Smoky Beans with Quinoa and Corn

A spin on one of my favorites, Smoky Beans and Rice, this time with quinoa and kidney beans rather than black beans and rice. Any bean will do, as would any grain. I added corn to this one for something extra.

I made a TON of quinoa and have been using it for everything: beans and quinoa, broccoli and quinoa, quinoa as hot cereal in the morning with soymilk and dried or fresh fruit.

I sauteed onion and garlic first and in another pan heated veggie broth. Then I added two cans of kidney beans, drained and rinsed, to the onions and garlic. I added in frozen corn and just when it was getting un-frozen, I added a ton of quinoa to the ratio I preferred, and mixed everything. A few drops of liquid smoke, another big stir, and then added some veggie broth and allowed it to simmer until the broth was absorbed by the beans and quinoa. The liquid will absorb more after cooking, so keep that in mind.

New Blog Design

Whoa, changes!! I have been playing around with layouts and designs, and like this new book-background one so far. It brightened up the blog a lot and I'll stick with it until I find an awesome coconut image to use as a background.

Hopefully I'll be back to posting more regularly because there are a lot of things I want to make and also a lot of restaurants I want to try out in the coming months.

Quinoa, Broccoli, Potato and Tofu with Curry Sauce

This was dinner for today.

I boiled some russet potatoes that I cut up into smaller pieces to cook faster, and while those cooked I made some quinoa and marinated tofu that I cut into cubes. I marinated in a sauce I made: soy sauce, dijon mustard, hoisin sauce, pickle juice, hot sauce. I then sauteed onions and garlic until soft, then set aside and started to pan-fry the tofu cubes.

At this point I started steaming the broccoli.

The quinoa was about done, as were the potatoes. I put potatoes aside, and then boiled water to dissolve a bouillon cube and curry paste in for the "sauce".

After the tofu was done to my liking, I set it aside, rinsed the pan out and then started to reheat the onions and garlic. Once it was getting hot, I added the potatoes, quinoa and broccoli, then stirred everything together. I added the curry sauce and heated until some of the liquid absorbed into the potatoes and quinoa.

I served in bowls with the tofu on top, a few shakes of sesame seeds to finish it off.

Indulgent Dessert: So Delicious Coconut Ice Cream Bowl with Toppings

This is a bowl of 2 flavors of So Delicious Coconut Milk Ice Cream, my hands-down favorite vegan ice cream. The flavors of "ice cream" are: Cookie Dough and Mocha Almond Fudge.

I cracked a sugar cone over the ice cream, and then some chopped cashews. Finally, I covered the whole mess in Hershey's Hard Shell Chocolate Topping. This stuff turns into a hard chocolate shell in a few seconds once it makes contact with cold items, like ice cream.

Needless to say, this was delicious and indulgent and awesome.

4th of July 2011

Not a food photo, though I did make some grilled food for 4th of July. I also played a lot of chess outside with Mr. Coconut.

I grilled up marinated tofu inside a foil packet, we also grilled veggie dogs and potato/onion/garlic foil packets.

I failed to photograph any of this, but at least there is a photo of one of the chess games.

Boca Burger with Peas, Corn and Mashed Potatoes

Nothing spectacular, other than the Burger Shark in the potatoes. Just a pan-fried Big Boca Burger (slightly larger than the regular-sized patties) with mashed potatoes and peas and corn. Some Earth Balance for butter, salt and pepper.

Bowtie Pasta with Green Pepper Strips

I was out of red sauce, but also had a lot of pasta and a lot of green peppers to use up. What to do?

This was the result. The peppers were a nice change from my usual broccoli or spinach. I just cut up 3 green bell peppers into strips and sauteed with onions and garlic. I like my cooked peppers to still have some snap in them, but you could cook until your desired texture. I might try to do more of a julienne cut next time, but this worked for a simple quick dinner.

Curry with Tofu, Broccoli, Cauliflower and Red Potatoes

This may not look that impressive or pretty, but it was DELICIOUS.

Just as the title says, this is tofu, broccoli, cauliflower, and red potatoes with coconut milk curry sauce poured over it. I served it over brown rice.

The method

I pan fried some cubed up tofu, using garlic, onions, and soy sauce. While doing this, I already started steaming cut up red potatoes and allowed them to start cooking. Before they were done, I added a bunch of frozen broccoli and cauliflower to steam them as well. I made the sauce with one can of coconut milk and some red curry paste. Yum yum yum!

The potatoes added a great texture and rounded out the dish with a "full" mouthfeel.

