Lasagna Rolls

Back in the pre-vegan days I used to make lasagna rolls pretty often, with a black bean & feta filling. I hadn't made them since giving up the feta, but I had a half box of lasagna noodles taking up valuable cabinet space so I threw these together tonight. The filling is Veganomicon cashew ricotta, with some spinach mixed in to green it up. I had the tomato sauce in the freezer, so I just thawed it out in the microwave and poured it on top. Then I baked them in the oven for thirty minutes.

Ben said, "This goo [that would be the cashew ricotta] is so delicious! I can't believe it's not dairy." BAM.

P.S. Check out these turtles I saw on my lunchtime walk yesterday.

Crockpot Eggplant Curry

I love my crock pot and The Vegan Slow Cooker!!

This is a simple eggplant curry to which I added chickpeas, and served it over rice. I also cooked some collards on the side for greenness.

It's a shame eggplant looks so nasty in pictures because it is gooood when it gets all smooth and velvety after being in a crock pot for nine hours.

Tempeh Stroganoff Stuffed Potatoes

Today I baked potatoes in the crock pot and it worked perfectly! I'm so excited! I pricked some holes in them and stuck them in there on low and cooked them for a little over six hours. I think they would have been fine for even longer, so it will work great for workdays too. Whoot!

OK so the filling is a stroganoff recipe from American Vegan Kitchen: baked tempeh cubes and mushrooms in a (homemade) tofu-chive sour cream sauce. Then you hollow out the potatoes and add the mashed filling to the tempeh mixture, mix it all together, and stuff the potatoes. It was delicious! I have tons of extra filling to eat plain for breakfast tomorrow.

It is full on spring here now, which means:

but also:

Pine pollen in Raleigh is the worst! It's been raining really frequently over the past couple of weeks but that looks to be ending after today, so this week is going to be pretty gross, I think. Check out the buildup on my car after only one day!

Yuck.

Harira

Harira is the soup traditionally eaten to break the fast during Ramadan. It's usually made with lamb, but this recipe (from Bean by Bean) is, obviously, vegan. The base is lentils and chickpeas, with lots of fresh herbs and vegetables and some noodles thrown in at the end. I used Japanese somen noodles because I had some on hand, so this is probably not strictly traditional even considering the lamb is omitted.

I've noticed a recent tendency I have to pick recipes that don't sound all that exciting or are even downright weird (see: African vegan meatloaf) in order to see if they'll actually be tasty. So far, I have not been disappointed. I thought this one might be on the boring side, particularly because I don't even really like soup, but I absolutely loved it.

I also made a loaf of the Vegan Diner Garlic-Dill Bread, but with chives in place of the dill. Our chives plant normally dies off in the winter but, as we didn't really have winter this year, it's going nuts out there and I've been trying to make a concerted effort to prune it back. ANYWAY here are some pictures of everything.

Mmmm, bread.

It was a great dinner!

Crockpot Biryani

I'm in love with this whole crock pot thing. So easy! This is a bunch of cinnamon/curry vegetables and chickpeas over brown rice.

One other thing I've started doing is cooking up a big batch of brown rice from scratch and freezing it in two cup portions. I've been buying pre-cooked frozen brown rice for ages but this is way cheaper!

Broccoli, Edamame, and Bok Choy Skillet

Ben is always complaining about how he doesn't like eating beans. As vegetarians, though, we pretty much have to eat beans for protein, plus I like them, so I always make them anyway and he eats them and never seems to have too much of a problem with it. Still, I feel a little guilty about it. In an attempt to come up with some new, creative things to do with beans that he won't whine about too much, I got a new cookbook called Bean by Bean. It's not a vegan cookbook, but the author is vegetarian and almost all of the recipes in the book are either vegan or have a vegan option. I was pretty excited flipping through it - it's huge and extensive and there are a lot of things that look pretty great.

