veganmofo Archives - Page 4 of 4

The best vegan Parmesan

“Being vegan is so expensive!”

We’ve all heard that one, right? And it’s easy to see how people might think that. If you look on the store shelves at straight vegan substitutes, the price differential can be alarming.

Let’s look at Parmesan cheese. Many of us probably grew up with the familiar green shaker container of Parmesan that came out every time you had something in an Italian red sauce for dinner. This stuff is pretty cheap due to subsidies, factory farming etc.

conventional parmesan cheese

Now, if you just grab a straight vegan substitute off the shelf, it’ll be about three times the price of the conventional version. Ouch.

vegan parmesan parma

Yellow Rose Recipes by Joanna Vaught But guess what? You can make your own vegan Parmesan! If you search online, you’ll find a number of recipes, but Joanna Vaught‘s from Yellow Rose Recipes is my absolute favorite. Unlike some of the other vegan Parmesan recipes, Joanna’s includes walnuts which give you Omega-3 fatty acids.

Speaking of Joanna and Yellow Rose Recipes, keep an eye on her website. If you weren’t lucky enough to get a copy of Yellow Rose Recipes before it went out of print, she’ll be posting all the recipes on her site! The Butternut Squash Lasagna will impress the most skeptical omnivores. Make extra spice mixture in her Cajun Spiced Tofu recipe to keep on hand so you can bust that tofu out even faster. And make “chicken” and waffles with her Crispy Beer-Battered Seitan. Oh man.

Joanna kindly gave me permission to post her Vegan Parmesan recipe here for Vegan Mofo. I always have a shaker in my fridge and have been known to use it on Mexican food.

To save even more money on ingredients, shop in the bulk bins. If you can find broken cashew pieces, those are often cheaper than whole ones.

Vegan Parmesan

vegan parmesan

by Joanna Vaught published in Yellow Rose Recipes

Makes 2 cups, or exactly 1 used 5 oz. nutritional yeast jar full (reduce, reuse, recycle!)

Ingredients

1/2 cup walnuts
1/2 cup raw cashews
1/2 cup brown rice flour (I’ve substituted other flours like whole wheat when I’ve been out. Still works great.)
1/2 cup nutritional yeast
1 TBS garlic powder
2 tsp salt

Combine all ingredients in food processor and process until fine crumbs. Will last up to a month in an airtight container in your fridge.

Lazy, cheap vegan curry

Yes, we do have a pretty decent range of vegan options when eating out in Atlanta, and you’ll be seeing many of them this month. But if you like to cook, Atlanta is also well-stocked with almost any international ingredient you might want. And we have most of the major chains that carry the foods vegans want and need, like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s.

This post starts at Trader Joe’s. I go there every six weeks or so. They’ve got great prices on frozen fruit for smoothies, tempeh, tofu, chorizo and non-dairy milks. And lazy food. The lazy food isn’t necessarily that cheap, but it’s cheaper than going out.

So I got my staples and I’m in the canned food aisle looking for lazy food that’s vegan. An employee asks if I need help because I might have been at that hangry stage and unable to make any decisions. So I said I was looking for lazy food. That’s vegan. One of the things he showed me was this vegan Curry Simmer Sauce.

trader joe's vegan curry simmer sauce

I did a quick mental inventory of what kinds of vegetables were in the fridge. Yes, this will work. When it came time to make it for dinner, I started a pot of rice. And then heated a little bit of olive oil in a pot. To that, I added half a chopped onion. Once softened, I poured in the jar of sauce plus the one cup of water it says to add, then a sliced carrot, a diced russet potato, a can of chickpeas and about a cup of frozen green beans. If this doesn’t sound lazy enough for you, you can always just use a bag of frozen peas and carrots and a can of chickpeas. The onion isn’t necessary at all.

vegan curry

All this simmered covered until the potatoes were tender.

Remember earlier when I was talking about international ingredients? If you’ve ever been frustrated because your curries don’t taste like the ones you get in Indian restaurants, one thing you are probably missing is asofoetida or hing. This is the one I have. I added about a half a teaspoon to the curry, but it would be fine without it.

asofoetida or hing

I got this jar at the now closed Taj Mahal market, but Patel Brothers is sure to have it. Another place to try is Buford Highway Farmer’s Market.

The curry came out nice. Much better than those vacuum sealed meal packets you can get. And five minutes of chopping made a much fresher tasting meal than that. This is a great option if you don’t have the space or patience to keep a bunch of spices around. Oh, and this jar was less than $3 and with the vegetables I added made 4-6 servings.

