Recipe of the Month: Coconut Cauliflower Curry (with bonus bread and dessert)

As I've noted before, my husband has a bit of a cauliflower problem. When he spots a cheap cauliflower at the store, he just can't resist buying it, even if he has no idea what he wants to do with it. Last week, he found himself in this position once again, and rather than fall back on an old standby like aloo gobi, he decided to look for something new. On a site called Rebel Recipes, he found a cauliflower and chick pea curry recipe with coconut milk, which he adores, so he decided to give that one a try. He didn't modify it much, aside from scaling dialing back the chili flakes to just a pinch and adding a teaspoon of salt, which the original recipe lacked entirely.

Visually speaking, this curry wasn't very appealing. It was a sort of orange, gooey mass, without much contrast in color or texture. The flavor, on the other hand, had a lot going on—a bit too much for my taste. Against the tang of tomato and the sort of musty coolness of the coconut milk, there was a huge array of spices—onion, garlic, ginger cumin, coriander, turmeric, garam masala, cinnamon, cardamom, fennel, chili—all fighting for attention. I found it a bit overwhelming, and I felt no urge to go back for more when I'd finished my bowlful. Brian, on the other hand, absolutely loved it. He's promised not to "subject me to it too often," and I've agreed to put up with it once in a while for his sake. Perhaps it'll grow on me after a while. And if it doesn't, he can have all the leftovers to himself.

But this was not the only new recipe we tried in August. We're only halfway through the month, and we've already tried two others: a simple bread that wasn't a stunning success, and a dessert that was.

The flatbread recipe was something I discovered while browsing Reddit. On the r/Frugal forum, a Redditor posted with great enthusiasm about a two-ingredient flatbread that he swore was a "gateway drug" for baking. To hear him tell it, this recipe could work for just about anything: pizza crust, burger buns, wraps, even crackers. It sounded interesting, but the original recipe called for Greek yogurt, which wouldn't fit our mostly dairy-free diet. So I hunted around and unearthed a vegan version that also called for only two ingredients: soy milk, which we had, and self-rising flour, which is easy to make by adding three teaspoons of baking powder to two cups of regular flour. (A third ingredient, salt, was listed as optional.) 

I showed the recipe to Brian and he agreed to give it a try with the next night's dinner, falafel. Making the flatbreads was pretty similar to the process he uses for the homemade tortillas he usually serves with this meal: mix the dough, knead it briefly, form balls, roll them out, and pan-fry them. However, since the dough got to rise a bit before cooking, the flatbreads came out larger, puffier, and more substantial than the tortillas. And at first, that seemed to be a good thing. The sturdier flatbreads could hold a larger volume of falafel and veggies without letting any spill out, and they felt more secure in the hand. And I found their chewy texture quite enjoyable.

But after a couple of days, the weakness of this recipe became apparent. The flatbreads that had been so firm and flexible when fresh out of the pan grew drier and more brittle with each day they stayed in the fridge. By the time I tried to use the last one four days later, it was so crumbly that it couldn't wrap around the falafel at all; it simply fell to pieces, leaving me to finish up the meal with a fork. Since the tortillas are about as easy to make and stay good much longer, it makes more sense to stick with those for all our sandwich-wrapping needs.

But on the dessert front, there is good news. For background, a couple of months ago, we discovered a vegan whipping cream at Trader Joe's that worked beautifully for plain whipped cream, in a fruit fool, in ice cream, and even in our anniversary cake. So we were devastated to discover on our next trip to the store that it had been discontinued. (This is an ever-present danger with Trader Joe's products we get too attached to, like their toothpaste and shampoo bar.) I thought maybe we could make our own plant-based cream using the TJ's product as a model, and I came up with what seemed like a promising recipe combining soy milk, coconut oil, and canola oil, with guar gum as an emulsifer. But apparently there was some key element of the alchemy missing, because the stuff stubbornly refused to whip.

But then the story took a happier turn. Last weekend, Brian stopped by Shop-Rite to use up a gift card, and while there, he noticed a plant-based cream from Country Crock in the refrigerated section. Both the package and the ingredient list looked pretty similar to the Trader Joe's product, suggesting that the taste and texture might be also. And when we tried whipping some, we found that was indeed the case. It needed more sugar, since it wasn't as sweet as either the TJ's cream or real cream, but the texture and mouthfeel were just fine.

After that, of course, we had to test it in an ice cream. Brian asked me to pick a flavor, and I suggested a fruity ice cream made from some of our frozen or preserved fruit. That reminded him that last year, he'd tried making a batch of raspberry jam that hadn't set up very well, so it was more of a raspberry sauce. And, recalling a particularly tasty black raspberry chocolate chip ice cream he'd had once at a place in New Hope, he decided to add chocolate to it as well. Solid chocolate chips aren't ideal for this purpose since they don't melt that quickly in the mouth, so he decided to use a technique he'd seen in another recipe: melt the chocolate with a little oil, then drizzle it into the ice cream base as it mixes.

The result: a truly delicious vegan ice cream. The flavor had the perfect balance of sweetness and tartness, and the mouthfeel was just as smooth and creamy as you'd expect from real dairy cream. It's good enough that, unlike the other two vegan recipes we tried in August, I think it's worth sharing in full. (This is a small batch sized for our baby ice cream maker, so adjust the proportions as needed).

Vegan Raspberry Chocolate Chip Ice Cream 

Combine ½ cup Country Crock vegan heavy whipping cream, 3 Tbsp. soy milk, 5 Tbsp. seedless raspberry jam, and ¼ tsp. vanilla. Refrigerate the mixture (if most of the ingredients are already cold, a couple hours should be fine). Place in ice cream maker and run for 10-15 minutes. Melt 1.33 oz. chocolate chips and 1 tsp. canola oil in a double boiler until liquid. When the ice cream is soft-serve consistency, slowly pour in the chocolate either while the maker is still running or while stirring. Run the ice cream maker for a little while longer, then freeze the mixture for a couple hours before eating.

Recipe of the Month: Green Bean and Mushroom Curry

First, a quick apology for the late post this week. We were away for the weekend and didn't get home until Sunday evening, by which time we had no energy left for anything productive.

Now, on to the meat—or rather meatless—of the post. Brian found July's Recipe of the Month the way he often does: by searching online for a dish he can make with whatever we happen to have in the fridge. In this case, that was a half-pound of mushrooms and a roughly equal amount of green beans from the garden (our first of the season). Running a search based on those two ingredients, he hit on this Green Bean and Mushroom Curry from a site called Cooking with Mum, which bills itself as "a collection of authentic recipes from Fiji." So we can now add Fijian to the list of world cuisines we've sampled.

Well, sort of, anyway. As usual, Brian had to make a few modifications to the recipe based on our dietary needs and what we had available. He left out the optional curry leaves, the Thai chili, and cilantro, none of which we had on hand. He used only half the volume of green beans the recipe called for, since that was all we had, and he didn't bother blanching them. He reduced the amount of oil from half a cup, which seemed a bit excessive, to a quarter-cup, and substituted cheaper canola oil for olive oil.  He added half a teaspoon of salt, since the original recipe called for none at all. And lastly, he gave the dish a boost of protein by cubing up 8 ounces of firm (or at least firm-ish) tofu, sauteing it with a quarter-teaspoon of salt, and tossing that in at the end before serving the whole thing up over brown rice. After all these changes, what he finally put on the table was more like an adaptation of the original Fijian dish than a faithful translation.

