Archive for November, 2007
Oh crepes, how we love you
This morning I made these ridiculously tasty Breakfast Crepes with a Raspberry Topping. Josh turned me on to crepes a while back and I just love how many different variations there are! He grew up eating crepes so now I’m trying to make up for lost time by eating my weight in crepes, like I did this morning 
Anyway, we decided to use the fresh raspberries that were sitting in our fridge waiting to be eaten. At the last minute I threw together a raspberry lemon topping for these crepes that turned out amazing and went perfectly with these lightly sweet breakfast crepes. After eating 2-3 of them like the one in the picture, I decided to throw a few chocolate chips in there with the hot raspberry sauce before rolling it up and it made the chocolate chips all melty and wonderful…not to mention it was another fantastic way to enjoy chocolate and raspberry. Then Josh came along and made more raspberry sauce (because we ended up eating all of it) and he added a few chocolate chips into the saucepan with the raspberries and other ingredients. He said he added maybe 4 or 5 chocolate chips, and it was just enough to give you a taste of chocolate but it wasn’t too thick and heavy. In a word, it was perfect.
I’m sure we’ll think of more variations for these crepes, and feel free to experiment yourself! These crepes are waiting to be filled with fresh fruit like blueberries, strawberries, and every other yummy fruit under the sun.
4 comments November 30, 2007
Mexican Wedding Cookies
Josh came home from work today, got out the KitchenAid mixer, grabbed some baking ingredients, and said “Ok what am I making?” He decided to make Mexican Wedding Cookies!
I’ve never had them before but I figured you couldn’t go wrong with a cookie made almost entirely of margarine and powdered sugar. After doing some research, we decided to use almonds and a tablespoon of rum, which makes everything delicious. Then we baked them for 10 minutes (they came out perfectly!), rolled them in powdered sugar, and then ate about 7 of them, before dinner I might add
These cookies are super easy to make and in North America they’re considered a holiday treat. Sooo this is the first of many holiday cookies and treats..so be prepared.
7 comments November 28, 2007
TVP meatballs!
My dad has been trying to find the perfect vegan meatball recipe for years now, and finally the other night we decided to just make our own! He had experimented using tofu in a recipe but after Josh and I experimented with TVP in our crab cakes, we thought it would work great in meatballs too.
We bake these meatballs for 30 minutes in the oven at 400 degrees, turning them every 10 minutes or so. We think this makes them stay together better than if we would have fried them. They stay together better than any other meatball recipe we have tried, too. We made a big pasta dinner at my parent’s house and these Meatballs Italiano were the perfect addition.
1 comment November 26, 2007
Pomander inspired biscotti
A few years ago we made pomanders, where you insert whole cloves into oranges in a decorative pattern and you can either hang them with ribbon or place them in a bowl like potpourri. This was a new thing for my family but not only were they beautiful holiday decorations but they smelled amazing. Oranges and cloves go so well together, and we figured that they would taste really good together too. So we made Orange Clove Biscotti.
Biscotti translates roughly from “twice baked” in Italian, because you first bake these lightly sweet cookies in slabs, then you slice them and bake them again. This dries them out a bit, making them great for dipping in tea or coffee. We’re going to be trying some variations with these, one which I’m really excited about which is dipping one of the ends of the biscotti in orange flavored chocolate 
3 comments November 20, 2007
Roasting garlic and vegetables=DELISH
Last night around 10pm Josh and I were sitting here working on the website (and eating some amazing new cookies that we made) and we realized that we had completely forgotten to eat dinner! We debated about going to get some pizza from this new restaurant that we’ve been obsessing over, but then we realized that we had just gone shopping the night before and gotten ingredients to make a bunch of new recipes. So, we opted to make this roasted vegetable ziti.
We used garlic, tomatoes, red and green peppers, artichoke hearts, and red onions and we put them all on a cookie sheet and doused it with olive oil. Then we roasted it for about 20 minutes, and the whole house smelled amazing. It’s crazy how roasting vegetables brings out such amazing flavors and smells. We put a few handfuls of spinach in there, stirred it around, and put it back in the oven for another 10 minutes, but some of the spinach got really dry and flaky. So we took it out of the oven once the veggies were done roasting, mixed it in with the cooked ziti, and added a few more handfuls of fresh spinach. We also added some chopped calamata olives and reheated everything to cook the spinach. Some salt, pepper, and a sprinkle of red pepper flakes and it was done! It was…soooo good. I just woke up but I think I’m going to have the leftovers for breakfast. We’ve never roasted garlic before but it made it a mellow, mild flavor that is just so good.
