Spicy Chinese Stir Fry

I'm watching a documentary about the "Obesity Epidemic" which is really interesting, but also very sad. Its called "Killer at Large: Why Obesity is America's Greatest Threat" and is on instant streaming on Netflix if anyone is interesting. So in honor of that, and inspired by a great meal in china town (Szechuan Crispy Tofu: Coming soon to Vegan Tasties), I got a new bottle of Thai chili sauce and experimented in making a good stirfry sauce. This would be a good meatless meal for Friday if you practice lent.



Start by putting on a serving or two of rice (or more if you want to save leftovers for later in the week). I think its usually a cup water for every half cup rice. Brown rice is a lot healthier, but if you want a more stereotypical Chinese style meal, you can go with white rice.

While this is cooking, cube up some tofu and dry it a little (my picture doesn't have this because I was lazy, but it adds some good protein). Cut up some veggies you enjoy. I had on hand broccoli and red peppers. You could do peapods, onions, peas, lima beans, corn, carrots, cabbage, ect.

Once the rice is done, put it in a frying pan and add the veggies and tofu.

Add:
2tsp Szechuan Marinade
2tsp soy sauce
1tsp sesame seed oil
1tsp ground ginger
2 cloves crushed garlic
1/2 teaspoon sake or white rice vineager

Mix well and cook for another minute or two. Top with sesame seeds.

Layered Baked Pasta

Sometimes I'm really in the mood for some Italian food. However, traditionally its loaded with cheese, and sometimes meat too. So I decided to combine the stuffed mushroom filling with the layered pasta idea of lasagna to give it a nice filling.

Take the recipe from "Delicious stuffed Mushrooms" for the Mushroom filling, and tweak it a little.
http://vegantasties.blogspot.com/2010/01/delicious-stuffed-mushrooms.html


1 cup Mushrooms, chopped (something like portabello or button mushrooms, but I'm sure other kinds would work too)
1 cup red onion, chopped
2 or 3 cloves garlic, diced or crushed
1/3 cup red peppers, diced
1 cup bread crumbs (or crumbled toast works too in a pinch, as we discovered)
3 Tbsp olive oil
1 tsp salt
1 tsp dried basil
2 tsp oregano

Optional:
1/2 tsp chili powder
1 tsp crushed red peppers (If you're not expecting this to be spicy, leave this one out. I thought the chili powder was good, because mine isn't terribly spicy. The crushed red peppers do add some heat though)

Before you start chopping the ingredients, start a pan of water to boil and start cooking 1 lb of pasta. There might be a little extra, but you can just put this in a tupperware with a little red sauce and have lunch for later.

Chop your ingredients, and then cook them much the same way as you would for the stuffed mushrooms.
Put the mushrooms, onions, garlic, and peppers in a skillet with the olive oil, for about 5 minutes.
Add salt, spices, and bread crumbs, then cook for another 5, stirring well.

Once both pasta and stuffing are done, take out a large baking pan (like a rectangular cake pan). Take your favorite pasta sauce (or make your own) and some spinach, and begin layering.
Layer it pasta, stuffing, sauce, spinach, pasta, stuffing, sauce, spinach, ect, until it reaches the top of the pan. The top two layers should be pasta and stuffing. Put in the oven at 375 for 40-45 minutes.

Ecuadoran Quinoa Soup

This is a traditional soup of Ecuador. Quinoa is an awesome seed (although it looks like a grain) from South America, high in protein and iron, and other good nutrients. This soup was warm and tasty, with an interesting flavor of spices, just perfect for a cold night.

Heat one tablespoon olive oil in a large saucepan (medium heat)
Add 1/2 cup chopped green or yellow onion, 3 garlic cloves (chopped or crushed)
Add 1/2 teaspoon cumin, paprika, and oregano.
Let cook for 5 minutes, until onions are soft and fragrant
Add 1/2 cup quinoa, rinsed and soaked.
Add 5 1/2 cups vegetable broth.
Add 1 tsp salt
Peel and add 1/2 pound of baking potatoes (I used about 5 small-medium sized ones)
Chop and add 1 cup cabbage or leafy green such as collards, mustard, ect (I ran out of room in my pot for this, but I was really wishing I had had room for some cabbage)

Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat and cook on low for 20 minutes (make sure the potatoes are cooked all the way through).

Optional - if you like cilantro, you can add 1 Tbsp chopped at the end.

I was in Ecuador a few years ago and one of the girls I was with was vegan. We were all surprised by how many of their recipes were naturally vegan. We all cooked together every night, and it was a great experience. To this day, I still add broccoli to my spaghetti sauce (its really good, and adds lots of vitamins). Maybe someday I can find the lentil dish we made there, it was so good.

Here's where I got the original recipe:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200211/kummer

Superbowl Sausage

On Sunday after work, my boyfriend and I went to a great superbowl party with some work friends. It was a lot of fun and I had a great time with my coworkers. Before the party, Michael and I had made something to bring so that we could have dinner there, since everyone else was having chicken wings (Melissa made delicious guacamole that we could have too). In my meat eating life, I wasn't a big sausage person. Never eating a hot dog again is no love lost. But this was pretty good, and its really easy. Michael eats these all the time. I don't know if these are available everywhere, but Ive found them at every Whole foods in this area, and they're produced in Seattle.

The sausages are made by a brand called Field Roast Grain Meat Co., and They're completely vegan. I love the smoke apple sage type. The chipotle is a little to spicy for me, and I haven't tried the Italian yet. You also need 2 boxes of some type of wild rice mix or rice pilaf mix. Whatever you prefer. I like the Rice-a-roni wild rice mix.