In its edited form, this dish was not particularly inspiring. Despite the large variety of spices included in the recipe, it wasn't all that flavorful. Even though Brian had added salt to it, we both ended up adding more and couldn't imagine how flat it would have been with none at all. Perhaps if he'd been able to include the missing chili and curry leaves, or if he'd sprung for the half-cup of olive oil instead of a quarter-cup of canola, that would have made all the difference. But I have a little trouble believing that. 

But though this curry wasn't remarkable, it wasn't bad either. The flavor didn't knock our socks off, but the dish was still reasonably enjoyable, and, with the addition of the tofu,  substantial enough to fill us both up. And even with the reduced volume of green beans, it made enough for two dinners and two lunches. It isn't necessarily worthy of a place in our recipe collection, but it served its purpose: turning the odds and ends into our fridge into a reasonably satisfying meal.

Recipe of the Month: Roasted Cauliflower and Chick Peas (plus bonus dessert)

On the last Thursday in May, during our weekly grocery run to Lidl, Brian made an impulse purchase of a cheap cauliflower. Having bought it, he then had to figure out what to do with it. We'd already had aloo gobi recently, and he didn't have any leeks to make his roasted leek and cauliflower pasta. So he went hunting online for ideas and dug up a recipe at a site called Last Ingredient for a dish made from roasted cauliflower and chick peas, topped with an "herby tahini" spiked with fresh parsley, cilantro, garlic, green onion, and lemon juice. We had all of that except the cilantro, so he just substituted additional parsley, which the garden is producing plenty of, and left the rest of the recipe unchanged.  

This dish isn't at all complicated. All he had to do was divide the cauliflower into florets, toss them and the chick peas with olive oil and spices, spread them out on a baking sheet, and roast them for half an hour. While it was cooking, he whipped up the tahini sauce and a batch of quinoa to accompany the dish. (The recipe didn't call for this, but it noted that "Leftovers can be stirred into cooked pasta, quinoa, farro or barley," so Brian figured there was no need to wait for it to be left over.) 

He served the dish with the herbed tahini on the side, along with some extra parsley for sprinkling. I tried it first without the sauce and found it quite enjoyable on its own: with its blend of onion and garlic powder, cumin, smoked paprika, black pepper, and salt, it wasn't at all lacking in flavor. But when I added a dollop of the sauce, that extra punch of lemon, garlic, and sesame flavors livened it up still more. It didn't need a lot, just a little sprinkle in each bite to give it that extra brightness and piquancy.

In short, I expect this recipe to become a part of our regular rotation. So long as cauliflower remains cheap at Lidl, we can alternate back and forth between it and aloo gobi so we don't get tired of either one.

This was not the only new recipe Brian tried last week. Late in May, the New York Times climate column ran a story (gift link here) about a vegan chocolate cake that was so good, it convinced the author to go vegan herself. She'd long been concerned about the climate and the impact our food choices have on it, but she also couldn't see a life without animal foods as worth living. Tasting this "sumptuous" cake at a backyard wedding, she reports, opened her eyes to the idea that "plant-based eating could be delicious."

Of course, this did not come as news to Brian or me. We already had many delicious vegan recipes in our repertoire, including a pretty good chocolate cake. That recipe, known in my family as "wacky cake," depends on a vinegar-and-baking-soda reaction to leaven it with no need for eggs. It's incredibly simple to make; I first learned to do it at the age of 7 or 8. But Brian found the swooning description of the cake in the New York Times piece so intriguing that he decided he had to try it for himself. 

The recipe, from the site Nora Cooks, isn't particularly complicated. In fact, the ingredient list is pretty similar to our basic wacky cake, with the addition of a cup of soymilk and some applesauce. The main feature this recipe has that mine doesn't is a chocolate buttercream frosting to go with it. The recipe calls for vegan butter to make this frosting—specifically, the kind that comes in sticks rather than in a tub. Brian and I used to buy this kind of plant butter for pie crusts, but lately it's become harder to find in stores. So, rather than go hunting all over for plant butter in stick form, Brian decided to try using our homemade plant butter in the frosting and see if that worked okay.

The answer turned out to be "sort of." The problem is, the oils it's made from (canola and coconut) have a significantly lower melting point than the palm oil used in the plant butter sticks. Brian had to put the cake layers into the freezer to keep the frosting from melting as he applied it, and the iced cake had to go immediately into the fridge and stay there to keep it from melting just in the warmth of the kitchen. When we wanted to share some slices with our friends at Morris dance practice, we had to pack them into a cooler to keep them from turning into puddles.

That bit of hassle aside, this was definitely a good chocolate cake, with a moist, rich texture and a strong chocolate flavor. But to be honest, it wasn't that much better than our usual wacky cake. It was mainly the rich frosting that made it feel much more lavish and decadent—almost too much so for my taste. I had to carefully manage the balance between cake and frosting as I ate to keep the sweetness from being overpowering.

So, while it was interesting to try this cake of legend, I honestly don't know that it lives up to the hype. Personally, I didn't find it that much better than the wacky-cake cupcakes with coconut frosting Brian made for my birthday ten years ago, and it certainly can't hold a candle to our wedding cake with its layers of chocolate and raspberry mousse. If we could figure out how to make that cake vegan, now, that would be a cake truly worth converting to a plant-based diet for. But this one, while good, is hardly a life-changing experience.

Recipe of the Month: Butternut Squash Mac & Cheese

When Brian asked me to look for new recipes to use up our plentiful supply of butternut squash, I recalled one I'd seen a while ago on It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken: Vegan Butternut Squash Mac & Cheese. We'd previously tried the Vegan Mac & Cheese Powder from the same site, and it hadn't at all successful, but I thought this squash-based "cheese" might be more successful. Most of the ingredients in it—onion, garlic, butternut squash, veggie broth, nutritional yeast—were things we liked and already knew would go well together, so it didn't seem like it could go too wrong.

However, there was one ingredient the recipe called for that we didn't have: white miso paste. We assumed this would be easy to find at our local H-Mart, which carries all kinds of Asian foods at affordable prices, but Brian couldn't find it there—nor at the Ranch 99, another Asian grocery store a little way down the street. Our local SuperFresh had some, but it was $9.99 for a 14-ounce package, which seemed a bit much to spend on an ingredient we'd never used before and might never want to use again. We finally managed to locate a smaller package for $2.99 at Trader Joe's—a 5-ounce resealable tube that we hope will help the stuff keep long enough for us to use it up.

Making the "cheese" sauce was simple enough: just saute the onion and garlic, then add the cubed squash and broth and cook it until tender, and then puree the lot in a blender with the nooch, miso paste, and a little salt. However, the volume the recipe produced seemed like far too much for the three cups of cooked macaroni it was supposed to cover. Fortunately, Brian had decided to cook a whole half-pound of elbows, which came out to about four cups cooked, because even this larger volume of noodles was more or less swimming in the sauce. It was more like a soup than a pasta dish. 

As far as I was concerned, these messed-up proportions more or less ruined the dish. There was nothing really wrong with the flavor of the squash sauce (although, like the other mac & cheese recipe from the same site, it tasted nothing at all like cheese), but there was just too much of it. I tried to eat it carefully so that the noodles were distributed as evenly through the sauce as possible, but I still ended up with a significant volume of cheese-sauce soup in the bottom of my bowl that I had to spoon up by itself. This wasn't at all agreeable and left me with no appetite for the leftovers. 

