©Ashy Macbean 2004. All rights reserved.
home recipes stories cartoons updates 2002 updates 2003 updates 2005 updates 2006 updates 2007 updates 2008
New additions to Ashy's On-line Vegetarian
Cookbook 2004
16 December
7 November
11 October
22 September
12 September
15 July
20 June
18 May
20 April
18 March
16
December
Pavlodar was great, but very, very cold. I think I was the only person in the city without a hat on. The story-telling and drawing workshop went well. Twice as many kids as I expected turned up, but I was prepared with extra paper and paints. I was on television jumping around like an idiot pretending to be the Gruffalo.
I got my certificate for my Russian A level a couple of weeks ago. I got a D. That sounds bad, I know, but I didn't sit two out of the three papers. My friends were visiting, it was summer and, well... there just were better things to do.
Sveta and I have been packing all this week, getting ready for India. I've also had hundreds of other things to do and the recipes below reflect the lake of time I've had for cooking. If you need something that takes less than half an hour to prepare, check these out.
Next stop, the Andaman Islands. Maybe not quite the next stop, but that is our projected final destination for this year's winter migration. We're flying to Delhi on the 18th of December and making our way over to Kolkata by train, via Bhodgaya in Bihar state and Puri in Orissa. The first week of January should see us on the Andamans.
This will be the last update this year, so I'll take the opportunity to wish everyone a happy New Year (Christmas too, if you're into that).
While we're away, I'll try to keep my travel-blog updated on a regular basis.
New recipes
tomatoes stuffed with tinned
vegetables
pasta with spinach in hazelnut
cream sauce
pasta with black olives and
rosemary
cabbage braised in white wine
with cream
New cartoons
Yozhik the famous coconut
part 1
Last week I was in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, visiting my mate, Alex. He comes from Samarkand and has been telling me for years I ought to come and visit him and see how beautiful the city is. When I finally did get round to making time, I found that Alex has moved to the capital to work as a translator. Too late. We did have a good time, though. Wandered about the city at night and ended up in a few bars and restaurants. Alex says there's a lot of reconstruction work going on in Tashkent at the moment anyway. It would be better to visit in the spring when they've finished. I managed to get a six-months multiple entry visa this time, so I might just do that.
I didn't find any new recipe ideas in Tashkent this time. I've already written up a couple of plov recipes, inspired by Uzbek cuisine and stuffed lavash and Grand Orzu eggless omlette are both discoveries from Tashkent, but I didn't come across anything special this time. I first had stuffed lavash when I was drinking with Alex, and we repeated the scene twice on this visit. I thought it was unique to one restaurant in Tashkent, but this is apparently not the case.
I stayed at the Grand Orzu hotel again but didn't have the eggless omlette. The hotel isn't as grand as the name suggests but it is very comfortable and quiet and the staff are friendly. It's also quite cheap.
The collection of recipes I offer on this update is a fairly mixed batch. Two were born of the necessity to deal with a large piece of pumpkin I bought on impulse at the bazaar. The ginger and lemon aubergines is something I wanted to try for ages. Sveta ordered an aubergine dish in India once and it came with a couple of large pieces of lemon amongst the aubergine. I was intrigued but kept forgetting to try it at home up until recently. I think you'll agree, it's a good way of preparing aubergines.
Tomorrow I'm off to Pavlodar in north Kazakhstan, to get involved in an exhibition
of children's book illustrations. I've volunteered to do a reading and drawing
workshop with the local school kids. I love the illustrations in children's
books. I recently read 'Fred' by Posy Simmons and 'Ugh' by Raymond Briggs. They
are two of my favourite children's writers and illustrators. 'Fred' is about
a pet cat who died, but the story has an uplifting, happy ending. 'Ugh' is about
a stone-age boy's search for soft trousers and has a very sad ending.
New recipes
mushroom, spinach and
courgette soup
ginger and lemon aubergines
steamed marrow and pumpkin
in spicy dressing
steamed vegetables
with rice and cheese sauce
tomato, orange and coriander sauce
very, very easy beetroot and apple
salad
vegetable boiled rice
New cartoons
Political animals
2
New links to other sites
Englishdroid
is a site dedicated to English language teaching. It is well written and very
entertaining. I don't usually spend time looking at ELT sites, but I spent ages
in this one. I recommend a visit to Englishdroid if you're thinking of becoming
an English language teacher.
Jennie Bates 2004 'Mr Rich Green' Salad and ketchup on enamel |
First, a picture. Over on the right you can see a photo of 'Mr Rich Green' by Jennie Bates, a budding young Scots artist. She created it in the Altin Orda micro-brewery restaurant, in Almaty, while her parents and I were getting stuck into the beer.
