Tag: vegan

Baked pasta & cheese, Tex-Mex style

After making a pot of chili, I flipped back a few pages of The Happy Herbivore to the Baked Shells and Cheese recipe. One of the variation was to add a can of chili and make it a chili mac. So I just added a cup and a half or so of the chili to it. I’ve always been a fan of nutritional yeast cheezy sauces, but I don’t think I’ve ever made one that uses silken tofu in it. It made the sauce really creamy. Very nice. Apparently it’s like glue on plates though. My dishwasher wouldn’t get it off. I had to hand wash some of those dishes. The top is sprinkled with bread crumbs and a little Daiya.

Meanwhile, there was still chili leftover. It went on to become lunches and top grilled hot dogs. I really stretched that one out!

Chili and cornbread

Sometimes I’m smart about menu planning. This particular week, I decided to make a chili, then a chili mac. It cuts the boredom of eating the same thing for days on end. I chose the Chili sans Carne from The Happy Herbivore. There were a couple of weirdish ingredients, like curry powder, but I just went with it to see how it would be. And it worked out well.

There’s a law or something that says you can’t have chili without cornbread, right? This batch is the recipe in Veganomicon with a drained can of diced green chilies tossed in.

A little Daiya on top.

And you can see the chilies in the cornbread slice. I might’ve also slathered it in coconut Earth Balance.

Dinner at Sauced

We keep forgetting about Sauced. But we finally remembered and decided to go with Kevin’s parents. I started off with a lovely cocktail that had muddled avocado in it.

We had a couple of starter munchies. Guacamole with taro chips and tomato jam. The tomato jam look it to the next level.

Oh, whoops. Forgot to grab a pic of the seitan and potato skewers before we started digging into them. So here are some bits and pieces.

Kevin and I both had the Sketti and Neatballs, seitan in a red sauce over spaghetti squash. Destroyed. I need to try making spaghetti squash again.

And this was a brussels sprouts salad with parsnip chips (I think) on top. I’ve seen recipes for raw brussels sprouts salads, but never had one. A+++ would eat again.

For dessert we went over to Irwin Street Market and had some Jake’s Ice Cream. They have a couple of vegan flavors on hand.

 

Dumplings and Hunan Salmon

Maybe it’s all the years of Chinese food being one of the few vegan options when eating out, but now it generally isn’t my first choice when eating out. I don’t hate it or even dislike it, I guess I’m just not excited by it. I like Thai, Vietnamese and Korean much better.

But we still go out for Chinese and it’s still good. This time we headed to Green Sprout to celebrate J.J.’s graduation. We started off with steamed dumplings. They were okay, but I like Harmony’s and Chinese Buddha’s better.

And I had Hunan Salmon. It’s vegan salmon, duh, lightly battered and deep fried with a nice assortment of vegetables. Don’t get me wrong, it was good and I was happy to eat it and the leftovers. But like most Chinese food I just can’t get excited about it.

Raw & Cooked at Healthful Essence

If Healthful Essence was more convenient, we’d definitely eat there more often. It’s kind of like a healthier version of Soul Vegetarian. Here’s what we got last trip.

Kevin had the raw lasagna. It was good but could have used some fresh basil and maybe garlic.

Lacking originality, I got rice & peas, collards and BBQ tofu. With a couple of bonus slices of plantain on top.

This time, they had patties, callaloo patties!

Is it wrong that I like mine better? I make the callaloo a little spicy. These are still good though and didn’t require any work on my part.