Mac and Chreese

Dinner was lazy. I made a box of123z and Chreese, a boxed vegan mac and cheese by Road's End Organics. I personally think this stuff is great. Add a little soymilk and a LOT of either vegan butter or olive oil and you have a creamy, tasty mac and cheese. I season it up with cracked pepper, dried dill or basil, red pepper flakes. Sometimes broccoli or peas or other stuff.

It's a nutritional yeast based sauce, so if you don't like that, you won't like this stuff. I am in love with the nooch and therefore love this Mac and Chreese stuff.

Pancakes #2: The Perfect Pancake

I didn't think it could be done. The Perfect Vegan Pancake: light, fluffy, golden brown and no different than any other pancake out there. Today, I did it. I was able to conquer all with one non-stick pan and a spatula.

What You Need:

software:

Our friends, Aunt Jemima and Ener-G are back. 1c Aunt J and 1 egg equivalent of Ener-G.
3/4c Soymilk, or other non-dairy milk
1T oil, canola

Hardware:
One Non-Stick pan
(Preferably One Awesome Electric Griddle)
One Spatula/Turner thing
One ladle

1. Mix up egg and add oil to it, mixing thoroughly.
2. Combine the egg/oil mixture and the soymilk with the pancake mix. Stir until it just comes together (lumps ok.)
3. Let the batter REST. Very important. Wait 10 mins or so, it helps for fluffy pancakes later.
4. Heat pan on med-low. Flick droplets of water into pan to test for how hot it is. The droplets should skate across surface, if they disappear instantly, too hot. Nothing happens? Too cold.
5. Ladle batter into the pan in a circular motion to evenly distribute the batter. My pan is small so I was only able to do one at a time. Takes forever but it's worth it.
6. Once lots of little bubbles come up to surface of exposed pancake side, flip it over. The pancake should be able to peel from pan easily. If it doesn't, either it needs to cook another minute or your nonstick surface sucks so get a new pan.
7. Less time on this side, check for an even brown coating. Most of mine aren't perfect on the 2nd side, splotchy brown is ok.
8. That's it. Repeat until batter is gone. Make a lot of these and freeze them to have awesome pancakes ready at any time.

Serves 2 People. I got about 7 3-4 inch pancakes, with 3 or so per person. Because, c'mon, who stops at one or two pancakes?

Here's another pic, this one is of my monster pancake I made:


Probably don't want to know this, but here is the Nutritional Info. NOTE: Nutritional Info does not include syrup. One serving equals one half of the total recipe above.

Misc foods eaten over the past few days

No pictures, just a documenting my food type of post.

Other stuff I've eaten on 7/30:

Pesto Chik'n Sandwich:
two pieces of bread, toasted if desired
spread pesto on both pieces
add one Boca Chik'n patty
Enjoy
Tomato slices and fresh spinach or basil would be great, too

Hot Chocolate with PB Toast:
Simple, satisfying and comforting snack to make on a cold day. Or a hot day where you feel like you need a hug. Or during "that time of the month", when everything chocolate is satisfying.

One mug of soymilk, plain (8oz) (or favorite non-dairy milk. However, I'd stick to plain as the cocoa I use is plenty sweet.)
Hot Chocolate Mix, 2T (I like Ah!Laska Organic Cocoa, Non-Dairy Style)
Two pieces of Toast
2-4T (or more) of Nut Butter of your choosing


Heat milk in micro or on stovetop until warmed to your liking. Mix in cocoa. Experiment with sweetness, sometimes a little is enough, sometimes there can never be enough.

Toast your bread, slather on Nut Butter.
Fold each piece in half, and --wait for it-- dip it in the hot chocolate. Yes. Seriously. It's good. The chocolate and peanut butter or whatever nut butter you use, is awesome. Then again, I used to eat bread slathered in honey, folded in half, and dipped in plain milk. I also still eat peanut butter sandwiches and tomato soup. I'm crazy.

I also had pickles today.

Green Stir Fry: Bok Choy, Broccoli, and Mushrooms with Noodles

I had a bunch of bok choy which needed to be processed soon, so I decided to do it today. A simple, veggie-tastic stir fry of sorts.

What You Need:



330g bok choy, cleaned and rough chop to bite size pieces
65g onion
1.5c frozen broccoli (not pictured)
1-2 cloves garlic
100g mushrooms
1-2t ginger paste or finely minced ginger root
cooked bean thread noodles

little to no oil for pan

1. slice up the onion, sauté until just browning (I like the carmelized flavor, you can cook until transluscent if desired) 3 mins
2. add mushrooms, garlic & ginger 2 more mins
3. add broccoli. I just add it frozen and cook until no longer frozen, 5 mins.
4. add chopped bok choy. I like some snap in the bok choy so I don't cook it that long, just enough to get barely tender.
5. I had precooked noodles in the fridge, so I just put some in a bowl and piled the veggies on top of it and added soy sauce/hot sauce as needed.

This could serve 2. I only used a tiny amount of noodles, about 100 calories worth or 1oz dry. I wound up eating everything myself. Here is a Nutritional profile. Note: Nutrition info is whole recipe for one person. Nutrition info DOES NOT include noodles or oil used as those items are optional and/or could vary by type of noodles you want to use or how much oil/what type of oil.

Another look, showing off the noodles:

Breakfast: Banana Muffins

Ugly, yes. Tasty? Yes.