Follow the instructions on the box and put the rice on the back burner while it cooks.

Open the sausages and basically just fry them up in a pan. We don't even use oil, they just need to be browned on the outside and cooked all the way through. (they also go really well with the earlier stuffed mushroom recipe)

Chop up all four sausages into bite sized pieces. Put them in a bowl with the rice when its done and mix it well. Thats it basically, pretty simple.

I was pretty proud at the party because one of my favorite vegan cooking things happened. I was telling one of my co-workers to try some and he said "Yeah, I had some, it was good, but you cant have any because it has meat in it." I replied, "No it doesn't, I'm the one that made it." He got a sort of confused/suspicious look on his face and asked "You mean thats not meat?". I explained what it was and he said "you know, thats really good. I couldn't even tell it was vegan."

5 Funny/ironic things that aren't vegan

When you first go vegan (or vegetarian), you spend a little bit of time really looking at labels and figuring out what you can and can't eat. The happy news is that you can find alternatives for pretty much anything thats now off the table, so to speak. Some things are still just kind of funny to find out aren't vegan.

Many of these things are due to gelatin, which is basically ground up animal bones, ligaments and other such happy things of that nature. Yum!

1) Frozen Corn-This was back when I was still just vegeterian, but I bought a bag of frozen green giant butter corn and didn't look at it very carefully. When I got it home, I think I was looking at the ingredients for some other reason and I realized they had gelatin in it. It was pretty frustrating, since I had already bought it, given them economic support, yada yada. Who puts gelatin in frozen corn? (More importantly, why?)

2) Altoid Mints-This was one of those weird things that have gelatin...

3) Poptarts - Gelatin again. For some reason it's in the frosting. You wouldn't think that frosting needs gelatin, but apparently they think it does. By the time I found out that whole foods makes a gelatin free poptart, I was vegan, and they have whey or something.

4) Vegetable soups (like Campbells and Progresso) - Most vegetable soups need to be double checked for animal broths. One would think, vegetable soup = vegetable broth, but not always so. My friend has told me of her bad experience with Campbell's vegetable soup. Apparently they have a vegetable soup with vegetable broth, one with beef broth, and one with beef chunks. She grabbed the one with chunks by mistake and got an unpleasant surprise for lunch. Unfortunately, vegetable soup is the big thing on the label, and everything else is only under ingredients or fine print. This can be a problem in restaurants too, but its up to each veg*n to decide if they want to ask/trust each place they go about the individual broths in the soups. For example, at my work they don't even carry vegetable broth (I work in a retirement home). We don't really get many veg*ns though.

5)McDonald's French Fries - My own personal distaste for Mcdonald's aside (soulless corporation, epitome of the obesity epidemic, Food-that-isn't-really-food, ect), their fries are basically a big pile of lies. In the 90's they told everyone their fries were definitely vegetarian, cooked in 100% vegetable oil. Later it was found out that the recipe for the actual fries includes beef extract. Thats why they had that big lawsuit.
They still use this beef extract, so their fries are not vegetarian. Its hard to find this information, you have to go on their website and look at the ingredients. If you ask the cashier, I'm not sure if they would know or not. Most people assume they are vegetarian. They also don't make it common knowledge that there is milk and wheat in the fries as well, which has implications for milk allergies and celiac's sufferers. They had a few lawsuits about this because some kids got sick (they had celiac's).

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11326937/

Easy Bean Stew

For me, winter is a time for soups. Lately, its what I mainly seem to be making. To make myself feel better after my terrible experiment with leek and potato soup tonight, I've decided to post a delicious one that I threw together last week.

I found a bag of 15 bean soup at this small grocery store down the street (The Market Place). It's made by Hurst and is really nice because you get the nutritional variety of all those types of beans in one place. It kind of comes out as a stew though, because the ingredients soak up almost all of the broth.

The annoying thing about beans, however, is that you have to soak them for a long time. You have to plan ahead a little since you have to soak them so long. You can either set them up overnight or while you're at work. These take at least 8 hours. I just set them in a pan of water and left for work. You don't need to boil them, just make sure that you leave them in enough water (more than covered).

Once the beans are done, drain and rinse them.
Get out a big stock soup pan and put in 2 containers of 32oz vegetable broth. You can use any kind, as long as its about that much liquid.

To enhance the flavor of this broth ( I use pacific vegetable broth), I usually add a few things. This may be optional if you are using a different broth.
3-4cloves crushed garlic or 2 tsp garlic powder
2tsp ginger (or to taste) powdered is better because then you won't have chunks, but fresh and chopped tastes better, so pick your battle.

Once the broth is boiling, add the following
The whole bag of soaked beans
3/4-1cup rice or barley
1 cup corn

Let this mix cook for about half an hour, then it will be ready. If you're eating this by yourself, I think it can be frozen quite easily. Between my boyfriend and myself, we always eat it before it gets to that point.

Quorn and Veggie Appetizer

This recipe is great for a snack or appetizer before dinner. It's really popular with everyone, including those who eat meat. Whenever I take it to work, it disappears really fast.

For the Quorn*, heat up some olive oil in a frying post. Chop up about 1/4th cup of onions and add them. Chop or press 2 cloves of garlic. Let it heat, get soft for about a minute or two, then add about 1/2 a bag of Quorn chunks. Fry it until golden brown (maybe 10 minutes), stirring occasionally.

While this is cooking, Chop up 1 tomato and 1 avocado.

Once the Quorn is done, arrange all 3 on a platter with some toothpicks and serve.

Meanwhile, I need to think of a good vegan dish to take to a superbowl party on Sunday.

*Not technically vegan. See my Quorn corn quinoa post about why I think it's still ok.