Category: recipe

Chipotle-kissed Red Beans and Sweet Potato Chili

No, I’m not done with the bowls but I did save some other posts to break them up a bit so it wasn’t bowl, bowl, bowl, bowl, bowl….

Slow cookers are awesome if you don’t know that already. You can turn dried beans into a big pile of mouth-watering bits to eat as is or freeze in batches to use in recipes. All without pot watching. Nothing better than getting home from work to find your kitchen already smells delicious.

This one is Chipotle-kissed Red Beans and Sweet Potato Chili from Robin Robertson’s Fresh From the Vegetarian Slow Cooker. Look at that color! If you follow the recipe it’s pretty mild, so punch up the hot stuff if you like to feel the burn. And there’s only a little bit of oil in the whole pot so it’s pretty much just a bowl of goodness. Not pictured: unhealthy bread or corn bread slathered with Earth Balance.

 

 

This Potluck Had a Theme

Over some silly conversation at a previous potluck we joked around about having a potluck with a theme that was a topic of conversation. I debated revealing the theme since there are going to be some folks dropping by for Vegan Mofo that aren’t expecting that sort of strangeness, but fuck it, Mofo or no this is my blog and if someone is offended they can just not come back, right? This is also the warning for the easily offended to stop reading, don’t click any links, and just look at the food pics and move on. Actually some of the pictures are pretty silly. Best just skip it.

Anyway, at this potluck, we got onto the topic of docking. Not the horrible practice of docking dogs’ tails. Not parking a boat. Something else entirely. What foods could we use to represent that? So this potluck represents the result. Some of the food strayed off topic a bit, but not too far.

So I made artichoke and hazelnut cannelloni with lemon soy bechamel sauce or docking stations.

My plate loaded with tasty bits: a docking station, fish taco, wiener in a blanket…

You can never have too much dessert, so we had three. Vegan Twinkies. Yes, we’re all 12-year-old boys.

I also made the chocolate strudel from Vegan Italiano.

Ice cream sandwiches!

Queenie was unimpressed with the theme, but loved all the extra attention she got.

Then we headed to the roof to check out the view of Atlanta. Look at my crappy picture. LOOK AT IT.

 

 

 

 

A Beefy Stew

Oh, hey Vegan Mofo people. So I was warning folks earlier this week that most food I’ve cooked lately has come in bowls. And I wasn’t even kidding. The top rack of my dishwasher is full of bowls and there are two plates in the bottom part. Ridiculous. But something about the turn to Fall makes me immediately start craving soups and stews. And it isn’t even really cool yet. It’s just no longer unbearably hot. Which is a good thing.

There are a few beefy type stews I enjoy making. This happens to be the one from Vegan Vittles, the Chuckwagon Stew. Instead of the tempeh, I used about a half a cup or so of dehydrated faux beef chunks and just tossed them in and let them rehydrate in the stew. I also tossed about a half a cup of frozen peas in towards the end of cooking for extra vegetabular goodness.

 

 

French White Bean and Cabbage Soup

Apparently I’m really excited about Fall and Fall foods. My last photo upload into wordpress was pretty much all bowls of food. Soup, stew, chili. Maybe I’ll get them posted before Vegan Mofo starts so I don’t have to rename the blog “Look at this bowl of crap I’m eating!”

Dried beans have been on sale at Kroger so I stocked up. They’re not that useful unless you cook them. So I soaked and slow cooked a pound of white beans. Now it’s time for a white bean party. The internets told me about this recipe for French White Bean and Cabbage Soup. I just realized when I looked up the recipe for the link that I totally forgot the parsley and liquid smoke. It was good anyway, but I have one more serving left so I’ll add those goodies and see if it becomes Next Level. This is the kind of soup that might make a good stand in for the traditional sick day chicken soup. Nice and brothy with just enough potato and bean for it to be reasonably filling. That grilled cheese with Daiya on the side helped with that also.

Oh yeah, I’m working on getting my blogroll back up. I lost it when I switched hosts and am trying to recreate from my Google Reader feeds. I’ll probably go up in pieces so consider it a work in progress.

 

 

Pasta with Chinese Tahini Sauce

Do you remember your first vegetarian cookbook? One of my first ones if not the first one for me was Paulette Mitchell’s The 15-Minute Gourmet: Vegetarian. I was a student at San Francisco State University at the time and picked it up at the bookstore there. It ended up being my go to book when I first became vegetarian. My copy is covered in stains from use. While not vegan, it has a few recipes that I still use that are vegan. It’s perfect for people that aren’t that in to cooking, need quick-cooking meals and don’t want to run around town looking for special ingredients.

The Pasta with Chinese Tahini Sauce is one of those fall back meals for me. The ingredients keep well so you can push off cooking it another week if need be without anything spoiling. And it is done in the time it takes for the pasta to cook. It went well with leftover cabbage crunch from the potluck and gomashio sprinkled on top.