Pre-Hawaii Post

Yes, we're going to Hawaii for a week! Woo-hoo! To the Big Island and Kauai, because I know you were wondering. I've never been to either island, so I'm really looking forward to it. We're going with my parents, so we'll have a bit of granny-nannying help, which is such a blessing! Since we all anticipate fairly limited vegan options on both islands, we chose to stay in condos with kitchens, so we can at least cook up our own healthy meals and pack them for day trips.

Anyway, back to what we've been eating lately.

Crazy-Good Balsamic Glazed Tomato Sauce, Brown Rice Spirals, and lightly salted Cucumber Slices

Seriously, this tomato sauce was out of this world!!! It's from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison...I think it was supposed to be a tomato side dish, but mine turned completely saucy (which was good since I wanted to toss it with pasta anyway!)

Basically, it's:
1 1/2 lbs tomatoes (ours were half backyard and half CSA tomatoes!)
2 T butter (EB, of course)
3 T balsamic vinegar
1 shallot, minced (I subbed 3-4 local cloves garlic)
s&p
(I added a handful of torn basil leaves from the backyard for kicks).

Slice/chop tomatoes in wedges. Melt the butter over highish heat until foamy. Add the tomatoes and cook for @ 3 minutes, flipping a few times. Add the shallot/garlic, balsamic and cook for a few minutes, shaking the pan over the heat until glazy. I added the basil at the end and seasoned with s&p to taste. OMGYUM!

Stuffed Eggplant with Salad and Citrus-Mint Vinaigrette

So, this was a major disappointment in flavor. But I will say this: I LOVE my pressure cooker. It is so handy. I cooked the brown rice in it in 12 minutes (probably 20 minutes total with depressurizing). Same with the lentils: 5 minutes of cooking and probably 5-8 more of depressurizing. STILL. So freaking fast, it is the bomb.

This recipe was from Local Bounty, which I've had luck with in the past, so I'm not sure what happened here. It was just totally flavorless. Basically, it was baked eggplant (scraped out of the shell), brown rice, brown lentils, mint, basil, oregano, lemon juice...and I think that's it. I added some salt to try to salvage, but nosuchluck. The leftovers were salvaged by adding balsamic vinegar and some flax oil, so it wasn't a total loss. But it was kind of a lot of work for very little flavor. The salad was great though!

Tempeh Piccata

So I LOVE piccata. And I also love coming home from my meditation group to a dinner of piccata that my husband cooked! So he used green garlic stuffed olives instead of kalamata - who's counting, right?! It was soo good. Local tempeh "breaded" in brown rice flour and fried, served over local mashed yukon gold potatoes (with way too much EB, it was decadent), and steamed local green, purple and wax beans. Oh, and of course with lemony, capery, olivy piccata over the whole thing. OMGLUV.

Oatmeal Pancakes with Celestial Cream and Fresh Local Fruit

This was a yummy summer breakfast treat! The pancake recipe is adapted from Vive Le Vegan and it's so simple: quick oats blended into flour in the food processor, some baking powder, cinnamon, cardamom, salt, vanilla soymilk, and canola oil. It needs to stand a bit longer than normal pancake batter, because the oat flour needs a while to soak up the liquid. But they are simple and tasty and cook up just like normal pancakes. The Celestial Cream is out of Eat, Drink and Be Vegan and is soooo good and a fun, more protein-filled alternative to just plain maple syrup (since it has silken tofu in it).

A Few Tostadas

I've been loving these tostadas lately! We have them weekly with whatever bean we've pressure cooked that week (chickpeas above) or sometimes leftover tofu scramble (pictured below). I usually use this recipe from Happy Herbivore for chickpea tacos to season the beans, and we top them with homemade guacamole, shredded lettuce, salsa, and my secret ingredient: Hot and Cool Drizzle. All it is is Wildwood Garlic Aioli mixed with some pureed canned Chipotle in adobo! It is so delicious though and kicks up the whole thing (idea stolen from Taco Bell, although theirs wasn't vegan.) Oh, and the whole thing resides on a corn tortilla.

Chickpea Ragout over Brown Rice

I used this recipe as a jumpling off point, and it was really good! I think almost everything (minus the mushrooms and rice) was local for this dish.

CSA Cucumber Salad with Citrus-Mint Vinaigrette

CSA Lettuce and Backyard Tomato Salad

Let me just say that if you have Vive Le Vegan you HAVE to try this vinaigrette! I ate it on everything for a week at least. It's so fabulous and summery.

Crunchy Tempeh Crumbles, Brown Rice and Green Beans with Miso-Walnut Sauce

This was a Mark Bittman bastardization from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. But it was SO good. We ate it on one of the hottest days of this year, when Seattle was over 100F and we all thought we were in hell because no one has a/c? Yeah, then. Thank the pressure cooker for not heating up the kitchen too too much. The green beans are CSA and the tempeh is local. The Miso-Walnut sauce is AWESOME and I will most certainly be making it again (possibly without ginger next time, but it was nice, too).

Backyard Garden Update

We've been kind of bad about our backyard garden, but it's still providing us with some yummy produce, like fresh herbs (basil, oregano, chives, thyme and rosemary) and tomatoes. There's broccoli that's actually flowering and really delicious tiny strawberries.