China was great. I wrote a couple of pages about Beijing in my travel-blog and you can see some photos on my new photopage (link below). I didn't write anything from Bedaihe as there was no internet acess. Internet is hard to find in China - I had to use the business centres in five-star hotels in Beijing and it cost a fortune. Perhaps the authorities are still not very comfortable with such an unregulated source of information. There may, in fact, be some attempt at government regulation. I wasn't able to access my cookbook, or the site of my webhost, from Beijing. I emailed Sveta and asked her to check if the cookbook was down. It wasn't.
I saw some great bonsai trees in Beijing - one with full-size apples on it. I put the pictures on my tree photopage.
I try to respond to all the emails I receive, but lately I've been having problems replying to AOL addresses. AOL and Yahoo mail don't seem to get on very well, so my apologies to anyone who has written and not received a reply. It's not because I didn't want to.
New recipes
black-eye beans with
red peppers
cabbage with pine nuts and
white wine
red beans with
spinach, walnuts and pomegranate juice
fried tofu with mushroom and orange
sauce
rocket and red pepper salad
New cartoons
Sweet tooth
Flatmates
Political animals
New photo pages
Beijing and Beidaihe
Two updates in the same month - this is unusual. It's partly because I've been doing a lot of experimental cooking so I have a lot of new ideas to write about. Another factor is that every time I update my site I notice that, a week or so later, it jumps four or five places in Google's ranking for the keywords 'vegetarian recipes'. It then begins to slide slowly back down again. It seems logical that the more regularly I update, the higher the average ranking will be. This doesn't necessarily mean I'll now be updating every two weeks, just that I'm trying to be more regular than I have been of late.
I'm off to China on the 25th. I plan to spend a few days in Beijing then travel across to Beidaihe on the coast to spend another few days. I need to find someone to write 'I'm vegetarian. I don't eat meat, fish, chicken or eggs.' in Chinese characters in my note book.
New recipes
mushroom stroganoff
tofu and mushroom cutlets with
white wine and ginger sauce
pasta with spinach and pine
nuts
beetroot tonic
New cartoons
Sheep thoughts
New links to other sites
Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms by Barbara Bassett,
is a nice site with loads of good pictures and descriptions of mushrooms.
Growing Herbs in the Home Garden is the place
to look if you want to do as the title suggests. There's information on each
herb including what to do with it once you've grown it.
Here's the latest, hot off the press. I wrote up all this stuff during the week. It's the first time I've had a chance to do anything on the computer for a while. My note book is full of ideas but it will take time to get them onto the site. I've been travelling a lot lately and haven't had the time or the inclination to sit down at the computer for any longer than it takes to check my email. When I created my travel-blog, it was with the idea of regularly updating it while on the road with details of the things I'm doing, the people I meet - all my colourful and zany adventures. The truth is, firstly, the things that happen are not always adventures and if they are it's in a personal sense, therefore they're not always so interesting or unusual and secondly, I usually just can't be bothered writing when I'm travelling. I think I've mentioned this before, but it seems to be a sort of paradox - if I'm doing lots of great things there's no way I want to take time out to sit at a computer and write. Conversely, if I have time to write, it means I've got nothing to write about. I guess I'd never make a travel writer.
So...the travel blog has been a bit haphazard, but then again it's my blog so who's going to hassle me if I don't do it? I will keep trying, though. Sveta and I got back from our trip to Europe a couple of weeks ago and I didn't write anything while we were away, but theres a link below to a load of photos I took. As soon as we got back to Kazakhstan, I got a call from some friends who were meeting up in Bishkek, in Kyrgyzstan. I did write a bit about that on my travel-blog, but not much - there was too much drinking and dancing to be done.
This time I'm presenting a few Turkish-style dishes. I don't know why it should happen now. It's been a couple of years since I was in Turkey. A delayed reaction, perhaps. It started with a desire to cook tomato pilau, which was prompted by the purchase of a couple of bags of excellent quality basmati rice. A shop I know stocks it intermittently and it's been a few months since they had it last. When it turned up again I bought two bags, but I'm thinking I should have got more. Maybe I'll go back. My philosophy with these kind of things is 'If they've got it, get it'. Anyway....I cooked the tomato pilau and that led, quite naturally, to an accompaniment of Turkish-style stewed green beans and cucuk. The kidney beans and coconut rice was also inspired by having such nice rice around the house.
About the cartoons. I don't know why I chose penguins as the subject of this lot. It's not really a matter of choice. It just happens. I couldn't be a cartoonist for a newspaper -my jokes aren't funny enough for a start, but besides that, I go through long periods with no inspiration and then I get three penguin jokes all at once. It would be tough luck if the newspaper guys wanted rabbit jokes, wouldn't it?
I think that's enough rambling. Suffice to say, it's nice to be back. Thank you once again to the guys who have written emails and also to the quiet visitors who come and go without anouncing their presence apart from registering on my wee counter. I hope you find something interesting. Your visits are all very much appreciated.
