Vegan Eggplant Parmigiana

So, first off, this isn't actually vegan, although it should've been. I was lazy and used an egg to batter the eggplant - that's just common sense. If you have an egg, use the egg. But more importantly (and disgustingly) I used these leftover bread crumbs I had in the cupboard and after I made it I regretted using them, and am glad they're not in my house anymore. According to the label... they're yuck. But whatever, I used them. It is fine. Not vegan.
So basically what I'm saying is that I made cheese-free eggplant parmigiana. It was good, cheese isn't necessary when you have deliciously fried eggplant.
Second piece of honesty... The only reason I didn't put cheese on the eggplant was because I only have cheddar, and I had too much of it with crackers as a pre-dinner snack. So I wasn't interested in more cheese, and it is just fried eggplant with red lentil pasta sauce.

Eggplant:
1 egg
1/2 eggplant
breadcrumbs
olive oil
Baking pan

Get your breadcrumbs ready in a shallow bowl, in another shallow bowl whisk your egg a bit with a fork. Spray the bottom of your baking pan with copious amounts of olive oil, and preheat the oven to 400. Dip the eggplant into egg then breadcrumbs, place on baking sheet. Spray with more olive oil before putting it into the oven - bake until the tops start to look brown and flip (the bottoms are likely darker) and bake a few more minutes

Eat with fresh cooked pasta and fresh pasta sauce - I can't find any posts about puttanesca, so I guess I'll have to make it again and post the recipe.

Red Curry Tempeh

I finally remembered to use the cilantro I bought as a garnish. A lot of it, since I have so much. The open bottle of red curry paste that I had in my fridge was pretty old - I ended up using all of it, and it still wasn't spicy enough - you can see the heavy dose of sriracha I added to pump it up. I think if you're using a fresher jar of curry, it'll be deliciously spicy.


1/3 block of tempeh
2 oz onion
1 red pepper
1/2 eggplant
3 oz cooked rice
1/2 c coconut milk (up to a half can)
Red curry paste to taste (2 t to start)
cilantro to garnish


Fry the tempeh and onions and add the red peppers, stir for just a few seconds, then add the eggplant and coconut milk. If you are using pre-cooked rice (as I did - I cooked extra rice earlier in the week knowing I'd need it for this and one other recipe) then add it towards the end, and a bit of water so that the rice rehydrates and reaches a suitable temperature with the coconut curry sauce. If you're making rice for this dish specifically, spoon the sauce and vegetables over it.
Delicious.

Pad See Ew

I overcooked the rice noodles. There are a couple of brands of noodles and they all need to be treated differently and I hadn't used these in awhile. So, read the instructions on your rice noodles! And follow them! Well... kind of follow them. When stir-frying noodles, you want to make sure that they've still got bite to them when you throw them in your stir-fry, otherwise they turn into a soggy mess and break apart. If they're perfect, they'll cook the sauce in perfectly and maybe even get brown on the outsides. My favorite noodles are the fresh wide noodles you can find in Asian markets, I just don't go to the Asian market often enough, and have settled for the dried Pad Thai noodles they sell at my local co-op.

I made this for 2. I made it exactly how I make Drunkard's Noodles, only no tomatoes, and I threw in rice vinegar to taste instead. I used red onion, red pepper, one cherry bomb pepper, and frozen broccoli.

Thai Carrot Soup

Most carrot soups are pureed - including the recipe for this one - but I don't like pureed soups so much. My nephew love coconut and peanut butter so he should like it, but probably would rather just eat his carrots separate from his coconut cream separate from his peanut butter. I intentionally undercooked it, so the carrots would have more bite, but I think I should've left it for another couple minutes. It is pretty rich, I could've reduced either the amount of coconut milk or peanut butter and it would've been just fine. Or, leave out the peanut butter and instead garnish with peanuts. I like that it doesn't remind me of my favorite peanut soup - it is something different.

2 t coconut oil
1.5 oz chopped onion
4 oz frozen shredded carrots
1/2 c water
1/2 c coconut milk
1 T peanut butter
Sriracha to taste
salt to taste

heat the onion in the oil, add the carrots and cook until defrosted, pour in the water and milk, bring to a boil, reduce and simmer for a few minutes until carrots are a little done, add peanut butter, and sriracha to taste.

