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!

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.