Homestyle Chocolate Chip Cookies

Another cookie recipe from Vive le Vegan. I've made these many times before; they are really awesome. We were grocery shopping this weekend and we walked past the maple syrup. My boyfriend asked if I needed any. I said I was all out, but that it's expensive so it could wait until I really needed it for something. "Or...we could have some more cookies." So the maple syrup went into the cart. And the rest is history.

Caribbean Beans and Rice

This was the first dish we made using the pressure cooker my boyfriend got me for Hanukkah. I must admit that even though I am the one who asked for a pressure cooker, I was scared to use it. Have I mentioned that I scare really really easily? This recipe came from Lorna Sass's Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure. If this recipe is any indication of the quality of the rest of the book, it is an AWESOME cookbook. We absolutely loved this dish. I think it was one of my favorite dinners yet. I thought I was going to find black-eyed peas to be an odd addition to a Caribbean dish, but they were really good. The only substitution I made in the recipe was to use two jalapeños instead of a red chili pepper, but that was because I already had the jalapeños on hand and needed to use them up.

Broccoli-Mushroom Casserole

As promised, this is the recipe I shared for the Recipe Exchange. It is actually my boyfriend's momma's recipe. She has made it for years in a non-vegan version. When we were visiting for the holidays, she veganized it for me. I liked it so much that she gave me the recipe for it. The casserole in the picture does not have any soy cheese on it, as I was all out. I liked it just as much without the soy cheese, though.

Broccoli-Mushroom Casserole

5 tbsp. Earth Balance, divided
1/3 cup diced onions
1/2 pound fresh mushrooms - sliced
White pepper, to taste
Garlic powder, to taste
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. cooking sherry (optional)
1/4^th cup all purpose flour
2 cups plain soy milk
1 cup raw rice, cooked according to package directions
16 oz. fresh or frozen broccoli, cooked until tender
1 cup vegan soy cheese (mozzarella or cheddar style), optional

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Sprinkle onions and mushrooms with garlic powder, white pepper and salt, then sauté in 3 tbsp. Earth Balance and 1 tbsp. cooking sherry until onions are tender.

In saucepan, melt 2 tbsp. of Earth Balance, remove from heat and add ¼ cup flour. Stir until blended, it may be lumpy. Add 2 cups soy milk a little at a time, stirring with whisk until smooth. Return to medium heat and stir until thickened. Add mushroom mixture to sauce and stir to combine.

In large bowl, combine rice, broccoli, 1 tsp. salt and sauce. Pour into large casserole dish and sprinkle with soy cheese. Bake at 350 degrees F for 15-20 minutes or until bubbly.

Recipe Exchange

A couple of days ago I received this email about a recipe exchange:

You have been invited to participate in a recipe exchange. (for the 2 names above, vegan recipes or non-meat, vegetarian recipes, thanks!)

Please send a recipe to the person whose name is in the number one position above (even if you do not know her or him), preferably something quick and easy without too many ingredients.

Then copy this letter into a new email, move my name to the number one position, and put your name in the number two position. Only your name and mine should appear on the list when you send out your email. Send the email to ten people. If you cannot do this within seven days, please let me know so it will be fair to those participating. You should receive 36 recipes.It is fun to see where these recipes come from. Seldom does anyone drop out because we can all use recipes. The turnaround is fast because there are only two names on the list. Bon Appetite!

I have enough people now and sent off my email--thanks!

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.

Coconut Lime Cookies

One word sums up these cookies: yum! The recipe is from Dreena Burton's Vive le Vegan and boy are these some addictive cookies (especially for my boyfriend. He would close the container and tell me he was done, then I'd turn around a little while later and catch him eating another one). They are light and fluffy cookies. My boyfriend dubbed them albino cookies, as he said he'd never seen a cookie turn out so "white." We're weird, what can I say? We are also in love with the chocolate chip cookie recipe from Vive le Vegan. Boy does Dreena know how to make some awesome cookies. My only complaint is that they tend to use quite a bit of maple syrup. She's Canadian, so I want to say that maple syrup is just cheaper there, but she lives in British Columbia and I've never known that province to be famous for it's maple syrup or anything. Then again, I've never been there, so what do I know?

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).

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.

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.

Bryanna's Soy Nog Muffins

I kept hearing such good things about soy nog (especially the Silk brand), so I really wanted to try some. Now, I've never had egg nog either, but I was disappointed with the stuff. To me, it had an odd banana-ish flavor that I wasn't expecting. I didn't want to be wasteful and just pour the stuff down the drain, so I was excited when Bryanna posted this recipe for some vegan eggnog muffins. I left the cranberries and pecans out of mine because 1) I'm picky and 2) I didn't have any. My topping wasn't as pretty as hers because I was out of Earth Balance and Smart Balance Light does not create a crumbly topping. It was still tasty, though.

