Some Food, Some Challenges

It's August! Woo-hoo! That magical time of bounteous produce, that gateway to the wonders of autumn (by far my favorite time of year), the days grow just a little shorter but the nights are still warm. Hooray!

And so it's a time for challenges. I'm participating in two challenges this month - Jennifer's Quit Now Challenge and Chile's Discretionary Eating Challenge.

I'm Quitting: Bananas and trying real darn hard to quit paper towels. So far, so good.

For the Discretionary Eating Challenge I'm in for 50% BUZZ (trying to have no more than 1 cup of coffee OR alcohol a day; ideally having no alcohol and very few coffee drinks in a week and only purchased during Espresso Happy Hour for half off!!!). I'm also in 100% for LITE (eliminating "white", refined products, except for sweets) and SOW (seconds only when hungry).

I'm doing well on this challenge so far, EXCEPT for this past weekend. We unexpectedly went to visit my parents in Portland and I ended up cooking a fair bit (blueberry muffins, biscuits) with white flour, because that's all my mom had. Like I said, last minute trip. I will say this as a consolation though: I made my blueberry muffins from scratch and my mom made non-vegan ones from a mix. There were 6 adults (2 were vegan) and one toddler (vegan). At the end of the meal, all 12 of my scratch muffins were gone but only FOUR of the mix muffins were eaten! It's clear that homemade (and vegan!) totally kicks Betty Crocker's ass.

It's fun to challenge yourself! And it's not too late to join, so if you haven't already, check them out and sign UP!

And now back to our regularly scheduled foodiness....

We've been chowing down on some fabulous eats this past week. It was the first week in a while that I PLANNED MY MEALS. Holy crap, but it's true. I don't know why I ever stop planning them, because everything is infinitely easier/better/amazing when I do. Even when I don't stick to the list, having the list there is a life saver. Because I forget things. I'm scatter brained. You know when you used to walk into the video store and stare and the movies blindly like here are all these movies and I can't remember the ones I really wanted to see? So you walk out with nothing or something really crappy? Yeah? Well the meal plan saves you from that feeling, seriously. Even when you decide to eat (or rent) something else instead, the list is good to have for when you feel uninspired.

The Ubiquitous CSA Stir-Fry Extravaganza!
Local: tofu, snap peas, green onion, mushrooms and garlic. Yum! Over rice. I thickened the sauce with some cornstarch this time, which I will do again. It was glossy and tasty!


Chickpea Sensation Patties with Balsamic Maple Sauce (And oven roasted potatoes!)
This meal was FABULOUS. The roasted potatoes were just thinly sliced yukon golds from our CSA share, tossed in olive oil and salt and pepper and roasted at about 400F for 30-40 minutes. During the last 10 minutes or so I added FRESH (from the backyard) rosemary and it made them crazyOMGdelicious. The husband was almost frantic with his worship of the potatoes.

I love experimenting with veggie patties, so I dove into this one from Eat, Drink and Be Vegan by Dreena Burton. I made a LOT of substitutions and they were still amazing. Especially with Balsamic Maple Sauce!

Spicy Italian Cutlet Parmesan with Fresh Peas and More Potatoes!
Sorry for the sucky photo. I NEVER claimed to really know how to use my camera!

Anyway, this recipe utilizes Julie Hasson's recipe for spicy italian vegetarian sausages, only instead of sausages you make cutlet patties for steaming. Then you bread and fry those puppies up and (in my case anyway) with the aid of a half-used jar of marinara sauce and the hunk of Teese that is begging to be used, you transform them into something magical AND thrifty!

These were so great. Not a terribly fast recipe, but not hard either if you know what I mean. I will definitely make them again, they are great. And who can deny the wonder of freshly shelled peas? Or more rosemary potatoes?!

Perfect Pasta with Peanut Sauce and Green Beans
This is a recipe that I tested for Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's new cookbook, and it's tasty AND easy. It's just noodles, fresh lightly steamed green beans and a peanut sauce. YUM! Silas is a big fan.