These are tasty and easy, and I believe from a cookbook somewhere so I'll have to figure out where it was from before I write out the whole recipe.

I've made these a few times, and this is definitely the ugliest they've been. Not the best turn out, but I didn't have all the necessary ingredients. I use 100% whole wheat flour and played around with the sweetener, maybe too much. Next time, I'm going to add another banana, less oil, less sweetener, and put the flax seesds in again.

The Chik'n Patty Experiment

While perusing VegWeb, I found a recipe for homemade "fried chicken" using TVP granules as the primary ingredient.

Here's the Original Recipe

I altered it a little. I didn't have any bouillon cubes (yet another thing I need to stock up on. Curses! Why can't I get paid 4 times a month?) so I seasoned some boiling water with a TON of stuff, no measurements. Lots of salt, poultry seasoning, Spike Seasoning, dash of cayenne, paprika, pepper. I just dumped it all in the water until it tasted somewhat close to a "chicken" broth.

I hydrated the TVP with this seasoned water, let it sit for a little while, then added some pancake mix until it became thick enough to form patties. I coated the first batch with really old rice krispies crushed up, pan fried them, and dried them out on a plate and paper towels.

Not too bad.

Next, I tried no coating. This was the best result. More "meat" like. The texture for almost all the variations was right on. The flavor was a bit off. Too much starchy flavor from the pancake mix.

Last, I coated the patties in crushed saltines. Not too shabby. Great with agave nectar.

Overall, I would say this recipe is worth expanding on. I'd like to find something that is less starchy to hold the patties together, and get some panko breadcrumbs for a coating. I'd also like to play with different flavors to see what comes of it.

Brunch: Pancakes and Strawberry Soymilk

This was a banner weekend. You can tell this blog is influencing me and motivating me, because I never cook this much, especially big project style brunch foods.

I really wanted pancakes Sunday morning. I wanted to make them from sratch. However, a quick once over of my pantry revealed that I am out of sugar. How can I be out of sugar? I have brown sugar, but as I was considering using that, I realized that I had a box of pancake mix:


With pancake mix, oil, soymilk, AND:

I went to work.

It should be noted that I also had The Perfect Pancake Maker. Yeah, the infomercial that says: "If you can turn a doorknob, you can make a pancake." Hmm...my doorknob doesn't make my pancake stick to the nonstick surface, effing up my pancake flip.

Doorknob - 1; Perfect Pancake - 0

The mix wasn't bad at all. It actually made the pancakes quite fluffy and tasty. Unfortunately, the Perfect Pancake Maker burned most of the pancakes. I wound up flipping half of the pancakes with a spatula. At that point, it was easier to just cook in a regular non stick pan.

To round out the pancake meal, I decided to make some strawyberry soymilk. I think some brands actually manufacture this flavor, but I drink it so rarely that I would never go through an entire container before it went bad. So I use Store Brand Strawberry Syrup mixed with my soymilk. It's good. Tastes even better in my Awesome Batman Cup. Jealous? I thought so.

Deep Fried Experiment #1: Tempura Green Peppers and Mock Duck

---> They look like sea monsters, don't they?

Deep fried food is oh so tasty, but a big pain to do at home. (I used to have a 3-in-1 machine that had a deep fryer, steamer and crockpot all in one.) Every now and then, though, it's fun to make a night of deep frying. Saturday night was one such night.

I happened upon some tempura batter without eggs a while back and had never gotten around to using it. I decided for the sake of the blog, I should really try it out. So I did. With one green pepper, a can of mock duck, and some onions.

What You Need:

software:
Tempura (check for eggs)
Mock Duck, one can, drained, rinsed, and sliced into smaller pieces for eating (also: packaged or homemade seitan, tofu, or anything else will work, too)
One Green Pepper, sliced into strips (or 5, or broccoli, or whatever)
One onion, sliced into rings
LOTS of oil (canola/vegetable) for frying

hardware:
Deep pan for deep frying (I used a wok)
Splatter Guard
draining rack/area
paper towels


Prep everything you plan on battering and frying. It makes the whole process much easier. Ideally, you should set up an area for the raw stuff, an area for battering, an area for frying and an area for draining. I have an extremely small kitchen, so this isn't really possible. Our draining area sort of crossed paths with the raw area, it was a messy situation, etc. I'm thankful that I was only working with green peppers and mock duck and not raw chicken.

The rest of this process is not very scientific. (as if the beginning half was.) Heat up oil to...really hot. But not too hot. Yep. (I don't have a thermometer. One more thing to add to my list of kitchen essentials.)

Batter the veggies or item you want to fry. We found that a really thin coating worked best. We also found that seasoning the mock duck ahead of time (pan frying with soy sauce, ginger, hot peppers, etc.) was an excellent decision. Place battered items into pan:


When the fried objects are golden brown (5-8 mins?) take them out of the oil and place on a wire rack on top of a cookie pan. (We used the toaster oven accessories for this because it was small and perfect.)

Yep. Use paper towel to soak up more oil after the objects have cooled more. Eat and enjoy. Soy sauce is a nice condiment, as well as cock sauce.

The Verdict:
It wasn't bad. Wasn't that good, either. More of a batter issue than anything. the tempura just didn't work well with deep frying, which is to be expected. The onions were the best. I thought they would not be tasty at all, and I feel foolish for questioning deep fried onions.

I will have to have a true deep frying night soon, testing a couple of batters.