Weekend food.

Meatloaf sandwich again, this time with homemade potato salad on the side. It's the "retro" potato salad recipe from 1,000 Vegan Recipes.

I made a delicious batch of "potato cheese" that I wanted to make mac n cheese with. Mine has potatoes, onions, a couple of carrots, cashews, garlic, herbs, white miso, salt, pepper and tamari.

It was absolutely perfect with macaroni pasta. So creamy.

I like salty things so I added a little Hawaiian lava finishing salt on top. Even more delicious! I get my salt from Salty Wahine here.

Dinners this week: Salad and Meatloaf.

Made a quick salad the other night of arugula, grilled Portobello seasoned with garlic and soy sauce and tossed in a Dijon vinaigrette. I served it with a baked sweet potato. This was so good.

Last night I made a Magical Loaf out of chickpeas, mushrooms, celery, onion, green peppers, panko bread crumbs and oats. Slathered it with Manwich sloppy joe sauce instead of ketchup. Yum! 

Create your loaf here!

Tonight it's all about the meatloaf sandwich on squishy white bread slathered with vegan mayo, mustard and ketchup!

"Meatloaf" dinner, Banana Jello, vintage "Radio Pudding".

Even though we're having a pretty uncomfortable heat spell this weekend, I still wanted to use my oven to make this meatloaf dinner. The recipe was made by using the Magical Loaf Studio. Mine was black bean based and I also added tofu. The vegetables I used were celery, onions, carrot and cauliflower, basically what was in the fridge that needed to be used!

So good! Don't forget the ketchup on top before baking!

Banana flavored jelly (Ahmed brand) that is vegan!

Love the colors.

I have an old vintage cookbook that I inherited from my Canadian mother in law that has this recipe in it. Don't know why it's called Radio pudding but the recipe is similar to a french canadian dessert called "pouding chomeur" that my mother in law always made.

It has a cake/biscuit topping and a caramel/brown sugar sauce underneath.

What made this recipe different is that it called for cream of tartar. And this cake is thinner than the pouding chomeur recipe.

To serve, scoop out a slice and invert into a bowl, add more sauce!

Mushrooms on toast, TV dinner and Homemade energy bars!

One of my favorite snacks and comfort foods. Saucy mushrooms and tomatoes on toast. Recipe by Mary McCartney.

Gardein "meatloaf", mash, gravy and peas. Vegan tv dinner! Thumbs up on the Gardein meatloaf by the way. Easy to prepare. I would rather make my own though with beans, grains and vegetables. It wouldn't have all that processed stuff that meat analogues have.

I found a recipe for diy energy bars in Runner's World magazine. Here is my version made with oats, peanut butter, dried fruits, chocolate chips and hemp powder.

Based on the Marronthon bars recipe in Runner's World Magazine.
Ingredients:
1 cup rolled oats (toasted in the oven first)
1/4 cup slivered almonds
1 cup dried fruits chopped (apricots, cranberries etc)
1/4 cup hemp protein powder (Trader Joe's vanilla flavor)
1/4 cup flax seeds
1/2 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup plus 2 TB of chunky peanut butter
1/2 cup agave syrup, 1/3 cup brown sugar (next time I will cut back to a smaller amount of agave and leave out the sugar)

Method: Mix the toasted oats, fruit, nuts, powder, seeds and chocolate chips in a large bowl. In a small saucepan, heat the agave, peanut butter and sugar until just boiling and the pb is melted. Take off heat and add to oat mixture. Stir until everything is combined. Spread into a prepared pan that was sprayed with oil. Flatten with wet hands and refrigerate for 4 hours. Cut into bars. Keep in fridge wrapped in foil.

4 days of "Me" time.

I love these four day weekends, don't you? Mine started on Wednesday night after work. Came home and made a "meatloaf" dinnner.

Again I used the Magical Loaf Studio and created a recipe that used black beans, pecans, oats, veggies and a bunch of other seasonings. It came out of the oven beautiful.

It's not a meatloaf dinner without mash and a vegetable. For the mash, I made a creamy miso gravy to pour over. Oh, that's kimchi on the side. I love kimchi but it didn't work flavor-wise on this plate.

Yesterday, my husband and I took the train downtown to see Ringo's exhibit at the Grammy Museum. Love this place. I've seen many a good music exhibits here. As for Beatle-y ones, I've been to John's, George's and now Ringo's. When they do one for Paul, I'll be all over that. He's my favorite.

RINGO! This was all I got a picture of. It was the entrance to the exhibit. They wouldn't let you photograph anything beyond that. The exhibit itself was amazing. Ton of artifacts, Ringo's drum kits, letters, photos, video etc. I was in Beatle heaven.

After the museum, we went to The Yard House for lunch. We usually start off with drinks. The Smithwicks on the left was my husbands. The pear cider on the right is mine.

Drink #2: Moscow Mule! Vodka, lime and ginger beer. So refreshing!

I ordered a Gardein burger with fries. Yum.

To celebrate the 4th and a successful sunshine day, I made this impressive almond-coconut mango "jello".

If you want to make a vegan jello, agar is your friend. Recipe here. Just substitute almond-coconut milk for the juice.

Meatloaf sandwich

The day after I make "meatloaf", I look forward to making this. A cold meatloaf sandwich piled high with tomatoes, lettuce, vegenaise and ketchup!

Chickpea "Meatloaf"

Finally finally I put The Magical Loaf Studio to use! I've known about this handy recipe generator for over a year and I've been meaning to use it. All you do is pick and choose your ingredients, hit 'submit' and out comes a recipe complete with measurements. How cool is that? I liked meatloaf and I had it all the time growing up. Now that I'm vegan, my loaves are meat-free and even more delicious. I usually make my veggie meatloaves with tofu and vegetables and I've never tried one which comprised mostly of beans. Today's loaf has chickpeas, brazil nuts, whole grain bread crumbs, onions, carrots, garlic, celery, ketchup, soy sauce, black pepper and bbq spice blend (mesquite powder, cumin, smoked paprika, garlic powder and other stuff). I also spread a little ketchup on top of the loaf to give it that 1950's touch.


I cut into it about 15 minutes after it came out of the oven. It was moist and very flavorful. If I didn't use bbq type spices in it I would have made a gravy to go with it. I love the versatility of the Loaf Studio and I can't wait to use it again to make an entirely different loaf.