Tomato Cups

I'm almost done with my first translation project!  I'm translating a NPO website and I only have 6 (out of 67) pages left, and I've done it all since May.  It's due Thursday, and I should be done in time.  However, I've been spending most of my free time doing that (or working or hanging out with friends) so there hasn't been much recipe posting.  Here's a quick one that we made the other night at the summer solstice party.

Tomato Cups
(fits into the category of raw food)
Idea was found on: http://www.living-foods.com

You want about 1/2 as many tomatoes as people will be there.  So I probably should have made 3 instead of 6 (I always make too much food and pawn it off to people at work)

For 6 people:
Take 3 medium tomatoes.  You can experiment with various sizes or flavors (cherry would be good but small) for different effects, but this is how I did it.

Cut the tomatoes in half.  Use a spoon (a grapefruit spoon would probably have worked great, if I had one) to scoop out the innards of the tomato, leaving a centimeter or two thick shell.  If its much thinner, you won't get much taste except for the tomato.  Keep the innards.

Chop the following:
Tomato innards
1/2 of a small sized cucumber
1 celery stick
1 green onion
1/4 cup red onion
1/4 cup cilantro or parsley
1 tbsp mint (fresh, not dried)
1 clove garlic (actually chopped, pressed won't work right)

Combine in a bowl and add:
1/4 cup sunflower seeds
1 tsp salt
1/2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tbsp lemon juice

Foster Kitten - Fawcett

I took back Little Man and Little Kevin on Wednesday so they could be neutered, vaccinated, and adopted.  I came home with a new four month old foster this time (possibly my last one for the year - not having a car has made things difficult) named Fawcett (named after Farrah Fawcett).  She's super cute, a little skittish, but she loves being petted and purrs like a rumble pack.  She's all white, except for two brown marks that look like eyebrows, a brown splotch on her heel, and a calico tail.  They said she was part Siamese.  I'll keep her until the beginning of July.

Don't forget, if you live around Chicago, that Kevin and Little Man are going to be at PAWS on Clyborne looking for homes!  The adoption coordinator said they should be there by today.  Please consider adopting them, or another kitten, if you live close enough to come by!

Kevin has the stripes and Little Man has the spots.  They were so sweet and cute!

Summer Solstice Menu

So, since agnostics don't really have a lot of holidays, and you can never have enough parties with friends, I decided to throw a summer solstice party.  It was a lot of fun.  I put on my summeriest dress, made clover flower garlands from flowers that I picked by the lake, and celebrated the start of my favorite season and the day jam packed with the most sunlight for the year.  I tried to cook food with a natural theme, meaning little to no cooking (so as not to over heat my already hot apartment), no processed foods, and everything from fresh vegetables and fruit.  Recipes and pictures will soon follow, but here's the menu.  If you want to know the recipe to any one in particular, comment and I can put it up first.

Snack
Omega-3 trail mix with cranberry

Main meal
Tabouleh and guacamole wraps
Asparagus and orange salad
Everything salad, with edible wild flowers
Tomato Cups
Aztec Platter

Dessert
Homemade nectarine sorbet
Fruit salad
coconut milk whipped cream

Pictures will be up as soon as my computer situation is settled.  Michael got me a new computer for my birthday today.  Also, foster kittens have officially been swapped.  Kevin and Kitten Little (Little Man) are back and ready to be adopted, and I now have 4 month old Fawcett (as in Farah Fawcett).

Whipped Cream

When I found out how easy this whipped cream recipe was, I was fairly upset at how long it had taken me to find.  I hadn't had whipped cream (something I ate in copious amounts both straight from a redi-whip can and also made from heavy cream by my mother) in almost a year.  It's so simple to make, and has that airy, fluffy taste that makes whipped cream delicious.  I found this from a video online and then figured the proportions myself.

Ingredients:
2 cans of coconut milk (full fat, not the beverage)  Thai Kitchen was the brand I used and it worked perfectly
1/3 cup powdered sugar

Pretty much everything must be refrigerated about 4 hours or more so that it is the temperature of the refrigerator.  This would be:
The cans of coconut milk  (you could just keep a few cans in the fridge so that you can always make whipped cream, if the mood strikes)
A metal mixing bowl
The beaters of the egg beaters or kitchen aid.  Or I suppose one could try a metal whisk, but you have to do a lot of stirring.

Once the cans are properly cold, poke a hole or two in the bottom with one of those bottle opener things and drain out the liquid.  Make sure the hole is in the bottom.
Then open the top and take off the lid.  There should be a creamy white layer about an inch or two thick at the top.  Scrape this out and put into the metal mixing bowl.  Repeat with the other can.

