home recipes stories cartoons video clips updates 2002 updates 2003 updates 2004 updates 2005 updates 2006 updates 2007 Ashy's On-line Vegetarian
Cookbook Whenever I post new material in the cookbook I link to from this page: recipes, photos, cartoons, stories, videos, the lot. As soon as I upload something new, I post it here, so, you can click on the dated links below for a list of what I've been up to lately. Each link will take you to another location on this page so it will only take a second to load. |
01 November - latest update
01 October
25 September
04 September
23 August
8 July
24 June
24 May
16 May
6 May
24 April
6 April
30 March
25 March
24 March
21 March
18 March
15 March
The last of 2007
Happy November, peeps. It's been a little longer than I had intended since my last posting of new material, but I've just had a wee look at how much I've produced this year and it isny bad at all. Quantity doesn't automatically equate to quality, though... But, let's leave it at that. Here's the new stuff....
New recipes
pumpkin and chestnuts with coconut
spinach and peanuts
cabbage cutlets
dates and orange with basil
pumpkin and orange dessert
classic hippy beanburgers
pumpkin with pine nuts and corn
Here's a quick collection of mostly drinks recipes. As usual, the night before we go on a trip. Off to Berlin tomorrow.... hopefully in a few days I'll be in possession of a new MSI Wind netbook. I plan to pick one up in Europe. The idea is to be able to work while on the move. It's a tiny wee machine, smaller than an A4 sheet of paper and weighs just over a kilo. I hope to carry it around south-east Asia this winder, typing as I go and updating periodically from wherever I can find wireless Internet (I can handle sitting in a shitty Starbucks for that long. They do have them - shitty Starbucks - in southeast Asia, though why anyone would go there, when there are so many much nicer alternatives, beats me. To use the Internet I suppose).
New recipes
the Macbean hot toddy
Russian bloody Marys
walnut and oat milk
chilli sin carne #2
I started putting these recipes together when we were in Amsterdam, but as I usually work on all the new pages at once, I didn't get any of them finished before we left. There's always something to distract from work in the 'Dam. When we got back to Almaty, I found myself too busy with cleaning, painting and decorating and other stuff, to sit down and write. But, at last, here's the collection of new pages I started on the boat.
I wrote up the recipe for asparagus and orange and realised I didn't have anything to put for the usual link at the bottom of the page... so I made an 'asparagus recipes' page. There are two recipes on it. I hope there will be more soon...
New recipe index pages
Asparagus recipes
New recipes
vegan pancakes
Brussels sprouts stuffed pankackes with tomato sauce
strawberry chocolate dessert with pinenuts
porcini mushroom risotto
asparagus braised in orange juice
avocado and grapefruit salad with Stilton dressing
New photo galleries
more pics from Amsterdam
Greetings from Amsterdam. We're chilling for a while before going back to Kaz. Found a boat to stay on....very relaxing. There's wireless internet, so I've taken advantage and uploaded a load of new photies....
New recipes
aubergines with lentils and sun-dried tomatoes
New photo galleries
Riga, Latvia
Liepaja, Latvia
This time it's not the night before we leave......we still have a week left in Armenia and then we get booted out of the flat. Fair enough. We've seen more of Armenia than most Armenians and had a good time here. It's about time to move on. We'll be going back to Kazakhstan for a while (via the Netherlands) then a bit more traveling round Europe - Turkey, UK, Germany - before heading off round South-east Asia for winter.
In the meantime I'm trying to write up all the notes I have and try out the recipe ideas I haven't done yet. I should have a few interesting things to post. Watch this space....
New recipes
vegetarian maki sushi
cooking chestnuts
fried summer salad
rice and green lentils
rice and green lentils soup
New photo galleries
Nagorno Karabakh 1
Nagorno Karabakh 2
New cartoons
Yozhik the famous coconut part 8
Yozhik the famous coconut part 9
Here are a few more recipes.... tomorrow we're off to Latvia and then on to Kazakhstan, so I thought I'd stick these up before we go. I seem to have developed a habit of updating the night before leaving on a trip.
