Vegamofo: Inspiration from all over

 

Let's just take a moment to give it up for all the amazing stuff going on across the internet right now for mofo. I know I've been starring things left-right-and-centre. Most of which I will likely only get around to after mofo is over, but I love reading about what everyone else is doing.

I love seeing everyone's unique and inspiring creations for mofo and perhaps even more-so, I love seeing everyone's ordinary food lives. The tried and true stuff people are making each and every day. New ideas are lovlie and inspiring, but something just draws my attention to the everyday moments in other people's kitchen. It's like being part of someone's family. Food is just so important, even when it's not important, you know?

So speaking about ordinary food and voyeuristic-food thrills, after lurking mofo-feeds for a few hours, I made some dinner and roasted squash I bought for risotto last week. I still had some beans leftover and an open tab to a sweet bean side dish so that got thrown in there too.

One of the things I made was a Mexican-themed rice inspired by this post on Run Crissie Run about tacos (MMM tacos). Crissie whipped up some tasty tacos and easy Mexican rice in her rice cooker. Now readers, here's the thing... rice and I have a mixed relationship. I have a rice cooker, I've tried the stove top, but rice is one of those things that never goes quite my way. Or leaves me uninspired.


To the point that I've stocked up on boxed rice/grain mixes and pilaf kits, because to make tasty rice was something I never got quite right. So I decided to take the rice recipe mentioned above and jump with it.

Mexican-Themed Rice Pilaf

• 1 cup brown rice (I rinsed it, because the internet told me to)
• 2 cups water (tap)
• 1 tbs olive oil
• 1/4 can of chopped tomatoes I had lurking in the fridge
• 2 cloves garlic minced
• 1/2 onion diced
• equal parts (1tbs?) Cumin, Chilli Powder, Oregano
• A lot of Parika 2 tbs
• Small amount of red chili flakes 1tsp or more (I plan to serve this with hot sauce)

So I dumped all this into my rice cooker and let it do it's thing. Alternatively, use stove top directions for rice and saute the onion/garlic for a bit in the oil, then toast the rice/spices before adding the liquid.

A few other dishes made their mark on my pallet and just so happened to fit what I had laying around. Like the sweet bean side dish from Alien's Day Out  with the Halifax rain's howling outside and wind making things chilly. I grabbed the remaining cooked kidney beans, browned an onion and garlic in some oil before dumping in the beans, cooking liquid, extra water, 2 Tbs brown sugar, 1 Tbs braggs, 1 Tbs soy sauce, salt pepper and a hint of cumin to tie into the rice.

I also tossed two sweet potatoes (on sale for 0.99$!) into a pot to boil, when they were almost done I tossed them in oil then into the oven with the squash. Ate them with Earth Balance, side beans and mexican rice. I debated whipping up tortillas to roll em up together with salsa and hot sauce.

Veganmofo: Cheddar Onion Biscuits:Cooking from the Mofo Feed

During one of my feverous Mofo Reader comment-a-thons I came across Mo's post on Best Thing You Never Ate where she posted these amazing biscuits!

So simple and flavourful, they come together quickly. I wasn't making gravy but I wanted a flavourful biscuit for breakfasts and to round out my lunches. Plus Diaya's been on sale here recently so I have a stock pile and Green onions were 99cents!

I followed Mo's Recipe with the following changes:

• I subbed Earth Balance Margerine for Shortening (because I oddly had none left)
• And I subbed 1 cup of WW Flour for the white and used WW to roll out the dough.
• Used a sili-pad to bake them on, so I didn't bother with the greasing
• I did a soy milk brush glaze on the second batch to go into the oven as well as played with some shapes.

The almond milk didn't seem to curdle as much as I expected, but I added it anyway. I also seem to have lost my Pastry Cutter, so I used my Mezzaluna and some butter knives/forks. It worked out OK, not supper pebbly but manageable.

I used a mason jar to cut my biscuits and played with the remaining dough to make tiny hand pies and some braids to see how they'd bake up!

The first batch cut with mason jars and rolled maybe 1 inch thick? Were in for 25 minutes before I checked on them.They didn't brown a whole lot on the top, but the were pretty firm. The second free-formed batch where much bigger and I think that helped them to get a flakier texture.

Sorry about the bad lighting. But there had to be a fresh outta the oven shot.

It turns out the smaller, denser biscuits that were rolled pretty thin because extra fluffy when microwaved the next day. All and all these are super flavourful and pretty damn tasty biscuits to stuff your face with!

