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!

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.

Tuscan White Beans with Sun-dried Tomatoes

This is such a hearty delicious dish. I decided to throw in some spaghetti but once I tried it, I realized that the vegetables are great enough to stand on their own. The recipe comes from The Vegan Table and the author says that this dish and variations of it can be found in restaurants in and around Florence. Now I don't remember seeing anything similar to this dish when I was in Tuscany last summer, but we didn't look at a lot of menus, I suppose.

Veggies not included in the title but also in the dish are zucchini and spinach. Sauteeing all the vegetables with some herbs in olive oil fills them with so much flavor. This recipe feels so summery, perfect for ushering in the new season and the not-so-welcome humid heat that comes with it.

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.