Category: recipe

Need some pomegranate ideas

A week or so ago I got an email from POM Wonderful offering to send me some of their products. Yay! Hey, it only took me 8 years of blogging to get offered some free stuff. And since they have stopped testing on animals, I agreed to receive whatever it is they wanted to send me. It turned out to be a case of 12 cute little bottles of pomegranate juice.

Okay, so what do I do with these? I drank one, of course. Duh. I already have pomegranate molasses for some Persian recipes I make from time to time. I need some ideas to save me from using the rest to make POMtinis. No one wants that. Googling around I did get a couple of ideas: Pomegranate and Maple Glazed Beets and Persephone Cupcakes. If you have any other ideas that use just the juice, not the seeds, drop ’em in the comments. Vegan, of course.

Forgetful

I keep forgetting to take pictures of food. I’m cooking food, I’m eating food, just not taking many pictures of it. Mostly it doesn’t matter, but I’m kind of bummed I forgot to take a pic of the Mini Wellingtons from Vegan Lunch Box that I made for Xmas dinner. I used some of the laminated dough I had made before that was hanging out in the freezer. The odd thing is that in the past I’ve had a lot of trouble with the Earth Balance oozing out of the dough and essentially frying rather than baking whatever I was making. That didn’t happen at all this time. Huh. I wonder if that’s because I froze and thawed it. More experimentation is necessary. 🙂

For breakfast Xmas morning, Kevin made pancakes. We had them with some Match Meat Breakfast Sausage and purple potato hash browns.

I also made a bunch of cookies that I’ve been trying to distribute before they all go in my mouth. There were white chocolate macadamia nut cookies, chewy chocolate raspberry cookies from Veganomicon and gingerbread cookies. I’m dumb and only took a picture of the gingerbread cookies:

With the extra time off, I tried to make a few items to freeze. The recipe floating around for Apple Sage Sausage caught my eye, so one day I whipped those up. So far, we’ve eaten them for breakfast in a sort of hash form with more purple potatoes and a bit of red bell pepper. The colors are so pretty!

Because there weren’t enough sweets in the house with all those cookies hanging around, I decided to make Egg Nog Cupcakes. Well, Soy Nog Cupcakes. Other than REALLY wanting to stick to the pan, they came out great. Also, I left the booze out of the frosting and made up for it with more Soy Nog, although I don’t think it needed the extra liquid. I gave a bunch away at work so I wouldn’t eat them all.

Random Collection of Food

I don’t feel very writey right now, but here are a few food pics that have been piling up.

The Cajun Tofu from Yellow Rose Recipes has turned out to be a great quick week night dinner star. Once you have the spice mixture around, the rest can be made up of staples I keep around. This time we had it with some of the collards that are filling my freezer and some hash browns that cooked up quicker because I diced ’em smaller. Oh, and that’s a little bowl of home made apple sauce.

When I saw this fairly quick recipe for bread bowls, I knew I’d eventually be dumping come Cholent from Veganomicon into them. I was right! The dry milk powder was replaced with soy milk powder.

Trying to keep the healthy cruise diet going, I baked up some Asian tofu and ate it on a salad of raw kale and bok choy seasoned with sesame oil.

And finally, this Peanut Butter Quick Bread recipe looked interesting. I thought it would be even more interesting as Peanut Butter and Jelly Bread. So that’s what I did. The bread itself is not all that sweet like a lot of quick breads, so the jelly does not make it too sweet. I veganized by using a flax egg and soy milk as replacements. The recipe worked in both bread and muffin form.

Match Meat Chicken stuffed with spinach

We had a package of the Match Meat Chicken hanging out in the freezer so I decided to see if there was something I could make with it without having to go to the store. Match Meat Chicken stuffed with spinach was it! You’ll find the recipe here, but you can’t link directly to individual recipes, so just find it in the list and click. The only change I made was to season the meat with salt, pepper, oregano and a little garlic powder before dividing and filling. Oh yeah, I also browned them on the George Foreman grill before baking rather than pan frying. These were really easy and so good! They look like something you spent way more time on than you did. See how pretty it is?

The broccoli is just steamed broccoli, but the potatoes are a new product Cosmo’s is carrying, Instant Organic Mashed Potatoes by Edward & Sons. We tried the roasted garlic version. They were good and practically instant. If you aren’t into cooking, are in a hurry, or just need another quick component to your meal, these might be a good option for you. I’m probably too cheap to use them all that often though because I don’t mind making mashed potatoes.

Papa Chorizo Frittata

Or, how to use up that half a package of veggie chorizo languishing in your freezer. I’ve been really happy with veggie omelet, quiches, etc. that I’ve tried in the past. So when I saw Alicia’s recipe, Papa Chorizo Frittata, I immediately marked it for future use. Tofu, potatoes, chorizo, roasted red peppers….what’s not to like? Plus, it’s gorgeous!

It was missing something green, and since I like to be a bit balanced, I picked up some callaloo at the market this weekend since they actually had it. If you haven’t tried this green, do. It’s really tasty. I ended up using a jamaican recipe as a vague guideline, but deviated quite a bit, so I’ll go ahead and tell you what I did.

 

  • 4 cups callaloo, washed and chopped
  • ¼ cup boiling water
  • 2 tablespoons sun-dried tomatoes, not the oil packed ones
  • 1 med. onion, chopped
  • 1 tablespoon oil
  • 1 garlic clove, minced
  • ½ teaspoon dried thyme
  • ¼ teaspoon salt, or to taste

Cover the sun-dried tomatoes with the boiling water. Set aside.

Add oil to a large deep-sided skilled heated on med-high heat. Add onion. Cook stirring occasionally until softened. Add garlic. Cook a minute more. Add tomatoes and their water and thyme. Stir. Add callaloo and cover pan. After a couple of minutes, callaloo should be wilted. Stir and replace cover. Cook a few more minutes until callaloo is tender but still bright green. Salt to taste.
Here’s the happy dinner: Papa Chorizo Frittata, Callaloo and sliced oat bread I made this weekend.