We have been caught up in other things lately and have neglected the blog a bit First was school and all of its stresses, then my graduation, then Josh and I spent 3 weeks in Europe..where we got engaged!!!

Josh proposed in Paris in a garden beside one of the oldest churches in the city. It was a gorgeous little park with one of the best views of the Notre Dame. Talk about romantic! We’ve set the date for October 2, 2010 (which is also our 8 year anniversary!)

So needless to say we’ve been a little preoccupied, but we have still made time to cook! Last night I made this delicious pasta called a BLT pasta salad. I found the recipe on Food Network and then tweaked it a bit to make it more yummy. The combination of the crispy fakin’ bacon, fresh tomatoes, and lettuce mixed in with the noodles in a Vegenaise dressing makes it taste like that perfect BLT sandwich that Josh and I both love.  It’s super easy to make and it’s perfect for any summer barbeque or picnic! 

This recipe serves 2-3 as a side dish, so if you’re making it for a larger crowd I would just double it or even triple it.

6 ounces rotini pasta

4 slices fakin’ bacon

1/4 cup vegan mayonnaise (we use Vegenaise)

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 teaspoon vinegar

1-2 small fresh tomatoes, chopped (we used red and yellow Roma style tomatoes from our garden!)

1 cup green leaf or romaine lettuce, chopped

Handful of fresh parsley, chopped

Salt and pepper to taste (we used about 1 teaspoon salt and 1/4 tsp pepper)

Cook pasta noodles according to package directions. Meanwhile cook the bacon until crispy, set aside. Drain the pasta, rinse with cold water, and set in a medium sized bowl. Add the vegan mayo, vegetable oil, and vinegar and stir to combine. Add the tomatoes, lettuce, and parsley. Crumble the bacon into the pasta and add salt and pepper to taste. Serve at room temperature.

Today is Josh’s 24th birthday (WOO!!!) and I set out to make him the best cinnamon buns possible. We both haven’t had cinnamon buns since we’ve been vegan, which means the last ones we had were probably Cinnabon..so I had a lot to live up to!
I searched the web for tons of different cinnamon bun recipes, but none of them really had what I was looking for… so I decided to make my own recipe using a combination of some of the better ones I found.
These came out PERFECT! I had very high expectations for them and they passed with flying colors! The soft dough has just a hint of sweetness, the filling has just the right amount of cinnamon, and the icing tops it all off with sweet vanilla-y goodness.
Since these use a yeast dough it did take a bit of time with the rising and all, but it is SO worth it! If you have some time to set aside for baking I would totally recommend making these for a brunch or for a delicious dessert. You can’t go wrong with cinnamon buns!

i saw a recipe for chicken tetrazzini in a magazine recently and thought how wonderful and yummy it looked! i have never had/heard of chicken tetrazzini before but i knew you couldn’t go wrong with vegan cream of mushroom soup, white wine, fakin’ bacon, and chick strips! 

we LOVE morningstar’s meal starter chick strips because they can be used in so many different recipes. they truly are a meal starter! they work perfectly for baked recipes like this and for pretty much any other recipe that calls for chicken. hells yeah!

we borrowed the cream of mushroom soup recipe from fat free vegan kitchen (with a little tweaks) because it is sooo delicious and super easy to make.

so here’s the recipe!!

Vegan Chicken Tetrazzini

7 oz of vermicelli

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 bag of morningstar meal starter chick strips, thawed

3 strips of vegan bacon (we use smart bacon)

1/2 cup vegetable broth

1/4 cup dry white wine

1 cup frozen peas, thawed

For the cream of mushroom soup:

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 cups chopped white or baby bella mushrooms

3 garlic cloves, minced

Salt and pepper to taste

Pinch of cayenne pepper

3 tablespoons flour

1 cup vegetable broth

3/4 cup plain soy milk

preheat oven to 350 degrees. cook pasta according to package directions. heat the oil in a frying pan over medium heat. add the chick strips and cook until lightly browned. transfer to a cutting board and cut into bite sized pieces. add the bacon to the pan and cook on each side until crispy. set aside with chick strips. 

for the cream of mushroom soup: in a medium saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium high heat. add the mushrooms, garlic, salt, pepper, and cayenne and cook until the mushrooms have softened. in a small bowl, whisk the flour into the vegetable broth until fully dissolved. stream into the mushrooms and stir until thickened and the mixture begins to simmer. add the soy milk and continue to stir while simmering until the mixture thickens a bit more (you want the consistency to be a little looser than a gravy).

turn off heat and add the cooked vermicelli, chick strips, bacon, vegetable broth, wine, and peas to the cream of mushroom soup. add a bit more salt and pepper and transfer to a 11×7″ casserole dish. bake for 15 minutes or until bubbly. serves 4.