Fortunately, Brian didn't mind it as much, so he was able to finish it off over the course of the next few days. But neither of us feels much inclination to try it again. In theory, this dish might be okay if we just made a smaller volume of sauce. But why bother making a squash-based pasta dish that's only okay when our Brown Butter Butternut Squash Pasta recipe (and the new vegan variation we've created) is already delicious without any tinkering?

Recipe of the Month: Maple-Roasted Tofu with Butternut Squash

Brian and I have found ourselves with an unusual problem this year: too many butternut squash. Most years, we've had barely enough to make all our favorite squash recipes—souffle, lasagna, pizza, rigatoni, Roasted Stuff—once or twice each. But after last fall's bumper crop of squash (42 pounds in total), we've already made most of these at least once without making that big a dent in the pile. (The one exception is the lasagna, which we hesitate to make with vegan mozzarella for fear it wouldn't be quite the same.) 

So for the first time I can remember, Brian asked me to look for some new squash recipes. I dug through our recipe files and found a few that looked worth trying, but the one that most piqued my interest was the Maple-Roasted Tofu with Butternut Squash and Bacon I'd printed out five years back from the New York Times Cooking section. (This gift link will allow you to view the recipe without a subscription.) We couldn't include the bacon, obviously, but the author had already provided helpful instructions to "make this dish vegan" by skipping the bacon and adding a half-teaspoon of smoked paprika. (Actually, that doesn't make it vegan, since it also calls for a teaspoon of Asian fish sauce. But with so many other strong flavors in the mix—maple, ginger, pepper, onion, sage, coriander, lime—you could easily replace this minor ingredient with an extra teaspoonful of soy sauce or, as one commenter suggested, half soy sauce and half rice vinegar.)

We tried this dish for the first time last Sunday. Since the recipe didn't offer any suggestions for a starch to accompany the tofu, we just served it up with some of Brian's whole-wheat no-knead bread, left over from an earlier meal of roasted vegetable sandwiches. Since the bread worked with one roasted veggie dish, we figured it would pair okay with the other. In any case, it was only there to provide ballast, as the dish certainly didn't need extra flavor. Between the sweetness of the maple syrup, the brightness of the lime juice, the bite of the onion and scallions, the heat of the red pepper flakes, and all those aromatic spices and herbs, the meal had quite a lot going on. It was not unlike our Roasted Stuff recipe (which we usually now make with Brussels sprouts instead of broccoli), but with an extra kick from the additional spices.

The one thing that wasn't ideal about the recipe was that the thick slabs of tofu were kind of awkward to work with. The recipe calls for them to be "tucked" onto the baking sheet with all the diced veggies and brushed with the maple glaze, then flipped halfway through roasting and brushed again. Well, as several of the comments on the recipe point out, trying to flip large slices of tofu while they're sitting in the middle of a pile of diced veggies isn't the easiest thing to do. Brian managed it, but it was a hassle, and the slabs didn't absorb much of the flavor of the glaze. And because the tofu was in such big chunks, it was unclear how to eat it together with the veggies. You could just alternate between bites of each, of course, but it would have been more satisfying to get everything onto the fork at the same time. I tried arranging the tofu slabs on the bread and covering them with the veggies to make a sort of open-faced sandwich, but that proved impossible to eat neatly.

So, next time he makes this dish, Brian plans to dice the tofu and soak it in the glaze for a while before adding it to the roasting pan with the veggies. He hopes this will make the tofu crisper and more flavorful, as well as easier to cook and eat. We might also try to think of something a bit more interesting than bread to accompany it. Quinoa might be good, or maybe kasha. We may have to experiment a little to figure out what works best. But repeating this recipe several times while we fine-tune it will certainly be no hardship.

Recipe of the Month: Vegan Pasta Alla Norma

Several years back, I mentioned in a post that Brian and I had become fans of the Netflix series "Queer Eye," in which five queer powerhouses (four gay men and one "nonbinary fairy," as they call themselves) team up to help others spruce themselves up both inside and out. Along with being energetic, funny, and heartwarming to watch, this show has proved to be a good way to discover new dishes. One of the earliest episodes introduced us to mujadara with fried eggplant, which has since become one of our staple recipes. And in a more recent one, we watched chef Antoni teach a deli owner how to prepare his girlfriend's favorite dish, pasta alla Norma: pasta in a light sauce made from tomatoes, eggplant, garlic, and fresh herbs, topped with crumbled ricotta salata cheese. It looked so tasty that right after watching the episode, I went to my computer and hunted for a recipe.

The one I found at Serious Eats looked pretty simple, but it had one problem: the cheese. According to the description, this particular cheese is a pretty major component of the dish's flavor; the notes on the recipe describe it as "funky as all get out with a punchy barnyard flavor, an intense saltiness, and a savory aroma somewhere in between a good aged pecorino and a feta." So simply swapping it out for some of our vegan mozzarella wouldn't work. 

My first idea for a substitute was to crumble up some firm tofu and spike it with nutritional yeast, lemon juice, and salt, as suggested at Voyo Eats. But when it occurred to me to just look up a vegan pasta alla Norma recipe and see what it used, I found that most of them didn't bother with any of that. The one at Holy Cow Vegan, simply left out the cheese altogether, and at Lazy Cat Kitchen replaced it with two tablespoons of toasted pine nuts. These nuts taste nothing like Kenji Lopez-Alt's description of ricotta salata, but they do have a pleasant taste of their own and would add a nice bit of crunch to the texture. 

So Brian made this simple substitution in the Serious Eats recipe, along with a couple of other minor changes. Kenji Lopez-Alt said to use whole peeled tomatoes and crush them by hand into 1/2-inch chunks; however, since the Lazy Cat Kitchen recipe called for four fresh tomatoes, peeled and diced, Brian figured he could get away with subbing in a can of diced tomatoes instead. He increased the amount of eggplant from 3/4 pound to a full pound and reduced the amount of pasta from a whole pound to half a pound, thereby boosting the veggie-to-pasta ratio. He replaced the fresh basil in the recipe, which we didn't have on hand in early March, with a roughly equivalent volume of our frozen basil. And he dialed back the quarter-teaspoon of red pepper flakes in the recipe to half that amount to accommodate my low heat tolerance.

I don't know if these modifications made a big difference in the flavor, but I found the result something short of extraordinary. There was certainly nothing wrong with it—with a sauce that was essentially just eggplant, tomato, garlic, basil, and oregano, it's hard to see how there could have been—but there was nothing all that exciting about it either. It certainly wasn't the best dish we've made with eggplant; it wasn't even the best pasta dish. I prefer the similar one we call pasta melanzane, which includes fresh mozzarella (regular or vegan) in the mix. 

Thus, this new vegan pasta is unlikely to make the cut to be included in our regular rotation. We'll save our eggplants for dishes we truly love, like our favorite eggplant and pepper sandwiches.