New recipes
Brussels sprouts with mustard sauce
kharcho (pomegranate and walnut soup)
spicy braised Swiss chard
New photo galleries
Karahunj prehistoric stone circle
A month exactly since the last update. I think all the work I did on moving my site affected my motivation a little. After so much repetitive cutting, pasting and typing, I was 'fair scunnered', as my granny would have said. I needed a break. We went to Kazakhstan where I went way out in the steppe exploring with my buddy. No computers there. Then Sveta and I visited Nagorno Karabakh and had a load of interesting adventures....without computers. I needed that. But now I'm back in front of the monitor and it feels alright...
New recipes
sun-dried tomato and chilli pesto
spinach and lemon potatoes
tom yam veg soup
Thought I'd post this one recipe just to keep things going. I thought I'd have time for more, but since moving the site, we've been busy travelling around Armenia and tomorrow morning, we're heading to Almaty for a week to see some old friends and I doubt I'll do much writing there - but who knows....
I've added a few wee bits and pieces around the site - fixed a few things too, so I thought I might as well upload this page at the same time. It's a good recipe...
New recipe
mushrooms in spicy yoghurt sauce
What's new today is something which, if I've done it right, you'll hardly notice. I've moved my whole website to a new home and registered my very own domain name. Look at the address bar and you'll see it - ashy-macbean.com. That's me! It's just vanity, I know, but I like it. I hope it will also have the effect of raising my profile in search engines - not just for people who search 'ashy macbean', coz not many people would do that. No, I think some search engines treat a site with a proper domain as weighing more in the rankings than one that is hosted at ashy.cheapskate.com or something like that. Let's see, but I feel good about this so it was worth the money anyway.
So...no new material today, just a new location, but I won't be slipping back to my old ways of doing nothing for months on end. I've spent every evening for the last week and more changing EVERY page on my old site to a redirect page that tells search engines (and anyone who enters an ashycook.topcities.com page) that I have moved. The redirect should be automatic, but I'm bound to have misspelled a few URLS so it might not work every time.
Now that I've done all that, I can get on with some new recipes......
I'm still sprouting seeds. It's getting to be a habit: one that's good for me for a change. Here's another seed-sprout recipe and, look, I've even done a bean-sprout cartoon. Is that bordering on obsessive?
You might notice that my more recent recipes are lower in fat and carbohydrate than previously. That's because Sveta has been complaining that all the dishes I've been testing out on her have been causing her to put on a bit of extra weight that she doesn't really need. For the past few weeks then, I've been working on cooking delicious food without the calories. And it's working. Sveta has lost about 5 kilos in the last two months. Here are a few more lower-calorie recipes and if you have a look through them and examine the ingredients, you'll notice that this month's colour is green. Well...it's spring, innit?
New recipes
asparagus risotto
braised cabbage and seed sprouts
potato, spinach and feta chanakh
vegetarian fisherman's salad
spring greens chilled soup
New cartoons
Beansprouts
Flatmates 2
The salad bar
Butterflies 2
New photo galleries
Hong Kong 08
Fruit and veg
Got back home three days and soaked a bag of sprouting seeds I bought in a health food store in Exeter. Three days later I had a big jar of sprouts and I tried a couple of recipes with them. They both worked out so here they are, along with a few photos from our recent travels.
New recipes
courgette and sprouted seeds salad
stir-fried seed sprouts, courgette and water-chestnuts
New recipe index pages
Sprouted beans and seeds recipes
New photo galleries
Nederlands
Exeter and Torquay
Still not a lot in the way of new recipes, as we're still travelling, but I have managed to produce a few nice new soup recipes. I've been experimenting with cheese as an ingredient in soup and there are two cheesy soup recipes below, although the first on the list is a cheese-free vegan recipe.
