Category: vegan/veggie/ar

Cold Weather Food

I thought yesterday morning was cold. Especially when Grover escaped as I was letting when I let Tak out for her first pee. Chasing him around the yard for ten minutes all bleary eyed at 5:30am was not much fun. He runs, he meows, he runs some more. I think he finally let me catch him when he realized he was cold. It’s a good think he’s a handsome cat. See?

 

Im too sexy for my fur, too sexy for my fur...
I'm too sexy for my fur, too sexy for my fur...

On to food. If you haven’t made the Cholent from Veganomicon, this is the perfect time for it. After chasing Mr. Short Bus cat around the yard, I swear I would have eaten this for breakfast if I’d had any left. So warming and satisfying. The tvp chunks have the perfect chew to them. It’s like the stew my mom made growing up without all the death. Hell, next time I might even make it with biscuits on top like she did if I don’t make it into a pot pie form. 

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.

Corndog Bread, what?

Okay, so I still have a serious backlog of VeganMofo posts to read. But I have made it through a bunch of posts and marked a ton for future fixin’. One of those was Corndog Bread. Oh hell yeah! I knew I’d have to get on that pretty soon. And soon was a few days ago. There’s really nothing to it. I just cooked 4 veggie dogs on the George Foreman, sliced them and tossed them in a standard cornbread recipe. I think I used the one in Veganomicon. Next time, I think I’ll try it with seitan sausages for a more grown-up flavor. But I bet kids would go nuts over this. And what better to go with it than roasted sweet potatoes and a big pile o’ collards!

Adventures in Fake Tuna

A while back I picked up a package of May Wah fake tuna and tossed it in my freezer. I had to wait until Kevin went out of town to use it because I knew he’d hate it.

So last week, I busted it out and made a Tuna Salad for sammiches. I put in the standard tuna salad things: onion, celery, veganaise and I also tossed in some shredded carrot to sneak in a little more veg. It seriously looks just like tuna. But isn’t as fishy and doesn’t totally have a flaky texture like tuna. It’s still wheat gluten like.

So here’s my bachelorette dinner: tuna salad sammich and the end of a bag of frozen spinach mixed with cauliflower and peas.

Boston Vegetarian Food Festival

It’s hard to believe that this time last week I was frantically putting out baked goods samples for a packed room full of people shuffling by our table. Aside from a couple of disasters like having a whole box of whoopie pies arrive destroyed and running out of food way too early, I think it went fairly well. Everything seemed to be well received. The cinnamon rolls & Teese bread were the first to go. Leigh has a great post about our adventures, so I’ll be lazy and point you over there. Kevin and I shared a room with Leigh & Ken and Josh Hooten. Normally I’d say I’m too old for those kinds of sleeping arrangements, but it worked out just fine. 

What I will do is give a run down of what I ate in Boston. Which wasn’t all that much with all the travel and stress. But we still managed a couple of restaurant visits.

Friday night we went to T.J. Scallywaggle’s. It’s a vegan pizza place. It has limited seating and probably does most business as take out. I had a chicken parmesan sub.

Kevin ordered the cheeseburger pizza.

We were starving, so any food was good food. I traded half my sub for a couple of pieces of Kevin’s pizza. I think my biggest complaint would be that the sauce wasn’t very flavorful. I like my pizza sauce to be a little bit spicy. More complex. I wish I could remember what the crust was like because that’s also a huge part of what makes a pizza good. But I was totally in scarf mode.

At the festival, after we ran out of stuff to sell and give away, Kevin ran off and got us a falafel wrap and some Teese nachos from the Chicago Soy Dairy guys. The falafel was pretty good, but no Ali Baba’s. The new Teese nacho sauce is pretty amazing. It seems to melt to the perfect texture. I think it wants some spicing up though. Still it gives you a great base to season the way you like.

Saturday night we all dragged our exhausted selves to My Thai for vegan Thai food goodness. We’d been drooling over a menu all day and were really excited at the concept of all those yummy Thai options. We we got there, Eric Prescott was working. We’d met him earlier at the show, and he ended up helping our table. It was kind of surreal. I think he probably doesn’t sleep with all that he has going on. We were also joined by Sarah Kramer and Jae Steele. We’d been hanging out with them a bit here and there throughout the weekend. Both of them are totally sweet.

We started with stuffed fried wontons. Yummy!

And then, my entree arrived, Mee Krob. It was HUGE. To be fair, about a third of the plate was greens. Still, I powered my way through most of it. There were so many wonderful flavors on my plate. The lemongrass beef had many layers of complexity. The rice paper stack I got was stuck together, so I gave up pretty quickly on making little rolls. Still, I enjoyed stacking my fork with various combinations of things from my plate so each bite was a little different.

We were disappointed that we wouldn’t be able to get a proper brunch because our flight left fairly early. We did get bagels with tofu spread. Of course, I can’t remember the name. I had the veggie tofu spread and thought it was pretty tasty.