Oh Yeah, Dinner.

In all my excitement about the pecan pie I forgot to mention what we had for dinner last night. When I go home from work I launched into making the pie and some homemade bread using new sprouted wheat flour and completely forgot about, ya know, the actual dinner. I would love to have pie and bread for dinner but my conscience can’t allow that. So I made super healthy stuff to go with the super unhealthy pecan pie. First up, massaged kale salad. Sounds sensual, tastes delicious.

I realize this photo is much more interesting for the colors rather than actually getting a good idea what the salad looks like, but kale salad is one of those things we never plate for some reason. I make it in a big steel mixing bowl that was my grandma’s and we just set it on the table and eat out of it. Every other salad gets a nice spot on the plate but for some reason this one never makes it out of it’s dirty bowl, so no great picture for you. I can’t even give you a real recipe with measurements, just approximations.

My Massaged Kale Salad

1 bunch kale, de-stemmed
1/2 a lime
1 big spoonful of tahini
1 decent splash of tamari
1 beet, grated (this one is a beautiful chioggia, but golden beets are my favorite)

Chop the kale into ribbon. Juice the lime into a large bowl, add the tahini and tamari and whisk together. Add kale and massage the crap out of it to break it down a bit. I usually try to use lacinato/dinosaur kale but curly kale works too. Once your fingers start to cramp add the beet, stir, eat out of bowl.

I also love this with an avocado instead of the tahini and lemon juice instead of lime. Really it’s just fat, acid, salt in some form mashed into the kale and add shredded root vegetable. I keep it simple and only add one additional vegetable. All those other odds and ends get thrown into the other thing we had for dinner last night.

Pepper bean salad.

A co-worker turned me on to this. It has single-handedly turned me into a cilantro non-hater. This is quite a feat people! I have hated cilantro for years and now I find myself buying it for this salad! I’ve made the recipe so many times I don’t use a recipe (though I did link one). Now I do cut down on the oil and acids and play with the spices some as well as using it to clean out my fridge (good with bits of cucumber and tomato) but the essence of it stays the same and it’s so simple it’s easy to swap things out.

Plus, it gets better the longer it stays in your fridge. If it lasts that long.

Coooooookies!

I’ve been pretty good at this whole blogging thing lately. Watch, I’ve just screwed myself over. Anyway, I’ll start with something healthy. You know it will quickly descend into sugar gluttony so how about a salad?

Red leaf lettuce, cucumber, and chopped up bits of sheese blue cheese. Not quite real blue cheese but it works in salad. I used some of my mom’s homemade French dressing which I found in the fridge. French dressing aka glorified ketchup vinaigrette. 

The scramble is probably the best I’ve ever made. Crumbled extra firm tofu, nooch, and some Fox Point seasoning – which is basically herb riddled crack. 

Now for some dessert. Spritz maybe? Yeah, I’m Norwegian, what of it. I like my spritz, my krumkake, kringla, lefse, and what have you. Even when its not Christmas.

The recipe is basically a vegan rip off of Betty Crocker (how I loved that mythical woman)

Spritz 

This is a small recipe (I only had one stick of EB) so feel free to double it.
1/2 c. EB, room temp
1/4 c. sugar 
1 c. 2 tbsp. flour 
1/8 tsp. salt 
1 tip vanilla (1/4 tsp) 

Cream EB and sugar, add vanilla. Mix in flour and salt. You might need to add a bit of soymilk.  Load into this:

And shoot (hehe) onto a very lightly greased cookie sheet. One click, pull up quickly. The sheet needs to only be lightly greased otherwise the cookies won’t stick and they will never leave their safe cylindrical home. Same thing applies to parchment – if you can get it to work on parchment by all means let me know. Bake for 5-8 minutes – until the cookies are set but not brown. Barely golden as my mom would tell me. Makes 20 cookies.

One type of cookie clearly isn’t enough. So here’s some more.

Chewy Banana Cookies

And some walnut ridges. I named them, I don’t care if I stole the recipe from VegNews. I slightly modified it (I left out the chocolate chips and used white flour instead of oat). And damnit, I want to name a cookie. Besides, they have cute little ridges from me using my fingers to smash them down. 

Maybe sometime when its not way past my bedtime I’ll post a recipe.

Hanging in There

So its Saturday and I’m with the fam. Since I would starve otherwise I made a millet-black bean salad to bring with. I’m loosely based off of the Mexican millet from Veganomicon. 

Its a life saver. 

This whole weekend is fun. But I would really like to be back home so I could spend time with the most amazing person. He lent me this. 

I wish I could sleep away the next twelve hours so I could merrily be on my way home. But for now I’ll entertain myself with a cupcake and sweet thoughts.

Dusting off the old cookbooks.

There’s a bit of a challenge on the PPK going on right now where for a week you use a cookbook that for some reason has fallen by the wayside. This week is Vegan Planet, which was actually my first vegan cookbook. But I was so overwhelmed I made a handful of recipes before putting it away. I’m really liking it now though so I doubt it’ll get shoved to the back of the shelf again. 

The first thing I made was the adzuki bean and winter squash saute. The nice thing about this book is there is something for whatever ingredients you have on hand at the time. And this is what I had on hand. I fiddled with the spices a bit, because I always do that. Spices shouldn’t be listed in measurements, just ideas. 

Tonight I made the Indian spiced quinoa with raisins and pinenuts. A few months ago I got some red quinoa from Paul’s Grains. Probably the cutest farming family ever. The dad once told my friend and I “A day without cornbread is like a day without sunshine.” They have all sorts of grains and cereals, all organic. But back to the food. Delicious. The raisins make it awesome. I also added split green peas, leftover adzuki beans, and some carrots. 

And here’s the taco salad I made last night. I was lazy and this was easy, perfect combination. Just a pile up of lettuce, beans, red peppers, onions, salsa, and chunks of FYH Monterey Jack. This is from the first package of vegan cheese I got. I really liked it in sandwiches and salads. I want to try other brands now.