Homemade Dog Treats

I will be brief. We tried to make homemade dog treats for our dog's 4th adoption anniversary (aka 6thish birthday), and they sucked. They didn't ever get crispy, even when we overbaked them. Our dog likes them (but then again, she considers a kale stem a treat, to be gnawed on slowly like a bome), but one of her friends spat it right out when we gave him one. They are cute, at least, due to an eternity spent cutting out little fall shapes (oak leaves, maple leaves, normal leaves, acorns, apples, and pumpkins, plus one dog):



We used the recipe from http://the-dairy-free-diva-recipe-exchange.yumsugar.com/All-Natural-Vegan-Dog-Treats-14252489 although to be fair we didn't have quite enough peanut butter so we topped it off with tahini and a bit of almond meal. Alas.

Chard Week at the Fishbands

We received a warning note from the Condo Board this week about our 'guerrilla garden', indicating that we had a month to remove the plants (including our very good-looking chard, which could practically be considered a decorative plant), or they would be pulled up for us.  Jon had already pulled up the tomato plants at my urging, because they were hardly producing anything and an eyesore anyhow.

This inspired a week long chard-centric menu in the Fishband household (a combination of our two last names, in case you were wondering).  First up was Color Me Vegan's Swiss Chard Tart.  Jon kindly made this solo while I recovered from filming the Rosslyn Jazz Fest a little too soon after surviving a killer cold.  He made two modifications.  The first was he didn't add any oil to the cashew cheese portion of the recipe.  He didn't replace it with anything - just omitted it.  The second was he didn't add as much salt as the recipe called for and it was still plenty salty.


          Doesn't this look like quiche made with eggs?

It turned out really well.  The texture is much more like a fluffy eggy-style quiche than my favorite vegan quiche recipe from Voluptuous Vegan (dang, that is a good quiche though!).  It wasn't overly chardy, which is helpful because we have to eat it every meal this week - best not to get sick of it too soon.  We'll also be eating Vegan Yum-Yum's Cheezy Chard toast points (so incredibly good, you should make those), and some chickpea crepes from VegNews that we'll sneak some chard into.  So no recipes anytime soon.

I did "invent" a soup recipe last week to help with my cold, which was 4 cloves garlic, 1 onion, 3 small sweet potatoes, a bunch of collards, and about 2-3 cups okra, plus 3-4 TBS of berbere spice mix, but the problem  is that, while tasty, the okra unfortunately gives it the look of goopy boogers when you scoop it into your bowl, so I can't wholeheartedly endorse that recipe due to its visually disturbing nature.

I am now a full time graduate student which I naively thought would give me loads of time to experiment in the kitchen.  However, so far I've been spending a lot of time reading textbooks and course materials, working on homework, and attending class.  Hopefully once I get my routine down I can spend more time having fun with new recipes.  I'm especially excited about making Miyoko Schinner's vegan cheeses.  I'm not sure if anyone else fell of their chair when they noticed, but Lauren Ulm of Vegan Yum Yum fame is back blogging again!  I was really pleased, her blog is such a pleasure to read and to look at.

Easy Ethiopian at Home

I made this last week while Jon was out of town.  I read a lot about people not wanting to cook for "just themselves" or why make such a fuss when its "just me".  Just you?!?!  That always blows my mind.  Did you have some sort of early childhood toungue injury so that the vicarious pleasure you get from others enjoying your food actually better than eating the food itself?  I like eating!  And I'm worth all sorts of crazy effort in the kitchen!  And so are you!  However, while you're working through your self-confidence issues, here's an easy recipe you can make:

Easy Ethiopian:

1 package Uptons Seitan Traditional Flavor, Chopped
1 package fresh green beans (about 2 1/2 cups) chopped
3 medium red skinned potatos, scrubbed, quartered, & sliced 1/4 inch thick
1/4 cup berbere spice mix (already contained salt) (more berbere to taste as needed)
1/4 cup water
1 onion, chopped
2 tsp oil

I sauteed the onion in the oil in the electric pressure cooker on the brown setting for about 10 mins, adding the garlic and berbere at the end and sauteeing for about 2 mins  Then I added the water, green beans,  potatoes, and seitan and set the pressure cooker to 2 minutes.  It was incredibly easy, and quite tasty.

