Portabello French Dip

This recipe comes from one of my two favorite cookbooks - The Cafe Flora Cookbook. When James was first diagnosed, we were at a loss as to where to get a tasty meal out. Cafe Flora totally fits the bill with an entirely vegetarian menu with many vegan options. James orders this French Dip sandwich pretty much every time we're there.

The Cafe Flora Cookbook is pretty complex with many steps, but the results of each dish are amazing. The pieces that come together to make this fabulous dish are as follows: mushroom essence (the broth), roasted portabellos, carmellized onions, and an herbed buttery spread.

The broth starts as 6 cups of water, half a pound of mushrooms and some garlic, and it reduces down to 2 cups of broth, then is boosted with some Tamari. While this is reducing, I started the onions to carmellizing and prepped the portabellos. The portabellos are roasted with a coating of crushed garlic and olive oil, then sliced up. The herbed butter is Earth Balance spread with a bit of olive oil mixed up with sage, tarragon, thyme and basil. Once it's all assembled, I baked it for a few minutes with some almond mozzarella.

All together, this is a hearty filling meal, and honestly as a non-lover of most things fungus, I even like it. I can't even give this a verdict, since I know this'll be repeated, without a doubt!

Stuffed shells

I'm slowly making the transition from die-hard recipe follower to free-form cook. Last night's dinner marks the third time I've made this dish, the first two were from the recipe and this one was all on my own. I found this recipe in an issue of Vegetarian Times and was intrigued - a vegan version of a classic Italian dish. Would it be filling? Tasty?

I started by sauteeing half an onion & a couple cloves of garlic, then added a box of frozen spinach (thawed, with all the water squeezed out.) I threw all of this in the food processor with half a block of tofu, a handful of fresh basil leaves, some oregano, salt & pepper. I ran the food processor until the mixture was smooth, then filled a zip lock sandwich bag and snipped off the corner for an instant piping bag. I filled each pre-cooked pasta shell, then lined them up in a well-lubricated baking dish and started my sauce.

The sauce is basically a cheesy bechemel with fresh basil using vegan spread, soy milk, organic flour and Tofu-rella. I poured this over the top of the dish, and baked for 20 minutes.

Survey says: James had seconds, so a success!! I felt it still lacked that extra something in flavor, but this was by far the best attempt yet, plus the creamy rich sauce really turned the whole thing into comfort food. Even better the second day for lunch! This was served with a thick slice of pan a lavan from the Snohomish Bakery, toasted with crushed garlic & butter. Yummy!

Corndogs!

In a direct idea theft from Jen at the Vegan Lunch Box blog, we had vegan corndogs for dinner last night. A reader of her blog suggested a new use for her Twinkie pan, so she created a Twinkie shaped corndog with a vegan dog in the middle and a cornbread mix around it.

Needless to say, I don't have a Twinkie pan. But I do have lot's of tinfoil, a loaf pan, and a sense of adventure! I built little channels of tinfoil, filled them with cornbread mix and nestled a slightly trimmed soy hotdog into the batter. They baked up just fine and were pretty tasty. Dinner also included an artichoke and a salad.

Will we repeat this? Probably. I have such a soft spot for junk food like corn dogs and it was pretty quick and easy. James did suggest that we lower the breading-to-dog ratio, so maybe I can figure out how to either fry the dogs with a coating of batter, or find a more suitable pan.

Fake out!

As you'll notice with most of the food posted on this blog, we have a tendency to use "fake" veggie versions of real dairy or meat products. Some vegans call them "analogs" of fake meats, faux meats, whatever. There also appears to be some amount of controversy in the vegan community as to the relative merit of these products.

There are some vegans who are adamately against any meat analog - saying the taste and/or texture is "too real" and therfore, gross. (If you want gross, check out Hufu. Seriously gross.) There is also the argument of why we eat something that is a vegan-appropriate substitute for the exact thing we're trying to avoid. And I'm sure that if some hardcore vegan stumbled across this site, I'd catch hell for not being vegan "enough" as we still eat fish. But our diet isn't for anyone else, it's only for ourselves and our health (saving the cute furry animals and being kind to Mother Earth in the process) so I can't pay any attention to this sort of argument. In fact, if that ever where to happen, I'd have to laugh - if a vegan is showing compassion to the Earth by only eating a plant based diet, why be so critical of people who are working to accomplish the same thing?

