Potato-Kale Soup with Chorizo

We have now entered the Detox Phase of the holidays and I'm so glad. It's such a weird thing we do, eating like maniacs for a month straight. Whyyyyy?? I feel gross and am afraid to get on the scale.

So here's some soup. It's a Viva Vegan recipe and the chorizo (vital wheat gluten-based) is hers, too. I cut the total oil in the recipe from 5 tablespoons to 2, and we didn't miss it.

It was so good I think we're just going to eat leftovers for dinner tonight instead of making something new.

Freezer Enchiladas

These are called Freezer Enchiladas because my goal in making them was to get rid of as much stuff in my freezer as possible. It's getting out of control in there.

The filling is Viva Vegan red seitan, black beans, corn, chipotles, tomatoes, garlic, onion, and oregano. The first four ingredients were in the freezer. So was the green tomatillo sauce I poured on top. The tortillas, vegan sour cream and cabbage were sitting in the fridge, left over from other things. I felt very efficient! I did buy an avocado to put on top because Avocado = #1.

Christmastime!

It's Christmastime!!

OK so I am a couple days late. Ben and I had a very, very nice Christmas weekend together - I left work early Friday and we hardly left the house all weekend, except to take long walks. We did miss our families, but it's awfully nice to have a quiet Christmas every once in a while.

Christmas morning I made pumpkin pie oatmeal in Christmas ramekins! I haven't made this recipe for over a year and I have no idea why. It's super fast and delicious and it reheats wonderfully. I have some leftover canned pumpkin so I'm going to make some more tonight for weekday breakfasts. I used canola oil in place of butter in the oatmeal mixture, and earth balance for the topping. Otherwise, the recipe is already vegan.

Sorry for the blurry picture. I need to stop using my iPhone for blog pictures, probably.

Christmas dinner was chickpea cutlets with mustard sauce, herb-scalloped potatoes, kale, and cranberry sauce. I was going to make roasted baby carrots, too, but I was scared I wouldn't like them and realized I'd rather just eat an extra chickpea cutlet instead.

For dessert I made the Vegan Diner's Chocolate Chip Bread Pudding recipe, except I used a loaf of sour cherry chocolate bread I found at the grocery store. I also used full-fat coconut milk instead of light. Living on the edge! It was off the hook awesome and took no time at all to put together.

Let's wrap this up with some cat pictures. We are becoming increasingly insane about these guys.

Banana was curled up for his afternoon nap (usually 12:00 to 7:00 p.m.) and Benjamin thought he looked cold so he gave him a little blanket. Banana was not terribly amused.

But Papaya had a terrific time with all the boxes and paper left over from present opening.

Merry Christmas!

Roasted Root Vegetable Green Thai Curry

This is why I'm glad I decided to become a vegan cook - because never on my own would I have roasted some rutabagas, parsnips, and brussels sprouts and put them in a green thai curry sauce. (I'm 99% sure I'd never had rutabaga in my life until this.) It is certainly an unusual combination, but it worked. Ben complains a lot about not liking brussels sprouts, but he continues to eat them if I put them in stuff, so I mostly ignore him.

Also, I saw this stuff at the grocery store.

Yikes! I wondered why I hadn't seen that stuff discussed on my vegan message boards but then I read the ingredients and it contains whey (milk). Why vegetarian companies bother to make a complicated meat substitute and then don't make it accessible to vegans I will never understand. Although I'm not sure I want to eat fake shrimp scampi anyway. What IS it?? Scary, no doubt.

Seitan Katsu with Tonkatsu Sauce

I've put this recipe (from American Vegan Kitchen) on my weekly dinner plan at least three times but for various reasons never got around to it. And now I regret that because it was awesome. I used Viva Vegan white seitan and almost skipped the breading & frying out of laziness, but I'm so glad I didn't because breaded + fried is always a good idea.

The seitan is served with a simple cabbage & carrot slaw and an awesome sweet Japanese sauce, sort of like what is commonly on fancy sushi rolls. I put the whole thing over lo mein noodles to make it a complete meal.

Ben took one bite and said, "Well, you've really outdone yourself here." I feel bad taking credit when I'm just following a recipe! It was really good, though.

Green Deliciousness

This was a superfast thrown together dinner that gave me an excuse to eat mass quantities of the Green Goddess Dressing from Appetite for Reduction. It's just a bowl of quinoa, edamame, and broccoli with the dressing on top.

This week I brought a quinoa/black bean salad to work for our Christmas potluck and discovered nobody knows what quinoa is. Well, one person knew, and that's only because she's gluten-free so she's had to learn about wheat alternatives. I was so surprised! Quinoa is great and especially good for easy meals like this because it's full of protein.