The quickest trip to Asheville for vegan eats and nature

About eight months after the bakery opened, I had to get out of town, even if just for one night. So Sunday after we closed, we zipped home, grabbed a bag and the dog and headed to Asheville.

We were staying at the Aloft Hotel which allows dogs. Not just allows, but caters to them with treats, toys and beds. Tak, of course, slept IN the bed because that’s what she does. Here she is enjoying the view of the pool we wouldn’t be using in February:

Tak enjoying the view at the Aloft in Asheville

Sunday night, we ate at Laughing Seed Cafe and I’m embarrassed to say that I completely failed to take pictures. We were exhausted and I totally didn’t think about it. The food was delicious though, I promise.

The next morning, we had breakfast at The Green Sage downtown which was just a short walk from the hotel. First up, gotta get in that caffeine:

Then I had the vegan version of the Green Sage Plate, tofu scramble, kale, a biscuit with mushroom gravy and sweet potato home fries:

green sage plate

After we fueled up, we went to enjoy some easy trails at The North Carolina Arboretum. I like to walk by water, so we picked a trail by a creek. Tak also enjoys the water.

Tak enjoying the North Carolina Arboretum trails

After all that walking, we earned a big ol’ lunch at Rosetta’s Kitchen. Kevin has brought me back food from Rosetta’s but I hadn’t ever actually eaten there.

We started with the Tempalo Wings:

rosetta's kitchen vegan tempalo wings

Yes, they’re as good as they look. Since I’ve had the peanut butter tofu before, and actually have the recipe and make it often, I went for a tofu avocado wrap. But I think Kevin got the peanut butter tofu, because someone had to.

tofu avocado wrap at rosettal's kitchen

Did I leave room for cake? Damn straight I did! I think this is some kind of peanut butter and chocolate cheesecake. I also had a glass of Buchi, they have it on tap. I’m not sure how it escaped being photographed.

vegan cake at rosetta's kitchen

And after this, we waddled over to French Broad Chocolates and bought pretty much everything they had that was vegan, bars and made on site. Because, vegan chocolate.

Sadly, that was all we had time to do. Next time I’m definitely going to try Plant. If you ever visit Asheville, there’s plenty of vegan food. All you have to do is check Happy Cow, like we vegans do, and plan your gluttony.

A bittersweet post

Recently I had to replace the hard drive in my MacBook Air. After I’d already decided I was doing Vegan Mofo. I caught the early signs of a failing hard drive, so nothing catastrophic happened, everything was backed up, and thanks to the cloud it was pretty easy to get up and running again.

My iPhoto library is kind of a bloated mess, so I’m probably going to end up manually choosing photos to import. That’s going to be time consuming, so I’m not going to deal with that right now. Instead, I just imported all the photos from my phone. Any past photos I want to use for blogging are on there anyway. If not, I know where to find them.

As I’m going through the photos I’d just imported from my phone, right early on in the first few is a set from Dough‘s holiday party the first year we were open, 2012. Ria Pell kindly hosted it at her second restaurant Sauced, just down the street from us. It was a more upscale place than her signature Ria’s Bluebird, but totally cozy even in its coolness. We’d actually looked at that spot for Dough, but decided it was going to take more work than we could handle. But she made it beautiful and brought out its best features.

Sadly, just a few months after our party, Ria passed away. Ria’s Bluebird lives on, but there will never be a replacement for Ria.

Sharing this special holiday meal she created for us seems like a perfect way to kick off Vegan Mofo. Oh, and keep in mind, she was not vegan, her restaurants were not, but she always took care of us well.

holiday menu at Sauced

The arugula kiwi salad:

Beans & Greens

Spaghetti squash in mushroom sauce

Eggplant Napoleon

Tempeh bacon, spinach & mashed potatoes

My blurry plate, one of them. I must have missed getting a picture of the brussels sprouts, but here they are!

Spiced soy ice milk with candied hazelnuts

Cardamom apple tart tatin

Yes, everything was amazing as it looks. And now I’m hungry.

Rising from the ashes for Vegan Mofo 2014

Yes, that’s right. I’ve gone and signed myself up for Vegan Mofo 2014. So I’ll be posting at least 5 days a week for the entire month of September. That seems a bit crazy at the moment, but as I thought about doing it, I easily came up with 10 post ideas. After 2 years of blog silence, I should be able to come up with something to talk about here. So yeah, I’m going to stop here so I don’t waste my words on a stupid post that doesn’t even count towards Vegan Mofoness. I’ll be back September 1st all covered in words and vegan food pictures. See you then!