I started off with a recipe so simple it's hardly even a recipe - steamed bok choy, broccoli, and edamame, seasoned with the zest and juice of a lemon, plus salt & pepper. I picked this because it was quick and also because I was interested to see if it actually tasted good. There's not even any garlic in there! Or oil! How could it be tasty?

When I presented Ben with his bowl of plain pasta + green stuff he was not too excited, but it turned out to hugely exceed both of our expectations. How can there be so much flavor in lemons and salt & pepper? I also put some walnut parm on top. I'm going to be using this method a lot in the future for quick healthy dinners.

Then for dessert I made an ice cream sandwich out of cranberry-oatmeal cookies (from Vegan Cookies Take Over Your Cookie Jar) and Trader Joe's soy creamy vanilla. It was outstanding.

Bobotie!

Oh, look, I cooked! Last week was lazy. Crock pot chili, sandwiches, leftovers, etc. Today, though, I got back on the horse and made two new things from World Vegan Feast, Bobotie (African Vegan Meatloaf) and African Yellow Rice.

The "meat"loaf was mostly tofu, which was frozen overnight, then thawed and crumbled. The texture when I was crumbling it was WEIRD. It did not feel like food. It was cottony or something. Anyway, I crumbled it up anyway and mixed it with the other things (bread crumbs, almonds, raisins, etc.) and put it in the baking dish. After baking for a half hour, you add a custard on the top made from almond milk and cornstarch. Look how it made a little pattern after baking!

She suggested pairing it with this baked brown rice, seasoned with cinnamon and sugar and turmeric, mixed with raisins and onion and garlic. It was GOOD.

We had a simple green salad with lemon juice and olive oil on the side.

This dinner was great! World Vegan Feast is proving to be pretty awesome.

Sweet & Sour Stir-fry with Smoked Tofu

This looks like your average stir-fry but it is awesome for two reasons:

1. I made the smoked tofu myself.

2. The stir-fry is not actually stir-fried, but was instead cooked in the crockpot, which means I didn't have to do any work (besides chopping).

I've been on the library request list for The Vegan Slow Cooker for ages and it finally came in last week. It looked awesome enough that I ordered it from Amazon on Friday. I don't think I've used my crockpot once since we quit meat two and a half years ago, and I really missed being able to come home from work and have dinner waiting for me all ready to go.

There are a lot of basics in the book, in addition to what look to be really good recipes. For example, apparently you can do baked potatoes in the crock pot by poking holes in them and tossing them in there on low for 8 hours. WHAT?? Acquiring that knowledge alone was worth getting the book.

The smoked tofu was also done in the crockpot - I smoked it all day yesterday by putting a mixture of tea leaves, brown sugar, and rice in the bottom and setting the tofu in a steamer basket. The flavor wasn't all that strong, but the texture was amazing - nice and chewy the way the pre-baked Trader Joe's stuff is. She has some other flavoring ideas for smoked tofu so I'm excited to try more of them.

So for this dinner, I just threw that tofu in there with some carrots & onions, and added pineapple, red pepper, and broccoli about 45 minutes before dinner time. The sauce is pineapple juice, ginger, and soy sauce. I only use reduced sodium soy sauce so I did need to add some salt at the end (and some pepper, too). I almost always find that I need extra seasoning for crock pot recipes - it will be interesting to see if that continues with other recipes in the book. Anyway, I'm all excited now for future crock pot adventures, especially now that summer is coming and I won't want to use the oven.

Tofu Salad Sandwiches

Tofu salad sandwiches were one of my last frontiers of vegan cooking. They just sound gross, like some kind of crappy egg salad imitation, and I have a weird mental block about tofu on sandwiches, period. But I made this anyway, to avoid having to go to the store for other lunch ingredients, and also because I have been hearing rave reviews of the recipe (from The Best Veggie Burgers in the World).

It was soooo gooood and I have some left over for lunch tomorrow and I am very excited about it. We put some arugula on the sandwich, too, to make it extra vegan.

I told Ben to "take some artistic photos of that sandwich" while I was dishing up the (not pictured) pasta side dish and I think he did a good job!