Also, in other exciting news, Isa posted one of my favorite dinners on her blog: Hottie Black-eyed Peas with Ginger Mashed Sweet Potatoes and Apples. You should go make it right now. I'm serious.

Veggie Pot Pie Stew & Biscuits

Oh, look, it's another dinner from Appetite for Reduction! I made a few changes to both of these recipes, though.

The biscuits are in the book as Sweet Potato Biscuits, but I had some canned pumpkin sitting around, as well as some carrot/tomato/onion pulp leftover from making an Indian soup, so I replaced the mashed sweet potato with a mixture of those two things. It worked perfectly! They were delicious and soft and biscuity.

The stew is pot pie vegetables - potatoes, peas, mushrooms, carrots - cooked in a broth that is thickened with flour but also yellow split peas, which gives it some protein. I used half of my potatoes in something else a few days ago, so I used one big russet and one big sweet potato rather than all russets. The sweet potatoes broke down almost completely, but it still worked as a whole thing.



Ben said, "This is the perfect wintery dinner!" Too bad it is going to be close to 70 degrees every day this week. This has been the weirdest December ever.

Christmas Kitties!

Last night Ben built a fire in the fireplace for the first time since we adopted Banana and Papaya last summer. I sort of expected them to launch themselves over the grate into the fire, but they were both very politely interested and well-behaved about the whole thing. Banana loves to be warm so he laid like this right in front of the fire for most of the night - his fur was almost too hot to touch. Silly boy!



We also got a brand-new Ikea Expedit bookcase courtesy of my mom for Christmas! I was extremely impressed with Ben's putting-together skills; it only took about an hour and he was so patient and methodical. I don't like to imagine what would have happened if I'd tried to assemble a six-foot square bookcase.

Papaya provided some very helpful assistance for the duration of the assembly.



They are both pretty big fans of the bookcase. I still need to get some baskets and things for the empty spaces, but for now they're making it their own. (Papaya is in the lower left! She's hard to see.)

Red Wine Tempeh & Eggplant Kibbeh

The tempeh and kibbeh are both new-to-me recipes from Appetite for Reduction and both were great. The tempeh is supposed to have kalamata olives pureed with the red wine, garlic & herb marinade, but I cannot get over my hatred of olives. I've tried so many times and it's just not happening. I added some capers instead to help give that briny taste, and it seemed to work okay.

The kibbeh is a mixture of cooked eggplant, tomatoes, onion, and garlic, mixed with bulgur and baked in a casserole dish. We really liked it.



I made a simple salad of tomato, cucumber, parsley, lemon juice, and olive oil on the side. It was a nice mediterranean-ish dinner.

Potato-Spinach Curry with Chickpeas

Due to a combination of laziness and a company Christmas party, Ben and I ate big restaurant meals two nights in a row and it was very taxing! I can tell my body is getting older because if I eat too much I'm up all night. For serious! Anyway, it was time for detoxing back to our normal diet and I was glad.

I made Appetite for Reduction's Potato-Spinach Curry and added some chickpeas for protein. Served over brown rice, it was exactly what I needed.

Halal Cart-Style (not) Chicken & Rice With White Sauce

I saw this recipe on the internet the other day and was dying with want. So I veganized it!

The changes I made are pretty obvious ones - Earth Balance for butter, Vegenaise for mayo. I used vegan sour cream in place of the Greek yogurt, because vegan yogurts tend to be watery and sweet - even the plain versions have added sugar which would not work well for something like this. The sour cream (Follow Your Heart brand) worked perfectly. I used Viva Vegan white seitan in place of the chicken and also cut the olive oil in the marinade to 2 Tbsp and replaced the other 2 Tbsp with vegetable broth.

The whole thing was totally great. This was one of those dinners I immediately wanted to eat again right after I was finished eating it the first time. Fortunately, there are leftovers for lunch!

Orange-Cilantro Spaghetti with Tofu & Avocado

I've had New Vegetarian Cuisine for at least a decade but haven't really made too many of the recipes. I was flipping through the other night looking for things that were either vegan or could be easily veganized, and ran across this pasta recipe which sounded interesting. You make a sauce out of orange juice, mostly, with some cilantro, soy sauce, dijon mustard and vegetable broth (and some other things I forgot). I made the Tangerine Tofu from Veganomicon to go with, and also added that avocado I was going to use in yesterday's salad.

One of the negative Amazon reviews of the cookbook says, "If you are looking for some basic recipes you want to play around with to build your own vegetarian specialties, this book may work for you." I would agree with that. The recipe as written would have been pretty boring, but the addition of the tofu and avocado made it really tasty.

