Accidental Thai plus, Tart Results

Did you know that when you combine this:

cashew ginger tofu from ED&BV made into a stirfry

With this:

coconut lime basmati rice from ED&BV

That you get this:

miraculous thai food!

And this?:

giant bowl of thai awesomness

Well, now you do.  I wasn't planning on making Thai food.  But I'm not complaining (and neither was Michael).  Somehow the flavors of cashew, ginger, lime, and coconut turned into the most awesome Thai food I've had...since our first visit to NYC, anyway.  I stupidly overbaked the tofu in the cashew sauce (even though it explicitly says on the recipe not to do so) and the sauce got all superthick (like...way too thick).  So we when added the baked tofu and sauce to the stirfry I had going, I had the idea to add about 1/4 cup of water to the whole thing.  The result?  Creamy and smooth and perfect.  If I could change only one thing, it would be to double the rice recipe, because there just was not enough of that deliciousness.  I think you have to have the rice flavors in there to make the Thai flavor combo complete.  But since there wasn't enough for seconds including the rice, I had room for this:

pear and almond tart, from the iron chef challenge i posted yesterday

Also known as the most delicious dessert that I've ever just made up off the top of my head.  Somehow, I lucked into making it just absolutely perfect.  That doesn't happen often.  Next time, I'd make my own crust because store bought crusts are just not...as good.  I've learned my lesson.  Anyway, since the verdict is in and positivie, please scroll down to the last post to get the recipe and make this yourself.  

We ate all this while watching Iron Chef on Food Network, and afterwards Michael declared that I won.  Yay!

Iron Chef Challenge: Pears and Nuts

Coming in right at the cutoff time...  I made a Pear and Almond Tart.  I'm hoping Blogger quits being a meanie soon and lets me upload the picture!  Whew! Ok, there it is:

nommy nom nom nom

I wasn't sure I was going to participate this week, but Michael got called unexpectedly in to work this afternoon, so...  I had some free time.  I don't have any pictures of it cut yet because it LITERALLY just came out of the oven and I'm going to wait until he gets home, but I will give you the recipe.  Even though I'm not sure if it's good, or crap.  It's like food roulette!  I will admit that I used a frozen piecrust (sorry, Mom!) because I was running low on time and honestly just didn't feel like messing with it.  So that's why the crust looks so perfect and the pan it's in is just tin.  Oh well.

Pear and Almond Tart

1 pie crust

3-4 red pears, cored and thinly sliced

1/2 cup raw almonds

1/4 cup vegan butter

1/4 cup brown sugar

juice of 1 lemon

dash of salt

small amount of water

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp ground ginger

flour (for coating pear slices)

Give the almonds a couple of pulses in the food processor, so you have some small bits as well as some whole almonds left.  Heat a small saucepan and toast the almonds, until they smell toasty (about 5 minutes).  Add the butter until it melts, then add brown sugar, stirring to incorporate.  Juice your lemon into the mix, then stir in the salt, vanilla extract, cinnamon, and ginger.  Heat until bubbling, then cover and set aside.

Preheat oven to 375F.  Core and slice the pears.  Arrange in a pie crust, coating each slice first in flour.  Once you have a nice design on the top (or not!), start heating up the almond mixture again.  It will be a little thick, so add a little water, until it's more like a liquidy syrup instead of almond gravy.  Pour this mixture over the top of your pears, filling in any open areas with the almonds.  Pop in the oven for 45 minutes.  That's it!

