My first sourdough bread!

I'm sorry I've been neglecting this blog. Sometimes life gets in the way, and sometimes I'm just lazy about updating. I've started a new job, which I really like. I still cook on a regular basis, but sometimes I just don't feel like taking a picture. Also, we have several favorite meals, and there doesn't seem to be much point in blogging about a recipe I've already featured on here before.


Until recently (read: when I made these loaves), I'd never had sourdough bread. My boyfriend kept raving about it, though, and when we found some dry sourdough starter when we are at the new Whole Foods in Nashville, he begged me to make it. It took me awhile to get around to it, but I finally did. Truthfully, I didn't get successful bread until the second try. Ideally, the starter should be doing its thing at around 80-90 degrees. The instructions that came with mine said that if it was too cold in your home, to put it in an oven with only the oven light on. I'm sure that would work just fine, except my oven is old and does not have such a light (but oh what I wouldn't give to have an oven that had one!). As such, it took my starter longer than the instructions suggested it would to actually be viable. In my sourdough ignorance, I tried to use it before it was ready and man was that dough tough. And it didn't rise; not one bit. So I threw it out, waited several days (and a couple of more feedings) and actually got my dough to rise. Woohoo! I'm told the sour flavor will grow stronger over time, but my first (okay, technically second) attempt was certainly not bad. And now that I've got the starter going, my boyfriend says he wants to try making the next loaf.

Indian Yumminess

I'm fairly certain that there isn't much you can do to potatoes to make me not like them. Even so, these Samosa Stuffed Baked Potatoes from Veganomicon still rank very high on my list of favorite ways to eat potatoes. And as a bonus, they're not nearly as bad for you as a baked potato loaded with Earth Balance and Tofutti sour cream.

To go with the potatoes, I made Red Lentil-Cauliflower Curry, also from Veganomicon. I am so glad that we have discovered a love of cauliflower. This recipe made a ton, but that's okay because it was delicious and we enjoyed eating the leftovers. I didn't serve it with any rice at first, since we had the potatoes alongside it, but once we ran out of potatoes, I made Saffron-Garlic Rice (yet another Veganomicon recipe) to go with it. Garlic is pretty much one of our favorite things ever, and we can't get enough of that rice recipe. I used to love those Near East rice pilaf mixes, but they are horribly high in sodium, so I never felt very good about eating them. I now found a yummier replacement, and it's less expensive to boot.

Clearly this is not part of the Indian meal, but this is the Skillet Corn Bread from Veganomicon, which I served with chili. I was intrigued by the jalapeño-onion variation, but it calls for putting cooked jalapeños and onions on top of the cornbread mixture. I like my jalapeños mixed into the batter, so that is what I did. This was my first time making skillet cornbread. My boyfriend had an old large cast-iron skillet that I never used because he had cooked meat in it. We got a wire brush attachment for our drill and removed the old seasoning so that I could re-season it and use it for vegan stuff. I guess I did a decent job of seasoning it, because the cornbread didn't stick at all. Yay! I love my "new" skillet. It sure is heavy, though. The skillet cornbread turned out great, even though I strayed from the recipe a bit. I was running a little low on plain soymilk, so I made up the difference with some plain soy yogurt. I'm always playing with new cornbread recipes, but I think I'll be sticking with this one now.

Leek and Bean Cassoulet With Biscuits

How on earth do you post pictures side-by-side in blogger?

Anyhoo, this is the leek and bean cassoulet with biscuits from Veganomicon. This dish is comfort food at its best. It's a sort of vegetable stew with biscuits baked right on top. Yummy! My boyfriend tried to convince me that since he'd never had leeks before, that this should count as Mission 3 of Operation Let's Eat Some New Vegetables, but I voted him down. After all, we eat onions all the time and they are both from the same genus. I didn't pick out a new vegetable at the store the other day, so there probably won't be a new mission until after New Years (we are going to visit his parents in Nashville all next week).

Something I have noticed about Veganomicon is that when they tell you approximately how long a recipe will take from start to finish, they are actually right. That might sound like a small thing, but someone the times are rarely right for other cookbooks, so this makes me happy.

I'm still here. No, really, I am.

I have been a really lazy blogger in the past month. As you can see from all of these pictures, though, I haven't been so lazy about cooking and baking.

We went to my sister's house in North Carolina for Thanksgiving. In addition to the vegan Thanksgiving meal I brought with me, I also brought some blueberry muffins for breakfast. I want to make the ones out of Damn Tasty, but I didn't have any soy yogurt. I found this recipe on VegWeb. I had all of the ingredients and it got such good reviews, that I figured it was worth a shot. The results were...meh. Despite turning out fairly pretty, if I do say so myself, the muffins weren't very flavorful (okay, they were downright bland) and were rather crumbly. I definitely don't plan on trying that recipe again. I don't know...maybe they'd be better with a teaspoon of vanilla and some sort of binder.

For Thanksgiving, I made whole wheat dressing/stuffing from homemade bread. I didn't really follow a recipe on that one, just looked at several different recipes to get a basic idea of what I should do, then went from there. This turned out well, but I should have let the bread dry out a bit more before I used it.

I also made the holiday cranberry sauce from Veganomicon. It got rave reviews from everyone who tried it (even my incredibly picky-eater sister tried it...I was impressed). I also made the mashed spiced sweet potatoes from Veganomicon, but I didn't take a picture because I've blogged about them before. They are so simple and everyone loved them, too. My brother even ate sweet potatoes for the first time. Have I mentioned that my siblings are not very adventuresome eaters? My brother's girlfriend is getting him to try new foods, though. One day, I will get my siblings to actually eat vegetables (besides corn, which they already eat).

This is the rustic white beans and mushrooms from Veganomicon. This recipe made a TON. I would probably cut it in half the next time I make it (and I will make it again....my boyfriend saw me make it, but didn't get to have any because he went to his parents' house for Thanksgiving. He said it looked good and asked me to make it another time, though.). I was going to have this as the main part of my Thanksgiving meal, but my boyfriend insisted on getting me a Tofurky when we were at the store. I do like Tofurky, but I sure can't get it to slice very neatly. Every time I try, the stuffing crumbles and spills right out. I think their stuffing recipe could use some work, personally.

One night I decided to be adventurous and make homemade sweet potato gnocchi. Oy, what a pain. I have no idea how people manage to shape gnocchi into anything remotely attractive-looking. It tasted good, but was a little gummy. It also made quite a bit and there is more waiting for me in the freezer. I served it with a homemade sundried tomato cream sauce, but I didn't write down what I put in it and it's been a couple of weeks now, so I don't remember. I know I used pureed canellini beans as the base, though.

More from Veganomicon

I served the leftover ED&BV Kinda Corny Muffins with Veganomicon's Chile Cornmeal-Crusted Tofu. I did the baked version, but forgot to spray the tofu with oil, so it was a tad bit dry. The flavor was still very good, though, and I would make this again. I am sure I would also like it fried, but I was trying to be a bit healthier. There was tons of extra coating, so I battered and fried (yeah, so much for the healthy thing) some mushrooms. My boyfriend came in the kitchen, found me coating the mushrooms, and said, "oooh, somebody loves me!" (He'll probably kill me for repeating that, but he meant it to sound goofy, I promise.) We had the carrots with the Black Creek Ranch Dressing from The Native Foods Restaurant Cookbook. It's peeking out of the top right corner of the picture...I don't know why I didn't take a purposeful picture of it. It's really good and so simple.

For dessert we had the Vanilla-Yogurt Pound Cake from Veganomicon. I haven't had pound cake in, ohh....at least a decade, but the wait was most definitely worth it. This might just be one of my favorite desserts yet. It's so moist and full of flavor. We still have plenty left, but already I want to make another. The strawberry sauce on top is homemade. I don't follow a recipe for it, but it is frozen strawberries, sugar, a splash of orange juice, and a cornstarch slurry.

Kinda Corny Muffins

For my first recipe from Eat, Drink & Be Vegan, I chose the Kinda Corny Muffins. I subbed all purpose flour for the spelt flour, though. A lot of the recipes in this book call for various flours that I just don't normally keep on-hand. I support the use of whole grains and know that I most definitely need to use more, but I wish she had advised when it was okay to substitute a different kind of flour. Luckily, all purpose flour subbed in just fine. Because I just can't leave well enough alone, I also added in some chopped chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. I probably should try a recipe as-is before adding in ingredients, but I really liked the chipotles in these. My boyfriend ate four muffins, plus part of mine that I wasn't finished with, but made the mistake of leaving half-eaten on the shared plate. I'd say these get two thumbs up from us.

Chipotle Basil Corn Chowder and Outrageously Easy Big Bread

This Chipotle Basil Corn Chowder is another test recipe for lolo at VeganYumYum. I can't believe that I grew up not liking corn. When I finally did start liking it a little tiny bit, I only liked it on the cob. My, how times have changed. This soup was wonderful. It had just the right amount of spice in it. I thought it was a great summer soup, but it would be great in cold weather, too.

To go along with the corn chowder, I made the outrageously easy big bread from VegWeb. Sometimes I'm a little leary of the recipes on VegWeb (particularly because so many of them are hardly recipes at all), but this one got such good reviews that I figured it was worth a try. I didn't follow the directions for how to shape the bread, as I thought it would turn out nicer the way I did it. I found this recipe to be a little odd, mainly because of the instructions to sprinkle the yeast over water first, and then add that into a partial dough. I like recipes that call for proofing the yeast first, as I like to know early on whether my dough is going to rise or not. This recipe worked out just fine, though, so I guess I shouldn't be too picky. We have so much bread to eat up before we leave for a week-long beach trip.

Butter Chik'N and Naan

Both of the dishes we made for dinner last night came from VegWeb recipes. I'd never had butter chicken or naan before, but both recipes looked pretty interesting to me. I used Morningstar Farms chick'n strips in the butter chicken recipe. They were pretty good, but I am still not wild about their texture. It's a little too authentic for me (but I have no idea if it really is authentic or not, since it's been 10 years since I had chicken). I think when (yes, when) I make this again, I will use seitan. Since I didn't want to buy a whole jar of sunflower seed butter, we bought some hulled sunflower seeds and made it into sunflower seed butter in our food processor. It was fun! I also used a few tablespoons of plain soy yogurt in place of the Silk creamer. Does anyone know what red chili powder is supposed to be? I used cayenne in its place, but only used a scant half a teaspoon.

Here is the naan recipe. I really have no idea why it says to let the dough sit for two hours in a warm place, since there is no yeast in the recipe. I let it sit for a little under an hour and it seemed to work just fine. I used Ener-G as the egg substitute and WholeSoy plain soy yogurt. I would really like to try the Wildwood brand of soy yogurt, but I've never seen it around here.

BBQ Ribz

We went to Nashville last weekend and I got a new bottle of barbeque sauce from Wild Oats. When I saw Susanv's post on barbecued seitan ribz, I knew just what to do with the sauce. These were good. I've tried the Gardenburger Riblets before and didn't really care for them, but I liked these and I'm looking forward to the leftovers. I followed the baking instructions on the recipe that Susanv linked to, since I don't have a grill (or a cast iron grill pan....yet). I served the ribz with mrsbadmouth's cornbread test recipe (I only made half the recipe, since I wanted to try making it in my cast iron skillet and my skillet is small) and some green beans from my boyfriend's parents' garden.

Check out my new sponges! I found them at Big Lots the other day. They were the same price as the regular ones, so of course I had to get these.

More Tester Recipes

I know that I just posted the tempeh wingz and the jalapeno poppers, but tonight I served the leftovers with a biscuit recipe that I tested for mrsbadmouth. I still prefer the biscuit recipe that my boyfriend's momma gave me (because they're fluffier), but these were a little easier since I didn't have to roll them out.


These are apple zucchini muffins that I also tested for mrsbadmouth. Historically I have not been a fan of zucchini (or squash), but I remembered having zucchini bread years ago and liking it, so I was willing to give these a try. I'm so glad I did. These are really good. Despite having whole wheat flour in them, they're pretty light, and they have a good flavor.

Calcutta Curried Potatoes and Cinnamon Rolls

This is Calcutta Curried Potatoes (served over yellow rice) from Olive Trees and Honey by Gil Marks. The subtitle of the recipe says that it would be called Aloo Bhaji. I added peas to the recipe (along with cutting the recipe in half....we still had enough for two nights, so four servings in all), which I know would change the name of the recipe, but I can't remember the word for green peas. This was a good recipe that I would make again. It had a lot of flavor without being overly spicy. I don't know that it would be considered a very authentic Indian recipe, based on the spices called for, but then again the cookbook is referred to as "a treasury of vegetarian recipes from Jewish communities around the world," and I know nothing about Jewish communities in India. Olive Trees and Honey is a huge cookbook. Many of the recipes are not vegan in the least (for instance, the recipe for Sephardic potato croquettes calls for 6 eggs, plus an additional egg for the coating!), but I look forward to trying more of the vegan or easily veganizable recipes.

For the cinnamon rolls, I used this recipe, substituting plain soymilk for the milk, Earth Balance Whipped for the butter, and Ener-G egg replacer for the egg. Although I have a bread machine, I decided to make these by hand because I was worried that 6 cups of flour was too much for my machine. I didn't use the frosting recipe included in that link. Instead, I beat an 8 ounce tub of Tofutti non-hydrogenated cream cheese with 2 tablespoons of EB Whipped and 1 3/4 cups of powdered sugar. These turned out really well. They are much softer than the previous ones I made. Don't ask me why I didn't cut the recipe in half, though. Twenty-four cinnamon rolls is a lot for two people! Our refrigerator is now busting at the seams with cinnamon rolls. Not that we're complaining or anything....

Despite My Absence, I Have Been Cooking

Sem Aur Khumbi, from Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian. The English name of this dish is decidedly less exotic-sounding: Green Beans with Mushrooms. This was the first dish I made from the book, which I currently have checked out of the library. I added some of the Morningstar Farms chick'n strips to it. They really weren't necessary, but we had some hanging out in the freezer and my boyfriend really liked them when he tried them recently. This dish was really good and I would definitely make it again, although I'd probably cut back on the cayenne next time. The recipe calls for a whole teaspoon of it and I found it quite spicy (and I don't even have the spicier cayenne....the health food store had two different heat-levels in the bulk spice section and I bought the less spicy one--boy am I glad I did!). I served this over organic whole-wheat couscous. I was excited to discover that Fantastic Foods started making a whole wheat version.

Vegan with a Vengeance samosas (potato and green pea) with homemade mango chutney. These took forever to make, but they were really good. I was going to take the easy way out on the chutney and just buy some already made (either mango or tamarind), but all of the ones I found had either high fructose corn syrup or refined sugar, so I bought a mango and figured I would wing it on making my own. It worked out quite well.

Tempeh hot wings. I am testing some recipes for mrsbadmouth over at the Post Punk Kitchen, and this was one of the first ones I tried. I'd never had regular wings before, but I was told that this was a milder sauce. It was really good and I definitely plan on making this again.

Lovin' Spoonful O' Cornbread. This is another test recipe for mrsbadmouth. It is a sweet, moist spoon bread and we loved it. I was sad that we didn't finish it before Passover started. The recipe calls for creamed corn, but I didn't go with my boyfriend to the grocery store and he came home reporting that all of the creamed corn at Kroger's had refined sugar in it. As such, he bought me a regular can of corn and figured that I would be able to make my own creamed corn. I must say, homemade creamed corn is much tastier than the awful canned stuff that my daddy tried to make me eat when I was growing up.


Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie, another test recipe for mrsbadmouth. The filling was much better than the store-bought crust. It's possible that I just don't like graham cracker crusts, but until I do some more experimenting, I am choosing to blame the Arrowhead Mills crust. My boyfriend didn't seem to mind the crust, though. I ate the filling out of my piece and he finished the crust. I like having a boyfriend that can eat more than I can. It means I waste less food.

Cheddar Biscuits!

I've been wanting to make some sort of cheddar biscuit for awhile, and I finally got around to doing it. I used Follow Your Heart cheddar for this, and was surprised at the results (seeing as how I don't think the FYH cheddar tastes like much of anything at all). I used the biscuit recipe my boyfriend's momma gave me, but added 1/2 cup flour and 3/4 teaspoon of baking powder to make up for the extra liquid I would be adding with the melted soy cheese. I didn't think the soy cheese would melt into the biscuits very well if I didn't melt it ahead of time. I melted a cup of shredded cheddar soy cheese into about 1/4 cup of plain soymilk on the stove and added 1/4 cup of nutritional yeast for some extra cheesy flavor. I prepared the biscuits as directed in the original recipe and added the melted soy cheese mixture along with the "buttermilk". I followed the original recipe for baking them. They didn't turn out as fluffy as their predecessors, but were still pretty good.

Fluffy "Buttermilk" Biscuits

This is another recipe from my boyfriend's momma. I am forever in her debt for teaching me to make some decent biscuits. Mine were always kind of hard and dense before, but not now! Folding them over several times while rolling them out really is the trick.

Homemade "Buttermilk" Biscuits

2 cups self-rising flour (sifted) (I subbed 2 cups all purpose flour, 3 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt)
¼ cup shortening (I used the spectrum stuff and it worked great)
¾ cup "buttermilk" (soymilk + vinegar)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Place sifted flour into bowl, add shortening and use pastry blender or fork to cut shortening into small particles.
Add "buttermilk" a little at a time until a medium-soft dough is formed. (More may be needed if dough is too hard.)
Turn out onto floured surface, and dust with more flour. Pat with hands to form ball. For flat biscuits, roll out and cut. For tall biscuits, fold dough in half and pat down about 3 or 4 times then roll out and cut. Place in pan with edges touching. Bake at 400 degrees for 10 – 13 minutes or until golden brown. Yum!!

