I'm Addicted to Greens

I love leafy greens. Kale, chard, spinach, they're all fantastic. And today has been full of them. I had chard for breakfast and now I'm having quinoa and spinach for lunch.

I listened to Episode 101 of the Vegan Freak Podcast today and they highly recommended eating a varied diet. Now, this is what I usually do anyway, but it can never hurt to get a little reminder. Varying the vegetables I eat and not always relying on tofu for protein are great tips to keep in mind, not just to make sure I'm getting a healthy variety of nutrients, but to keep from getting bored as well. Lucky for me I never find veggies, grains, and legumes boring. How could I when there are such infinite combinations?

A Special Treat

I never buy food. Or, I guess what I mean is that I never get takeout. It's so much more economical and (usually) relaxing to buy plenty of dry staples, vegetables, and spices and create something new at the end of each day. But today was especially draining. I had two midterms in one day and the last one finished at 8 PM. Thus, I was not really in the mood to make dinner.

Instead I splurged on a three-course sushi dinner. My three roll combination (cucumber and shiitake, cucumber and avocado, and avocado and peanut) came with a salad with the most delicious dressing. I'm not entirely sure what it was, but I'm fairly sure it featured carrot, ginger, and sesame, along with probably some vinegar. I paired them with miso soup I already had at home and was perfectly set with my indulgent three-course meal. There's nothing like relaxing at home with sushi in your sweatpants after a long and stressful day.

Further Delaying My Homework:

Curry.

I went to a meeting for work tonight that was to include dinner, and while my boss is usually really good about making sure there's vegan food, tonight was an exception. Therefore, when I finally got home at eleven it was not time to do more homework, but rather time to finally have something to eat.

And this is what came out. A Thai-style red curry with tofu, orange peppers, green beans, and broccoli. I must say that I don't eat tofu as often as my blog might make it seem, but when I get a package, it needs to get eaten up within a few days. That and the fact that my tofu dishes always seem to be the ones that are most worth photographing.

Never Go In With A Plan

The selection of vegetables at my local grocery store is a total crapshoot. One day they may have baby bok choy and shiitake mushrooms, and the next they may not even have red bell peppers. That's why trying to plan a recipe you're going to have for dinner that night is next to impossible. For example, this afternoon I thought that I would have a shiitake, tofu, and bok choy stir fry with a spicy black bean sauce, based on the availability of all of those ingredients in the past. When I got there, of course, they had neither the mushrooms, nor the bok choy. It was time for Plan B.

Plan B, which is how I do 99% of my cooking, is just looking around to see what they have or what catches my eye and throwing something together based on that. I was in a mustard-y mood, so I decided to turn the tofu into a vehicle for mustard and serve it over some spinach. Hence, tofu encrusted in a mixture of semi-grainy dijon mustard and mustard seeds that I toasted myself and mixed in. It seems my motto is "For best results: improvise, improvise, improvise."

Viva TVP!

I don't usually buy meat substitutes, but yesterday I was craving gumbo with some faux-meat crumbles. Tonight I passed by a farmer's market on my way home. Because it was late in the day, the only thing left that really caught my eye were some banana peppers. I decided to stuff them with the TVP, onion, garlic, and serrano chiles for a deliciously spicy and semi-meaty tasting Mexican-inspired meal.

It looked so good coming out of the oven, that I actually cut into it before realizing that I hadn't taken a picture. Hence the destroyed corner of pepper number two. It was totally worth it.

Vegetables, My Not-So-Secret Love

Most people worry about how to cook so as to hide the fact that they're eating vegetables. Nonsense, I say. Let the vegetables take center stage. Allow that bok choy to come out in a viking hat and sing the aria to end all arias. Hell, you can barely even see that there are soba noodles under there and to be honest, I don't even think it needed them. Sometimes when I'm thinking about what I'm going to have for dinner, I imagine the vegetables in my refrigerator and ask myself "But what am I going to have with them?" And really, the answer could just as easily be "nothing."

