Category: food

How to warm up

Brrr it got cold here! Saturday I was being stubborn and didn’t want to turn on the heat. So I baked a bunch of oatmeal cookies to warm up the house. Then I broke down and turned on the heat anyway. The animals were really happy about that. There were cats draped over floor registers all over the house. Now I’ve got too many cookies in my house. That’s a terrible problem, I know. These have chocolate chips, white chocolate chips and walnuts in ’em. I don’t hate raisins, but I prefer not to have them in my oatmeal cookies. Not sure why that is.

Sloppy Joannas

Still working off of my store of ingredients, Friday I poked around to see what I could make for dinner. I was going to make cheesesteaks again, but when I defrosted my chunk of seitan it didn’t smell quite right. When in doubt, throw it out. So what else to do with these sub rolls? Sloppy Joannas from Yellow Rose Recipes popped in my brain. I’d never made them but sure enough I had all the ingredients. Well, I didn’t have tomato sauce but I had tomato paste. Dilute with some water and tada! tomato sauce. Just for fun I tossed on some cheddar Daiya.

These were pretty good. They didn’t totally rock my world. I probably need to adjust the seasoning to my taste. They’re probably spot on for sloppy joes and I just didn’t eat those very often. Actually, I haven’t had since I was a kid. Kevin thought the Daiya tasted kind of weird with the sandwich innards. I didn’t think it was that off.

Also, the frozen french green beans from Trader Joe’s rule. They are going to become a freezer staple for me.

Bourbon black-eyed peas

One of the fun things about VeganMoFo is how it inspires you to try different things. This week, I only made a minimal soy milk and cereal run so dinners had to come from ingredients on hand. Of course, I could probably live for 6 months on my hoarded ingredients, but still. One meal’s inspiration came from Jessy’s bourbon baked beans post. I had sweet potatoes and collards on hand. And a bag of frozen black-eyed peas. Sure, those will work. And work they did! Kevin thought they were a tad sweet. I can see possibly cutting back the sweetness and/or adding something sharp like a bit of cider vinegar. But all in all this was a perfect fall meal.

Pasta in cheezy sauce

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.