VeganMofo: Weekend Edition

So maybe this would be a good time to talk about my serious addiction to biscuits and gravy?!? Seriously?!!? I think I need a support group. Maybe you do, too. Let me know, we'll talk.

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Love.

We also enjoyed some pretty swank vegan pizza - a refrigerated crust from TJ's topped with some marinara, leftover roasted veggies (carrots, parsnips, cauliflower, garlic, cherry tomatoes and onion) and some leftover field roast sausage, crumbled. Topped with a packet of Chreese sauce. It was really good! Quick and easy, just what I was in the mood for.


It was a "use-up-all-these-aging-leftovers" kind of weekend, so I transformed my leftover pumpkin puree (from making VWaV Best Pumpkin Muffins) into pumpkin pancakes. They were wicked, wicked good. They reminded me of when we used to get pumpkin pancakes all the time in Michigan at The Original Pancake House. Topped with tonnnnnns of whipped cream. I need to work on the vegan whipped cream angle. Maybe next time we'll try some coconut milk whipped cream, been meaning to give that a go. Anyway, try these pancakes, I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Pumpkin Pancakes of Powa!
Serves 2 adults and 2 kids

1 3/4 cup ap flour (or some combo of ap flour and ww pastry flour)
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp fresh ground nutmeg (or 1/2 tsp already ground)
egg replacer for 3 eggs (4.5 tsp egg replacer mixed with 6 tablespoons water)
1 1/2 cup nondairy milk
3/4-1 C pumpkin puree
4 T canola oil
1 T molasses

Combine dry ingredients. Combine wet ingredients. Mix toghetha. Cook in a skillet. EAT IT! Yum.

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Continuing with my southern comfort food addiction, last night we had fried seitan chicken, smoky collard greens, and some crazy good pickle chips and radishes that we made. I made the seitan the day before, using the recipe from Yellow Rose Recipes - I've been digging that recipe a lot. I think next time I make fried chicken, though, I would probably try to carefully slice my cutlets in half. They were a little squishy in the middle. But serioulsy, it was wicked good anyway, this is a minor thing.

Another Vegan Southern Feast

I used the Jay-Lo's Fried Chicken recipe from La Dolce Vegan! and I think this is the best it's ever worked. It was almost eerie how convincing it looked on the plate!

The collards I've talked about before here, and they were as magical as ever, even without mushrooms. Quote from Chad, "If you would have told me a year ago that I could love collard greens so much, I would have laughed in your face. But I want to eat these every day." Seriously, try this recipe! It's soooo good.

The pickles were kind of a last-ditch effort to save some aging cucumbers and some radishes that I had no use for. Oh and a red banana like pepper. I used a recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian and they've been in our fridge for quite some time. They are so sour and awesome and addictive! It's really hard to stop eating them. Silas is a big fan of the radishes, what a freak child! I think the texture of the cucumbers is weird for him, but the radishes remain crispy. In fact, I have some radishes from the CSA that I need to slice up and throw in the dwindling jar...

BBQ Beans and Mole!

So I am officially in love with Veganomicon for giving me my two new favorite recipes: Backyard BBQ Sauce and Chili-Chocolate Mole! I've talked about the BBQ sauce before, but I had to use it up before it went bad (can! not! waste!) so I created this little meal on the fly:

BBQ Beans Over Capered Couscous with Sauteed Spinach and Tomatoes

Every part of this meal owes some part of its creation to Vcon although I came up with the BBQ bean thing on my own. I just used (all measurements are very approximate):

1/2 C onion, diced small
3-4 button mushrooms, chopped
1 cup garbanzo beans
1 cup black beans
1/4 cup Backyard BBQ sauce
4-5 shakes Chipotle Tabasco

Basically, I sauteed the onion in some olive oil for a few minutes, then added the mushrooms. I cooked those for about 5 minutes and then added the rest of the ingredients until warmed through. So easy, but don't let that fool you! They are delicious!

Chili-Chocolate Mole!!!
Ok, so I don't have the opportunity have mole very often, so I get really excited when I do. Chad is out of town (mysterious, I know) so basically that means that everything I cook while he is gone will contain chocolate! (Because he's allergic, in case you missed my mentioning it like 500 times in past posts. It's my cross to bear. ;) ). So my buddy Brooke came over last night with her toddler, because her husband is out of town, too. She is like 90% vegan, so that just made cooking all the more enjoyable, because I didn't have to worry about representing all of veganism with this meal!

