Enchilada Casserole

I know this isn't a good picture by a longshot, but this enchilada casserole tastes good. I promise! It is from Nava Atlas's The Vegetarian Family Cookbook. I like to add mushrooms to the bean mixture (really I like to add mushrooms to any dish that they go well in). The spiciness of this dish depends on the kind of salsa you use (you can use mild green chilis instead, too). This is the recipe that taught me to extend my soy cheese by melting it into some soy milk and thickening the mixture up with a bit of flour. I have used that trick many times, since it is so hard to get soy cheese to melt well in the oven if you aren't cooking at a very high temperature.

Mustard-Battered Tofu, Baked Risotto, and Green Beans

The recipe for the tofu can be found here, but in case you don't feel like clicking on the link:

Mustard-Battered Tofu

1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. onion powder
1 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. garlic powder
2 cups unbleached white flour or whole wheat pastry
4 Tbsp. nutritional yeast (optional)
3 Tbsp. yellow mustard
1/2 cup water
2 Tbsp. baking powder
2 to 3 lb. tofu
3 1/2 cups vegetable oil

• Mix together the salt, onion powder, pepper, garlic powder, flour, and nutritional yeast in a deep bowl.
• In a separate bowl, dilute the mustard with 1/2 cup water.
• Add 1/3 cup of the flour mixture to the mustard mixture and stir. Add the baking powder to the dry flour mixture and mix.
• Dip chunks of the mock chicken into the mustard batter, then drop each chunk into the flour mixture and coat with the desired amount of “crust.”
• Fry the chunks in hot oil on medium-high heat in a large skillet or deep fryer until crispy and golden brown, turning as needed.

I didn't use any nutritional yeast in mine, simply because I was all out of it. I only used one package of tofu (which I'd frozen and then defrosted), and I definitely should have halved the rest of the ingredients. This was really tasty, though, and it doesn't have a really strong mustard-y flavor. Shortly after this picture was taken, I dipped my tofu in ketchup. Mmmmm mustard and ketchup. My boyfriend willingly took all of the leftovers for lunch today, so I give this two thumbs up.

The baked risotto is from Nava Atlas's The Vegetarian Family Cookbook (you can see a little bit of the cookbook peaking out of the top of the picture--woopsie). This recipe was so much easier than making risotto the traditional way. Honestly, the one time I made it "traditionally" before, I didn't really like it. That was just me being picky, though, as I don't really like creamy non-dessert stuff all that much. I still had arborio rice to use up, though, and noticed this recipe and thought I'd give it a try. It bakes for an hour, stirring every 15 minutes. At first I thought it wasn't going to work at all, as the first couple of times I stirred it looked remarkably like it had when I first put it in the oven. The last time I stirred, though, it had magically turned into something resembling risotto. I thought it was going to be a little too liquidy, so when I was supposed to add a cup of water at the last stirring, I only added half a cup. It's really thick now, so I probably should have followed the directions, but honestly I kind of liked the texture better than the previous time I'd made risotto.

The green beans are nothing special. They are organic ones from a can. I added black pepper and a bit of liquid smoke. They're actually pretty good for beans from a can.

Strawberry Muffins

We went to visit my boyfriend's parents in Nashville recently and I wanted to take some breakfast food with me. I found this recipe in Nava Atlas's Vegetarian Family Cookbook. It is the basic muffin recipe with frozen chopped strawberries added in. I think I added about twice as many strawberries as the recipe said; I reallyyyyy like strawberries. These muffins were really easy and they rose pretty well, too. Often when you find vegan muffins at bakeries, they're really dense, but these were nice and fluffy. It's so disappointing when the only vegan food a place sells really isn't very good.

Guilt-Free Chocolate Brownie Cake

I promise we eat much more "real" food than we do dessert.
Yesterday I bought a quart of chocolate Silk soymilk. I don't know why I bought a whole quart when I'd never tried it before. I didn't like this stuff at all--it tastes almost bitter to me. I would feel awful throwing out that much soymilk, so I started looking for dessert recipes I could use it in. The first one I chose was Guilt-Free Chocolate Brownie Cake from Nava Atlas's Vegetarian Family Cookbook. I just replaced the regular soymilk with chocolate. This was tasty and simple. It only used about 1/4th a cup of soymilk, though. I see a lot of chocolate desserts in our future.