abracapocus

Time for another Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale!

Hey kids! You all like tasty vegan baked goods, right? Then you don’t want to miss this year’s Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale! This year, Cosmo’s Vegan Shoppe is hosting the sale at their space in Marietta, Georgia Saturday, May 1st noon – 4pm to give those OTP folks a chance to get some tasty vegan baked goods. I’m donating some goodies…of course I can’t remember what I said I was bringing except banana cream pies. Yep, gonna make some mini vegan banana cream pies. You don’t want to miss that, do you? You can also promote and RSVP to the event on Facebook here.

The Metro Atlanta Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale will benefit Ahimsa House. Ahimsa House is dedicated to helping the human and animal victims of domestic violence across Georgia reach safety together.

Thanks Steph Timms for once again creating a super cute flyer for the sale.

The bake sales are being held all over the world, so check here to find out when and where one is being held near you.

Peanut Butter Baked Tofu

I’ve never been to Rosetta’s Kitchen in Asheville, NC but everyone raves about it and especially the Peanut Butter Baked Tofu. [oh man, sorry folks, that link went bad.] The recipe is crazy simple. My only complaint is that it came out pretty salty, even for me, and I like salt. It’s probably because I used tamari instead of regular soy sauce. Next time I’ll try soy sauce and if it’s still too salty cut the soy sauce with stock for the third try. Bonus, the leftovers made a nummy sammich.

Black-eyed Pea Masala

I love Indian food. Asafetida seems to be the magical ingredient that pushes a dish from close to spot on. If you like to cook Indian, do yourself a favor and secure some. One jar will last you forever.

This recipe is one I saved in my RSS reader to try some time. I have tons and tons of stuff waiting to be tried. This one worked nicely because I was also trying to clean out my freezer a bit and had a bag of frozen black-eyed peas to use. If you use those instead of the dried called for, you can skip the soaking step. You could also used canned and it might cook a little faster. Just for fun and added nutritional value, I tossed in some chopped fresh collards. I mean, they go with black-eyed peas, right? Right! It was perfect. We ate this over brown basmati.

Vegan Breakfast Biscuit

One of the things that’s not really available around here is a good vegan breakfast sandwich. At least, not yet. But you can make your own. And it’s not all that hard, either. Especially with all the great products that are on the market now. I already had a package of Match Vegan Meats Breakfast Sausage left over from the batch they sent me to make holiday loafs. And Chicago Soy Dairy sent me some Teese to play with for their blogger challenge.

So here was my plan. Tall fluffy biscuits. This recipe made the fluffy awesomeness you see in the photo. For the “egg”, I started with Susan’s crustless tofu quiche recipe. I omitted the bell pepper, mushrooms, chives and rosemary and replaced the fresh garlic with a 1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder since I wasn’t going to fry it up. Then, instead of baking them in a muffin pan, I spread it out in a rectangular baking pan then cut into squares to go on the muffin. The Match was just formed into patties, fried in a pan with only salt and pepper as seasoning. To assemble, the biscuit was split, a couple of thin slices of the Teese creamy cheddar was put on the top half and then I slid it under to broiler to melt. Sausage and tofu egg was placed on the bottom half then everything was put together once the Teese was melty.

These were amazing! I do have a couple of changes I’d make though. I made 3 oz. sausage patties which were a little too much. 2 oz. might be thin enough. I’d try to make the tofu egg a little dryer. Maybe half the soy milk and cook it a little longer. And I’d probably switch to regular cheddar Teese so it would contain a little less moisture.

POM Smoothie

Since we got back from our gorgefest in NYC in November, I switched to a smoothie for breakfast instead of cereal. And I guess it’s a habit now because I’m still doing it. That’s a couple more fruit servings a day than I was getting before. Yay me!

The folks at POM Wonderful offered to send me some more pomegranate juice. Thinking of my morning smoothies I said “hell yeah, gimme!” Or something similar. I may have tried one smoothie when they sent a past batch of juice, but now I have that whole thing down and can get into it more.

POM Smoothie

1 banana
1/4 cup frozen blueberries or strawberries
1/2 tsp chia seeds
1 scoop Sun Warrior rice protein powder, natural
1 tsp agave nectar
1/2 cup POM 100% pomegranate juice
3/4 cup unsweetened vanilla rice milk

Throw into a blender. Blend. Drink.

The blueberry variation was the first I tried. Mainly because I’m lazy. This is my normal go to smoothie with some pomegranate juice subbed for some of the rice milk. The chia seeds are a fairly recent addition. They seem to give it that little extra needed to carry me through to lunch without wanting to attack snacks. Too much. While this version was perfectly tasty, trading the blueberries for strawberries was even better. The pomegranate and strawberries seem to boost the flavor of each. Gives you an extra fruity punch.

Since I haven’t been cooking much lately, the rest of the juice will probably end up in smoothies. I’m considering substituting pineapple for the berries. Hopefully that won’t be gross.