Yam Quinoa Patties with Rhubarb Mango Salsa

This is a multi-step meal but I was pleased with the results. I cooked the yam on the bbq while I was making lunch, I have cooked rice in the freezer, and quinoa is pretty easy to prepare so while it's lots of steps, it's not a difficult meal to make.

Yam Quinoa Patties

4 smallish yams or 2 medium yams
1 cup uncooked quinoa
1 1/4 cups water
1 cup cooked brown/wild rice
1/2 cup green onions, sliced thin
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp fresh herb of choice (I used thyme), chopped
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper

Bake/boil/steam/bbq the yams as you so wish so that they can be mushed with a fork.

Add the cup of quinoa to the 1 1/4 cups boiling water in a small saucepan with a lid. Cover the saucepan, turn the heat down to medium-low, and leave it for 12 minutes. Remove from the heat and leave for another 5 minutes. Fluff with a fork.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix all the ingredients together in a large bowl. Use your hands to really get everything well mixed together. Make 8 patties and place on a greased baking sheet (or use a silpat mat). Bake for about 20 minutes until they are steaming hot. The edges will start to brown a little.

These can be eaten hot or cold.

Rhubarb Mango Salsa

2 stalks rhubarb, chopped into small cubes
1 mango peeled and cubed
1 red pepper, chopped into small cubes
3 green onions, sliced thin
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp seasoned rice wine vinegar
 2 tsp minced ginger
1 tbsp lemon juice or the juice of 1 lemon
1/2 tsp salt

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. Let the salsa sit while you are cooking the patties and then serve on top of the patties.

Happy Meatless Monday!

All American Meal

Tonight for dinner we had what seemed to us like a really traditional American meal: salad, potato, vegetable, and BBQ meat. Not our usual fare at all! Of course ours was a vegan version but as we normally eat Asian themed meals, this was as close to American as we get!

I roasted sweet potatoes in the oven at 375 degrees for about 30 minutes. They were smallish so they cooked quite quickly. I just gave the skins a quick scrub, dried them and then plunked them on the oven racks. One burst (be forewarned) but the rest were delicious. If you let them cool a bit before peeling them, the peel just comes right off with a whole cooked yam left on your plate.

The vegetable was the roasted asparagus that I blogged about a few weeks ago. Not enough left for my corn chowder unfortunately.

The salad was with my mother's typical French vinaigrette: 3 tbsp olive oil, 1 tbsp vinegar, 1 minced clove of garlic, 2 tsp Dijon mustard, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp pepper, chopped parsley. You can replace the vinegar with lemon juice and sometimes I use 2 tbsp vinegar if I am feeling like eating something a little more sour. This is our go-to salad dressing.

Our "meat" was tofu of course. I used extra firm tofu and cooked it in this yummy BBQ sauce from Dreena Burton's new cookbook. Dreena has a vegan blog too and is the Canadian vegan queen, just like Isa is the American vegan queen. Dreena's cookbooks were recently recognized on Michelle Obama's White House website. Quite the coup for a Canadian vegan mom and cookbook writer from Whiterock, BC.

BBQ Tofu (as always, adapted to fit what I have in my pantry)

1/2 tbsp tahini
2 tbsp ketchup
1 tbsp low sodium soy sauce
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp Italian herb mix
1/4 tsp smoked paprika
1 pkg extra firm tofu

In a glass dish (8x12) mix all the sauce ingredients. Pat the tofu dry, cut into 3 slices and into squares. Pat all the pieces dry. Coat the tofu in the sauce and leave in the dish. Cover with foil, bake 20 minutes at 375 degrees, flip the tofu, cover and bake another 10 minutes. You could probably BBQ the tofu too but I like to have some sauce left to dip my tofu into as I eat it. If you BBQ it, it would probably make excellent sandwiches.

For dessert I have strawberry ice-cream setting in the freezer (all american meal eh?) but it's not ready yet so the recipe will have to be posted later when we've decided if it's yummy or not.


