Mum's "Meatless Monday" Mac and Cheese

This recipe is for tomorrow's Meatless Monday. I'll eat the leftovers of what I made today tomorrow for my lunch.

When I was growing up, Mum made an amazing mac and cheese using bacon, wine, and tons of Velveeta cheese on top of ravioli or tortellini. It was creamy heavenly artery-clogging goodness. I made it quite often for guests and some requested it when they were going to come over for a meal.

That recipe obviously does not lend itself well to a vegan lifestyle but today I made a cheese sauce that is almost identical. Still not good for us but oh-so-tasty!

Mum's Mac and Cheese

1 pkg (340g) uncooked rice (or not) macaroni
1tbsp olive oil
2 cloves garlic, crushed
1 small onion, chopped
4 cups unsweetened non-dairy milk
1/4 cup white wine or sherry
3 cups grated "cheese" (I used vegan cheddar and monteray jack)
1 "chicken" stock cube
1/2 tsp cajun spice or chili powder or paprika
a few drops liquid smoke (Corey also suggested trying small cubes of smoked tofu to be like bacon)
pinch of crushed chili flakes
salt and pepper to taste

You can do this two ways:
1. Cook the macaroni. Meanwhile, fry the onion and garlic in the heated olive oil in a large saucepan. When they are fragrant, add all the other sauce ingredients and bring to a very light boil. Turn down the heat and leave to simmer while the pasta cooks. The sauce will thicken. Add more smoke, salt, pepper,chili flakes to taste as needed. Pour onto the cooked macaroni.

OR

2. Fry the onion and garlic in the oil in a large saucepan. Add all the other ingredients including the raw macaroni. Reduce heat to low and cover. Cook 20 minutes, stir, cover, cook 20 minutes, stir, cover, etc until the macaroni is cooked. It will take about 1.5 hours depending on your pasta. Don't have it too high or else the sauce will burn. Adjust the seasonings as above.

Kabaka's Koffee Flavoured Kake

I made this cake last weekend and was sitting at the counter enjoying a piece when Kabaka decided that he LOVES coffee cake and wanted to crawl onto the counter to get a bite. This is the first human food he has tried to get. His claws were dug into my thighs and he was using all his 20lbs of weight to push against me as I tried to stop him from getting to my piece. I like the cake too, as does Corey.

Kabaka's Koffee Flavoured Kake

1 cup unsweetened almond milk
2 heaping tbsp instant coffee granules
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
2 cups flour (mine is whole wheat but I will also try with other types of gluten free flours)
1/4 cup sugar
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup canola oil
1 tsp vanilla

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees and lightly grease a cake tin/muffin cups/ loaf pan.

Measure out half of the milk and stir in the coffee granules. Once they have almost all dissolved, add the other half of the milk and vinegar. Set aside.

In a medium mixing bowl, mix all the dry ingredients together. Make a well in the centre and add the oil, milk mixture, and vinegar. Stir together with a metal spoon until just combined.

Pour into the prepared pan and cook until a toothpick comes out clean. Muffins are about 25 minutes. A loaf is about 40 minutes. Set your timer for 5 minutes less and check. My oven is a bit off for temperature so I set it higher and cook for about the same amount of time. You know your oven best.

When the cake is cool, you can make a coffee icing that is 1/2 cup margarine, powdered sugar, and instant coffee dissolved in a tbsp of milk. The amounts vary on the intensity of the sugar/coffee flavour that you want.

I have also made these as chocolate chip muffins and added 1/2 cup chocolate chips after mixing in the dry ingredients.

Meatless Monday Huo Guo

Happy Meatless Monday!

Today I have made a quick soup and we are having Huo Guo which I have been craving for a long time.... Ever since we ate it at Sean and Xiaoli's over the Easter weekend.

Huo Guo is a Chinese fondue. Veggie broth, Szechuan peppercorns, allspice, chili flakes, lotus seeds, some other weird seed that looks like nutmeg but isn't, green onions, and then all sorts of veggies and tofu to cook in the soup. I have made it from scratch but when we were in Calgary, we bought a variety of package soup mixes to try. Sean and Xiaoli like the Little Sheep brand and so we bought one of those but we also bought several other types.



I have made plates of veggies to cook in the soup:
Firm tofu
Bok Choy
Enoki mushrooms
Snap peas
Vermicelli noodles
Carrots
Celery
Black fungus (I added the reconstitution water from the fungus to the soup)

There is also a dipping sauce that consists of:
Sesame oil
Raw garlic
Stinky tofu (I had this in the sauce for the first time at Sean's and it made the sauce more unctuous - it's basically preserved tofu that is almost like a block of cream cheese - also called fermented tofu)

The soup simmers on the induction cooker in the middle, we add what we want to eat, scoop out what we are ready to eat when it's hot and voilà! Huo Guo! Love it!