Whip this a little by mixing it.  Add the powdered sugar and continue to whip until it is all mixed in.  Do not over mix it.

Use on pies and cakes, or just eat it strait.  It's delicious.  It tastes a little like coconut.

Sunday Vegan Dinner Party

Last Sunday, one of our friends from Michael's work invited us over for a vegan dinner party.  We cooked some pretty tasty stuff together, and then ate and talked together with some more friends.  We had a great time, and I was really pleased by how well all the food turned out.  Here's a brief run down of our menu:
Appetizers:
Potstickers (the Trader Joe's ones are vegan)  with Ginger People dipping sauce
Apple Sage Sausages, cut up into circles (to be eaten with toothpicks or put on pita crackers)
Melon and grapes



Colorful Salad

Entrees:
Gardien Beef Stir Fry

Stuffed Mushrooms and Bell Peppers

 Desserts:
Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars

Blueberry Mini Cheesecakes with Strawberry Sauce and Whipped Cream

All food prepared:

Weekend Food Adventures

This weekend, I've been cooking up a storm.  I'll have lots of new recipes to post, but I just wanted to talk about the cooking adventures.  On Wednesday, I was in the mood for dessert and experimented making some chocolate chip cookie bars (which turned out really well), and some peanut butter "kiss" cookies like the kind my grandma makes (peanut butter cookies with a hershey's kiss in the middle).  Of course, I can't use hershey's kisses, so instead I used some Ghiradelli baking chocolate (the semi sweet kind is vegan).  I took a basic peanut butter cookie recipe from peta, and tried to modify it, but it wasn't quite sweet enough, so I will be working on that more.  Desserts in hand, I went over to a friends house where we do pretty much weekly Vegan cooking.  This week, we made a really interesting avocado pesto pasta dish.  It was really tasty, but to make it even better next time, I'm going to add sauteed veggies to the pasta.

After a wild goose chase on Thursday, I picked up my first batch of produce from my farm CSA at Uncommon Grounds.  It's from a southern Wisconsin farm called Harvest Moon.  In this batch I got spinach, rhubarb, asparagus, cilantro, radishes, chard, and garlic scapes.  I'm in the process of finding a recipe for the chard and scapes, but I've used most of the spinach, rhubarb, and asparagus.

Priya was up this weekend, so that meant a lot of cooking.  We made my Aunt's Fruit Pie, and then some Apple Sage Sausages and Quinoa.  We played Taboo with some friends, attempted to get drunk and pretty much failed (although we discovered fruit smoothies with pomegranite schnopps are delicious).  The next day, we had star fruit and made strawberry rhubarb pie.

On Sunday, a friend of Michael's and mine from from his work wanted to have a dinner party with Vegan food, and cheese and wine.  I'll talk more about this in a separate post.

Chickpea and Kale Pasta

I made this recipe as an experiment, not expecting it to be very good.  Surprisingly it was delicious.  It's a great way to sneak in a good portion of kale, and the chickpeas and pasta compliment each other  very well.  I got the idea for the recipe out of a book called Leafy Greens.

Kale:
Take about a pound of kale (2-3 cups), wash and rinse it, and then cut the leaves off the stem.  I threw away the stems because they take even longer to cook than the leaves, and detract from the taste.  Chop up the remaining green.

Add them to a pot of boiling water for about 15 minutes (kale takes a long time to cook, but don't let them get to smushy)

Pasta:
Standard directions, use one of the larger shapes or perhaps spaghetti would work too.  Cook about a pound.

Skillet (put this in about 7 minutes after you start the kale):
Add 1 tbsp olive oil in a skillet on medium low heat and add:
2 cloves minced garlic
1/2 red pepper
4 tbsp minced parsley
salt and pepper, to taste
1 can chickpeas, drained

As soon as the kale is done, add it to the skillet as well.  Fry everything for another minute, then toss with the (drained) pasta.

Gardein Beef Stir Fry

Gardein makes some great mock meat meals that are pretty high in protein and tasty.  They have recently started selling some gardein beef tips at a nearby whole foods.  Michael really likes them, and after I made this recipe said it was the kind of thing we should make once a week.  Our version of meatloaf.  

This recipe should make enough for 4 people.

In a saucepan, start preparing 2 cups wild rice.  I think its the standard 1 cup water for every 1/2 cup rice and it cooks for about 40 minutes.