Pretty simple, especially if you use a frozen crust...  (i.e. cheat)

I'll let you know tomorrow if it's actually any good :)

the only pot pie in my eyes

I thought about titling this entry "oh great, it's going to be one of those evenings..." but I decided to try to start out on a more posi note. No one wants to hear about how everything I touch today gets broken, which puts fear in my heart when the time comes for dinner making... oh wait, I guess you just did. Well, anyway. Let's try again:

Generally, I would not reccommend that anyone actually eat half a pie. But the rules get changed for the Seitan and Veggie Pot Pie I made last night. This is not my first pie venture, but it is my first pot pie venture. I pretty much made the recipe up on my own, but I borrowed a gravy technique simply for measurements from Alternative Outfitters. But I changed it some, so I'll go ahead and post the recipe here for you. It's fall, it's pot pie and soup and bread and casserole season. So get ready for a lot of that from me, because I am all about warm, yummy dinners on cool fall days. Michael calls it putting on our 'winterfat'. We vegans need to bulk up some for those cold as fuck winter months. Well, maybe I don't need to bulk up, but he does, and I'm happy to oblige and just worry about it later (ugh Spring weight loss season, how I hate you). So anyway, here's what my pie looked like out of the oven.

ok, i know it's kind of ugly. ignore that. we had crust issues.

Well, by the time came to put on the top crust, I was totally over crustmaking and rolling, and I mostly blame that on the fact that I used whole wheat flour (not pastry flour). I was out of AP, and whole wheat pastry flour is so expensive here that I tend to get frugal and not use it when I should. So... use pastry flour if you go the WW route. Or regular AP would of course be fine, but I was trying to cancel out all the fat in the crust with at least a healthy carb. The problem is that it doesn't stick to itself and just wants to flake...well...anyway. It was frustrating, and looks ugly as crap, but it tasted good (if maybe a little grainy, but that didn't bother me ONE BIT).

Also, for my seitan, I used the recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance, but I steamed it for 40 minutes intstead of simmering it like the recipe says. I find that simmering it in broth makes it uber salty, and simmering in general makes seitan spongey. Steaming makes it nice and firm, and the flavors you put in the seitan are the flavors you get when you eat it. So... that's just my two cents. For this recipe, I divided the seitan into 4 cutlets before steaming, and used one of them for the pie. It was about the size of my hand (so..what, like 5"x3"x1"). I'm just telling you all this so you know how much to use in the pie, because you can't use too much because it just won't all fit, unfortunately. Ok, on to the recipe.

Seitan and Veggie Pot Pie

for the crust:

5 cups flour

1/2 tsp salt

2/3 cup shortening (or room temp vegan butter)

6-7 Tbsp water

for the gravy:

1/3 cup vegan butter (i used earth balance)

1/3 cup flour

1/2 medium onion, chopped

2/3 cup unsweetened soymilk

1 3/4 cup water

1 veggie bouillon cube

1 tsp poultry seasoning (i used one that was heavy on the sage..mmm!)

veggies/seitan:

1 seitan cutlet, chopped into 1" pieces

2 carrots, sliced

2 celery ribs, sliced

3-4 baby red potatoes, cubed (really small ones, i'd use only 1 or two regular sized taters)

handful of broccoli florets

couple handfuls of spinach

handful of peas (i forgot these and kicked myself later, but you should use them)

2 scallions, thinly sliced (white and green parts)

3 or 4 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley

Method:

Heat oven to 425F.

First, get your pie crust started (you could also just use frozen pie crusts...if you want to CHEAT). Mix together the flour and salt. Cut in shortening until the flour resembles fine crumbles. If you have a pastry cutter, you can use that, but I just used my hands. Sprinkle on the water and mix in (really, just use your hands, it's easiest) until you have a smooth dough. Divide into two equal pieces, roll one out to fit a 9 inch pie plate, put it in the plate and leave it alone until later. Cover your other dough ball with plastic wrap, or it will dry out (like mine did).

Next up, chop your veggies. You will steam these before they go into the pie crust to bake. This is my genius solution to steaming lots of different veggies: Get a medium pot and put about 2 inches of water in the bottom, along with your steaming apparatus (ours just fits into the bottom of the pot). Then, chop your veggies in the order they'll need to cook, starting with the ones that take the longest, and layer in the pot accordingly. Mine went potatoes, carrots, celery, spinach, broccoli. Lid it up and turn on the heat. By the time you start to smell the veggies, they're done. This took me until I was done with the gravy. Drain them when they're finished. note: the parsley and scallions (and peas if using) don't get precooked!

