Thai Curry, Mashies & Cabbage, Tomato Quinoa Red Pepper

Last week my fi was eating all his meals on the company dime due to some conference, so I decided to indulge in eating things he wouldn't like. 1. was just some basic "I am lazy pasta" with sauce. Turns out, it was too boring for me too! Plus I had to eat a ton of it since the eat-o-matic was not there to share it with me. Sigh. Anyhow, onto my next adventure, 'beefy' seitan with mashed potatoes and purple cabbage sour kraut. Well, it was not exactly sour, but it was kinda sweet cabbage from a jar. I was hoping just for purple sourkraut, but unf. I didn't really read the label. Next time. Actually the dish was really good and I felt extra good because it was purple so probably had some purple nutrients I don't normally get. Made the seitan with faux beef broth instead of water (to mix with powder stuff). So it had a nice flavor. Need to work on tenderness though, texture was kind of like the offspring of a rubber band & a sponge. Friday, at WF I found a can of bamboo shoots by native essense I think the brand was? Anyhow, I do enjoy them in a curry at restaurants, so I thought I would try this brand. It was quite good! I used the usual thai curry paste from the thai grocery store (looks like a cat food can, but has thai writing on it and curry paste inside!), added a can of coconut milk, brocolli, matchstick-cut carrots, the can of bamboo shoots, simmered that till slightly tender, and then poured that over some short grain brown rice. BTW, I shall now mention my almost militant stance against white rice & white bread. I grew up eating the stuff, but then when I read all about whole foods and how they are better, over time I learned to love the brown rice & ww bread. Now I can barely stand white rice or white bread. How odd is that? I do use white flour for baked goods, because they aren't good for you anyhow so lets stop pretending, but I do like to use ww pastry flour as well - usually a mix of white and whole wheat pastry flour works well. We've discovered you really can't go 100% whole wheat for a pizza crust and expect it not to be dry and gross.

Wierd Food

I had some leftover 'mayo' that I'd created with some silken tofu, oil, mustard powder and vinegar for the bhan mi sandwiches we enjoyed recently. I was thinking 'what on earth can I make with mayo?' Enter, the Hellmans mayo web site. They put mayo in cake even! Cake! I saw a recipe that called for mint, and we also had leftover mint (from our recent mojitos). The recipe was basically mayo, dijon mustard, minced onion, mint, and peas on pasta. I didn't have any regular pasta, so I boiled up some soba. The verdict? Not bad really. You would think it would be gag worthy, but its similar to pasta salads I've had in the past. The mint is nice actually, and you would not think it would pair with onion or mayo, but its not bad. No prize winner, but just mildly flavored and not at all disgusting tasting, though it probably sounds disgusting, food.

Vegan Cheese Tasting

We had some company recently so we decided to load up on some unhealthy snacks. We got corn chips - the round kind, and daiya, and sheese, and while they were here we headed up to pangea, and on impulse bought some dr. cow. So we had a cheese tasting. We put the daiya on the corn chips and melted in the toaster oven, and served the sheese and dr. cow uncooked. People really liked the dr. cow and nachos, the sheese was good but not the favorite. I am so in love with Dr. Cow. It has such a bitchin aged cheese flavor. Jon was like 'it tastes like cashews and tahini' and I was like 'blasphemer! it tastes like awesome, awesome aged cheddar!!'. I ate it on apples in the morning, just as I remember eating strong cheese on apple slices as a kid. Yum! Since we had sheese lying around, we made a super tasty (cucumber-tomato-sheese-lemon-herbs) greek wrap like you might do with feta, that was the perfect application for sheese. We also made chili daiya cheese dogs, and I had a mushroom daiya cheese vegi-dog like I remember from Mexico (well, I didn't have the dog part in mexico since they didn't have vegi-dogs there). So we got many of our cheese-based comfort foods of childhood taken care of. We heard they recently re-formulated teese so we'll see how that turns out.

Stinging Nettles/ Mexican Salad

We were really excited to see stinging nettles being sold at the farmers market last weekend, since the Millenium cookbook has a recipe for stinging nettle ravioli, and I love exotic-sounding ingredients. We got lazy/busy and didn't make the ravioli, instead we just cooked up the stinging nettles, being careful not to actually touch them while raw, only after they were cooked, because as the name suggests, they will sting you. They were hairy, and reminded me of a cat's tounge. It was like eating something with fur all over it. Pretty nasty, I was unable to finish my portion. I'm quite pleased that I didn't bother making ravioli, because that would have been a tragic waste of time.

Onto salad! I combined mexican oregano, chipotle chili powder, cumin, paprika and salt to make a coating for tofu. I coated the firm tofu in the mixture, and then fried them up with a minimum of oil and then cubed. I took regular salad greens, added cilantro, crushed up 'red hot & blue' or something like that blue corn chips, and topped it with date-lime-chipotle chili dressing. That was just lime juice, a date, rice vinegar (teeny qty), and chipotle chili powder. I loved that salad, and I can't wait to make it again.