Category: vegan/veggie/ar

I’ve been lazy about posting food pics. Before any more pile up, let me toss ’em on up here. These peanut butter oatmeal cookies from Vegan With A Vengeance rock. I made some as a congratulations present for a friend and then was left with more than I was comfortable having in the house. So I took them to a work meeting and they were gobbled down. Then I told everyone they’re vegan. Heh. See? Not all grass and twigs.

Here’s the Tofu Scramble from Vegan With A Vengeance, Mexican style, about a half cup of salsa stirred in at the end. With it is leftover Green Mexican Rice (yeah, not very green) from Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure that I took to a potluck. It ended up being a little dry. I have other similar recipes that aren’t done in the pressure cooker and I think they’d probably work better.

I’m still powering my way through Vegan Italiano. This is the Cannellini Beans with Grilled Radicchio, except those are navy beans instead of cannellini. I don’t think it makes much of a difference. Another winner from this cookbook. I’ve been all about stews and beans lately. They go nicely with cold weather. I seem to be in some sort of cooking grove lately. Eating out has been pretty rare lately. Soul Veg is probably worried about me.

The recipes in Vegan Italiano so far seem to be pretty easy. Maybe that’s just the ones I’ve picked to cook. Still I think this is a good cookbook for begining to intermediate cooks.

This is the Winter Vegetable Stew. What a great way to use cabbage. If you’re looking to save some money, this is a really inexpensive, tasty dish. Everything comes out infused with classic Italian flavors. I usually think of a stew being a little more juicy. Concerned that this would start to stick to the pot, I ended up adding about 1/2 cup of water early on. That seems to have been the right amount. The flavor didn’t seem to suffer.

Later in the week I made the Rotelle with Fennel and Cherry Tomatoes. This is a great “I don’t feel like cooking” dish. Especially if you use canned cherry tomatoes as I did…DeKalb Farmers Market carries a brand that is really tasty. There is very little chopping involved and only 1 pot. It’s done in about 20 minutes. And I love fennel so I’m always happy to have another way to use it. I know, these aren’t rotelle. I got these mezzi rigatoni instead.

It’s kind of hard to think about comforting winter soups when it’s going to be near 70 degrees today. But it looks like winter temps are headed our way again, at least for night, so I can go ahead and plot my next soup. This week I made Lentils and Pastina Soup from Vegan Italiano. It had all the standard ingredients you’d expect to find in your basic lentil soup. I used orzo for the small pasta and it adds a nice texture difference in your mouth when slurping it down.

Thought I’d better get a shot of this banana bread before it disappears. As you can see, that’ll be really soon. I have bounced around and tried many different banana bread recipes. Usually making banana bread is spur of the moment. (oh shit, those bananas are about to liquify. guess i’m not going to eat them. time for banana bread!) So, which recipe I use is generally dependant on ingredients I have on hand. This one is from How It All Vegan and is probably one of the best I’ve made. It’s moist on the inside, browned on the outside. No spices involved so it really focuses on the banans. The recipe called for dates but I used walnuts instead. And it includes wheat germ which doesn’t hippy it up at all…you don’t even notice it after it’s baked.