Did we all survive another office holiday party season? For vegans, this usually sucks. If you’re lucky, you’ll get spaghetti with marinara or some sad steamed vegetables. Even at nice restaurants where you’d think the chef would have a little more pride. Just because we’re vegan doesn’t mean we lack taste buds.
My company doesn’t give a crap about the vegans that work here (no, I’m not the only one), so I don’t even bother going to work food events. Kevin’s company usually makes a pretty good effort. This year was really nice. The party was at The Mansion in Buckhead. Our entree was ravioli but the pasta part was celery root. The innards were tasty mushrooms. It came with various root veggies scattered around. Of course, I can’t remember what the sauce was, but it was good. See people, it’s not that freakin’ difficult!
Dinner in a flash seems to be a recurring theme around here. If it’s not so flashy that I’m having someone else cook it, it’s often something that takes little fiddling. Bonus if it’s something that I can keep around for a quick meal without worrying about it going bad.
Enter the easy vegan cheese sauce mix. Your Vegan Mom posted the recipe a while back and ever since I first whipped it up I try to keep some around. I always keep frozen peas and pasta of some sort in the house. And I always have soy milk. So half a cup of the mix, plus one cup of milk equals sauce. If you’re feeling fancy, add soy curls, tofu, chopped up seitan log, whatever. Here instead of the peas, we had spinach on the side and I tossed in some tofu leftovers I had. Really you can just dump whatever you like in it. I only wish I had a vitamix to get the mix more powdery. I think the sauce would come out smoother.
Apparently I can’t stop with the Daiya. I swear they aren’t paying me. Or even sending me free cheese. I’m not opposed to that though. 
How is it that there are so many styles of vegan mac & cheese that are so freakin’ good? You have ones based on nutritional yeast, cashews, whatever magic Soul Vegetarian puts in theirs, etc. So I had to see how Daiya would do. And the answer is, quite well thank you very much. Because I’m lazy, I used this recipe. I still had some lunch meat log so I chopped that up in place of the veggie ham. I also made a half batch so I wouldn’t be eating nothing but mac & cheese for two weeks, not that there’s anything wrong with that. When making it, I went with the lower amount of soy milk and I think I would like it saucier so next time I’ll try the higher amount at least. The taste was spot on though. I say this as someone that hasn’t eaten cheese in years, but I have been through a ton of vegan mac & cheeses and this one seems to hit closest to the blue box kind. I’d love to get the opinion of an omni or vegetarian on Daiya.
Seriously, how 70s does this plate look?
Last night I whipped out this recipe from Eat, Drink & Be Vegan. You can find the recipe here. I admit that I drizzled in a couple more tablespoons of olive oil, but it still has way less than a standard pesto recipe. And doesn’t it look like Spring? Yeah, I know basil is a Summer thing, but work with me here. Also, I only used half of the pesto on half a pound of pasta. The rest I froze in a bucket for an even quicker meal some time in the future.
Friday night we had a nice date night that started with Cafe Sunflower and then was followed by the symphony. We started with pear in a wine sauce with endive. No picture because I forgot. It was refreshing though. I had the ravioli with butternut squash (I think) and tofu ricotta. They’ve switched from using regular ricotta which rocks!
And Kevin got the lemon chicken.
Oh, and we split a piece of strawberry cake. But I was too interested in tearing into it to take a picture.
I’ve had pretty consistently good food at Cafe Sunflower over the years. My only complaint has been trying to find the hidden non-vegan items. But the server this night asked us right off if we were vegan and then gave us the whole rundown of the menu and what we could and couldn’t get or substitutions that could be made. Other vegetarian restaurants should take note if they’d like to gain the trust of vegans.
Even though I had my camera stolen and essential didn’t post the last week while preparing for the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival, I still somehow managed to get in more than 20 VeganMofo posts. Go me!
Anyway, I have a couple of posts in me to catch up. This one will be the random assortment of food pics I took.
This was a quickie dinner thanks to the cheezy sauce I blogged about before.
Cheezy pasta & green beans with garlic bread
This lovely grill thali from Madras Chettinaad was a tasty break from baking for the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival. By the way, this is one of my go to restaurants for mixed veg/non-veg company.