Ok, so while the veggies are steaming, make your gravy. Melt the buttery stuff in the bottom of another medium pot. Add the onions and cook for about a minute, then add the flour and stir until it's bubbly. Turn off heat. Pour in the soymilk and water, drop in the bouillon cube, and add the poultry seasoning (sage, thyme, and oregano would work fine). You might also want to grind some pepper in at this point, if you like (i do). Put back on the heat and bring to a boil, stirring all the while. Hold it there for about a minute, and keep stirring. You will see it thicken. Take off the heat.

Add veggies (including scallions and parsley and peas this time) to the gravy along with the chopped seitan. Stir it up and pour it in the piecrust. Roll out the second crust and fit it on top the filling. Crimp down edges (michael did this for me, i was too frustrated) and make sure you make some slits on the top for the steam to escape. Or you could do something creative like cut out little shapes and then use that dough to make nice cute decorations. I just wasn't there yet. Brush top crust with oil, if you want it to be a toasty brown (i'd honestly had enough fat content at this point though). Place pie on a cookie sheet lined with foil (in case it overflows), throw it in the oven and bake for 35 minutes. Let cool at least 10 minutes before cutting.

I really did eat half this pie. It was so amazingly delicious that I couldn't stand it. I couldn't stand it!!

how on earth could you resist this? you can't. it's that simple.

So this was a huge hit. Next time, I'll use my pastry flour and do something creative and lovely with my crust. But seriously, when it's just Michael and me, presentation isn't always the first thing on my mind, especially when things like crusts are giving me fits. Forgive me? kthnx.

I think I was going to say something else, but I'm blanking. Maybe I'll remember later....

eta: I can remember one thing I was thinking about. I absolutely love having a blogname that starts with an 'A' because I'm at the top (or close) of anyone's blogroll that has added me. I know that's silly, but I just love, as a new blogger, seeing my blog on other amazing vegan blogs. Thank you to all that have added me! If I for some reason haven't added you yet, let me know and I totally will. I'm all about spreading the vegan word, friends.

a variety of dinners and some semi bad photos I took of them

So I have this problem where I drink a little bit before and during cooking so that by the time I need to take pictures of the food, I'm too tipsy to hold the camera steady. Since I eat dinner at like 11 pm every night (ugh!) the lighting is bad too. Therefore, if you ever wonder why sometimes my photos suck hard even though I have a masters in photography, now you know. Plus, I'm still not an expert at digital photography and the fact that the shutter doesn't click as soon as I want to, although my dad's camera is much better than the OTHER one I was using. Anyway. I just uploaded a bunch of craptastic pictures and wanted to explain ahead of time. On the plus side, there is someone who is happy about the fact that Michael and I drink a lot of beer:

ghostface's new home

And so he won't get jealous, here's Bill Murray, looking particularly evil:

Ok, so first off, a few photos of random stuff I've made that haven't fit into other posts so far. This one is a nice salad with calendula flowers (edible!). The petals are kind of buttery tasting. But don't eat the middle parts, they're just there for show for the photo.

mmmm flowers

This is one of our favorite, junky, go-to meals when no one feels like cooking. CroissantDogs! It's highly processed and not good for you. Best served with lots of ketchup and spicy mustard.

This is obviously fairly simple... Just wrap up some soydogs in croissants and bake them according to the croissant package. It's a nice twist on pigs in a blanket (ew!) with the flakiness of that croissant. It's better than it should be, actually. This time, we used Worthington's Linketts. WHAT! They are so good. Even better than Yves, despite their creepy light pink coloring. Michael says that's how real hot dogs look, but I'm not so sure.

croissantdogs

Oh, and this is a chocolate pie I made for my grandmas' (plural!) birthday party. My one grandma used to be like... a baking expert and somehow I managed to catch this gene in my DNA. Yay! The only problem is that her best best best recipe is a chocolate pie that mostly consists of cook n serve pudding and butter and milk. And I veganized it, much to my family's surprise. I even made the crust. I suppose you want the recipe....

