Bean & Vegetable Salad with Chimi dressing - Vegan Mofo 2013

Whoops!  Lost this weekend, but still making great food.  Hopefully this week I will get the chance to fix some of the goofy formatting that has been happening.  It is the first time I have been blogging via iPad, phone, and computer on a rotating basis.  

Getting Delivered Dish of the Week over the summer and again starting last week has inspired me to make more awesome vegetable-packed dishes.  This is a salad I made for lunch at work last week.  One 15ozcan of white beans, half a medium green bell pepper (diced), cherry tomatoes sliced in half, shiitake mushrooms, diced jalapeno, parsley, one baby cucumber (peeled), and that crazy chimichurri sauce I made earlier.  Great stuff, though the mushrooms were not a great fit.  This would be great with greens like spinach or arugula, but I was out.  I am excited for this week of Mofo - I will highlight another DDOW and maybe have a couple treats from local restaurants.

Foxy Falafel Food Truck - Stoplight Platter

Today I was able to be in Downtown Minneapolis around 11am, which is when most of the food trucks open for business. 
I was SUPER excited to come across Foxy Falafel, which I have been meaning to try for a long time.  (They just opened a brick & mortar restaurant last year, too!)

I tried the Stoplight Flafel Platter: 2 pieces of the curry, beet, and regular falafel (6 total); cabbage. cucumber, tomato, hummus, served with pita or corn chips.  I added some of Foxy's homemade pickles and some hot sauce.  It was delicious!

Vegetable soup for a snowy April night

That's right, it is April 22nd and it is snowing on MN.  Not a flurry, or a light dusting of snow, but several inches are falling outside.  I like winter, but enough is enough. 

So I channeled my never ending winter blues into some vegetable soup.  Pretty standard: onion, garlic, white beans, frozen mixed vegetables, one small can of tomatoes.  What makes this soup unique - Anaheim peppers diced up, as well as a lot of shredded cabbage.  I had a lot of bagged raw coleslaw mix, and needed to use it up.  Salt, pepper, cumin, paprika, veggie broth and water make the rest of the soup. 

Lemon-Dill Dressing: on Pan-Fried Tofu and a CSA Salad [Vegan Mofo]

Happy Vegan MoFo Day 4!

So many great ideas on the giant 2012 blogroll of MoFo-ers! It's fantastic to read through what others are doing this fun-filled month.

So I made this dish a while back, when I was up to my ears in dill and did not know what to do with it all! After a Google search of something along the lines of "what do I do with all this dill!?" I came across a few interesting recipes and stumbled upon this Lemon-Dill Tofu from Oh She Glows.

I had everything except the tahini, but it still turned out great and was a fantastic addition to some pan-fried tofu triangles.



My sides for this meal include some homemade simple cabbage and carrot coleslaw with a light vinegar/oil dressing and some steamed broccoli with sesame seeds. The coleslaw and dill were from the CSA. The broccoli was frozen.

I loved the dill dressing! I used it on a salad made from greens, carrots and tomatoes from the csa and topped with some flax seeds. Delicious!

Chana Masala with Kale

So this is another test to see how blogging goes straight from my smartphone. Tonight, I have a cold. So my cure is to cook warm, comforting slightly spicy foods.
I have been thinking about making chana masala for a while and tonight I had everything I needed.
The recipe was cobbled from a few different googled "easy chana masala" recipes I found. Basically, I sauteed onion in olive oil until it got soft, added cumin seeds, cumin powder, curry powder, cinnamon. Added minced jalapeno & garlic and one 15oz can of chickpeas.
I added 2-4 diced tomatoes, stirred everything up and added about 1/2 cup of water or so and let everything simmer until it reached the consistency I liked and at the very end I added 1.5-2.5 cups of kale. I served with quinoa. i

Tempeh Bac'n BLT

Whoa! Way too long with no posts!

Today I bring you a Tempeh Bac'n BLT: new-ish Earth Balance vegan mayo, Tofurky Maple Tempeh Bac'n, tomatoes, red onion, and spinach.