Sanctuary Chef Salad

I have been putting this off ever since I got Appetite for Reduction, because even though it sounded delicious there are a jillion steps. Here's what you have to do:

1. Make dressing (vegan ranch, but she calls it Sanctuary, since ranches are mean places for animals. Get it?)

2. Marinate and bake tofu

3. Make eggplant bacon, which involves thinly slicing an eggplant and then baking it for 9 minutes, flipping over all the little slices and baking for another 3 minutes, dredging each slice in a mixture of soy sauce and liquid smoke, and then baking again for a few more minutes)

4. Make herb-roasted cauliflower, in which cauliflower is chopped and tossed with basil, oregano, thyme, olive oil, salt, and bread crumbs, and then baked

5. Wash and chop a ton of vegetables.

SEE? It's insane. But I had the feeling it would turn out to be worth it and it was! Here's all the stuff (minus the lettuce). I bought an avocado to go with because I like avocado on salads, but after seeing all the other ingredients we felt like it would have been excessive.

Here is the result!

It was really hearty and filling and super great. I won't be throwing this one together all the time, but it's definitely worth making for a special treat.

Red Lentil & Root Vegetable Dal

I put off making this and really only went through with it, to be honest, because I had the turnips and parsnips already and couldn't think of anything else to do with them. I'm not a root vegetable fan, or so I thought. But this is in Appetite for Reduction and I've decided for some reason to make all the recipes in the book, so I made this and it was awesome.

The turnips, parsnips, and carrots become totally creamy and delicious and the flavors were amazing. I made one of those packages of Birds Eye frozen brown rice and mixed in it to make it a complete dinner stew. Thumbs up!

Braised Cabbage with Seitan

I almost didn't make this dinner, despite it being on the schedule, because a) it sounded sort of yucky and b) I was lazy and kind of headachy. If we hadn't had to pay for a new heat pump yesterday I probably would have ordered pizza, but I felt guilty about spending money.

So I made it (from Appetite for Reduction) and it's one of the most surprisingly delicious things I've made in ages. The seitan is sauteed first, and then braised with the cabbage in a thyme and garlic broth for about 15 minutes. It was super fast and the end result was super flavorful and juicy and delicious. Amazing.

Dinners like this make me glad to be vegan and also glad to have committed myself to cooking all the way through Appetite for Reduction. I would never have made this otherwise.

Mac & Cheeze with Broccoli

I don't really like the convention of spelling cheese with a Z to indicate it's vegan, but everyone does it so I feel peer pressured.

Anyway this is the Vegan Diner Cheezy Mac recipe with broccoli mixed in, and then baked with homemade bread crumbs on top. I even made the bread! Quite the little homemaker over here.

Sausage and Kale with Mashed Potatoes

This is vegan comfort food - quick, easy, hearty, tasty. I had the sausage (from Vegan Brunch) in the freezer and threw the rest together in just a few minutes.

I missed mashed potatoes! They've been out of the rotation recently for some reason.

Spicy Tempeh, Creole-Stuffed Peppers & Messy Rice

All of these recipes are from Veganomicon. I chose this dinner using the tried and true "open a page and go with it method", and the page happen to open to the Creole-Stuffed Peppers. Now, historically Ben has been kind of whiny about not liking stuffed peppers, but I decided to disregard that and make them anyway.

They were GREAT. Every time I've made stuffed peppers before you just slice them open and stuff them up and bake for a while, but these were boiled for 5 minutes beforehand to soften them up and it made a huge difference. The filling is black-eyed peas, carrots, tomatoes, garlic & onion, etc. Totally delicious.

I was going to just bake the tempeh but I caved halfway through the cooking time and took it out of the oven to fry it. It's better that way! And the rice was great too, seasoned with garlic, tomato paste & coriander.

Tamarind BBQ Tempeh & Sweet Potatoes with Polenta Stuffing

This is another Appetite for Reduction meal. I've made the tempeh & sweet potatoes before but not the stuffing.

I'm glad I got around to the stuffing this time because it was delicious.

Baked Asian Tofu & Eggplant Dengaku

This dinner looks very brown. Probably I should have made some greens to go with it, but I did not. It doesn't matter, though, because that eggplant (from Appetite for Reduction) was UNREAL. I am not kidding. It's one of the best things I've eaten in ages. The eggplant slices are broiled for a few minutes and then you spread on this sauce of miso, agave, and soy sauce and broil again for 2 more minutes.

I cannot emphasize enough how delicious it is. Isa is a genius.