TOO BAD! It's a family secret, sorry. Well, the orginial recipe was a secret, and this is based on the original and tastes just like it. So... if you want to come over for dinner, I'll make it and you can taste it for yourself. Oh...maybe someday I'll post it. But not right now.

grandma's chocolate pie. VEGANIZED. check!

Ok, what's next.... *sigh*

(I can only upload pictures in batches of 5 so I might need to take a break here)

Remember how I got even MORE swiss chard at the farmers market? In a valiant effort to eat more leafy greens...this is what I keep doing. I buy them, and then have no idea how to make them edible. I can't stand the kale that's sold in our grocery stores (it's so bitter!) and the one time I tried just cooking chard, I made it really vinegary, and I kind of hate the taste of vinegar by itself, so for some reason that scared me off from cooking it like that. Anyway, so we stuck to stuffing it for this round. Also, Michael did saute some up that was really good, so maybe he should be the one who cooks it from now on. But this time, we went south of the border with Mexi Swiss Chard Rollups! Um... all the photos I took of prep turned out terrible, so you'll have to just listen to how we ate them with and what's inside them.

more creative swiss chard solutions

We put some brown rice with cumin in our rice cooker and let that cook up. After it was finished, we mixed in a can of kidney beans and seasoned to taste. Again, blanche the chard to make it easy to work with. Then, just a spoonful or two of the rice and beans went into the leaves and we rollllled em up and baked them at 350F for maybe 30-40 minutes. That's Follow Your Heart mozzarella on top. By the way, it only melts truly when you cover it with foil. We did not know this until this point, so foil yours. Served it all up with some homemade salsa and guacamole on a small bed of tortilla chips.

Next is something I AM SUPER PROUD OF!!!! No really, after I made this, I danced around the kitchen in complete ecstasy for about 10 minutes. And me dancing is like a combination of Elaine and Michelle Tanner. Bad. But humorous! Anyway, this is Sausage, adapted from Vegan Dad's recipe. I used a little less fennel, because I'm not a huge fan of the licorice taste, and added some thyme. Oh, and we didn't have pinto beans, so we used butter beans instead. Um, but, seriously.... amazing. You won't know what hit you. And it was so easy! Ok, enough gushing. We used these in a stew that was delicious, but photographed like babypoop, so I'm not showing it. There were lots of veggies, the sausage, a lot of soymilk, 'beef' broth, and Earth Balance. Rich, to say the least. But delicious.

better than any sausage on the planet

When we went camping, we took one of these links and sliced it very thin, left it in the oven on about 100F for around 2-3 hours and ended up with jerky! Which we took camping. Mmm.

Zucchini Bread Muffins

My buddy AllyChristine from VegWeb gave me this recipe. She sent me these muffins when we had a package exchange a couple months ago, and I literally needed the recipe. Like, I needed it. And you need it. She dusted hers with cocoa powder, which was awesome. But I was lazy, plus I don't have a sifter, so I didn't do that.

INGREDIENTS

3 tbs ground flaxseed or 4.5 teaspoons (tsps) ener-g egg (I used ener-g)

.5 cup water or 6 tbs if using ener-g

1 cup neutral oil or 1/2 cup oil 1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce (I actually used 3/4 C applesauce, 1/4 C canola oil)

1 tbs white distilled vinegar (I used redwine vinegar here cause i didn't have white and it was fine)

2 cups gran. sugar (I used Sucanat here)

2 cups grated zucchini (no need to peel)

2 tsps vanilla

3 cups unbleached AP or whole wheat pastry flour (I use the latter)