So to save myself from extra hassle I decided to prepare the seitan the day before. I used the Simple Seitan recipe from Vcon, which I hadn't used before (my tried and true is the Faux Chicken Seitan from La Dolce Vegan). It turned out really well! I was even able to slice it really thinly for sandwiches (on Chad's request, for plane food. Which he forgot at home and I ate.)

I also made the mole the day before, and I'm really glad I did that. It's not hard, it's just lots of little steps and uses several electronic devices (food processor, immersion blender). I ate some the day I made it (see the photo above) - leftover Chipotle burrito bowl in corn tortillas with mole on top. YUM! It was pretty hot though, and I was a little worried I was going to burn Brooke's taste buds off. Luckily, it had mellowed some the next day. Note to self: the chipotle chili powder I own is as hot as the fiery pits of hell!

So my "dinner party for two vegans" menu was:

Seitan Simmered in Mole (Vcon)
Mexican Millet (Vcon)
Steamed Broccoli with garlic and olive oil
Corn Tortillas on the side

She brought chocolate desserts: coconut cupcakes with chocolate frosting (from Vegan Lunch Box) and no-bake cookies (yayayayay!). She left me like a dozen full-sized cupcakes and like 25 tiny mini-cupcakes. And like ten cookies. Yeah, I'm going to gain like 10 lbs this week. Sigh.

It was all awesome! And she loved it, too, which was awesome. Silas likes the seitan plain and really enjoyed the millet. Her toddler was not such a fan of any food, but he's slow to warm up to most foods. He munched on baby carrots and soymilk. Little vegans, so cute.

Oh, this week I also made up a batch of the Curried Carrot Dip from Vcon, which I love! It's the second time I've made it, and it is great party food. I've brought it to playdates both times and people always love it and want the recipe. If you haven't tried it yet, do. It's tasty and really easy. It's great on crackers, bagels and as a sandwich spread. I have also been known to stuff whole wheat pits with both it and tofu "egg" salad - kind of sounds weird, but it's awesome!

Wheat and Potatoes, et al

Here's what's been on our menu of late!

Fronch Toast with Leftover Scramble and Potatoes


I can't remember if I've made the Fronch Toast from VwaV before, but I was happy with the results. The garbanzo bean flour gives it that weird metallic eggy taste that's missing from most vegan french toast recipes. But the biggest plus of this recipe? It totally didn't stick while cooking. Bitchin'.

Fried Tempeh with Almond Sauce, with Assorted Salads
So I had defrosted tempeh on Monday without a definite idea of what I planned to do with it. I finally decided on some fried tempeh and some kind of peanut-type sauce. So while I fried up the tempeh in peanut oil, I found a recipe for peanut sauce in Vegan Planet. It was AWESOME! Oh, but I subbed almond butter for the peanut, just to see what it would be like (plus, the toddler could eat it without me worrying). I served this over leftover diced baked potatoes (remind me never to buy a 5 lb bag of potatoes ever again - we just don't eat them fast enough!). On the side is Quinoa Black Bean Salad and a basic green salad with balsamic maple vinaigrette that I made up on the fly. A satisfying meal all around, and I definitely need to copy that sauce recipe before I return that cookbook to the library!

Leftovers Extraordinaire
Do you love to transform leftovers into something totally new? Me too. So this is some leftover quinoa with steamed broccoli and peas and some AWESOME smoked cubed tofu (Soy Boy, I think?) with leftover almond (peanut) sauce. Soooooo good! I'm going to have to buy stock in that tofu, it is outrageous, and so easy to deal with - it's ready to eat out of the package. The toddler is also a huge fan, so yay protein. I had this for dinner last night and lunch today, it was THAT good.

