Some sort of curry

Cauliflower, peas, onions, rice, curry… you know it looks good. Well, it was.

Swing Thai

Red curry with coconut milk

Why not, right?

"GFV" on the menu = gluten-free and vegan

Swing Thai for curry. How can you ever go wrong with curry? They have 3 locations in Denver. We went to the one at 301 S. Pennsylvania. Friendly staff. Worth a look.

Arroz con Palmito

A simple Costa Rican dish that I veganized. Arroz con palmito (hearts of palm). I spent last winter in Argentina, and found palmitos everywhere. They would base salads around them, put them on pizza, have them in sandwiches, and I developed a taste for the tangy things. This dish really keeps their flavor alive.

Ingredients: (serves 10)

• 3 cups white rice, cooked  
• 1 (13 3/4 ounce) can hearts of palm, drained and diced (palmito)
• 2 cups bechamel sauce (2 cups almond milk combined with 4 Tbs flour and 4 Tbs Earth Balance)
• 2 cups tomato sauce
• 1 cup nutritional yeast or shredded vegan cheese 
• 1 teaspoon breadcrumbs

1. Preheat oven to 375

2. Combine palmito and bechamel sauce. In a large deep pyrex dish, put a layer of 1/3 rice, then a layer of 1/3 bechamel sauce, then a layer of 1/3 tomato sauce and top with thin layer of nutritional yeast or vegan cheese. Repeat layers three times. Garnish with bread crumbs.

3. Bake at 375 degrees for 15 minutes or until golden brown.

*derived from this recipe

Organic Palmitos

 

Pasta Fresca

Pasta fresca a la Noodles and Co., but homemade of course! Penne with red onion, cherry tomatoes, and spinach. Sauteed with marsala cooking wine and spices. A fresh, lovely dish with fantastic flavors.

Tofu Spring Rolls

Vegan spring rolls with tofu, cucumber, bean sprouts, romaine lettuce, carrot shreds, scallions, glass noodles, and peanut sauce. A lot of stuff packed in there, I know, but that’s the fun of spring rolls. They are surprisingly easy to make and if you make a whole batch (using all the spring roll wrappers in a pack), you’ll have snacks for work or home for days!

Minnie wrappin'

You just need to prep the stuffings, preferably with all the ingredients sliced thin, and then get a bowl of warm water and a wet towel to do the stuffing and rolling on. Soak each wrapper for a few seconds and the put whatever you want in it and seal it like a Qdoba burrito. Some other good stuffings are bell peppers, maybe avocado, or whatever veggies sound good to you.

Jamaican Red Bean Stew

A lot of  red and orange in this one… This is a slow cooker recipe made with red kidney beans, sweet potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, scallions and coconut milk. Derived from Robin Robertson’s cookbook, Quick Fix Vegetarian (although I got the recipe here after seeing a post about it on Cafe VegNews). A tasty, interesting dish to mix things up. It went great with some roasted butternut squash on the side.

Red Lentil Dal

This tasty dal is one of the recent fruits of my efforts to incorporate more legume-based protein into my diet, in lieu of soy. I’m not giving up soy, just trying to supplant it when I can. As vegans, we have an opportunity to get the bulk of our protein from more complete sources like beans and lentils, and I hope to use that opportunity to discover lots of new recipes.

I was very pleased with how this dal experiment came out, and I hope to make variations on it pretty often. I found the recipe for it online. Dals are pretty easy, and The New York Times put a quick little guide up online for making simple legume-based dishes in their Minimalist series, so check that out for more ideas.

Some prep pics:

   

 

Catching Up

This posting won’t be pretty, but I want to catch up on some of the tasty vegan food I’ve been eating lately. Think of this as a food diary of sorts. No pics to upload, but I figure it is worth it to share some of the things we’ve been cooking.

• Miso Soup – a tasty simple soup that even I can’t screw up. Miso contains probiotics that boost your immune system, and it makes for a great lunch on a cold December day. I added scallions, fresh spinach, and thin noodles, along with some sriracha to spice it up.
• Spaghetti – an easy vegan standby. I got a bunch of organic mushroom marinara on sale, so Minnie whipped up some pasta with texturized vegetable protein, nutritional yeast, and added tomatoes. Always good.
• Red Lentil Dal – I will do a pic for this one shortly. In my quest to cook more and try new dishes, I decided to give Indian dal a shot. Red lentils with onions, garlic, turmeric, more spices that my tired brain can’t think of now, all served with Minnie’s magical yellow basmati rice. More details on this dish soon.
• Vegetable and Barley Stew – slow cooked to perfection. I’m surprised we haven’t done veggie soup with barley until recently. The barley is such a perfect addition that I doubt we’ll leave it out ever again. Carrots, potatoes, celery, onions, tomatoes… noms.
• Mashed potatoes – this time Minnie made them nice and creamy with hemp milk. I can’t wait to have some tomorrow!
• Roasted Butternut Squash with lentils – another one I managed not to screw up. I wanted to make sure to do another squash before the season ended. There has been so much organic Colorado squash at the store this fall that it screams at me to buy it every time I shop. I have learned to bake it a little hotter and a little longer than the on-squash sticker specifies; maybe the local farmers don’t account for altitude on their labelling? Another tasty leftover waiting for me tomorrow…

I’ve been trying to increase the variety in my diet and reduce the amount of processed foods I eat (like veggie burgers, fake meat, etc). This means more dried beans and lentils from the bulk bins, and staying on the lookout for interesting recipes that a kitchen amateur like me can handle. Right now I am soaking some kidney beans for a Jamaican sweet potato and kidney bean stew I am making tomorrow. I also have a new chickpea/veggie curry I want to try out soon. It has been rewarding to get back to basics and get protein and nutrition from legumes and fresher whole foods. I still love my Yves fake ham and turkey for a quick sandwich, but I am consciously trying to get protein from fewer soy products, just in case all those scary rumors about soy are true (and protein variety seems much healthier to me).

Being vegan is such an evolving lifestyle. When you start out, you tend to eat a lot of Boca burgers and pasta. While those meals still end up in my rotation, I have found a lot of new recipes that I might not have considered if I still ate a diet based on the industrial food system I was so familiar with before. Going vegan only gets easier and more rewarding as you go, and I love it more every day.

Exploding Baked Potato

Sometimes you just want a quick, easy dinner using what you already have in the fridge. Baked potatoes can be the way to go, and in this case the potato was actually blogworthy. While I nuked the potato, I pulled out my fixins: carrots and broccoli, corn, Toffutti sour cream, salsa, Earth Balance natural buttery spread, textured vegetable protein, and some hot sauce. Potatoes provide such a great canvas. This time, it gave me a great way to use up ingredients we had left over from other recipes. The TVP originally went in a spaghetti sauce, the carrots and broccoli were left out of the vindaloo recipe, and the corn was in tupperware as a salad add-in. A late dinner can still be good.

Vindaloo

Vindaloo is an Indian curry dish that apparently has Portuguese origins. I had never heard of it until I was browsing the curry wall at Savory Spice Shop, and fell in love upon smelling it. I used Savory’s provided recipe and made the dish with Mori-Nu Tofu, cauliflower, 1 Russet potato, yellow onion and white rice. It was so good, and I can’t wait to make it again so I can try some new variations. I think it would be good with chickpeas, carrots, and maybe lentils. It seemed to get better over the next couple days when I nuked it for lunch at work. I love when that happens.