Vegan Ramen

I used the ramen noodles from Serious Eats. It wasn't super pleasant to work with a very low hydration dough, but my pasta maker was up to the task.

For the broth:
- Better than Boullion veggie broth paste
- miso
- tahini
- tamari

Toppings:
- Baby bok choi, grilled
- frozen corn
- vegan "pork" from Homemade Vegan Pantry
- green onions

It was a great dish to have on the first snow day of the season and I'm excited to try making the noodles again.

Cooking for my parents

Last week I was in Colorado for a conference. The weekend before the conference, I spent a few days seeing my sister and her family, my aunt, uncle, cousin, and my parents. It was good to see everyone!

I made a couple of things for my parents during my brief visit.


My dad had some vital wheat gluten and nutritional yeast. So I decided to make vegan sausages.


Look at all the cast iron! I am super duper jealous.


This was the best way I could come up with to steam them.


What my mom was doing while I was cooking. Making a quilt for my nephew!


Chickpea gluten sausage, broccoli and carrots, and brown rice.


My mom and I were chatting and she started looking through my food blog when she came across the recipe for the Bubble Up Pizza Bites. She made some dough in her bread machine and then we rolled out pieces and filled them with tomato sauce, olives, and mushrooms. She put cheese on half of them. We rolled the toppings so that the dough was completely enclosing them. I think it works better that way, even though it is no longer "bubbling up". Pretty tasty!


My parents had two bananas reaching the end of its life. I decided to make some banana bread with it before I left. I used the recipe from here and it came out a bit dry, but it was still tasty. I did not use the sesame seeds on top, although they sound really good.

Notes
Lately, my seitan has not been coming out super duper well. It is slimy and not well formed. I'm not sure what changed in my seitan skillz, but they are lacking now. My parents were nice enough to eat the seitan and say that it tasted good. Also, since we have gotten the rice cooker, I have a hard time making rice on the stove top, this came out a bit gloopy. Not my finest culinary moment.

Grillin'

Today I was looking through Pinterest (see my boards here) and I saw a recipe for Grilled Mint Julep Peaches. I do love a good grilled peach and we had a few ending the near of their life from our produce delivery as well as bourbon, mint, and sugar, so we put together a grilling fest.



The recipe for the grilled mint julep peaches is located here. We had four small peaches, so I cut the glaze down by half and still had a lot left over. I tried to turn it into a drink with ginger beer, but it was waaayy too sugary. Over the peaches, the glaze was fabulous.

We also grilled apple-sage field roast sausages, a pear, and beet slices. The beet slices were still super hard by the time they came off the grill. Next time I would probably par-cook them by boiling in water or softening in the microwave oven before putting them on the grill. When we cut the beet into spears, it was tender enough to eat with the salad.

Here is our grill set up.




We have a charcoal grill, but instead of going through the hassle of setting it up and waiting for the coals to get hot, we used my husbands burner he usually uses for beer brewing. He put our cast iron grill pan on top of it and it got hot really really quickly.

Notes
We both enjoyed this meal a lot. The sausages are always good, the peaches were excellent, the pear was a pleasant surprise, and the beets were very tasty. A win!

Planet Box Lunches

So it has been a while since I have posted, but we are still cooking a lot around our household. We are currently doing a food delivery service and a winter CSA. The delivery comes right to our door every week filled with all organic fruits and vegetables - not local because we get things like oranges, bananas, and fresh blueberries. For the CSA we pick it up every three weeks and it usually full of carrots, potatoes, apples, lettuce, local milled wheat and oats, honey, etc. It is amazing, but a lot of food to receive all at once. It is a good thing it is vegetables that store really well.

Anyway, we have been eating better because we are always flush with fresh produce and I have been enjoying putting together awesome lunches.

If you are wondering about our great lunchboxes, you can find all about them on their website, Planet Box. They are pretty expensive, but we really like them. We have the rocket magnets, because you know, we are scientists!


My husband put this together for me this past weekend. It is Field Roast smoked apple sage sausage, salad with carrots, apples, and red bell pepper, chipotle spiced mashed potatoes, caramelized onions, salad dressing made with curry powder (do this! it is delicious!), an orange, and a leftover biscuit from our biscuits and gravy earlier that day.