Chickpea Coconut Curry

I am the queen of accidentally making dishes too spicy. Oops. I based this recipe off of an eggplant coconut curry recipe I found on vegweb. I used mochi curry that I got in the bulk spice section of the health food store and two tablespoons full was entirely too much. Lesson learned. I cooked the onion in white wine just to use up some more of it, but I'm sure that wasn't necessary.

Chickpea Coconut Curry

2 cans (15 oz. each) chickpeas
1 can straw mushrooms
1 can baby corn
1 large onion, chopped
1/4 cup white wine
1 teaspoon red curry paste
1 tablespoon curry powder (or 2 if your curry powder is mild or you really like spicy food)
1 1/2 teaspoons garam masala
1 1/2 cups vegetable stock
3/4 cup coconut milk
fresh ground pepper, to taste

In large skillet over medium heat, cook onion in white wine until softened. Add remaining ingredients and bring to a boil (may have to increase heat to medium-high). Once boiling, lower heat and simmer uncovered for 30 minutes. Serve over rice.

This made a ton (I would say at least 8 servings), so you might want to halve the recipe if you're only cooking for two people or so. I was expecting the sauce to cook down more, but it really didn't.

Tofu Cacciatore

We got some white wine the other day that my boyfriend didn't really care for (and I'm not much of a drinker, so I wasn't going to like it in the first place). I started looking for recipes we could use white wine in and came up with this one from randomgirl.com. I thought I had all the ingredients going in, but it turns out we were out of the diced tomatoes, so I subbed some marinara sauce we already had in the fridge. We also used more mushrooms than the recipe called for since we really really really like mushrooms. I'd never had any kind of cacciatore before, but we both really loved this. Yum!

Earth Fare, why must you taunt me?

I have made this dish before, but with some vegan feta that I found at our health food store. When I went in there the other day, though, said feta was nowhere to be found. There was no longer even a place for it. I'd already planned to make this dish, though, so I just wound up using some grated Follow Your Heart mozzarella. Since it was made on the stovetop, it melted pretty well. This time I was actually able to find affordable fresh basil to use, too.

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.

For so long I didn't eat chocolate....

And then one day I just decided that I wanted to again. I have to say, it sure is good.


These are peppermint patties; I got the recipe from SDGvegan's blog, Vegan-licious (recipe here). These were AWESOME. Mint+chocolate=heaven.

This one is candy cane chocolate bark. I found organic candy canes at the local health food store--yay! The recipe is the Sublime Chocolate Bark recipe from Dreena Burton's Vive le Vegan, but I subbed the candy canes for the dried fruit and nuts. I had fun taking a hammer to the candy canes, and I kind of wished that the noisy guy who lives downstairs had been home to be annoyed by it (but I checked and he wasn't--I wouldn't seriously have sat there banging on the floor if he'd been home. Even though he is rude, I just can't be that rude back.).

Cheesy Potato Chili Gratin

Yet another recipe from Vegan Planet. I liked this one, but it sure isn't pretty to look at. That's Follow Your Heart cheddar-style on top. I knew it wasn't going to melt in the oven since it was set at 375, so I heated some soy milk on the stove and melted the soy cheese into it, then added a bit of flour to thicken it up. One day I'll try this again with homemade sour cream and chili. This time I used the non-hydrogenated Tofutti sour cream and a can of Amy's chili that had been hanging out in the pantry for awhile. I hear that a lot of people can't stand the Tofutti sour cream, but I really don't mind it. Maybe that's because I never ate the regular stuff except in a blintz casserole my momma makes, so I really don't have anything to compare it to.

Not-So-Dirty Rice

This may be our favorite recipe yet from Vegan Planet. It was pretty simple, and the only change I made was to use Gimme Lean "sausage" instead of vegetarian burger crumbles. I thought faux ground beef sounded odd in dirty rice. My boyfriend took the leftovers for lunch and came home saying how much he liked this dish, so I think it's a winner.

