I was bored of toast, and therefore needed some muffins to go with my breakfast smoothies.  Breakfast is likely my favourite meal, since most breakfast foods are awesome.  Who doesn’t love a meal that can consist of fruit and greens smoothies, pancakes, waffles, oatmeal (you haven’t seen oatmeal until you’ve seen the crazy oatmeal I cook up), muffins, fruit salads, hash browns, and so forth?  I also believe in eating big at the beginning of the day.  Some people would disagree with me, but I find my body likes this system best.  Then, you have the whole day ahead of you to use up the energy from that big meal, whereas if supper is you’re biggest meal, you’ll be going to sleep not that long after eating it.  I also like simultaneous breakfast lunch.  I know, there’s another word for that, but mine’s cooler.

This batch of muffins turned out amazing, and they’re healthy enough to actually be included in my normal everyday breakfast.  No sugar, no wheat flour (although I’ve added wheat germ), no oil, but lots of delicious flavours.  This is a severely altered version of a recipe I found in the Zen Monastery Cookbook; I’ve used the base recipe from their orange pecan muffins for a few different modifications, as its proportions just seem really nice.  I also think the citrus helps to make them rise all lovely-like, and therefore gives them a nice texture.

Oh, and these are made with stevia.  I know, some people aren’t fans.  However, I actually really, really like the taste of the stuff, as long as you add just enough.  Don’t go overboard.  Stevia is strong stuff, and a teaspoon can be as sweet as a cup of sugar.

Orange-Blueberry-Banana Breakfast Muffins

-2  1/4 cups light spelt flour

- 1/2 cup wheat germ

- 2 tsp baking powder

- 1 tsp salt

- 1/2 tsp baking soda

- 1/4 tsp white stevia powder

- flax seed for decoration, optional

- banana egg replacer for 2 eggs (mash a banana with 1/2 tsp baking soda.  Usually it’s 1 tsp, but there’s already another 1/2 tsp of baking soda in this recipe.)

- 1 cup orange juice, plus 2 tbsp of orange juice concentrate

- 1 cup blueberries, fresh, or thawed from frozen (or partially thawed, if you forgot to thaw them ahead of time, like me.)

Preheat oven to 375.  Coat muffin tins with non-stick spray or a light coating of oil.

Blend the flour, wheat germ, baking powder, salt, baking soda, and stevia powder together.  In a separate bowl, mix the banana eggs, orange juice, and blueberries.  Mix the wet ingredients into the dry until just blended.  If it seems a little too thick for muffins, add a little more orange juice.

Spoon into muffin tin, and if desired, sprinkle with flax seeds.  Cook for 25 min, until a toothpick comes out clean.

Oh, and since I missed blogging yesterday, here’s another quick mini- recipe. Sometimes, if I have leftover rice, I just mix a little rice vinegar, a sprinkle of salt, and a half spoonful of veg-friendly sugar with it to make a dressing for the rice, and use it as though it were sushi.  I know, this may be blasphemy, but to be fair, when I actually make sushi rice, it comes out beautifully.  For these rolls, I added lots of avocado and thinly sliced cucumber, and a little wasabi.  Actually, it was a lot of wasabi…mmmmm.

Since that title seemed to get everyone’s attention in one of my first ever blog posts…

Now, for another addition to my attempts at blogging for
A brief post for today.  I was rummaging through a garage sale looking for something to turn into a sculpture for art class, when I came across a simplified ice cream maker that uses a pre-frozen tub to chill the ice cream.  Glee!  Took it for its first run on Sunday, and created this.

I think I overfilled it a little bit, because it was freezing somewhat slowly, yet when I started scooping it out, the remainder froze really fast.  The whole process from mixing ingredients to eating ice cream took just over half an hour, and that was with my miscalculations.  I’m excited to try again!

This particular ice cream was made from coconut milk, blended frozen blueberries, fine turbinado sugar, Cocoa Camino cocoa powder, almond slivers, unsweetened shredded coconut,  and almond extract.  Yeah, we went a little crazy.  It was actually delicious, although a little too almond-y.  Less almond extract next time.

On top, you may notice some sprinkles.  Vegan sprinkles!  In one of the issues of Vegetarian Times recently, there was an article on vegan donuts, where they called for vegan sprinkles in a recipe.  I scoffed at this, thinking, “Sure, I bet in some big city you can find vegan sprinkles, but what about those of us living in small cities?  I’ll never come across those, and that is so not a realistic ingredient to call for in a recipe!”  Yet, when I was perusing a health food store that I don’t go to that often, guess what I found!

Ice cream with sprinkles.  I feel like I’m seven.  Oh, and in keeping with the seven-year old theme, here’s a pic I took today whose colours delight me.