Refried Bean Burritos with Funky Salsa Verde
Last week's bean was the chickpea. This weeks? The Pinto!!! I'm always kind of "eh.." when I think of pintos, but when I make them and eat them I remember why my husband always wants them - they're so good and creamy!

This was just a refried bean recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman, with this amazingly delicious "salsa verde" - recipe courtesy of my CSA. I can't imagine that this is authentic salsa verde, but I don't care - it's soooooo good! I want more! I want to eat it on eveything! Anything is a vehicle for this delicious sauce! And in case you were wondering, that is a WHOLE WHEAT tortilla - I'm totally doing well on my challenge!

This is taken from the CSA's newsletter:
Salsa Verde:
We have made this sauce with marjoram, basil and cilantro so far and all have been incredibly yummy! The amount/variety of herbs doesn’t seem to be that important, but the lime zest and juice is! Serve with quesadillas, tacos, or roasted potatoes.

-Roughly chop up 1 bunch of dill and ½ bunch of chives and put them in a blender.
-Add the zest and juice of 1 lime, 2 TBS olive oil, 1 clove of garlic and a big pinch of salt.
-Blend until smooth.

That's all for now! Hopefully this week's meal plan will hold and I'll have some more goodies to showcase soon. :D

Vacation and lots o' food!

So we went out of town for 5 days and before that? Sick. Oh yes.



So I'm going to go backwards and start with vacation! Because it's fresh in my mind and really, who doesn't want to relive vacation?! We went to Phoenix from Wednesday-Sunday because Chad had a second job interview, so we decided to turn it into family vacation time. We were actually in the western suburbs of Phoenix, which was basically all strip malls, all the time. But it was beautiful, the desert, and it was 86 degrees the whole time. And sunny. Did I mention sunny? And 86? In MARCH? I was loving it UP. It smelled like sage and everything just had a crisp spring edge to it. Lovely.

So I was a little worried about being in the land of Mexican food and being vegan, because for all the ethnic cuisines that are vegan friendly, Mexican food is really not one of them. So no little taquerias for us unfortunately. Luckily, we weren't all that tempted because we were mostly surrounded by chains, which can be very helpful to the traveling vegan who has access to the internet! Let me just say that this was the best vegan traveling I have ever done. We had a couple great lunches at Chipotle (fajita burrito bowls with the black beans), and a great dinner at Macaroni Grill (pasta with garlic olive oil, bruschetta with no cheese, garden salads sans cheese and crutons - and a dirty martini!), and some decent bagles with hummus for me and pb&j for Chad for breakfast. We also bought some cereal and almond milk for brekkie to have at the motel, but we didn't have a fridge, so there was a lot of putting the almond milk in the ice bucket in front of the a/c, so after day 2 we decided not to risk it. ;) We also had some of the BEST vegan food EVER at Green restaurant, in Scottsdale. We had the edamame (for Silas) and Spicy Buffalo Wings (OMG!!! Must try to recreate this recipe!), then Chad had the No-Harm Chicken Parm and I had the Texas "moo-shroom" po boy, with unbelievably thin crispy and delicious thyme fries. Then, as IF that wasn't good enough, they also have their own homemade vegan soft-serve "ice cream"!!!!! That they make blizzards with!!! Called tsoynamis!!! Seriously! I had the rocky road with chocolate chips, vegan marshmellows, almonds and chocolate syrup, and Chad just had strawberry, cuz that's the kind of guy he is. It was bliss, pure bliss. I can't get over how wonderful it is to be eating at a restaurant where I can order ANYTHING off the menu and still be true to my ethics! It's amazing.

Whoo. Anyway. We also had some fabulous Thai food, but I have to confess that I'm a bad vegan. I never ask about fish sauce. The first time we had the thai I didn't taste fishiness at all, but the second time I caught a vague whiff of it. I'm going to stop being a lazy vegan and just start asking. Geez! What's my problem anyway? I guess I'm just worried about language barriers and being denied my favorite ethnic cuisine. But I'm gonna do it!

