Coronation Tofu Recipe: Royal Wedding Special!

Happy Royal Wedding Day to you all!

To celebrate I have a vegan Coronation Tofu recipe for you to make and share for this happy occasion. It's so simple and delicious, I hope you enjoy it.

Ingredients
1 large block of firm tofu, pressed and cut into triangles

Marinade
2 cloves of garlic grated
1 inch piece of ginger grated
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp salt
1 tsp red chilli powder

Spiced Sauce
280g vegan mayo
1 tsp garam masala
50ml vegetable oil
½ tsp cinnamon
½ tsp red chilli powder
½ tsp salt

The How To

Marinade
Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees.
Line a baking tray with foil.
Mix all ingredients for the marinade into a bowl.
Cover the tofu with the marinade, place each piece on the foil-lined tray and leave to marinade whilst preparing the sauce.

Sauce
Mix the spices and salt with vegan mayo.
Add the oil slowly, ensuring it doesn't start to curdle (if it does, you can sieve the oil from the sauce)
Refrigerate


Place the baking tray into the oven and cook until the tofu reaches your desired consistency. I cooked mine for about 45mins so it was crispy on the edges. The last thing you want is your tofu to fall apart when you mix it in to the sauce!
Leave it to cool then mix into the sauce and serve. Voila!

Have a very happy Royal Wedding Day!

This recipe has been veganised from this meaty original.

Your Knitting and Crochet Time - 2KCBWDAY7

Ah, today on the final day of Knitting and Crochet Blog Week 2011 (I nearly wrote 2007 then. I always thought I was a bit behind) I'll be talking about my precious knitting and crochet time (2KCBWDAY7).

Last year I talked about how I was an exhibitionist knitter but this year the subject has more of a twist and requires more depth. Not just where am I, but what do I do to really set the scene.

There are two key places where I knit and crochet at the moment. The first one is at home, on the sofa. Not having a job leaves me time to mosey around at my own pace and pick up my work whenever I feel like it. The key ingredients to my knitting success at home relies on two things: throw away TV and a nice mug of Masala Chai (I no longer drink regular tea, it's so incredibly dull!).

The throw away TV usually tends to be something trashy and of the reality kind. I'm a seasoned Jerry Springer fan. I know, it's utter trash and some people tell me it's not real but that really doesn't matter to me. I love Jerry Springer, I love the car crash brainless entertainment it provides and it's perfect background noise for my knitting and crochet endeavours. This video is quite tasteless, but I must admit it's perfect creative viewing for me (don't judge me, please).

Other new television trash I'm into includes anything with the Kardashians and Holly's World.

The second place I find myself being creative is in the car. Not what you'd expect but I'm always the passenger, so when I'm traveling between Oxford and Bournemouth to visit my friends I have a couple of perfect hours to kill. This usually involves crochet, rather than knitting and I can finish more than a couple of hexagons in this time. Here, the scene doesn't really need to be set, I can lose myself completely to it, so long as my other half doesn't taunt me with his much loved Timmy Mallet tape.

So that concludes it for another year. Thanks to everyone who stopped by and the few of you who left comments. It was great to discover new blogs to read and I hope to keep up with you all until next year!

Something to Aspire to - 2KCBWDAY6

As soon as I saw today's topic, Something to Aspire to (2KCBWDAY6) I knew immediately what I wanted to write about. Charts.

I first attempted to knit from a chart about 9 months after I'd started knitting. It was the beautiful Tiger Eyes Lace Scarf.

 

This is not my scarf.

I remember it was over Christmas, I was at my parents house in the Highlands in Scotland and I had shut myself away in my room determined to master the pattern. I'd researched how to read charts and was confident but for some reason I just couldn't get to grips with it.

It may have been that I just hadn't been knitting for long enough but it was enough of an ordeal to make me avoid charts until this very day.

Now, this is becoming more of a problem. There was a pattern that I was particularly interested in recently; a crocheted bikini, but the written instructions were in Russian (I think) and the only other way I could have completed the pattern was by following the chart. Needless to say, I didn't do it.

Writing this now has inspired me a bit. I'm not usually one to sit down and accept defeat so easily. Maybe it's time for me to treat myself to some more lovely Araucania cotton and finally master this pattern.

Embellishments - 2KCBWDAY5

Today, whilst I take up the wild card of discussing embellishments (2KCBWDAY5) most people will be doing something different in their blogging: videos, poetry, pictures only etc, but I just couldn't think of anything that wouldn't be too time consuming. I wanted to make a puppet style show with some of my finished projects (including headless dude of course) but I would need a script and time to edit the video, and as it's my boyfriends birthday today, I just don't have time (we're currently laying on the futon watching Anaconda - much more serious business than being creative!)

Instead, I've decided to focus on something that I truly believe for all my creations. The eyes have it. You can make any old toy, but if you don't get the eyes right then the toy is not right. They add character, personality and depth to the creation.

Here's an example of not quite getting the eyes right. For me, they lack depth and look a bit boring. Later I added some circles of felt behind/around the eyes and they looked much nicer but I don't have a photo of it.

And here's an example of using the same eyes, with a little addition which makes all the difference

It's amazing how a little extra detail around just one eye can make the world of difference.

But then sometimes simple can work. I just get a feel for whatever it is I'm creating and let them do the talking, like my little cyclopse monsters. The orange one is Kurt, who still lives with me and is famous for being my blog mascot.

As always, thanks for reading and I'll see you all tomorrow (hopefully a little earlier than today!). Until then I'll be laying around, watching crappy horror movies tonight and eating Chinese. Nom.