Winning at veganism with a slightly modified brussels sprout fried rice from The PPK* and ginger beer tofu from Salad Samurai.
Categories
Author: vegansneedsauce
Categories
Kale salad with kabocha squash and sprouted lentils (roughly based on the one from Isa Does It) and some shells and cheesy sauce on the side. Homemade sauce of roux, garlic, leftover cashew cheese, white wine, and nooch. So much whisking.
Categories
Green tea chocolate chunk cookies with walnuts — just the basic recipe from Vegan Cookies Take Over Your Cookie Jar with matcha powder added in with the wet ingredients and a handful of walnuts with the chocolate chips is my favorite trick.
It’s late summer, and the farmers’ market is full of inspiration. There’s still berries and corn and tomatoes, but also brussels sprouts and apples and pomegranates. Some serious best-of-both-worlds stuff.
Anyway, among the things I picked up today were fresh dried black beans, dark red poblano peppers, San Marzano plum tomatoes, and squash blossoms. Some of these are not exactly weeknight-quick ingredients, so I wanted to use them today.
First I set the beans a-soaking, along with a couple handsful of cashews to make nut cheese (with a bit of white miso, one chopped scallion, nutritional yeast, and water, spun in the food processor until smooth and creamy). After a couple hours, the beans had doubled in size, so I cooked them until tender, then added a chopped onion, salt, and a little ground coriander and kept simmering until everything else was ready to eat.
Then I roasted the salsa veggies.
Once brown and beautiful, I threw it in the blender with a handful of toasted pumpkin seeds, cilantro, and a splash of white wine vinegar.
Next, it’s stuffed squash blossom time. Definitely a Sunday thing, way too much work for any other day. But worth it. I rinsed the blossoms and mixed up some flour, salt, and pepper to dredge them in. Scored the blossoms, pried them open, spooned in some cashew cheese, closed it back up, got some flour mixture on the outside of the blossom, and threw it in a hot oiled cast iron pan for a few minutes on each side.
Last, I shredded half a bunch of curly green kale and a chunk of red cabbage and green cabbage, massaged it a bit to break down the kale, and tossed it with a pinch of salt and a drizzle of white wine vinegar and olive oil.
To serve, I put the beans on the rice, the blossoms on a bed of kale, and the salsa on top of everything. Really, it all gets mixed around anyway.
Categories
Grand Sunday plans
Of course, Sunday dinners always become a late afternoon affair. Breakfast I enjoyed some prepared goodies: oatmeal scone and cocoa noir almond milk cold-brew coffee. Sunday mornings are when I make the ritual visit to the farmers’ market and, because it’s convenient, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods as needed. The market haul was beautiful, with everything from late season bi-color corn to brussels sprouts on the stalk stuffing three cloth bags. This is my church; I take it seriously. Carrying that much food requires energy.
Now I’ve got fresh-dried black beans and cashews soaking and a notion about making roasted ancho chile and tomato salsa. Plotting some kind of cashew cheese-stuffed squash blossoms with black beans and rice. Need to plot how to incorporate more green vegetables.
All this and so much good TV to watch: last night’s Doctor Who and Outlander; tonight’s Good Wife season premiere. Sundays are indulgent. More later.
Categories
The usual Saturday morning pancakes with a hint of nutmeg, served with apples and walnuts cooked in brown sugar and lemon juice
Categories
When “what to have for dinner” texts go wrong…
You may have observed that all my food ends up as a “bowl.” It’s not that I never do anything more elaborate; weeknights just don’t lend themselves to it, in my experience. It’s enough to throw things in a pot/pan/oven and give it a little sauce to pull it together. That’s more than a lot of people bother with, I think. It’s just not terribly photogenic.
The red beans and rice started with minced onion, red bell pepper, and yellow bell pepper, then a little red pepper flakes and oregano. Added three cups of water and one and a half cups of germinated brown rice, cooked it down a while. Added some hot sauce, coriander, and a can of kidney beans. Cooked until the water was absorbed; seasoned with a pinch of salt.
Steamed greens…self explanatory. Collard greens and a little purple cabbage, chopped and thrown in a steamer basket. Because I gotta.
Salsa is also fairly basic. The following ingredients entered a small plastic container with a screw-top lid, suitable for shake-mixing:
- One big fat heirloom tomato, diced small
- One dark green jalapeno, minced
- One clove of garlic, microplaned
- A few cilantro sprigs, roughly chopped
- One long green onion, green and white parts chopped
- Juice of half a lime
I just wish I had an avocado. This cries out for avocado.
Making dinner for myself again tonight and I didn’t want to wait on rice to cook, so I made this tofu stir-fry to go with some wilted greens.
