Hey, I started a weird email newsletter! It is not going to be the same as the blog or the Instagram, but it will talk about food. And other things. Feelings. Et cetera. I will try to write something weekly-ish!
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Category: Food Blog
A sporadically-updated log of what I cooked, why, and how. Not a recipe creator. Mostly Vegan MoFo posts.
HAAAAA HA HA. GET IT??! NUTS!!!!!
Yeah. OK. So finally, there’s vegan cheese that doesn’t gross me out, and it’s made out of nuts. But it’s also super expensive, so I usually just make some vegan cheese. Cashew ricotta is quick and easy for a creamy filling/topping; nutty nooch is just nuts/seeds of my choice–usually almonds or walnuts and hemp seeds–whizzed in the spice grinder with nutritional yeast for a parmesan sub. But the best ones are cultured.
I’ve made the herbaceous cultured cashew spread from Vegan Eats World a whole bunch of times, and it’s a dang winner. Well, I do not bother with sauteeing any garlic or shallots; I just add raw garlic (BOOM) and lemon zest along with the herbs. It is awesome on bread. It is excellent as pasta sauce. It’s not bad in a salad dressing.
But really, a simple presentation is the best one. Something carby. A little tomato. Delicious.
Seriously, though – making a lifestyle change based on one meal is a bit much to ask. So maybe let’s focus on that thin pie slice of maybe-could-be-vegan-but… sorts. You know, the ones who say things like “But I love cheese too much.” Yes, I realize that’s tomorrow’s prompt. So let’s refocus on the pie metaphor and make a goddamn delicious vegan pizza.
I’ve made a lot of vegan pizzas over the years, trying to find what works, because I cannot with the options available at pizza restaurants. (How sad! I really did eat a lot of omni pizza in my youth…) The key thing is getting used to pizza without the chewy, melty layer of cheese–DAIYA DOES NOT COUNT, ICK–and somehow giving it that rich, salty, yummy thing that omni pizza has in spades. The key, I’ve found, is that things must be pre-cooked–spinach sauteed, especially–and olive oil generously applied. Seasoning is critical. Best toppings include mushrooms, spinach, well-spiced crumbled tempeh, artichoke hearts, and cherry tomatoes. But, if I’m honest, my version of a deep-dish pie piled with vegan staples isn’t going to calm the culinary nerves of a soy-phobic non-vegan.
This might.
America’s Test Kitchen, bastion of omnivorous home cooking, came out with a brilliant vegan cookbook this year, Vegan for Everybody. They applied their nigh-scientific methodology to a full slate of vegan cooking techniques, including ricotta subs (cashew, tofu, cauliflower, etc.). And one of its applications is this gorgeous mushroom pizza: sauteed cremini AND shiitake mushrooms, garlic, a really good homemade whole wheat crust, cashew ricotta, and parsley. Simple, but delicious and substantial. It feels fancy. And it might help change a mind or two: Hey, maybe this could be OK.
Served with salad. Because vegans gotta vegan.
Ugghhh…the dreaded veggie wrap tray. Cold, moist, bland, barely edible. Crudites. The shittiest hummus you’ve ever bothered to eat. Cookies that definitely aren’t vegan but you might sneak a bite because you just want something that might taste OK, but then they taste like nothing.
Anyway.
I made that kind of stuff, but not so shitty that you don’t know how you’ll make it through the rest of this very long, very boring day.
First up, hummus. Instead of regular chickpea-based hummus, I went with white beans (cannellini, specifically, because it’s what I had on hand) and roasted a whole little head of garlic to throw in the blender with it. The remaining ingredients–olive oil, juice of half a lemon, tahini, salt and pepper–are pretty basic, because I really wanted that sweet, roasted garlic to sing. Served with fresh veggies for color and crunch. Easy-peasy.
