Saturday, February 2, 2008

a simple hello


Hello there! My name is Bea and this is a sample of my cookbooks.

From left-to-right they are:
Eat, Drink & Be Vegan
Vegan on a Shoestring
How it all Vegan
Vegan with a Vengeance
La Dolce Vegan!
The Garden of Vegan
Veganomicon (!!!)
Skinny Bitch in the Kitch (it was a Christmas gift)
Please Don't Feed the Bears
Hot Damn & Hell Yeah!
Fresh From the Vegetarian Slow Cooker
Vegetarian Planet
Vegan Planet

I've been collecting cookbooks for several years, I got it from my mom, and half.com serves only to feed my addiction. My two most recent cookbook acquisitions are Veganomicon and Vegan on a Shoestring. I'm 28 now, I was a vegetarian for 2 or 3 years in high school, and then I reverted back to eating meat until almost a year ago. Some other post I will talk about what brought about that change. I calculate that I eat about 99.7% vegan now, I am strict at home and working on being stricter when the time comes. I started this blog to motivate and encourage myself to branch out into fancier foods more often, not just every once every few weeks while eating various grain/salad/prepared deli stuff the rest of the time. Being a single person it's not always easy to feel like it's worth the trouble to make something awesome just for yourself but if I'm going to be taking pictures of it that's a whole different beast.

I'm also hoping in the future my posts will have a little better writing/focus/point/direction to them but this is good for now. If this blog was the experience of making a recipe, this is the part where you go to the store for the stuff you need I think. Possibly it's the part where you're bringing it home, possibly.

My most notable food experience of late was making the Stewed Tofu and Potatoes in Miso Gravy from VwaV. It was the most ambitious thing I've ever made but so worth it. The gravy was savory and thick, I pressed my tofu for over an hour so it was super chewy, as were the potatoes (I used dutch yellows, so buttery). I ate it for the next week and literally said goodbye and that I would miss it when it was all gone. I am deciding between making it again or actually branching out and trying something from one of my new cookbooks or one of the older books I haven't used much. It's so very hard to decide.

Something else I made recently with only half-success was stuffed peppers. My friend told me her recipe for stuffed delicata squash which was shallots, quinoa, and pine nuts in lots of Earth Balance. I took it from there and added sauteed mushrooms and thyme and bits from the tops of the green peppers I was using. The pepper part turned out not so hot because I didn't parboil them, I think. But the stuffing itself was just fine on it's own, so it wasn't a complete loss. This is the sort-of recipe:

1 cup quinoa
big tablespoon Earth Balance
1 shallot, finely diced
6-8 crimini mushrooms, sliced
handful of pine nuts
1/4 cup or so of diced green pepper (or whatever pepper, I think red would be nice)
dried thyme, black pepper, salt to taste

Cook the quinoa with 2 cups water as you would rice, either on the stove top or rice cooker. I use my food steamer's rice bowl thing. This part is really up to you.

In a pan, melt the EB and when that's hot add your shallots and mushrooms, sautee until the mushrooms are browned and have almost released all their moisture. Then add the diced pepper and thyme, black pepper, and salt, however much you like is fine. I learned from Isa to crush the thyme before adding and have never looked back. Cook all that together until it's done, combine it with the quinoa. Add more seasonings if need be. At this point you can either stuff it into peppers (if you do, parboil the peppers in salted water for five minutes first) and bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees. OR! You can just eat the quinoa mixture with a nice salad on the side, it is up to you.

I am off to make breakfast and figure out what my next food adventure will be. Thanks for reading!

~Bea

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