When? June 9, 2008
This was the first time I’ve made a tart, I used to just buy them and stick them in the microwave, but most tarts, even if they don’t contain milk are glazed with it, or eggs. It was about time I started making my own. This is Nick’s absolute favorite dessert, thanks to his granny who used to bake them for him. It’s funny, I always see grannies as the type to bake tarts but mine never did. I wonder where I got that stereotype from? There are loads of vegan rhubarb tart recipes out there, but this is just what worked for me. One that I want to try in the future contains not just rhubarb but strawberry (yum yum) over at the Rural Vegan blog
For the rhubarb and sugar filling, I added some flour as I made a peach crumble from La Dolce Vegan a while ago, and the flour/sugar seemed to form a wonderful syrup. The rhubarb came from my fathers garden, so now I have tonnes of the stuff. It’s immense, particularly the leaf which he stripped off for me, it’s was pretty much as big as me!
Anyone have any suggestion of how else to eat it other than tart, and stewed rhubarb with custard (I have yet to try the vegan custard I found in Tescos)?
Directions:
Filling:
4 large stalks of Rhubarb
3/4 cup regular sugar
1/4 cup flour
3 tablespoons lemon juice
Chop up the rhubarb into 1/2 inch pieces and mix with the rest of the filling. Leave it to sweat.
Pastry:
2 cups plain flour
Pinch of salt
1/2 cup margarine
1/5 cup water
Mix the flour and margarine with your hands until crumbly. Gradually add water (you may not need it all) until the dough sticks together when you squish it together. Roll out roughly and put in cling film. Leave in the fridge for about a half hour before rolling out two circular pieces. Place one in your pie dish, add the filling, then place the other on top. Crimp the edges and poke a few holes into the top. You can then glaze the top with a little bit of soy milk. I cooked my tart for about 75 minutes at gas mark 4 (Thats 350 degrees folks) but cooking times vary from oven to oven. Leave to sit for a few minutes before cutting a big slice to have with a large mug of tea. The tart was lovely, it left the house smelling great for a few hours and our tummy’s nicely satiated with a good combination of bitter and sweet.
When? March 28, 2008
I hold a warm place in my heart for the woman charmer that he played in Star Trek, and the quick witted lawyer in Boston Legal, and I adore the fact that he played host and narrator to a short documentary supporting vegetarianism: The Vegetarian World.
I’ll admit, it’s a rather PG introduction to vegetarianism, but anything narrated by that wonderful voice goes down easy. Shatner believes “Vegetarianism is not just a diet, it is a whole approach to life” which, I guess, is the reason I became a vegan. He goes on to talk veganism as the purest of the vegetarian diets.
It’s sad that at the time of making, back in the early 80s, there was a realization that if the world could reduce it’s consumption of meat by 10%, it could feed 60 million more people. As it stands, about one third of cereal grown is used to feed the rich countries live-stock. According to a report by the UN, entitled Livestock’s Long Shadow in 2006 the number of overweight people (1 billion) outnumbered the malnourished (800 million). Mmm, they have also gone as far as to state that livestock products are one of the major contributing causes. Their current statistics for world obesity weighs in at 300 million.
Of course, it would be naive to think that you have to be an omnivore to be over-weight. Shatner himself nearly died during a hip replacement because of heart complications that were due to excess weight.
William Shatner is not the only geeky vegetarian that I have a soft spot for. Leonard Nimoy would have to be up at the top of that list. As Mr Spock, the first officer aboard the Starship Enterprise, he played the first vegetarian to appear regularly on television. Vulcans did not consume meat, although they did use futuristic technologies to replicate food to taste like meat. A 24th century quorn no doubt.
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