Here is my entry for another week for steemit #iron-chef challenge by @progressive-chef, I decided to make a starter and main course as I won't be entering the challenge next week because I'm visiting the family in England next weekend.
My family are all meat eaters so I often just have to work around them in the kitchen and make my own simple vegan dinner whilst they scoff down their Sunday roast. As someone who use to enjoy meat eating it was quite a test to my vegan diet at first but when you stand by a philosophy, it's quite empowering to be able to control yourself instead of being controlled.

I am vegan for many reasons, it wasn't an over night decision but in the end it made sense to me for my own well being, for the animals and the planet. I've heard complaints that it is boring to be vegan but in fact I am way more creative with my ingredients and flavors and I definitely give my body a lot more nutrition, which it deserves. I'm more excited about food shopping as a plant based person, I go to good quality independent stores instead of the supermarkets like I used too, when it comes to fruits and veggies there's always new and surprising things to discover.

For this entry I had no clue what I wanted to make, I was doing some of my weekly shopping and found next to the fresh peas pods, and other types of bean pea things and artichokes. To be honest I get a bit confused over the different names for the green bean and pea pods as they are not something I use as a staple in my diet. I snapped them all up and used whatever else was in my kitchen to start building a meal idea.

pea shop.jpg

I used a lot of ingredients in this dish and I didn't manage to capture all of them in a photo because I was just getting inspired as I was cooking and then just adding more of just what was lying around......

Here's a full list of my ingredients

Starter

Artichokes (seasoned with fresh lemon juice and himalaya salt)
Frozen peas and avocado pureed
Toasted sesame seed and beetroot pureed (seasoned)
Fresh peas for garnish
Green Romano Beans sliced for garnish

Main course

Sauce

Spring onion
Mushroom
Red pepper
Celery
Parsley
Himalaya salt
(lightly sauteed and all blended together)

Stirfry

Fresh peas
Green beans
Green Romano Beans
Garlic
Rice pumpkin and ginger noodles
Khmer tom yum seasoning (brought back from Cambodia)

At one point I felt like I was in an episode of master chef because I was trying to juggle preparing multiple things at once, my roomie was getting hungry and it was taking me hours to cook and prepare everything. In the end I felt quite rushed to finish because I was also starting to feel hungry. One advantage of being the chef is to be able to try the food before serving, although by serving time I felt in no fit state to eat the food.

It was quite chaotic in the kitchen and I didn't really manage to get cohesive shots of the food preparation process but I did get quite a few nice shots of the final dishes....

When I finally got around to eating, I was pleasantly surprised how tasty the artichoke dish was, I felt like I ordered it in a restaurant. We ate the starter alongside the main course and the 2 dishes balanced each other out really well. I was particularly impressed with the puree's they were my favorite part of the whole meal.

Thank you to @progessivechef @steemit-ironchef and the sponsors @canadian-coconut, @donkeypong , @trophytokens , @voiceshares and @bambam808 for their support to Steemit-Ironchef