Recipe of the Month: Kung Pao Tofu (with bonus dessert)

I've had other things to post about the past couple of weeks, so this is my first opportunity to tell you about our new Recipe of the Month: Kung Pao Tofu with Roasted Cauliflower. Brian found this recipe on a site called Eating Bird Food while hunting for new ways to use a cheap cauliflower we'd scored toward the end of January. As usual, he made a few small changes to the recipe:

• Scaling it down from four servings to three
• Substituting canola oil for avocado oil
• Leaving out the fresh cilantro, which we didn't have (and I don't care for anyway)
• Replacing the hot chili sauce, which we also didn't have, by adding a dried hot chili to the marinade instead—and then, for fear that change would make it too fiery, dialing back the crushed red pepper to just a pinch for the two-thirds recipe

As it turned out, he needn't have worried about the heat level; the dish was mild enough that even my delicate taste buds could easily have handled more. In fact, I'd say it was bordering on bland, despite the ample amounts of onion, garlic, and ginger in it. It just seemed like it could have used a little bit more of pretty much everything. Texture-wise, the cauliflower worked better than the tofu, which seemed a little too soft and squishy for the dish. It might have worked better with some Soy Curls, which have a firmer texture closer to chicken. But given how unmemorable we both found it, it's probably not worth making a second attempt.

But that wasn't the only new vegan recipe we tried this month. Last night, as a special Valentine's Day treat, he prepared the Salted Dark Chocolate Tart from Gimme Some Oven. This rich little dessert has a gluten-free chocolate-almond meal crust filled with a dairy-free chocolate ganache made with coconut milk. It's supposed to be served with flaked sea salt on top, but Brian decided to make that part optional. Since the recipe says it makes 8 to 12 servings, Brian cut it down to one-quarter of its size for the two of us.

This dish was much more successful than the tofu. The crust was a bit crumbly and didn't come out of the pan neatly, but the ganache was creamy and delicious. Brian had his with a sprinkling of salt and found that enhanced it still more, but I chose to top mine with a generous portion of coconut whipped cream instead. This actually made it a bit less decadent, tempering the richness of the filling by stretching it out over a larger volume. We ate about half of it up while watching the last bits of Campaign Three of Critical Role, leaving us with two more small portions to enjoy tonight.

So, unlike the kung pao tofu, this dessert looks like a keeper. We might fiddle with the recipe a bit to see if we can keep the crust from sticking, but we can be sure the results will be good enough to justify the effort.

Recipe of the Month: Spicy Orange Broccoli

This holiday season, I acquired not one but two new vegan cookbooks. My mom gave me Anything You Can Cook, I Can Cook Vegan by Richard Makin, which I became interested in after trying his whipped cream recipe. (It didn't quite work, but it came closer than any of the numerous attempts we've made with coconut milk, aquafaba, or a combination of the two.) That one, as the name suggests, focuses on plant-based versions of animal-food favorites like chicken nuggets, grilled cheese, and (since the author is a Brit) sausage rolls. Some of the recipes in that one look pretty complicated, but we can probably get a lot of mileage out of simpler ones like Blender Bean Burgers and Cannellini Gnocchi with Pesto. There's even an instant mac and cheese powder that might work better than the disappointing one we tried from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken. 

The other cookbook, Everyday Happy Herbivore by Linsday S. Nixon, looks even more promising. I bought this one myself during our annual pilgrimage to Half Price Books in Indianapolis. Its focus is fat-free or extremely low-fat vegan dishes—so extreme that it labels some recipes as "cheater" dishes because they contain peanut butter, which seems to me like taking things a bit too far. But regardless, there are lots of interesting ideas in here, from Charleston Grits to Apple Fritter Cups.

Our first pick out of this book was a simple dish called Spicy Orange Greens. This recipe can be made with any type of greens or, alternatively, with broccoli florets, which is the option that we chose. The veggie of choice gets cooked until just wilted with a simple sauce made from water, soy sauce, fresh ginger, red pepper flakes, and orange marmalade, then served over soba noodles. 

We had most of these ingredients on hand, but we didn't have any orange marmalade, and we couldn't find any at Lidl. Rather than spring for a pricey jar at the local Superfresh just to pull out a tablespoon for this dish, Brian decided to try whipping up his own using a recipe from Tastes Better from Scratch. After half an hour of simmering, he had a chunky mass somewhat stickier than commercial marmalade, but close enough to use in the recipe. Along with the homemade marmalade, he made two other minor changes: replacing low-sodium soy sauce with regular (since that's what we'd had) and adding some diced tofu, since the recipe was otherwise lacking in protein.

The resulting dish was very pretty to look at, but it fell a bit short on flavor. With two tablespoons of fresh ginger and a quarter-teaspoon of red pepper flakes, the "spicy" part came through just fine; it was the "orange" that was lacking. Maybe it was the homemade marmalade, or maybe it was the fact that it was spread out over a larger volume of food thanks to the addition of the tofu, but to both of us, the recipe had no discernible orange flavor. I had to stir another spoonful of the marmalade—at least half a tablespoon—into my bowl to get what seemed like a reasonable level of orange. To orange-ify the whole panful of greens and tofu, we'd probably have needed at least three tablespoons—three times what the recipe called for. 

Fortunately, that's not a difficult change to make, and with that slight adjustment, this could be quite a useful recipe. Since most of the ingredients are usually in our pantry or fridge, keeping a jar of marmalade on hand (homemade or store-bought) will allow us to trot it out as a last-minute supper for nights when we're not sure what to make. (Alternatively, Brian thinks we might be able to make a sufficiently orangey sauce by leaving out the marmalade and replacing the water with orange juice. But that's an adjustment we'd have to experiment with to get it right.)

If this dish is any indication, we can probably expect this cookbook to be useful overall, but in need of a little tinkering to get the recipes just right. We'll get another chance to test it out shortly, as Brian is currently cooking up a more complicated one from the same cookbook: the intriguing-looking "Chickpea Tenders," which are designed to take the place of a chicken cutlet. I'll let you know how that one turns out in a future post.

Recipe of the Month: Greens, Beans, and Mashed Potatoes

As the days ticked down toward Christmas and our annual trip to Indiana, I realized I had one task to complete before the trip that had nothing to do with holiday gifts: finding a Recipe of the Month for December. I had a couple of downloaded recipes I'd been meaning to try, but none that were both vegan and vegetable-forward. So I turned to our shelf of cookbooks and started flipping through them, looking for inspiration. On page 69 of Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven, I found what looked like just the thing: a dish called "Green And White Beans Under Garlic Mashed Potatoes." It was a casserole of white beans, fresh green beans, and spinach topped with a layer of mashed potatoes, in the manner of a shepherd's pie. All the ingredients were either in our kitchen already or easy to get hold of. It did have a rather lengthy preparation time (an hour and 45 minutes, with 30 minutes of hands-on work), but since Brian had three extra days off before we had to leave for our trip, he'd have plenty of time to make it.

As usual, Brian modified the written recipe in several ways. First, he had to swap out a few ingredients to make it vegan. That wasn't difficult: he just replaced the butter and milk in the mashed potatoes with oil and soy milk and the gruyere cheese that was supposed to go on top with a spritz of oil and a sprinkling of nutritional yeast and salt. He also replaced the olive oil used to saute the veggies with cheaper canola oil and the fresh green beans, which are quite expensive in December, with frozen. He boosted the 10 ounces of frozen spinach the recipe called for to a full pound and dialed down the half-teaspoon of nutmeg the recipe called for to just a quarter-teaspoon to avoid overpowering the other flavors. And rather than simmering the white beans and boiling the potatoes on the stove, he did them in the pressure cooker, thus saving a good chunk of time and energy.

Even with that change, this recipe was fairly time-consuming. First, he had to cook the soaked white beans and set them aside. Then he cooked the potatoes and mashed them (skins and all) with soy milk, oil, garlic, and salt. The next step was to saute two chopped leeks in oil with salt, thyme, and more garlic, then add flour, pepper, nutmeg, and water to make the sauce. When all that was done, he integrated the cooked white beans into the dish with the green beans and spinach, cooked it briefly, and spread it in a casserole dish with the potatoes and his improvised nutritional-yeast topping layered on top. And finally, he loaded the whole thing into the oven to bake for around 40 minutes.

