Grilled Melty Sandwich!

Yesterday I came across this video on youtube and was mesmerized. I decided I was going to make a gooey melty sandwich for myself on the weekend. Went out to the store and got some good rye bread, Daiya cheese and roasted peppers. I made some caramelized onions first and then layered it all up and grilled it in my pan. It was so yummy. I served it with ginger sesame coleslaw.

4th of July weekend food.

A big giant burger with a vegan Boca patty, grilled veg and Chao Cheese!
I wasn't too fussy this holiday. Wanted to keep it simple.

Grilled veg, the usual.

Delicious beet and apple salad, a Happy Pear recipe (without the spinach and toasted nuts).

A very colorful coleslaw with a KFC style dressing (vegenaise, soymilk, lemon juice, vinegar, sugar).

Yesterday I made another BKT salad, this time with mixed greens which included baby kale, spinach, tatsoi etc. and I used coconut bacon instead of tempeh bacon. Still delicious!

Blueberry BISQUICK cake. I followed the old vintage recipe for "velvet crumb cake" but instead of the egg, I used half a banana, soymilk for the milk and instead of broiling a sugar/crumb mixture on top, I sprinkled a bit of brown sugar before baking. Oh and I added blueberries! This tasted exactly like blueberry muffin. I should have baked them in muffin tins.

Belizean Stewed Beans, Coconut Rice and Chocolate Cake

Daaaaamn! This was so delicious! I've never had authentic Belizean food before but I wanted to give it a try when I learned that they use coconut milk in a lot of their dishes. My kinda food, I said! I looked up a lot of recipes online and kept coming across "Rice and Beans" so many times. In that recipe, the beans are cooked together with the coconut milk and rice. I decided to do it seperately by pre-cooking my kidney beans in a crockpot the day before and then today sauteeing onions, garlic, thyme, salt and pepper then adding the beans (with the broth it was cooked in) and the coconut milk and letting it stew for about a half hour. Wonderful on top of coconut rice and with a side of fried plantains and coleslaw. Here is the beans recipe that I worked from. I omitted the pig tail for obvious reasons.

Coconut Rice recipe
(I don't know where I got this recipe. I wrote it out on a piece of paper and failed to note where it came from!)

2 cups water
1 cup basmati rice
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 cup coconut milk
cinnamon stick

Rinse rice if you want (I did not.). Bring water to a boil in a saucepan. Stir in rice, salt, coconut milk and cinnamon stick and bring to a boil again. Lower heat and cover for 30 minutes. Remove cinnamon stick and fluff rice with fork before serving.


For desert I continued with the use of coconut milk by adding it to this basic chocolate cake. I think it would have tasted more like coconut if I hadn't poured the rich chocolate ganache over it! Oh well, it was still very very moist, just very chocolatey.


Vic from The Life blog inspired me to make this cake when I saw a photo of his crazy delicious looking cake. Thanks Vic!

Want Some Dim Sum?

Dim sum is like the greatest thing ever. It's like a chinese version of tapas, an array of light dishes which can make an excellent dinner. Dim sum may include something like what I made tonight: yummy dumplings of steamed dough with a tasty filling and dipping sauce. One year on my birthday back in my omni days, my friend and cousins took me to a local dim sum restaurant. It was so fun getting to choose which dishes we wanted from shu mai to steamed buns and dumplings of all kinds. Unfortunately a veggie dim sum place is nowhere to be found here in Los Angeles, at least not to my knowledge. Tonight's dinner featured only one dish of tofu and veggie potstickers with a homemade sweet and sour sauce served with coleslaw. If it was the weekend, I would have made a few more dishes to heighten the dim sum experience. But just having these and salad was completely satisfying.

Recipe for potstickers here. (This time I steamed them in a steamer basket instead of pan frying first!)