Next, the veggie wrap. No mere crudites wrapped in a fucking tortilla, no sir. I started with baked tofu, seasoned simply with soy sauce and a dash of liquid smoke. Then I whipped up a quick massaged lacinato kale salad with a thick, creamy dressing made with herbed cashew cheese, nooch, more nuts, and red wine vinegar. I also wanted avocado, but I didn’t end up using much because they were not great when I cut into them. The big whole wheat tortillas I bought got a quick warm-up on a griddle pan before filling them with tofu and kale. Simple, but full of flavor and texture.
And you know I already had cookies from yesterday’s junk food post. Mmmm, cookies.
A.K.A. I Am Not A Nutritionist, But I Know How to Google
Listen, if you’re here, you probably already know that getting your protein as a vegan, like, ain’t a problem. That shit’s in everything. It’s B12 you gotta look out for, but let’s not get into that. But I went ahead and looked up some allegedly high-protein ingredients and picked a few to invent a meal out of. It’s like Chopped! But without the egos and arbitrary time limits and referring to dead animal parts as “proteins” (noun)!
- Tofu – 10g protein / ½ cup
- Quinoa – 4g protein / ½ cup
- Spinach – 5g protein / 1 cup cooked
- Sun-dried tomatoes – 6g protein / 1 cup
- Lentils – 18g protein / cup
- Pepitas – 9g protein / 1 oz.
From this, I propose: Baked tofu with a sun-dried tomato and pepita pesto, garlicky sauteed spinach, and a quinoa-lentil pilaf. Oooh. That sounds pretty good. Pantry ingredients include: garlic, onion, lemon, parsley, olive oil. I WILL NOT BE UNDERSEASONED. DON’T BORE NINA. (Wait. That last one is a different show.)
Pesto: Throw all of this in a food processor and make a paste.
- 1 cup sun-dried tomatoes packed in oil, patted dry
- â…” cup pepitas, toasted
- 3 cloves of garlic
- Small handful of parsley, torn
- Zest of 1 lemon
- Olive oil, salt, and pepper to taste
Smear half the pesto in the bottom of a baking dish, spray with olive oil, add tofu slices to fit, then spray with more olive oil and cover with the rest of the pesto. Bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes on each side (I used my toaster oven).
Pilaf: Saute the onion in olive oil, add bouillon, then add washed lentils and quinoa until a bit toasty. Transfer to multicooker, add 3 cups of water, and cook for about an hour. (I used the brown rice setting on my VitaClay.)
- 1 medium yellow onion, minced
- ~1 Tbsp. vegetable bouillon
- ¾ cup French green lentils
- 1 cup quinoa
- 3 cups water
- Salt to taste
Spinach: Wilt spinach in a big pan with a little olive oil. Add a pinch of salt and minced or microplaned garlic to your heart’s content. Splash with a good vinegar of your choosing. Serve.
- 2 bags baby spinach (12 oz. total)
- At least 4 cloves garlic, minced or microplaned
- Olive oil, salt, and your favorite vinegar (I used balsamic)
The result is not the most photogenic dish I’ve made, but it’s pretty tasty. It could use a sauce, though. Why didn’t I make my usual tahini sauce?!
OK, to be fair, I was fat before I went vegan, but I also didn’t experience any kind of miraculous weight loss after I did, because god dammit, I LOVE SUGAR and I WON’T BE SHAMED. Anyway, among my favorite homemade junk foods is any kind of cookie, period, which I sometimes just make into a “bar cookie” (i.e. I put all the dough in a pan so I can eat it with a fork) because I’m the only one in my house who’s going to eat any. Ooooh. Evil. I try not to do it too often and seek out healthier alternatives.
One of the most fun ideas in Isa Does It is adding rosemary to chocolate chip cookies. GOD. IT’S SO GOOD. But I use a different recipe, because I like oats (fiber! so virtuous!) and try to use less refined coconut oil than her recipe calls for. That’s really an “occasional” kinda fat, and my junk food consumption is more frequent.
So I usually start with the “Monster” oatmeal & chocolate chip cookie recipe from Big Vegan, skip the raisins–I like ‘em, but they’re a bit much–and sometimes add chopped rosemary from my overgrown weed-addled garden.