When culinary judgment fails: franks n' waffles

There are times when the intersection of hunger and a lack of time lead to culinary malfeasance. This is the story of such a time. I'm working at home today, don't have time to go out for lunch, and supplies are critically low here. But we do have Field Roast frankfurters (which I love and rarely have), which got me craving a proper veggie dog. Sadly, we don't have buns, or bread, or even crackers. What we do have is frozen waffles. Frozen blueberry waffles.

But I'm that hungry, and so I press on. I'm not proud of this: it isn't a creative culinary breakthrough, nor a whimsical nod to carnival fare. This is what happens when you want something, realize you can't have it, come up with an awful solution, overrule that solution, then get curious.



In the end, it wasn't actually that bad. The flavor of the frankfurters - assisted by the tomatoes from my garden, sriracha, and celery seed - pretty much dominated the flavor of the waffles. "Operation: not be hungry" can be considered a success.

Blueberry Salad

I had some blueberries that lasted longer than expected (that means I didn't wolf them down within 2 hours of purchase), so I decided to make a salad dressing with them, and some ground cashews. It was a mighty purty salad if I do say so myself. I ground up about 2-3 TBS of cashews, threw in 1/4 cup of blueberries, 2 TBS balsalmic vinegar, 1 TBS rice vinegar, and 1 TBS oil, and blended up with an immersion blender. It was a thick dressing that solidified in the fridge, so I loosened it up with some hot water to get a pourable consistency. This is over baby arugula, which wasn't as peppery as the adult arugula I'm accustomed to.




Another green snack I've been into lately is Trader Joe's organic brocolli heads dipped into Trader Joe's Goddess dressing. Its a tahini-garlic dressing I could probably easily make myself but am too lazy. It's so savory-licious. Its a very strong, very addictive flavor. I like that kind of funky raw broccoli taste. Tragically, I just googled the calcium absorption from raw vs. cooked brocolli, and it nearly doubles when cooked. Bummer! I thought I was onto something, calcium-wise. Well, tahini is still my friend, at 128 mg per 2 TBS. Why the sudden obsession with calcium? Well, I have to take a medicine to control stomach acid*, which interferes with calcium absorption. I'm not sure if that only counts for calcium carbonate, which you need stomach acid to break down, and you can still absorb calcium citrate, or if by some mysterious means it prevents absorption of both types.

Some people have the misconception that all vegans eat is salad.  Or, almost more annoyingly, that everything we eat is healthy.  Seriously, I can bring in a stir fry dish loaded with oil, sugar and salt, and people will comment on how "healthy" my lunch is because it has vegetables and no meat in it.  If you suffer from this reputation despite your best efforts to explain that 1/4 cup of oil in a dish is not healthy, you can eat salad in secret and pretend like you never eat salad when people ask.

*note to all people who will be thinking "you don't need medicine from 'the man', have my shaman exile the evil stomach spirit for you", I've tried the aloe juice, and the marshmallow, and enzymatic supplements and pro-biotic supplements, etc., etc.

Vegan Queso Fresco

In my senior year of college, I studied abroad for six months in Sinaloa, Mexico. I adore Mexican cuisine, which has much more variety and nuance than you'll find at a typical Mexican restaurant in the U.S. It was there I discovered delicious nopales, which are fleshy cactus leaves that were available fresh in the grocery store whole with needles, whole without needles, chopped, and chopped and cooked. I had the good fortune of living with an awesome Mexican roommate whose father happened to own a cheese distribution business, so I got to eat some delicious cheeses. One of the cheeses that was new to me was called queso fresco. Its about as firm as extra firm tofu and its crumbly, salty, and has a mild but addictive flavor. The closest food store sold queso fresco made by nearby farmers, and I loved it
Obviously once becoming vegan, queso of any kind was no longer in the cards for me. I hadn't ever tried to replicate this cheese with vegan ingredients until Jon's Mom sent me a bag of pepitas (among other things) for my birthday. I googled pepitas to see what I could make with them, and found a recipe that included queso fresco. I looked at recipes to see how I could recreate queso fresco, but when it came time to actually make it, I realized our recent power-outage-induced fridge cleaning meant I didn't have a lot of my staples handy.

