Alicia C. Simpson’s Quick and Easy Vegan Comfort Food – #3 & #4 & #5 November 17, 2009

Tonight I made Spicy Buffalo Bites, only spicy doesn’t go over so well with my cute spouse so I subbed Ms. Simpson’s BBQ Sauce for the hot sauce. This recipe involved making Chik’n Seitan, then battering it, deep-frying it, and drenching it in sauce. The sauce, the seitan, the bites… amazing! Use this recipe any time you want a chicken nugget-style seitan — crispy, fried, and delicious. You could serve them with any type of sauce. I was completely impressed with the quick and easy barbecue sauce, which was the perfect balance of sweet, smoky, rich, and spicy flavors. Absolutely marvelous. We were tucking into this so fast I completely forgot to take a picture. Ms. Simpson writes, regarding her BBQ sauce, that she is working on mastering mustard and mayo-based BBQ sauces, but she can make one heck of a ketchup based one. I’m here to tell you that is one heck of an understatement.

In conclusion, this is the book to buy if you want to prove to yourself and others how decadent and down-home vegan cooking can be. I’m sad to move on from this book — we’ve been loving it! Next up is The Tropical Vegan Kitchen by Donna Klein.

Alicia C. Simpson’s Quick and Easy Vegan Comfort Food – #2 November 15, 2009

Tonight I had a life-changing experience. I made Quick and Easy Vegan Comfort Food’s Mac & Cheeze, the most perfect vegan mac and cheese I have had to date. I don’t particularly love nutritional yeast, and this recipe doesn’t use any. The sauce is rich, creamy, and tangy. It is also the perfect golden color. Because I have no sense of decency, I used a ton more bread crumbs than called for and sauteed them in Earth Balance before sprinkling them over top of the casserole. Trust me on this, you NEED this book. If it contained only this recipe, it would be well worth it!

Alicia C. Simpson’s Quick and Easy Vegan Comfort Food – #1 November 12, 2009

I’ve decided to continue the PPK cookbook challenge on my own, cooking three new meals per week from my (way too many and underused) cookbooks. Check out the PPK, though, because right now our crew is cooking their way through a grunch of amazing vegan cooking blogs! Super fun and delicious and no need to buy any cookbooks.

I, however, must hit the books! I own way too many and it’s time to get some use out of these puppies.

So, for my first sola week of the challenge, my cute spouse and I picked out Quick and Easy Vegan Comfort Food. This cookbook looks so awesome! Definitely recommend it.

Check out the first dish — Veganized Orange Chik’n. This was sweet, a little spicy, flavorful, not too overpowering, and perfectly delicious! The recipe calls for over 1/2 cup of sugar. Is that a lot of sugar? I didn’t think so because, I mean really, you KNOW they’re putting at least that much (and probably way way more) in the sauces you’re getting at Chinese restaurants, right? So I say, let’s make up some delicious sweet sauce and knock off the denial! Ha. But, if you wanted to cut down the sugar and add more orangey flavor, say by subbing orange concentrate for the orange juice, I believe Ms. Simpson’s recipe is solid enough that you could make those modifications. But do try it as is because it’s a wonderful and faithful reproduction of that scrumptious take-out orange chicken everyone loves.

Okay, someone help me out with cornstarch. The recipe just tells you to whisk in 2 T of cornstarch or arrowroot — like, without dissolving it in water first. How do you do that? (Or maybe the recipe assumes that we all should know to dissolve it in water first! I’m terribly literal.) I once added straight cornstarch to a hot pie filling and ruined it and have never done that again! So I dissolved the 2T in cold water first — it turned out great so I’m hoping that was the right way to do it. Someone share cornstarch secrets with me! I love love love making thick shiny Chinese sauces, so I really want to know how to work with it the right way. And is there an advantage to arrowroot? I’m off to Google… 

Get this book and make this chicken! Yum.

Gingerbread Cookies from How it all Vegan November 1, 2009

HIAV Ginger Snaps

 

Seriously delicious cookies, especially with a nice lemon icing drizzled on top. (When a sugar icing sets up on baked goods into a soft but solid white topping, it has to be one of the most satisfying things on the planet.) These are called gingersnaps in the book, but mine turned our really cake-like. Eight huge cakey gingery delicious cookies.

 

Happy Hippie Bowls October 29, 2009

Okay, that’s not even a real thing. Happy Hippie Bowls. Or it’s not an original thing, that’s for sure. I was really craving one of the fabulous vegan bowls from Cafe Yumm just outside of Portland. Or one of the equally fabulous vegan bowls from The Whole Bowl right on Hawthorne.

But I’m trying to figure out my life through cooking, right? Not through take-out. So I decided to build some of my very own Happy Hippie Bowls.  Here’s how you do it:

1. Make some brown rice in your rice cooker
2. Make this incredible Yumm-knockoff sauce I found on Recipezaar. (See recipe below — I used cashews, put everything in my Kitchenaid high-speed blender, and whizzed it all up smooth, smooth, smooth. This sauce is just as delicious as the real thing! I subbed cashews for almonds because I had them and prefer them.  I omitted the soybeans with no problem and I also used only about 3 T of nutritional yeast.)
3. Saute a small amount of onions with some garlic and cumin, throw in your beans and some salsa
4. Build your bowls! Rice, beans, sauce, salsa, cabbage, carrots, avocado, cilantro.
5. Serve with chips for added deliciousness.

