Pasta and Peppers

It is currently 39 degrees according to the weather man on our balcony. I don't doubt it... It's so hot that my greedy cats haven't asked for food since 11am...












...and my poor nasturtiums on the balcony have gone from being all perky this morning to wilted and cooked this afternoon.






What a perfect time to make a cold supper. Unfortunately, the cold supper I decided to prepare required boiling and baking which are not the best activities on the hottest day of 2015 so far! Oh well, hopefully it will be yummy.

I have two bags of mini peppers and while I love them raw, I decided to roast a few. The result is delicious!

Roasted Mini Sweet Peppers





20 mini sweet peppers
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Put parchment on a baking sheet and place the peppers in a pile on the parchment. Drizzle olive oil on them and mix them around so they all glisten. Spread them out, sprinkle with salt (I used the new trendy Maldon salt flakes and proceeded to spill the container all over the counter and floor while I had oily fingers), crack black peppers over top and pop into the oven for 30 minutes. Take them out and eat hot or let cool but be forewarned that they will be very hot inside! When they are in the oven, they will still be all puffy but they will collapse once they start to cool.






I baked tofu at the same time as the oven was on as we needed something more than just roasted peppers! Tofu bakes for 60 minutes.

I also decided to make a pasta salad since Corey had been saying how much he was craving pasta salad and the one at IGA is certainly not vegan (or really that good in my opinion.) Why not just boil water while the oven is on??

Creamy Pasta Salad (it never makes a good photo!)





In a large bowl, mix:
4 cups cooked pasta
Celery
Peppers
Carrots
Any other raw veggies you like

In the Nutribullet or blender, blend:
1 pkg soft silken tofu (although medium or firm would be fine but not the banana flavoured kind)
3 tsp chopped fresh dill
2 tbsp dijon mustard
2 tbsp white vinegar
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp agave syrup
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper

Pour over the pasta and veggies, mix, and put in the fridge until you eat! Pasta salad always tastes better the longer it sits. Well, not weeks but hours or a day.

And while the oven was on for the extra half hour for the tofu, I decided to make the rhubard loaf I wrote about last week except I made into muffins. They took 40 minutes to cook.

Not my proudest energy-conscious day as now the air conditioner is going full blast.

Have you tried this olive oil? It smells delicious and has a nice flavour.






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The Most Amazing "Cauliflower" Recipe

This recipe calls for cauliflower but I found this great broccoflower at Nature's Fare and couldn't resist. Its flavour isn't as strong as cauliflower and it just looks so cool. I would certainly buy it again.










I made this with the real greek yoghurt. I used organic but it was still milk. You could try using soy or coconut and I would be interested in hearing how it worked out for you. The greek yoghurt is thick so it really coated the broccoflower and stayed on throughout the baking.

It was quite spicy so I used the leftover yoghurt mix as a dip. It seemed to be less spicy when it hadn't been cooked.

Spicy Broccoflower (adapted from Shape Magazine)

Ingredients:
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 head broccoflower
1 1/2 cups plain Greek yogurt
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons chile powder
1 tablespoon cumin
1 teaspoon curry powder
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 teaspoon black pepper

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and lightly grease a small baking sheet with vegetable oil. Set aside.

Trim the base of the broccoflower to remove any green leaves and the woody stem.

In a medium bowl, combine the yogurt with the lemon juice, chile powder, cumin, garlic powder, curry powder, salt and pepper.

Dunk the broccoflower into the bowl and use your hands to smear the marinade evenly over its surface. (Excess marinade can be stored in the refrigerator in an airtight container for up to three days and used with tofu or other veggies.)










Place the broccoflower on the prepared baking sheet and roast until the surface is dry and lightly browned, 40 minutes. The marinade will make a crust on the surface.










Let the broccoflower cool for 10 minutes before cutting it into wedges.










It was delicious! I could have eaten it all!




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Masala Fusion Cuisine of India Restaurant Review

When I was in Uganda, I did a few restaurant reviews because I often looked for reviews when we were going to be out for the day. My blog got lots of hits so obviously restaurant reviews are popular! I decided to add a few to this blog as well.

I doubt this restaurant is vegan as Indian food uses ghee, clarified butter, but as a vegetarian option, it was amazing. Lots of choices for veggie and carni lovers.





We had one order of veggie samosas. There were two samosas and a dish of tamarind chutney. The pastry was flaky and the filling was mostly potato with peas and onions. Served piping hot.





We then chowed down on kadai paneer, chana masala. We ordered one dish medium and one dish hot and the chana masala (chickpea curry) was HOT! Not so unbelievable that we couldn't eat it but certainly hot enough to make us both sniffle and appreciate the yoghurt cucumber that I had ordered.





We also had one order of basmati rice and one plain naan. Both of those were plenty for the two of us.





We were stuffed and took leftovers home for lunch. We added two more orders of naan to bulk it up a bit but there was plenty of food for us both for both meals.

Total, including tip: $40. No drinks, just water.

We will certainly go again.

Address: 103 - 2106 Harvey Avenue, Kelowna, across from the mall, next to A&W.

They are closed on Mondays.

11.95$ Buffet lunch from 11:30-2:00 the rest of the week.

Website: masalafusionkelowna.com


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Roasted Veggies

It's not quite officially fall but the fall veggies are coming out so we made our first batch of roasted veggies tonight for dinner. The temperature is supposed to drop below freezing at the airport so the gardens will soon be cleaned out. It did snow in Calgary yesterday... That is a little depressing as it is only September 9th.







The beauty of roasted veggies is that almost any veggie can be used. Our mix today had baby potato, patipan squash, zucchini, carrot, celery, baby eggplant, garlic, and broccoli. Normally we would have added cubes of onion but we suddenly realized that we had none! We also often add cubes of tofu.

I roasted an acorn squash and beets at the same time to eat with the roasted veggie mix. Corey doesn't like beets so I keep them separate and the acorn squash tends to get too mushy.







Preheat the oven to 300 degrees.

Get the root vegetables you want. No need to peel unless you are adding beets directly to the mix in which case I would peel those. Cut them into cubes about 1 inch square.

Mix all the veggies together in a large bowl. Drizzle olive oil over the veggies and several pinches of salt, cracks of black pepper, and shakes of italian herb mix. You could use any spices you like.

Mix, mix, mix then spread the veggies out over one or two cookie sheets. You don't want the veggies crammed together or else they won't cook properly. Put them in the oven and wait. After 15 minutes, stir the veggies, switch the trays if you have two on separate levels, then leave them to bake some more.

Total cooking time is about an hour depending on the type of veggies and the thickness of your trays. Darker cookie trays take less time to cook.

As for the squash, I cut it in half lengthwise, then half widthwise, then into two pieces each to end up with eight pieces. Cut out the seeds, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper and place skin side down on the tray. Leave in the oven with the veggies, about an hour or so, depending on the size of the squash.

My beets I just top and tail, rinse, and put directly on the bbq. Once they are black all around and I can stick a fork in them, I take them off the bbq, let them cool and peel them. You can do the same in the oven but they won't turn black. You'll have to test them for when they are soft enough to peel. I've heard that when they are soft you can take them out and put them into a paper bag to sweat for a few minutes and the peel comes off very easily. I've never tried.




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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.