New recipes
tomato pilau
guacamole (version 2)
cucuk
polenta with tomato and
balsamic vinegar dressing
basic cous-cous
cous-cous with peppers and mint
aubergines with
pumpkin seed and courgette sauce
courgettes in spicy tomato
sauce
kidney beans and coconut
rice
Turkish-style green beans
New cartoons
Penguin 1
Penguin 2
Penguin 3
New photo pages
Summer 2004
Trees
Not much to offer on this update. I've been out more than in over the last few weeks. I've been on a trip to Hong Kong and Seoul and I've been showing visitors around Kazakhstan. I haven't had time to cook or to write much (though I did post a few travelblogs). I've been taking photos and I made two new photo pages. I've also added a couple of photos to my boats and mountains pages.
In a couple of days we're heading for London. After that we'll be in Amsterdam, then in Scotland. I won't be putting anything on the site for the next month, but I'll keep the travelblogs going as often as I can.
Big thanks to Roy for supplying more terms for my American-British English dictionary.
New recipes
tofu masala
New Photo pages
Hong Kong June 04
Watermelons on the road to Charyn
Canyon
New Links to other sites
www.ecotourizm.kz
is the site to visit if you find yourself in Kazakhstan and want to visit nature
reserves or just get off the beaten track (not that there is one in Kazakhstan).
The site gives details of ecotourism projects which are run by VSO in conjunction
with local NGO's in various parts of the country, to provide environmentally sustainable
tourism which also benefits local communities.
I've been experimenting with savoury fruit recipes this month and I've detailed two of my more succesful creations below. The soft fruit season is already nearing the end and the streets of Almaty are lined with people frantically trying to off-load cheap and extremely ripe fruit by the bucketful. Anyone who's into making jam or wine should get down here immediately. I've also done a few pies and cakes recently, but I haven't put up any recipes. I'm usually quite surprised when I successfully produce a pie in the oven and afterwards I'm never quite sure how I did it.
I finally got round to doing a brown rice recipe - something I've been meaning to do for ages. Brown rice is hard to find outside Europe, North America, Australia - the countries with health food shops. It's extremely difficult to find in most of Asia. I did find some in Kazakhstan recently - imported from America and very expensive. I usually avoid buying imported food if I can get something similar which is locally produced or grown. However, as I hadn't eaten brown rice for years, I bought a bag just to do something a little different. It was only when I cooked it I remembered that I don't really like the stuff. Everyone else thought it was fine, but I think it will be a while before I'll cook brown rice again.
I'm going to Hong Kong tomorrow, for a week or so, and I'm quite excited about it as I've never been there before. I'll try to make a few entries in my travel-blog while I'm there, and I'll no doubt have some photos and recipes to post on my return.
New recipes
green pepper and coconut dhal
brown rice with walnuts and celery
tofu, almond and aubergine
cutlets
cheese and mushroom soup
carrot and peanut cutlets
avocado with strawberry sauce
spicy potato gravy
cherry and mushroom sauce
A few days ago, I took the unusual step of putting something new on my site without announcing it on my update page. I refer to the Aksu Zhabagly photo page linked to below. Anyone who has come in through the out door - i.e. through my travel-blog - might have noticed a link to the photo page. I felt like doing a bit of blogging and the photos nicely illustrated some of my comments, hence my sneaky update.
This time, I offer a relatively paltry selection of items. I haven't been around my computer much. In fact, I've been running around like the proverbial blue-arsed fly over the past couple of weeks. Oxana is on holiday at the moment and with us in Almaty, which means we've been out on the town a fair bit. The weather is perfect at the moment for wandering around the city in the evening. It's also pretty good for heading into the mountains during the day and I've been out hiking and bird-watching a lot, too. I've also been doing a lot of other work, some of it in exchange for wads of spondulocks calculated on an hourly basis - still an unfortunate necessity in my life.
New Recipes
coconut chutney
quick veg biriyani
sambar
spinach with peanuts
New photo pages
Aksu
Zhabagly nature reserve
I went for a day trip to the Tamgaly Tas petroglyphs last weekend. That was the second time I visited but I still only found one petroglyph. It was quite impressive though, and I took a photograph of it. You can see it if you follow the link below. I went with a friend who borrowed a car for the day and we invited a couple of young students who are studying tourism. They spent most of their time throwing stones at things. They also began collecting tortoises and they weren't very happy when I made them put them all back where they found them.
I've gone out drinking beer a couple of times recently. The weather in Almaty is getting warm and sunny and the days are becoming longer. Big coloured umberellas are beginning to sprout like mushrooms all over the city. Almaty is a particularly attractive city for sitting out in the street, watching the world go by. There are a lot of trees and gardens, even in the city centre.