 

 

 

everyone should have a cake pan like this

one of josh’s favorite things to eat for any meal of the day would have to be biscuits. we’ve tried several different vegan biscuit recipes before..some good results, but mostly he would nod his head and say, “yea, they’re good,” but i could tell they weren’t the best. so this morning i woke up and decided i wanted to make josh breakfast. the first thing that came to mind were biscuits! i knew that if i made a big batch that josh would be able to have, oh, 5 for breakfast..1 or 2 for a snack, maybe some with dinner, and i might be able to sneak in a couple myself! 

this recipe is adapted from “tyler’s ultimate” on the food network, and it turned out great! you can see in the picture that they came out perfectly flaky, buttery, and just perfect for breakfast, lunch, or dinner! the original recipe called for buttermilk, so i used soy milk and lemon juice to make my own vegan buttermilk. yesterday morning i made these buttermilk pancakes from flavor vegan (which is now our go-to recipe for pancakes!) and she used soy milk and lemon juice to make buttermilk, and it worked wonders. i usually use soy milk and vinegar but from now on lemon juice is it!

here’s the recipe!

1 1/2 cups soy milk

1 teaspoon lemon juice

4 cups flour

1 tablespoon salt

1 tablespoon baking powder

2 teaspoons baking soda

1/2 cup vegan margarine, cold, cut into 1/2″ pieces

1/2 cup vegetable shortening, cold, cut into 1/2″ pieces

preheat oven to 375 degrees. in a small bowl, mix the soy milk and lemon juice and stir to combine. in a large bowl, mix together the flour, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. cut in the margarine and vegetable shortening with your hands or a pastry blender until it resembles course crumbs. make a well in the center and add the soy  milk mixture. use your hands to fold the dry ingredients into the buttermilk until a sticky dough forms. add more milk if it’s too dry, or more flour if it’s too wet. turn the dough onto a floured surface and gently fold the dough onto itself 3 or 4 times. roll the dough out to a 1 1/2″ thickness and cut with a 2 or 3 inch biscuit cutter (or a round cookie cutter). place them onto an ungreased cookie sheet, brush the tops a little buttermilk. bake for 12-14 minutes or until golden brown.

long time no post! we’ve been super busy with the holidays and family and all of that…did everyone have as great of a holiday as we did?! i wanted to post all the pictures from christmas but i feel like we’ve all moved on from it by now so it might just be overkill. but let me say that it was filled with wonderful family and even better food!

so josh and i have been sitting on this recipe for baked potatoes for a while now, and i thought now would be a great time to release it! we’ve been making these probably a good 3 times a week because they’re SO good. seriously! we’ve incorporated the usual sour cream, bacon bits, and green onions that everyone loves either on potato skins or on their baked potatoes, and mixed it all into this delicious mushroom and onion gravy. once you pour the gravy mixture into the baked potato you basically get the best dinner of all time! 

you can have this along side anything you want…in this photo we made some yummy vegan chicken nuggets, and other times we’ve had broccoli with chickpea cutlets from veganomicon (which are SO good by the way!)

so here’s the recipe!

Loaded Baked Potatoes

Serves 2

2 baking potatoes

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

2 tablespoons margarine

1/3 cup onions, chopped

1 cup mushrooms, chopped

2 tablespoons bacon bits (make sure they’re vegan!)

3-4 tablespoons flour

2 cups vegetable broth

1/2 cup vegan sour cream

3 tablespoons green onions, chopped

salt and pepper to taste

bake potatoes in microwave until done. while they’re cooking, heat oil and margarine in a large pan. add onions and cook until softened. add bacon bits and mushrooms and cook until the mushrooms are softened. add the flour and stir until well combined and a paste has formed. slowly stream in the vegetable broth, stirring constantly to combine. add the sour cream and green onions. heat and stir over medium/medium high heat until the mixture thickens to a gravy consistency (adding more flour if not thick enough) add salt and pepper to taste.
take the baked potatoes and slice them down the middle. use your hands to squeeze the two ends of the potato to split open the middle, creating a little cavity. pour a generous amount of the gravy into the cavity and top with green onions and bacon bits. enjoy!