Indulgence

So this cannot remotely be construed as healthy, but sometimes life just calls for a baked mac and "cheese." I made the "cheese" sauce from silken tofu, garlic, habanero, lemon juice, mustard, and turmeric and then baked it to bubbly deliciousness.

Studying for midterms is one time I don't feel the least regret about comfort foods.

Pay Attention to Time

This split pea soup with caramelized onions was supposed to be accompanied by oven-roasted kale. However, in my soup-pureeing and onion-sauteeing, I left the kale in the oven too long and ended up with crinkly black bits that disintegrated upon being touched. Not too appetizing.

Thus, a kitchen timer has moved up to number one on my list of things I need to get to make my kitchen functional and efficient. Also on the list are a vegetable peeler, a decent paring knife, and respectful housemates who always clean up after themselves. Hey, a girl can dream, right?

The Vegan Pantry

All the essentials: miso soup, adzuki beans, black eyed peas, brown lentils, quinoa, red lentils, soba noodles, jasmine rice, rice noodles, and a package of red beans hiding way in the back of the drawer. I don't have a jar for it yet.

I also have many many cups of cooked black beans that I made in a giant batch and then froze. They're for when I want to whip something up quickly and easily.

Julia Child's Vegan Bastard Stepchild

That's how my roommates described me after I pulled these out of the oven. They were initially under the impression that they were chocolate-chip cookies, but in reality they're black bean and black-eyed pea cakes held together by a smushy blended mixture of black eyed peas, silken tofu, onion, garlic, soy sauce, and hot sauce. These took quite a while to make, but the magic of Thursday night is that class ends at 4 and I don't have any homework for the next day. That means I can spend all evening cooking.

I also set about making some homemade baba ghanouj, which was incredibly easy and will now add to my repertoire of spreads to put on lunchtime lettuce wraps. Yes, no more sandwiches for me. I've decided to essentially follow the Eat to Live diet, which encourages a limited consumption of breads, pastas, starchy vegetables, and grains and unlimited raw and cooked vegetables plus plenty of beans and fruits. That seems like a diet I could really stick to in the long term and it understands what's really healthy and should be encouraged (veggies, fruits, and beans) and what's okay but shouldn't be a part of your diet too often (bread! I love bread!). I'm feeling great so far and not hungry. Hurrah healthy eating and weightloss!

Unfluffy starts here

I've made a decision: I'm going to lose weight and I'm going to do it without starving myself or purging, which are my two go-to strategies. I've never really had a healthy relationship with dieting given my history with eating disorders, so this is going to be a challenge. But if I'm ever going to be successful, I'm going to have to do this the healthy way.

I started this afternoon with a small step: having lettuce wraps with hummus and black beans instead of a sandwich with just hummus. Everyone loves carbs, but I'm going to do what I can to limit my intake of them, especially those of the white bread, white pasta, white rice variety. That also, of course, includes beer. I know that if I'm going to actually get this healthy eating thing right, I can't tell myself that anything is off-limits; if I do that, it makes the temptation to have what's forbidden oh so strong, and that leads to binges. Instead, I'm going to try to introduce something into my eating life that I haven't had a very successful history with: moderation.

Wish me luck!

Wintertime...And the livin' is easy

All right, it's not really wintertime. But it is time for winter squash. Specifically, with regard to this soup, butternut. This soup combines butternut squash with Fuji apples and is topped with some toasted pine nuts.

It's actually not quite as thick as I usually like my soups, but I have a feeling that the rest of the batch will thicken up as it sits in the fridge. Also, that's what broken up toast is for. I love warm food when it starts to get chilly. This really hit the spot.

I'm a fool for you

If you're a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that is. Sometimes when it's 3 AM and you haven't even begun the work that's due in the morning, you need a really over the top PBJ. Like one with chocolate sauce that drips and looks suspiciously like it's bleeding chocolate blood.

What, you've never had those nights?