There were also several soy lattes at Starbucks. Good stuff all around. And we even survived the flight home with only access to a regular old grocery store (Fry's) - we found fresh berries, soy yogurt, Odwalla protein shakes and bagels and hummus for breakfast, and made Yves salami and hummus sandwiches on kaiser rolls for lunch. I was pretty proud of our success with vegan traveling.

We also did 3 hikes, visited 2 communities, walked around a couple downtowns, browsed an awesome used bookstore (Bookman's) and generally had a great time.

On to the food!


We had some fronch toast revisted here (with the additions of some vanilla and cinnamon to the VwaV recipe - a vast improvement!), with a side of almond butter sweet mashed sweet potatoes (inspired by Vegan Lunch Box), and some sliced bananas. Good stuff! I love having the sweet potatoes in the morning, it's a great way to get some orange veggies in first thing! The basic recipe is :

Breakfast Sweet Potatoes
1-2 sweet potatoes
1-2 T almond butter
1 T maple syrup (or to taste)
.5-1 T earth balance
salt to taste
cinnamon if you want (I skip it)

I microwaved the sweet potatoes for about 4 minutes , turned them over, and microwaved them another 4 minutes. Let them sit for a minute and then pulled the peels right off. Mashed in a bowl with the rest of the ingredients and serve!

Blueberry Coffee Cake from The Joy of Vegan BakingTo DIE for! I made this when we had some omni friends over after dinner out and it was a smash hit! This is a dangerous cake to have around because it is soooo tasty. We finished it for breakfast the next day!

Vegan Pizza Night!

Crust from TJ's, sauteed portabellos, a wee bit of leftover pesto and sliced tomatoes. Oh and just a bit of Follow Your Heart Mozzarella. The cheese was ok - it didn't melt much and didn't taste like much either, but it gave the appearance of cheese, which was fine. Now that I have the cheese in the house, I'll use it, but when we use it up I'm not sure if I'll replace it or not. I'm all about flavor, baby, and not so much for just appearances.

Loafcakes/Loaffins
Do you know the magic that is the Magical Loaf Studio? Created by the author of the blog and cookbook, Vegan Lunch Box, this handy little tool can pretty much make a vegan loaf out of anything you have in your kitchen. Ok, that might not be entirely true, but it's pretty close.

My loaf consisted of pumpkin and sesame seeds, lentils, breadcrumbs, onion, garlic, carrot, and celery, veggie broth, thyme basil, sage, nooch, veggie Worcestershire, ketchup, flax meal, Braggs, and olive oil. I cooked them in muffin tins, and before baking them I brushed on a combo of ~ equal amounts of ketchup and brown sugar with a dollop or two of more veggie Worcestershire sauce. Yum!

We had these with garlicky southern greens (from Vcon - can't get enough of these!) and baked potato with earth balance and s&p.

We had them a couple times, each time with the greens (they sell giant 1 lb bags of greens already washed and stemmed at TJ's! Awesome).

Navy Bean Cutlets with Mushroom Sauce and Roasted Carrots
Can't go wrong with the chickpea cutlets! I made a double batch this time with navy beans instead of chickpeas, and baked them for the first time (wow, easy and awesome!). This meal was a make-up-on-the-fly kind of thing, which is not my usual thing. I sliced up carrots and tossed them with some olive oil and maple syrup and salt and roasted them while I baked the cutlets. While that stuff was cooking I chopped up a portabello mushroom and sauteed it in olive oil with salt and white wine, then added in some flour and soy milk creamer to make it creamy and a little saucy. Oh and salt and pepper. It was really tasty over the cutlets, not really a gravy, but savory and delicious.

Other Stuff I Don't Have Pictures Of

I also baked up a big batch of cornbread from The Joy of Vegan Baking which was deLICIOUS! Like cornbread you'd get at The Cracker Barrel or something, it was really tender and sweet and awesome. Very different from the usual southern style skillet cornbread I make.
I also made a really great impromptu curry loosely following a recipe from Robin Robertson's Vegan Planet. It was coconut milk, red curry paste, chickpeas, green peas, and a can of diced tomatoes, sauteed sliced onion, carrots, and garlic all over whole wheat spaghetti. Next time I would add a tablespoon or two of Braggs, because it needed saltiness, but otherwise it was really tasty and made a LOT of food, AND the toddler was a huge fan.

