Local Booty Report: 12.7.08

So I haven't done a local booty/bounty report in a loooong time, and since I got to go to the West Seattle Farmer's Market today ALL BY MYSELF (thanks, mom!!!), I thought it was a good time to do it again.

So starting in the front left:
Rock Island Red Dried Apricots ($4) - Pipitone Farms, 160 miles
Celeriac ($3.25?)- Willie Greens Organic Farm, 43 miles
Tall Grass Bakery Bread ($5.25) 13 miles
2 bunches Collard Greens ($5) - Willie Greens Organic Farm, 43 miles

Back row:
1 bunch Baby Carrots with tops ($2.50) - Whistling Train Farm, 25 miles
1 (lb?) bag braising greens ($4) - Willie Greens Organic Farm, 43 miles
2 Heart of Gold Winter Squash ($3?)- Whistling Train Farm, 25 miles
1 12 oz bottle Hazelnut Oil ($13) - Holmquist Hazelnut Orchard, 118 miles
Total: $40

Not a bad local haul! I'm forecasting some smoky collards in my future, probably with some biscuits and gravy. Because, you know, it's been a while.

I've never had celeriac before, so I'll be researching some recipes on that one. Any tips or recipes would be mucho appreciated!

I'm totally stoked about the bag of braising greens! I used to buy an non-organic Trader Joe's product like these almost weekly, back when we lived 2 miles from TJs. Even though they need some washing, it's totally nice to have all the greens stemmed and chopped already. Gooooo, greens!

The dried apricots are sooooo good! In the past, we've purchased their dried peaches and sun-dried tomatoes, which are also awesome. But dried apricots will always have a special place in my heart as my favorite dried fruit. I'm forseeing some appearing in my hot cereal this week!

Oh, and this is the first time I've ever purchased (or eaten?) hazelnut oil. It is divine! I love hazelnut flavor, and this stuff is delicious. I ate some (a lot) of the Tall Grass Bakery bread dipped in some of this golden goodness, and although the first bite is kind of aggressive, it really mellows with repeated application. I can't wait to try cooking with it! I'm thinking the braising greens would do just fine with it. And it will probably make an appearance as part of a salad dressing as well.

Some Foods I've Eaten...

Curried Acorn Squash Soup

Ok, remember a few posts ago when I was dissing all squash soups? I decided to take it as a personal challenge to make one that was actually satisfying. And I think I did it!

2 cups of roasted acorn squash (scooped out of the shell)
2-3 C stock
1-3 tsp madras curry powder
1/4 C cashew cheese
Juice of 1 lime
salt to taste

I had leftover roasted acorn squash from the other night, and I threw that in there with water and the curry powder and started heating it through. But it was too thin and boooooring...so I threw in some lime juice and more salt (and more curry powder). It was better and brighter, but still thin. I almost added coconut milk, but I was afraid that a) I would waste the rest of the can and b) that it would thin it out too much. What to do?!? I finally settled on stirring in some cashew cheese. And it was totally the right thing to do! I pureed it with my immersion blender and tasted it: It was creamy, spicy and sooo comforting. My curry powder is Madras style curry powder, I bought it at Market Spice at Pike Place Market. Your mileage my vary, depending on the type/age of your curry powder, so, you know, add it to taste like the salt. :)

I don't have a picture (which is probably a good thing), but I also made a Chocolate Bundt Cake from The Joy of Vegan Baking and topped it with Chocolate Hazelnut Frosting (using the Chocolate Peanut Butter Frosting recipe from JoVB). It got off to a rocky start, because the cake stuck to the bundt pan and thus looked reallly crappy once reassembled. It was super soft and luscious, but didn't hold together all that well. When I got the cake cut and put on plates, it was NOT at all aesthetically pleasing - kind of like garbage on a plate. BUT! Don't judge this book by it's cover! Because it was soooo unbelievably delicious. The chocolate hazelnut frosting was crazy delicious. I used some oregon-made hazelnut-hemp butter instead of peanut butter, and it was fabulous. Make it! Now!

Even When the Universe Hates Us...

We still eat well.

This picture of Silas really captures my mood lately:
We have now entered the lovely stage of the spring I like to call "the waiting for him to call nightmare." In this scenario, the "him" refers not to a boyfriend or whatever, but to the imaginary job person who is calling to offer Chad a job. This has nothing at all to do with food or eating, but I thought it might help to explain the surliness that might just come screaming through the computer to eat your faces off, lovely readers. Let's just say we thought we had something in the bag (in SEATTLE!!!) and now it just looks like we are one of 4 lucky candidates who gets to go BACK. Again. For an interview with the president. Because bringing back FOUR of the SIX original candidates interviewed in the first round is perfectly reasonable right? RIGHT!?!???! Who DOESN'T want to bring back 2/3rds of the candidates to interview a THIRD time!?! Not me! Why don't we bring all six back? Why not!

Anyway. We are also waiting to hear back from a Rancho Cucamonga job (I swear to god I didn't make that town up). And there is another interview in San Diego in two weeks. And then we go to Oregon to chew our nails down to the quick and plead with any deity, mineral or vegtable who will give us audience to get us the hell out of this decaying place. Please.