Long time, no internet…I needed a break from updating and keeping track of too many different accounts for awhile.  However, I decided to start blogging again (likely with more pictures, less text, to keep things manageable) for VeganMoFo the III (Vegan Month of Food).  This will mean blogging every day, or almost every day, for the rest of the month.  So, sometimes it will be short cooking tips, or pictures of simple meals, and other days I will post some of the more complex recipe posts I’ve been putting off (like puris…).

Now, in honour of official World Vegetarian Day, I give you what I ate for supper-

Simple Sesame Greens, Zucchini and Beets

Ingredients

- zucchini, chopped into half rounds

- a small beet, also chopped into half rounds

- a minced  green onion

- a leaf or two of kale, chopped

- a couple teaspoons to a tablespoon of cooking oil

- sesame seeds, as many as you like

- a splash of sesame oil

- soba noodles (if you’re rich, go for the real ones, but if you’re poor, you can get ones that are partially buckwheat flour, partially wheat flour)

Process

Cook your soba noodles following the instructions on the package.  Chop your veggies, heat your cooking oil in a frying pan, and sauté the beet, zucchini and onion for a minute or two.  Add your kale, sesame seeds, and a little sesame oil, and cook until the kale just begins to wilt.  Don’t over-cook.  Eat the veg over the soba noodles.

Nom!

Three gardens.  One salad.  Devoured by many.  This is a sneak peak of one of the recipes that will likely be in my cookbook, with more exact measurements and instructions attached.

The potatoes are from the organic community agriculture project that I’ve become a part of (aka, we finally have veg baskets in Saskatchewan like the ones everyone else is bragging about!), the spinach, radishes and green onions were from my friend’s garden that I’m helping tend in return for produce, and the herbs were my doing!

Now, let’s see if I can remember the ingredients…

- potatoes, cut into smallish cubes and boiled, skins on

- a large handful of fresh spinach

- some green onions, chopped

- a few garden radishes, thinly sliced

- chopped fresh dill and chives

Toss together, then add a dressing made of

- a little extra virgin olive oil

- a good splash of chive flower vinegar (where you’ve soaked chive flowers with vinegar, turning the vinegar pink and flavouring it, a trick I took from Where It All Vegan, I think).  Or, I bet cider vinegar would work well too

- a little dry mustard

- freshly ground salt and pepper

I think that was everything.  I’ll add an update if I remember any forgotten ingredients.

I’m thinking of compiling a cookbook, because it seems like a fun thing to do.  It might possibly end up here so that people can download it for free; I don’t think I’m in this project to make any money, so much as to create a crazy compliation of recipies and pretty pictures.  Actually, half the pictures will likely have nothing to do with food, and just be photos that amused me and seemed to loosley fit for strange reasons.

However, the reason I’m posting about this is that I don’t think I want the chapters in this cookbook to be consistent with all the others on the market.  You know, where they are traditionally divided into categories like soup, starters, entrées, salads, breads, and desserts. While this is helpful, it’s been done already… a lot.  No, I think I want to find some more interesting way of sorting recipes.  Categories I have in mind so far include Accidental Recipes, Things with Avocados, Thins that Taste Way Better than they Look, the Colour Orange, and Things That can be Made in Fifteen Minutes Flat.  What I want to know is if anyone has some more chapter ideas.

I will have to keep this post brief, as the cat asleep on my one hand is making typing incredibly slow.

Hi internetz!  I kind of got sick of tending to all of the chores of the Internet for a while (partially due to the daunting task of dealing with the lack of space in my flickr account…which I’ve been avoiding) and needed a break from blogging.  However, today I made a sandwich that I couldn’t keep to myself.

I have no idea where this little bit of logic came from (about the apples and the tofu), but the results were delicious.  I decided I wanted a toasted sandwich with an avocado-Dijon spread for lunch – something along the lines of what I created for an article in our university paper.  It was a delightfully easy sandwich made from lettuce, tomatoes, sprouts, red onion, and seasoned, pan-fried tofu slices.  The spread was just mashed avocado and Dijon mustard.  The problem I was having today though is that I am currently not eating any soy products in an attempt to figure out if I have a soy allergy.  So, no tofu.

So why not apple slices?  I started by making my avocado spread, with the intention of putting lettuce, cucumber and tomato on it, and calling it a sandwich.  Then, this nagging little voice told me to look over at the fruit bowl.  The textures and flavours of the cucumber and apple just seemed to be calling out to be paired together.  This was the results:

Apple Sandwich

1/2 avocado

Dijon mustard

1/2 apple, cut into centimeter-thick slices

handful of thin cucumber slices

lettuce

optional- a sprinkling of pumpkin seeds

2 pieces of toast.

Mash the avocado and stir in Dijon to taste.  Spread on both pieces of toast.  Assemble the rest of the ingredients onto one slice of toast, and then place the other on top.  Eat immediately.

Don’t be scared of the whole fruit-in-your-sandwich thing; this is absolutely delicious!  It went well with the nice spring weather.

