A True Southern Meal

The other night, while eating leftover lasagna, my boyfriend told me "I've been looking forward to this meatloaf all night." "Umm...you're eating lasagna." "I know, but I have really been wanting meatloaf, so that's what I'm pretending it is." Cue the vegan meatloaf. I used this recipe (which is actually the first recipe that comes up if you do a google search for "vegan meatloaf"). The taste was pretty good, but it didn't firm up enough, even after sitting for 20 minutes. I would probably search for a different recipe in the future.

The mashed potatoes are this recipe, subbing plain soy milk and Earth Balance Whipped (we hardly ever buy the regular Earth Balance, as we like the texture of the Whipped one, or even of Soy Garden, better...plus, EB Whipped is organic and regular EB is not). The gravy is just the Pacific Foods brand mushroom gravy. I bought the small box of it after Thanksgiving when it was on sale, but it's just been sitting in the fridge ever since. I don't often have a need for brown gravy, so I'm not entirely sure why I bought it.

The green beans are actually from my boyfriend's parents' garden. His momma cans the beans each year. They're so good!

I made a really stupid mistake with the biscuits, hence their lack of fluffiness. My biscuit recipe calls for self-rising flour, and I always sub regular flour with added baking powder and salt. This time, it wasn't until I'd mixed the soy milk into the flour and shortening mixture that I realized I'd forgotten said baking powder and salt. I kneaded it into the dough, but it just wasn't the same. Woopsie.


These are Fig Not-Ins from Vegan with a Vengeance. Before cooking the filling on the stove, I ran it through the food processor. I didn't have quite enough figs, and I wanted them to have a raspberry flavor, too, so I added some raspberry jam to the mixture. It worked nicely! The cookie part is a little harder that I recall Fig Newtons being, but these are still very good. They sure aren't the easiest cookies to put together, though.

lolo's Crispy Sweet and Sour Seitan

lolo over at the ppk posted about this Crispy Sweet and Sour Seitan. She posted the recipe on her blog, VeganYumYum, and I had all of the ingredients, so I just had to try it. In case you can't tell, I made a batch of seitan recently and I've been trying to use it up. I couldn't decide which of these pictures I preferred, so I posted both.
This was pretty good. I definitely liked the method for making seitan crispy and will try it again with other sauces as well. The sweet and sour sauce was a little vinegary for me, but I think that adding some apricot preserves to it next time will fix that. I also forgot to add the salt, so I'm sure that didn't help.

Another One From Vegan Planet

The actual title of this recipe is "Baked Polenta with Red Beans and Fresh Tomato Salsa," only I used pinto beans and jarred salsa. I had a can of pinto beans on-hand, but only dried kidney beans and I hadn't planned ahead. Plus, pinto beans sounded like they went better with salsa than kidney beans would. I also left out the cilantro in the recipe, simply because I didn't have any, and instead of a small amount of scallions, I used a chopped yellow onion. This was really good. I was worried my boyfriend wouldn't like the polenta, as I fixed a dish using the polenta that comes in a tube a couple of years ago and he didn't care for that stuff that much. Turns out that he loves homemade polenta, though. Yay! Don't be fooled by the title of "baked polenta." You do bake it, but you cook it on the stove first, so you still have the 30-40 minutes of stirring. Now I know how to make grits from scratch, too! I would use white cornmeal for that, though.

Red Curry Seitan and Cookies and Cream Cupcakes

This red curry seitan was such a simple "recipe" (I made it up on the fly). I cut up seitan into bite-size pieces and browned it over medium heat. I added chopped onions and a red bell pepper and cooked them until they were softened. I meant to add a can of straw mushrooms, but I managed to forget it despite the fact that I had it sitting out on the counter. I then whisked approx. 2 teaspoons of Thai Kitchen red curry paste (would cut that back a little next time) into one can of coconut milk. I added this mixture, along with some chopped fresh basil, to the pan of seitan and veggies and let cook until it was heated throughout. Except for the time it took to make to cook the brown rice, this was the fastest dinner I've made in awhile. We had enough for leftovers the next night, which was good because we got home from our day-trip to Atlanta pretty late.