Oh, and I also made an asian-marinated baked tofu and some sesame rice to go with.

Cosmos Apple Pie

Apparently, according to some website I found yesterday, December 1st is National Pie Day. So naturally:

That's the Cosmos Apple Pie from Vegan Pie in the Sky. I'm not too great at making the crust pretty, as evidenced above, but it tasted fantastic. Perfect with some Trader Joe's Soy Creamy vanilla ice cream!

Tortilla Soup

This is an Appetite for Reduction recipe I hadn't tried before - kidney beans, corn, tomatoes, and tortilla chips in a cumin-spiced broth. It was good, but I've made similar recipes before so it wasn't all that exciting.

I'm starting to accept that I might not really be a soup person, though. It doesn't feel like enough of a meal to me most of the time.

Pasta with Italian Sausage

I chose the recipe for tonight's dinner by opening American Vegan Kitchen to a random page and going with it. I always mean to use that cookbook more, but the ingredient lists look intimidatingly long so I seem to unconsciously avoid it. I did make a couple changes - I halved the pasta (she called for a pound for four servings - too much!) and I added half a jar of quartered artichoke hearts that I had sitting around in the fridge. It wasn't complicated in the least - I need to make more of an effort to move AVK into regular rotation.

The sausage is a Vegan Brunch recipe I made this afternoon, and exceeded my expectations by quite a lot. I'd tried her sausages once before but I didn't wrap them tightly enough before steaming, so they weren't very firm. This time I wrapped those suckers as tight as I could and they were fantastic. I eat a lot of homemade fake meats and I wouldn't try to convince people that most of it actually tastes like meat, but these sausages could easily be substituted for those fancy packaged chicken ones and I doubt anyone would notice.

A Vegan Thanksgiving!

We had a small Thanksgiving at home, just me and Ben, but we sure did eat a lot.

I made the beer chocolate waffles from Vegan Brunch for breakfast, with a homemade chocolate sauce on top. These were my first successful vegan waffles - the ones I'd tried before stuck to the waffle iron even after spraying it with oil. Someone on the PPK message boards suggested cooking them a little longer than you think you should, and that worked!

Here is the dinner: I made a seitan pot roast with carrots & potatoes in the crockpot (recipe: Vegan Diner), roasted broccoli with garlic in the oven, and opened a can of jellied cranberry sauce because it's Ben's favorite. Even after more than a year of being vegan, I was sort of suspicious that a seitan pot roast would be any good, but it was great. A good thing, too, because we have tons of of it left over.

And then I made pumpkin cheesecake for dessert.

I used the recipe in Vegan Pie in the Sky, which uses a combination of cashews, silken tofu, and banana to stand in for the cream cheese. The consistency was incredible, just like regular cheesecake.

The flavor was not very pumpkiny, though - you could taste the banana and the citrus (orange zest & lemon juice) more than the pumpkin. This is possibly because we don't like nutmeg so I left it out. Regardless, it tasted great and is definitely something I'll make again. I need to try more things from the pie cookbook!

Stewed Tofu, Potatoes & Kale in Miso Gravy

This is a Vegan With a Vengeance recipe I modified by adding steamed kale, because I like to add steamed kale to almost everything.

The broth is mostly white wine & miso and had a nice sweet, hearty flavor.

Sunday Night Ethiopian

I've been jonesing for the Ethiopian restaurant the last couple of weeks, but it's kind of a pain to drive to so we keep putting it off. Instead, I made some Ethiopian things for dinner.

I've made this seitan & peppers (Vegan With a Vengeance) once before, and I thought it needed to be less spicy and more saucy, so I cut the chiles by two-thirds and added an extra half-cup of vegetable broth this time around. But! I tasted the puree before I added the seitan & peppers and it was terrible, super bitter - the exact flavor of the green thai curry disaster! The only common ingredient is serrano chiles. Mystery solved!!! Serranos are hereby banned from my house. I'm thinking the last time I made this recipe, I must have used jalapenos, which I often do out of laziness. I put it in the oven regardless because peppers generally mellow out when they're baked, and it totally worked and was delicious, to my relief.

I also made the Mushroom Tibs from Appetite for Reduction, which we have also had once before.

Good dinner.

Smoky Split Pea Soup

Split Pea Soup does not photograph attractively, but this recipe (from Appetite for Reduction) is so, so good. The secret is a bunch of smoked paprika, which is also what gives the soup a reddish tint.