 

remember when i said that i wasn’t sure if we’d be able to top last thanksgiving? well we TOTALLY did! everyone helped to cook the absolute best thanksgiving dinner in all of the rodgers/kirk/benz/maines/clapp history! 

i was wayyyy too hungry to take the time to take pictures of each and every delicious dish, but i managed to take a few shots of my plate, which had everything on it!

my aunt maura, my cousin emilee and i made a double batch of the green bean casserole from fat free vegan kitchen and it is by far my favorite of all the thanksgiving dishes! super creamy and delicious, and we had enough for leftovers this time since we doubled the recipe! the mashed potatoes are my nanna’s “holiday potatoes,” but she has the cutest way of saying it…she pronounces potatoes as “ba-day-das”, if that makes any sense..haha. its possibly the cutest thing in the world. anyway, the potatoes and SO good! she uses vegetable broth, margarine, and vegan sour cream to make it super fluffy and moist and amazing! we also made three, yes three, tofurky roasts topped with my dad’s now famous mushroom and red wine gravy, which we had to tear out of william and josh’s hands because it was so good!

here we have my dad’s super scrumptious stuffing, my grandpa’s glazed carrots, and my winter vegetable casserole that turned out to be really good!!!! i roasted a butternut squash and an acorn squash, and mashed them both together with 4 baked sweet potatoes..then i added margarine, brown sugar, and a pinch of salt. i topped it with some more brown sugar and chopped pecans..it was a HUGE success!

josh and i made about 36 homemade dinner rolls, which aren’t pictured, but they were perfect! my momma made our yummy corn muffins, which we have never had on thanksgiving before but i think they will definitely be a new tradition!

now that everyone is filled in on our family’s curse with thanksgiving desserts, you wouldn’t believe how well all of the pies turned out!!!! my cousin emilee made the pumpkin cheesecake, it was quite possibly the best thing i have ever eaten in my life. my sister ally made a pumpkin pecan pie, and made the mistake of allowing my mom in the same room with it because someone opened the fridge and her pie came flying out and landed face down on the floor! we were able to salvage it and even though it looked a little rough it tasted really good! silken tofu is a complete god send…it really makes the perfect pumpkin pie! josh and i made a brandy apple pie with a crumb topping, and we made a brandy caramel sauce to go on top. holy shit…so good. we made it in a spring form pan so it was a super deep dish pie with a thick, buttery crust..and the brandy in the apple filling gave it such an amazing flavor.

we hope everyone had a great thanksgiving! now if you’ll excuse me, i’m going to go help josh in the kitchen…he’s baking vegan versions of THESE:

hells yeah.

thanksgiving is right around the corner and i’m starting to get super excited! this will be our family’s 4th vegan thanksgiving and it gets better and better every year. i have been reallllly busy with school lately and i feel kind of bad because my dad has made a few attempts to plan the menu with me and i’ve had to sort of put all thoughts that aren’t related to interior design on the back burner (ha! i love cooking jokes). but i just turned in my project that was due today so now i’ve got thanksgiving on the brain!

last year’s thanksgiving meal was FANTASTIC, and it’s going to be pretty hard to top it but i think we just might! we love to stick with the traditional thanksgiving side dishes, like mashed potatoes, green beans, stuffing, etc..but josh and i have a couple ideas that we can add to our menu that will really make it spectacular. we made brown sugar glazed baby carrots a few weeks ago on a whim and they turned out super good, and i think that would be great for thanksgiving! the brown sugar glaze is sooo good…and perfect for thanksgiving. 

another idea i had is to make a winter squash casserole. my nanna always makes a sweet potato casserole that everyone loves, but i thought about adding some roasted butternut and acorn squash in there too! i think the flavors and textures are very similar and would give the dish a little special something. we’ll see how that goes over with the fam’…we’re kind of creatures of habits

for dessert, my cousin emilee has requested pumpkin cheesecake, which is something josh and i have been wanting to make FOREVER. i found this recipe over at fat free vegan kitchen that looks great, so i think we’ll be giving that a try this year. 

let me let you in on a little family secret: my mom is cursed…. cursed with the inability to make a successful pumpkin pie. it has plagued her for decades…every thanksgiving she tries it one more time, yet still comes out with what we lovingly call, “kathy’s pumpkin soup.” the flavor was always spot on, but she was never able to get that perfect pumpkin pie consistency, vegan or not vegan. last year i thought i would take over the responsibility of making the pumpkin pie..i thought maybe i would be able to pull it off. i should have known that i was cursed even before the pie was done baking. i had finished mixing all the ingredients and i asked my mom to help me spoon the filling into the pie crust. i was holding the huge mixing bowl while she spooned the filling into the crust, when all of a sudden the weight of the bowl combined with sore arms from baking and of course the inevitable stress of thanksgiving came down upon me..the bowl slipped from my hands and fell right into the half full pie crust, splashing pumpkin pie mix all over us and all over the kitchen wall. 

i started to laugh at myself for being clumsy, but my mom looked concerned. she knew at that point that she had passed on the curse. i told her not to worry, and we cleaned up the pumpkin splatter and tried to salvage what was left of our pie. we baked it, let it set in the refrigerator for a few hours, and crossed our fingers. when it came time for dessert after a wonderful thanksgiving dinner, my mom and i took the pumpkin pie out of the fridge and did the jiggle test: shaking it a bit to see if it was going to pumpkin pie or the dreaded pumpkin soup. it seemed to be ok, so we put it out on the table and tried not to let the family know our fears. i was the first to receive a piece of the pie, and sure enough…pumpkin soup.