My boyfriend took me to Atlanta this weekend as a belated Valentine's Day present (I was sick on Valentine's Day, so he couldn't surprise me then like he'd wanted to). We ate lunch at Soul Vegetarian, then went to Ikea, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods. At Ikea I got a large whisk (my other one was getting rusty in the handle, plus this new one is silicone-coated so that it won't scratch my pots), a mortar and pestle, a wok ($7!!!), and an apron (also $7!!!). We spent entirely too much money on food, but it was a fun trip. I long to have a Trader Joe's here.


Cookies and Cream Cupcakes, from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, of course. So cute! Cutting a Newman-O in half is not as easy as you'd think.

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.

Seitan Nuggets

Last week I bought these red potatoes at the produce market and knew that I wanted to roast them. It took me a little while to figure out what I wanted to serve with them, but I finally settled on these seitan nuggets (and green beans). I used the seitan recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance, then cut the seitan into nugget-sizes and coated them in some seasoned flour. I let that dry for a few minutes, then dipped them in plain soymilk and then coated them in seasoned bread crumbs. We use the Edwards and Sons brand of bread crumbs. They are expensive, but last for quite awhile. It's so hard to find bread crumbs that aren't full of funk. Even the panko bread crumbs I found at the Asian market contained hydrogenated oil. No thanks! Anyhoo, I baked these nuggets at 350 degrees for 10 minutes, then flipped them over and baked for 10 minutes more. They turned out pretty good. I'm sure they would have gotten more of a crispy coating had I fried them, but I try to keep frying to a once-in-a-blue-moon sort of thing.

Chag Purim! (a little late)

"Chag Purim" is "Purim Holiday" in Hebrew. Purim is a Jewish holiday celebrating when Queen Esther saved the Jewish people by foiling Haman's plot to kill all of the Jews (it is the story told in the Book of Esther). The cookies that you see above are called Hamantaschen. They are traditionally served on Purim. There is some confusion over just what the three-cornered cookies are supposed to symbolize. Some say it is Haman's hat, some say his ears, some say his pocket, and others say the name derives from something else entirely. Nonetheless, they are tasty cookies. This is the first time I made a vegan version. I used this recipe, only I creamed together the Earth Balance, sugar, and vanilla first, and replaced the 1/2 cup water with almond milk. I used an all-fruit raspberry jam and chocolate chips as the fillings. This recipe needs some tweaking, as the cookies spread a bit more in the oven than they should have (I'm thinking reducing the baking powder and using one or two "eggs" worth of Ener-G egg replacer might work), but they still taste very good.

The Conclusion of Vegan Planet Week

This is Indonesian-Style Rice with Tempeh. The tempeh is crumbled up, which is why it's not really visible in the photo. This was my least favorite of all of the recipes from Vegan Planet that we tried last week. My boyfriend actually liked it quite a bit, though, so it might just be a personal preference and not a knock on the recipe. The recipe calls for one or two hot red peppers. Said red peppers were nowhere to be found in Knoxville last week, so I used two hot green peppers (I don't know exactly what variety they were...Kroger's doesn't seem to believe in accurately identifying their peppers). I couldn't decide if they were going to be more or less hot than the red peppers would have been. I wound up adding two peppers and I could barely detect any heat in the dish. Maybe the spiciness is what I was missing in this recipe.

Basic Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Frosting

I am absolutely in love with this peanut butter frosting from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. It's not too sweet like frosting so often is. I swear my boyfriend told me one day that he doesn't really like peanut butter mixed with chocolate, so I hadn't made these cupcakes even though I wanted to (I'm not going to make cupcakes if I don't have someone to help me eat them). Then one day he swore that he never said such a thing and that the cupcakes sounded tasty to him. And tasty they were. With the frosting not being too sweet this time, I can even eat a whole cupcake!

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.

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.

Chickpea Broccoli Casserole and White Bean and Roasted Garlic Soup

Both of these recipes are from Vegan With a Vengeance. I really really really wanted to like this chickpea broccoli casserole. I love chickpeas, broccoli, and onions, so what's not to love? I don't know....this just didn't do it for me. It was too dry, but that part might have been my fault. I cooked up some dried chickpeas for this. Maybe using those rather than canned ones meant I should have added more broth to the recipe. I'm not sure. This recipe doesn't call for much of anything in the way of spices. The blurb above the recipe recommends trying it as is first to see if you like it, before doctoring it up. If I make it again, it definitely needs to be doctored up for me. I later put some cheesy sauce on top just to add a little something. I suppose it had to happen sometime that there would be a recipe in VWAV that didn't rock my world.

P.S. I still love you, Isa. No hard feelings.


