Another One From Vegan Planet

The actual title of this recipe is "Baked Polenta with Red Beans and Fresh Tomato Salsa," only I used pinto beans and jarred salsa. I had a can of pinto beans on-hand, but only dried kidney beans and I hadn't planned ahead. Plus, pinto beans sounded like they went better with salsa than kidney beans would. I also left out the cilantro in the recipe, simply because I didn't have any, and instead of a small amount of scallions, I used a chopped yellow onion. This was really good. I was worried my boyfriend wouldn't like the polenta, as I fixed a dish using the polenta that comes in a tube a couple of years ago and he didn't care for that stuff that much. Turns out that he loves homemade polenta, though. Yay! Don't be fooled by the title of "baked polenta." You do bake it, but you cook it on the stove first, so you still have the 30-40 minutes of stirring. Now I know how to make grits from scratch, too! I would use white cornmeal for that, though.

The Conclusion of Vegan Planet Week

This is Indonesian-Style Rice with Tempeh. The tempeh is crumbled up, which is why it's not really visible in the photo. This was my least favorite of all of the recipes from Vegan Planet that we tried last week. My boyfriend actually liked it quite a bit, though, so it might just be a personal preference and not a knock on the recipe. The recipe calls for one or two hot red peppers. Said red peppers were nowhere to be found in Knoxville last week, so I used two hot green peppers (I don't know exactly what variety they were...Kroger's doesn't seem to believe in accurately identifying their peppers). I couldn't decide if they were going to be more or less hot than the red peppers would have been. I wound up adding two peppers and I could barely detect any heat in the dish. Maybe the spiciness is what I was missing in this recipe.

It's Vegan Planet week around here.

Before we go grocery shopping on Sundays, I sit down and pick out a few recipes to make for the week. This week everything I picked was from Vegan Planet. On Sunday night we had Not-So-Dirty Rice, but I didn't take a picture of it because I've posted it on here before. We added mushrooms to it this time, which made it even more awesome. Have I mentioned how much we like mushrooms?

This is a Red Bean and Sweet Potato Curry served over brown rice. It uses curry powder, so it's not exactly an authentic curry, but it was simple to make and pretty tasty. The recipe suggests pureeing a portion of it and then mixing it back in if you like a creamier sauce. I might try that in the future (I was in a hurry the night I made this).


This one is Tofu and Vegetable Lo Mein. I hadn't had snow peas in a very long time and had forgotten how good they were. The recipe said to use either eggless Chinese noodles (that's not very specific...I'm pretty sure there are different kinds of Chinese noodles) or linguine. I went with whole wheat spaghetti since I already had it on-hand. There is shredded cabbage hiding in there, even though you can't really see it. I have no desire to sit there and actually shred cabbage, so I just buy it already shredded for coleslaw. The lo mein was good and, like the other recipes above, simple to prepare. I haven't really come across anything in Vegan Planet thus far that I've found to be complex to make. There will be another recipe from the book coming up here. I think it was an Indonesian rice dish that I picked out.

Cheesy Potato Chili Gratin

Yet another recipe from Vegan Planet. I liked this one, but it sure isn't pretty to look at. That's Follow Your Heart cheddar-style on top. I knew it wasn't going to melt in the oven since it was set at 375, so I heated some soy milk on the stove and melted the soy cheese into it, then added a bit of flour to thicken it up. One day I'll try this again with homemade sour cream and chili. This time I used the non-hydrogenated Tofutti sour cream and a can of Amy's chili that had been hanging out in the pantry for awhile. I hear that a lot of people can't stand the Tofutti sour cream, but I really don't mind it. Maybe that's because I never ate the regular stuff except in a blintz casserole my momma makes, so I really don't have anything to compare it to.

Not-So-Dirty Rice

This may be our favorite recipe yet from Vegan Planet. It was pretty simple, and the only change I made was to use Gimme Lean "sausage" instead of vegetarian burger crumbles. I thought faux ground beef sounded odd in dirty rice. My boyfriend took the leftovers for lunch and came home saying how much he liked this dish, so I think it's a winner.

Sweet Noodle Kugel with Apples and Almonds

For those of you wondering what on earth a kugel is, it is a thick baked pudding, usually made with either noodles (generally a sweet dish) or potatoes (not sweet, as that would be gross). Apparently the word kugel is actually Yiddish for "ball" and I have no idea how it came to be used as it is. This was my first attempt at a vegan kugel. I came across the recipe in Vegan Planet. Of course, I made a few changes: I left out the raisins (call me picky, but I don't like them), used farfalle instead of the broken fettuccine called for (my momma always made noodle kugel with egg noodles, and I thought farfalle looked more traditional), and used peanut butter instead of almond butter (because I did not have almond butter). Overall, this was pretty good, but I personally prefer my noodle kugel a little sweeter. That is an easy fix in the future, though. On the plus side, apparently I don't mind almonds if they're ground up (they're in the topping). I usually don't care for nuts mixed in dishes, but I always wish I did because I know they're so good for you.

Good news: I got a new oven thermostat today. Yay! This was the first dish I made after the new thermostat was put in. Three cheers for non-burnt food!

Tempeh and Red Bean Jambalaya with Chipotle Chiles

I bought Vegan Planet a few days ago and this was the first recipe I tried from it. It was really tasty and I look forward to trying more recipes from the book. Instead of the bell pepper that the recipe called for, I used some frozen gumbo veggies (okra, corn, red pepper, etc.) that I had, as I was out of bell peppers and didn't want to go to the store for that one ingredient. My only "complaint" with this recipe is that it said this made 4 servings...it actually was more than 6! Granted, I eat fairly small portions, but my boyfriend doesn't. It's not a huge deal, but I am trying to scale down recipes so that we only have one day of leftovers.