Sometimes, I just start throwing together foods that  I’m craving, and see where they take me.  If I’m lucky, it turns into something delicious.  If I’m not…well, then I just try to eat quickly.

However, these two dishes were successful ones.

Bowl O’ Things

This one was mostly leftovers in my fridge, and makes a very quick lunch.  It was mostly created because I was craving the mango salsa and the peas, but didn’t know how they could go together.  It may sound like a stretch, but trust me, this one’s tasty!  Sorry, no pic today.

- rice noodles

- sugar snap peas

- a falafel, crumbled

- mango salsa

Layer in a bowl in that order, warming up the falafel first.

Pot O’ Stuff

- 3 ish green onions

- a clove of garlic

- mushrooms (a few handfuls or however many mushrooms you have leftover in your fridge)

- 2-3 leaves of kale

- a small can of tomato paste

- a dollop of molasses

- Rosemary

- a lemon, sliced

- chick peas, a can, or a couple of cups

- black olive slices, however many you like

Cook the onions and garlic in a pot with a little water.  Add the mushrooms and cook a little longer.  Add the kale, cook some more (I prefer my kale to still have some crispiness to it, so I don’t cook it long, only a minute or two).  Add the tomato paste, molasses, rosemary, and lemon slices, as well as a little more water if you need to thin the sauce a bit.  Stir, and once heated, add the  chickpeas and olives.  Once those too are heated through, serve.  I served it on rice noodles, but if I had actually been planning ahead, I would have chosen brown rice for this, I think.  The rice noodles were just convenient.

First, I would like to bust a myth; vegans do not live off tofu alone.  (Gasps fill the internetz.)  Varying your diet is a good thing!  However, tofu is a good friend of mine.  So after some cooking advice requests from friends that resulted in a tofu night as well as inspiration for a student newspaper article I wrote, I’d like to share a little on how to prep tofu.

Tofu can be prepared in about a gazillion ways.  Today, I’m basically going to share just one way to prepare it for two different dishes.  For these dishes, you will want to buy regular extra firm tofu (not the silken kind…it’ll crumble easier, so it isn’t very beginner-friendly.  More on other types of tofu to come later).  When you open a package of tofu, it’s a good idea to rinse it off first.  Any leftover uncooked tofu (assuming you have leftover) should be stored in the fridge, covered in water.  The water should be changed every day.  The packages say that they keep for 3 days after opening, however that looks as though it doesn’t account for the whole storing in water thingy, and I’ve had tofu stay very fresh up to a week after opening.

Both of these recipes are created by basically frying tofu cubes in a pre-heated pot or pan with a little oil.  The trick to doing this well is not to get flip-happy; let the tofu turn golden on the side that’s facing down before you stir it!  I cook tofu on medium heat to make it a little chewier on the outside, but some people prefer it cooked on a lower temperature.  Also, this can be done in a non-stick pan without oil too, and you will still get nice, golden tofu.  I will often skip the oil when I make myself lightly stir-fried veggies and tofu in a non-stick pan for a quick meal.  Actually, if you’re not worried about getting the outsides golden, then just lightly heat your tofu cubes and call it a night (half the time, I don’t really care if the tofu in my stir-fries is golden on the outside).

Tofu marinates very well.  Try putting it in a marinade for at least an hour, and it’ll soak up a bunch of flavour.  Also, being meat-free, you can re-use the marinade as a sauce for the same dish later.  Glee!

When cutting tofu, make sure you don’t cut it into pieces that are too small or too thin.  I would guess that a good rule of thumb is to keep everything at least a centimeter thick, or it might crumble badly while cooking (which can be a desired effect at times).  Also, if cooking tofu to add to veggies or the like, cook the tofu first.  You may even want to cook it and set it aside while the veggies cook, and add it back in after if you fear it’ll end up getting too beaten up in the stir-fry process.

Ready for some recipes now?

Miso French Onion Soup

Since this one’s supposed to be richer and almost gravy-like, I would cook it with the oil and the sugar, however if you were wanting to make a healthier version, by all means skip those two ingredients and cook the tofu and onions in a non-stick pan.  I didn’t bother with the bread or the fake cheese on top, because I personally was in it for the rich broth and excessive amount of onions myself.  That and soggy bread makes me irritable.

(Serves one.  Multiply for more.  I’m actually guessing at the measurements a bit, just so that you know.  I never measured this one out.)

- 1/2 onion, chopped in fair-sized pieces

- 1/4 block of tofu

- a little cooking oil (not pure olive oil, as it’ll heat too hot, and have the wrong flavour)

- a small spoonful of not-so-refined sugar

- Freshly ground pepper.

- 2 cups water or veggie broth

- 2 tbsp of miso paste (or to whatever strength you prefer)

- (oh, and if you want some greens, wilt a little bok choy greens in here too!)