After a little cabinet digging, I found some preserved lemons we'd received from Jon's sister in law (and brother, but who we kiddin'?). Since we hadn't figured out what to do with them yet, I figured now was as good a time as any to experiment. After some neighborly jar-opening assistance (Jon was out of the house), I de-seeded one lemon and added it whole to the food processor along with one of the red chilies in the jar. I was too busy to press the tofu, but you really should, because this came out as a thick cream which was too wet to mimic the texture of queso fresco. Who cares? It was yummy!
I even drew you a little picture of the jar of preserved lemons. Why didn't I pursue my clearly innate artistic ability? Well, that is a question for another blog post.

Recipe:


1 whole de-seeded preserved lemon
1 preserved red chili
1/2 tsp onion powder
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1 block extra firm tofu (I used Whole Foods brand), squeezed a bit to shake off excess water
1/8 tsp white pepper

Directions: Throw everything in the food processor and press the on button. Wait till you can't really see any lemon bits larger than a small fleck. Chill and serve.
So far we've used some in a salad, I dipped Salsitas (insanely delicious spicy tortilla chips) in the queso, and I'm on the fence if I should use the rest in a 7-layer dip, or make quesadillas. Quesadillas are so darn easy...I think they may win.

Subway Vegan Sandwich Review

I used to be a huge Subway fan before I went vegan. In fact, aside from cheese pizza, the Subway veggie patty was one of the last things I gave up. When I heard that Subway was actually going to offer three new vegan sandwiches at select locations near me, I was incredibly excited. I dreamed of my old Subway days, bread doused in vinegar and oil, oregano, onions, tomato, and I LOVE the baked lays potato chips* you can get with your combo. Very shortly after they started offering the vegan sandwiches, Jon, Colleen and I made a pilgrimage to Alexandria, VA in order to try out the new sandwiches. Since it was Old Town, the subway was super classy inside, with a natural stone wall, and opera playing in the background. Yes folks, OPERA at Subway. They had the Riblet (made with bbq seitan riblets) and the Malibu Greek (made with a veggie burger) sandwiches available, and also a vegetarian chick'n sandwich, which we wished we could try. We tried asking about whether the chick'n patty itself was not vegan, or just that it came with mayo or cheese that made it not vegan, but there was a language barrier so we gave up. The gentleman who made our sandwiches asked what we wanted other than the vegan meat, and I said 'whatever normally comes on this sandwich'. He kept looking at the picture of the sandwich they had hanging up, and since the Malibu Greek looks like it has cheese on it, he put cheese on the sandwich. We explained that cheese wasn't vegan so we couldn't eat it. 

For the Malibu Greek, we ended up with lettuce, tomato, olives, banana peppers, and an oil and herb dressing, after determining that they didn't have a specific dressing for the sandwich that gave it the 'Malibu Greek' name.   It was a fairly tragic sandwich I must admit [Jon says it wasn't bad, he thought it was worth eating].  Part of it is being out of practice with ordering at Subway - I really should have gotten the oil and vinegar plus oregano, salt and pepper of days of yore, but a lot of it was just poor quality vegetables, and a lack of an overall sandwich design vision.  If you're calling a sandwich Malibu Greek, the sandwich should have some flavors that evoke those two concepts.  There wasn't very much flavor in the sandwich at all.

Malibu Greek (neither Malibu nor Greek).  Note how incredibly pale and weak both the tomato and lettuce are. 

On to the Riblet!  You can't really go wrong with a Riblet.  It's already got the flavor and sauce built into the vegan meat, so you don't have to worry about making it tasty.  If I'm in the vicinity of a Subway, I would definitely order this again.  However, I wouldn't make a special trip, because I can buy prepackaged vegan riblets at most grocery stores in the DC Area.

Riblet.  It can't not be tasty, its a bbq riblet.

I hope that they will train their employees more thoroughly on what to put on these sandwiches (if there are specific items that should come with each sandwich), and also not to put cheese on a vegan sandwich unless specifically requested.  I also hope they come up with a great vegan dressing to put on the greek malibu so that more people will order it.  I want these sandwiches to be successful so that they will start offering them at more Subways, and feel that they need to improve quality to ensure the success of these new sandwiches.  I would love it if they offered vegan mayo and Tofurky deli slices for their sandwiches, that would draw me in for sure.  I would make the trip to Subway much more frequently for nice Tofurky mayo sub.

*apparently I am some kind of weirdo for loving baked lays.  no one I talk to seems to like them at all.