan’s Choice grocery so we were able to dash in on our way home and stock up on vegan chocolate for our baking day tomorrow!