About 20 minutes into the rice, chop up:

1/2 a red pepper

6-8 broccoli crowns

6 brussle sprouts (or some cabbage finely sliced might work as a good stand in)

5-7 asparagus tips

2 scallions (or 1/4 cup finely diced onions)

3 or 4 cloves of garlic

Combine these and a bag of the gardein beef tips into a frying pan with a few tbsps olive oil, cover, and saute them for about 10-13 minutes, stirring occasionally.  Once the vegetables soften, it is done.

The next step can be done in one of two ways.

You can put some of the wild rice on a plate, top with the veggie mix, and then drizzle some ginger sauce on it (the kind I mentioned in this post).

Or, combine everything in a large bowl and pour on maybe 1/4 cup of the ginger sauce (not so much that its soupy, but enough that it coats everything) and mix well.

Rosemary Veggies and Potatoes

This is half a remake of this recipe, and half a new experiment that had a different flavor I liked.  Basically, it involves more veggies.

Peel and chop 1 potato into cubes.  Put into a frying pan with a few tbsp of olive oil on medium-high heat.  Let them fry while you chop the other vegetables, about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally to brown all sides and adding more olive oil if needed.

Chop
3 stalks of asparagus
3 brussle sprouts (really tasty in this)
4 broccoli crowns
1 scallion
2 cloves garlic
8-10 sugar snap peas

When the potatoes look soft (you can poke them with a fork), add these to the frying pan as well.  Cook for about another 5-8 minutes, until vegetables are tender.  Salt and pepper to taste.

Foster Kittens - Little Kevin and Little Man

First off, no I did not get to name the foster kittens.  I would have named them something awesomely nerdy like Spock and Tuvok.  Kevin is a workable name, but I can't think of a good nickname for little man, besides just little or something unrelated.

That being said, the kittens are awesome!  I got them this morning and they are adapting well.  Right now they are sleeping, after exploring all day.  They are very jumpy, but I am teaching them that pets are good and so is being cuddled.  We'll see how the first night goes and if they'll keep us up all night.  The other cats are somewhat disgruntled and want to know what sort of party is going on in here and why they can't come in.

I get them for about 2 weeks, until around the 21st.

While at the PAWS foster center, I noticed they had a goal on their white board for fostering.  1,200 kittens rescued from Animal Control this year.  So far it was somewhere over 400.  They provided food and a carrying case, and a long list of numbers in case something goes wrong.

Updates as time goes on, but so far I'm enjoying the experience.

Little Kevin

Little Man

Foster Kittens

Quick, fun update:
I get my foster kittens on Monday!
I got permission from my landlady to take in 1 or 2 sets of foster kittens for a few weeks each.

Fostering kittens basically works like this.  When warm weather hits, mother cats start having kittens.  Lots of them.  When they're found and taken to Animal Control, there's so many it overwhelms them.  They call other local shelters.  However, kittens derive a large portion of their immune system from their mother's milk, so if they are not with her, they will be too immunocompromised to be able to stay in the shelters.  So, for the period until they are old enough to receive their shots and be spayed/neutered, they need foster homes to help take care of them.  Shelters will only agree to take as many kittens as the have foster homes for, so after Animal Control fills up, it has no choice but to euthanize some of the kittens.  By taking in two foster kittens, that's two less that will be put down.  Then, once they're old enough, PAWS (the shelter I'm working with), will put them in their adoption center and find homes for them.

I'm really excited to be able to help.  To me being vegan is about doing less harm and more good in the world whenever possible (ahimsa).

Pictures will be posted.  You are warned of the impending adorable-ness.

Peanut Butter Rice Crispy Treats

I made this vegan version of rice crispy treats (gelatin free) for the pizza party the other night.  It's pretty simple, and topped with the same stuff that you put on puppy chow.

Treats:
1 cup sugar
1 cup corn syrup
1 cup peanut butter
6 rice crispy cereal

Combine the sugar and corn syrup in a saucepan and put on medium heat.  Cook until the mixture becomes bubbly, stirring so it won't burn.  Remove from the heat and add the peanut butter.  Put the cereal in a large mixing bowl and put the mixture on top.  Mix well.

Spread the mixture in a 9x13 in. pan.

Topping Sauce:
1 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/4 cup vegan butter
2 tbsp vanilla

Melt all together in a small sauce pan.  Pour the sauce over the cereal in the pan.

It's good warm, or chilled to completely harden the chocolate topping (otherwise it will stay the consistency of the peanut butter).  Cut into squares and serve.