I used a silipat  to bake mine, 

VeganMofo V: Recycling your leftovers take 2

 

So the other day I posted about the whole recycling your leftovers, as brought forward by one of my most loved zines The Cheap Vegan ( a sadly out of print zine.

 Issue 14 seems to be on etsy tho!

Where in the last post I turned some smashed beans and other leftovers into a rice bowl/burrito filling.

 

Now that leftover burrito filling becomes soup/gumbo! With the aid of some additional red onion, turnip, canned tomatoes, chili powder, cumin, another spoon full of kidney beans from the batch I made last week, and fresh garlic to pump up the garlic taste.

Start with chopping your new fresh onions and garlic. You want the onion to cook for a bit in some oil with salt/pepper before adding your garlic. While those cook, peel and chop your selection of turnip (or other fridge veggies). Once the onions are getting good, saute the turnip pieces to brown then toss in your spoon full of beans and some tomato liquid. Add seasonings. You want the flavours to blend a bit before you dump the whole can in, but we do want lots of liquid to help boil the turnip so they become nice and soft.

Once you have a nice soupy base thanks to the tomatoes mix in your bowl/leftover burrito filling (if you'd made it all into burritos then slice the tortilla into strips and save it to bake/top your soup bowls with). Now, if your burrito mix had diaya like mine did you'll want to stir the crap out of it as it cooks. The mixture wants to stick to itself but we want it to break apart into soup and get everything all mixed together. So keep string it occasionally and make sure nothing is burning at the bottom. I brought it to a boil and covered for 10 minutes before taking the cover off and simmering until the turnip were finished. Add additional seasons if it doesn't taste the way you want.

I like mine chunky, but smaller piece would cook faster

And voila! So now we have 3 different ways to eat the same thing. Alternatively, if you hadn't mixed your smashed beans with stuff on the first leftover day you could find a few dozen things to do with them. But this worked out well enough.

 

VeganMofo: Cheap Eats, Recycle your leftovers!

Making a large batch of foods definitely saves you on two major resources time and power. But sometimes eating the same thing for weeks (especially if you live alone, and you wind up with even more meals/portions) makes your stomach turn, or heck you get bored with whatever it was.

This is where leftover recycling comes in, a concept I first hear about from the amazing Cheap Vegan Guru Stephanie (author of the Cheap Vegan series of Zines).

 

Leftover recycling allows you to enjoy one meal for a variety of days in different ways and helps strench out your food and time budgets. 

This meal was a combo of leftovers from earlier in the week. I had made the AFR Not-refried beans earlier in the week, some leftover kidney beans from when I cooked up a lbs of them to make the beans + in sauce, plus some chick-in brown rice (brown rice cooked in vegan chick-n stock from bulk barn), steamed carrots from a meal I cooked for the boy and I and the crumbs of Kale chips.

The beans were used with chips originally, rice was a side for some meal same with carrots. So tonight's meal was essentially a bowl. Rice topped with the re-fried bean, kidney beans in sauce, kale chips, steamed carrots topped with some cock-sauce, salsa and Daiya.

 The result was a nice creamy dish that doesn't photograph well but tastes great. Alternatively, it would also be great in a wrap as a burrito. MMM burritos.

So there it is, recycling your leftovers one simple way. Stay tuned for more examples, because this made more than I could eat!

VeganMofo V: Bachelorette Meals Part 1

Sometimes after a long day at work/school/volunteering and you kinda just need to put something in your face before you take the dog out and go to bed. The PPK has been a little obsessed with these terrible, lack-luster or otherwise poor meal offerings that us single folk like to chow down on. I'm a little bit obsessed too.

Bachelorette Meals might not be the mightiest of offerings but they have served me well enough through years of university. They certainly haven't killed me yet. And since this The Unhealthy Vegan Blog I figure the pseudo meals deserve some lime light. In all their single-hood-glory, I bring you yet another series of lameness:

Vegan Eats for Sad-n-Single Folks: Bachelorette Meals 
(there is a tongue and cheek thing happening here, in case that didn't come through).

These sad offerings of non-meals consumed by the lonely over the sink in their single bedroom apartments sometimes in the wee-hours of the morning.

Many are limited to grains with seasoning, spoonfuls of spreads, crackers for the adventurous. Just clicking through the thread, almost makes me want to cook/eat my way through it.

So now, I'll show case a few examples from over the many years of single-dom through which I've survived.