Yellow Broth

The main ingredient is steel cut oats. I love steel cut oats. Apparently it is a traditional Irish soup. It was actually more yellow than I thought it would be. I'm still torn on whether I even liked this? Or, if I would make it again? And if I do, what will I do differently? But I ate it. Quickly. And enjoyed it thoroughly. It is thicker than most soups I make because of the oatmeal. I put in too much salt, but that might've made it even more delicious.

2 t butter
2 oz each - onion, celery, carrots
2 t flour
1 c water + veg broth powder to make veg broth (I used too much)
1 T steel cut oats
1/2 c spinach, chopped.

Heath the vegetables (except spinach) in butter until soft, add flour, cook for a minute, add broth and oats, bring to boil then lower heat and cook on low for about 15 or 20 minutes, add spinach and cook until spinach is desired texture.

Blueberry Pie

I mentioned I made a blueberry pie, so thought I'd share a picture. I don't really use a recipe for fruit pies, just guidelines. Blueberries need lemon or they just taste too bland - it is just sweetness, they don't have their own tartness (like cherries - cherries are my favorite, I don't add anything.)

Always my pie crust recipe:
1 3/4 c flour
1 t salt
1/2 c olive oil
3 T ice water

What actually went into my Blueberry Pie Filling:
Enough blueberries to fit into the pie crust (I had too many, as you can see it in the finished photo of pie - it ran all over! But I went for it, no regrets.)
1 lemon, juice and zest
Maple Syrup or Honey to taste (I literally just squeezed sweetener in, stirred, and thought it was probably OK, but then worried about it so made a caramel sauce.)
Sprinkle in some tapioca (my go-to pie thickener)

I like tapioca as a thickener, but I'm out now, so I'll probably use arrowroot until I run out of that.

Fig Jam

Making sweet things to put on toast without refined sugar:
Figs, dates, and lemon. My second batch had a slightly higher date-to-fig ratio, but I love the crunchy fig seeds, so I prefer this one:

4 oz dates
8 oz figs
2 T lemon juice
1/2 t lemon zest
1 c water

Boil figs for 10 minutes, replace figs in water with dates and let them soak for ten minutes, blend everything together with an immersion blender.
Alternatively, just slow cook into jam.
Jar and process in pressure cooker canning cycle for 10 minutes, check to make sure they sealed.
I made a quadruple batch and will have fig jam forever.

Apple butter

I have been making more bread which means I've been eating more jam. I don't like store-bought jam because it just tastes like sugar to me. (No sense of smell = smaller nuance of flavor = anything with a lot of sugar just tastes like a lot of sugar.) Even the kinds with less sugar still taste like dessert. I don't like my jam to taste like dessert. Maybe I'm in the minority. Anyway, this was Experiment One of the No Added Sugar Homemade Fruit Spread Experiment - the next one is going to be Fig-Date-Citrus.

1.5 lb apples

2 T water

dry ginger (1/2 t?)

fresh ginger (1/2 inch?)

cinnamon (1 t?)

cloves (1/2 t?)

(Makes about a cup)

Core the apples - I also peeled them because A) I haven't stolen my mother's food mill yet and B) these apples are from the farm and had been in my fridge forever, and looked very sad until I took off the peelings.

Slow cook overnight. My electric pressure cooker is my slow cooker, so I slow cooked overnight for about 6 hours with the steam vent open.

In the morning, use your hand blender to make applesauce. Remove cover from slow cooker, but leave cooker on, stirring occasionally, until the apple sauce is reduced to something you can spread on toast.

Spread it on toast..... I was going to take a picture but I ate it too fast.

Curried Potato Salad w/ spinach and peanuts

I love potato salad so much that I'll try any recipe just so I get to eat more potato salad. This one wasn't bad, it was spicy, I still would've rather just had my regular old potato salad. I threw in a ton of spinach.

Dressing:
1 t oriental mustard
1/2 t hot curry powder
1 T rice vinegar
2 T olive oil
1 T soy sauce

Salad:
1/4 c chopped parsley
6 oz boiled potatoes
2 oz chopped onion
1 oz roasted peanuts
3 cups baby spinach

The secret is to drain the potatoes and immediately throw them in the dressing - hot, freshly cooked potatoes soak up liquid like a sponge.
I added the spinach when I was ready to eat (after the potatoes had cooled.)