Grill Thali
I had some pumpkin in the freezer that I’d roasted and some home made stock, so I thought a pumpkin soup would be a good way to use some of that up. I started with this recipe, veganized it and skipped the cream/honey part at the end altogether. Also, a lot of the comments complained about it being bland, so I added a teaspoon of cayenne, a tablespoon of cumin and used ground cloves instead of whole so I wouldn’t have to try and fish them out later. The whole teaspoon of cayenne made it pretty spicy, so go lighter or skip it if you’re not into that. Monday night we ate this with grilled teese sammiches, but I failed to take a pic. So here it is with the pj&j as I ate it tonight. If I wasn’t lazy, I’d type this up in a nice new recipe, but I am, so there.
Oh, there’s more coming. A whole pile of Boston pics and another fabulous vegan potluck.
I’m not very good at throw together dinners unless it’s something like veggies, fake meat & mashed potatoes. Every week, I go through my cookbooks, pick things to make, make a list, go to the farmer’s market once and call it good. Kevin is a lot more free-form when it comes to cooking at home. I usually handle those details, but last night Kevin brought over some Soy Curls and Chik-Style Seasoning and said “I want to use these.”
Hmm…okay. I had planned a pasta with beets and I didn’t think the Soy Curls would go very well. So we switched things up. Kevin was in charge of the Soy Curls. He followed the directions for using the Chik seasoning with them. I remembered seeing a cheezy sauce I wanted to try so made that up. And then I boiled up the tri-color rotini I had along with some frozen broccoli. It all came together fairly quickly and turned out super yummy! And bonus, I now have cheezy sauce powder that I can mix up quickly at some future date. Yay!
Cheezy Soy Curls and Broccoli Pasta
Kevin always makes his food look better on the plate than I do. And you know, we both augmented the drizzled cheezy sauce with piled on cheezy sauce. Yum!
Hey, so if I used whole wheat penne in the Pumpkin Baked Ziti recipe from Veganomicon that makes it have, like, negative amounts of calories and fat, right? Right? Sigh, I guess not. It makes an ass-ton too, so I’ma need to freeze some of it. It kind of dirties a lot of dishes and takes a while, slightly less then 2 hours from start to face stuffing, but like the Butternut Squash Lasagna, it’s worth it. I even made the bread crumbs for it from a bread I tossed in my bread machine at the end of last week.
Pretty in the pan.
All messed up on my plate.
There are a few photos cluttering my desktop that I keep meaning to post. I say cluttering, but it isn’t like I ever see my desktop. It’s all open apps and exposé around here.
This is Summer Spaghetti with Corn and Tomatoes from Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone by Deborah Madison. I’ve had this cookbook for over ten years but still find myself going back to it. Yeah, it’s not exactly summer around here but sometimes you need to step away from the roots and indulge a little. I considered using canned tomatoes but was able to find some nice grape tomatoes and they were lovely. It also gave me a chance to use the Sunergia Soy Feta I picked up at Cosmo’s Vegan Shoppe. I never expect soy cheese to be spot on, but I found this to be a nice substitute. It doesn’t quite crumble like feta, but shredding works fine. And the smell seemed to have that requisite cheese stink. The little cardboard outer package for this has been sitting on my kitchen counter waiting for me to blog about this forever. I’m glad I can finally throw it in the recycling bin.
This is another one from Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone, Stir-Fried Bok Choy with Roasted Peanuts. To make it a main dish, I rehydrated some fake chicken pieces I picked up from the Asian market a while back. I can’t remember which variety of bok choy I ended up using. I tend to just choose whichever one looks good that day, or even a different sort of green. I think this might have been Shanghai bok choy though. This always comes out nice, but this time I actually used the called for peanut oil instead of just canola. It really does add flavor so I recommend doing that.
Oh, and another one from Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone. If I’d paid attention I could have said that once at the top, eh? This is the Posole with Red Chile Pods. We’re lucky enough to have a number of hispanic markets around here where you can find a bunch of different dried corn varieties. Here I used a red one. The base for this soup is very simple. It’s the condiments that really make it. Here I have cilantro, avocado, soy feta and a lime wedge piled on top. There are more suggestions in the recipe, but this combination suited me just fine.
Okay, so this isn’t so much a quick, throw it together on a weeknight after work kind of recipe. But it’s definitely worth all the pieces and parts that go into it. This is also the first time I’ve worked with a vegan béchamel sauce. It came out really nice. I was surprised. Makes me want to revisit some old ovo/lacto recipes I used to make. Oh yeah, I should say it’s from Yellow Rose Recipes. I’m tired or I’d rave more about it instead of just going to bed.
Loading ...