Vegan MoFo Red Week – Strawberries

Today I’m having some fun with my favorite berry!

Few things are as beautiful in their simplicity as fresh strawberries.

I eat an exorbitant amount of strawberries during summer months, usually in their raw form. They make a perfect portable breakfast. For example:

Strawberries and pineapple

Strawberries with coconut yogurt and hempseeds

Strawberries and kiwi

They also make a gorgeous addition to grander breakfasts, such as pancakes with Warm Strawberry Sauce.

A.Cook’s Warm Strawberry Sauce
(This recipe has been given the omnivore seal of approval by H.)
Total time: 15 minutes, including chopping and zesting

You need:
1 1/3 cups of chopped strawberries (medium to small dice depending on how chunky you want it)
1/3 cup orange juice (or you can use water in a pinch)
1/4 cup of strawberry jam
1/2 tsp. citrus zest (optional but highly recommended! I used lemon but orange or lime would be awesome too.)
optional: 1/2-1 tsp. liquid sweetener (such as agave nectar or maple syrup) or to taste

To make: Add all ingredients (except sweetener) to small saucepan and heat over medium-low heat until it looks a little bubbly, then lower the heat and cook until the strawberries cook down and the mixture has thickened, stirring frequently. Taste and add sweetener as needed (sometimes your berries will be sweet enough on their own but sometimes they might need a little help! The sweetness of your jam and whether you use orange juice or water will also be a factor.). Use on top of your favorite vegan pancakes (mine are Perfect Pancakes from Vegan Brunch/Vegan With a Vengeance…the recipe is posted here) or as a topping for ice cream or Yonanas!

This recipe makes enough sauce for one hearty pancake breakfast for two with some leftover, or for one moderate pancake breakfast for four. Try stirring any leftover sauce into yogurt or oatmeal, or incorporating it into a smoothie!

Strawberries are wonderful for dessert (obviously!)

Vanilla Cupcakes with Strawberry Buttercream Frosting by Made Just Right (click for recipe). This recipe makes buttercream frosting by whipping Earth Balance together with fresh strawberries and confectioner’s sugar. The flavor is incredible!

In recent months I have actually become extremely fond of pairing strawberries with savory flavors and fresh herbs.

I make Strawberry Salsa by tossing chopped fresh berries with red onion, diced jicama and/or mango, chopped cilantro, and a splash of lime juice.

Strawberry and mint is another favorite combination. I love to have a simple salad with these ingredients (click for recipe):

Or throw a bunch of each in to soak in filtered water. It’s such a simple thing but it feels so luxurious.

I also think strawberry and basil is a beautiful pairing. Try my Basilberry Smoothie to use up some of the last of summer’s fruit and herbs!

Yeah, it’s more purple than red, but the main ingredient is strawberries so I’m sticking with it! 🙂

You Need:
1 cup chia gel (this is made by combining 1 tbsp. chia seeds with 1 cup water and allowing to soak at least 10 minutes, but preferably overnight)
1 cup of frozen strawberries (a little more is okay…I find these are actually pretty hard to measure!)
3/4 cup fresh or frozen blueberries (I used fresh)
4 basil leaves
(optional) 1/2 – 1 tsp. liquid sweetener such as stevia or agave

To Make:
Place all ingredients in blender in the order shown and blend until smooth. Taste and add liquid sweetener if necessary (end-of-summer basil tends to be a little more bitter and the berries less sweet, so sweeten as needed).

What is your favorite way to enjoy strawberries?

Not Yo Mama’s Happy Meals

Those who know me know that I strongly believe that being vegan is a snap if you plan and are adequately prepared on any given day. Even so, in the midst of busy lives, work schedules, and obligations to family, friends, and significant others, true preparation can be a lofty goal.

