Chinese Tofu Salad

This salad here is one of my favorites. Growing up my mom would make Chinese Chicken salad; this is similar, but even better--sorry mom! For the base we've just got some cut up Romaine lettuce, cucumber, and normally oranges but I didn't have any so this time I subbed golden raisins. For the tofu I just pressed it, then covered it in a mixture of flour, cornstarch, nutritional yeast, salt, and pepper. After dredging, I cooked it up until crispy--good stuff. I used the sesame dressing recipe from How it all Vegan and topped with additional sesame seeds, both black and white. Just writing this has made me want this again...

Marley's Hemp Granola

It's been a while since I've made some granola and I really wanted one with lots of big chunks (that's how I love it!). I normally use the recipe from How It All Vegan which has great flavor but never forms chunks. This time I tried a recipe from Vegan Fusion World Cuisine and subbed brown rice syrup for the maple syrup because I've heard that that helps make it stickier and forms more chunks (plus I'm still out of maple syrup). I also subbed canola oil for the safflower oil. But, yes, hello chunks!!


I had to break this up quite a bit and ate some of the burned pieces while doing so, yum. This was fairly simple to prepare and gave me another use for my hemp seeds (til now I'd only used them for Spicoli Burgers from Eat, Drink, and Be Vegan). This will be excellent with soy milk or yogurt and some fruit. I'm also drooling over the possibility of putting it on this banana soft serve from Choosing Raw (processed frozen bananas--the consistency of frozen yogurt!).

This is super sticky while it's cooking so I would recommend parchment paper or a Silpat while baking it up.

Cheezy Broccoli Baked Potatoes

When I don't really feel like cooking, but also don't want to go out this is a great option. Once the potatoes are almost done I just steam some broccoli and whip up some cheeze sauce, and we're good to go. This is also an incredibly satisfying and filling dinner. I use the cheeze sauce recipe from How it all Vegan because it's my favorite at the moment, it uses no butter and very little oil while having a great taste.

Spicy Tomato Chickpea Soup and Biscuits

This delightful, very filling, soup is from Vegan Yum Yum. It had a nice spicy, almost curry-like, flavor from the chickpeas and spices that were simmered and then blended together. It was perfect for this chilly, overcast day. Browning the chickpeas also imparted a nutty flavor that was very nice.


We also made some biscuits to go with the soup. These were a variation on the fancy biscuits from How it all Vegan; I left out the green onion and dill and used thyme, basil, and rosemary instead--turned out great.

Noon-Time Nachos

I decided to throw together some nachos for lunch today. I heated up some refried beans while I made a melty cheese sauce from How It All Vegan. I added some salsa to the sauce then topped the beans with it. On top of both of those is some cilantro and ample hot sauce. The chips were from Trader Joe's: hemp tortilla chips with black sesame seeds. I'd never had these before, but I'll be buying them again--they were the best store-bought tortilla chips I've ever had. I definitely recommend!

Tofu Benny

I just received Vegan Brunch from Amazon, as I was flipping through for the first time this recipe caught my eye, I showed it to my boyfriend and he demanded it for dinner that night. The tofu has a delicious marinade and all the flavors from everything come together so well. We devoured this quickly.

I didn't have all of the ingredients called for, like the two special salts (Black and Roasted) that Isa calls for in her recipe, but this still turned out great. I also ran out of white wine vinegar while making the marinade for the tofu. Since quite a bit was called for in the sauce I got a different sauce recipe from How It All Vegan. I added a little thyme to it though to give some more flavor.



I served this with a smoothie: 1 cup soymilk, frozen banana, 8 frozen strawberries, a couple of handfuls of spinach and about a 1/2 Tbsp of flax seeds blended to perfection. Yum! It was a very ugly brown color, so no photo (you can see part in the upper right corner of the second photo). I love putting greens into a fruit smoothie, it's so good for you and with all the sweetness from the fruit you don't even taste them.

Pizza

Last night I made a vegan version of my boyfriend's favorite pizza from one of our local pizza places, Engfer's (they have great vegan pizza here too). It's got sliced tomatoes, pepperoni, sausage, and pesto.

It took hours...I decided to make the dough from scratch using the dry container for my Vitamix. I then also made the sauce, the pesto, and the cheeze (all of which required either the blender or the food processor, so many dishes to clean). The pepperoni was Yves brand and the sausage was Tofurky Italian Sausage. I had made a pizza before with the Classic White Uncheese recipe from Vegan Vittles. That works really well (it doesn't melt per se, but it looks nice and has great flavor), it however takes hours to set, so I forwent that recipe this time and tried the Melty White Cheeze instead (from the same book; I picked up this book at a used book store for it's cheeze recipes and it has not disappointed). This cheeze was much runnier, so I just mixed it with the tomato sauce as I spread it on the dough. It tasted great, we just had to let it set about 10 minutes after it came out of the oven so it could firm up a bit before cutting into it. It had a great melty consistency while eating though. The pesto recipe is from How It All Vegan, I really like that it uses no oil. It has just a few tablespoons of pinenuts and miso for the consistency, it's really great. So many other pestos are just drowning in oil.

After about two hours of work in the kitchen, we were able to sit down to some yummy pizza. And it tasted that much better because it was made with love.