Lunchtime takes precedence over class time

I will gladly be late to class if it means having a tasty lunch. For me, a quick weekday lunch isn't a sandwich or something out of a vending machine. Very often it's leftovers from previous nights' dinners, but today I made a nice stir fry of tofu, leeks, and rice noodles.

When I'm in need of a Sound of Music fix, I always change the words to "My Favorite Things" to "tofu with noodles." Who needs schnitzel anyway?

I Will Squash You

Whenever I emerge from the kitchen with a delicious vegan meal that a) involves actual vegetables, grains, and legumes and b) did not come from the microwave, I get lots of impressed noises from my roommates. What they don't realize is that a meal like this is just about the easiest thing I think one could make. All I did was hack apart an acorn squash, cover it in some salt, pepper, and oil and throw it in the oven for about 45 minutes. Bam. Done. Delicious.

If you're me, you top it off with come chili-garlic-lime sauce, but any old topping will do. Hell, you could even turn it into somewhat of a sweet indulgence with brown sugar, a fate that will befall the other half of the squash for leftovers lunch in approximately 3...2...1...

You Love Tofu, You Just Don't Know It Yet

I am the self-proclaimed Queen of Making Tofu Delicious. My go-to standard when I'm feeding non-tofu lovers is Isa's Orange Ginger Tofu. Seriously, everyone loves this recipe. Even my grandparents, who raise happy meat, love it. I brought it to a potluck yesterday and got rave reviews. Someone even put chocolate fondue on it and proclaimed it just as delicious. I think that idea has some real merit, but it was milk chocolate so I didn't get to test her ingenuity.

Tonight's creation, seen above, was an effort to use up the leftover ginger from last night and a half a can of coconut milk that I used for a curry earlier in the week. So, after frying slices of tofu marinated in soy sauce, I sauteed garlic, ginger, and red pepper flakes before adding green beans, red pepper, coconut milk and lime juice and letting it all simmer to delicious perfection. Served over rice noodles (which are one of the more difficult foods I've eaten in a while. They really test my fork-spinning skills.), and with some sriracha and this was a perfect Saturday night dinner.

Of course, since it is one AM on a Saturday, I made the executive decision to accompany it with a pumpkin beer. Truly, beer and spicy foods are a match made in heaven.

Soup!!

There are few things I look forward to more than the coming of soup weather. In honor of that fall chill in the air and that fall soreness in my throat, I decided to spring for potato-leek, an easy, creamy and cream-less favorite.

It doesn't look like much, but trust me, it's delicious.

Cooking for One

My preference for improvisational cooking without recipes is due in large part to the difficulty of finding recipes geared towards cooking for one and my general lack of desire to adapt those that are designed to make eight main course servings. Hence I turned one marinated and broiled portobello mushroom, two roasted beets and a half a tomato (plus some impromptu bread crumbs made from rye crisps) into this creation here. I called it a stuffed mushroom at first, but "mushroom with stuff piled on top of it" would be more accurate.

Those beets were very tasty but suffered from a problem I'd never before realized could afflict beets: after too long in the refrigerator they get slightly softer and more difficult to peel, even after roasting. Now, you might just say "Then eat them up right away and don't give them the chance to sit in the fridge." That is, however, easier said than done when you're the only person in your household who eats fruits and vegetables (Well, that's being a little less than fair to my roommates. They eat them, they just don't ever buy them or cook them.). I roasted some beets earlier this week and served them over lentils and topped with a chard pesto, but using a whole bunch of them for one meal is too much and I'd rather not have them two nights in a row.

Hence, the problem of cooking for just myself. It's an inconvenience, but I cannot stress enough how much I enjoy it. There may even be (yes, I admit it) a touch of moral superiority in there. Hopefully someone will keep me in check before I build myself an elite fortress.

