vegancooking

I realized that I’ve done a lot of baking and cooking recently and haven’t put it on LJ in picture form! Here’s two things I’ve made rather recently:



caramelized butternut squash with ground clove, cinnamon, and brown sugar...

...quinoa cooked with olive oil, sunflower seeds, raisins, fresh chopped rosemary sprigs, and coarse sea salt


Recipe:

For the quinoa, follow the instructions on whatever quinoa you are using as to how to cook it (usually it is a 1:2 quinoa:water ratio). Into the water after it is boiling, add all the ingredients and cover after reducing temperature. I added rosemary, seasalt, olive oil, and raisins directly into the water so it cooked *into* the quinoa. You can add them after, though, too! The taste just may not be as infused. There is no measurement, it is simply to-taste.

For the squash,

1. First preheat your oven to about 350.
2. Line a baking sheet with tinfoil as to save from mess.
3. Create a "sauce" out of really really soft / quasi-melted "butter" (earthbalance, margarine, etc. - about 3tbsp), brown sugar (about 1/2 cup), and whichever spices you'd like (I used cloves and cinnamon and a little nutmeg - add to taste) by first mixing butter and brown sugar together, then adding spices. Add coarse sea salt to add a little flavor differentiation. Taste the "sauce" (it's more like a paste) to make sure you like the flavors!
4. Peel one butternut squash and cut it length-wise.
5. Scoop out the seeds and either save them for baking or discard into your compost.
6. Cut each half of the butternut squash into 1 inch / 1.5 inch "cubes" (as uniform as possible...it's tough with a weird shaped fruit), and then mix into the brown-sugar sauce in a large bowl.
7. After all the squash "cubes" are covered in the sauce, spoon them onto the cookie tray and spread them out as evenly as possible (it's easier if you double the recipe because then you have a more "full" tray).
8. Place tray on the middle oven rack, or if you're feeling ambitious, place on the top rack and switch to bottom rack (and then vice versa) every ten minutes (this creates a more "broiled" look on the squash; a little more browned edges).
9. Check on the squash frequently with your oven light and don't be afraid to stir the cubes around in their sauce while cooking. The more marinated they are, the better!
10.  
11. Remove from oven when they are the desired tenderness you like; for me this was about 40 minutes.

 

MMMMMMMM!!!!

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help! my omni-boyfriend is sick - aches/pains, no energy, bad headaches, sore sinuses, regular cold symptoms and i wanna make something tonight that will make him feel better and help him get over it quicker. vegetarain times had some good recipes to inspire me to ask but everything looked too complicated/expensive.

if anyone has any tips on what they eat to get over colds, i'd be much obliged!


xposted to cheap_vegan

Vegan Express by Nava Atlas has been a life saver since I work full-time and go to school full-time and don't normally have a lot of time to cook. Her recipes are easy and really are quick to make. Tonight I made the Nearly Instant Thai Coconut Corn Soup (if you look at the Amazon.com link, this recipe is included in the excerpts!). I'm not a big soup girl, but this one never fails me. I just love it. Tonight I paired it with her suggestion of Thai Tossed Salad w/Coconut-Peanut Sauce. Yum! :)



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P.s. When cutting up one of the red bell peppers, I found this:


It was like a whole other pepper was growing inside each of the normally hollow sections. Anyone seen this before?

One of my favourite foods is my Aunt Kinga's falafel with special red sauce(tm). People tell me that falafel exists in India, but in the 16 months I've been here, I haven't seen (or tasted) any. When I was fasting last year, I dreamt about my aunt's food all the time, but figured it was a lost cause. This year, I changed my mind.

On the third day of fasting last week, I started dreaming about her red sauce again and started thinking about how to make falafel here. I came up with a plan -- which xseaxgypsyx posted in vegancooking. (Fantastic! I love it when my recipe ideas spontaneously manifest themselves!)

Today I made them. It took...2 and half days of sprouting and soaking beans plus 3 hours in the kitchen today. I would do it again, happily, but next time would (1): make the chutney with more coconut and coconut oil, (2): wait for my dad to come home with olive oil for the veggies, and (3) find some brown bread alternative to these white flour pizza crusts (maybe it's possible! all of the tourists are coming to town, so fancy food is starting to appear!). While cooking, I was worried that I had used too much oil -- especially post-fast -- but it was ok; the "worst" was the chutney which managed to be too rich somehow. (Maybe the sesame/coconut oil mix?)

Anyway, food! My sandwich is on the left (mmm....extra red sauce); my dad's arty sandwich is on the right.

Also, apologies for all of the space between text and photos. I couldn't manage to delete it.











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I was eating at a restaurant tonight and ordered a bowl of Vegan Hearty Beet Soup. It was okay, I could mostly taste the beets above everything else but I like beets, so that was fine.

From what I could tell the ingredients to the soup were beets, onion, red pepper, chick peas and some sort of greens. I wasn't blown away by the taste because it was pretty bland but I thought what a great vegan soup. Beets for iron, chick peas for protein and one could use kale for calcium. Not to mention that it was pretty filling.

I'd like to attempt to make something like this at home but I haven't found a recipe like it. I don't think it would be that hard to make, though. Any ideas? Does anyone have any similar recipes they'd like to share? I can't be the only one out there who likes beets!