vegetarian Archives - Page 74 of 80

Stuff cooked but not documented

Over the past few weeks I’ve been really bad about taking pictures of food. There are various reasons: laziness, forgetfulness, ugly food, repeats, and so on. Anyway, here’s a list of stuff I’ve cooked lately but haven’t blogged:

Mole Posole: This is one of those recipes I go back to again and again. It’s easy and made up of mostly pantry food. And it tastes amazing. By “prepared mole sauce” they mean the paste you normally find in that jar you can’t re-close rather than the aseptic box of sauce I used on the enchilada stack.
Rice Vermicelli with Soya Mince & Peas: This is from A Vegan Taste of Thailand. Another one that’s pretty quick and easy and I make on a regular basis. It’s basically rice noodles, tvp, peas and thai red curry sauce.
Cumin Lime Tofu with smashed sweet potatoes & broccoli: The tofu came from Eat, Drink and Be Vegan. It tasted wonderful but was a little bit too juicy. I probably could have cooked a bit longer to dry it out more, but I was hungry. As leftovers, it seemed to dry out a bit more and be about perfect.
Gemelli with Asparagus and Pine Nuts: Another book I keep going back to for easy, tasty recipes is Vegan Italiano. This one was a perfect use of new spring asparagus. And what is it about toasted pine nuts that totally makes my mouth water?
Savory Vegetable Pot Pie: This one is another go to recipe and comes from The Candle Cafe Cookbook. Use chicken style seitan instead of tofu and even picky omnis will enjoy it.
Linguine with Broccoli Sauce and Garlic: This one is also from Vegan Italiano. It came out a touch dry so I ended up adding a bit more olive oil at the end. Still tasty and easy.
Three-Bean Chili with Chive-Flecked Cornmeal Dumplings: Seriously, how can this be bad? From Fresh From The Vegetarian Slow Cooker. I love coming home to dinner all ready and waiting. Okay, I did still have to make the dumplings, but it was mostly all ready.

Enchilada Stack Mole

A couple of weeks ago I picked up this box of prepared mole sauce in addition to the regular paste that I buy. It was vegan and I thought it might be good for some future lazy food. Well, the future lazy food is now the past lazy food and finally I’m getting around to posting it. It’s rare that I actually make up a recipe. I usually let other people slave away at testing recipes to see what works. But with this, there’s really nothing to go wrong. It’d lend itself to all kinds of vegetables, for example right now I’m thinking some potatoes would be nice, of course beans could always be tossed in, whatever fake meat you have, or none at all. See what I’m saying? Anyway, here’s what I did this time. I’m sure that’ll change in the future…

dona maria mole sauce

Enchilada Stack Mole

• 1 tablespoon olive oil

• 1 med. onion, chopped

• 1 med. green bell pepper, chopped

• 2 garlic cloves, minced

• 1 cup chicken style seitan, chopped

• 1 med. yellow summer squash, chopped

• ½ cup frozen corn

• 1 box prepared mole sauce, pint size

• 8 corn tortillas

• ½-1 cup grated soy cheese

Spray a medium casserole pan with cooking spray. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Heat oil in a large sauté pan. Once warm, toss in the onion and bell pepper. Sauté until onion starts to soften, about 2-3 minutes. Add garlic and seitan. Sauté for another minute or two. Add squash and corn, sauté another few minutes until onion is translucent and squash is softened. Season with salt & pepper and remove from heat.

enchilada stack mole innards

Spread a small amount of the prepared mole sauce on bottom of casserole. Lay down two corn tortillas. Spoon 1/3 of the vegetable mixture on top of the tortillas, spread a spoon or two of mole sauce on top of that. Now do the same with two more layers ending up with two tortillas on top. Pour remaining mole sauce all over the top completely coating the tortillas. Sprinkle top with cheese. Bake about 25-30 minutes or until cheese is melted. If necessary, broil for a minute or so to melt cheese.

