German Apple Cake

This is the most beautiful creation I've made to date. The recipe is from The Joy of Vegan Baking and baking this cake certainly was a joy. The cake layer is very thin so the apples are really featured (I used Golden Delicious.) It's a surprisingly easy cake to make. Because the cake batter is so thick, the apples can easily be layered atop, a process I found quite fun. And even the non-vegans loved this dessert. I will definitely be making this cake again.

Creamy Avocado Potato Salad

I made this dish to bring to a day-after-the-4th barbecue. (I also brought along some more hot sauce glazed tempeh, but just for me rather than to share since everyone else was going to be having meat.) This recipe is from Isa Chandra Moskowitz's newest book: Vegan Brunch. It's great to have an alternative to the typical mayo-saturated potato salad. The creaminess here comes from avocado instead, which gives it a gorgeous green hue.

I'm really excited to try out more recipes from this book. Breakfast can seem pretty vegan-unfriendly at times but this book proves otherwise.

Fourth of July Feast!

I went home to NJ last weekend and we ended up having a 4th feast although we hadn't originally planned on it. Here are the components of a very good meal:

-Hot Sauce Glazed Tempeh: Another great tempeh dish coming from Veganomicon. While the rest of my family had burgers and hot dogs, I marinated some tempeh and panfried it up. It got slightly crispy and had some bite from the hot sauce. It was perfect for the barbecue mood.

-Grilled zucchini and squashed: This side was made by my mom. I actually have never cooked on a grill. It's so simple yet so tasty with a little bit of herbed olive oil brushed on prior to grilling.

-Baked "fries," two ways: Crispy delicious fries can be created by baking! One need not ruin potatoes in a deep fryer. We made these by slicing thin potato wedges and tossing them in some olive oil in a large bowl. Some were then covered with a Cajun seasoning (pictured) and others with Herbes de Provence. They are then placed on baking sheets and put in the oven or about an hour.

Stuffed Pepper

One small pepper can hold it all: grains, protein, veggies. More specifically, the stuffing includes Israeli couscous, lentils, tomato, and shiitake mushrooms. It was a very yummy combination. The recipe comes from Vegan Cooking for One, and is one of the slightly complicated Sunday dinner recipes. There are several different steps including cooking the lentils and couscous, softening the pepper in some hot water, and cooking the veggie mixture and seasoning it, before everything can actually be assembled and baked. I think next time I'd add more veggies and less couscous/lentils so those flavors come through a little more.

Pumpkin Pancake Disaster

I'm sure this recipe from The Joy of Vegan Baking is typically great, but it didn't turn out so great with the pan I was using. This pan doesn't have a non-stick coating. Typically I can deal with it and only have small issues with tofu or garlic sticking to it but can save the dish. These pancakes, however, ended up unsalvageable. The pan grabbed hold of the batter and would not let go. The result was globs of half-cooked pancakes and was a mess. I got one to look okay, albeit a bit burnt since I had trouble getting it to let go of the pan, so I placed it on top of the pile of disaster to try to make things look a bit better.

Spaghetti and Beanballs

This is one of my favorite dishes ever. So so tasty. Make it!

Another recipe from Veganomicon. The thing that makes this dish so good is that the beanballs don't try to be meatball replacements. Rather, they show off what they are: legumes. I feel like this is how vegan food should be: honest, not imitation.

The beanballs are fun to make. I baked them though there are also directions for panfrying. I also made the recipe for marinara sauce rather than using sauce from a jar. Marinara sauce is extremely easy to make and I will never use sauce from a jar again. Premade sauce has a strange flavor to it because of preservatives. But this sauce was so fresh and light. I only wish I had made more than I did to better cover all the spaghetti!

Smoky Grilled Tempeh and Collard Greens

These recipes come from Veganomicon. I was originally just going to make the tempeh but the intro to the recipe suggested making collard greens using the leftover marinade so I decided to give it a try. (I had never had collard greens and learned from this meal that I'm not a huge fan.)

The marinade for the tempeh is made using liquid smoke. I didn't know such a product existed but it's wonderful. And it seems to be available in just about every grocery store, including the ones around here which can sometimes be limited. The recipe recommends grilling but I panfried the tempeh triangles and thought it was great. I think next time I'd use kale or spinach, my preferred dark leafy greens, as a side.

Warning: marinating takes an hour, so this is not a good dish to make for those pressed for time or who are extremely impatient.

Sugar Cookies

Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of these since I had made them as a surprise. Still, they were delicious and deserve a post.

I wanted to bake something a little fancy for an anniversary gift so I attempted a more involved cookie than the typical chocolate chip. The recipe for the cookies along with the royal icing I used to hold bright red sprinkles both came from The Joy of Vegan Baking.

I didn't realize how much work sugar cookies can be, especially with such little counter space. Mix the dough by hand since I have no electric mixer here, let the dough cool in the fridge, roll it out, cut out circles with the lid of a peanut butter jar since I had no cookies cutters, put the baking sheet in the fridge to cool the dough again so they don't expand too much in the oven, actually bake them, repeat the rolling out through baking again for tray 2, let cookies cool, mix icing, ice cookies, add sprinkles.....and done.

It was all worth it though. I thought the combination of the cookie and the icing was delicious.

All-veggies-left-in-the-fridge Pasta

I do my grocery shopping on Sundays so for dinner last night, I wanted to make sure I used up any veggies left over from the past week that could soon go bad. I had some leftover broccoli from last Sunday's stir-fry and some zucchini and red pepper I had planned on using for a recipe I didn't have the energy to make yesterday. I chopped up all of these and threw them in a large pan along with a can of chickpeas to sautee in a little bi of olive oil, garlic, herbs, salt, and pepper. I covered the pan to make sure everything cooked thoroughly while I boiled some rotini. Tossing the cooked rotini with a splash of olive oil and salt and pepper gave it a bit of flavor but the star of this dish was the veggies. As soon as the zucchini was cooked through, I served the veggies atop the pasta for a light, easy, and delicious dish.

Lentil Cauliflower Curry

Coming from Veganomicon, this delicious curry calls for red lentils, which I thought I had on my shelf but they turned out to be typical lentils. No problem there because curry dyes all ingredients a beautiful yellow tint; so red or brown, you can't really tell from looking at it.

This is a sweet curry rather than spicy. It's a very comforting and warm flavor. There is also parsnip in the dish along with the star ingredients, lentils and cauliflower. I've actually never had parsnip prior to this, or at least never realizes I was eating it had it been hidden in a dish. Because the spices are so overpowering, I couldn't really tell what parsnip tastes like. It certainly didn't stand out in this dish; but rather it offered a different texture for some variation.

Although curries take awhile to make, there isn't much active cooking time besides chopping during the prep stage. It's a very easy meal...if you ca be patient enough to wait!