I would seriously recommend making this recipe, and from now on we’ll probably be making a lot more recipes using roasted garlic and vegetables.
1 comment November 17, 2007
vegan survey!
I just saw this on Veggie Delight and thought it would be cool to fill it out.
1. Favorite non-dairy milk?
Silk lite2. What are the top 3 dishes/recipes you are planning to cook?
Seitan fillets with red wine reduction sauce, choux pastry, and more cupcakes!!!3. Topping of choice for popcorn?
nooch (nutritional yeast), soy butter, and salt4. Most disastrous recipe/meal failure?
pumkin banana pancakes:(5. Favorite pickled item?
pickles6. How do you organize your recipes?
www.nowheyjose.com7. Compost, trash, or garbage disposal?
compost for the compostable, the rest in either trash or recycle bin8. If you were stranded on an island and could only bring 3 foods…what would they be (don’t worry about how you’ll cook them)?
tofu, jelly doughnut cupcakes, and pistachios.9. Fondest food memory from your childhood?
baking with my mum, she started it all.10. Favorite vegan ice cream?
tofutti vanilla, i know bland, but its delish.11. Most loved kitchen appliance?
hot rod red kitchenaid artisan stand mixer.12. Spice/herb you would die without?
basil, hands down.13. Cookbook you have owned for the longest time?
moosewood vegetarian kitchen.14. Favorite flavor of jam/jelly?
Raspberry.15. Favorite vegan recipe to serve to an omni friend?
hmm i guess i dont have any “omni” friends i ever cook for.16. Seitan, tofu, or tempeh?
WE <3 TOFU
17. Favorite meal to cook (or time of day to cook)?
after dark.18. What is sitting on top of your refrigerator?
some doggie training pads, animal food, and backup filters for our ac/heater.19. Name 3 items in your freezer without looking.
white bread, sourdough bread, hard rolls.20. What’s on your grocery list?
nothing i just went shopping.21. Favorite grocery store?
ellwood thompsons!22. Name a recipe you’d love to veganize, but haven’t yet.
CHOUX23. Food blog you read the most (besides Isa’s because I know you check it everyday). Or maybe the top 3?
www.nowheyjose.com takes over my life.24. Favorite vegan candy/chocolate?
hmm i love my peanut butter cups25. Most extravagant food item purchased lately?
we jsut bought s TON of tofu. really like 6 blocks.26. If you could eat dinner at a vegan cookbook author’s home, who would it be?
Isa Chandra Moskowitz, with a vengeance.
1 comment November 16, 2007
Choux??
I have been pondering the thought of a vegan puff pastry for a while now and tonight I decided to try my hand at making a choux. This pastry calls for a lot of eggs and I thought the hardest part would be to get the pastry to “puff.” Turns out that that wasn’t that hard at all; my pastries formed a nice cavity inside but they didn’t get cooked all the way through. To sub for the eggs I used a mixture of ground flax seeds and water. I heated that up to the consistency of eggs. I think that it was this mixture that held my pastry back from cooking all the way through. Using the base choux recipe from Food Network’s show “Good Eats,” it calls for them to cook for a total of 20 minutes. This was definitely not enough. So if anyone has any ideas on an egg replacement that would cook in that amount of time, and still hold the batter together, let me know.
4 comments November 16, 2007
Thanksgiving is in 7 days!
Pictured is Josh with Pearl the turkey from Poplar Springs Animal Sanctuary. She fell off of a truck on her way to the slaughterhouse and she was found and taken to the sanctuary. If you live in the Virginia or Maryland area, you should go to Poplar Springs’ “Thanksgiving With The Turkeys,” a vegan potluck served amongst their rescued turkeys.
This will be our family’s 3rd 100% vegan Thanksgiving, and our few non-vegan family members (most of which are vegetarian) have been so supportive and enthusiastic about the idea, and most importantly the food!
