Mushroom & Sausage Stroganoff with Mashed Potatoes.

This recipe is ridiculously good! I used the "Seitan Portobello Stroganoff" recipe from Vegan With A Vengeance. I used two 8oz. cartons of cremini mushrooms and replaced the seitan with 2 sliced Field Roast smoked apple sausages. The amount of sauce it makes is wonderful! You can use it on top of mash and also on wide noodles which I plan to do tomorrow because it looks like we have quite a lot of leftover sauce.

Fresh russets make the best fluffy mashed potatoes whipped with almond milk and Earth Balance margarine.

View #1. Beautiful stuff. You can see how rich and red it is from the wine and mushrooms.

The Field Roast worked very well and held up in the sauce. I love Field Roast.

Spaghetti w/ Red Wine and Rosemary Marinara

Made dinner with help from my new cookbook 'Vegan Italiano' tonight. Very simple sauce that came together in under 30 minutes. I added lots of fresh basil and zucchini. I topped my portion of pasta with a blob of creamy cashew cheeze sauce that I got from work (sorry can't give you the recipe). The sauce was great when mixed in with the pasta, it made it very creamy and so yummy!

Lentil-Vegetable Soup with Red Wine and Miso

It's soup time! This is adapted from the "Lentil and Escarole" soup in The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen cookbook. I swapped escarole for kale and added potatoes, summer savory, red wine and red miso paste. It also has onions, garlic, celery and carrots. So hearty and delicious!

Edited to add: This soup gets very thick the following day and turns into stew! Yum!

I Love Pasta!

Hello Friday! Good to see you. I got out of work early today (3pm) so I wanted to celebrate an early start to the weekend by cooking up a big pot of my special red wine vegetable marinara. I really love this sauce. It's rich and deep with a hint of sweetness and full of a variety of veggies. Whatever I have in my fridge is what goes in this sauce. I had zucchini, carrots, red bell pepper and onions which made a wonderful chunky sauce. I haven't had pasta in a while so this was a treat. My husband brought home a fresh loaf of french bread. It was definitely a carb heavy dinner but it was worth it! Underneath the pasta there is a big handful of fresh baby spinach. The topping is "Parmezano Sprinkles" from The Ultimate Uncheese cookbook.

A big bowl of pasta.

Sometimes that's just all you want. It's comforting, it's pretty easy to prepare and it just hits the spot on a cold, rainy night like tonight. I love pasta and it's probably one of the most prepared foods in my kitchen. For years, I was always aware that too much white flour pasta is just "carb and calorie" overload which leads to weight gain etc. etc. But recently I've become more concerned not so much with carbs and calories, but with processed foods and how a diet with a majority of it is bad for your body. Here's an excerpt from an article which talks about processed foods, in particular refined white flour (which regular pasta is made from):

Refined flour has had the brown husk of the grain stripped away, leaving the white, refined starch found in white bread, white rice, pasta, cookies, and numerous other junk foods. Without the fibrous husk, refined starches are broken down quickly into sugar and absorbed immediately into the bloodstream causing glucose levels to rise, and increasing the risk of obesity.

So that's not such good news. But don't get me wrong, I am not totally against things like white rice and pasta. You will have to pry my rice cooker full of Thai white jasmine rice from my hands and I will always make cakes and cookies with white flour and I will not give up white flour pasta. It's just that I need to balance things out but by eating more whole foods that have not been stripped of their nutrients. Which is why I'm over the moon about this brown rice pasta that I can now get at Trader Joe's for $2. It's lovely and I find tastes so much better than whole wheat pasta. A few days ago I tried the brown rice fusilli and it was great. My husband and I could not tell the difference between this and regular pasta. Today I got some spaghetti which I had with a luscious mushroom red wine spaghetti sauce that had been simmering for a few hours. I accidentally overcooked the spaghetti (D'oh!) so it was a wee bit mushy but my sauce rocked. I used this recipe but added mushrooms. Next time I have to keep a good eye on the pasta while it cooks.




Sprinkled with "Parmezano Sprinkles" which is just almonds, miso paste, nutritional yeast and salt ground into a powder. It's yummy!

Sauce + Bananas: Caramelized!

No, not sauce and bananas together! I just happened to have made two dishes with caramelized somethin' in them!



I wanted to make tofu cutlets tonight with some kind of sauce. I first thought of marsala but I didn't have any marsala wine. What I did have was red wine so I experimented and came up with this rich, flavorful sauce with loads of caramelized onions. If you're onion phobic like my husband (he didn't really like the amount of onions in it), you can cut the amount of onions you use in half. I smothered pan fried tofu cutlets with the sauce and had them that way. To be honest, I would have rather enjoyed the sauce with something meatier like a veggie burger patty or veggie meatloaf. The tofu was just too bland for me. But maybe you can make it work better than I did!

Red Wine Miso Sauce with Caramelized Onions

2 TB olive oil
1 medium onion, sliced (you may use 1/2 or less if you desire)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 cup red wine
1 cup vegetable broth
1 tsp tomato paste
2 tsp cornstarch
1 TB mellow white miso paste
1/2 tsp italian seasoning
1/4 tsp sugar
salt and pepper to taste

Heat oil in a saucepan on medium high heat. Saute the onions and garlic until onions are soft, browned and caramelized. Add the red wine and let it simmer and reduce for about a minute or so. In the meantime, combine the broth, tomato paste and cornstarch and whisk together. Pour this mixture little by litte into the red wine/onion mixture and stir to combine. Keep simmering for another 4 minutes or so until it gets thick and shiny. Stir in the miso paste, italian herbs, sugar and season with salt and pepper to taste.


On tofu with mash and peas.

Earlier today I got these from my banana tree in my backyard:



So I made this:



Caramelized Bananas with Cinnamon

3 mini bananas, sliced (go ahead and use a couple normal bananas or even very ripe plantains.)
1-2 TB canola oil
2 tsp sugar
couple pinches of cinnamon

Heat oil in a small saucepan on med-high heat. Add the sliced bananas in a layer and let cook for a few minutes. Sprinkle 1 tsp of the sugar on top and then flip them over either with a spatula or a "flick of the wrist". Sprinkle the remaining sugar and cinnamon and continue to cook and flip around until all the bananas are browned and caramelized. These would be delicious served on top of vanilla soy ice cream or on top of pancakes.

Red Wine Marinara Sauce

I make spaghetti and marinara all the time because I almost always have the ingredients in my fridge and pantry. Not only is it easy to prepare, it makes a delicious, hot and comforting weeknight dinner. This particular sauce was an experiment with red wine. I had a half bottle of cabernet sitting on the counter and I decided to slosh some in. Hey, why not?

Red Wine Vegetable Marinara Sauce

2 TB olive oil
1/2 white onion, chopped
1/2 red onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 carrot, chopped in small pieces
1 zucchini, diced small
2 TB tomato paste
1 cup water
2 14 oz. cans stewed tomatoes (blended until smooth in a blender) or you can use crushed tomatoes instead
1/2 cup red wine
1 tsp crushed red pepper flakes
1 tsp sugar
fresh basil (about 6-7 leaves, chopped)
salt and pepper to taste

Heat olive oil in a large pot. Add onion and garlic and saute for a few minutes until onions brown a bit and get soft. Add carrots and zucchini and cook until they are fairly soft. Add the tomato paste and stir around and then add water and canned tomatoes. Stir to dissolve tomato paste. Add the wine, red pepper flakes, sugar and basil and bring to a boil. Then lower heat and simmer for 30 minutes or more. Season with salt and pepper to taste.


The red wine really did something to the flavor of the sauce. It made it deep and rich with a hint of sweetness. Yum!