Slow Cooker Seitan Pot Roast


It's been a Robin Robertson kind of week here, what with this meal and the awesome peanut sauce recipe from Vegan Planet! Ok, that picture above of the whole deal IN the crockpot looks a little scary (brains!?!), so here's what the plated version was like:


Much less brain-y. It was soooo good! God, there is nothing like having that warm, secure feeling of knowing that dinner will be ready just by lifting the lid of the crockpot! This took about 7-10 minutes to prepare this morning before Chad left for work, and then voila! It was ready when he got home. This was sorely needed today, because none of us are sleeping well since Silas has a cough and was coughing ALL. NIGHT. LONG. At about 15 minute intervals, so you'd *just* fall asleep and then COUGH! HACK HACK! COUUUUUGH!

But I digress. (It's the sleep deprivation). This was an awesome, hearty meal. I will definitely be making this again. It was my first try at seitan in the crock, and I'm really glad it worked out, because seriously, what could be easier? I think next time I'll try to make the seitan dough more "roast-y," this time I made it kind of flat to cover the veggies so it was kind of thin and disc-shaped. Just an aesthetic thang.

Random Baking
Oh, and I did make some cookies that didn't last long enough for photos - 2 batches of Dreena's Homestyle Chocolate Chip Cookies. I think I could eat a batch a day, seriously. I made one with regular chips and one with carob, so the dudes could partake. Chad was very impressed. The carob was actually really good, very malty, not chalky at all. Although now he is wondering if he has a carob allergy because he was getting the fluttery allergy feeling after eating them. ARGH! This chocolate lover can't win. :/

A Pretty Dang Local Thanksgiving

AKA DDELC #6
So Thanksgiving was a blast! Here was our menu:

Bryanna Clark Gorgan's Soy and Seitan "Turkey" (not local but homemade!)
Mashed Yukon Gold Potatoes (local potatoes, half and half)
Cornbread stuffing (local cornmeal, celery, onion, sage)
Good Gravy (local thyme, milk)
Steamed Brussels Sprouts (local sprouts)
Cranberry relish (local cranberries)
Buttermilk-Blueberry Pie (local buttermilk, blueberries, eggs)
Maple Pumpkin Pie (local pumpkin, half and half, eggs)
Potato Rosemary Rolls (non-local, but homemade)


Everything was delicious! We were especially in love with the "turkey" - it is amazing to find that you can make you're own tofurkey like product for so cheap and with so little effort - and the results are way better than tofurkey! Seriously, I think the whole roast cost us about $5 in ingredients and fed us for well over 4 days - some of those days more than one meal. And the toddler LOVED it. We will definitely be making this again - like maybe once a week until the end of time. And supposedly they freeze well, too. Yay!

I would also like to add that I made both of my piecrusts from scratch this year - I've NEVER made piecrust before and I was a little worried. Then I saw Martha Stewart on Wednesday and she made it look soooooo easy to roll it out and whatnot that on Thursday, I was like "This will be a piece of cake! Or pie!" Fast forward several hours, hissyfits and globs of dough flung across the kitchen in fits of rage....The goddamn dough kept sticking to EVERYTHING! Yes, even after I refrigerated it! And froze it! Goddamn dough! Then I remembered reading somewhere that I could roll it out between pieces of plastic wrap, so I gave that a whirl as a last goddamn chance...and it worked. Beautifully. As if I had never squished the everloving shit out of the dough in frustration nor thrown in at my window in despair. It all came out beautifully. So note to self: use the goddamn plastic wrap, you idiot. Save some years on your life.

I would also like to say how awesome and easy it was to make REAL homemade pumpkin pie! With a pumpkin! And no cans of any kind of milk, just real, local half and half! It was a miracle, and so delicious. Definitely making that one again!

ELC Day 12

ELC Epiphany
I've always been loathe to waste food that I made (not so much leftovers, but loaves of bread, jars of sauce, baked goods, etc) because, well duh, I put effort into. I saw it transform from raw ingredients into something else entirely, as if by magic.

