Category: food

Winging a chili mac

Not every meal is planned. Sometimes you look around your kitchen and see what you can do with what you’ve got. This was one of those meals. Pasta, black beans, Daiya, tomatoes, tomato paste, bell pepper, onion, a jalapeño … sounds like a chili mac! And indeed it was.

Chili powder, garlic, cumin, cayenne, maybe some oregano … sorry, this is definitely no recipe.

If you find yourself afraid to stray from recipes, just keep cooking things. Once you’ve cooked enough things you will eventually be able to collect ingredients and make a meal out of them without outside help.

Christmas Day/Birthday dinner

Christmas Day we celebrated not working and Nick’s birthday with a chill traditional dinner. Vegan of course. Nick was surprised that Danielle made him a cookie cake that he’d mentioned wanting months ago.

And here it is! Cute and delicious.

We found Christmas Vacation moose mugs, so those had to be busted out.

We brought the green bean casserole, a vat of gravy and sweet potatoes with marshmallow topping.

Crescent rolls.

My starter plate. I guess I was easing into it. There’s some tofurky under that gravy.

Potato-Kale Soup with Sizzling Chorizo

How do you take a simple potato-kale soup to the next level? Toss some chorizo on top! Which is exactly what Terry Hope Romero does in the Potato-Kale Soup with Sizzling Chorizo recipe in Viva Vegan! It was so good I ate the whole batch over the course of a week for various meals. Instead of making chorizo, I just picked up some from Trader Joe’s. It worked great but I did use it more sparingly since it’s kind of oily.

Also, Kale is awesome. Cooked or raw.

Christmas Eve pizza party

If you get a pizza craving on Christmas Eve, you might just be shit out of luck. Pizza places around here closed early, and I don’t blame them. But back to that pizza craving. Throw your own pizza party! Which is what we did. We bought a bunch of dough balls and had people bring toppings. Then made up a bunch of pizzas.

First out, pepperoni!

How about spinach, sausage and onion?

And a … crap, I don’t remember what this was. Update! Kevin tells me this was the baked potato pizza.

The Mexican deep dish pizza.

And a cheezeburger pizza topped with onion rings. Epic, right?

Looks like I failed to get pictures of the baked potato pizza and the chili dog pizza. Dang it.

Sweet and Spicy Seitan-Potato Empanadas

Viva Vegan! has been in my possession for a while, but I really haven’t made much out of it yet. So when planning the weekly shopping recently, I picked out two recipes to make. The Sweet and Spicy Seitan-Potato Empanadas was the first one. I’d already stocked the freezer with a couple of packages of vegan empanada wrappers so these went a little faster than if you had to make those too.

Kevin doesn’t like olives, so I left those out. Instead of making seitan, I just rehydrated some beefy TVP chunks. They worked beautifully. The more you cook, the more you get a feel for easy substitutions.

Just a little steamed broccoli on the side to round out the meal. This was lunch. The seams held up really well. Only a couple leaked.