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.

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.

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!

Spicy Tempeh and Brocolli with Pasta

I'm fairly new to tempeh. I had never tried it until this past winter at Weird Fish in San Fransisco. I had not had it since but I've had a craving for it recently and looked for a good tempeh recipe. This recipe is from Veganomicon and is actually "Spicy Tempeh and Broccoli Rabe with Rotelle" but I'm more of a broccoli person. I'm not even sure if the groceries around here carry broccoli rabe anyway.

This dish is absolutely delicious. I made the full recipe so I could bring the leftovers for lunch the next day and I even had some leftover for dinner the next night. It was that good. The dish is a bit complicated to make and does take some time because there are three different parts of the cooking process: boiling the pasta, steaming the tempeh in a marinade of sorts and then stirfrying it, and also stirfrying the broccoli. The tempeh is so flavorful as a result of the marinade with the right amount of bite from red pepper flakes. I love tempeh because of its nuttiness. Tofu can be bland and its texture uninspiring but tempeh is just great.

Once the three components are cooked, all are tossed into a large bowl and mixed together. The spiral of the pasta catches crumbles of the tempeh. There is no real sauce for the dish. Rather, the tempeh and broccoli are strong enough to stand on their own and a bit of red wine vinegar and salt and pepper is sprinkled over the mixture. The lack of heavy sauce is refreshing and again, the tempeh is just so good. I will definitely be making this dish again.

Mac and Cheese!

Cooking has become a way for me to relax after coming home from my internship. I get really excited picking out recipes and making my shopping list on the weekend and I think about cooking while riding the trolley back to my apartment each evening. Today I was exhausted simply because it was a Monday and wanted comfort food. What better than mac and cheese.

I'm allergic to dairy and cheese used to beat me up terribly when I was a kid, but I still find myself craving mac and cheese quite often. I used to settle for the boxed Road's End Mac and Chreese but it never fully satisfied. Because I journeyed all the way to the nearest Whole Foods (an extra mile in wrathful shoes) last week due to Trader Joe's sucking lots, I now have a good sized bag of nutritional yeast flakes. This magical substance is a godsend for creating cheese-like perfection.

I cooked up some whole grain rotini and cauliflower and used the Cheezy Sauce recipe from Veganomicon. This sauce is super easy and quick to make. It came out much better than I expected and is fairly similar to cheese, at least as much as I can remember from 6ish years ago. The sauce is slightly tangy but is very rich and a good texture. Most impressive of all is that there is not one bit of faux-dairy in the sauce. No soymilk, no Earth Balance, nothing. Just some creative culinary chemistry.

I will definitely be returning to this recipe again.

Pineapple-Cashew-Quinoa Stir-Fry

This recipe comes from Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero in their lovely book Veganomicon. Isa is perhaps my favorite vegan cookbook author and I've collected as many of her books as I can. Veganomicon is a great book, though many of the recipes are a bit time consuming so they aren't meals that can be thrown together quickly. Still, it's a must on any vegan's bookshelf.

This stir-fry is so flavorful and delicious. The quinoa is a nice change from the typical noodles. I really can never say enough wonderful things about quinoa; it truly is a superfood. I omitted the scallions and chiles from the dish and instead added more peas and red peppers.

Quinoa can be bitter if you don't rinse it properly. Because I don't have a strainer in this kitchen, I placed the quinoa in a bowl, filled it with water, and sort of scrubbed the quinoa between my hands for a minute or so. I drained the water and repeated this process two more times. It worked just fine.