But I had an epiphany this morning while eating breakfast. Maybe epiphany is too strong a word; let's say I had a sudden realization. When I know where my food comes from, I am loathe to waste any. I was inhaling my toasted peanut butter and local raspberry jam sandwich on rye this morning (I woke up ravenous, omg, thought I would die). And since I had toasted the bread prior to making the sandwich, all the pb&j were getting melty and squishing out the sides of the sandwich. And I thought, "I'm not wasting this jam! Someone made this jam with their hands. With real raspberries. In their kitchen. " So I started using my finger to mop it up and lick it off. Now, it might have been low blood sugar at the time, but thinking back on it, I really think that it's true: when you have a more personal connection to your food, you really want to, sort of, well, honor the food. And the people who made it/grew it for you. When your food isn't coming from a faceless corporate factory, the connection to other people becomes more transparent. I want to honor the farmer that grew the raspberries, the person who stood in the kitchen making jam, and poured it into jars, made labels and brought it to the farmer's market. It's easier to imagine human faces behind this food I'm eating, and that makes it more special.

Now, I'm not about wasting food in general, but it's hard to care quite as much about food that you know was mass produced. It's a little more soulless, a little less there there. I've worked in an industrial food setting before, and I know what that's like (I wasn't in the food prep areas, I was in admin, but believe me, I've seen what happens there). Underpaid people doing hard physical labor with few benefits and long hours. The cheapest ingredients. Giant giant giant vats of food. It's just plain creepy. I'm sure not all industrial food settings are the same, but I still contend that as the process of growing/cooking/packaging becomes further and further fragmented, the person-to-person connection to the food grows weaker and weaker. And we all suffer for it. It's like when Thich Nhat Hanh talks about interbeing:

"If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are" (Essential Writings, p. 55).

Like seeing the cloud in the paper, eating locally is opening my eyes to the farmers and artisans in my food. It is a very peaceful realization. If I were a great buddhist, I would be able to see them in the mass-produced food, too. But I kind of have to wonder: are they even in there anymore? Does any love at all go into the products at the industrial level? If so, t's definitely harder to detect.

On a totally different subject: Making Seitan
For dinner, I tried making seitan using vital wheat gluten for the first time. Previously we had only had seitan purchased already made from the freezer case and we've always been sort of mediocre fans (a distant third to tofu and tempeh on the pseudo meat product scale). But since we can't find local tempeh in any shape or form, I decided to give it a go. I realize that the vital wheat gluten isn't local, either, BUT you can make seitan using just wheat flour. Which I can get locally, so there. But before going to the trouble I wanted to see if homemade would turn out at all.

So I followed the directions on the back of the box, but used a broth recipe from La Dolce Vegan ("beef" flavored). I realized after I started making the broth that it was probably for only half as much seitan, but I thought, it's just simmering in the broth, so there'll be enough, right? Eh. It looked fine when I dropped all my little seitan steak-lets in the broth, but holy crap, when I checked on it a few minutes later it had EXPANDED. Quite a bit. So I poured some more water in and added a little concentrated broth goop to make up for the diluted broth recipe.

And it turned out great! It seemed to be more strongly flavored than the store bought stuff - in a good way. We only used half of what the recipe made, but it keeps for about a week in the fridge, so we'll just use it up later in some other dish. And now I'm ready to try it from just wheat flour. The real scratch method. In a couple of weeks.

And with that I bring you our menu from today (I should note that I haven't felt well for a few days, but today I realllly got my appetite back!):

Breakfast:
Peanut butter (from Costco, ack!) and red raspberry jam (from the Lansing City Market) on toasted rye bread (from Strawberry Moon bakery in Ferndale).
Yogurt with fresh peaches (from Lansing)
Strawberry kefir (purchased from the local HFS in Ferndale, Natural Food Patch)

Lunch:
Poor man's omelet: rye bread cubes toasted in local butter, with 2 local eggs poured over. And a little local gouda shredded on top.
Rye toast
Local apple

Snack:
Chocolate with hazelnuts (from TJ's - I know, it's my weakness)
Kettle corn (from Lansing)
Mint tea (fresh peppermint and chocolate mint from the backyard)

Dinner:
Marrakesh Vegetable Curry (using local peppers, squash, carrots, onions, garlic, chickpeas, dried cherries, ginger juice, sunflower seeds; non-local spices, oil, OJ, raisins)*
Homemade seitan (using vital wheat gluten mix)
Whole-wheat couscous (purchased in bulk from local HFS)

Dessert:
Local cinnamon ice cream (OMG YUM!)


*Marrakesh Vegetable Curry is sooooooo good. This is the second time we've made it, and it rocks. Use whatever vegetables seem appropriate, it's a very flexible recipe.

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.