One of the most basic vegetarian dishes is beans and rice. It really gets around: all kinds of beans, all kinds of rice, all kinds of seasonings and regional styles. You’ve got your Hoppin’ John with black-eyed peas, black beans and lightly seasoned white rice accompanying Costa Rican cuisine, Spanish rice and refried pinto beans (usually smothered in melted cheddar cheese, ugh) on any plate of American-style Mexican food… I mean, I can’t begin to claim any preparation of it I’d make is truly revolutionary. It’s beans. And rice. But I can give it my own spin. It’s MoFo!
First there has to be a sauce. A lot of rice dishes are seasoned with tomato sauce, so I’ll start with that: but roasted, for full effect. And I’ve got a couple poblano peppers, which are extra-great roasted. So I tossed some plum tomatoes, seeded poblanos and an onion with a little oil and salt and stick it in a hot oven until things are brown and blistered, then threw it in the blender with garlic to make a nice sauce.
I set aside most of the sauce and blended the little bit left in the blender with water to cook rice, then cooked a batch of brown rice in my clay pot cooker. It smelled SO delicious. Then I let that chill overnight to develop flavor, and everything comes together easily the next day: saute the rest of the sauce with some cumin and chili powder, add the beans, then add the rice, and stir to combine and taste. (It needed a dash of soy sauce.)
Served with marinated shredded cabbage and smoked jalapeno sauerkraut for crunch and tang.
And avocado. Duh.
Categories
HELLO! THIS BLOG LIVES! Mostly for VeganMoFo, coming soon to a corner of the internet near you.
After last November – that terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad election; breaking my foot; not getting to finish all my awesome planned VeganMoFo projects – I pretty much abandoned this platform in favor of just posting shit on Instagram, which I do with a regularity that alarms me.
But I’ll make an effort to do more than my haphazardly hashtagged posting o’er there and write some stuff on here again. For a while.
Let’s keep this real simple: purple cabbage linguine (one of my favorite monochromatic easy meals, from Color Me Vegan), plus some slices of roasted ‘carnival’ squash, which as a nice yellow flesh and edible skin.
I s’pose I could’ve arranged the plate so it was rah-rah my alma mater, University of Washington, whose colors are purple and gold, but as much as I enjoyed my time there, I have no such color-centric loyalties.
For today’s ONE COLOR challenge, I cooked an all-green dinner. Look, I know there is a SIMILAR prompt on the 20th, but I am gonna go with the OTHER meaning of “green” then. Stay tuned.
My all-green platter includes: green seitan, kale, avocado, chimichurri, pepitas, and jade green rice.
How do you make seitan green? Take the steamed white seitan recipe from Viva Vegan, blend the 1 ½ cups of broth with a handful of spinach plus herbs (I used basil and cilantro), and violà ! Green – well, olive greenish – seitan. It’s nice and dense and flavorful.
How do you make chimichurri? Throw a bunch of stuff in a blender and be happy. Stuff includes cilantro, parsley, garlic, onion, jalapeno, red wine vinegar, and olive oil. It manages to stay a nice bright green.
Honestly, who knows what aliens would like. Who knows what their taste/smell/other senses prefer, or what kinds of limbs they’d use to eat it with! Maybe they don’t “eat” in a way we recognize at all.
But let’s say it’s a very Star Trek-like alien visiting, the kind that looks basically human with funny ears or extra ridges on the face, something like that. Maybe we’re in some fabulous utopian future where “exotic cuisine” means tasting the native foods of other worlds and not just, say, visiting a hawker center in Singapore. What kind of food might be a good representative of the tastes, smells, textures, and style of Earth food?
I went with pho. It’s got fragrant, hot broth, textures  galore, slurpy noodles, and a certain amount of customization. Maybe aliens will go nuts for hoisin sauce and bean sprouts–it’s not for me to judge.