luckily our family has been very understanding over the years of a pumpkin pie-less thanksgiving. our only hope is that the curse has not been passed to anyone else. in fact, josh has made an amazing pumpkin pie before, so we might pass on the pumpkin pie baking to him this year. what makes it worse is that pumpkin pie is my favorite thanksgiving dessert…i miss it dearly. 

but curse or no curse, we always have delicious thanksgiving dinners spent with our amazing family. i can’t wait to see how it turns out this year! 

does your family have any funny traditions? we’d love to hear about them!

my sister ally and her boyfriend william invited josh and i up to their house for halloween last weekend! they were both super excited about the food they wanted to make, including william’s crazy idea to make vegan buffalo chicken pizza! i got emails from him weeks before we came over telling me about how he made a vegetarian buffalo chicken pizza and he said it was delish, and he wanted to see if i could make a vegan ranch dressing so that we could make a vegan version for halloween weekend. i said i could TOTALLY make a vegan ranch! 

it came out great too! william was the test, since he’s had non-vegan ranch a lot more recent than any of us have, and he said it was spot on. he even said he likes it better than the non-vegan ranch! 

armed with a big batch of vegan ranch, william was let loose in the kitchen to make his vegan buffalo chicken pizza. he used morningstar chick strips and marinated them in some store bought buffalo wing sauce. he was able to score a hand-tossed pizza crust from pizza hut (he has hook ups), so he covered it in the vegan ranch, then the marinated veggie chicken strips, and topped it with some tofutti mozzarella cheese. he baked it for about 15 minutes, and holy crap look how it came out!

before we all had a chance to eat it, william took a big slice and discreetly took it over to the dining table..took a bite, and then gave his stamp of approval. he said it was everything he expected it to be!! i love it when a non-vegan finds vegan food to be just as good, if not better, than the “real” thing! 

i have never had any kind of pizza that wasn’t the typical italian stuff, so i was a little leery at first. my mom and i are pretty boring when it comes to flavors..you know, choosing vanilla ice cream when there’s 30 different flavors..that type of thing. but i LOVED this pizza! totally a different pizza experience than i had ever had before, but super good! the ranch was cool and creamy and the buffalo sauce was spicy and zesty, yum!

something inspired me to make carrot soup the other day. i’ve only had one experience with carrot soup, my nanna made it once a long time ago and i remember really liking it! the only time we ever really buy carrots is to make our veggie florentine pasta, but i bought a big bag of carrots last week to use for our pumpkin party but we didn’t end up using them because my dad already had some. i dont know about you guys but we never end up using all of the carrots that come in those big bags, and they always go rotten on us. so i figured i was going to put a stop to this and went about to make some carrot soup!

i went online and searched for basic carrot soup recipes, and then i came across one that used roasted carrots. we always think that roasting veggies is one of the best ways to bring out their best flavor, and i figured that logic must apply to carrots too…so i gave it a try!

i roasted the carrots in some olive oil and fresh thyme for about 20-25 minutes. then i sauteed some onion in a pot, and when they were soft i added the roasted carrots, 4 cups of vegetable broth, and some salt and pepper. after it came to a boil, i turned the heat off and used our handy dandy immersion blender to blend it all up really smooth. i tasted it, expecting to have to add tons more spices to make it taste good, but it was amazing!!!! so simple, and the roasted carrots gave the soup a nice depth in flavor and the thyme really brought everything together. perfect! i ended up eating all of it for lunch over the next couple of days, and when it was gone i started to feel sad…so i made another batch!

this time i switched things up a bit. i read this post on vegan yum yum about making your own vegetable broth, and boy was i inspired.

she talked about how some store bought vegetable broth is packed full of sodium, msg, high fructose corn syrup, and other additives that i certainly don’t want in any of my healthy, home-cooked meals! i thought this would be a great way to use up leftover veggies in the fridge as well as fresh cooking scraps, and all you really have to do is chop them up and throw them in a pot! i love easy, simple ways to use up leftover veggies, and unlike composting, this way you get to use the product in your cooking!

so when i went to make my second batch of roasted carrot soup, i decided to make my own vegetable broth too (partly because we ran out of our store bought broth ) i basically did everything lolo says in her post, i used the basic combo of onion, celery, and carrots, then added whatever else i had lying in the fridge, which was some red pepper and a few mushrooms. i then added enough water to fill the pot i was using, some herbs, salt and pepper, and let it simmer for about an hour or so. once it was all done i strained the veggies out, and voila! homemade vegetable broth!

perfect for my second batch of roasted carrot soup! and this batch was even better than the first! i would totally recommend making your own veggie broth. it’s super simple and really a great way to use leftover veggies and it’s perfect for making homemade soups!