Yesterday I got to learn how to make roti. The cook that taught me cooks with lower-fat (only brushing the roti lightly with oil while cooking), no animal ingredients, and without a recipe. For the bus-up-shut roti, she used some local margarine. If I had access to it, I would use Earth Balance.
Here’s a video I made documenting the experience.
Well, I’ll admit I have been kind of lax on the posting this week for Vegan MoFo, but here is a great recipe that I’ll be doing next week for Thanksgiving. We really like having this salad instead of your average cranberry sauce. It’s sweetened with apple juice, so it doesn’t have refined sugars, either.
Grind raw cranberries in food processor until they are in very small pieces. Next, shred apples in the food processor, and drizzle the juice of 1 orange over them to keep them from discoloring.
Mix the cranberries, nuts, and apples together in a bowl.
Bring the apple juice concentrate to a boil and add agar. Stir to dissolve, and cook on a hard boil for about 5 minutes, stirring constantly. Pour liquid over the cranberry/ apple mixture, and pour into a fancy bowl. Let set overnight.
Enjoy the next day!
A couple of my friends have requested that I post some recipes for cheese sauce and mayo, respectively. I’m posting a great cheese sauce recipe that I have used often over the years, as well as a soy mayonnaise recipe. I can’t readily obtain Vegenaise here, and the vegan mayo that they do sell is, to put it mildly, in need of help.
Blend all ingredients until very, very smooth. Pour into a saucepan and stir constantly while bringing it to a boil. When it has thickened (usually right as it has come to a boil), remove from heat.
At this point, you can drizzle this on pizza, mix it in with cooked pasta elbows and bake it for a few minutes for Mac and Cheese (I love, love, love this cheese sauce in Mac and Cheese!), serve over cooked veggies like broccoli and cauliflower, add to tacos, drizzle on your lasagna, etc.
This does NOT make a good sliceable/ shreddable cheese. This is great for a cheese sauce only. I think this makes around 3-4 cups, although I haven’t actually measured.
Blend water, soy supreme, garlic clove, salt, and onion powder together. While blender is still running, drizzle in the 1/2 cup of oil, and then add the 2 tsp. instant clear gel at the very end. Turn off the blender, then stir in the 2 tbsp. lemon juice by hand.
This makes a lot of mayonnaise (like, 3 cups or so — haven’t actually measured it). If you are just making it for one or two people and don’t have plans for making potato salad or other dishes with a large amount of mayonnaise involved, you might consider just making half a recipe of this.
This is the type of recipe that is perfect for cleaning up a couple of leftover cups of rice in your fridge. I got the basic idea for this recipe from my grandma’s cookbook, 375 Meatless Recipes. While this is a vegetarian cookbook, it does have non-vegan recipes, and this basic recipe wasn’t necessarily vegan, so I had to make some adjustments. Here’s what I came up with for my veganized version!
Ingredients:
Chop your reconstituted soy curls into bite-sized pieces. Place in a medium-sized mixing bowl with the rice and mix. Make your mushroom soup and add to the rice and soy curls. Sauté the chopped onion, celery, and mushrooms in a tiny bit of oil or water for a few minutes until the onion looks kind of transparent. Then add the veggies to the mixing bowl.
Grease a 2-quart casserole dish and pour your casserole mix into that. Sprinkle the top of the casserole with sliced almonds and paprika.
Bake at 350° for 40 minutes. Enjoy!
This week, we had potato salad. My salad is really simple and doesn’t have a whole lot of complicated ingredients. Here’s how I do it.
Ingredients:
I boil my potatoes with the skins on. Then I put them in the fridge or freezer to cool them down a bit. Then I peel them and chop them into bite-sized pieces. Stir in the cucumbers, carrots, minced onion, and olives. I don’t have a specific amount I use. I’m flexible and if I feel like a little more, I add it until it looks “right” to me, whatever my definition of “right” is for that day.