The tofu in this recipe is sauteed with onion and garlic, then mixed with various spices, nutritional yeast, Vegenaise, and mustard. I don't know what about the whole thing makes it so delicious but the flavors are just perfect. This is going to be a summer staple at my house.

Eggplant Parmesan

Obviously there is no cheese in this, but it's the same idea as the non-vegan eggplant parm - breaded, fried eggplant with pasta and tomato sauce - and it was just as good. I did have that walnut parmesan I made the other day to sprinkle on top!

I'm actually not very good at frying things, probably because I've spent half my adult life on Weight Watchers and am trained to think that oil = bad. The good thing about eating vegan, though, is that the foods being fried are typically very low calorie. I think I fry more things now than I ever have before in my life. I'm also still learning how to use my cast iron skillet, which heats up much differently from other cookware. So anyway, it was sort of a learning process frying up all this eggplant but it ended up being really tasty!

General Tso's Soy Curls

This is my second dish from World Vegan Feast, which I chose because it looked super fast and because Ben is obsessed with the General Tso's tofu from our Chinese delivery place. It WAS super fast - it took about twenty minutes, which includes ten minutes of marination time. Great for a weeknight.

So, soy curls are amazing. So meaty! And this sauce was really good. However, my General Tso's connoisseur said it did not taste like General Tso's sauce. Who cares? It was a great, easy stirfry and I will be adding it to the rotation.

Veggies & Dumplings

Everyone on the vegan message boards keeps raving about this recipe from Vegan Diner, which is good because I thought it sounded boring and probably wouldn't have made it otherwise. It's just a vegetable stew, thickened with a milk/cornstarch slurry, with dumplings steamed in the soup. So basic! And really, really good. This is going to be a winter staple. Assuming we ever have winter again.

I also used that Wayfare We Can't Say It's Cheese spread to make mac & cheese (with linguine because that's the pasta I had open). I used about a quarter cup of the cheese to 1 cup of cooked pasta, and mixed in some soy milk to thin it. It was good, but the cheese spread lost some its flavor heated up. I should have added some salt & pepper but I was too lazy, and it was good enough as is. The texture is amazingly smooth and cheesy.

I also made Ben some gingersnaps from a Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar recipe. I don't like gingersnaps but he assures me they're really good.

Corn Grits & Sweet Potato Gratin with Arugula

Here is my first, poorly photographed dish from World Vegan Feast. It's a layered casserole of polenta, sweet potato, and arugula, with a creamy sauce (she calls it a cheese sauce but let's be honest, there was nothing cheesy about it except the texture) and topped with panko & walnut "parmesan" (which does in fact taste parmesany). You can kind of see the layers here:

I steamed some collards seasoned with soy sauce & liquid smoke on the side.

This is what it looked like straight out of the oven.

It was delicious and very unusual and I'm even more excited about the cookbook now, if this recipe is any indication.

New Things!

I was at Whole Foods today picking up some chickpea miso and what did I see but this:

I'm always up for trying a new and exciting vegan fake cheese product! I've heard about this stuff but not seen it around here until now. I put some on toast as a quick snack after the gym this afternoon and I like it. The flavor is straight up nacho-ey and it has a good spreadable texture. I think this is the best tasting commercial vegan cheese I've tried so far, but it's actually pretty similar to the Vegan Diner cheeses I've made myself. I should do a cost analysis to see which is cheaper. Anyway, I'm going to mix it with some macaroni tomorrow and will report back.

Here is my second new item.

I am super pumped about this book. I've been checking random vegan cookbooks out from the library in an attempt to find something worth buying, but the selection is pretty limited and nothing was really catching my fancy. This book kept getting rave reviews, though, so I gave in and ordered it from Amazon sight unseen. I've read through almost the whole thing twice now and it looks pretty amazing. Her recipes are truly innovative, with combinations and techniques I've never heard of and would never even think to try. I have a couple things on the schedule for this week so stay tuned for excitement.

I tried to get a better picture of the book but this kept happening.

Cats are bad!