I made this after a ladies night where we had a taco bar. I turned the TVP taco meat into a taco salad with sauteed onions and bell peppers. Actually, my husband made all the food for ladies night and then I kicked him out. He is really good to me. Next we have some pear, blueberries, a leftover macaroon, vegan mayo mixed with sriracha, bell peppers and carrots, raisins, Lara bar, orange, and tortilla chips.


In January, I test cooked the vegetarian meal for Once a Month Mom February meals. We have been slowly eating all of those meals. It is a great way to pull together an easy lunch because everything pretty much unfreezes by lunch time. On this day we had, Chickpea patties, bell pepper and blueberries, kiwifruit, BBQ sauce, carrot sticks, raisins, and a lemon poppy seed muffin.

I'm really sorry for the terrible pictures! Early morning is not the best time to take pictures in my kitchen.

Not Your Mama's Pot Roast

I used a combination of Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker and Table for Two. Well, just the seitan and gravy recipe from Table for Two and the method from the Slow Cooker book.



Ingredients
Seitan
1 1/2 cup vital wheat gluten
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
chipotle powder
cumin
salt
black pepper
chili powder
red pepper flakes
1 cup water
2 T soy sauce
2 T olive oil

Rest of the pot roast
onion
carrots
potatoes
~3/4 cup water/broth
thyme

Gravy
2 T nutritional yeast
2 T flour
3/4 cup water/broth (cooking liquid from the roast)
1 T olive oil
chopped mushrooms
roasted garlic (you can wrap a head of garlic in foil and place in the crock pot when you put in everything else and it should be roasted by the end of cooking time)
black pepper
salt

Method
Seitan
Mix the dry ingredients in medium bowl until mixed. Add the liquid ingredients and knead until gluten strings develop, about 3 minutes. Place in the slow cooker.

Rest of the pot roast
Chop the vegetables and place on top of the gluten roast. Add the water until the seitan is covered. Top with thyme to taste.

Cook on low for about 8 hours or until the roast is cooked through. Slice the roast and serve with the vegetables and a gravy made from the cooking liquid.

Gravy
In a small saucepan, over medium heat, toast the yeast and flour for a few minutes until warm and yummy smelling. Whisk in the liquid ingredients, stirring constantly over medium heat until the mixture thickens. Add the mushrooms and roasted garlic (mash into a paste before adding) and any seasonings and warm until everything is cooked through. Serve over everything else.

Notes
I really enjoyed this. My husband thought the seitan was a bit rubbery. I can't seem to get my seitan to not be rubbery if I boil or steam seitan. I have had good luck with baking it and having a good texture, but I don't want to bake it every time.

The gravy was super awesome. And I could eat roasted vegetables for every meal for the rest of my days and not get tired of them. When I was little, we would have pot roast from the slow cooker every Sunday for lunch after church and the meat was soooo dry. I would mostly eat the vegetables and not the meat. Maybe that is where my love of the roasted vegetables comes from.

Savory Stuffed Wheat-Meat Roast

Another entry in the slow cooker challenge

This one sounded like it would be delicious. Overall, it was pretty good, but there are things I would change if I were to make it again.



Braaaaiinns, after marinating all night long


I made the seitan last night and allowed it to marinate over night. The recipe called for it to just marinate in soy sauce, but I used about half of the soy sauce called for, added some olive oil, and filled the rest with water. The resulting roast was very very salty. I might eliminate the soy sauce completely or at least limit it drastically next time I make it.




Gluten rolled out, stuffing and rolled up with stuffing


The gluten was a pain to roll out. I enlisted the help of my husband who has more upper body strength than I do. I wish we had rolled it thinner because the ends were a bit too thick.

The stuffing part was delicious. While it cooked, the stuffing seemed to have melted into the gluten.

I had some left over stuffing, so I cooked it in my other crock pot for about three hours.



Stuffing before and after cooking


Finally, the roast. It was much much too salty. The water drizzled over top of the roast had soy sauce in it as well. Next time, much much less soy sauce.




Before cooking, after cooking, Im gunna eat choo!, inside the roast.


Verdict? It was good and I am looking forward to eating the roast this week with a bit of gravy. My husband didn't like the chewy texture of the roast and compared the appearance to haggis, but I thought it tasted fine. I loved how brown the roast became cooking in the slow cooker. The stuffing really is the best part about this dish.