Even though a large majority of my family is vegetarian or vegan, over the years my grandma would still cook a turkey for those who still ate meat. I can remember being over at my grandparent’s house on Thanksgiving and walking through the kitchen while everything was being prepared and seeing a huge turkey in the oven. Since I was raised vegetarian the only time I ever saw meat being cooked for a family dinner was Thanksgiving, and it was awful. It was even more shocking to me to walk around the corner into the kitchen and see my grandpa, a long time vegetarian and animal lover, carving the carcass of a turkey on the kitchen counter. A few years ago my parents and I decided that we didn’t want to have a turkey sitting in the middle of our otherwise completely vegetarian Thanksgiving table anymore. We talked to the rest of the family, and everyone agreed that it was time to cut out the turkey.
Since then our Thanksgiving dinners have been vegan. I find it funny how people are so astounded by the idea of a vegetarian or vegan Thanksgiving. Besides the turkey, mostly everything else that is spread out for Thanksgiving is vegetables and bread. Why is so hard to believe that you can have a fulfilling and delicious Thanksgiving without having the stuffed carcass of a turkey sitting in the middle of all of those amazing vegetable dishes?
We’re still coming up with ideas for our Thanksgiving dishes, but here is a preliminary menu that will be served at our 3rd vegan Thanksgiving:
Appetizers
Famous Hummus and pita bread
Spinach Vegetable dip and fresh veggies
Dinner
Garlicky Mashed Potatoes
Mushroom Gravy
Cranberry Sauce
Green Bean Casserole
Breads
Sweet Potato Corn Bread
Biscuits
Dessert
Classic Pumpkin Pie
Apple Pie
(And one more that Josh and I have yet to create!)
This week we’ll be compiling all the recipes for the menu and linking to them, so make sure to check back for the full recipe list. All in all, it’s a pretty classic Thanksgiving menu, just remove all animal ingredients and replace with love and kindness Okay that was sappy, but it’s true.
Try not to stress too much about Thanksgiving. I know I’ve already started to stress because there’s so many things I want to make but my mom has requested a “traditional” Thanksgiving (in other words, she doesn’t want me to go crazy with new recipes and leave out the oldies-but-goodies). If your family isn’t having a vegan or vegetarian Thanksgiving, offer to make a few of your favorite dishes, that way you can prepare them vegan! They don’t need to know that there isn’t any butter in your delicious mashed potatoes, right? Besides, Thanksgiving is about family, togetherness, and giving thanks to what we have. In no way should that have anything to do with the brutal slaughtering of gorgeous birds.
5 comments November 15, 2007
We got crabs…cakes
Growing up, I would spend every summer at my grandparent’s beach house in Delaware. One of my favorite things to eat there was, sadly, crabs. So I decided to make crab cakes! I’ve always wanted to use TVP (textured vegetable protein) in one of our recipes, and we thought this would be the perfect place to put it. I thought it would take a couple tries to get the recipe right but they turned out great the first time.
And since you can’t have crab cakes without a creamy basil mayo, I went ahead and whipped some up. Keeping fresh herbs like basil on hand makes recipes that calls for herbs, like this one, so much better. We regretfully did not have any lemon to serve with these little cakes. Chelsea wanted to drive to the store to get some specifically for the picture, but we opted not to because we couldn’t resist them much longer than we already had to to take the picture.
Here’s a picture of me making them, and another one of Chelsea and I cooking.
So, yeah..we got crabs..and you should too.
2 comments November 11, 2007
Eggless Salad- new recipe!
We have posted our delish recipe for Eggless Salad. I made a batch in order to get all the measurements and ingredients right for the recipe and it turned out to be the best tofu egg salad we’ve had yet. It’s not too strongly flavored but each of the ingredients really shines in every bite you take. Tumeric was used to give it a yellowy color, but I made sure not to put too much because we’ve seen some tofu egg salads that are radioactive yellow, and that’s just not appetizing. The celery, onion, and green pepper was diced really small so that no one flavor overpowers another. I added some paprika as well and I think that’s part of what makes it so good.
I called my grandma to ask her what she puts in her egg salad (it used to be my fav growing up), and as she was trying to tell me how she makes it I could hear my grandpa in the background telling her things to put it in it. At one point my grandma said, “Hold on, Chelsea..your grandfather is telling me to tell you to put pickle juice in it but I DON’T PUT PICKLE JUICE IN MY EGG SALAD!” It was hilarious. I love it when they bicker.
Ok enough about my grandparents. This egg salad is really great on sandwiches and on crackers for a mid-afternoon snack or even as appetizers for a party. So go make it!
Add comment November 10, 2007