{I really like Isa’s idea (in Veganomicon) of the paper-thin cucumber slices instead of pickles, so that’s what I do these days. You can use pickles if you prefer.}
Add your vegan mayo and season with salt to taste. I’m a minimalist when it comes to potato salad toppings, as you can probably tell.
Garnish your salad with a few sprinkles of dried dill weed or paprika. And that’s all!
I love traveling. A few years ago, my dad and I were traveling in Milan, Italy doing research and photography. We needed pictures inside a certain church but happened to arrive there around lunchtime, so it was closed for siesta. We decided to make good use of the time and grab a bite to eat nearby.
We entered a bakery and looked for some vegan-looking options. We found a type of bread that looked like it didn’t have cheese. So we bought that. It was delicious. It had tomatoes on top and was seasoned with olive oil and herbs.
A few weeks ago, I was looking through my travel pictures and came across that picture from that day (pictured above). I decided I should reinvent that pizza/ focaccia stuff at home (and make sure it was for sure vegan that way)! What I came up with was yummy. I’m not sure if it qualifies more for pizza or focaccia, but here you have it. Call it whatever you want! (My invention is pictured below.)
Ingredients:
Make your pizza dough according to directions.
Roll it out on your pizza pan or stone. Lay the tomato slices out on the pizza dough and drizzle olive oil over each tomato slice. Sprinkle the tomatoes and crust with the herbs and seasonings.
Bake in the oven at 450° for 10-15 minutes, or just until the crust edges start to brown. Then move it to the top rack and turn on the broiler. Watch carefully so the crust doesn’t burn. I cooked these for about 2 minutes under the broiler to make sure the tomatoes were sufficiently cooked the way I wanted them.
Enjoy! We ate this with pesto on penne pasta and carrot sticks. Yummy.
This stroganoff {pictured above, top left on the plate served over brown rice} is super-easy, and can also be used for mushroom gravy, if you substitute a small can of drained mushrooms instead of the gluten or meat substitute.
Blend water, cashew nuts, soy sauce, and cornstarch until very, very smooth. Pour into a pan on the stove and add your vegan meat substitute and bring to a boil over medium high heat, stirring constantly so it won’t stick or burn to the bottom of the pan. Once it has thickened to a gravy consistency, remove from heat and serve.
We like this stroganoff served over rice or fettucine-style noodles.
To make this into mushroom gravy instead: Simply replace the veggie meat with 1 small can of mushrooms, drained. Also, if I am using this as mushroom soup in a recipe, I typically cut back on the soy sauce and only use 2 tbsp. as I find that the flavor is very strong and the recipe typically has some sort of salt included already.
Welcome to the folks who are stopping by from Vegan MoFo!
This morning, I felt like it was high time to do some experimentation and break out the Vegan Brunch cookbook.
I hadn’t tried the Tofu Omelets recipe yet, and I did. They were awesome! I had to do a little fiddling with the recipe because I ended up using firm water packed tofu instead of silken tofu, but they turned out really well. (This was my second time trying to make vegan omelets in general. Once when I tried it before, let’s just say it was a disaster. And they didn’t taste quite right. These were incredible, of course. I wouldn’t expect anything less from a cookbook by Isa.)
I also wanted to try one of the sausage recipes. However, I had to do quite a bit of adjustment in the seasoning department because I don’t have all the seasonings listed, and well, I just felt like something different. I even made a boo-boo with the quantity of beans that I used. Nonetheless, the sausages turned out really well! Hubby said they were delicious. I’m posting what I did since it’s quite a bit different from the recipes in the book.
Get a big pot of water boiling with a steamer and lid. I don’t actually own a steamer so I use a metal colander with foil around the edges to block off the steam’s escape. It’s ghetto, but it works. (This is what I also do, for some of Vegan Dad’s lunch meat slice recipes, too.)
Mix mashed beans together with the other ingredients in the order listed.
Tear four sheets of tinfoil (I used squarish sheets). Divide the dough into four even quantities. Shape in an oblong type shape and roll up like a Tootsie roll.