Tuesday Night Celebration

Voilá! Two Asian-inspired meals I've made recently. The one on top was tonight's: fried tofu, yellow beans, and shiitake mushrooms with a spicy peanut-ginger sauce. The one below I made on Sunday: a Thai red curry of tofu, yellow squash and yellow beans. Both were very tasty, but I definitely need to get better quality spices if I'm really going to be able to recreate my favorite flavors at home. More interesting vegetables would also go a long way.

Luckily, I have a trip to Philly planned on the Chinatown bus, which should afford me ample food shopping opportunities in the Chinatowns of both cities. I'm looking forward to coming back inspired and ready to cook.

Tonight, however, I recieved inspiration of a very different sort. I had a generally excellent day today: my Spanish and ballet classes both went well, and after ballet was over the best dancer in the class told me I was really good and that I should audition for the student-run dance group on campus. Then earlier tonight I went on a very successful food recovery (read: dumpster diving) mission and even completed all of my work before I even got home.

To celebrate, I'm going to sit back, watch Center Stage, possibly my favorite movie (though I don't go broadcasting that fact) and indulge in the three main bad-for-me food groups: salty, sweet, and alcoholic. There's nothing like popcorn, Tofutti Better Pecan, and a beer to cap off a good day.

War Wound

My first battle scar of the new kitchen. It's actually quite comforting, because it means my knife is nice and sharp. That's a chef's way to look at it if there ever was one.

Ah, that's better.

Now that's the salad I would have loved to make last night. Roasted beets, beet greens, orange slices and plenty of garlic.

I made it for myself in celebration of (I'm pretty sure) doing very well on my Italian placement exam. Now I just have to get through the consent workshops and I can move on to the fun part of my day.

Ma, non voglio.

Already my blissful period before classes start is starting to get stressful. Tomorrow I not only have to take an Italian placement exam (Me augura buona fortuna) but I have to give a presentation to college freshman on consent and sexual assault. I myself was a college freshman just one year ago and I remember that presentation; it did not go well for the facilitators involved. Hopefully my group will be more responsive and less sexist and demeaning, but perhaps that's too much to hope for from 18 year olds.

I'm honestly becoming slightly afraid about how the kitchen and cooking situation is going to work out once there are five people sharing it instead of two. I'm the only vegan in my suite and from what I know of their Costco purchases, the rest of my suitemates seem to regard EasyMac and Bagel Bites as staple foods. I'm pretty well disgusted by the amount of cheese lacto-ovo vegetarians rely on, but perhaps their penchant for microwaveable foods will mean that I'll have easy access to the kitchen for when I want to roast some beets or whip up a nice pot of soup.

Tonight's dinner was out with my roommate while we waited for her tattoo appointment. I was thrilled to go with her to her tattoo appointment and have some unconventional roommate bonding, but I was not thrilled about having to pay $14 for a salad in Herald Square. I would have gladly made us a much better salad back home (and a vegan one at that), but I stuck to my usual strategy of not confronting people. This seemed like a time to just let it go.

But in the future: watch out!

The Christening

As thrilled as I am to be back in New York after three months away, I may be even more excited about the fact that I now have a kitchen to come home to. Not only does it make vegan living a hell of a lot tastier than relying on my university's dining hall, but I find cooking an incredibly relaxing and enjoyable way to end the day.

To celebrate my newfound ability to cook for myself here at school, I went down to the Union Square Greenmarket and picked up some baby beets, red chard, plums, yellow cherry tomatoes, and peppers and eggplants in assorted and unusual colors. Behold, the result of my opening foray into preparing my own food:

A roasted orange pepper stuffed with lentils, quinoa, onions, garlic, and jalapeño and sauteed chard with red wine vinegar.

It wasn't quite as spiced as I might have liked and I turned our small kitchen into a disaster, but overall I was quite pleased. As the year goes on I plan to amass a much greater collection of spices and sauces as well as learn how to take up less space while I'm cooking (an invaluable skill when you're sharing a tiny kitchen with four other people).

Stay tuned as I document my vegan cooking and living adventures, with a little bit of kvetching thrown in just for good measure.