Sesame Tofu

Somehow this picture slipped through the cracks when I was looking through all my backlogged food pictures. I got the recipe for sesame tofu from the Whole Foods' website, and the only change I had to make was subbing agave nectar for the honey (and I left out the scallions because I did not have any). This was good, but I don't know if I'd make it again. I think I'm just not a huge fan of sweet sauces at dinner.

And here's some more....

I finally got around to trying the pumpkin cinnamon rolls from the second issue of Don't Eat Off the Sidewalk. I have no clue why I waited so long to make these, because they are awesome. They were nice and soft with just a hint of pumpkin flavor. For those of you who haven't ordered the second issue yet, she put the recipe up on her blog. The only change I made was I used a 9x13" pan, as a 9" square pan just seemed to small to me. Normally I like my cinnamon rolls covered in cream cheese (Tofutti non-hydrogenated, of course) icing, but these were good with just the glaze.


For Hanukkah, I made the potato latkes from Veganomicon. Sorry I didn't get a very good picture of them. These were good, but I am undecided as to whether I prefer latkes with or without matzah meal. They had more body this way, but still...I'm just not sure. I like both, though. Last weekend we had a family Hanukkah celebration in Columbia, SC. We spent the night at my parents' house in Greenville, then drove down to Columbia just for the day on Saturday. I brought the leftover latkes to serve with dinner Friday night and my dad really liked them (I'm sure Momma would have, too, but she wasn't there...she went to go help out my sister with her new baby). At the family Hanukkah celebration, they made me some vegan latkes before they fried the non-vegan ones. My aunt even made me vegan cookies (Mexican wedding cookies from The Joy of Vegan Baking, which she got me for Hanukkah).

I brought some dessert with me to the family Hanukkah, so there were vegan cookies galore. I got this sugar cookie recipe from A Veg*n for Dinner. I didn't use any food coloring for the icing, though, as I avoid artificial colors and the natural food colorings are just too expensive for me right now (and I've never seen them locally anyway). I also made the sparkled ginger cookies from Vegan with a Vengeance, but I didn't take a picture because I've also blogged about them before. I have learned that my family is scared of the word ginger, but if I call them "molasses cookies," they are okay. Crazy people.

This is the hot and sour soup with napa cabbage and woodear mushrooms (I may have muddled that name up a bit) from Veganomicon. My cabbage was being stubborn about coming off the head of cabbage neatly, so I cut it up in the food processor instead. The only other time I've had hot and sour soup was at a restaurant in Richmond, VA called Panda Veg. It was good, but homemade is better (and quite simple). Awhile back we were at a Whole Foods and we found this little package of dried woodear mushrooms for a reasonable price. We'd never even heard of woodear mushrooms, but we bought them anyway, then couldn't think of a use for them. Veganomicon arrived and ta-da, finally a recipe that calls for them. This soup is both spicy and filling and the leftovers reheat well.
Hanging out behind the soup are some homemade fried wontons. They would have been spring rolls, but I was having a ton of trouble with the rice paper wrappers. I got so frustrated that I defrosted the wonton wrappers that I had in the freezer and decided to use those. I know that wontons are normally boiled, but I already had the oil all set to fry, so I just went ahead with this. They actually turned out pretty well this way. The filling was napa cabbage, red cabbage, dried shiitake mushrooms, Morningstar Farms chik'n strips (they'd been hanging out in the freezer for quite awhile, so I figured I might as well use them in something), soy sauce, sriracha sauce, ginger, and garlic.

Broccoli Almond Sweet and Sour Tofu

This is another test recipe for lolo at VeganYumYum, but this time it's a recipe that she already had up on her blog, so I can link you to it (here and here). I forgot to garnish it with sesame seeds, but it was good as is. I liked the sauce much better than the last time I made it (she updated the recipe at some point in between).

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.

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).

Sparkled Ginger Cookies and Orange "Chicken"

These are the sparkled ginger cookies from Vegan with a Vengeance. They are absolutely awesome and you should immediately drop what you are doing and go make some. After you do, you should probably hide most of them from yourself because you will want to inhale them in just one sitting.

And this is orange "chicken" (those are green peppers mixed in...I was running low on vegetables that day). The faux chicken are TVP chunks. This is a bastardized recipe from Bryanna Clark Grogan's Authentic Chinese Cooking. I was supposed to fry the TVP chunks before adding them to the sauce, but I wanted to go lower-fat (and less messy) so I baked them instead. That probably would have been fine, but I still battered them as per the frying instructions. They ended up kind of gooey. Oops.

I have cooked lots of food for Thanksgiving, but haven't taken any pictures yet. We are leaving for Nashville in a little while. I'm bringing a field roast (this will be my first time trying one--I'm really excited that we were able to find one at Earth Fare), cornbread stuffing, sweet potato latkes, gingerbread apple pie (from Vegan with a Vengeance), and pumpkin muffins (also from VWAV). I also have a can of cranberry sauce that I got from Whole Foods when I was visiting my parents a couple of weeks ago. Momma said that the kind I got would not be the jellied kind (which I don't like), but now I'm not so sure. I guess I'll be finding out for sure tomorrow.