Cheese-Free Mexican

While we were in San Diego we enjoyed many Mexican meals but each meal is laden with cheese. One soup I did not find that I have eaten in Mexico is tortilla soup. It is one of my favourites! So tonight I made a cheese-free tortilla soup. I'm not sure if it usually has cheese as some recipes had cheese and others didn't but this one has the flavour that I was looking for. Corey says it's a bit cilantro-y for him so reduce the amount if you don't like a strong cilantro flavour. I love it! There is another recipe that used nutritional yeast to make a cheesy tortilla soup. I'll let you know what that one is like.

Tortilla Soup

4 cups veggie broth
2 garlic cloves, chopped
4 green onions,sliced
1 can (15oz) diced tomatoes (don't use canned tomatoes - use frozen or fresh ones)
1/4 - 1/2 bunch cilantro
1 tbsp chili powder
1.5 tbsp cumin (fresh ground from Abby's - remember?)
3-4 handfuls of tortilla chips
1 tsp salt or more to taste
1/2 cup frozen corn
1.5 cups cooked black beans (one can or the ones you have cooked and in the freezer)
juice of 1 lime (or about 1tbsp of lime juice)
1 avocado, sliced

Bring the stock, garlic and onion to a boil. Turn down heat and add tomatoes. Allow to simmer for a few minutes. Remove from heat. Stir in cilantro, chili powder, cumin and tortilla chips. The chips will soften (duh) and when they do, blend the soup with an immersion blender. Add salt and adjust seasoning to taste. Return to heat, add corn and beans and bring up to almost a boil. Turn the heat down and simmer until you are ready to eat the soup. Crumble tortillas into the soup and add slices of avocado on top.

I love lasagna!

I used to make lasagna quite often but gave this wonderful one-pot meal up when we became vegan. I really don't like many of the soy cheese products and I try to avoid as much wheat as possible but when I came across this recipe in the Accidental Vegan cookbook I just bought, I could not resist (with a few modifications of course!) I was having good friends over for dinner so I decided they could be my guinea pigs. That's what good friends are for!

There are several steps for this recipe because you make all three sauces but each one is made quickly so the overall time is not a big deal. You could melt soy cheese on top but as we have recently discovered, some brands have casein from milk in them. Check your labels carefully.

I use the instant lasagna noodles because I hate fighting with lasagna noodles that stick in my pot when I am boiling them and then fall apart as I transfer them into the lasagna pan. It limits my options for "flavours" of lasagna noodles but for these rare occasions, I don't mind just eating plain white semolina flour noodles.

Spinach Pesto Lasagna

1. Spinach Tomato Sauce
1 tbsp olive oil
1 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp dried oregano (been to Abby's yet?)

2 tbsp dried basil
1 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp pepper
6-8 large tomatoes skinned and chopped or just chopped fine
1 pkg frozen spinach, thawed

Heat the oil in a saucepan, add onions, garlic, herbs, spices and salt. Fry on medium heat until the onions start to become translucent. Add the tomatoes, lower heat, cover and let simmer 30 minutes. (This is when you make the other sauces.) Squeeze the water out of the spinach and mix it into the sauce. Let it heat through.

2. Pesto
1/2 cup sun-dried tomatoes, reconstituted in boiling water
2 cloves garlic
3 cups loosely packed fresh basil leaves
1 cup shelled walnuts
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup fresh parsley
1 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp pepper

Put the garlic cloves in the food processor and chop finely. Drain the tomatoes and add all the ingredients to the food processor. Process until finely chopped and well mixed.

3. "Cheese" Sauce - nothing like cheese at all really except the creaminess of a cheese sauce
1/2 tbsp olive oil
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup nutritional yeast (great source of B12 - one of the only sources for vegans)
1 1/2 cups water
1/2 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp prepared mustard

Gently heat oil over medium-low heat. Add flour and yeast and whisk until it is all mixed together. It will be a combined crumbly mixture. Add the water, raise the heat to medium and whisk continuously until the sauce boils and thickens to the consistency of pea soup. It will burn fast so it is important to whisk it all the time. Remove from heat and whisk in the salt and mustard. 