Week 2 Menu and Shopping List

Shopping List:
Large box cookable salad greens*
Parsley
1 small box of cherry tomatoes
2 cucumbers
1 carrot
4 oz mushrooms
Lemon
cheese for sandwiches
millet

* I like the baby kale/spinach/baby chard mix because if I do have excess I can cook them up, rather than other mixes of greens, like the spring mix, that contains varieties of salad greens I don't think I'd enjoy cooked.

The list is pretty short because I've got a very well-stocked kitchen. Here is what is on the list for the week:

Time-consuming dinner:
Savoury Nut Pudding
Quick lunches:
Grilled Cheese & Tomato Soup
Curried Potato and Peanut Salad
Quick Dinners:
Millet chili
Nut Rissoles with Tomato Sauce
Bread Dumplings with Broccoli
Millet-Cashew Patties with Tomato Sauce
Pasta e Fagioli

Nut Celery Timbale

This was delicious. It was shockingly sweet, and I never did figure out why. The celery in stew form was perfect - it is the perfect stew vegetable - it has a nice bite, with great chewiness, while also being soft. This was the recipe I kept ignoring last week when I looked at my options. I was looking for something tastier. But this might've been the tastiest thing.

The recipe is originally titled "Celery and Cashew Timbale' but the recipe basically directs you to make a stew and serve with boiled or roast potatoes. So, learning from previous after-the-fact-googlings, I googled 'timbale' and was presented with delightful images, and a definition that indicates this stew should be in a pastry, or in a mold. So I made the stew, mashed some potatoes, and molded it in my small pie tin.

I was sure it was going to fail - the potatoes wouldn't contain the stew, or the plastic wrap would stick, or the stew would go way over the edges of the potatoes - which is why I started taking so many pictures, to show the possibility if not the result. But it turned out beautifully! Next time I'll put some horseradish in the potatoes (the bite would've been great with the sweetness of the stew.)

Also, a Timbale is a perfect single serving meal - making an individual mold for more than one person would be way too time consuming and annoying, but just for me, it was delightful.


Stew:
1 T butter
2 oz onion
4 sticks celery
1 bay leaf
1 oz walnuts
1 oz cashews
1 T flour
1 T tomato paste
1/4 lemon - juice and zest
Soy sauce and water as needed.

Heat the onion and celery in the butter, keep cooking, maybe add a bit of water if you need, until the celery is soft but not goop. Grind the nuts in a food processor, then add them with the flour, lemon zest, and tomato paste, and then slowly add water while stirring to create a thick stew. As you go taste seasoning and use soy sauce as you desire. Turn off the heat and stir in the lemon juice.

Mashed Potatoes:
6 oz boiled potatoes
1 T butter
salt and pepper
(next time add horseradish)
parsley

To assemble - mash your potatoes to your desired taste, line a small pie tin with plastic wrap and sprinkle with black pepper, mold the potatoes around to make a crust, throw the stew in the middle, invert, carefully remove plastic wrap, sprinkle with more parsley and dot with more butter.

Making a mashed potato crust

I was sure it would all fall apart.

Artichoke Paella

I burnt so many almonds today. But when I had them toasted perfectly, they were the best garnish. I don't like nuts as much as the rest of my family, but today i really appreciated them.

Everything I have posted so far has been incredibly bland, so I was excited about using saffron today. I didn't realize just how old my saffron really is. But now I get new saffron!

As I was eating it I googled Paella and figured how (without the fancy equipment) I should really make it - which is reflected in the recipe, because I will definitely make this again.

½ c brown rice

1 T olive oil

3 oz onion

1 clove garlic

½ can artichoke hearts

⅔ c water

Salt and pepper

Saffron (a pinch)

Rosemary (a twig to take out later)

Paprika (a sprinkle)

Cayenne (two sprinkles)

Big squeeze of lemon juice

4 black olives, sliced

In the morning, pour boiling water over the rice, cover, and let sit until naturally cools. Drain and set aside.

Heat oil, cook onion and garlic, then add artichoke hearts, water, salt, and spices. Bring to a boil and add rice, stir a minute, then lower the heat and cook until rice is tender - about 15-20 minutes.

In the meantime slice the almonds and toast them in the oven. Do not burn them.

When rice is tender, stir in lemon juice, top with olives and almonds.

Artichoke bean gratin

 

So whereas on Thursday I made a casserole ingredient, on Friday I made a casserole. I mean, I'm pretty sure "gratin" is french for "hot dish".