Fried Tofu

A single persons best friend. Fried foods offer the warm comfort that others may gain through companionship, it's fat content and protein-y goodness makes this humble offering an speedy way to a sustained stomach so you can get back to watching The Early Edition on Netflix.

Bonus points here for this is pre-fried packaged tofu puffs from the Asian discount store. So I just opened the pack and poured some sauce into the dipping bowls. But I used fancy dipping bowls and lacquered chopsticks, LIKE A LADY.

Burritos
Frozen morsels of salvation. Even making them yourself can count as bachelorette chow (what you opened some can beans and put it on some bread, face it you are one of us). Although the below pictured is actually a wicked-fancy-stuffed-to-the-max-morsel from a local take out place, it's take-out so the cooking effort was dialing the phone.

ok, sorry not the most photogenic of foods.

And unlike 98% of Bachelorette-Chow Burritos may actually offer more than one food group/nutrient requirement. So really, these are the all-stars of single-person-foods, there is avocado and lettuce in there. FRESH VEGGIES (sometimes frozen veggies, but at least they are green).

Bachelorette-Smash
Perhaps the closest thing to true bachelorette-chow, The Smash features a selection of available edibles a-top a baked potato. Most often a can of drained chickpeas, fake-bacon-bits, and seasoning. Earth balance if one is feeling refined.

Bonus points for microwaved potatoes that are then pressed with a fork in your bowl and seasoned with spice mix.

Boxed-Mac
Although the vegan version is arguably not of the same neon-orange calibre, it is still packaged and easy. So I figured it deserved a brief mention.

I will conclude this post for now on the ultimate bachelorette meal the one that inspires pity form your friends and family. Assending to new culinary lows in bad habits and despair, may I present:


The Vegan-Ice-Cream Diner
It can be observed in two distinct levels of culinary thought and levels of desolation, the classier approach is the dinner sunday which offers the comforting embrace of sugar.

Not only does this distinguished school of thought offer the user the self-esteem-boost which comes from eating out of an actually dish but it's liberal thoughts on flavour mingling and add-ins provides an assortment of sugar sources.

This is for the classy-folks among us

 The second school, is reserved for the more accustomed solo-travellers. Those who have been segregated from humanity long enough to shed even the most basic of social customs. This level of desperation and loneliness should not be rushed, it can only be undertaken after sufficient solitude. Always alone, often unspoken, this is the meal eaten with a shield of humility. The meal we hide from our cats/dogs, because you don't want anyone watching you eat this.

It's clean-up is a breeze and it's social stigma is long lasting. Ice-cream from the carton. Bonus points for both eating the whole thing at once and for the sad-affair of returning the half eaten carton to the fridge to eat for dinner the next day.

Happy Mofo Folks!

Veganmofo: Selection of Quick meal tips: Frozen Burgers

Being a student sometimes bringing cooking to a back burner, I won't get into a post about the various levels of terrible junk I consume in the guise of 'diner' most evenings (maybe another post). But I found a selection of easy, under 30 minutes to whip up meals which I've enjoyed over the past few weeks.

The key to quick and easy meals is timing, multitasking and sometimes convenience food. Ok, so you going to grab that frost bitten veggie burger and pull a sesame seed bun out of the freezer, again. No big deal, take a few extra steps and it can really make the difference.

Tips for burgers from the freezer:

• Marinade or sauce it. Glaze your frozen patty in a thick, maybe sweet BBQ sauce, or Plum Sauce. Raid your condiment shelf for inspiration.
• Take the time to pre-heat the cast iron or use a grill. Sure, it's a frozen burger but it'll taste better grilled or seared properly.
• Toppings. Avoid the urge to squirt ketchup and call it a day. Mix it up with salsa, veggies, fruit (grilled pineapple!), chutney or some fancier pickles/sauces from the local market. Even adding lettuces/tomato gives you something fresh and a nice contrast to the chewy burger texture.
• Onions/Mushrooms. They fry up in minutes and can take the bruger experience to the next level.
• TOAST YOUR BUNS. If you spend time on nothing else, crisp the inside of that bun.

The little Darling featured  below may appear simple with its no-name ketchup and mustard, but the secret lies in that big meaty chunk of purple heaven. A wide slice of onion, which I baked in the oven (directly on the rack) and then broiled just before the burger finished. Amazing.

Happy Mofo'ing!

Veganmofo: Food related songs on the internet

Veganism tweeted this an hour ago, and I'm perhaps a bit in love with it despite it's corny-tune.