Unleash your power

  A slight detour to get started. There's a vegan burger joint next to my favourite pizza emporium (Paradise slice, 108 Brick lane) that caught my eye a while ago. The pizza maestros who like the occasional change from eating endless pizza had said it was worth a go so in we went.

  You can see below what arrived. One had a black bean and quinoa 'patty' and was incredibly disappointing as the patty was like porridge. I don't know if you've ever had a porridge sandwich. I haven't because I can't imagine a lot that would be more of a chore to eat, and this wasn't much better, so I'll move on. The other was loads better and had an onion bhaji for a 'patty' and was utterly delicious. The bhaji was freshly fried, (a sign of a good restaurant is that they fry their bhaji's to order), tasty, light and crisp and was accompanied in the bun with a chutney, guacamole and I don't remember what else but I'd go back and have another. But on to tonight's inspiration...

  To help you get started with developing some trust and confidence in your hidden tasting talents I'll be giving you a series of simple recipes that you can use as a starting point for a bit of experimenting. The idea is that though you can eat them as they are, they lend themselves very well to tweaking and adjusting. I'll let you know my variations and also encourage you to make up your own.

  The first is one of my favourite snacks and it's about as complicated as making toast. I often use it as a garnish for soups or put a bowl out for guests to enjoy with a drink as well as uncontrollably shovelling handfuls of them into my face. Toasted sunflower seeds, and it goes like this. Get a frying pan on the heat and tip in about a cup of seeds. Stir almost continuously as you want them to brown evenly, (the higher the heat, the more you'll need to stir but the faster they cook).

  When they look nicely toasted, turn the heat off and carefully pour about a dessert spoon of soya sauce over them and continue to stir. The residual heat will dry the soya sauce onto the seeds but keep stirring until you can see the soya sauce is mostly dried out. Tip out of the pan to cool and dive in.

  Though they're already a delicious, moorish, crunchy, salty (and healthy) snack, there's plenty of room for variation. For example, with the soya sauce I've added maple syrup and chilli and you can also make it with different seeds like pumpkin. Try your own variations but more importantly, get the kids involved. Send in your stories of how you get on. See you tomorrow.

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Kirk out

RevoltingFood.com