There is not broccoli in the picture, but I ate a lot of steamed broccoli with it, because it was just too rich without more vegetables. It was less like spinach-artichoke dip than I thought it would be. Would I make it again? I'm really not sure. It isn't really my style.

1/2 oz cheddar

1/2 oz feta

1 T butter

2 oz mushrooms

½ can artichoke hearts

1 T flour

⅔ c milk

½ cup white beans

1 oz breadcrumbs mixed with a little bit of butter

steamed broccoli

Cook the butter over medium-low with the mushrooms until they let start to let out juice, then add the artichokes and cook a bit longer, until both are soft and the mushrooms are fully cooked. Stir in the flour until everything is a evenly covered, then stir in milk a little bit at a time while stirring constantly. It should start and stay thick. When all the milk is incorporated and thickened, melt cheese in, continuing to stir.. Add beans. Transfer to shallow baking dish, cover with breadcrumbs, and bake at 350 for 15 minutes. While it’s baking, steam some frozen broccoli, unless you haven't eaten all day and are starving, in which case eat it with toast.

Tofu salad sandwiches (with tabbouleh)

I'm pretty sure Grandma Sylvia always had a jar of Tabbouleh in the fridge. I think she called it bulgur salad, and I'm curious as to where the recipe came from. I made the pictured bulgur salad on Thursday, but that's not what I'm writing about today.

Tofu Salad - my Friday lunch.

The original recipe was flawed for three reasons - First, it was a vegan replica of a non-vegan food. Second, the thing it was trying to replace was tuna salad. Tuna. Ew. I've disliked tuna salad for... I don't know, my whole life? And the third and last reason the recipe was flawed is that it followed the cream of celery weirdness I made yesterday. I didn't want to try something I was quite sure wouldn't work, just to be proven right. I wanted a delicious lunch.

So I made one.

Sometimes, at picnics, I make myself a lame cheese and mustard sandwich on bread just so it doesn't appear as if I'm just eating potato salad. But I'm mostly eating potato salad.

I made the tofu salad very similarly to how I make potato salad, except I was weary of using balsamic, so I replaced it with rice vinegar. 

Potato salad on a sandwich would be terrible, and this was amazing!

A word on frozen tofu - basically, after thawing, the non-liquid part of tofu is more solid, and you can squeeze the water out like a sponge, and then use it to absorb whatever moisture is anywhere near it. It has a very different (and much more appealing) texture than fresh raw tofu or silken tofu. If I'm cooking tofu in cubes, I prefer raw fresh extra firm tofu, if I'm blending tofu into something I'm baking tofu works better. But eating uncooked tofu, I'm going to say I think frozen is the appealing.

Ingredients:

3-4 oz frozen tofu

1 stick celery

1 green onion

2 olives

1/2 a baby pickle (because I ate the other half while chopping)

1 t Grey Poupon

2 t rice vinegar

4 t olive oil

bread

Pour boiling water over the tofu and set aside.

Chop onion, celery, olives, and pickles.

Whisk vinegar, mustard and olive oil in a soup bowl.

Drain tofu, squeeze out extra moisture, and crumble into bowl with dressing.

Stir in vegetables.

Top on toasted bread spread with more mustard.

Creamy Celery Soup

On its face, this vegan recipe for cream of celery soup presented a lot of questions - Is cream of celery soup, in addition to being a casserole ingredient, also soup? Why would a vegan attempt to make cream of anything? Will this have enough flavor to count as food? Is 3 stalks of celery enough vegetables to even call this a meal? 

I was so curious I made the recipe, as it was written, with only one change - using dairy milk rather than soy milk. The three reasons, in order of importance, that I proceeded (despite being very suspicious) were:

1) I was so damned curious

2) I love the idea of making one serving of soup at a time, and wanted to practice it

3) I had milk in the fridge, which never happens, and I needed to get rid of

It doesn't look good, does it? Even after I found some parsley to throw on it. I had a couple of bites and reflected that it resembled a sauce that might be good over vegetables. And then I started thinking about how much better it would be if there was something crunchy on top. And then I realized that I was constructing a casserole - not because I pigeonholed it! - but because that is where it belongs. 

Like that painting in my apartment in Chicago that brought the entire room together. The painting was a bit awkward on its own, but with the pillow/drapes/furniture combination, that painting was completely necessary!