White bean and roasted garlic soup is SO good...and easy, too! I love roasting my own garlic, as our apartment smells wonderful now. After I had my wisdom teeth removed about a year ago, I was really burned out on soup for awhile. I am glad I am past that now. Now the problem is that it's starting to get too warm here for soup. I chose to pretend that it wasn't 60 degrees out today, as I really wanted to try this soup.

Jewish Cookies!!!

I was at Ross recently, just wandering around, and I spotted these awesome cookie cutters on clearance. They were only 99 cents! There is a Chai (Hebrew word for living), Star of David, Torah, menorah, dreidel, Kiddish (prayer over wine) cup, and a shofar (ram's horn...I like my vegan version much better).


With my new cookie cutters, I just HAD to make some sugar cookies. I used NoWhey's recipe from the PPK. I used Ener-G as the egg replacer. Normally I use flax seeds as my egg replacer, but that doesn't work for sugar cookies (unless you like little brown flecks in your sugar cookies). Later I dipped these in a chocolate ganache, but somehow I never got around to taking pictures of the chocolate-covered cookies.

Lots O' Food

Valentine's Day dessert. Brownies from theppk.com and caramel sauce from the Vegan Chef (the recipe is on there as Vegan Caramel Sauce...the site doesn't let me directly link to the recipe). I've made the caramel sauce before and really like it. This time I used dark brown sugar by Wholesome Sweeteners. I think I liked it a little better with a lighter brown sugar, but it was still good. The brownie recipe was a little too cakey for me, but I am generally a fan of fudgy, non-cakey brownies, so that doesn't mean anything was wrong with the brownies. And I could ignore the cakey-ness with the sauce on top!


Jerk Seitan, from Vegan With a Vengeance. Not a pretty picture, but a tasty dish. Green peppers + onions = mmmmm. I made the seitan from scratch. I used the other half of the batch for spring rolls on Valentine's Day. Why I didn't take pictures of said spring rolls, I don't know.


Stuffed Shells. We love these and I've made them several times, but just as I was about to eat this last night, it occurred to me that I've never taken a picture. I don't follow an exact recipe. It's loosely based on the Baked Stuffed Shells recipe from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook (well, I follow the baking instructions, at least). We like soy cheese melted on top, but this is only baked at 350 degrees. It's hard to get soy cheese to melt at that low of a temperature. I heat some plain soymilk on the stovetop, whisk in the grated soy cheese and whisk until it is melted (I also added in a bit of nutritional yeast, since the soy milk tones down the soy cheesiness a bit). Once the soy cheese is melted, I add a couple of tablespoons of flour and whisk until the mixture thickens. I then pour the mixture over the stuffed shells. You can see some of the cheesy sauce on the left side of the picture.

Black-Eyed Pea and Quinoa Croquettes with Mushroom Sauce

Yet another fabulous recipe from Vegan With a Vengeance. The mushroom sauce is particularly awesome. The croquettes were fun to make, and I like how the bread crumbs on them make them look like toasted coconut-covered marshmallows. I hadn't made quinoa in a longgggg time, but this recipe reminded me of how much I like it. It has much more protein and calcium than most other grains, so I definitely need to start using it more often.

Teriyaki Tofu (Take 2)

This is more of a product review than anything else, as I've posted a teriyaki tofu stir-fry on here before. This time I marinated the tofu in Soy Vay's Veri Veri Teriyaki sauce, then baked it according to the instructions for the Asian-marinated tofu in Vegan With a Vengeance. Please ignore the veggies underneath the tofu; that's certainly the last time I buy the Kroger brand of mixed veggies! Anyhoo, we've been wanting to try the Soy Vay teriyaki sauce for quite awhile and finally bought a bottle last weekend. It's not bad, but I found it a little too salty. There is also quite a bit of sugar in it. You could really tell how sugary it was after baking the marinated tofu, as a lot of the sugar caramelized on the tofu and the pan. I liked all of the sesame seeds in the sauce, but overall, I don't think this was really worth the money and don't plan on buying it again. They still get credit for a cute brand name, though.

Brooklyn Pad Thai and Quiche....I think

This is the Brooklyn Pad Thai from Vegan With a Vengeance. Sorry the tofu looks kind of weird. We have established that my boyfriend likes the texture better of tofu that has been frozen (and then, of course, defrosted), but clearly I have not gotten the hang of this. I can't seem to do it without the tofu getting all crumbly. Does anyone have any suggestions for me? Despite my crumbly tofu, this was good. Spicy, but not too spicy. I halved the recipe and it still made a ton (way more than the 2 servings that half of the recipe should have been).