The finished casserole didn't look much like a vegan dish. Between the golden-brown topping and the white sauce that had bubbled over the sides, it gave a very good impression of something rich and cheesy. Unfortunately, its flavor and texture didn't live up to the hype. The biggest problem was the green beans; after nearly an hour of cooking between the stovetop and the oven, they were mushy and bland, doing nothing to relieve the stodginess of the bean-and-potato mixture. (Fresh ones might have stood up better to the long cooking time, but even they might not have survived it.) And while the leeks, garlic, nutritional yeast, and spices did their best, there just wasn't enough of them to perk up such a vast mass of greens and starch. Unfortunately, Brian had decided to make a full batch of the recipe (six servings), so we had quite a lot of it left over after that first meal. We managed to get through it all before leaving for our trip, but we were pretty sick of it by the end.

Despite these shortcomings, I think this dish has potential. If you left out the green beans altogether and made it with only spinach and leeks, it would basically be a variation on colcannon, a classic Irish greens-and-beans mixture, but with an added pop of protein from the white beans. Another variant of this dish, called Rumbledethumps, was a staple meal of ours for years until we gave up cheese; this beany casserole, with a little more nutritional yeast to boost the flavor, could potentially fill the same role. (But if we decide to try it this way, we'll probably go with just a half recipe.)

Recipe of the Month: Roasted Butternut Squash Curry

After slipping October's Recipe of the Month in just under the wire, Brian decided to get started early hunting down one for November. He did a general search for "hearty fall recipes" and came across a list that included an intriguing-looking recipe for butternut squash curry—a serendipitous find, since we happened to have all that butternut squash from our fall harvest. But we didn't have all the other ingredients required for that particular dish, so Brian did a second, more targeted search for similar recipes that we could make using only what we had on hand. And that's how he came across the Roasted Butternut Squash and Chickpea Curry at Cupful of Kale. The only thing it called for that we didn't already have was curry powder, and he could easily whip that up using another recipe he found on the site Feasting at Home. (It calls for 14 different spices and seasonings, but our well-stocked spice cabinet has all of them.)

As usual, Brian made a couple of minor modifications to the basic curry recipe. Following a tip at the bottom of the recipe, he added six ounces of frozen spinach to the dish to boost its veggie content. He also substituted home-cooked chick peas for the canned ones and changed the unspecified "salt and pepper" in the recipe to a teaspoon and a half of salt and no pepper. Also, since I'm a spice wimp, he replaced the quarter-teaspoon of "hot chilli powder" with a dash of our not-that-hot cayenne pepper. And, midway through the cooking process, he decided to omit the 200 ml of vegetable stock the recipe called for because the sauce seemed quite liquid enough without it.

The result was a mild but flavorsome curry that both of us enjoyed. Roasting the squash, rather than just cooking it on the stove, definitely seemed to add more depth and complexity to the flavor. Of course, it also added time to the cooking process. The squash had to roast for about 40 minutes to get tender enough to go into the dish, and while you spend part of that time preparing the rest of the sauce, it's still not exactly a quick weeknight dinner. So we probably won't make this as often as other squash favorites like our roasted vegetable medley (diced squash roasted with Brussels sprouts and potatoes, with scrambled egg added for protein) or butternuts squash souffle. But it can join our beloved butternut squash lasagna as a dish we trot out for relaxed weekend dinners.

Recipe of the Month: Roasted Stuff

As I noted last week, these past couple of weeks have been insanely busy for us. Between medical appointments, home maintenance, and special events like last weekend's game fest and this weekend's trip to the Renaissance Faire, I wasn't sure when we'd manage to squeeze in a Recipe of the Month for October. But as always, Brian came to the rescue. He looked at what we had on hand—some broccoli in the fridge, canned beans in the pantry, some leeks and butternut squash harvested from the garden—and decided to toss it all together and roast it. We'd already tried roasting all these ingredients separately and knew they cooked up well that way, so it was just a question of how well they worked together.

The answer turned out to be "pretty well." The sweet squash, starchy white beans, and crispy, flavorful leeks all complemented each other nicely, and the soy curl "bacon" Brian threw in added a salty note and made the dish more substantial. The only element that wasn't quite on pitch was the broccoli. Its flavor was okay, but its fibrous texture didn't mesh well with the other textures in the dish. We think it would probably work better with a different vegetable, such as Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, or even cabbage. All of these roast well and would probably play nicely with the other ingredients.

All in all, we considered this recipe good enough to write down, but we're treating it as a work in progress. For lack of a better idea, we're calling it:

ROASTED STUFF

Peel and dice 1 lb. butternut squash. Toss it with 1/4 tsp. salt and 2 Tbsp. canola oil. Roast at 400F for 15 minutes.

Chop up 5-6 oz. broccoli (one small head) and one medium leek. Drain and rinse two 15-ounce cans cannellini beans. Add these to the squash, along with 1/4 tsp. salt and 1 Tbsp. canola oil, and toss to combine. Roast another 15 minutes.

Prepare the Soy Curl bacon. In a medium bowl, combine 2 Tbsp. water, 2 Tbsp. soy sauce, 1 tsp. nutritional yeast, 1 tsp. Dijon mustard, 1 tsp. maple syrup, and 1/4 tsp. Liquid Smoke. Microwave the mixture 20 to 30 seconds. Soak 1 to 1.5 oz. Soy Curls in this mixture for 10 to 15 minutes, then toss with 1 tsp. canola oil to coat. Add the curls to the mixture in the roasting pan and roast another 20 minutes.

If you decide to try making this, consider replacing the broccoli with an equivalent amount of cauliflower or one of the other veggies I named. Then let me know how it turns out.

Recipe of the Month: African Peanut Stew

All week, I've been nervously watching the last days of September running out without a single good idea for a new Recipe of the Month. Fortunately, Brian came to my rescue. After a quick search for "high protein vegan recipe," he tracked down something that didn't look (at first glance, at least) like anything we'd tried before: this African Peanut Stew from The Plant-Based School. He picked up most of the necessary ingredients (sweet potatoes, onion, crushed tomatoes) on our weekly Lidl run and grabbed a bunch of fresh spinach at the new SuperFresh in town, and he was ready to cook.

Brian made only a couple of minor modifications to this recipe. Knowing that I don't like things too spicy, he dialed back the red pepper flakes from 1/2 to 1/4 teaspoon and the 1/8 teaspoon of black pepper to just a pinch. He cooked everything else just as directed, and it was pretty straightforward. Not lightning-fast, since it takes half an hour on the stove (or in this case, the new induction burner) to get the sweet potatoes tender, but it didn't require a lot of baby-sitting. The only real work was the ten minutes of chopping, grating, and sauteing before tossing everything in the pot.

Then there was the matter of garnishes. The recipe recommended topping each bowl with "a small handful of crushed, toasted, unsalted peanuts, a generous squeeze of lime juice, and some pickled red onions." Brian wasn't entirely convinced the lime juice would work with the rest of the dish, so rather than waste a fresh lime on it, he just got out the bottle of lime juice and set that on the side. (As it turned out, his instincts were good: neither of us felt that the stew would benefit from this addition.) But he did chop and toast some peanuts and whip up a small batch of the Quick Pickled Red Onions from the same recipe site: sliced red onion steeped for half an hour in a mixture of vinegar, lemon juice, salt, sugar, and red pepper. Since I'm not a huge fan of onions (and they don't love me, either), I skipped this garnish, but Brian tried it and found that it did indeed go well with the stew. However, he didn't think it added so much that he would go to the effort of making it again.