So every time the phone rings we jump. And hope. And every time it's not our ticket out of here we die a little inside. But still, we cook good food and eat it. Because that's what good vegans do!

I will spare you all the rest of my mental breakdown.

Begin Foodiness!

Some catch-up!


Black Bean Burgers with Cilantro-Cashew Cheese, Curried Carrot Dip, Chips and Pickles!So even though I have several bean burger recipes that I like already, I decided to give the black bean burgers out of Vcon a shot. They were good! They didn't change my life, and I think they could have used a hefty pinch of salt, but they were solid. The cashew cheese continues to change my world and is transformed into a magical topping for these burgers by stirring in some minced cilantro. We also had some leftover Curried Carrot Dip out of Vcon - always a crowd pleaser, but it makes a LOT, so sometimes it's hard for us to use it all up in time.

Magical Granola with Sliced Bananas

Chad LOVES some granola. I always want to have made it - the night before. Even though it doesn't take long, I have issues with breakfast recipes that don't require my full attention from start to finish. As in, if it's going to take an hour, I want to be at the stove the whole time doing stuff. I have a problem with stir-it-up-and-wait recipes in the morning. Too hyper I guess! But I made it happen last week. Note to self: double or triple the recipe in the future, because this amount only got us through two days! We are granola hogs.

I got inspiration from Vegan Lunch Box for this granola recipe, but I feel that I've changed it up enough to share with y'all!

2 cups old fashioned rolled oats
1/2 cup raw pumpkin seeds
1/2 cup sesame seeds
1/2 cup raw pistachios
3/4 tsp cinnamon
dash of salt
1/4 cup canola oil
1/3 cup maple syrup

Preheat your oven to 300F. In a large bowl, mix the dry ingredients. In a liquid measuring cup or small bowl, whisk together the wet ingredients. Add wet to dry and stir to coat. Spread the mixture evenly on a baking sheet and bake until lightly toasted, about 3o minutes, stirring halfway through.

Let it cool if you can wait that long. Stir in dried fruit if you want (we don't, but up to 1 cup works fine). Serve with vegan milk or yogurt and sliced bananas.

Out of Town Vegan Guest!

We had a friend visit for a few days last week (one reason I'm so behind blogging). She is vegan, too, which made things uber easy. We enjoyed some great food out - Pizza at Amici's and Middle Eastern ood at La Pita (thanks for the tip, Jennifer!) and awesome Ethiopian food at The Blue Nile. La Pita sent our guest into a frenzy looking for a recipe to recreate the amazing garlic dip that we found there (and used to get at La Shish) - it's some magical combo of garlic, olive oil and salt, and some people say potato. And a freezing cold mortar and pestle. Still haven't tried to make it, but someday soon because that stuff is seriously garlic crack!

I also made some food that I forgot to photograph (or maybe just felt too nerdy to do it in front of our guest). One morning I made tofu scramble (VwaV) and diner potatoes (Vcon). The potatoes were tasty, but kind of a pain. Why do potatoes take so darn long to cook?!? Another morning I made a double batch of pinto sausages and a double batch of powerhouse pancakes (it was a double batch kind of day). Another morning I made Drop Biscuits from Joy of Vegan Baking (awesome!) with leftover sausage. And one day our guest cooked lunch for us, and even though there was a sugar-salt confusion, it all turned out fine (I keep containers of both sugar and salt near my stove. You just have to know that the sugar is unrefined and brown, and the salt, though sea salt, is white. And decidedly not sweet!)

Today to try to reign in some of my sanity while Chad took Silas out to play, I whipped up a batch of these Raspberry Oat Bars:

Kind of a shoddy pic, but they are delicious! So few ingredients, but still awesome (basically, quick oats, flour, brown sugar, salt, baking soda and vegan butter with some raspberry jam layered in the middle. So good!) Perfect with a glass of unsweetened almond milk.

I also made up a batch of Apple-Sage Seitan Sausages, which were really good. They were more involved than the Pinto version, but I wanted to try a new sausage recipe. Next time I would add a little more salt, but otherwise these were a great combo of sweet and savory (and I love the fact that I finally got to bust out the Marmite that's been taking up space in my pantry for a while!). We had them for lunch with steamed broccoli and artichoke hearts topped with a little fresh cashew cheese and leftover tomato-caper couscous (Vcon).

I need advice and/or recipes!!!
So today I went to our local middle eastern grocery (which I always forget is sooooo close) and found myself in the bulk section where I quickly grabbed any random spice that had previously been called for in a recipe that I never had on hand. And this, dear readers, is why I'm looking for recipes that call for ground Sumac or ground Fenugreek. Because now that I have them, I can't remember which recipes called for them! And I know they're out there, and now I have to make them. Because the smallest container I could get for each was huge. So help a vegan out! You will have my undying gratitude.

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.

More Pancakes, Cookies and Eating Out

So we enjoyed Carrie's Powerhouse Pancake recipe so much that we decided to make it again - with blueberries! This was a major leap of faith for two reasons: 1)Every freaking time I try to make blueberry pancakes, they end up sticking to the pan and basically disintegrating, which results in much swearing, spatula flinging and general tantrum throwing and 2) we only had frozen blueberries, and I wasn't sure how they would work.