Anyway, I can only speak for myself when I say that being vegan and vegetarian is a process. While I would love to instantly know how to prepare a well-balanced entirely plant based meal, I don't. But I'm learning. In the meantime, I'll use subs for things I used to use all the time. Hence the popularity in our kitchen of the vegan spread, soy milk, egg replacer, Silk soy creamer, Tofutti soy sour cream and the like. Using the fake meat products only expands the repetoire of what we can eat, and it's an easy way to get James the protein he needs to rebuild from the chemo.

Though now that taco's are out due to their spiciness, I gotta figure out a new way to use the Smart Ground!

A variation on a classic...

At the end of a long day that was also at the end of an even longer week, all I really wanted for dinner was something easy, filling and quick that wouldn't take too much energy to prepare. And since we had a fridge full of food and I knew we shouldn't call our local Thai place, I went for a classic - tuna noodle casserole. Now granted, fish out of a can isn't the best kind of fish for James to be having, but I knew this would come together quickly, and the fish would add a bit of protein for after chemo.

I also like to toss in as much veggies as possible, too. So I sauteed onion, celery, & carrots in some vegan spread then threw in some broccoli in the end. I added a couple tablespoons of organic unbleached flour then some soy milk to create a roux. To this I added grated tofurella - a vegan version of mozzarella cheese. I mixed in some pasta and some peas & poured it all in a casserole dish, then crumbled up some organic crackers over the top and let it bake for 20 minutes. Viola! A hearty filling meal in nearly no time with very little effort.

The verdict: it was just as quick and easy as I thought it could be. Plus it was gooey with a crunchy top, and warm & filling - the perfect comfort food. I'll keep this one in rotation for those "need it fast and need it NOW" times. I might make one change, though. By the the time I got done with the veggies and the noodles, this hardly needed the tuna at all. I could easily leave it out and it'd still taste fine, plus then it'd be entirely vegan.

Tofu "fish" tacos

A lot of inspiration for this blog comes from a blog James sent me: www.veganlunchbox.blogspot.com. It's a vegan mother who packs interesting vegan lunches for her little schmoo. She shared a recipe for tofu fish sticks with her readers and at first I was skeptical. But all the readers that tried it raved and raved about how good they were, so I figured it was worth the risk to try it.

James and I are also huge fans of a taco dinner. It's easy, fast and filling, but I've needed to make some changes to the way it's been done in the past. First off, we can no longer use taco seasoning packs, they all contain tomato. So I started mixing my own seasoning from garlic powder, cumin, coriander and chili powder, but as James progresses in his chemo, he's getting sores in his mouth that make anything spicy quite painful to eat. I decided to try the tofu fish sticks to see how they'd work in a taco, sort of an imatation of our favorite fish tacos at Agua Verde.

The verdict: Awesome! I didn't even make the tofu fish sticks entirely according to the recipe (I didn't have all the almonds I needed so I added sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds as well) and they still came out great. They taste just like the horribly bad-for-you, made from who-knows-what kind of fish fishstick from the box, but these are better. They're vegan and they've got far more protein than a regular fish stick. Putting it all together in a taco worked wonders too. Other ingredients included red cabbage, purple onion, cilantro and mine (pictured above) also had tomatoes and tartar sauce. James skipped the tomatoes and used a vegan sour-cream to add a bit of moisture.

These are definitely worth trying again and again. I urge anyone with little kids to give this recipe a shot, too since it's such an easy recipe (except for finding the kelp powder, I suppose). They are so tasty I ate three of the pan before they even made it into a taco! Mmm, fish sticks...

mmm, breakfast!

This appetizing looking concoction serves as breakfast on the go most weekday mornings. It's power packed with goodness to keep us both going strong until lunch. It contains oats, ground flax seed meal, almonds, hemp protein powder, spirullina, bee pollen granules, a banana, chopped ginger, frozen strawberries and blueberries and soy milk and cherry juice to keep it all in a liquid state. I'm sure I wake up the neighbors every morning with our jet engine of a blender, but this tasty bevvy is worth it!

Of course, I do spend about an hour and a half each weekend putting together "smoothie packs." I combine all the dry ingredients in one baggie, all the frozen ingredients in another so it's much easier for me to just grab and blend instead of hauling out each of the 12 separate ingredients. But that planning ahead thing is getting easier and easier as we go along...