This is a really delicious alternative to having meat as your main dish on Christmas day. I serve it with all the usual Christmas trimmings – roast potatoes, minted peas and brussel sprouts, stuffing (minus the turkey), a rich onion gravy and my extra-special carrot salad.
Ingredients:
- 3 T olive oil
- 2 onions, finely chopped
- 2-3 garlic cloves, chopped
- 2 x 400g cans of tomatoes or passata sauce
- 2 tsp dried basil
- 75ml red wine
- 225g mushrooms, chopped into fairly small pieces
- salt and freshly ground pepper
- 1 x 275g packet of vegan filo pastry
- olive oil to brush over the pastry
- 90g roasted cashew nuts, roughly chopped
Gently cook the onions with the olive oil in a large covered saucepan until tender but not browned. Then add the garlic, tomatoes, basil and wine. Let this simmer gently with the lid off the pan until the liquid has reduced and the mixture is quite thick. At this point, add the mushrooms and cook for a further 15 minutes or so until any liquid has boiled away. The mixture should be quite dry. Remove from the heat and season to taste.
When the mixture has cooled, assemble the strudel on a large baking tray. If your filo pastry sheets are quite narrow, double the size of your surface area by putting two sheets side-by-side, overlapping them by about 2 cm. Brush some olive oil and sprinkle some of the nuts over the top, and then add another layer of filo pastry. Repeat until you have used up all the pastry and nuts. Trim any excess pastry (you can use this to decorate the top of the strudel). Spread the tomato mixture onto the pastry, leaving a margin of about 2.5cm around the edge. Fold the pastry edges to enclose the edge of the filling, and then roll to create your strudel.
Decorate with the trimmed off pastry and brush with olive oil. Then cook in the oven at 200 degrees celcius for 30 minutes.
Recipe adapted by Nadia from Rose Elliot’s Vegetarian Kitchen