LASAGNA

1 pkg express lasagna
1 pkg soft tofu, drained and crumbled into a bowl
the 3 sauces above

Heat the oven to 375 degrees. Mix the pesto into the bowl with the crumbled tofu. In a 9x13 pan, spread 1/3 of the tomato-spinach sauce. Layer noodles onto the sauce. Spread 1/2 the tofu-pesto sauce on top. Add another layer of noodles. Spread 1/3 of the tomato-spinach sauce on top then cover with the rest of the tofu-pesto sauce. Another layer of noodles. Cover with the rest of the tomato-spinach sauce. Pour the "cheese" sauce on top, cover with foil and bake for 45 minutes. Remove the foil and bake another 15 minutes. Take out of the oven and let stand for 10 minutes before serving.

Each of the sauces are good on their own for pasta. I boil macaroni then fry onions and tomatoes together, toss in the macaroni, add the "cheese" sauce, put it in a baking dish, cover it with breadcrumbs and bake it for 20 minutes. Makes a great lunch!

Wednesday Morning Pancakes

The advantages of being on Spring Break is that I can cook more and I can blog more recipes as I try them. Corey had this morning off so I decided to make some pancakes. It is a rare morning when we have time or energy for pancakes and I find that recipes are usually too big. I know I can reduce the amount but then that adds another mental step and that makes the task even more onerous! All for silly pancakes.

Isa Chandra Moskowitz to the rescue.Her book Vegan Brunch has great recipes in realistic quantities. This one made 8 small pancakes which was perfect for us. I modified the recipe a little so this is my modification. If you want her real recipe, buy her book!

Wednesday Morning Pancakes

1 1/4 cup whole wheat flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tbsp canola oil
1/3 cup water
1 1/4 cup unsweetened soy milk
2 tbsp maple syrup

cooking spray

Heat a skillet (or two) over medium heat while you make the batter. You want these to be hot and dry.

Sift the dry ingredients in a medium bowl. Make a well in the centre and add the wet ingredients. Use a metal spoon to mix the two together until just mixed. A few lumps are okay. Don't over-mix or the pancakes will be tough.

Turn the heat down just a little under the skillets. Lightly spray the skillets with cooking spray. You only need to do this once. Drop a large dollop of batter on the skillet and move the skillet around to get a somewhat circular shape if that matters to you. I used about 1/3 cup of batter per pancake. Leave the pancake to cook about 3 minutes. There will be small bubbles popping on top and the top will seem almost dry. Flip and cook the other side for about 1 minute.

Serve with maple syrup, agave syrup, blueberries, or whatever takes your fancy! 

Chocolate Pudding

This comes as a request from a friend who is apparently turning into a muffin because she is making my "instant yummy muffin" recipe all the time. I love this pudding recipe because it's fast, easy and yummy. I've served it on top of frozen blueberries and raspberries as a dessert for guests and no-one has complained that it tastes like tofu. That's the beauty of silken tofu. I buy mine at Superstore or Save-on-Foods.

Firm or Soft - whatever you can find.

Chocolate Pudding (adapted from Vegan Planet by Robin Robertson)

1 cup semi-sweet vegan chocolate chips
1/4 cup maple syrup
1 12oz package of silken tofu
1 tsp vanilla extract
raspberries and blueberries

Melt the chocolate chips with the maple syrup in the top of a double boiler or in the microwave. Heat 30 seconds, stir, then heat again. Don't let it burn! Stir it and let it cool slightly.

Place the tofu and vanilla in a blender or food processor. Blend until it's smooth. Add the melted chocolate mixture and blend until it's well combined.

Put blueberries and raspberries in the bottom of individual glasses or in a serving bowl. Cover with the pudding and refrigerate for 2 hours until it's firm (or eat it when it's more liquidy if you can't wait!)

Happy Meatless Monday!

Check out this great website!

Even if you only go meatless on Mondays, it makes a huge difference.

Awesome Kale!

Kale is an awesome leafy green that can be added to anything from soups to stews to smoothies. My step-sister chops and freezes it then adds it to her morning protein smoothies. I usually add spinach to mine but Jan swears by kale. I'll try it one day and let you know.

Here is a great article about the advantages of kale by www.organicauthority.com entitled 7 Reasons Kale is the New Beef.

