Veganmofo15: Lunch on the go! #19

For the ultra lazy vegan on the go: microwave burritos!

Behold the burrito!

These are a pretty simple standard in our house hold, where we make huge batches to freeze for fast and lazy meals.

The steps are pretty simple: Buy bulk tortillas when on sale, cook a large pot of rice and a large pot of refried beans and optional black beans/salasa.

Everyone has their own go to recipe, but I prefer to make lime scented rice, with refried pinto beans +jalapenos, Cooked cumin scented black beans and optional diaya or fire roasted tomatoes.

Once assemble you add a base of rice, re-fried bean and your toppings  then roll them up by the dozen. We then wrap ours in paper towel and freeze for up to six months (but really they never last this long). Although it seems sacrilegious, I don't usually put salsa in these and instead serve them with salsa on the side. I find this helps them keep longer in the freezer without getting weird. We do sometimes cook the beans with tomato/onion/salsa for flavor, but you want to avoid rolling them with anything too wet.

I actually found this rogue burrito in the bottom of our freeze from a batch made last year, which was still quite good. I ate it with some Salsa my roommate's parent's brought us from their supply (which is not spicy, so I added equal parts sriracha and tobasco). I prefer to serve them with hot sauce/salsa on the side or ontop after they are cooked.

Burritos really aren't a pretty food. Sorry.

My roommate Tory started this tradition, and honestly it is a pretty great way to keep everyone fed during the killer school months and other high stress times. She recommends nuking them burrito in its paper towel for 1-1.30min flip then repeat on the other side. I typically nuke them then bake them on high for a bit or pan fry to get them crispy on the outside.

Either way enjoy this filling, portable, and lazy vegan lunch. Happy Mofo!

Veganmofo: Favourite blog post oldie

Sometimes the simplest of posts are the best. There are so many brilliant vegan food blogs it almost seems like a cop-out to call on the ppk's blog. But heck, it's just so swell.

Obviously Isa has all kinds of amazing recipes, tempting photos and glorious colour close up shots of said food.

But one of the posts I love refering people to, especially students, is the big old pot of bean post!

So simple, but sometimes contextualizing a plan for say.. what do you really do with that giant pot of beans you just cooked? hits it home.

PPK Blog What to do with a big pot of beans.

Meal planning is something I'm a bit obsessed with and it makes a lot of sense yet somehow I never seem to be able to stick with even my looses planning attempts and these kind of voyeuristic posts really help me get a feel for planning.

Plus beans are the go-to food for cheap living, so there is a bonus

Black Beans:
Day 1 ? Black Bean Burgers
Day 2 ? Chili
Day 3 ? Sauteed with Greens
Day 4 ? Tamale Pie
Day 5 ? Black Bean and Quinoa Salad
Chickpeas
Day 1 ? Dill Hummus Sammiches
Day 2 ? Moroccan Chickpea Stew
Day 3 ? Falafel
Day 4 ? Chickpea Samosas
Day 5 ? Chickpea Hijiki Salad Sammiches
White Beans
Day 1 ? Pasta Fagioli
Day 2 ? White Bean Quinoa Croquettes
Day 3 ? Roasted Garlic and White Bean Soup
Day 4 ? White Bean and Tempeh Sausage Patties
Day 5 ? Vegetable Soup with White Beans

Chickpea Salad Variant with pickles!

Obvious these are just some guidelines but what are your favorite bean dishes? or beans even?

My Chickpea pot might look more like this

Day 1 Chickpea Cutlets
Day 2 Chana Masala (I use kittee's dal recipe or YRR)
Day 3  Chickpea Salad (which I though I'd blogged about before. Lazy style onion/celery/garlic/chickpea/vegan mayo +acid)
Day 4 Pot pie!
Day 5 Chickpea Noodle Soup Vcon
Day 6 Scrambled Chickpeas!