Here's another photo to see the whole bowl:

Open-Face Sandwich: Cashew Cheese, Tomatoes, and Basil

I've been experimenting with nut cheese lately. I wasn't able to get raw cashews, which I know may affect the taste and texture. I've been experimenting with roasted unsalted cashews, soaked and blended. The first time around, I added sundried tomatoes, salt, lemon juice, water and garlic. My errors? Too much garlic, a little too much salt, kind of bleh. This time? 1 clove of garlic, a touch of sea salt, a little water, some nutritional yeast, and a touch of liquid smoke. Not bad. I am not in love with the texture - it's like hummus but weird, but not bad. Hard to explain.

Mr. Coconut has not tasted any of it yet, it's far too much into it's infancy to be worth giving to others yet. I like it, it's not bad. But I've had amazing raw nut cheese before, and this is not it yet.

With all that negativity, I liked this sandwich. It was delicious. I also tried the "cheese" with some pasta. Again, I need to get the texture to a better consistency. Maybe in the Magic Bullet as opposed to my tiny food processor would get it there.

Sweet Potato Oatmeal Casserole: From "Oh She Glows"

This is a sweet potato oatmeal casserole from the vegan blog, "Oh She Glows". The recipe can be found HERE.

Basically, it's oatmeal with a cooked sweet potato and banana mashed in, then covered with a crunchy pecan topping and baked.

The only changes I made were: I used 1 cup coconut milk beverage from So Delicious and 1 cup soymilk. I didn't have chia seeds, so I used a little more oats.

Delicious breakfast for several days! I really like the blog "Oh She Glows" and found it in a round about way. Hopefully I will do more recipes from there in the future.

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 Shells

The best part about making Stuffed Manicotti is that we usually make a lot of it, so we have lots of leftovers. We had some jumbo pasta shells, so for the past couple days we have been making dishes of 2-3 shells filled with tofu pesto ricotta and covered with sauce.

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:

Vegan Cinnamon Rolls!

Wow. I spent all day today making cinnamon rolls. I used a recipe from Vegan Yum Yum. Wow, it was a LOT of butter, almost too much, but that was the point. After studying a lot of different recipes on the internet, I decided that this one was a good place to start. It seemed the most like a butter-egg-dairy style recipe you might find from a bakery.

I learned a lot of lessons from this experiment that will help me with future baking, in particular with cinnamon or other rolls. I am excited to try to make a healthier version of these while still having similar taste.

In short, these were AMAZINGLY delicious. They are also AMAZINGLY high in calories, just like the ones made with animal products. They clock in at around 650 calories without any icing/frosting. Very indulgent.

Snobby Joes with Coleslaw

I've made vegan Sloppy Joes plenty of times, with "beef" crumbles, tvp, or lentils. However, I've never made it from scratch, I've always just used a can of Manwich. I finally decided it was time to just suck it up and make it from scratch. Well, that and I had a TON of lentils that I just barely burned a few of while trying to make the lentil meatballs yesterday.

I used an oldie but goodie from The Post Punk Kitchen, Snobby Joes.[link to recipe] Pretty straightforward. I didn't really modify anything other than using red and yellow small sweet peppers because I had a ton of those and no green bell pepper.

I served the mixture on Arnold's Multi-Grain Sandwich Thins along with spinach and a small bowl of coleslaw

The coleslaw was just a boring bag of shredded coleslaw, BUT with the awesomeness that is Organicville's Non-Dairy Coleslaw Dressing. I like it quite a bit as it hit the spot for my strange coleslaw craving of the past few weeks.

Here are more photos!

A closeup

Spaghetti-Nos with Mini Lentil Meatballs (From The PPK)

I have been dreaming about this recipe for the past month, ever since I saw it over on The Post Punk Kitchen. Finally, I could wait no longer and I gathered the last ingredients necessary to round out this recipe.

The idea of this is to veganize a classic from many people's childhood: Spaghetti-O's and meatballs. I served mine with strawberry Kool-Aid, as pictured above, to really bring home the kid meal feel.

I'm not going to re-post the recipe here, but you can see it over on The Post Punk Kitchen. The only big modifications I made was to substitute the oregano with thyme and mini wagon wheels as my pasta rather than the "traditional" Anellini style.

Short review, delicious! I would probably make the mini lentilballs even smaller next time, and I would really like to try the Anellini style pasta to see the difference. The mini wagon wheels were great, but they are also a little thick for these purposes.

But don't worry! I have plenty of pictures.

Here are two of my prep counter, complete with laptop on the site with the recipe. (The container that says couscous is actually holding the vital wheat gluten.)






And a couple pics of the mini lentilballs before cooking:




And one last closeup of the finished product:

Vegan Pho With Tofu and Garnishes

Pho is a Vietnamese noodle soup consisting of a very flavorful broth usually made from beef. Thanks to a generous co-worker who provided me with a recipe and some ingredients, I made a vegan version.