This is the quiche recipe from Celine's blog, but with mushrooms added (and green onions instead of chives because apparently the cultural mecca that is Knoxville does not choose to recognize the existence of chives). Hers is much prettier to look at than mine. I've never had quiche before, so I really have no clue, but I think it should have firmed up more than it did. This wound up being really rich. Is cheesy quiche normally so rich? There's nothing wrong with rich food, it's just not my cup of tea. If I try to make a vegan quiche again, I will probably try it with tofu. It seems like it would be firmer that way. Oh well, new recipes are fun to try anyway!

Mustard-Battered Tofu, Baked Risotto, and Green Beans

The recipe for the tofu can be found here, but in case you don't feel like clicking on the link:

Mustard-Battered Tofu

1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. onion powder
1 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. garlic powder
2 cups unbleached white flour or whole wheat pastry
4 Tbsp. nutritional yeast (optional)
3 Tbsp. yellow mustard
1/2 cup water
2 Tbsp. baking powder
2 to 3 lb. tofu
3 1/2 cups vegetable oil

• Mix together the salt, onion powder, pepper, garlic powder, flour, and nutritional yeast in a deep bowl.
• In a separate bowl, dilute the mustard with 1/2 cup water.
• Add 1/3 cup of the flour mixture to the mustard mixture and stir. Add the baking powder to the dry flour mixture and mix.
• Dip chunks of the mock chicken into the mustard batter, then drop each chunk into the flour mixture and coat with the desired amount of “crust.”
• Fry the chunks in hot oil on medium-high heat in a large skillet or deep fryer until crispy and golden brown, turning as needed.

I didn't use any nutritional yeast in mine, simply because I was all out of it. I only used one package of tofu (which I'd frozen and then defrosted), and I definitely should have halved the rest of the ingredients. This was really tasty, though, and it doesn't have a really strong mustard-y flavor. Shortly after this picture was taken, I dipped my tofu in ketchup. Mmmmm mustard and ketchup. My boyfriend willingly took all of the leftovers for lunch today, so I give this two thumbs up.

The baked risotto is from Nava Atlas's The Vegetarian Family Cookbook (you can see a little bit of the cookbook peaking out of the top of the picture--woopsie). This recipe was so much easier than making risotto the traditional way. Honestly, the one time I made it "traditionally" before, I didn't really like it. That was just me being picky, though, as I don't really like creamy non-dessert stuff all that much. I still had arborio rice to use up, though, and noticed this recipe and thought I'd give it a try. It bakes for an hour, stirring every 15 minutes. At first I thought it wasn't going to work at all, as the first couple of times I stirred it looked remarkably like it had when I first put it in the oven. The last time I stirred, though, it had magically turned into something resembling risotto. I thought it was going to be a little too liquidy, so when I was supposed to add a cup of water at the last stirring, I only added half a cup. It's really thick now, so I probably should have followed the directions, but honestly I kind of liked the texture better than the previous time I'd made risotto.

The green beans are nothing special. They are organic ones from a can. I added black pepper and a bit of liquid smoke. They're actually pretty good for beans from a can.

Double Mushroom Barley Soup

Yet another recipe from Great Vegetarian Cooking Under Pressure. This was, of course, delicious. I originally had checked this book out of the library to make sure that I liked it. I have fallen in love with it and gone ahead and bought it. I highly recommend it. The double mushrooms in this soup are buttons and dried shiitake. After we spent entirely too much money on the shiitake mushrooms at the health food store, we just happened to go to an Asian grocery store the next day and found them for MUCH cheaper. Lesson learned. I also found vegan spring roll wrappers there, which I am very excited about, but have yet to use.

Chocolate Cupcakes!

This is a basic chocolate cupcake with chocolate buttercream frosting from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. I haven't actually eaten one yet, as I'm saving it for dessert, but I had a bit of the frosting and mmmmmm. The top of the frosting reminds me of a kewpie doll. I finally made was able to use my pastry bag without any catastrophes (I'm still not very good at it, but at least I didn't wind up with a big glop of frosting like I usually do). I got new cupcake liners yesterday. I know that you can't see it very well, but it has these hippie-looking flowers on it. So cute!