Cheap & Easy-To-Make Vegan Dinner Recipes With 5 Ingredients
By Jess Commons
Never before have recipes with a short shopping list felt so useful than during lockdown. Saves on going outside? Check! Easy to make at home? Check! Kind on the purse strings? Check!
Katy Beskow, a vegan cookery tutor and author is here to help you with that. Her previous three books were all about vegan recipes that take just 15 minutes and her new book, Five Ingredient Vegan, is made up of similarly easy concoctions but this time with only five ingredients each — meaning you don’t need to go overboard at the shops. Also, none of those five ingredients is nigh on impossible-to-find seitan.
Ahead, Katy has gifted us three of these below-budget recipes.
P.S. For those of you who might look at some of these recipes and go “Hm, actually there are more than five ingredients here,” the extras are only ever oil, salt and pepper, and if you don’t have those in your cupboards already then quite frankly we need to have a word.
Coconut and squash traybake
Sometimes dinner is as easy as adding everything to a roasting tin and letting the oven do all the hard work. This simple traybake will be ready to serve in less than 45 minutes. I love serving it with wedges of lemon for a fresh contrast to the coconut milk.
Serves four
Ingredients
1 medium butternut squash, peeled, deseeded and cut into 3cm cubes (about 500g prepared weight)
Handful of green beans, trimmed
200g basmati rice
400ml canned full-fat coconut milk
1 tbsp mild curry paste (ensure dairy free)
Generous pinch of sea salt
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/gas mark 4.
Arrange the butternut squash and green beans in a deep roasting tin and scatter in the rice.
In a jug, mix 200ml cold water with the coconut milk and curry paste until combined. Pour this into the roasting tin, making sure it covers all of the ingredients.
Cover with foil, then bake in the oven for 40–45 minutes until the squash is tender.
Remove from the oven and carefully lift off the foil. Season with sea salt before serving.
This recipe also works well with frozen butternut squash, saving you peeling and chopping time. Frozen butternut squash is available from most supermarkets, and is a useful addition to your freezer.
Santorini tomato fritters
If you’ve been lucky enough to visit a Greek island, it’s likely that you’ve sampled authentic tomato fritters, originating from the beautiful island of Santorini. Some varieties contain fresh mint or basil, but I love the burst of flavour that flat-leaf parsley adds. Serve hot with cool unsweetened soya yogurt to dip, and a wedge of lemon to squeeze over — perfect with a leafy green salad.
Serves two generously
Ingredients
3 tbsp plain (all-purpose) flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp dried oregano
300g cherry tomatoes, roughly chopped
Handful of flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped
Pinch of sea salt and black pepper
4 tbsp sunflower oil
Instructions
In a mixing bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder and dried oregano.
Stir in the tomatoes and flat-leaf parsley, then season with sea salt and black pepper.
Add 50ml cold water and stir to form a thick batter.
Heat the oil in a frying pan until hot. Add in tablespoons of the batter (up to four at a time, to avoid the fritters touching and merging) and cook for 1 minute until golden and crisp, then carefully flip the fritters and cook on the other side.
Drain on paper towels or a clean dish towel, then repeat the cooking process until all of the batter has been used. Serve hot.
The key to perfect fritters is hot oil: if the oil isn’t hot enough, the fritters will be soggy. Test the oil by dropping a small amount of the mixture into the pan; if it turns golden within a few seconds, the oil is ready.
Spinach pancakes with cream cheese and chives
Who doesn’t love a pancake? Blending spinach into the batter gives the pancakes a gorgeous green hue, which little diners just love too. I often serve them with a lemon wedge for squeezing over.
Serves 2 generously (make about 6)
Ingredients
100g plain (all-purpose) flour
180ml unsweetened soya milk
Chilled generous handful of spinach
3 heaped tbsp vegan cream cheese
Small handful of chives, very finely chopped
Generous pinch of sea salt and black pepper
6 tbsp sunflower oil
Instructions
Add the flour, soya milk, spinach leaves and sea salt to a high-powered jug blender or food processor and blitz until you have a smooth green batter.
Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a frying pan over a medium–high heat. Test if the oil is hot by adding a drop of the pancake batter to the pan; if it sizzles and becomes golden within 30 seconds, the oil is at the optimum temperature.
Add about a ladleful of batter to the pan to make one pancake, swirling the batter around the pan to coat the base evenly. When the pancake becomes slightly crisp after 2–3 minutes, carefully flip it onto the other side and cook for a further 2–3 minutes. Drain on paper towels and keep warm while you cook the remaining pancakes, adding a tablespoon of oil to the pan each time.
In a small bowl, stir together the vegan cream cheese and the chives. Spread or spoon the cream cheese onto the pancakes and serve, sprinkled with a few extra chopped chives, if you like, and a pinch of black pepper.
Vegan cream cheese is available from most supermarkets — there are so many brands and varieties to choose from, so try them all and decide which is your favourite!
Five Ingredient Vegan by Katy Beskow is out now, published by Quadrille, £20
Originally published at https://www.refinery29.com.