The experience also made me realize that I love soup, and I aspire to make more soup, one bowl at a time. But no more creamy, dairy-based soups. At least until the next sweet corn crop comes in.

Creamy Celery Soup:

2 t butter

3 stalks celery

2 green onions

2 T water

1 T flour

2/3 c milk

Melt butter. Chop vegetables and add to pan, stir around until you're scared they will burn, then add water, cover, put on low, and cook until the celery is pretty soft - about ten minutes. Stir in the flour, and then very, very slowly and gradually while stirring the entire time, pour in the milk, simmer for a minute to cook out the flour and thicken.

Peanut Noodles with Tofu

2-3 oz rice noodles

1 cup frozen broccoli

2 green onions

3 oz tofu

2 t olive oil

1 T peanut butter

2 t soy sauce

1 t Sriracha

1 T salted peanuts

Boil water, when it is boiling drop in noodles, cover, and turn off the heat. After 5-8 minutes check on them, and add the frozen broccoli and re-cover, let sit until needed.

Chop the green onions, keeping white sections (for cooking) from green sections (for garnish.) Cube the tofu. heat the oil and cook the tofu, when it starts to brown add onions. Mix the peanut butter, soy sauce and Sriracha. Turn off the heat when the onion is done and add the sauce. Drain (and rinse!!) the rice noodles and broccoli, and add them with the sauce to the saucepan to mix everything.

Garnish with peanuts and green onions.

Week One Grocery List and Menu

I'm getting a late start to this week... I thought I'd be starting Sunday, and I'm not sure when I'll get through the menus.
My impression of this week of menus:
They are missing vegetables, and about half of them seem to be lighter rather than filling meals. Also I'm not really looking forward to celery soup, but I want to give it a fair shake. 

I'm going to try and write a conclusion at the end of the week that has a more complete list (just like how I have recipes now, but I'm going to cook and tweak them before I share them)  but here is what I actually bought at the grocery store, and the menu I plan on making with it:

MENU:
Tofu Roast
Creamy Celery Soup
Tofu Salad Sandwich
Peanut Noodles with Tofu
Artichoke Mushroom and Bean Gratin
Artichoke Paella
Celery Cashew Stew
Yogurty Mushrooms and Beans on Bulgur

Grocery List:
- Spring Onions
- 3 oz mushrooms
- small box of spinach
- Tofu
- 2 T Cashews
- Olives
- can of artichoke hearts

One bowl at a time explanation, + Mushroom Storganoff

After two years without posting anything, I meant for this to be my coming-back post, but seem to have forgotten to post it. Better late than never...

I decided to re-open an old cookbook I bought for my sister (then stole from her) called 'The Single Vegan'. I love the insinuation.

The book gives you a weekly shopping list, and a menu of six dinners and 2 weekend lunches. Each of the 8 recipes is for one single serving of food, mostly from scratch, mostly coming together in less than 20 minutes. To someone like me, who enjoys cooking every night, wants something different at every meal, and likes doing math, the principle is perfect.

I love the variety, that there's no waste, and to be honest, I kind of love rewriting everything, although it can get tiresome - I'm constantly rewriting recipe. Scrapping whole pages and coming up with other things that use similar ingredients. Adjusting the shopping list before I go. Not being vegan. So I'm going to start publishing that work here so that I have a reference for later.

The first recipe to share is Mushroom Stroganoff:

3 oz spaghetti

1 T butter

1/2 T olive oil

2 oz onion

1 oz garlic

2-3 t Paprika

4 oz mushrooms

1 T flour

1/2 c water (to start, probably needs more)

½ c whole milk plain greek yogurt

1/2 t Worcestershire sauce

1/4 c parsley

Soy sauce / salt too taste

Cook drain and rinse pasta. You can reserve the pasta water to use when you make the sauce.

Melt butter with oil, cook onion and garlic until soft, add mushrooms and cook for a few minutes until they release juices and start to cook down. Turn up the heat a bit, stir in flour and cook for a minute, and then add a little bit of water at a time while stirring it in until it is the consistency you want for your pasta sauce - not too thick or thin for your liking. Stir in your yogurt and Worcestershire, season with salt or soy sauce and stir in half the parsley. Add the drained pasta to your pan and incorporate, then throw on a plate and sprinkle with remaining parsley.

Thoughts on future versions: Maybe add some actual vegetables - frozen broccoli would've been delicious. Parmesan wouldn't kill you.