The stew, on the other hand, was something we both deemed worthy of being added to our recipe rotation. It's healthy, vegan, and easy to make, and it doesn't call for any expensive or hard-to find ingredients. And it offers a complex, satisfying mixture of flavors and textures, with chick peas, tender chunks of sweet potato, and chewy strands of spinach in a flavorful broth blended from tomatoes, onions, garlic, ginger, cumin, pepper, and peanut butter. This combination sounds quite unusual, but I realized after a few mouthfuls that it wasn't so different from another dish Brian is very fond of: the tahini-spiked Garlic, Chick-pea and Spinach Soup from Linda Frazer's Vegetariana. However, that recipe isn't vegan (it calls for heavy cream), so this one fits better into our current diet.

The one thing we might do differently next time we make this dish is to plan ahead and make sure we have a suitable bread to serve with it. The recipe suggests either naan or pita bread, but all we had on hand was a loaf of Brian's sturdy whole-wheat bread and some whole-wheat tortillas. So instead, we accompanied the meal with some waffles left over from that morning's breakfast. They were made with whole-wheat flour too, but their lighter texture made them a closer approximation to what the Plant-Based Schoolteachers had in mind.

Recipe of the Month: Mushroom Seitan Burgers

Last month, we tried a recipe for seitan burgers that was not a resounding success. The texture was just about perfect, satisfyingly chewy and able to hold up well on the grill. But the recipe's secret ingredient, raw beet, gave the flavor a note that was, to my taste, distinctly off-putting. 

When I inquired on the recipe site about substituting something else for the beet, one of the bloggers suggested sweet potato. Brian tried this version of the dish, and it did indeed work better, but it was sort of lacking in oomph. The burgers had the same meaty chew without the odd bitter flavor from the beets, but they also didn't have much flavor, period. None of the main ingredients—lentils, wheat gluten, sweet potato—had a strong enough taste to carry the dish.

However, Brian wasn't prepared to give up yet. While searching for ideas to replace the beet, I'd come across another seitan burger recipe that used black beans and mushrooms along with the seitan. Brian decided to combine these two recipes, substituting black beans for the lentils in the original dish and sauteed mushrooms for the raw beet. For a half-recipe, he used 7 ounces of raw mushrooms, which cooked down to about 3.5 ounces. He also decided, on the spur of the moment, to substitute tamari for the soy sauce in the original recipe, mainly because the soy sauce bottle was empty and he didn't feel like going downstairs to grab a new one.

This revised recipe was a vast improvement on either of the versions we'd tried before. The burgers were still hearty, chewy, and easy to grill, and the new combination of ingredients gave them a rich, earthy, savory flavor. If they had a fault, it was that they were a trifle on the dry side, not juicy like a real beef burger. That's a flaw we might be able to amend by adding a little more fat to the burgers, possibly by upping the amount of peanut butter in the mixture. 

But even as they are, these are far superior to any commercial plant-based burger we've ever tried to grill. They're also much more affordable than most. Based on a quick calculation, it looks like the half-sized batch we made cost us a total of $2.85, or about 71 cents per burger. And that's with the tamari, which is significantly costlier than soy sauce and probably doesn't make that big a difference to the taste. Switching back to soy sauce could knock it down to around 62 cents per burger; doubling the volume of peanut butter would increase that to around 67 cents. But no matter how you make them, they're less than one-third the cost of Impossible Burgers, which run around $2.25 per patty, and less than half the price of Morningstar Farms Grillers.

In short, these Mushroom Seitan Burgers are our new go-to protein for grilling. That's not to say we're planning to ditch our Soykebabs, which are quicker to prepare, or to give up on experimenting with ways to grill tofu. But with this burger recipe, we'll always have something to toss on the grill at a picnic or any other event where carnivores and herbivores mix. Indeed, I suspect that we might even be able to impress the carnivores with these burgers if we could persuade any of them to try one.

Recipe of the Month: Seitan Burgers

A new month, a new Recipe of the Month. And this one's something we haven't tried before: a veggie burger. You might think that doesn't really fit the criteria for a Recipe of the Month, which is supposed to be a veggie- or fruit-centered dish, but this one features a secret veggie ingredient: beet. (Actually, it turned out to be not so secret, but more about that later.)

One of the difficulties of being a vegetarian in summertime is grilling. Don't get me wrong, grilled vegetables are fantastic, but they're just not that substantial. (We love our grilled eggplant and pepper sandwiches, but we have to supplement them with smoked herring to add protein to the meal.) We've tried all the brands of veggie dogs and sausages without finding one that we both like. (Brian quite enjoyed the Impossible Brat, saying it tasted just like a real bratwurst; I concluded that I must not like bratwurst.) We've also attempted multiple recipes for homemade vegan sausage, and none of them really ticked all the boxes for taste and texture. And when we tried taking some veggie patties from Trader Joe's and tossing those on the grill, it was a complete failure. (Maybe that was partly because they'd been in the freezer too long, but I don't think it would work much better with fresh ones.)

After that failed attempt, I decided to check the It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken blog for a vegan burger that would work on the grill. Not only did the author have one, she confidently billed it as "The Best Vegan Seitan Burger." This, she maintained, was due to its weird-sounding combination of ingredients, including vital wheat gluten, cooked lentils, soy sauce, liquid smoke, peanut butter, and raw beets. I was skeptical about that last one, since I have never been a fan of beets, but the post insisted that this ingredient would "add a deep earthiness that really makes these burgers taste authentic." Even her beet-hating husband, she assured me, loved these burgers. So I decided to swallow my objections and give it a try. Even if it was another failure, I reasoned, it would at least give me a Recipe of the Month for July.

This recipe has multiple steps, so Brian spread it out over a couple of evenings. First, he cooked up a batch of lentils in the pressure cooker. (The blogger said she'd used canned lentils, but we've never seen those in any store. Maybe it's a Canadian thing.) The second step was supposed to be mixing those up in the food processor with the other ingredients, but Brian quickly realized that even the half-batch he was making would be too much for our little Magic Bullet. So, instead, he mixed up the dough in stages. First he pulsed the beet in the Bullet; then he added the lentils and mixed those in; then he dumped the contents into a bowl and stirred in all the seasonings; and finally he blended in the wheat gluten by hand. 

Once that was done, he shaped the dough into patties and steamed them. The full recipe was supposed to make six patties, but he found that his half-recipe was enough for four reasonable-size patties, just enough to fill our steamer basket. At this stage, the burgers looked very much like actual ground beef patties. They then went into the fridge to be chilled until grill time. 

The next night, the burgers went onto the grill, along with some zucchini spears and sliced potatoes. With a coating of oil to keep them from sticking, they held up quite well on the grill, coming out firm and nicely browned. Nor did their texture disappoint when they were served up on buns. The burgers had a satisfying, meaty chew, and they weren't dry or tough like so many other meat substitutes. If I were judging them strictly based on texture, I'd say they were by far the best homemade plant-based meat we've ever tried. 

