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.

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.

General Tao's Tofu

This recipe received such rave reviews on vegweb that we just had to try it. I doubled the sauce because I reallyyyy like sauce. It was really good, but I highly recommend cutting back on the sugar. I didn't use as much sugar as the recipe called for and I still thought it was a bit too sweet. For the tofu, I used frozen tofu for the first time. I don't normally plan meals far enough in advance to have time to freeze and then thaw out the tofu, but I finally got around to trying it. I thought the texture was a little odd, somewhere between springy and gummy, but my boyfriend said he actually liked the texture. He also said that this meal got two thumbs up from a carnivore (his words, not mine....technically he'd be an omnivore).

Time Warp Lemon Squares

These were tastier than they look, I promise. The recipe is courtesy of vegweb. They weren't a pretty yellow color because I used flax as the egg replacer. I'm sure Ener-G would have made them look prettier, but I don't normally use the stuff. It's so pricey. I would maybe buy some to use in recipes like this if they came in tiny boxes for a reasonable amount of money, but I don't want to spend more than $5/box for something that's going to just sit in the pantry for years.
I recently read that to help clean the microwave, you should boil some water in it for a couple of minutes. It helps loosen up the icky stuff stuck in there. To make it smell good, you can add lemon slices to the water, so that's what I did with the lemons after I was done squeezing and zesting them.

Black Bean and Corn Enchiladas

That enchilada sauce look so unassuming, doesn't it? Don't let it fool you, though; it is fiery hot and takes no prisoners. It's my fault, though. I have never bought the store-bought enchilada sauce because I've never found one that doesn't contain refined sugar or corn syrup, so I went looking for recipes and came up with this one from vegweb: http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=7103.0. I really want to write a sarcastic reply to the person who commented and asked why it has peppers in it, as it wouldn't be called "chipotle enchilada sauce" without the chipotle peppers. I will refrain, though. Anyhoo, I really should have added the chipotles one at a time to test the spiciness, but I did not and foolishly added all three at once. I am not exactly sure what qualifies as a "small" chipotle pepper, so I will keep that in mind for future reference and proceed with care.
The idea for these enchiladas came from a recipe title I found in Mastercook (I recently downloaded all of the vegetarian recipes from Mad's Recipe Emporium), but instead of following the recipe, I made up my own.

Ingredients:
Enchilada sauce
1 large onion (white or yellow), diced
2 ts olive oil
2 cans black beans, drained and rinsed
1 1/2 cups frozen corn
1 ts oregano
1 ts cumin
1 ts chili powder
8 tortillas (6-8" in diameter)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
Heat olive oil in large skillet over medium heat.
Sauté onion until soft. Add black beans and corn, stirring occasionally until hot. Stir in oregano, cumin, and chili powder.
Spoon some of the enchilada sauce (from the vegweb recipe, or whatever you choose to use) on
the bottom of a 9x13" glass baking dish.
Warm the tortillas in the microwave (or oven, since it's already on) for 45 seconds to soften them up.
Spoon some enchilada sauce onto a large plate. Dip a tortilla in the sauce, spoon some filling onto the tortilla, then roll it up and place it seam-side down in the baking dish. Repeat with the remaining tortillas.
Bake, uncovered, for 15 minutes.

Cannellini Piccata

I found this recipe on vegweb tonight while looking for a new use for a can of cannellini beans. I've never had piccata before and was worried it would be on the bland side since it didn't call for much in the way of spices. It was pure lemon-y deliciousness, though, and a nice change from marinara sauce. I'm glad I tried the recipe as is before adding spices to it.