Spaghetti with Tempeh Cutlets with Creamy Tomato Sauce

This recipe is from American Vegan Kitchen.  I marinated the tempeh overnight in red wine vinegar and spices and it was so good - it soaked up every bit of the marinade.  The tomato sauce was a little spicy, and made creamy by the addition of soy milk and a little flour for thickening.  I don't know why I've never thought to do that before.

I also used the first of our backyard summer basil to garnish!

Pad Thai Salad with Red Thai Tofu

This salad is soooo gooood.  Lettuce, carrots, bean sprouts, peanuts (or in this case cashews, because I used up all the peanuts in the dressing) and I added some sliced red bell pepper.  The dressing is slightly spicy peanut-lime.  The tofu is coated in a mixture of Thai red chili paste, agave, and soy sauce. Perfection.  All recipes from Appetite for Reduction.

Using Up Greens + Strawberry Pie

Somehow, I ended up with a bunch of collards and three bags of kale in my refrigerator all at one time.  Even though these items are basically free in North Carolina, I still feel bad wasting food and have gone on a quest to use it all up.  

The collards were oldest, so I cooked them up on Saturday night using Viva Vegan's Brazilian Braised Kale recipe.  I often am in a hurry cooking collards and don't give them enough time to cook down - kale is much faster - but Saturday I was patient and let them go for a long time to get tender and they were perfect.  I made my old standby garlic yellow rice to serve as the base of the bowl, and then threw together some black beans, loosely based upon Viva Vegan's Venezuelan Black Beans recipe, using things from the freezer.  Man!  This turned out to be a great dinner.  The beans are sweet, not spicy, so the flavor of the rice and collards wasn't overpowered.

And then for dinner we had strawberry pie.  I just barely got in under the wire for farmer's market strawberry season this year.  This recipe comes from Ben's mom and is already vegan (assuming you use shortening rather than butter for the crust).  As you can see, I am still not very good at making pretty crusts but with time and lots of pie-making, hopefully I will get there.

Today is Monday and that pie is already gone.  I only had two pieces!  Ben is a good dessert eater.

Seitan Stroganoff

I'm a big fan of the stroganoff recipe in Vegan With a Vengeance, but I'm trying to branch out and keep trying new things so I went with American Vegan Kitchen's Beer-Simmered Seitan Stroganoff for last night's dinner.  It was really easy to throw together and tasted great, but it didn't really scream stroganoff to me - the sauce was really tomatoey and flavored mostly with smoked paprika. 

I served it over buttered (Earth Balance-d) parsley noodles and it made for a really good, hearty dinner.

Stovetop Mac & Cheeze with Chorizo

Ben is out of town this weekend, and that means I get to eat nutritional yeast-based "cheese" sauce.  This is a basic stovetop mac and fake cheese recipe from American Vegan Kitchen, to which I added some mozzarella  style Daiya and Trader Joe's soy chorizo. 

Can you tell it was awesome?  Look at it!  It looks so cheesy!  I was going to add some peas but I didn't have any, so too bad for me.  I'll just take some extra vitamins.

Plate of Mexican-y Goodness

Normally I sit down with my cookbooks on Friday or Saturday and choose recipes and make a grocery list for the week.  We've had a crazy few weeks, though, and didn't get back in town this week until late Sunday night, so on Monday I went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of random vegetables with the intention of using them up with whatever staples we have around the house.  It's working pretty well!  Tuesday night we had quinoa, steamed broccoli, and tempeh all mixed up with peanut-lime dressing (from Appetite for Reduction) on top.

Last night I made the chipotle potato & seitan taco filling from Viva Vegan, but instead of eating it in tacos I served it over a big pile of lettuce and yellow rice with cherry tomatoes and avocado.  It was reeeeeeally good.  The discovery of how much I like to eat big mixed up piles of things is maybe my favorite unexpected side benefit of learning to cook vegan food.

I had leftovers for lunch today and even without the avocado (which naturally we polished off between the two of us last night), it was still delicious.

Roasty Soba Bowl

I made another recipe from the PPK website tonight and it was great.

I subbed broccoli for the cauliflower, which is not a McClure favorite, and added some heirloom cherry tomatoes I needed to use up.  This turned out to be a genius idea because the tartness of the tomatoes worked really well with the earthiness of the other elements.  Here is the roasty goodness.