Fry the tofu and onion together in the oil, adding in the sugar to speed up the caramelizing and browning processes, and give everything a slight glaze.  Season with pepper.  It should look like the picture below, where the sides of the tofu are slightly brown in places, and the onions are turning transparent.  Note that for the onion’s sake, you’ll need to stir this more often than you normally would stir tofu, but the sugar will help with the browning so it’ll be ok.

Add the water or broth, and heat until warm, but not boiling.  Remove a little of the warm water or broth and stir it into the miso paste.  Add the miso to the rest of the soup and stir well.  Again, make sure none of this ever comes to a boil, or your soup will be bitter.

Tofu Stir Fry

Of course there’s never been one true way to make a stir-fry, but some people like a place to start from.  This is the stir fry from our tofu night.  Serves fourish.  Again, sorry for the not so exact measurements.

- a block of extra firm tofu

- cooking oil (optional)

- Green onions

- broccoli

- Chinese bean sprouts

- bok choy

- carrots

- any other veg your heart desires (am I missing anything we used that night?)

for a simple sauce:

- soy sauce

- lime juice

- a little not-so-refined sugar or maple syrup, but keep this to a minimum

- freshly grated ginger

- fresh or powdered garlic

- dried chili (we used 2 chilies)

- a little corn starch

Cook the tofu either in oil, or in a nonstick pan.  Note- if you’re using a really nice wok (like somebody’s…you know who you are…) you won’t need much heat to do this, so keep it on medium-low!  Warm up the wok to medium-high, and tir-fry the veggies for about 3 minutes (or more if you’re not into crispy veggies, but I urge you to try it).  Add a sauce, such as the one I described above (blend everything together before adding), or just a little soy sauce.

Sorry there’s no picture…we kinda forgot the camera part-way through cooking.

More tofu tutorials in the future.

Experimenting time!  As mentioned previously, I’ve been doing some reading on raw foods.  I had read about eating raw potatoes, and mentioned it to a friend, who immediately wanted to know more.  Yet the book I read didn’t have any actual recipes for raw potato in it.  So, I made up my own.  Can’t say it’s my favourite thing to eat, but it’s not terrible.  Needs some work still.  That and the graininess of raw potato kinda irks me.  Still, I’ll share my recipe, and if anyone knows how to make a better raw potato recipe, please do speak up!  (Oh, and I’ve got plenty of raw sweet potato recipes, so don’t worry about that one.)

Some Sorta Potato Slaw

1 potato, grated
a few cherry/berry tomatoes or a whole tomato, sliced
a large handful fresh parsley, chopped up
half an avocado, mashed
lemon juice (about 1/4 a lemon)
small drizzle olive oil
a little sea salt and pepper

Just mix everything together.  Not much more to it than that.

If I were a zombie… because these are the important things that we discuss.

Recently, I recorded another year of living on this planet.  I’ll leave you to guess my age- suffice it to say, my brain was in seven-year-old mode, so it doesn’t really make a difference.   I was tricked into coming to my own surprise party by all my delightfully crazy friends (they told me we were gonna celebrate Friday the 13th…which could have been fun too).

In culinary-related news, Kiekaisu made me a sushi-themed vegan cake- all on her own!  Yay for omnis who like to learn how to cook vegan.  She has offered to share her creation with the internetz, so I’ll hand you off to Kiekaisu…

Mah Vegan Cake

This was a fun cake to make, because the recipe has been altered to the point that it doesn’t look like the original barely at all (I had also considered how to make this gluten free… I will notify when I try it out!) Also, this was my first attempt at making a vegan cake! I may reduce the sugar a little more next time if I were to use the fondant again, but was still good!

¾ cup organic sugar

½ cup earth balance

1 portion Starch-based egg replacer*

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp almond extract

1 ½ cups flour

1 ¾ tsp baking powder

½ cup soy milk

* Starch-based egg replacer recipe (from Goodbaker):

1 Tbsp tapioca or corn starch
1 Tbsp potato starch
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp xanthan gum (if you have it)

- Add a scant 1/2 cup water and 2 tsp oil. Whisk until thoroughly combined and somewhat frothy

DIRECTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Spray a 9×9 inch pan or line a muffin pan with paper liners.

2. In a medium bowl, cream together the sugar and earth balance. Beat in half of the “eggs”, then the second half, then stir in the vanilla and almond. Combine flour and baking powder, add to the creamed mixture and mix well. Finally stir in the soy milk until batter is smooth. Pour or spoon batter into the prepared pan.

3. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes in the preheated oven. For cupcakes, bake 20 to 25 minutes. Cake is done when it springs back to the touch.

I doubled this recipe to get the amount for the cake, which fed 12 people easily. I suggest using some sort of organic jam in between, as the jam won’t spoil as fruit will (fondant and fridge don’t always get along for me)