But their flavor was a disappointment. Despite the blogger's assurance that I wouldn't be able to taste the beets, to me that distinctive bitterness was the dominant note. Brian, who is not a huge fan of beets either, said he couldn't detect them at all, and other commenters on the recipe post have said the same (including one who loves beets and was quite disappointed that she couldn't taste them). But for me, it was clearly present, and neither ketchup nor mustard could entirely disguise it.

Still, all hope is not lost for this recipe. I left a comment on the post asking if there was any way to make these burgers without the beet, and I got a response suggesting I could "try substituting with sweet potato for a milder flavor." So my idea is to give this one more go, using that substitution, and see how it comes out. If we both find that version palatable, it could be the perfect protein for summer grilling. The wheat gluten is a somewhat pricey ingredient, but it's still only a little over a buck for four patties' worth. That makes these much cheaper than Impossible Burgers, with a lot less packaging to boot. And, assuming we can eliminate the beet flavor, just as satisfying.

Recipe of the Month: Creamy Zucchini Pesto

Last week, as I spied the end of the June approaching, I started hunting around for a new Recipe of the Month. However, this quest was complicated by the early-summer heat wave, which made Brian reluctant to cook indoors any more than he had to. So he presented me with a list of all the veggies we had in the fridge and I started looking for a vegan-friendly dish we could cook on the grill with them. 

That search led me to the Easy Grilled Vegetables recipe from Damn Delicious. We didn't have all the veggies the recipe called for (many of which, like tomatoes and asparagus, aren't in season at the same time), but we figured that wasn't a big deal. Since the key component of that dish was the basil garlic sauce, we thought we'd just make a batch and serve it with our usual selection of grilled veggies, such as zucchini, pepper, and eggplant. In preparation for that, Brian went out and picked a bunch of fresh basil, the first of this year's crop.

But then a complication arose. Dark clouds started piling up in the sky, and the weather report, which had been predicting thunderstorms that night, moved their ETA up to the early evening. That meant we needed a new plan for dinner—one that would use up all that fresh-picked basil without the use of the grill. And, since it was still blazing hot, one that ideally wouldn't heat the kitchen up too much in the process.

So I tried looking for recipes again, this time including "fresh basil" as one of my search terms. Unfortunately, most of the hits I got were just recipes for pesto, which wasn't a new dish to us. But then I came upon a pesto recipe with a twist: the Creamy Zucchini Pesto from The Simple Veganista. This dish featured zucchini in two different forms: pureed as part of the pesto sauce, and cut into long strips to form the "noodles." It certainly cleared the bar for a veggie-centered dish, and it didn't call for anything we didn't have.

However, Brian and I were a bit skeptical about the use of zucchini strips in place of pasta. We've tried a couple of other dishes built on a base of raw veggie "noodles," such as the butternut squash ribbons we made last November, and they just weren't that satisfying. So instead, we decided to use a trick we learned during my low-carb period: mixing raw vegetable strips with real noodles. We had just enough basil to make a quarter-sized batch of the whole dish, which would normally use just half a zucchini's worth of "noodles"; instead, Brian used one very small zucchini plus four ounces of dry whole-wheat spaghetti. He sliced up the zuke with our spiralizer and sauteed the zoodles briefly in oil to soften them up before tossing them with the cooked pasta.

Brian used another mini zuke in the pesto, along with a smallish garlic clove and one-quarter the amount of all the other ingredients. Rather than steaming the zucchini as the recipe recommended, he cooked it in the same pan he'd used for the zoodles, adding a little bit of water and covering it just long enough to soften the squash. He had to add a little bit of oil—about two teaspoons—to this quarter-batch of pesto to get it to blend properly, but it was still much less oily than most pesto. The quarter-sized batch was more than enough to sauce up our mixture of pasta and zucchini.

The resulting dish was pretty good. It wasn't mind-blowing, but it was as flavorful as most pesto, and the addition of zucchini gave it a creamier texture without the need for a lot of high-fat (and expensive) nuts and oil. Its biggest downside was that, even with the added noodles to bulk it up, it wasn't terribly substantial. It really could have used a protein-rich ingredient to give it more heft. I ended up adding the tail end of a tin of herring to my meal because the noodles just weren't enough to fill me up on their own.

Still, I'd say this is a decent recipe, one that will definitely come in handy in a month or so when our zucchini plants are really cranking out the squash. Next time we'll try tossing in some cubed tofu, and maybe some halved cherry tomatoes as well. That will add flavor and texture interest, making the dish more satisfying to the palate as well as the stomach.

As for that other grilled vegetable recipe, I'm sure we'll get around to trying it some other time. There are still two or three months left of grilling season, and there's plenty more basil where this batch came from.

Recipe of the Month: Crispy Citrus Soy Curls (with bonus dessert)

Last week, with Memorial Day approaching, Brian and I were casting about for a Recipe of the Month for May. After taking stock of what we had in the fridge, he did a little hunting online and came across a suitable-looking dish on, of all places, Instagram. The post featured (of course) an exquisitely arranged photo with the title, "Crispy citrus soy curls with soba noodles and roasted brussel sprouts and broccoli." Neither of us actually has an Instagram account, but fortunately he didn't need one to grab the recipe; he just copied all the text out of the post, pasted it into a Google doc, and went from there. 

As usual, Brian made a few minor modifications to the recipe. First, he decided to use only Brussels sprouts rather than a mix of sprouts and broccoli, since we had plenty of them on hand. He also replaced the agave nectar the recipe called for, which we didn't have, with simple syrup. (He thought he might need a substitute for "vegan hoisin sauce" as well, but it turned out the hoisin sauce we had in the fridge was vegan; I guess this qualifier was only added because there are some varieties that aren't.) And finally, he added a little salt and nutritional yeast to the soaking water for the Soy Curls to boost their flavor a bit.

My picture of the finished product isn't as beautiful as the Instagrammer's, but I'd bet it tasted just as good. The fried Soy Curls and roasted Brussels sprouts were nice and crisp, drenched in sticky, sour-sweet sauce rich with the flavors of citrus, garlic, and ginger. And the soba noodles, with their earthy buckwheat flavor and chewy texture, made a more interesting backdrop to the dish than rice. I wouldn't say we like this dish better than our other Soy Curl recipes, but it's nice to have it in our repertoire in case we ever feel like a change of pace.

Here is Brian's version of the recipe:

Crispy Citrus Soy Curls with Roasted Brussels Sprouts and Soba Noodles

Toss 1 lb. halved Brussels sprouts with ½ tsp salt and enough olive or canola oil to coat. Roast at 400 degrees F for 30 minutes (until browned).

Mix ½ tsp. salt and 1 tsp. nutritional yeast in 1 ⅓ cup hot water, then add 4 oz. Soy Curls to soak. When the curls are soft, remove from liquid and squeeze as much liquid out as possible. Sprinkle ½ cup cornstarch on the soy curls and toss to fully coat. Fry curls in oil, stirring constantly, until crisped and browned.

Mix ¾ cup orange juice, 1 Tbsp. lemon juice, 2 Tbsp. tamari, 3 Tbsp. agave or simple syrup, and 2 Tbsp. (vegan) hoisin sauce. In a separate bowl, mix 1 Tbsp. cornstarch in 2 Tbsp. water.

Mince 4 cloves garlic and saute with 1 tsp. (or more) minced or grated ginger root on low heat until softened. Stir in juice mixture and simmer for ~3 minutes. Stir in cornstarch slurry and continue to stir until sauce is thickened and smooth.

Cook 9 oz dry soba noodles until done. Drain and rinse with cold water.

