Portobellos and Perogies

I was supposed to make these Five Spice Portobello Satays from Vegan Planet for Alicia’s bachelorette last night, but I totally ran out of time! But not before I had bought all the ingredients. So I made them today and am going to have the leftovers in sandwiches this week. Then, onion and potato perogies from Denninger’s, which are fantastic, but also an excuse for me to eat more sauerkraut: I finally got some yesterday after wanting some for a long while. Hanging out with my friends Robbie and Laurie always gives me a hankering for sauerkraut, because we spend a lot of time chatting about our mutual love of pickles and fermented foods. Crazy vegans. Rounding out the meal, some green beans and chopped broccoli stem in garlic tomato sauce. I love finding ways to use up leftover ingredients…

Home Fries

Here’s the home fries I made this morning after a late night at Alicia’s bachelorette. Baby local yukon golds, boiled for awhile and then panfried in some olive oil, with paprika, salt, thyme, cumin, lemon juice, and a bit of nutritional yeast.

Grilled Cheese

Here’s a poorly-lit photo of the Gooey Grilled Cheez sandwich I made from The Uncheese Cookbook the other day for lunch. The camera ran out of batteries before take two! I really like this sandwich, I’ve made it a couple of times. I haven’t had dairy cheese in almost three years, but the sauces and spreads in this book evoke the things about cheese I liked– the richness, the depth, the tang. Without the sour-body-fluid thang that accompanies every sensory encounter with cheese after you’ve been vegan for awhile and your tastes have changed. Vegan secrets, out of the woodwork and unsolicited!

Ethiopian for Four

I had three people over to finish all the Ethiopian food filling up my freezer! I made one new dish, which happily used up my niter kibbeh, too.
Starting with the yellow on the left and going clockwise, we have atar allecha (split pea puree), yetakelt kilkil (vegetable stew), atar allecha made with green lentils, yesimer w’et (split peas in a spicy red gravy), another yesimer w’et made with red lentils, and some gomen (made with chard instead of collards).
There’s a store in town that usually sells homemade injera, but yesterday they didn’t have any; instead, they had Sudanese sour flat bread, which I think was also fermented like injera, but a little less spongy and with no teff flour. But it worked really well!

Orange Tofu

I’m back! I was in Toronto for a couple of days, and then I had no food when I came home and spent a lot of time out of the house, hence no updates. Last night I made a really tasty orange tofu that’s fried with a cornstarch crust and has an orange sauce. It’s the closest thing to North American-style Chinese takeout that I’ve had in years. It’s a good dish to make for omnis, I think, and is pretty addictive. I added a minced clove of garlic and some minced ginger in with the carrots.
I found it through someone’s post on the Vegancooking Livejournal, here’s the original: (from allrecipes).

More Piping Practice

I’m practicing flower-like piping these days, and I think it’s coming along pretty well! These are the last of the freezer vanilla cupcakes from wedding testing, with a strawberry frosting (thanks to my new prized online baking supply purchase: strawberry extract!)

Two Sandwiches

Another five minute meal. A Gardein “chicken” breast, miso-tahini dressing with some lemon juice and hot sauce added, leftover roasted red pepper, field greens.

An amazing sandwich from earlier in the week. Storebought roasted onion and garlic hummus with the leftover sliced Smoky Tempeh. I don’t know what it was about this combination, but it was so good.

Green Tea Cupcake

Practicing decorating for the wedding cupcakes is all kinds of fun. Here’s a vanilla cupcake from the freezer (good news- they freeze well!) with a green tea “cream cheese” frosting and all-natural sprinkles and nonpareils from India Tree.

Scalloped Potatoes

Here are the Herbed Scalloped Potatoes from Veganomicon. Very good stuff. Alongside I made a salad with a balsamic lemon vinaigrette. I half-roasted a red pepper: I’ve always wanted to roast a pepper over a gas flame instead of in the oven, but I got impatient half-way through, plus worried about it popping and spurting pepper juices onto my gas stovetop any more than it already had. So, I’m chalking it up as another shattered dream… Fanned on top is the leftover smoky tempeh.

Smoky Tempeh

I’m so in love with the Hot Sauce Tempeh from Veganomicon that I thought I should finally try its other tempeh recipe. And it’s good, too! The hot sauce one is still tops, but that’s okay. Tempeh is so rich for some reason that I thought I should just have it with plain kale (when you live alone it takes a while to get through a bunch…) I’d have had it with some rice or something, too, but I’d had a bunch of tasty bread before dinner so I decided to streamline things. I’m so glad I’ve finally found a method of preparing tempeh that makes it taste good to me. I think the poaching step before marinating is really crucial: it brings out the best you could dream for your humble fermented soybean cake.