Da Sauce – http://www.recipezaar.com/Yummy-Sauce-297251

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup canola oil (preferably cold pressed)
• 1/2 cup almonds (for a creamier sauce, use almond flour)
• 1/3 cup nutritional yeast (available at Whole Foods grocery stores)
• 1/2 cup chickpeas or garbanzo beans, cooked
• 1/4 cup soybeans, cooked (not green edamame beans)
• 1/2 cup filtered water (important for flavor)
• 1/2 cup lemon juice (fresh is best)
• 1-2 garlic cloves (small to medium size)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 teaspoon dried cilantro

How It All Vegan: 10th Anniversary Edition October 24, 2009

HIAV Linda's Ginger Chicken

Making seitan is easy and rewarding. Once you can do it, you can’t believe you didn’t do it before. Kind of like… well, like other things in life. And, once you make seitan, you realize you are truly on your way to vegan cooking greatness. There is just something about it that makes you feel… fearless.

And, really, all you do is mix vital wheat gluten flour with water, knead it (a little kneading makes seitan that’s fork-tender and looser in structure; a vigorous kneading results in a smooth, sticky dough that will turn into chewy wheatmeat — I like it both ways), and simmer it in a flavorful liquid. This recipe from How it All Vegan has a wonderful simmering broth with nooch and soy sauce and herbs (I threw in some rosemary because I had some fresh). It is, dare I say, incredibly chickenish-smelling while cooking. But only the good parts of that smell, which are completely about the herbs and spices! Not the meat! Anyway, your house will smell like Sunday at Mom’s.

My cute spouse really loved this one. It’s salty and savory — NOT a sweet and sour dish at all, but the method is so good you should definitely use it as a base any time you want and just change up the sauce. I’d like to try it next time with a sweet and sour sauce. This one, though, was gingery and delicious. Try it out! 

For those seitan experts out there, please share your failsafe methods!

Isn’t it hard to be vegan? No, but I do sometimes miss tuna fish sandwiches… October 19, 2009

Vegan Vittles' Tempeh Tuna Salad

That was then… this is now, bay-bee!

I’ve never ever even made anything with tempeh before! But I took a chance and picked up a pack and a couple other ingredients for this simple and delicious — not to mention creamy, salty, crunchy, herby, tangy, incredible – tuna salad. If you ever get a craving for tuna fish like I do, then this is the recipe for you! Simply wonderful, especially with a little homemade pickle relish, which I happened to have in my fridge from that canning expedition I talked about a while back. Seriously, you won’t even be able to detect the missing mercury.

Caramel sauce over ice cream… October 19, 2009

My cute spouse wanted some caramel sauce to go over ice cream… I’ll try it, I said, dubiously. But don’t hold your breath.

Well, I googled “vegan caramel sauce” and a bunch of great-looking recipes came up but they seemed to call for corn syrup, which I didn’t have, and I really wanted to make the kind of caramel sauce that is a bit healthier – you know, sugar, butter, and cream.

So I turned to Joy of Cooking.

I’d never done anything radical like melt a cup of sugar and 1/4 cup of water into syrup and boil it (covered for two minutes, then uncovered) until it turns a beautiful amber and thickens into gooey romance and then take it off the heat and add an entire stick of butter and some heavy cream and a little vanilla. And, well, all I can say is, I have now! Using Earth Balance and Mimicreme, of course. The result? Pure heaven. HEAVEN. Next time, I’ll probably add a little less butter and cream — I’m guessing that the water content in my vegan versions was higher, making my final product slightly thinner than the original. Easy to modify for next time and it was still the type of thing that’ll make you swoon and long for a little alone time with a carton of SoDelicious peanut butter and chocolate ice cream and a vat of your homemade vegan caramel sauce.

I like recipes that teach you stuff… October 16, 2009

I really am a beginner cook, that’s for sure. I don’t feel comfortable just throwing things in a dish, slinging it into the oven, and hoping for the best. I’d like to be that way, though, which is why I like recipes like this one… Gardener’s Pie from Vegan Vittles, which is the cookbook for this week’s PPK Cookbook Challenge. It’s a really basic recipe that you could use as a foundation for throwing together your own uber-comforting casserole.

What you need to know is… saute an onion or two in oil with some garlic until soft, maybe ten minutes. Then, off the heat, you add some flour — a 1/2 cup — and mix it around with some herbs and salt and pepper and whisk in about 1 1/2 cups of non-dairy milk. I used some soy and some almond because that’s what I had. Heat until thick, stirring and stirring. Add your vegetables and tofu, enough to fill up your casserole dish. Any kind you want! Next time I will pre-bake my tofu for added pizzazz. The recipe calls for topping with yummy potato buds, but I prefer real mashed potatoes so that’s what I did. Wow! Improvisation!

Do you guys have recipes that taught you how to cook by heart? I have VERY VERY few — hummus, refried beans, maybe pesto… but I will say that all this cooking for the cookbook challenge has helped me feel comfortable making substitutions. I’m slowly learning!

Trying to be a healthy vegan… October 14, 2009

So, a lot of us vegans start really getting into cooking and reading about food and veganism and, though we LOVE to indulge and create beautiful scrumptious decadent meals and we should NEVER EVER stop doing that, all of this cooking and reading about food and food issues tends to make us more aware of nutrition and what it means to live a healthy life. So we really want to take good care of ourselves, all the while living a decadent life. Also, if I may paint with a broad brush here, it seems to me that if you care about things like animals and the environment, you might have a tendency to be a bit sensitive so taking care of your health becomes even MORE important, so that you can stay positive and energetic.

Below are the things I would like to do to be a healthy and happy person. Doing these things makes me FEEL much much better and saner in my head. So my question for you, internet gurus, is why is it so damn hard (for some of us) to DO good-for-you things consistently and what are your tips for making it easier? Let’s talk about this. I’d also like to hear YOUR goals as they relate to health.

1) Walk for an hour 3x per week

2) Go to yoga once per week

3) Run 2x per week

4) Eat a smoothie and a big salad every day to make sure I’m getting 9 servings of fruits and vegetables

5) Cook 3 new recipes per week/Eat at home more often