I don’t know about you, but I’m feelin’ 22 I find that every aspect of my life runs so much more smoothly when I am on top of my food and eating. Recently, I did a 3-day Detox Cleanse from Maria Guadagno at Bombshell Blueprint (more information here). The cleanse was awesome of course, but what it really showed me was that having a true plan and schedule for what I’m going to eat, when I’m going to eat it, and maybe most importantly when I’m going to prep it, is the key to my feeling happy, productive, and in control of my life and health.

So today I present some of the “happy meals” that I have been eating of late. These are meals that, with a little advance preparation, can be thrown together super-quickly at any given time, whether it’s the usual early-morning-packing-lunch-for-the-workday grind or a getting-home-after-Zumba-and-have-no-time-to-cook-dinner situation.

Ever since my cleanse I have been wild about cooking up a pot of brown rice with shiitake mushrooms at the beginning of the week and using the rice in all sorts of meals. All you do is add the sliced mushrooms to the rice about 10 minutes before the cooking time is up.  You get a whole lot of extra texture and nutrition with little to no extra effort. Best of all, you can eat this rice with basically anything.

For example, here we have shiitake brown rice packed alongside lentils (which my mother-in-law cooked up with a little onion and carrot and gave to me), ready to take to work.

I stirred some turmeric and cayenne into the lentils and it was absolutely delicious, hearty and filling, not to mention healthy!

I tried the shiitake mushroom trick with soba noodles as well. Scroll down for shiitake soba noodles three ways:

1) with stir-fried green beans and red pepper (also a gift from my mother-in-law):

2) with sauteed sugar snap peas:

I topped and tailed these babies the night before, then sauteed them with toasted sesame oil (my LOVE), garlic, ginger, and a little fresh cilantro in the morning and packed it all up to take to work.

3) with the remaining sauteed sugar snap peas, with Sticky Maple Tempeh by Happy. Healthy. Life (recipe here) for dinner:

Another big reason that meal planning is mentally refreshing for me is that it allows me to actually use up the ingredients I have in my constantly overpacked fridge and pantry, which is especially important this time of year when fresh produce is everywhere. Planning also allows me to utilize a handful of the several thousand recipes I have stored in my email (never mind the ones in all my cookbooks) that I want to try which use those ingredients.

I especially love to make a recipe that leaves leftovers that I can repurpose in another way. One night I made Summer Slaw from Happy. Healthy. Life (recipe here) and used it as a base for jackfruit carnitas tacos (look out for those in an upcoming post).

The slaw recipe made a TON! So the next day I ate some of it with the leftover Sticky Maple Tempeh. The rest of the week I had it as a side with pretty much everything else that I ate. (I highly recommend both the slaw and the tempeh recipes, but especially the tempeh, by the way. I have had mixed results with tempeh in the past but making this gave me more confidence to try other things with it in the future.)

With a block of extra-firm tofu that was on sale, I made Curried Tofu from Veganomicon. That one block of tofu lasted me more than a week, and was delicious chopped up over salads or used in sandwiches like this one:

I also recently made Curried Chickpea Salad from Fettle Vegan (recipe here) one night and used it on sandwiches and wraps for days.

I only used 2/3 of the amount of mayo called for and still found the recipe a little too rich/creamy for my tastes. I’m not sure I would make this specific recipe again but I would definitely tweak it and/or use other chickpea salad recipes (Lord knows there are thousands) because I love the idea of having something like that available for quick meals, snacks, or sides.

Finally, since it’s berry season, I’ve been all about fresh strawberries and blueberries (organic because the other ones scare me). I made Strawberry Mint Salad by Maria Guadagno (recipe here) and ate that over organic baby spinach and oh my.

For breakfast, some blueberries mixed up with So Delicious strawberry coconut-milk yogurt and hemp seeds.

Or cherry vanilla smoothies that I made for H and me after finding cherries for $1.99/lb (yay!).

Each smoothie had about 2/3 cup of pitted cherries, 1 cup of unsweetened almond-coconut milk, 1/4 of an avocado, 1/2 a frozen banana, 1 tbsp of hemp seeds, and 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract. They were really tasty but strangely turned a nasty-looking gray/steel color after 2-3 minutes (?!). Not sure what that was about.  I didn’t take a picture because it was disgusting.

Another popular and quick breakfast has been a sprouted whole wheat English muffin with peanut butter, hemp seeds and banana slices (this breakfast idea came from H, my little hemp seed convert).

Those are just a few of the happy meals that, along with the beautiful summery weather, have been keeping a smile on my face!

What are your happy meals made of?

Sunshine and Rainbows

Happy spring everyone!!!

Check out the beautiful magnolia blooms that appeared on this tree in my yard over the weekend!

Last week was absolutely incredible in Boston (and pretty much everywhere else, too, I’m told). It actually reached 83 degrees here last Thursday, shattering the old temperature record, set in the 1940s, by 11 degrees–amazing!

Last week also marked the first week in my half marathon training program.  This will be my third half marathon and it feels great to be “in training” again.  I love being active and getting to spend a lot of time outdoors, and even more than that, I love how easy it is to eat a clean, wholesome diet while training–my body just craves that sort of food!

Despite that temperatures are back to a normal Boston March level today, it certainly feels like my life has been all sunshine and rainbows recently.  Check out some of the bright and colorful things that have made their way across my plate!

BREAKFAST
Normally, I’m not a huge breakfast eater, but when in training this meal becomes a crucial part of my day.  I try to find things that are quick and portable, but also contain a respectable balance of carbs, protein, and healthy fats.

Banana Flapjacks from Vegan Brunch by Isa Chandra Moskowitz

This has recently become my go-to weekend breakfast, mostly because I never seem to run out of must-be-used-now bananas.  For this batch, I added shredded coconut and spread a smidgen of Earth Balance on top.  This recipe is a sure bet any time you are making breakfast for non-vegans who cannot imagine what vegans eat for breakfast if not pig patties stacked with various globs of eggs and cheese.  The recipe produces pancakes that are soft and creamy from the banana and just the right amount of sweet.  Very highly recommended.

Later in the week, I used leftover flapjacks to make breakfast roll-ups.  I spread a small amount of pecan butter in the center of each, rolled it up, and just like that, it was ready for me to take along on the train!

Freakin’ so delicious, and filling too!

Homemade Yogurt Parfait
It is rare that I eat strawberries so early in the season, but I found a carton of incredibly fragrant, perfectly ripe specimens at Russo’s and couldn’t resist.  I cut them up along with some banana and layered it with Whole Soy & Co.’s Strawberry Banana (which has replaced Apricot Mango as my favorite flavor) yogurt for a sweet treat of a breakfast that was pleasing to both the eyes and the palate.

LUNCH
In keeping with what I mentioned in my last post about trying to fit in more high-volume cooking, I’ve been buying produce that looks good and cooking it up on the weekends, then finding random ways to use it throughout the week.  My latest experiment involved roasting a small butternut squash with maple syrup and olive oil, as well as a batch of gorgeous beets that I found at Russo’s (where else?)–they were only 98 cents for the whole bunch, leaves and all!  The result was this delicious concoction, which I’ve dubbed The Rainbow Sandwich. 

Look at those beautiful colors! Earthy roasted beets, sweet maple-roasted squash, baby spinach, and incredible fresh-baked Russo’s “rustic bread” make for the most delightful and spring-appropriate sandwich imaginable.  Sunshine in every bite!

I would be lying if I said I did not eat this same sandwich for lunch 5 out of the last 8 work days.

I have a lot more cooking to chronicle and recipes to review, but time is short, and this post is already very long!  Thanks for reading if you’ve gotten this far.

A final thought: we all know that life can’t be all sunshine and rainbows all the time.  But that is exactly why I treasure weeks like these so much when they do come around.  I hope you all do, too!