I enjoyed the EB mayo, pretty decent stuff. It is sold at a price that is way more expensive than Vegenaise in my area, so I just picked it up to try it out. I might get it in the future once in a while if it's on sale and ends up being cheaper than Vegenaise.

I've got a lot of pics stored up, just need to resize and upload to Flickr. I am also planning some pretty big new food adventures in the coming months, including some theme months and before you know it, Vegan Mofo will be here again!

I am trying to streamline my photo to blog system, and hopefully I will be able to get it down to a science so it doesn't take up too much time and I can focus on cooking and writing rather than the technical side of things.

My favorite go-to free online photo editing site shut down so it's been hard to get my groove back. I am playing with a couple of programs to see what is easiest and fastest for me.

So far I have enjoyed PicMonkey.

Stay tuned for more!

Kidney Bean Stew [Vegan Mofo]

Tonight was Chipotle but I forgot a camera. I may be able to get a blurry cell picture from it, but was way too stuffed with burrito to want to try.

Instead, here is a bean stew I made a few weeks ago. Tomato-based, with kidney beans, mixed veggies, wild rice and barley or brown rice (can't quite remember, sorry!).

Simple, and it made a ton of food for several days for two people. Plus, it's really cheap!

Okra, Tomato & Potato Curry [Vegan Mofo]

Vegan Mofo, Day 4!

So this is what I whipped up for dinner tonight, with delicious results!

A stew/curry of tomatoes, potatoes, okra, quinoa, curry powder, onions, garlic, spicy Rotel for more tomato-y goodness.

I didn't measure anything, really. This was an experiment to work on something in the future. I think that this is a great example of why I don't blog all my food. I feel bad if I don't write down a full recipe and measure everything, etc. By the time I even start thinking about that, I give up on considering blogging and just eat some food! So this is a great push to keep posting about food, recipe or not.

Pesto Chicken Sandwich: Leftovers Day 3

What else can be done with leftover ingredients from Stuffed Manicotti?

Sandwiches! The sandwich above consists of 1 Morningstar Chik'n Griller, a schmear of pesto tofu ricotta, and some tomato bruschetta mix. The bread is Arnold's brand. I've been a fan of their sandwich thins, and now they have flat/skinny hot dog "buns" called fill 'ems. They aren't on their website yet, but Wegman's has it up on their site, here.

Stuffed Manicotti Dinner

Mr. Coconut and I cooked a tasty Italian-style dinner for Mr. Coconut's Grandparents. We decided to make one of our favorite meals, Stuffed Manicotti, which I've blogged about before.

I made some focaccia-style bread and some bruschetta mix to go with it. We made some sauce from a combination of some canned whole peeled tomatoes, onion, garlic, olive oil, oregano, tomato paste, and basil. The star of the show, though, is the pesto tofu ricotta. A blend of basil, garlic, olive oil and walnuts for pesto; mixed with extra firm tofu. We stuffed that into cooked manicotti and then spooned sauce over the top and baked it to heat through everything.

We served the meal with a salad of greens, onions, snap peas, and pepitas (pumpkin seeds toasted and salted).

A Close-up of the meal:

Double Decker Tacos!!!

Taco Night! If you follow the Flickr-linked photo above, you'll get complete labels on the fillings.

Taco night is awesome. And last night was no exception. Refried beans makes excellent "glue" to hold a soft flour tortilla to a hard corn shell. Perfect. Morningstar crumblesSomeone pointed out to me that Morningstar changed the crumbles ingredients and it's no longer vegan. Grr, stupid ingredient change! Boca crumbles are still vegan. with spicy taco seasoning was the "meat" for this dish. Other layers include: homemade garlicky guacamole, diced tomatoes, chopped black olives, chopped onions, spinach instead of iceberg lettuce, chopped cilantro, and spicy taco sauce.

It was delicious!! I believe that another taco night, or perhaps some taco pizza, will happen very soon.

Another pic: