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.

Hot Sauce-Glazed Tempeh and Mashed Spiced Sweet Potatoes

I can't put my copy of Veganomicon down! Dinner last night was hot sauce-glazed tempeh, mashed spiced sweet potatoes, and steamed broccoli (obviously the latter was not a Veganomicon recipe). The tempeh was so good. Ideally it should be grilled, but I followed the broiling instructions since we don't have a grill or grill-pan. It is spicy without being unbearably so, and the tempeh had a great texture. I love tempeh, but my boyfriend only seems to like it in certain applications...this was one of them. I'd like to try tofu in the same marinade. And I want a grill pan (or a grill, but we don't have anywhere to put that until we move).

The mashed spiced sweet potatoes might just be my new favorite way to eat sweet potatoes. I think I found a winner to bring with me to Thanksgiving (even if my family doesn't actually like sweet potatoes). I am really looking forward to the leftovers of this meal. There are actually only leftovers because I instructed my boyfriend to leave me some so that I could take it with me on our short trip to North Carolina. I have a new nephew (my first!) and we are going to his bris tomorrow.

Meet my new nephew! He was born on October 29th (18 Cheshvan). 5 lbs 15 oz and 18 inches long. I can't wait to meet him tomorrow!

Blackened Tempeh

Blackened Tempeh (Real Food Daily), Maple-Mashed Sweet Potatoes (The Vegetarian Meat & Potatoes Cookbook) and steamed broccoli (no recipe for that, of course).
The blackened tempeh was really good and just spicy enough. It probably would have been better suited on top of a salad, as it was kind of dry just on its own. I didn't have any lettuce, though, so no salad.
The mashed sweet potatoes were the first recipe I tried from The Vegetarian Meat & Potatoes Cookbook, which I just got today. I had $15 in Borders' Holiday Rewards to use up (they're redoing their rewards program, so people could cash them in early). With a 20% off coupon, I wound up paying less than $2 for this book. Woohoo! Anyway, as far as the recipe goes....maple plus sweet potatoes is a very good combination. Adding apple juice into the mix is, well, not quite as good. Don't get me wrong; it wasn't bad, just not something I would be likely to do again. Next time, I will stick with soymilk or coconut milk. It doesn't need much extra liquid anyhow.

Jerk "Chicken" over Coconut Mashed Sweet Potatoes

The other day I learned that these Morningstar Farms chik'n strips are actually made by Garden Protein International. I have been avoiding Morningstar Farms products for quite some time. For one thing, they make very few vegan products (check this out if you want to contact them to encourage them to cater more towards vegans), but they are also well known for using genetically modified soy. Upon reading on the Garden Protein website that their products are non-GMO, I decided to give these a try. I have mixed feelings on supporting Morningstar Farms. On the one hand, I am giving my money to a company that does things that I disagree with (not that there are many companies that I agree with 100%), but on the other hand, I feel like if vegans don't support new vegan products that come out, the food industry won't see a demand for them and we won't see many new vegan products in the future.

This product was just okay. I wasn't wowed by it, but it wasn't bad either. There is quite a bit of salt in it (but the only other salt I added to the dinner was in the sweet potatoes), but I often expect that from prepared products. Mainly we tried this out of curiosity. I like seitan better, and it's certainly cheaper to make.

I used the jerk marinade from the Millenium cookbook (the recipe was for Grilled Jerk Seitan, if you're looking for it), only I left out the cilantro because I didn't have any. I marinated the defrosted chick'n strips for about half an hour, then took them out of the marinade and cooked them on the stove along with the green peppers for a few minutes. I added the rest of the marinade to that and heated that up. The sweet potato recipe is the one that accompanies the Grilled Jerk Seitan recipe in the Millenium cookbook, although the book refers to them as yams. I never call them yams. The coconut mashed sweet potatoes were definitely my favorite part of this meal. I wish the picture had turned out better, but I didn't realize it wasn't a very good picture until after I'd eaten my dinner. Oops.

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.

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.