Vegan MoFo – Gettin’ Down with Brown

The point of this post is definitely not to be like “Look What I Ate!”  Trust me, I am aware that this is not 2007.  But once in a while I get excited about something I’ve made out of whatever stuff I have lying around.

Plus I’m really excited about the little bowl I made today because it fits in with my MoFo theme this week in that it’s full of yummy and under-appreciated brown foods!

Allow me to introduce you to the Brown Bowl (with accents of green of course!):

You’ve got your quinoa, your steamed kale, tempeh sausage crumbles, and brown rice all in one! (Sorry the image is a little off-center…Wordpress and I are currently having a disagreement over photo-editing.  And of course the rice looks white…sigh.)

Anyway, the bowl.  It’s a super-yummy and healthy option for lunch or dinner!  I suppose it doesn’t technically need a sauce but I like to have one.  Here, I used straight-up sriracha but a tahini sauce would be amazing as well (specifically I’m thinking a sriracha-tahini sauce.  Yeah, I’m obsessed.)

(And in this one everything is still off-center and looks yellow/orange.  Grr.)

I used the recipe for Tempeh Sausage Crumbles from Vegan with a Vengeance (click for recipe).  As I’ve mentioned before, I’m in the early stages of my tempeh appreciation.  I’m loving this recipe as a cheap and versatile way to incorporate this protein- and iron-rich food into my diet.  Seriously, a single serving of tempeh (1 cup) has 31 grams of protein.  [Source: NutritionData.com]  Compare to a serving of steak (3 oz., and who actually eats that little?) which has 23 grams of protein but is also served with an unattractive side of cholesterol [source].

My first go at the tempeh crumbles recipe made enough to feed me for something like 5 meals.  Last week I packed it up with mashed Yukon Gold potatoes (left over from this recipe) and steamed kale.

I didn’t eat it in little perfect sections obviously.  Here it is, all mixed up like 311:

Tempeh sausage crumbles…not just for brunch anymore!

Kitchen Purge: A Romantic Comedy

A little creativity and basic food knowledge can take you pretty far.  Sometimes, I manage to make something truly delicious out of the most random crap.

I’m sure we’ve all had those times were there is just an accumulation of stuff in the kitchen. In the fridge, on the counter, in the cabinets, etc.   On one recent evening, for example, I came home from work and spent about two hours trying to decide what I wanted to do for dinner since H was at a work event.  I knew I had food in the house and it would have felt distinctly irresponsible to get takeout. So I took an inventory:

Counter: one super-ripe mango, one pineapple that needed to be cut, one cantaloupe that needed to be cut [I am soooo lazy sometimes], one Russet potato that was beginning to be questionable, and the ever-present garlic, onions, and shallots

Fridge: Crikey. Um…some sliced crimini mushrooms (which turned out to be gross and I had to throw them out), cooked brown rice, turnip greens, asparagus (some cooked and some raw), Trader Joe’s soy chorizo (FAVE), an unopened package of tofu, a baseball-sized chunk of cauliflower (why?), some past-due edamame hummus, and a mango-flavored coconut yogurt

Cabinet: let’s not go there

Eventually I formed a loose plan, incorporating the cauli-ball, some garlic, the cooked asparagus, the brown rice, and the soy chorizo.

I started the cauliflower first, since it would have to cook the longest.  Since I didn’t feel like turning on the oven, I just sauteed it in a little bit of olive oil on the stovetop, and covered it with a lid to help it cook faster. I tossed in a clove of chopped garlic about 2/3 of the way through, and toward the end I added a dash of garlic salt and a couple of dashes of red pepper flakes (and then I spent the next hour coughing. I knew that was going to happen when I put the flakes in, yet I continued breathing. How stupid of me.)

Anyway, I just heated the chorizo through in a pan with a little cooking spray. I cut the asparagus into pieces and was going to heat that in a pan too (stuff reheated on the stove is SO much better, in my opinion) but then I got impatient so I just nuked it, along with the rice.

What I should have done

When everything was done cooking, I put it in a bowl and VOILA:

I don’t know if you can tell from the picture, but this was a giant bowl of food. Since I am not exactly svelte, I thought to myself that I should probably only eat half, but of course I ate the whole thing, and then wished I had even more. Sigh.