Friday Morning Scones

I love my Fridays off... it has been awesome to have a three day weekend even if most of my Fridays were spent working on my Master's project. Next year it's back to full time. Sigh...

This morning while Corey went for a run (I ran 60 minutes last night for the first time - yahoo!) I decided to make scones for breakfast for when he returned. I modified a recipe from Vegan Brunch which is the same book that I got the muffin/loaf recipe from. These recipes are always great.

Friday Morning Scones

1 1/4 cup "milk" (I used the new almond/coconut milk but any milk will do)
2 tsp apple cider vinegar
3 cups flour (I used a mix of whole wheat and white)
2 tbsp baking powder
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup margarine (the block, not the tub kind)
2 tbsp canola oil
1 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Lightly grease a cookie sheet or use a piece of parchment paper. I use my Silpat.

Measure the "milk" in a large measuring cup and add the vinegar. Set aside to curdle while you make the rest of the mixture.

In a large bowl, combine the dry ingredients. Cut the margarine into small chunks and crumble it with your fingers into the dry ingredients. The mixture will be like little crumbles when it's all mixed together. What you are aiming for is to not have large clumps of margarine in amongst your flour.

Make a well in the centre of the mixture. Pour in the curdled milk, vanilla and canola oil. Using your fingers again, gently mix it all together. You want to be gentle and use just your fingers, not your whole hand that will overwork the batter. The batter will come together but there will be some dry patches, maybe some dry mixture left at the bottom of the bowl but most of it will hold together. Use your hands to divide the batter into 12 pieces and mould them gently into scone shapes.

Place on the cookie sheet and bake about 20 minutes. They will start to brown on the top and a knife stuck into the centre will come out clean. Eat warm!

The scones are fairly large so next time I will make a half-batch for Corey and I. We still have 8 scones left. The advantage of these is that they are not sweet so they can be eaten with soup or stew. The recipe calls for 1/2 cup sugar with extra to put on top but that makes it too sweet for us. You could add cheese into the batter or blueberries or herbs depending on the rest of your meal or your mood!

Meat-free Monday Burgers

We just returned from Calgary where we had a great vegan/vegetarian lunch at a little place called The Coup on 17th Ave SW. There is also a bar next door but it wasn't open. The food was delicious but expensive. Everything is made fresh and the menu items are quite original. I had a tempeh dish which was very tasty. It was busy so plan on arriving before or after the meal rush. You can't make reservations.

Another place we visited was the new Spark Science Centre which had a display about climate change and what we can all do to help slow down climate change. Everyone is invited to write a little card and post it on the metal people. This was mine:

Tonight we are heading to Mum's for dinner. She is making her yummy tacos and for us she makes these awesome re-fried beans. This is not the recipe for the beans but one day I will get it from her and post it here. The burger recipe that I am sharing came from the back of the Urban Harvest Herald that we get each week with our delivery of organic fruits and veggies. If you live in the Kelowna area, I strongly suggest that you get Urban Harvest. If you do, mention my name so that I get a credit on my order! If you live somewhere else, look into this type of service. It's well worth it. I love getting a box of fresh organic fruits and veggies each week delivered to my door.

Dixie Burgers (adapted from the Moosewood Restaurant recipe)

1 tbsp canola oil
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 onion, chopped
1 pinch salt
2 cups grated raw sweet potato
1/3 cup minced celery
1/4 tsp dried thyme
1/2 red pepper, minced
1 cup chard, stemmed and finely chopped
1 tbsp soy sauce
1/4 tsp black pepper
1 1/2 cups canned or cooked black beans
4 oz firm tofu
panko or other fine breadcrumbs

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease a cookie sheet.

Heat oil in a frying pan on medium heat. Add onions, garlic and salt and cook until translucent. Add sweet potato, celery and thyme and cook for a few minutes, stirring often. Add red pepper and chard, stir, cover and cook on medium-low heat for another 5 minutes until the greens are getting tender. Remove from heat and stir in soy sauce and black pepper.

While the veggies cool a bit, pulse the beans and tofu in a food processor until mashed but not smooth. Mix the veggies into the bean mixture. Add panko or breadcrumbs to make the mixture a bit more solid for shaping into patties. The recipe says to make 4 patties, we made 6 and even they were quite big.

Bake on the cookie sheet for 20 minutes until firm.