Tofu: pan-fried in my trusty cast-iron skillet with a little olive oil and a pinch of salt, then set aside.
Greens: shredded green cabbage and half a bunch of kale, just wilted in another skillet with a little oil or water.
The rest: minced shallot, red bell pepper, and a handful of whole cashews sauteed/toasted in the cast iron. Juice of one orange, two microplaned garlic cloves, and a splash each of soy sauce, rice vinegar, toasted sesame oil, and hot sauce make up the sauce, which gets a quick simmer in the other skillet before adding in the sauteed shallots and bell pepper, cashew, and tofu cubes. Finished with two green onions and a few sprigs of roughly chopped cilantro.
Pretty pleased.
How bad could that be?
How fun is that?
How’s that for easy?
How good does that look?
How good does this look?
Who could turn that down?
Isn’t that great?
Who wouldn’t want that for their birthday?
Who wouldn’t want that for his birthday?
We need a nice cocktail for breakfast, don’t we?
Who wouldn’t like that for breakfast?
We should all be so confident in our cooking.
Categories
I’m not sure if this will taste any good. The onions burned. The basil-mint coulis looks like green water. The lemon risotto is gunky. Sometimes I try and I fail.
EDIT: OK, but actually, the flavor is not bad. I managed to avoid the burnt bits when I mixed the onions/greens with the beans, the herbs are bright, and the risotto is a good absorbent base for all of the above.
Categories
My boyfriend had dinner at work, so I was cooking just for me. So … It’s just some stuff. Roasted slices of delicata squash, sauteed spinach and garlic, pan-fried tempeh (i kinda burned it) , and some tomato and avocado. Also: black pepper. Boyfriend dislikes black pepper. It’s only for me. Mmmm, black pepper.
I LOVE watching Chopped! even though it involves a lot of reverence for dead animal “proteins.” The creativity in throwing together random ingredients in a short period of time isn’t too far off from how I often cook dinner, albeit with less totally obscure ingredients (by vegan standards).
So when they announced the ingredients for the Vegan MoFo Chopped! basket, I knew I had to give it a shot. They are: radish, oolong tea, fresh prune plums, and jalapeno. It took me a little time to mull it over (look, I won’t do well on the real “Chopped”), but I decided to look to Indian cooking for inspiration and make channa masala with some plums in the spicy tomato sauce base, radish salad, and basmati rice cooked with oolong tea.
First I cooked the tea that I later added the rice to:
Then chopped the plums (I couldn’t find prune plums, but fresh purple ones from the market are close enough), jalapenos, and tomatoes for the masala sauce:
The sauce started with cumin seeds toasted in coconut oil, then a minced shallot, some ginger, ground coriander, and the jalapeno went in:
Followed by the plums and tomatoes:
Then cooked it down for quite some time, adding a splash of water when it looked to be drying out, before hitting it with a little immersion blender action to really get it saucy before adding the chickpeas to cook for a while:
Later I added a handful or two of fresh spinach to bump up the color and nutritional value, plus a sprinkle of garam masala and a squeeze of lime juice before serving.
The last thing is the salad. I shredded several french breakfast radishes with the julienne peeler:
And tossed with fresh ginger, a couple beautiful stripey tomatoes, cilantro, and lime juice. It’s supposed to have more jalapeno, but I forgot–at least I have the peppers in the curry sauce already!
End result is rather pretty, and, I think, tasty.
What did YOU come up with?
Categories
Because I didn’t cook at all on Friday, this is my Saturday breakfast. Pan-roasted fingerling potatoes, scrambled tempeh and kale, heirloom tomatoes and avocado. Yum.
I don’t usually like to get the stalks of brussels sprouts because the damn things already so much work to prep, but it called to me. I cradled it like a baby–a silent, green, nodule-covered, leafy baby. Mmm. And now you know too much about how my brain works.
So I prepared the brussels, starting with plucking all the sprouts off the stalk:
Then washed, trimmed, and sliced them all in half. This took a little over half an hour, as observed by watching an episode of The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail. And…what next? Brussels are best roasted…need more veggies…how about the other half of the kari squash from the other day? And for color, those three purple potatoes that are probably still hiding in the fridge somewhere?
These colors don’t run. They get tender.
OK, sure. Good. But then? That isn’t a whole meal yet. Tempeh? Yeah, sure. Cast iron cooking. How about shallots? Definitely, throw those in there too. Needs a sauce (*points to blog name*) to tie it all together + make it not totally fricking bland. Tahini + hot sauce + apple cider vinegar + nutritional yeast, add water, shake it up.
Oh yeah. Pretty good.