Since, in this case, there were no aliens, just two Earth-dwelling humans, I made it the way I like it, more or less. Broth that’s a little sweet and salty and spicy. Plenty of chewy rice noodles. Vegetables and mushrooms–bok choy, tree oyster ‘shrooms, thinly sliced white onion–plus, of course, lime juice, jalapeno slices, crisp bean sprouts, and zesty basil leaves. Sliced homemade seitan (it’s green! I made it with spinach, basil, and cilantro). Really, too much for its bowl, but still good.
An aside: I ain’t trying to culturally appropriate, just respectfully make tasty, veggie-filled food for myself. I love learning how to make new foods and have some fun sharing the results on here/Instagram/etc. Lately there’s been a lot of back-and-forth about white people claiming expertise in pho and Vietnamese people being like, huh? Maybe you heard about it. A tone-deaf video was made and posted to a major food site; a response was made by an Asian-American comedian, Jenny Yang. If you haven’t seen it, please enjoy it now.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktVsO_b03dc&w=560&h=315]
When I think about food that gets me excited to go on a long plane ride, it has to be the glorious pineapple. Oh, I’d love to hop on a plane right now and take a four-year-long world tour of places that grow this delectable fruit. But, alas, there are reasons I need to be home. In theory. Supposedly.
Anyway. So I was thinking about pineapple and places to get it and decided to imagine a visit to Hawaii, completed with teriyaki tofu, rice, cabbage slaw, and grilled pineapple. It was delicious.
I did my best to make the plate look pretty. There’s crispy fried shallots and minced garlic atop the rice, black sesame seeds in the two-color slaw, pretty green onions piled on the freshly baked tofu, even a lovely flower nestled alongside (it’s a California-native variety of mallow, which is related to hibiscus).
All vegans love falafel, right? And I haven’t really made other Middle Eastern-type dishes this month. So today’s the day.
I’m writing this post ahead of time, the day after the US election. I am not happy about the result. It’s a distressing day. I’m not all that hungry, if I’m being honest. But I do have some leftover baked falafel that I plan to eat with a simple yogurt dressing (Kite Hill, please and thank you) over salad greens.
I mean, I guess, kinda. I love Indo-Chinese food, which is already a fusion, so I tried to make some of that at home: gobi manchurian and salt and pepper tofu with roti. Why reinvent a pretty good wheel?
OK, well, I did try to make it “me,” too. So it’s Indo-Chinese-Emily fusion. I baked the cauliflower in its batter – and threw in a few halved brussels sprouts, just to see if it’d work. (Verdict: kinda!)
I figured eating it with roti would lean into the “Indo” part of the fusion, but added a nicely minced scallion in the dough. I really like making flatbread. It takes some practice to roll the dough out perfectly thin and reasonably well-shaped. The way it puffs up when it hits the hot skillet is impressive. And really, it just tastes good for something that is so simple, ingredient-wise.
Last month, my boyfriend and I trekked up to Oakland to check out the Vegan Soul Wellness Fest and had the great privilege of watching a demo by Astig Vegan on making Filipino food vegan-style. Until then, I’d been under the impression FIlipino food was synonymous with “contains pork,” so it was eye-opening to hear her discuss the flavors, ingredients, and techniques that are 100% plant-based. Also, the food she made and shared was crazy-delicious.
So what better time to actually give her recipes a try than today’s challenge to cook something you haven’t tried before?
The menu included tempeh adobo with spinach (I couldn’t get to the Asian market to get water spinach), squash and beans in coconut milk (which she demo’d), and garlic fried (brown) rice. The preparation is very simple and requires only a handful of ingredients. I often avoid coconut milk-based dishes because they’re so heavy, but it works as a nice, creamy side to contrast the sharp, tangy tempeh adobo. I also used *so much* garlic. I should have counted how many cloves, but it was enough to justify using the food processor to expedite the mincing and end up with about â…” cup of yum.
I’d definitely make Filipino food again, and recommend checking out Astig Vegan if you haven’t already!