Bagel (soy) dogs!

I saw these bagel dogs on bunnyfoot's blog and I just had to try them. They are so cute (and tasty)! I was thinking that my package of Yves' veggie dogs had eight links in them, but after I'd already divided the dough in eight parts, I realized there were only six in the package. Hence the twist of bagel dough you see in the picture. The success of the bagel dogs has boosted my confidence to actually try making bagels. I promised my boyfriend a couple of months ago that I would make some. I should probably deliver on that promise.

Posole and Beer Bread

The posole recipe came from Lorna Sass's Short-Cut Vegetarian. This might be one of the easiest dinners I've ever cooked. It's sort of a stew (with tomatoes, hominy, black beans, and corn along with some spices). Apparently posole is another name for hominy, although I'd never heard that name before reading it in the cookbook.

The beer bread was another incredibly simple recipe to go with the posole stew (I really feel the need to add the word "stew" to the recipe's name, as it's more than just hominy). I found the recipe here. I used one of the beers my boyfriend had in the fridge, which was an ice brew. I thought that was synonymous with light beer, but apparently it is not. I could kind of taste the bitterness of the beer, but my boyfriend said that ice brews have a slightly higher alcohol content. We'll have to try this again with a "better" beer. The crust got kind of hard, but it was still soft inside. Maybe I'll just turn the oven down a bit next time.

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.

Thanksgiving Leftovers

Okay, so I neglected to actually take any pictures of all the food I made for Thanksgiving. I wasn't a huge fan of the field roast, though. It was a little salty for me. I didn't just want to throw it out, though, so I decided to make it into a pot pie. And then I decided to turn my pot pie into miniature pot pies using muffin tins. The recipe (both for the crust and the filling) is loosely based on the recipe from the Vegetarian Times Complete Cookbook. Their biscuit crust recipe calls for 2 friggin' pounds of butter/margarine, though! I didn't use NEARLY that much and mine was still tasty. The filling contains onion, celery, carrots, peas, and chopped up field roast. I didn't add any extra salt (or soy sauce like the recipe calls for) because the field roast was already a bit salty, and the recipe used vegetable broth, which also contains quite a bit of salt.

I've been slacking on posting

Chocolate Mint Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. Funny story....I bought the book right after it came out, only I'm trying really hard to control my spending, so I kind of neglected to tell my boyfriend about it. I figured he would figure it out eventually, though, especially when I suddenly started making lots of cupcakes. Apparently guys do not think the way I do, though. Instead of analyzing where the cupcakes came from, he just thought "mmmm cupcakes." So, one day he went to the front page of theppk.com and noticed that the cupcake book was out. He asked me if I was going to get it. I am a horrible liar and don't like doing it anyway, so I fessed up that I'd had it for a couple of weeks already. Turns out he didn't care that I spent the money and, in return for not getting upset with me for hiding the book, he got to pick out the next cupcakes (but the Tiramisu ones got vetoed by me because I don't do coffee).
The mint icing on these just wouldn't stiffen up for me, and there was a bit of an incident with my makeshift pastry bag, but I think everything turned out just fine. I kind of like the mint icing being smooth like it is because it reminds me of a mint filling from a peppermint patty.

Asian-marinated baked tofu (Vegan with a Vengeance) with sauteed green beans and onions over yellow rice. I just love yellow rice. Even though it's really just turmeric added to regular rice, I think it is tastier and much more visually appealing. Hey, I'm easy to please.

Baked BBQ seitan with mushrooms, black beans, and (I think) onions over rice.

Homemade bread. It's shiny because I brushed it with oil after coming out of the oven. Although I have a bread machine, I did this one all by hand. Non-bread machine bread is so much easier to slice, plus there is no hole in the bottom from the paddle. I think I'm going to start using my bread machine for the kneading and rising, but then shape the dough and put it in a loaf pan. It might take some practice to get that right, though, as I'll have to figure out what temperature to bake it at.

Chipotle-Kissed Sweet Potato and Red Bean Chili with Sunny Corn Muffins

The chili is from Robin Robertson's Fresh From the Vegetarian Slow Cooker and the corn muffin is from theppk.com. I LOVE the muffins. The chili is good, but next time I will probably use less water, as I don't like my chili quite so soupy. I can never get enough sweet potatoes, though.