Yesterday for a toddler playgroup I made a batch of Cornbread Blueberry Muffins from The Joy of Vegan Baking. These were ok - I was really expecting the tenderness of the cornbread, and these were much heavier/breadier. I was out of yellow cornmeal, so I used white, and I used all whole wheat white flour instead of half-white, half-wheat, so that might have been the culprit. I would make them again using less whole wheat flour because the flavor was good otherwise.

And finally, yesterday I made a batch of the Backyard BBQ Sauce from Vcon. OMG, yum! I slathered in on tempeh and fried it up for sandwiches for dinner last night (and lunch today) on whole wheat buns with a little veganaise and bread & butter pickles. Awesome combo! We had salad on the side.

ELC Day 5 Food Musings

So the local chickpeas cooked all night long in the crock pot and are now cooling on the counter (I read somewhere that a good trick to keep the cooked beans intact is to let them cool in the cooking water). The kombu strips have been pulled out, and the beans are pretty much ready to rock.

I made another great batch of homemade granola last night (recipe adapted from La Dolce Vegan's Simple Crunchy Granola). I can't believe how freaking easy it is to make granola, especially when considering what people will pay for it at a store (easily $6-8 per pound!). It is crazy. Although it's not 100% local, it is about 60% local by volume. I used organic local oats, butter and sunflower seeds, with oats being the biggest ingredient in the whole recipe (4 cups). Next time I could improve the local-ness by using local honey, but right now we are still trying to use up a giant bottle that we bought from Costco a year ago, so that was out. The other stuff (pepitas, sesame seeds, coconut, wheat germ, cinnamon) - I'm not so sure we can find local, ever. I've seen brans at the Farmer's Market, but not germ. Possibly pepitas will show up during pumpkin season? But I think we're out of luck when it comes to sesame seeds, coconut and cinnamon. Maybe over time we can replace these with other local ingredients. If anyone has any good recipes to share, please let me know!

Today at the local health food store, I restocked my supply of Vital Wheat Gluten, which I use when I bake bread. When reading the box later, I realized I can make seitan with it. Cool! I've never made homemade seitan before, so I'm anxious to try it out. I think we're going to do eggplant parmigiana tonight, but seitan will soon make an appearance on the table. After trying it out the easy, mostly instant way via the VWG, I'll be more willing to give it a whirl from scratch, hopefully using local wheat flour. Stay tuned for that.

This challenge is so great because it's making me try lots of new things: freezing tofu for chicken fried "steak", making homemade seitan, looking into making our own cheese, yogurt and kefir. It's also making me do stuff I should do all the time anyway: use our crockpot more, use the bread machine more (or just make bread totally by hand). Also, really appreciating our local farmers, both from the CSA and the farmer's market - they work their butts off year round so that we can have this bounty. Around this time of year every year, I start to get tired of the CSA share - it seems like we get the same stuff every week, and I get sick of trying to come up with new ways to use it all up. But this year, due to this challenge, I'm really appreciating the magic that is food like never before. It's amazing that tiny seeds can spend time in dirt, and magically become fuel for our bodies, sensory experiences for our minds. So, I may smirk when I see yet more green peppers in my box, but it turns into a grateful smile a few seconds later when I remember how hard won they are.

The Local Dairy Hunt
So after reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and how impossible it is for small dairy farmers to sell their wares directly to consumers, I've been feeling pretty discouraged about finding good sources for local dairy. I mentioned this to our next door neighbor, Rick, and he said, "What about Canada?" DUH! Of course, Canada! Right over the bridge from Detroit, 14 miles from our house, is Windsor, Ontario. I checked out their Farmer's Market website, and although there was no specific mention of dairy products, we're going to check it out tomorrow, just for the experience. I'm psyched! It never would have occurred to me to check it out if Rick hadn't mentioned it; just another reason why it pays to be friendly with your neighbors.