While on our trip, thee was no opportunity to eat vegan unless we had an undressed salad (a rather rude salad but not as rude as these vegetables are...) so we opted for vegetarian as much as we could. If I had really thought about it this would not have come as a surprise as we were just north of Mexico and on the Pacific Ocean where seafood is king. Everything is coated in cheese and creamy sauces. Luckily we walked about 20km per day! We did get vegan food at Disneyland though! We found a cart with hummus and crackers, mango slices, pineapple, giant pickles, and dried fruit and nut mix. It was like a little piece of heaven in a sea of "toxic edibles." We ate, we enjoyed, and we are now thrilled to be back to our plant based diet.

Back to kale!

When we were in the airport in Portland, I found a wrap that proudly advertised that it was vegan so Corey and I shared one with another pot of hummus and crackers (I need to find those here - they are great even if they do produce a lot of waste. Handy to have when I suddenly need a snack on the go! let me know if you ever see these.) The wrap was delicious. More filling than wrap (my mother's complaint about wraps is that they are always more wrap than filling) and very tasty! The filling was: kale, cabbage, broccoli, pea shoots, red grapes, apple, and hazelnuts all chopped small so that you wouldn't pull big chunks out when you bit into the wrap. The filling was mixed with a soy dressing like Little Creek but it wasn't wet and drippy; only enough dressing to add a bit of moisture. Yum! I think I'll make it as a salad.

When I was growing up, we ate borecole (the dutch word for kale but for us it was the whole dish) which consisted of boiling potatoes with an onion and steaming chopped kale and a sliced rookworst on top at the same time. The juices from the sausage would drip through the kale and into the boiling water to flavour the potatoes. The potatoes and onion were mashed and the kale and rookworst mixed in to make a single dish. Apparently a dish used during hard economic times because one sausage could be used to feed a large family with cheap potatoes and kale. Obviously I don't make borecole anymore because I really don't like meat flavoured artificial sausages but the mixing of kale, onion and potato is delicious as a side dish.

And here is the real recipe for the post...

Egyptian Lentil Soup (adapted from The Accidental Vegan by Devra Gartenstein)

8 cups veggie stock
2 tsp sea salt
2 cups brown/blue/green dried lentils (not red or yellow or else it will be mush)
2 tomatoes, chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp dried mint (don't omit this or else it's not Egyptian)
1 bunch kale, remove the middle stem and chop the leaves
1 tbsp lemon juice

Check the lentils carefully for rocks or other debris. Trust me - I've seen beans and rice being dried on the side of the road in China - you don't want to skip this step. Combine the veggie stock, salt, lentils, tomatoes, onion, garlic, cumin, and mint in a pot. Bring it up to a boil then reduce the heat and simmer, uncovered, for 30-40 minutes. Add the chopped kale. Stir the greens in and let the soup simmer another 20 minutes. Add more stock if needed and stir often near the end of the cooking time to prevent burning. Check that your lentils are cooked. Stir in the lemon juice and serve hot.

Another avocado recipe

I have been away for the past couple of weeks (well, no not really but over the weekends)so there have been no new posts. Don't despair veganites! I am always thinking about what I am going to post next. That being said, I will be away this week again trying new foods in San Diego. I'll try to get some new yummy recipes.

This is a warm avocado dip that I made that called for the dip to be put back in the avocado shells and then baked. I would skip that step and just put it in a small oven-proof dish and heat it that way. Makes for easier dipping.

Spicy Stuffed Avocados

2 ripe avocados
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup chopped red onion (the smaller the chunks the better for getting it onto your nacho chips or crackers)
3 cloves garlic finely chopped
1 green onion chopped
1 jalapeño stem and seeds removed and diced
1 red/yellow/orange pepper chopped small like the onion
1 tsp sea salt
1/2 cup chopped parsley or cilantro
1 tbsp Tabasco or frank's hot sauce or other vinegary hot sauce
1 tbsp lemon or lime juice

Heat oven to 375 degrees. Warm the oil over medium heat in a frying pan. Sauté the red onion, garlic, green onion and jalapeño. When the onions begin to soften, stir in the peppers, salt and cilantro. Slice the avocados and mash the flesh into the frying pan. Add the hot sauces and cook for about 5 minutes until it is all mashed together. Stir in lemon or lime juice. Taste and season more if needed. Return the mixture to the avocado shells or put in a small oven-proof dish. Bake for 15 minutes and then remove and eat with nacho chips or crackers. This would probably be good cold too. I thought it would be a great layer on the 7 layer dip with beans and salsa (so mine would be a 3 layer dip) but easy to take to an appy party or potluck.