Thai Red Curry and "Kanom Jean"

I've been craving red curry served on top of "kanom jean" (thin somen noodles) that my family eats all the time, especially at holiday parties. My auntie usually makes a big pot of red curry and a big bowl of "kanom jean" prepared into coiled mounds. Since the curry is always meat based I haven't been able to partake in this wonderful marriage of foods. There's something about the noodles that works so well with the curry. They provide a soft, neutral cushion of slippery noodle goodness for the spicy curry that rice doesn't quite do. The only problem is that it goes down so well, you can eat bowl after bowl very easily!


Little coiled mounds of cooked "kanom jean".


My curry was made with coconut milk, chickpeas, zucchini, baby corn and thai red curry paste. I served it with a side of miso sesame coleslaw to extinguish the heat!

Red Curry with Chickpeas

1/2 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
2-3 heaping tsp thai red curry paste (the more you use the spicier it will be!)
1 14oz. can coconut milk
1 cup water
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp rhizome (krachai) powder (If you can't find this, it's ok. But if you can, use it. It really lends an authentic flavor to kanom jean curry.)
1 zucchini, sliced into small pieces
1 14oz. can baby corn, drained
1 14oz. can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
3 TB mushroom soy sauce or 2 TB regular soy sauce

Saute onion and garlic in oil until soft. Add red curry paste and saute for few minutes. Add coconut milk and water and bring to a boil while stirring to dissolve currry paste. Add vegetables, chickpeas, sugar and rhizome powder. Lower heat to simmer for about 30 minutes. Season with soy sauce.

Psst...I edited the recipe to include rhizome powder which is one ingredient that I forgot about. I didn't put it in my curry at first but the next day, I heated up the leftovers and added the rhizome powder and it made it even more perfect!

Detox Week 1, Day 4

Last night husband and I were talking about our cravings. I kept saying the word "cake" and he kept repeating "pizza". Oh dear, it's only day 4...

But today's foods were awesome.

Breakfast: Strawberry-Dates-Banana-Collard Greens Smoothie (no picture sorry!)

To make up for the missing breakfast picture, I'll show you what I got at the local health food store today. I was supposed to just go to the post office but when I passed by, I couldn't help but pull into their parking lot.


Salt-free brown rice cakes, brown rice syrup, salt-free peanut butter, ACV, and some bulk items from L to R: aduki beans, raisins, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds and whole wheat flour (for the healthy pizza I'm making next week!).


I had to make a mid-morning snack with some of this stuff! I spread a little peanut butter on a rice cake and drizzled it with brown rice syrup and sprinkled sesame seeds on top. Yum! I haven't had a rice cake since high school when I used to yo-yo diet. I will continue to buy them, they're so nice!


I wanted to have a large chopped salad for lunch and needed a good salad dressing. I found this easy, delicious Goddess dressing at oneweekraw.com (Scroll down to Day 5 to get the recipe.)


For lunch: chopped salad with green leaf, spinach, red peppers and cucumber. And a sprinkling of flax seeds. To make it lower in fat, I diluted about a TB of dressing with some lemon juice. Worked very well and gave my salad a lot of flavor!


For dinner we had vegetable sushi rolls. The rolls had brown rice, red peppers, carrots, cucumber and avocado. They were delicious. We didn't eat all of these! I ate about 6. My husband ate a lot. The rest are for lunch tomorrow.


I served the rolls with Crunchy Walnut Coleslaw with sesame miso dressing. Recipes from You Are What You Eat Cookbook.

Stuffed Peppers & Creamy Chili Lime Coleslaw

I made stuffed peppers for dinner last night that were pretty awesome and easy to make. They are stuffed with soy crumbles, corn, onions, rice and tomatoes and spiced with cumin, oregano and other mexican seasonings. I originally wanted to use cooked lentils instead of the crumbles but my husband is a big fan of the crumbles. Next time I'll try lentils. I also made a really nice creamy coleslaw with the flavors of lime juice and chili powder to go with the flavors of the stuffed pepper. For dessert we had banana cake. I used this recipe but omitted the chocolate chips.