Cherry Tomatoes

Late Bloomer Basil

Giant Basil

We pulled three other plants just like this and left them at my mom's in a vase.

Tiger-y Tomato

These guys kind of stay dark green on top. They're smallish and tasty!

Orange Tomato

Have you gathered yet that I have no idea what any of the tomato varieties actually are?! :) These guys are totally orange when ripe and super firm.

3 Broccolis, 3 Strawberries

Quinalt Strawberries

Silas Sampling Strawberries

I think about 5 have made it in the house. We just can't wait to eat them!

Hope everyone is enjoying the fabulous produce that August brings! We are off to pick up a CSA box of Corn, Yukon and Fingerling Potatoes, Garlic, Broccoli, Cherry Tomatoes and Collard Greens, along with Blueberries, Strawberries, Purple Plums and Peaches. Yum!!! And we have to eat all of it before Sunday. Wish us luck!

What's on the Menu

My menu is abbreviated this week, because we're going out of town starting Thursday afternoon through Monday. Part of the time we'll be staying with my parents and cooking there, but we'll also be attending our first Unschooling Conference, Life is Good - we're so excited! So we'll be staying at the hotel two of those nights for the fully steeped con experience.

Monday: Tofu Pineapple Curry over Brown Basmati Rice (recipe from Vegan Express - new!)

Tuesday: Gimme Chimis (out of Eat, Drink and Be Vegan - one of our faves!) and Mashed Chipotle Sweet Potatoes

Wednesday: African Peanut Soup (from Local Bounty - new specific recipe, though we've had versions of this soup before)

Thursday: Leftover smorgasboard

What I've Been Up To...


I just took that bad boy out of the oven a few minutes ago. Yay, bread! It's half whole wheat and half (local!) white. I made some last week and it was really, really good and probably cost me less than $2 to make.

Farmer's Market, Revisited
This weekend we made it to the local farmer's market, and boy howdy has it picked up since the last time I was there! I was there probably a month or maybe a month and a half ago (it's year-round) but man, was I disappointed. There were so few veggies and they were SO expensive! And tiny. I can't even remember what I bought, but I walked away quite a bit poorer and much more down-trodden than when I arrived. Not so yesterday! Yesterday it was positively bustling with fresh food fervor - people lined up for local organic plant starts, veggies were piled high and inspiring, there was a band playing...and it didn't hurt that it was a gorgeous, sunny day! So I stuck to my meal plan and only bought a few food items, namely, some fresh asparagus, some spring carrots, an awesome mix of salad greens, including baby spinach and pea shoots (!!!), and some spring onions and garlic.

For lunch, I made Asparagus Leek Curry out of Local Bounty.
It was crazy good! I made a few substitutions: instead of leeks I used some of the spring onions and garlic, and I didn't want to open a can of coconut milk (it only called for 1 cup) so I used one of the plain coconut milk yogurts that have been haunting my fridge for a while now. The results were really, really good! I would probably use regular coconut milk next time (the yogurt has a sweetness to it, despite being labeled "plain). The spice combo of this recipe is off the hook - turmeric, cumin, cardamom, cayenne - really really amazing. We ate this over white Jasmine rice. And I was super proud of myself for using some previously frozen homecooked chickpeas instead of opening a new can. Bonus!

Leftover Transformation Shenanigans
I didn't get a picture of this meal, but I gotta say I *LOVE* transforming leftovers (that nobody wants) into new meals that we all do a little dance for! Last night for dinner I was poking around the fridge trying to figure out what we would eat then and what we would be eating for lunch today. The leftover Rustic Black-Eyed Peas and Mushrooms were glaring at me - I knew it was time to eat them or freeze them, and I honestly didn't think that I liked them enough to freeze them. So, to the cookbooks I went. I dug out Passionate Vegetarian and found a recipe for Hillbilly Hummus - and it saved the day!!! I threw my beans, some peanut butter, some of the spring garlic, salt, apple cider vinegar and some sage in the food processor, and voila! Totally new meal. We had the hummus in whole wheat pita pockets with some Chow Chow (also been haunting my fridge forever) and some of the fresh salad mix. What hummus was left over was devoured with the aid of tortilla chips. And my fridge is haunted no more!

Crazy Container and Topsoil-Bag Garden
On our farmer's market extravaganza we also purchased a bunch of plant starts (6 alpine strawberry, 3 (or 9?!?) broccoli starts, and 6 basil). Yay! We planted the strawberries and broccoli in bags of topsoil.


After we transplanted the broccoli, we started to wonder if there were more than one plant in each start...here's a close-up, can anyone weigh in? We think there might have actually been 3 starts in each one...to be continued.

We also had three tomato starts that we planted and I transplanted my perennial herbs (rosemary, oregano, chives) to bigger pots. (The thyme looks bad, but I think it's going to rally!)

Some of the basil went in the tomato containers, others are on their own in other containers.


We even planted some lettuce seed in two bags of topsoil. Oh, and some nasturtium seeds in a weird container left by the former tenants (trellis included!). So we're on our way with our goofy garden. Next up: peas! We just need more dirtbags. Heh heh.


Super Duper Bonus Points to anyone who can tell me what kind of flowers are growing behind the lettuce bags (the red ones). Peonies? I'll get a close up soon. There are a lot of mystery flowers on this property. Bless the former owner, she had a green thumb and we now we are lucky enough to reap the rewards.