Sweet Noodle Kugel with Apples and Almonds

For those of you wondering what on earth a kugel is, it is a thick baked pudding, usually made with either noodles (generally a sweet dish) or potatoes (not sweet, as that would be gross). Apparently the word kugel is actually Yiddish for "ball" and I have no idea how it came to be used as it is. This was my first attempt at a vegan kugel. I came across the recipe in Vegan Planet. Of course, I made a few changes: I left out the raisins (call me picky, but I don't like them), used farfalle instead of the broken fettuccine called for (my momma always made noodle kugel with egg noodles, and I thought farfalle looked more traditional), and used peanut butter instead of almond butter (because I did not have almond butter). Overall, this was pretty good, but I personally prefer my noodle kugel a little sweeter. That is an easy fix in the future, though. On the plus side, apparently I don't mind almonds if they're ground up (they're in the topping). I usually don't care for nuts mixed in dishes, but I always wish I did because I know they're so good for you.

Good news: I got a new oven thermostat today. Yay! This was the first dish I made after the new thermostat was put in. Three cheers for non-burnt food!

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.

Raspberry-Chocolate Chip Blondie Bars

Yet another recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance. You know, as often as I use this cookbook, there are still a ton of recipes I have yet to try. With this one, I took the shortcut and used raspberry jam instead of making the raspberry sauce. This was really because I already had the jam on-hand and did not have any frozen (or fresh) raspberries. It was still very good, though, and with the shortcut I took, it was a cinch to make!

Tempeh and Red Bean Jambalaya with Chipotle Chiles

I bought Vegan Planet a few days ago and this was the first recipe I tried from it. It was really tasty and I look forward to trying more recipes from the book. Instead of the bell pepper that the recipe called for, I used some frozen gumbo veggies (okra, corn, red pepper, etc.) that I had, as I was out of bell peppers and didn't want to go to the store for that one ingredient. My only "complaint" with this recipe is that it said this made 4 servings...it actually was more than 6! Granted, I eat fairly small portions, but my boyfriend doesn't. It's not a huge deal, but I am trying to scale down recipes so that we only have one day of leftovers.

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.

Pizza stones are awesome!

I finally got a pizza stone. It's official: I'm in love. This made the most perfect pizza yet. Instead of the usual quick pizza dough recipe that I normally use, I made the recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance. It was awesome. It made enough dough for two pizzas, so I froze half of it and we'll have another pizza soon. I'm not actually a big fan of the faux pepperoni on here, but we had some to use up. I never ate pepperoni (or any other pork product) growing up, so one day recently when I had a coupon, I decided to try the fake stuff. Now, I have absolutely no idea if this tastes anything like real pepperoni, but I really don't think it adds anything special to the pizza. It also tends to burn, which my boyfriend says is because the real stuff is much fattier (yuck!). The soy cheese melted soooo much better on the pizza stone than it ever has before. Yum!

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.

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.

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.

Seitan Fajitas

Yesterday I made homemade seitan, and then used some of it to make fajitas (seitan, onions, mushrooms, and green pepper sauteed with chili powder, cumin, and garlic powder). I used my Cuisinart to do the kneading for the seitan--it made things SO much easier.

Here's the seitan simmering in its broth:

The fajita mixture sauteeing on the stovetop:

Served with a dollop of salsa:

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.

Golden Vanilla Cupcakes with Fluffy Buttercream Icing

I had leftover icing from the last cupcakes I made (actually, I STILL have leftover icing even after this), so I just had to make some more. This is another recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. The recipe had a choice to use non-hydrogenated margarine or oil. I went with oil just because it was faster and cheaper. I have a feeling the cupcakes would have turned out fluffier if I had used the margarine. They were still good, though.

Aloo Chana Masala

Apparently I have a thing for non-photogentic food. This was a simple dinner. I mainly followed the recipe on the back of a box of chana masala spice mix. It was a little spicy, so I added some plain soymilk to tone it down a bit. I really want to figure out how to make my Indian food have more of a sauce the way it does in restaurants.

Crimson Velveteen Cupcakes with Vegan Fluffy Buttercream Frosting

Crimson Velveteen Cupcakes with Vegan Fluffy Buttercream Frosting from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. I used black cherry concentrate instead of red food coloring, hence the lack of "crimson" color in the cupcakes. They still turned out really well. I have lots of leftover icing, so I'll have to make more cupcakes soon.

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies

I used the chocolate chip cookie recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance, but took out 2 TB of flour and put in 2 TB of cocoa. I also added some almond milk (it was all I had on hand) since the batter was too dry. These turned out really well. They stayed soft, which, for me, is the mark of a good cookie. I took most of them to a Sukkot party last night (the ones in the picture are the ones I set aside for my boyfriend to eat at home) and they got eaten up.

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.