Day 7 Salad with chickpeas on top (because they are so good! Or Roasted chickpeas)

My black bean list would include tacos, YYR Refried Black Beans, AFR Mango Black Bean Salad, and YRR Black Bean Soup

Veganmofo: Spotlight on Burritos

Burritos are gods food. Seriously, you take some hearty soulful full bodied fully flavoured foods and stick them together in a wrap that you toast to perfection?

More please.

Recently in our little city a place open and stayed open late called Burrito Jax. Tasty tasty stuff which has become a fan favourite. They offer a pretty fab spread and have inspired a few burrito party's in my kitchen.

So here's a laydown to the simple fixings to assemble a burrito of your own

Keys:

• Wraps
• Salsa/sauce
• veggies
• beans
• rice
• flare: like sweet potato, pickled jalapenos, lime, crispy onions, cranberry anything that adds texture/flavour and makes this burrito different from the last

So here a few easy examples from the list.

Step 1: Rice

Now a rice cooker makes this part easy but any rice you enjoy can work as a filling. Plain fluffy rice is nice, adds texture, grasps flavour and helps make each wrap fullfilling. But they key to a good burrito goes beyond the fluffy nutty texture of simple brown rice, zest it up with flavour.

Roast garlic rice or zest a lime into the cooker with the rice, finish with a fresh squeeze maybe some cilantro. Or add some mexican pilaf punched up with flavour.

Step2: Bean/Protein or Both!

Seitan is a great filler, fried tofu, cooked black bean/pintos, refried beans. Any combo as long as she's got flavour. Cook your beans  with garlic and spices, toasted cumin and if you go with non-bean protein fry them in spice. Use a flavour marinade or seitan then crust in with toasted cumin. You really want the flavour to pop.

Black beans or chili beans, with onions and spice. Mashed with onion, garlic and cumin or from a can. Refried beans are a burrito classic but home cooked black beans provide some killer texture and are a nice addition.

Step 3: Veggies
Fried/roasted onions. All onions all the time. Crips lettuce, green onions, chilis, peppers anything crisp, chrunch and wet. Helps cut the heat and add texture, give your mouth a break.

  

I like raw veggies in my burrito, but slow sauteed peppers curl around your tastebuds in pleasing ways. Lettuce is great in wraps, but for true authenticity try thinly sliced cabbage with lime or lemon juice. Allow it to wilt a bit, and you get the best slaw. Crisp and refreshing surrounded in warm spicy beans and sweet potato

 Sweet potato is a burrito favourite, roasted cubes with lime and cumin. Or mashed with cilantro and a pat of butter. It provides a great warm accompaniment to any wrap.

4. Sauces.Salsa
Cranberry, tomatillo, canned, fresh, homemade. There are many schools of thought, mole works wonders. A fresh pico de gallo is nice crisp tomato and onion with herb and citrus. Or the smoke chipotle sauces or sweet sting of vinegar based hot sauce or canned burrito sauce. Smooth or Chunky, I find a mixture of sauces gives you the best.

5. Flare

Cranberry salsa, dried fruit, previously mentioned sweet potato or carmilized onions. Hot peppers. This is where you make the burrito yours. Smoked peppers or grilled pineapple, slices of mango? Go drastic, and really break up the flavours.

What are your favourite combos? Best burrito memories?

Do you all build up a stack of different home cooked fillings and set up family style where everyone chooses there own?

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 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!

Theppk's Cookbook Challenge #2: Week 1 Apetite for Reduction!

That's right, cookbook challenge is back! This time we'll be starting with Isa's latest book.

Get all the details on this weeks challenge and snoop what everyone else is making here.


My first dish is simmering away from page 133

Mango BBQ Red Beans!

Super easy and man does it smell good. Not sure I'm going to want to add Agave to it... Maybe I will eat a bowl and then decide.

Super easy directions, pantry friendly stuff and it comes together quickly.

JUST BE SURE TO KEEP A CLOSE EYE ON THE ONIONS AND GARLIC. Maybe cook on 5 or lower, I caught mine burning a few times.

Otherwise it smells and tastes fantastic. I served mine over brown rice and saved the rest for lunches.