Put the rolls in the steamer and steam for 40 minutes. I pan-fried them with some cooking spray when they were done, and they were delish.
I am curious what the difference would have been if I had correctly read the recipe and only added 1/2 cup of beans instead of the whole can. Whoops, oh well. It was fabulous anyway. I’m going to take one of the sausage rolls over to some of our vegan friends’ place later and they can try it out too.
Here is also what I did for the veggies that we ate with the omelet. The cheese was grated Native Chis from the Native Foods cookbook.
Sauté the onions in the oil for a few minutes, then add mushrooms and zucchini. Add seasonings and continue to sauté until the veggies have cooked down a bit and are starting to brown slightly.
Remove from the heat and serve with omelets and cheese of your choice.
I had a bunch of leftover “cheese” sauce from my improv creation of grilled cheese sandwiches earlier this week. I decided that rather than making plain ol’ mac and cheese, I should be a little more creative. The baby needs calcium, after all, so I should add some more nutrition… um, like spinach. Hence, you have today’s recipe.
Boil water for the pasta and drizzle a little olive oil in it to keep pasta from sticking together once you add it to the water. Add pasta to boiling water and cook until tender.
Meanwhile, sauté onion slices in a little olive oil in a skillet. Add mushrooms, spinach, and tomato and continue sautéing until spinach is thawed and vegetables are combined well. Preheat oven to 375°.
Drain pasta, and then mix in cheese sauce, vegetable mixture, salt to taste, and nutritional yeast flakes to taste.
Pour into greased casserole dish and bake for about 15-20 minutes or until pasta is just starting to brown a little bit on top.
Serves 8-10 people.
One of my pregnancy cravings was for a hearty, breakfast-y tofu “egg” gravy. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about a tofu gravy that I ate when I was in high school. (And that one, sad to say, was actually not very delicious. Makes ya wonder why ya wake up craving something that wasn’t that delish.)
I brainstormed, and luckily, I found a gravy that really fits the bill! (SO much more yummy than the gravy that I remembered in high school that triggered the funny craving.) It is this tofu “egg” gravy from Amazing Meals I by LuAnn Bermeo. It has tofu (duh), nutritional yeast flakes, other various seasonings including basil and sage, and she recommends adding some sort of veggie breakfast sausage. I added crumbled unsausages that I had in the freezer, ready to go for spur-of-the-moment needs. I usually serve this gravy over toast or homemade biscuits. Yesterday, I served it over some slightly misshapen veggie burger buns that I made from scratch. The hubby really enjoys this hearty gravy, too!
Side note: If you are in the mood for picking up a new, very practical two-volume cookbook, may I recommend Amazing Meals! Unfortunately, this book is not available from Amazon. I believe it is self-published, but don’t let that stop you from getting a copy. Stop by the Facebook group and get in touch with the author to get your own copy of the two-volume set. I believe they run around $60, last I checked, but this two-volume set is not your skinny cookbook. They are quite large, full-size pages, and chock full of great ideas for vegetarian, plant-based meals and menus. And once you get your copy, you have GOT to try the whipped topping recipe!
Disclosure: I am NOT being paid to write my opinion of this book and am not being compensated in any way, shape or form. I just really like it a lot and thought you should know about it!
Hi! I'm Joelle. Welcome to my home on an island. I am a missionary's wife, and I have fun homemaking. Hubby and I are Americans. On the island where I live, I have access to many American foods. However, they are quite expensive, so on this blog you'll find the ways that I try to get around and live frugally. You'll find my reflections on faith, frugality, femininity, and of course food.
I love cooking healthfully. I cook vegetarian food and I focus on making food that is easy, healthy, and inexpensive.
This blog started back in 2007, and was called Healthy 'N' Happy Home. I have since imported many of the posts to this blog and hope you will find them useful.
Please browse around my blog and subscribe so you'll know how my homemaking adventures are going!