enchilada stack mole

“Butter” Tofu

Someone blogged a while back about the fact that you can pick up Butter Chicken seasoning and the spice packet itself is vegan. So last time I was at the Indian market I picked one up with the intention of trying out a “Butter” Tofu. I finally got around to that this week.Here’s the mix I used, the tomatoes I added and the tofu. I’m not sure why the pappadums jumped in the picture…I loosely used the recipe on the back of the box. Here’s what I did: “Butter” TofuIngredients1 pound firm or extra firm tofu, drained and pressed2 tablespoons lemon juice1/2 packet Shan Butter Chicken Mix2 tablespoons oil 1 14oz. can whole cherry tomatoes or diced (smash them if you use whole ones)1/2 cup soy milk2 tablespoons Earth Balance Mix lemon juice, 1/4 cup of water and the 1/2 packet of seasoning mix. Pour over drained, pressed tofu and marinate 30 minutes. Heat oil in a non-stick frying pan. Add marinated tofu reserving the marinade. Fry up until browned. Add tomatoes, soy milk, and reserved marinade. Cover, reduce heat to low, and cook 15 minutes. Add Earth Balance, stir in until melted.Eat.We ate it over basmati rice with Dino’s Collards. Nummy.

A tale of two muffins

What’s better than baking a batch of muffins? Baking two! For the first batch, I modified the Zucchini Muffin recipe from Yellow Rose Recipes to make it carrot and zucchini. Not much of a modification…just reduced the zucchini and added grated carrot. I also skipped the raisins and opted to toast the pecans in a pan before chopping and adding. We’ll call these the healthy muffins. They have a really small amount of oil and are light on the sugar but they’re still sweat enough and don’t at all taste like hippie food. Plus I got to break in the whole nutmeg I picked up at the Indian market. Wow, does that make a difference! I even cut back the amount a bit so it wouldn’t overpower.

carrot zucchini muffins

And these Hearty Spiced Cocoa Muffins we’ll refer to as pure evil. This might be my first try at a recipe from The Joy of Vegan Baking. The heavy reliance on Ener-G Egg Replacer in the book made me a bit nervous as I don’t like it in everything. In this case I had nothing to worry about. They came out perfect and kick much ass. The cinnamon, cloves and cayenne pepper go so well with the chocolate and the higher than usual amount of salt really makes the chocolate flavor pop. I just stuck with the chocolate chips and did not add any nuts.

Hearty Spiced Cocoa Muffins

I think it’s kind of funny that I chose to photograph the “evil” muffins against black and the “good” ones against white. Hmmm… Oh, and my helpful tip of the day, well, and probably of the year because I don’t really hand them out, now do I? How often does a muffin recipe make exactly 12 muffins? Not often, right? I have these little muffin cup sized ceramic ramekins that I use for mise en place, salsa, etc. They’re also perfect for overflow muffin batter. See above. No wasted batter!

Food on my desktop

There are a few photos cluttering my desktop that I keep meaning to post. I say cluttering, but it isn’t like I ever see my desktop. It’s all open apps and exposé around here.This is Summer Spaghetti with Corn and Tomatoes from Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone by Deborah Madison. I’ve had this cookbook for over ten years but still find myself going back to it. Yeah, it’s not exactly summer around here but sometimes you need to step away from the roots and indulge a little. I considered using canned tomatoes but was able to find some nice grape tomatoes and they were lovely. It also gave me a chance to use the Sunergia Soy Feta I picked up at Cosmo’s Vegan Shoppe. I never expect soy cheese to be spot on, but I found this to be a nice substitute. It doesn’t quite crumble like feta, but shredding works fine. And the smell seemed to have that requisite cheese stink. The little cardboard outer package for this has been sitting on my kitchen counter waiting for me to blog about this forever. I’m glad I can finally throw it in the recycling bin.This is another one from Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone, Stir-Fried Bok Choy with Roasted Peanuts. To make it a main dish, I rehydrated some fake chicken pieces I picked up from the Asian market a while back. I can’t remember which variety of bok choy I ended up using. I tend to just choose whichever one looks good that day, or even a different sort of green. I think this might have been Shanghai bok choy though. This always comes out nice, but this time I actually used the called for peanut oil instead of just canola. It really does add flavor so I recommend doing that.Oh, and another one from Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone. If I’d paid attention I could have said that once at the top, eh? This is the Posole with Red Chile Pods. We’re lucky enough to have a number of hispanic markets around here where you can find a bunch of different dried corn varieties. Here I used a red one. The base for this soup is very simple. It’s the condiments that really make it. Here I have cilantro, avocado, soy feta and a lime wedge piled on top. There are more suggestions in the recipe, but this combination suited me just fine.