A quick note: I didn't have a lot of whole spices, so I subbed ground. I would not necessarily recommend this but it still worked out great.

Recipe: Reposted from Food.com, with some changes in directions by me as well as substitutes in bold and italics
BROTH
1 small unpeeled onion, quartered -- I used an onion that was about 91g
2 unpeeled shallots, halved
8 garlic cloves, halved -- I peeled these even though the recipe didn't specify
Ginger, coarsely sliced -- I wound up using about 1/8 of ground ginger because I did not have fresh ginger. I would recommend 1 inch of fresh ginger.
2 [3 inch] cinnamon sticks -- Again, I only had ground, so I used 1t ground cinnamon
2 star anise pods -- I subbed 1t ground star anise
4 cloves -- I subbed 1t ground cloves
8c clear veg stock
3T Soy Sauce
salt, to taste

SOUP:
1lb Rice Noodles
8oz fried tofu or cooked seitan
6 scallions, thinly sliced
1.5c bean sprouts
1 lime, sliced into wedges
basil or mint or cilantro (or all of them); a big handful left whole
hoisin sauce, to taste
sriracha chili sauce, to taste

1. In a large pot, heat to medium-high heat and dry roast onion, shallots, garlic, ginger, cinnamon, star anise, and cloves. Stir occasionally until vegetables begin to char. I would recommend leaving the spices out until the vegetables start to char and then adding the spices in. I burned a few spices before the vegetables could char, but the broth still tasted great in the end. Prep the other vegetables/garnishes during this time as well.

2. Add the veg stock and soy sauce, bring to boil. Then lower heat to simmer, cover for 20-25 minutes. Start another pot boiling to cook the rice noodles.

3. Strain broth into a clean pot and discard the solids. Taste and add salt if necessary, set aside. Check noodles and drain them, rinsing thoroughly. Make a plate for the garnishes. I set mine up into little bowls for some items and larger items just on a plate, like bean noodles and chopped bok choy.

4. Put noodles into bowls; ladle the broth over the noodles. Garnish as you see fit. Enjoy.

The broth is the key along with a bunch of garnishes to really punch up the flavors. Fresh herbs and bean sprouts along with lime juice and soy sauce makes for a fantastic meal. I also added some fried tofu, but mock duck or other faux meats would work great as well.

Above is a photo of my garnish plate: bean sprouts, sliced jalapenos, cilantro, scallions, basil, and chopped bok choy are the ones I had around.

Below is my soup bowl, fixed up with everything. Rice noodles [I used larger flat rice noodles rather than the vermicelli style I usually get] with the broth ladled over it and then I topped mine with sautéed mushrooms, fried tofu, and all of the fixin's from the garnish plate along with some lime juice and shoyu.

Roasted Asparagus with Whole Roasted Garlic Cloves

Simple recipe for spring to utilize the short window of asparagus season.

Pre-heat the oven to about 400 degrees while you prep the asparagus and garlic.

I like to cut just the ends off of asparagus and leave most of it in tact. Then I washed the spears, placing in a single layer on a baking sheet. I peeled one head of garlic and scattered the cloves throughout the asparagus. Drizzled olive oil and sea salt, mixing with my hands so everything was evenly coated. Pop in oven, 15-25 minutes until desired tenderness is reached.

Med. Breakfast: Hummus, Tabouli, Pita Chips

An unusual breakfast, sure. It is still delicious, any time of day. Pita Chips served with hummus and tabouli for dipping. Hummus is Sabra Brand with Pine Nuts. I like Sabra in any place I cannot find Holy Land.

I ate my breakfast with a mini-V8 (low sodium) and water.

Chik'n Style Seitan with Pasta

I thought about the seitan strips from yesterday all day and how I could improve or experiment with the flavors and seasonings. So I did.

Recipe:

dry ingredients
1c vital wheat gluten
3T nutritional yeast flakes
about .5-1t Old Bay Seasoning
a dash of Montreal steak seasoning

wet ingredients
.13c soy sauce/shoyu
.5c veg stock
.25c water
1T olive oil

Again, heat up oven to 375 degrees F. Mix dry ingredients and wet separately, then combine. Mix well until ball forms, then knead. I rolled into a cylindrical log, and sliced up as thin as I could. Lay onto lightly oiled cookie sheet and bake for 5-8 mins on one side, flip and then other side. I was getting impatient, so I wound up pan frying after baking to crisp up some of the pieces.

I served on penne pasta with organic strained tomatoes as my sauce, seasoned with salt and pepper.