Enjoy meatless Monday tomorrow! Lots of yummy fare to eat without using any meat!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Roasted Asparagus Corn Chowder

This rain is depressing. It's June 7th and I have the fireplace on to warm up because the outside temperature drops to about 6 degrees at night. It shouldn't be time to be making soup but who wants salads and sandwiches when we are wearing scarves and gloves in the morning and at night? Ridiculous!!

I made this chowder in the slow cooker and left it for about 4 hours on low. You could do it in a regular pot and cook it faster. It depends on your time. You could also toss in raw asparagus if you don't want to roast it but I can't guarantee that the flavour will be as good. Play around!

Roasted Asparagus Corn Chowder

2 tbsp canola oil
1 medium leek, sliced thin (see note below)
3 medium carrots, sliced
1/4 tsp cayenne
1 lrg can garbanzo beans or 1 cup cooked garbanzo beans that you have waiting in your freezer
1 red pepper, sliced
1 yellow pepper, sliced
1 tbsp coarse sea salt
2 cups corn kernels, frozen or fresh
1 package powdered coconut milk
5 cups water
1 vegan stock cube
chopped roasted asparagus - however much you have left

If you are making this in a slow cooker, omit the oil and throw all the rest of the ingredients, minus the roasted asparagus, in the slow cooker, mix really well to get the coconut powder to dissolve as much as possible, and leave on low for 4 hours or so. Add the asparagus in the last 30 minutes of cooking. If you are using raw asparagus, add it at the beginning.

If you are doing this in a pot, heat the oil and fry the leek until the pieces start to brown. Add all the other ingredients , minus the roasted asparagus. Bring to a boil, turn down the heat and leave to simmer, covered, for about 15 minutes. Toss in the roasted asparagus and leave to simmer another 5 minutes. If the asparagus is raw, toss in with the rest of the ingredients so that it cooks.

Leek Note: Leeks can be full of dirt. To clean them properly, cut off the root end and slice down the length of the leek so that you cut the rings in all the way down. Don't cut all the way through, the knife should go half way through to the core and then slice down. Put the leek under running cold water and use your thumb to separate the layers to wash the grit caught in-between the layers. You can even pull the leek layers apart, wash them, and then put them back together.

Spinach Almond Pesto

We have tried in the sat three years to grow spinach in our community green with no luck. This year we decided to give it one more chance. I threw in all our leftover seeds into one rectangle of space and left it to the gods to decide if we were to grow spinach or not. Well, we did. And did we ever!




Of course it's all ready to be harvested at the same time so now we find outlives with a mass of spinach that needs to be dealt with. Some will be washed and frozen for smoothies but I decided to try a spinach pesto recipe that is in Drena Burton's new vegan cookbook: Let Them Eat Vegan!




Typical me though... I did not have all the ingredients so I modified the recipe somewhat!
Spinach Almond Pesto
5 large handfuls of spinach
1 cup raw almonds
2 cloves garlic cut into quarters
2 tsp sea salt
Cracked ground pepper
1.5 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 cup parsley
1/2 cup basil
1-2 tbsp water unless you have to wash your spinach in which case enough water will stay on the spinach even when you've squeezed it "dry"
In a food processor, blend the almonds, garlic, salt, pepper, lemon juice, olive oil, parsley, and basil. Wile it is blending, add one handful of spinach at a time and let it blend before adding another one. Add water if the mixture is getting too tight. Refrigerate until you use it. You can just toss it into hot pasta. The remainder can be frozen as it makes quite a big batch.
I will be serving this on pasta with cherry tomatoes. You could toss in any other veggies you want as well as long as they aren't too rich because the pesto is already quite rich.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Huo Guo #3

I forgot to take a photo of the Huo Guo package #2 that we took to my cousin's place for dinner one night. It was yummy but it doesn't matter because Huo Guo #1was better and the one we had for lunch yesterday was incredible. Was it ever spicy!! Lots of dried chilies in there and terrific flavour. It's called Chongqing flavour which is a very large city along the Yangze River. Not sure it tasted like the city but it was certainly delicious.