So I whipped up a double batch of batter (using only 1 T of applesauce and 3 of oil because I ran out of sauce). I poured my frozen blueberries into a measuring cup for easy access. And instead of mixing the berries into the batter, I used this magic trick: I poured the batter in to the pan to form pancakes, let sit for a few seconds AND THEN added the blueberries, by hand. I know this seems a little crazy or OCD, but it resulted in AWESOME pancakes that didn't stick AT ALL! This is the best trick ever. I remember reading it in that kid's cookbook by Mollie Katzen.

Pancakes a-cookin'

The finished product! I need to work on my garnish skills, they are obviously lacking, but luckily this did not impact the awesomeness of these pancakes. We did have sliced kiwi with these, but I didn't get them in the photo.And since we had a double batch, we got to have these two days in a row! Nothing like waking up and having pancake batter waiting for your loving attention in the fridge. Say it with me: Gooooooooo, Pancakes!

Eating Out
Yesterday we took an impromptu trip to Ann Arbor, because it was a nice day and we wanted to go for an outdoorsy walk AND I've been wanting to go to Seva, a vegetarian restaurant there. So we got to the walking place first (The Matthai Botanical Gardens) and of course, Silas fell asleep like 2.3 minutes before we got there. So Chad went for a walk and I read in the car while Silas slept. Which was fine, I didn't mind sitting in the sun reading and listening to the Canada Geese honking.

Then we went to Seva. I was so excited, it's a cool little place not far from UM campus, and even though I had been once before it was like 3 years ago and I barely remembered it. Everything vegan on the menu is marked, and so many things sounded so delicious. However, it is pretttty pricey. Like lunch entrees in the $9-15 range! I don't know, maybe I'm just cheap, but those seemed more like dinner prices to me. After much hemming and hawing over what to order, we both decided on getting the lunch special, which was half sandwich and a salad and we also each got a fresh juice from the juice bar. I decided on the BBQ Eggplant sandwich with sweet potato fries and salad with creamy dill dressing, and Chad got the Persea sandwich (open faced with sprouts, mushrooms, onion and guacamole - and he forgot to say no cheese, whoops) with regular fries and thai dressing on his salad.

Ok, so overall it was a fairly pleasant experience. My sandwich was tasty and spicy, and it wasn't something I normally would make for myself. Chad said his was ok, and he thought I could have easily made it at home and probably better. That was one of my big disappointments: a bunch of the stuff on the menu that was vegan I felt like could have so easily made myself. Like one was a tofurkey wrap - um, I make those all the time. They also did a tempeh wrap - same deal. And I don't think they're $9 when I do it. I'm exaggerating a little, because the sandwiches did come with fries AND someone else is obviously doing the work, but still. I don't know, I guess I was expecting some more creativity or innovation or something. Alas, we are still in Michigan, so I don't know why I got my hopes up that high. ;)

Second, I wasn't overly excited about our server (ok, if you work in hospitality, would it KILL YOU to crack a smile? Once? I was so excited to be there, and her energy was a total downer). Maybe she was having a bad day, I don't know. It was just kind of a bummer.

But maybe it was a good thing overall to have a mediocre experience - now I won't be jonesing for Seva constantly, and suggesting we take 90-mile round-trip excursions just for a veggie restaurant.

Oh, but I will say this: the dessert we got was AWESOME. We took it to go and had it last night and it was fabulous. It was a vegan cream tart with mixed berries. When I read tart I expected a mini-tart or pie, but it was basically a slice of vegan cheese cake with berry compote. It didn't look like much, but the cheesecake was rich and delicious and didn't have a weird tofu taste or grainy consistency and I don't know what they did to the berries but they were the perfect complement to the creamy tart/cake.

Neeeewwwww Cookbook!
We also stopped by Borders (we have a $50 Gift Card! I know all about independent bookstores, seriously, put the flame-throwers away!) and looked at kid's books, but we couldn't commit to any. So I decided to mosey up to the vegetarian cooking section (heeheehee) and just happened to find this:

Yayayayay! I've been waiting on hold for this book at my library FOREVER. Months. So I just decided, WTF, I'm using this freaking gift card, dammit! I love cookbooks, and as you know, I've been really inspired by Colleen's podcast, Vegetarian Food For Thought, so I was very psyched to try this book.

So when we got home, I made these:Oatmeal Raisin Cookies! Except I couldn't find my raisins, so I used dried blueberries, to the benefit of all, really. Chad doesn't really like raisins in his oatmeal cookies, and the blueberries were really subtle. This made a HUGE batch, like 4 dozen! I sent a dozen home with my neighbor (heh heh, subtly taking over the world with vegan baking!), and we have 2 dozen baked and ready to go (which should last about 2 days) and I also have over a dozen in the freezer, ready to be baked at a moment's notice! They were really tasty. I think next time I might cut back on the amount of oatmeal just a bit, they were pretty oat-y and dense. But really, really good overall.

There are so many delicious sounding treats in this book, I'm sure you'll be seeing a bunch in the future!