Stuffed Peppers

3 large green bell peppers, cut in half lengthwise with seeds and membranes removed
2 TB olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1-1/2 cups frozen corn, thawed
1 12 oz. bag Morningstar Grillers Crumbles, frozen (you may substitute rehydrated TVP or even cooked lentils.)
1 14 oz. can stewed tomates, broken up and with juice
1 TB taco seasoning, store bought or make your own
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp oregano
salt and black pepper to taste
1-1/2 cups white or brown rice cooked
tomato sauce seasoned with a little taco seasoning

1. Preheat oven to 350 F.
1. Bring a pot of water to boil. Submerge peppers in the boiling water and let them cook for 3 minutes to soften them a bit. Take them out and let cool.
2. Heat olive oil in a pan on medium high heat and saute the onions and garlic for a few minutes. Add the corn and cook for about 4-5 minutes until onions are soft and corn is a little browned. Remove from pan and set aside.
3. In the same pan on medium high heat, add a little oil and add the soy crumbles. Stir around for a few minutes until all the crumbles are no longer frozen. Add the corn/onion mixture and the stewed tomatoes. Add the spices and continue to cook for about 3-4 minutes or until everything is incorporated and heated through.
4. Pour the mixture into a large bowl and add the cooked rice. Mix everything until combined. Season with salt and pepper if needed. Proceed to stuff each pepper half to bursting with the stuffing mixture.
5. Place stuffed peppers in a baking dish and spoon a little tomato sauce on top of each pepper. Add about 1/4 cup water to the baking dish. Bake uncovered for about 30-40 minutes or until peppers are soft and tops get nice and browned.



Creamy Chili Lime Coleslaw

1 small head of cabbage, chopped or sliced thinly
1 carrot, peeled and grated or sliced thinly
1/4 red onion, sliced
Optional ingredients: corn, olives, tomatoes, avocado etc...

Dressing:
1/2 C vegan mayo (Vegenaise preferably)
2 tsp olive oil
2 tsp red wine vinegar
juice of 1 lime
1 tsp (or more if you want) of chili powder
1/2 tsp cumin
1 tsp of sugar
salt and pepper to taste
You may add more or less of any ingredient to your tastes.
Whisk all ingredients together and toss with cabbage mixture. Chill in the fridge for a few hours.

This is what dessert looked like...

Sharing at family gatherings.

Went to a family shindig yesterday (to celebrate 2 birthdays) and it was a great opportunity for me to bring a dish to share. I usually freak out a little when something like this comes up because I want to impress them with my vegan cooking skills and show them that I still eat great tasting food with lots of flavor and variety. I also didn't want to scare them away with 'weird' ingredients (like tempeh or any kind of fake meat) so I decided on a vegetable lasagna. Something familiar and comforting yet a little different from the usual. This one had a creamy white sauce instead of the usual marinara. To put this together, I used two compenents of two different lasagna recipes. I took the spinach white sauce preparation from the Florentine Lasagna in 'The Vegan Family Cookbook' and the creamy herbed tofu and soy cream cheese filling from the Cheesy Lasagna recipe over at vegweb. I thought it was ok for me to use tofu in this dish (which to some people is still weird) since it was going to be hiding inside the layers of lasagna.


Some of the ingredients. Cremini mushrooms, zucchini and carrots, tofu and soy cream cheese for the filling. Onions, garlic and a bag of spinach for the white sauce.

This is what the filling looked like as it bubbled away. See, you can't see the tofu!


After boiling the noodles and making the spinach white sauce (forgot to get a photo of this), it was just a matter of layering it all together. I had this idea to peel thin slices of zucchini to decorate the top. I think it worked well.


Before going into the oven...


And just out of the oven. How beautiful it looks in the dappled sunlight!


I also made Thai coleslaw which was really good except probably not that great as a potluck dish. Because it was sitting out most of the day, it got warm and wilty and lost it's crispness.

So the verdict? Everyone loved the lasagna and I was happy to see pieces missing as the day turned into night. The coleslaw, not so much but that's ok. The cookie dough brownies I made were a hit with the kids.