I mentioned last week that my photo galleries are appearing more often not just because I currently have access to a broadband Internet connection, but also because I have discovered a new free image editing programme called FastStone. The programme can be downloaded at www.faststone.org and it's completely free with no spam or spyware attached when downloading. I can thoroughly recommend it for batch editing images and I'm putting a link on my resources page (along with a link to the Audacity site for a simple and brilliant free multitrack sound recording, mixing and editing programme).
New recipes
Sichuan spicy noodle soup
spinach, blue cheese and mushroom soup
tomato, basil and feta cheese soup
New photos
Yuangtong Temple, Kunming
Selected China snaps
New recipe index pages
Sweet corn recipes
The last Berlin photo page...
More photos from Berlin...
This is coming from Berlin where, unusually, I have access to a broadband connection. I've gathered a lot of recipe ideas on this trip but as I don't have access to a cooker and some pots and pans, they'll have to wait till a bit later. I've taken a lot of interesting photos here and for a change, I'm able to post them almost immediately. So, here's the first page of Berlin photos. I also posted a couple of new videos of an amazing brass band playing on Kurfurstendamm.
Photo pages
Berlin 1
Here's the stuff I promised last week. I've put up a few new videos too.
New recipes
bunch-o-vitamins
rice, spinach, sweet corn, pine nuts
apple and carrot aladi
Diamond green salad
fettuccine with spinach and beans in creamy sauce
Tex-Mex buckwheat
Aberdonian tropical salad
vegetarian paella
green olive pesto
how to cook buckwheat
New photo galleries
Lisbon
Macbeans get the munchies
Penang, Malaysia
Tbilisi, Georgia
Lama Island, Hong Hong
Lan tau Island, Hong Kong
Golden Temple, Kunming
New recipe index pages
Buckwheat recipes
Just a quickie.... one more recipe... I want to post this in a blog entry tomorrow... Here's Portugese vegetarian paella....
Once again, it's been a long time...I know and I'm going to start off with excuses...I have not been idle. I just haven't uploaded what I've written lately as I'm working with a particularly shite web connection here in Armenia. I took all my material on a flash memory stick with me to Portugal but Sveta's laptop died just after we got there and I couldn't upload from there either. I've written a bunch of new recipes and prepared loads of new photo galleries. I'm using Faststone image editor now - I got it free off the web ( I think you can get it at download.com - there's a link on my resources page). It's got a batch editor which means I can resize and rename a whole bunch of pics at the same time. First I do the full size ones then add a wee 'th' to the name, change the size and do a load of thumbs. Everything in two moves. The only downside is it doesn't auto correct the images while batch editing. I can see why not. That's probably a lot to ask of any programme. I can make small adjustments to the contrast settings etc. but that applies to all images and some inevitably come out worse than others. It's a great programme though. Totally recommend it. I'll check where I got it and if it's not from download.com, I'll post the correct link next time.
Next time is, for defo, going to be happening very shortly. We're off to Berlin next week and as soon as I find a broadband connection I'll fire everything new up onto the site. Prepare for a couple of very neat recipes - true Macbean originals, not to be found anywhere else. There are also two more installments of Yozhik on the way....and of course all the photos I mentioned. Sounds scrummy, eh? But back to this update... one recipe. That's it. I was going to wait till next week but I wanted to blog my Jerusalem artichoke experience today and I need the recipe up so I can link to it. I've just completely redesigned my home page and I had to upload it too, in order to link to this new updates page, so there's a bit of 'value added' for this session....
Since this is the first update of the year, I suppose I should say 'Happy New Year' to everybody - it is a bit late but I can say Happy Scottish New Year, Happy Russian New Year, Happy Chinese New Year and Happy Iranian and Kazakh New Year, all at the same time.
Today's new recipe
Jerusalem artichoke soup
This was the last update I did before the New Year....
New recipes
creamy cauliflower fettuccine with capers and cashews
green pepper salad
courgette and capers pasta
dry fried aubergine
fluffy cheese balls
pkhali - Georgian spinach (or beetroot) and walnut pate
New cartoons
Nessie part 4
New stories
Penny dainties