2 tsps cinnamon

1/2 tsp nutmeg

1/4 tsp ground ginger

1/4 tsp ground cloves

1 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp baking powder

one tsp salt

Preheat to 325. Lightly grease 8x4x2 loaf pans, 4 mini loaf pans, or 2 muffin tins. In food processor or bowl (I just use a whisk), combine flaxseed and water...or ener-g and water. Whip until thick and creamy, about 2 minutes. Add oil, vinegar, and sugar, and combine. Stir in the zucchini and vanilla. If using food processor, transfer oil/vinegar/sugar mix to large bowl before stirring in zucchini and vanilla.

In separate bowl, sift flour, cinnamon, nutmeg, baking soda, baking powder, and salt together. Add nuts and raisins if using. Stir dry into wet until just combined. Divide into prepared pans, and bake 60-70 for standard loaves, 40-45 for mini, 30-35 for muffins (I did like 25). Check with toothpick!

Last night we made lasagna. The sauce is sauteed onion, zucchini, squash, and crumblers with some of our homemade marinara and some storebought as well.

oh yum.

So the noodles are layered with the sauce, some spinach, and my basil/spinach/tofu ricotta (huge bunch of basil, 3 garlic cloves, package of spinach, extra firm tofu, salt blended in a food processor) with a little Follow Your Heart mozzarella on top. This time, we foiled the top so the cheese would melt. But halfway through cooking I wanted to unfoil it in order to brown the cheesiness, but when we looked only half of the cheese was melty. I said it would be fine. It turned out just like the cheese on the mexi chard rollups. So guess which side of the lasagna I got to eat, since it was my fault? haha...I don't care, it was still delicious.

Ok, and finally I have a little Indian food for your tasting happiness. I was in a curry mood. And I had a lot of beets and sweet potatoes. This resulted in sweet potato and beet curry salad. Which was not good until the next day, but the next day, it was sooooo good. So if you make this, make it a day ahead and refrigerate until you're ready to eat it. I needed something to go with it, so I whipped up a quick Chana Masala to go over some brown rice. Chana Masala = chickpeas, onions, garlic, tomato paste, curry powder, soymilk, and salt. You can find a recipe you like online, yes? It's really simple.

Indian food does not photograph particularly well. especially when the photographer is a tad tipsy. oh well.

Here's the recipe for the Sweet Potato and Beet Curry Salad:

sweet potatoes (cubed)

beets (peeled and cubed)

tahini

plain soy yogurt

scallions (thinly sliced)

dijon mustard

red curry powder

a tiny amount of garam masala (optional)

I know there are no amounts up there. But this is pretty versatile, and you can just use as many beets and sweet potatoes as you like, then adjust the rest to fit. Ok, so cook your beets and sweet potatoes first. Note that it takes longer to cook beets than cubed sweet potatoes, so adjust your cooking time for this. I boiled all mine together and my potatoes were a tad mushy and the beets were a tad crunchy (they went on the stove for about 25 minutes, so I'd say 15-20 minutes for the potatoes, around 30 for the beets). Once the beets are cooked, peel them and cut them. To the lovely root veggies, add your tahini first. You will want to have like... a 2:1 tahini:yogurt ratio, however much you use. So, more tahini, ok? Then just add your mustard, scallions, curry (I used around 3-4 Tbsp here, but remember that RED curry is spicy, so be careful - do it to taste [and remember that the flavor will intensify and get better the next day]). Salt to taste, give it a really good stir, and plop in the fridge for several hours.

The sweetness of the sweet potatoes and the beets (and the earthiness of both) goes really well with the curry flavoring, while the tahini and yogurt make this creamy creamy creamy. You will be pleasantly surprised, I promise!

I'm done for now. I will (i will i will) post about our camping trip next, as I'm pretty much caught up on our meals now. I might even do it later tonight. But my hands are a little tired right now. Go make dinner! But don't drink so much you can't photograph it...