I watched a bunch of guys the other day, comparing mobile phones to see who had the smallest. I thought that was quite ironic.
The 'links' issue has been on my mind recently. I'm continually looking out for new links to add to my links page, but I've taken a few down recently. I put them up as part of a link-exchange thing (which is meant to improve search engine ranking), but the sites turned out to be advertisements backed by link farms, with loads of unconnected links lumped together and no information about the sites they led to. 'Not very interesting to my visitors', I thought. Everytime I open my mail box, I find two or three automated e-mails offering link exchanges to sites offering things like 'herbal viagra' and cheap medicines and contact lenses. They all go in the trash can now. Sometimes people ask me to put up a link, sometimes I ask them if I can post their link, but any new links I put up in future will be carefully checked for interesting, useful, entertaining or otherwise relevant content. It might not be a veggie site, but if it doesn't jar with what I'm doing and I think people might like it, I'll put it up. Last time I put up 'Birding in Kazakhstan', this time we've got 'Narelle and Yves' photojournal' - both very nice sites.
As we're coming to the picnic and barbecue season (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) I thought I would write up some outdoor cooking recipes. There are two amongst the new links below. Like most of the others, they're both from our recent trip to India. I've got a few more ideas from India to try out, but they'll have to wait till the summer when more vegetables are in season.
My next planned trip, in a couple of weeks, is a short jaunt down to Aksu-Zhabagly nature reserve in South Kazakhstan. It's about 700 km from Almaty and I'll be there for three or four days. I should have some nice photos to put up if the weather is good. Longer term plans include a few weeks in Jockland in August to see mum, dad and wee brother and a visit to Beijing in October, to see whatever there is to see there (a load of good things by the sound of it) and do a spot of bird watching on the coast (migration time, you see).
Here's what I've put together this time:
New recipes
barbecued sweet corn
paneer tikka
Uncle Sydney's weight-loss
diet meal
paneer with green beans
pinapple stewed in coconut milk
cauliflower with lemon and
coconut
puris
quick fried okra
easy gnocchi
New cartoons
Cat tales 2
New photo pages
Nauriz (Kazakh New Year)
Tamgaly
Tas Petroglyphs
New links to other sites
Narelle
and Yves' photojournal is a journal of the authors' travels around
the world since March 2000. They've got some great pictures of places in Scotland
- one of the reasons I like the site so much - as well as pictures from other
countries in Europe and some from Australia. There are also links to articles
and other interesting sites.
It's been a long time....Sveta and I were in India until last week. All the new recipes below are from this year's trip and I've written a bit about our travels on each page, so I won't repeat it here. We had planned to return around the end of February but when we got to the airport, we discovered Air Kazakhstan had gone bankrupt while we were wandering around India. We managed to book tickets on an Air Kyrgyzstan flight to Bishkek on the 10th of March. It's not far to Almaty from Bishkek and our friend met us at the airport with his car. It was great to have an extra couple of weeks in India but our funds had run dangerously low by the time we realised we were staying longer. Captain Credit Card came to our rescue. I usually carry a card stashed about my person for emergency use only, although up till now I've managed to deal with any emergencies without it. There's a first time for everything I suppose. Of course, I'm now looking at a gaping financial deficit in my immediate future. I'll have to do a little bit more work than usual - not that I don't count the things I do for the cookbook as work, but I'm talking specifically about the nasty stuff you have to do when you're skint.
I tried to keep up my web-log while we were travelling but I don't think I put much of interest on it....The usual problem - when you're doing nothing you have lots of time to write but nothing to write about. When you're busy doing interesting things, there's no time to visit the internet cafe. I'll leave the link on the front page meantime in case I get a burst of inspiration on my next trip away from the computer.
New cartoons...I've done a couple with military themes this time. Every time I check the news there seems to be extreme violence happening somewhere. This is always the case, I know. It's depressing to think that after thousands of years of civilization, so many people still view beating the crap out of each other as a justifiable means of human interaction. There's been enough written about it already and I have neither the skill nor the inclination to try to add to the body of literature condemning violence, but I was inspired to use humour as a means of expressing at least a little attitude.
Thanks to everyone who has written over the last couple of months. I've got a back-log of letters to reply to, but I'll be working on that over the next few days.
New recipes
Oxana's mung bean salad
chana chat
spinach pakora
bread pakora
paneer and spinach kofta in
rich tomato sauce
spinach and paneer cutlets
New cartoons
Going green
Open season
Frozen assets
Midnight in Gotham City
New photo pages
Kalakshetra heads and Krishna's Butterball
New links to other sites
Birding in Kazakhstan is a new English language information site
for birders visiting Kazakhstan. It's all free, so if your heading out that
way and you're interested in birds, give the link a click.