Anyway, I was pretty happy that I managed to make a really tasty, filling dinner (despite starting with only a loose plan), make some room in the fridge, and incorporate some stuff that needed to be used (my battle against wasting food is ongoing, but that’s another tale for another day).

I do feel that this is important, because even if one does not have the time or resources to shop for and cook a big, fancy meal each night, a little resourcefulness and some standard ingredients can go a long way!

Let’s review: anything sauteed with olive oil and garlic is good, amirite?! Hello, cauliflower. Add some texturally-pleasing and flavorful ingredients (here, chorizo, though I could have definitely been healthier and used beans or non-rotten mushrooms. With either of those, I would have added some more spices and maybe a touch of tomato sauce or veg broth, but I didn’t need to do that with the chorizo because it is a processed food that is pre-flavored). Finally, a mild starch (here, brown rice) provided the vehicle on which to enjoy it all.

Of course, now that farmstand/farmer’s market season is here (rejoice!), I’m guaranteed to have loads of random produce laying around on any given day.  Maybe I’ll start my own Chopped competition of one.  Poor H.

Anyone else have any tips for incorporating various ingredients from around the kitchen? Or any examples of seemingly-incongruous stuff you’ve thrown together in a pinch?

Summer Bummer

It is June 11th, and my one-year blog anniversary was June 2nd, which I somehow missed, and that is sad.  😦  Also, I managed to lose another digital camera to a bad fall last weekend, which doesn’t really help me in the blogging department, and is depressing because now that school has ended I’ve been doing alot of cooking and baking.  Tomorrow a big group of my friends is going down to Cape Cod to spend the weekend there, and I have this whole long summery menu of things to cook up for them while we’re there, which I’m really excited about because I love cooking in the summertime!  Of course, it is currently 56 degrees in Boston so maybe not so much.

Alright, enough bad humor.  Until my camera is fixed (or I bite the bullet and buy my third one in the last 13 months) I have a few pictures in my Photobucket that I can post for the sake of keeping up the blog…

First up is a series of photos of Dad and me making Happy Herbivore’s Chickpea Piccata. 

Here we have the patties, getting ready to go into the oven.

And there is the sauce, simmering away.

Some steamed spinach for a side dish.

The finished chickpea patties.

The finished sauce.

Overall, I enjoyed this recipe but we had to modify it a little.  The chickpea mixture that forms the patties was very dry (maybe because we used dried beans that had been soaked and cooked rather than canned?), and we had such a hard time keeping the mixture together that we ended up using an ice cream scoop to form the patties (as seen above), as well as putting lots (probably too much) of flour on them so they didn’t stick to our hands or the scoop. We did not flatten them before baking (as the recipe directs) for fear they would fall apart.  We also added a significant amount of olive oil (not HH’s style, certainly) to try to moisten the mixture and keep it together.  Also, I thought the sauce was pretty good but Dad thought it was slightly too acidic (with the bulk of the liquid being white wine and the lemon juice), and so next time we decided we’d use a little more water (in addition to that used for the cornstarch) and maybe even a dash of soymilk to even out the pH a little (while avoiding making it too creamy). 

This second pic is an old one, from last fall I believe, and it is Pumpkin Seed Crusted Tofu. 

Served up with brown rice and a plate of pita chips and roasted red pepper hummus

I can’t for the life of me remember where I got this tofu recipe.  If anyone has seen it before, can you please leave a comment or email me so I can give the author proper credit?  Thanks!  I usually wouldn’t post something if I didn’t know where it came from (since that is kind of the point of this blog) but they’re really pretty pictures and I’m kinda short on material at the moment. Overall this was a pretty yummy spread, nothing exceptional though.  Looking at the picture now, of course, I’m chiding myself on serving too much rice and no actual vegetables!

To wrap up, I just want to say that now that the semester has ended, I feel like a real person again, and not only am I thrilled to be back into the kitchen and back into my healthy eating and exercise habits, but I am thrilled to once again have the time to catch up on all of your wonderful blogs, from which I have been long absent. I’ll be back to commenting soon!!