Combine Soy Curls and sauce until curls are well-coated. Serve Soy curls, sprouts, and soba together.

And if you'd like a vegan dessert to go with that, here's a chocolate cookie recipe Brian made up on the spur of the moment for a game party last weekend. They're both vegan and gluten-free, yet surprisingly moist and tender. For a completely improvised recipe, not bad at all.

Brian's Impromptu Double Chocolate Cookies

Combine in mixing bowl:

• ¼ cup cocoa powder
• ¼ cup sugar
• ¼ cup refined coconut oil, melted
• ¼ cup aquafaba
• 1 tsp vanilla
• ¼ tsp. salt
• ½ tsp. baking powder
• 1 ¾ cup + 2 Tbsp almond flour
• ¼ cup chopped walnuts
• ½ cup vegan chocolate chips

Drop by spoonfuls on baking sheet. Bake at 375 degrees F for 14 minutes.

 

Recipe of the Month: White Bean and Mushroom Stew with Dumplings

Brian and I are currently visiting my in-laws in Indianapolis for the solar eclipse. We'll be away a total of five days, so one of the things we had to do before leaving was to eat up all the leftovers in the fridge. We managed to do this by lunchtime on Friday, which left us with a slight dilemma about what to have for dinner. Whatever we made needed to use up a container of mushrooms we had in the fridge, since we weren't sure they would survive until next Thursday. But all our existing mushroom-based recipes—mushroom-barley soup, pizza, stir-fry—made large batches that would create new leftovers. And we couldn't just use the shrooms in an omelet, because we had only two eggs in the fridge. (For the past several weeks, Lidl has been all out of Certified Humane eggs, and we haven't been desperate enough to pay $8 a dozen for them at the farmers' market.)

To resolve this problem, Brian decided to improvise a mushroom stew. He sauteed the mushrooms first to release their juice, then sauteed some onion and garlic as well. Then he added the mushrooms back in, along with a can of cannellini beans for a protein source. He thickened the liquid from the beans and veggies with a little flour to make a gravy and flavored it with nutritional yeast, salt, and fresh thyme. And then, rather than serve it over pasta or rice, he whipped up some dumplings to go on top.

This thrown-together dish worked surprisingly well. It wasn't much to look at, being a sort of uniform beige color with a lumpy consistency. But the mushrooms and nutritional yeast provided plenty of umami, and the white beans and dumplings made it hearty enough to stick to our ribs. The texture was a bit stodgy, but still, for a totally ad-hoc recipe, it was remarkably satisfying.

That said, I'm not sure this stew will become a regular addition to our dinner repertoire. As I noted before, we already have quite a few other recipes that use mushrooms, most of which we like better than this one. And under normal circumstances, a recipe that makes lots of leftovers is a feature, not a bug. We'll file this dish away in the memory banks in case there's any future occasion when we need a quick, one-night-only dinner with no leftovers, but we probably won't haul it out very often.

Recipe of the Month: Peanut Tofu with Cabbage Noodles

A few weeks ago, the It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken newsletter recommended a recipe that looked intriguing: Easy Peanut Tofu. Most of the ingredients were things we normally keep on hand, and the method looked pretty simple. At first, though, I didn't think this dish would work as a Recipe of the Month. It's vegan, but it's a protein-centered dish with no vegetables in it, which would defeat these recipes' stated purpose of getting more fruits and veggies into my diet.

Brian, upon examining the recipe, came up with a novel solution to this problem. Rather than serving the tofu up over rice as the recipe suggests, he proposed to serve it with a mixture of rice noodles and thinly sliced cabbage. He knew this combination would work because he regularly uses it in pad Thai—a modification he made to that recipe to up its veggie content when I was on my reduced-carb diet. This accompaniment sounded both healthier and more interesting than plain white rice, and it would eliminate the need for a separate vegetable side.

As usual, Brian made a few alterations to the peanut tofu recipe, but only small ones. He left out the Sriracha and cilantro, which we didn't have. He used plain peanuts instead of salted peanuts, which we also didn't have. And since the tofu we had on hand was firm rather than extra-firm, he baked it longer than the recipe specified—about 25 minutes instead of 12 to 18—to make sure it wouldn't be too moist. While it was baking, he cooked a third of a package of rice noodles (about 5.5 ounces) and sauteed 14 ounces of thinly sliced cabbage, together with a couple of sliced scallions and half a teaspoon of salt, until it was tender. Then he tossed the cabbage and noodles together and served it alongside the sauced tofu.

This turned out to be a splendid combination. The cabbage noodles had more flavor and texture interest than plain white rice, but not so strong a flavor as to clash with the real star of the show, the tofu. It had a sticky outer coating and a chewy texture that contrasted nicely with the soft, slippery noodle mixture, and its flavor was a dazzling blend of peanut, sesame, garlic, ginger, and salty soy sauce, with hints of tangy rice vinegar and sweet maple syrup. And the crunchiness of the chopped peanuts on top added still more texture interest. It's possible the dish would have been better still with the missing cilantro and Sriracha, but don't think it suffered at all from their absence.

In short, this recipe is a definite keeper. It's easy, it's healthy, it's delicious, and all the ingredients are cheap and readily available. On top of that, it's both vegan and gluten-free. It's a recipe anyone who doesn't have a peanut allergy can love.

Recipe of the Month: Roasted Leek and Cauliflower Pasta

February's Recipe of the Month came about because of a fortuitous find: sale-priced cauliflower at Lidl. Brian didn't have any particular need for cauliflower, but he couldn't pass it up. As a result, he ended up cruising the Internet searching for vegan recipes that used both cauliflower and leeks, which we also had on hand. And when he came across the Roasted Leek and Cauliflower Pasta recipe at Lazy Cat Kitchen, he decided it looked like a winner.

As per usual, Brian made a few minor modifications to this recipe. He increased the volume of veggies slightly to use up our entire medium-to-large cauliflower and two medium leeks (as opposed to the half a large cauliflower and two "smallish" leeks called for in the original). He also increased the volume of pasta from 7 ounces to 8 in order to use up a half-box of whole wheat penne we had sitting around. He left out the capers, which we didn't have, and cut the amount of black pepper down from a quarter-teaspoon to just a couple of grinds. And since we didn't have either dairy-free cream or cashews to make a homemade cashew cream, he mocked up his own substitute by blending soft tofu with soy milk.

But his most significant change was deciding to frizzle the leeks—that is, sauté them briefly in oil before browning them in the oven, à la Molly Katzen—rather than soaking them in boiling water before roasting them. He put them on a separate baking sheet so he could remove them from the oven when they were done, rather than spreading them alongside the cauliflower and having to remove them once cooked. Besides being less work, this was a technique we were already familiar with and knew would give us good results.

And good indeed were those results. The dish was packed with flavor: tart lemon juice, cheesy nutritional yeast, and fragrant frizzled leeks and garlic. The contrast between the tender veggies, chewy pasta, crunchy toasted walnuts, and silky, creamy sauce added plenty of texture interest. And between the nutritional yeast, the walnuts, and the tofu in the sauce, it provided enough protein to fill us up despite the lack of any meat or meat-alternative component.

Good as it was, I don't know if this dish will become a regular addition to our repertoire. We can't count on finding cauliflower on sale all the time, so we'll probably save this recipe for cauliflower season, which around here is from September through December. Fortunately, leeks are also in season at that time, and this warm and savory meal will be just right for crisp autumn evenings.