And the bowl.  Mine isn't as pretty as Isa's but I bet it tasted as good!  The dressing is genius - so easy and only three ingredients (miso, tahini, garlic) - all staples I have on hand at all times.

Sloppy Jerks

"Creamed spinach" has always sounded like a horrorshow to me, and has definitely been on the list of my Final Frontiers in what I'm willing to try.  When this recipe popped up on the PPK blog a few weeks ago I thought, "Well, I guess this is it," and I put it on the dinner list.  

Maybe it helps that it was coconut cream, I don't know, but I loved it!  And the seitan sloppy joe mix, seasoned with jerk flavors, was also great.  I like making fancy vegan sandwiches because they are hard to come by outside of my own house.

Served with tots, of course!

Happy Birthday to Benjamin!

Today is Ben's 35th birthday!  I was going to make him a non-vegan key lime pie, his favorite, but he requested a fruit pie instead, which are the pretty much the same recipe, vegan or not - just using Earth Balance in the crust instead of butter.  

This is an apple-blackberry pie based on a recipe from Vegan Pie in the Sky, but with a crumb topping rather than a double crust.

Of course it was great.  How can pie be bad?  It was pretty liquidy straight out of the oven and kind of collapsed into a fruity cobbler-type thing.  I'm sure it will firm up in the fridge, though.

Jamaican Empanadas?

I've not been making anything exciting lately, and this was really just another thrown together meal with staples and random things from the freezer, as well as some vegetable odds and ends from last weekend. It all came together really great, though!

I thawed some of the empanadas I made with leftovers from the Jamaican Lentil Turnovers of a few weeks ago, whipped up a vegan ranch from silken tofu, chopped up some lettuce remnants, cherry tomatoes, and an avocado, and made some garlic yellow rice to tie the whole thing together.

Mexican feast! Except with Jamaican curry filling.

Black Bean & Soy Chorizo Crock Pot Stew

This was crazily simple and totally excellent for our randomly cold day today. Garlic, onion, red pepper, black beans, and half a package of Trader Joe's soy chorizo.

Another winner from The Vegan Slow Cooker!

Crunchy Kale and Coconut Bowl

A bunch of my friends have been talking about this recipe for weeks and I finally got around to trying it out tonight. I only used 1 Tbsp of olive oil as opposed to the 1/3 cup she calls for, and also halved the coconut, but even with those modifications it was pretty amazingly awesome. Neither one of us are huge coconut fans, really, but it works better in this than anything else I have run across, ever.

I served it over brown rice instead of farro, and made Veganomicon's Smoky Tempeh to round it out as a full meal.

Jamaican Lentil Turnovers

I've wanted to make this recipe since the first time I flipped through Bean to Bean - it's a mixture of lentils and vegetables, mashed into a paste-like consistency, stuffed into tortillas and baked. Basically sort of like a thick quesadilla, except with Jamaican flavors.

It belatedly occurred to me I should have used empanada dough instead, but luckily I have empanada wrappers in the freezer so I'm going to use some of the leftover filling and make some to freeze for a later quick dinner.

This was another solid recipe from Bean to Bean - I am really liking that cookbook! Highly recommend!

Caramelized Onion Quiche

I've been wanting to try a vegan quiche for quite a while, and finally got around to it today. I made this recipe from Vegan Brunch because it called for three pounds of onions, caramelized, and if there is one thing I love it's a whole bunch of caramelized onions. The rest of the filling is tofu and cashews, mainly, blended until smooth.

It was delicious. One of the other reasons I wanted to make a quiche is that Ben is always going on about how much he hates real (egg-based) quiche, but I was pretty sure he would like this. It really tasted more like a ricotta pie than anything else. I'm going to be trying other quiche recipes in the future for sure.

Chipotle Adobo Black Beans with Mexican Millet

This was so good but SO spicy. Why do I keep doing this to myself?? I knew as I was putting in all those chipotles and jalapenos (recipes: Veganomicon) it would be rough for my wimpy mouth. Ben loved it!

The millet is like spanish rice, except, you know, with millet. I'm sure there is something healthy about millet but I don't really know what it is; I just like it. I served a green salad on the side with blackberries and pumpkin seeds and just lemon juice to dress it since I am lazy and also Weight Watching.

This was a good dinner. Next time I will only put a little bit of the chipotle sauce on my serving, though!