Quick and Healthy Snacks: Tapas

Vegan Tapas make great snacking material. They're quick, easy, and packed full of veggies. Best of all, they're delicious.

If you're keen to get your day's vegetables all at once, Gazpacho is the soup for you. It's a thick, velvety cold soup bursting with ripe tomatoes and refreshing cucumber and seasoned with vinegar, garlic and olive oil. My favourite recipe is this one.

If you're looking for something comforting and a little more filling, try Pan con Tomate, thick slabs of baguette toasted and topped with grated tomato, salt and olive oil. I love to pile them up with more grated tomato and drizzle extra olive oil on top. So good!

 

What are your favourite Tapas? Do you know of any other Spanish dishes that adapt themselves well to vegans? I would love tips!

Avocado and Sundried Tomato Pasta

Avocado pasta sauce sounds good, but for a long time we weren't friends. My boyfriend came up with this meal, and it had a long development cycle. We tried many different avocado sauces. But they were all a bit boring, and, well, too avocado-y.

Then he came up with the excellent idea of adding nutritional yeast, and I suggested adding sundried tomatoes. Combined, they take it to another level. This is my kind of avocado pasta: creamy and rich avocado sauce with a hint of cheesiness and bites of savoury flavour from the sundried tomatoes.

This recipe could be your new weeknight dinner staple. It's super easy; the sauce is made in less time than it takes to cook the pasta.

Avocado and Sundried Tomato Pasta

Serves 4

Ingredients

500 g pasta (gluten-free if you like)
1 avocado
150 ml sundried tomatoes
1 clove garlic
1 tsp nutritional yeast
25 ml olive oil
1-2 tbsp lemon juice
salt and pepper

Method 

1. Cook the pasta. While it's cooking, make the sauce. Mash the avocado. Rinse and slice the sundried tomatoes and mince the garlic. Mix with all remaining ingredients and toss with the pasta.

New Zealand Sweetcorn Fritters

Fritters have been popular in New Zealand for some time. Their fame was probably helped by their inclusion in the "Edmonds Cookery Book", New Zealand's most popular cook book. The book was originally published in 1908 to market baking powder, hence the slogan "sure to rise" that still stands on the cover.

You can sometimes buy seafood fritters at fish and chips shops, but corn fritters are normally made at home. They can easily be dressed up or down. I remember my dad cooking corn fritters made with creamed corn for me and my sisters a lot when I was a child. I've also eaten them on a date.

If you want fancier fritters, use fresh corn and chilli and throw some minced herbs into the batter.

New Zealand Sweetcorn Fritters

Makes 18 fritters
Serves 2 as a meal or 6 as a snack

Ingredients

1/4 onion
660 g canned corn (ca. 900 ml)
300 ml flour
1 tsp baking powder
350 ml soy milk
1/2 tsp chilli powder
1/2 tsp salt

Method

1. Chop the onion finely. Drain and rinse the corn. Combine all ingredients. Heat an oiled pan over medium heat.

2. Spoon in a few fritters. Cook until browned, turn and brown the second side. Drain on paper towels. Cook remaining fritters, adding oil between batches as needed. Serve with sweet chilli sauce.

Tomato Toast

This has been my favourite breakfast lately. It's not really a recipe: just spread some nice toasted bread with margarine, top with sliced tomatoes and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Tomatoes taste amazing like this, and it's a great way to get some vegetables first thing in the morning.

Variations:
1. If you like it with a little more pep, add a few drops of tabasco sauce.
2. If you're not so into margarine, skip it and drizzle with good olive oil.
3. Use cucumbers instead of tomatoes.

Lindsay's Bean Salad

It was always a treat for us kids to go on holiday to our grandparents'. One of the reasons was that my grandmother was a wonderful cook. She and my grandfather had a big garden in which they grew most of their vegetables, and she put them to great use. One of her dishes that I remember particularly well is this very simple but delicious bean salad. It goes perfectly with quiche.

Lindsay's Bean Salad

Serves 4

Ingredients

2 400 g cans mixed beans or kidney beans (ca. 750 ml)

400 g green beans (ca. 1 litre)

1/2 onion

4 tbsp vinegar

4 tbsp olive oil

2 tsp sugar

1 tsp salt

Method

1. Top and tail the green beans. Steam them until tender, drain, and rinse with cold water. Drain and rinse the canned beans. Slice the onion finely.

2. Mix the beans and onion with all the remaining ingredients. Leave to marinate for at least half an hour.

The Best Panzanella

This panzanella recipe came about a few summers ago, when I tried five or six different versions. None of them were quite right. So I combined the best parts of all of them... Ripe tomatoes, slices of crunchy cucumber, smoky roasted capsicum, salty capers, and chunks of good bread with a dressing of vinegar, olive oil and tomato juice. It's a great way to get your veggies - fresh, flavourful and delicious. We don't really eat anything special for Easter, apart from chocolate, but this would make a good addition to an Easter meal.

The Best Panzanella

Serves 2 as a main, 4 as a side

Ingredients

6 large ripe tomatoes
2 large capsicums (or some roasted capsicum in a jar)
1 cucumber
200 ml olives
3 tbsp capers
a bunch of basil
2 cloves garlic
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp vinegar
1/2 tsp salt
1 loaf stale good-quality white bread (ca. 250 g)

Method

1. Put the tomatoes in a bowl. Cover with boiling water. Let sit for a few minutes, until the skins have loosened. Drain, peel, and core the tomatoes. Cut each tomato into quarters and squeeze the seeds and juice into a bowl. Put the seeds aside.

2. Roast the capsicums at high heat in the oven until blackened. Put in a bowl with a lid. Peel the cucumber. Quarter it and remove the seeds. Cut into slices. Peel the capsicums, remove the seeds, and tear into long strips.

3. Rinse the olives and capers. Slice the basil and mince the garlic. Mix the tomato seeds with the garlic, capers, olive oil, vinegar and salt. Cut the bread into chunks and combine with the rest of the ingredients. Let rest for at least half an hour.

Do you eat anything special for Easter?