I also made homemade bread, which was an adventure. I had it all mixed up and ready to rise and realized I'd forgotten the yeast. I figured it was mostly unsalveagable, but I didn't want to waste all that flour! So I put it back in the mixer, dumped the packet of yeast on top, and added a little warm water - so the yeast would have something to activate in, you know. Then I turned the mixer on and yeasty water was flung all over the kitchen. Brilliant! I turned it back off and dumped out some of the water, then mushed the remaining water into the dough along with some flour. Anyway, the result was predictable - it barely rose at all and was very, very dense. Fortunately my husband is weird and he loves bread like that, so he did a pretty good job of eating it up anyway.

Lazybones

I have been the laziest cook ever this week. We've had pizza twice (homemade, at least), gone out for Mexican, and did the fake chicken nuggets/tots/steamed broccoli the other night. Back on track tomorrow.

In the mean time, this is actually from last week - I've been a lazy blogger, too! This is one of my favorite things, a white bean/mushroom casserole topped with sage bread crumbs, with a tomato-caper couscous on the side. Both recipes are from Veganomicon.

Pesto Pasta with Artichokes & Seitan

This looks like greenish goo but was really, really good and took all of 15 minutes. I had pesto and seitan in the freezer, so all I had to do was cook pasta, saute some onion and garlic, add the seitan for a little while, then mix everything together to heat through.

Next summer I'm going to plant as much basil as my porch can hold. I want lots and lots of pesto.

Lemon Risotto with Green Peas & Roasted Red Peppers

Although the flavors here - lemon, parsley, peas, red peppers - seem summery, risotto always feels like a cold weather dish to me. It also seems like a pain to deal with - so much standing & stirring - but I like to do it once in a while and this really didn't end up taking any longer than a usual dinner.

This is another Veganomicon recipe, changed only slightly in that I mixed the red peppers in with the risotto instead of serving them on the side. I usually try to plan the week's food using several different cookbooks, but I really got caught up in Veganomicon's Pasta, Noodles, & Risotto section this week. More to come tomorrow.

Udon with Shiitakes, Greens, and Tofu

This is a Veganomicon recipe, mostly. I added tofu for protein, and used turnip greens because the grocery store was randomly out of the called-for kale. I'd never tried turnip greens but they were basically the same as kale or collards or whatever - maybe just a little flimsier.

The recipe called for serving it with a lot of broth, kind of soupy, but I decreased the liquid and made it more like a stirfry. The sauce is just mirin, soy sauce, miso, and water. Kind of a nice sweetish flavor.

Marbled Banana Bread & Rustic Winter Stew

I put off this stew for three days before I finally convinced myself to make it. It seemed hard in my head, what with peeling the carrots and cutting things up, etc., so basically I was just lazy. And then, of course, once I actually got started it didn't take very much work at all. It's also very good, perfect for a chilly night!

And then I made more bread. It's really no wonder I've gained eight pounds in 4 months. This is "lower fat", but that hardly matters if you eat the whole thing in less than a day. Fortunately, when I make anything dessert-like it's a given that Ben will take care of at least two-thirds of it for me, but still. STILL.

This is chocolate banana bread. I've never done marbling before and it came out pretty!

Tempeh Orzilla

It's a PPK kind of week over here - I made another recent recipe from the website last night, Tempeh Orzilla. (Her picture is prettier than mine.)

I had to replace the anise with fennel, but otherwise did just what she said and it was great.

Sunday in the Kitchen

I turned 35 (!) this week and my present from Ben was this baby. (If you look closely you can see the reflection of my red snowflake pajama pants in the bowl. What? It's almost Christmas.)

He didn't seem sure at all that I would even like it. WHAT!! The only reason I've resisted buying one up until this point is that I historically have not been all that into baking and didn't feel like I needed it. I've surely been wanting it, though, especially since I've realized that none of the decent bread available in grocery stores is vegan.

So the first thing I made, naturally, was basic white bread. I used a recipe from the little instruction manual (just replacing the called-for butter with Earth Balance) because I wanted to be sure to mix it for the right length of time on my first attempt. It was super awesome to bypass the mess and hassle of kneading! And the bread turned out great.

I made this Pesto Soup with Gnocchi, Beans, and Greens to go with. I've had it mentally bookmarked since I first saw it on the PPK blog, but I never feel much like making soup until it gets cold. This was just as good as I hoped - Ben was doubtful about the cauliflower but you can't even taste it after the soup is pureed.

I also made another PPK recipe today, because biscuits and gravy + bread + soup + seitan (not pictured) apparently didn't give me enough time in the kitchen today. The recipe is for Chocolate Pumpkin Bread, but I turned it into muffins in the interest of portion control. Both the texture and flavor are amazing, moist and also somehow light and fluffy despite being, you know, a chocolate muffin.