Burrito Bowls

So I mentioned in a past post that the way that Tony and I handle dinners is to make a list of meals we can eat and then randomly select a meal to make. Tonight, we made burrito bowls. In retrospect, we could just have made burritos because we did have tortillas, but we did them as bowls. We don't play by the rules around here. Also, we have a nasty habit of hanging on to tortillas well past their prime. It's something we're working on.

One thing that I should mention that I may have mentioned before is that when I make meals, I have to make them keeping in mind the fact that Tony is incredibly picky. If there's something I want for a meal, like sour cream for my burrito bowl or guacamole, I have to make the meal in such a way that I can keep those things separate because Tony won't eat them.

This has been a constant theme for us, cooking around the desires of each of us in such a way that we can both have what we want. So our burrito bowls needed, obviously, to be sort of customizable. So I tried to make things a little bit separate. You may have noticed that over the last few days, a lot of our meals have components that are made somewhat separately and combined together in a bowl. This is because I am lazy and it's easier than trying to brainstorm something that will be good for both of us or asking one of us to compromise.

First, I made brown rice in the Instant Pot. I actually ended up making extra so that I can use it for another meal that we're planning later in the week--or weekend, as it were. While the brown rice was cooking, I sauteed some red onion in a bit of grape seed oil. Once they were softened, I added some mushrooms--only about four since the mushrooms that we bought were very large. Once the mushrooms had some decent color, I added garlic and red pepper and cooked them until the peppers were softened, adding salt and pepper to taste.

The onions ended up beautifully caramelized, and the flavors all ended up really wonderful. There's something about sauteed mushrooms and onions that I feel like I'm rediscovering. Sauteed mushrooms were among my favorite things when I was a child. I remember how disappointing it was to me when they were gone. Now, as a vegan, I feel like I'm rediscovering the simplicity and depth of flavor that are present in something like sauteed mushrooms and onions, but as a main focal point rather than as a side dish. It's pretty cool, actually. I was legitimately surprised at how delicious tonight's vegetables were, not because I didn't expect them to be delicious but because I think I've been taking for granted how satisfying these components can be. 

For protein, we cooked some of the black beans that were left from yesterday's meal as well. I added some vegetable stock so they wouldn't dry out in the pan--just a splash--and seasoned them with garlic powder, onion powder, chili powder, salt, and pepper. I didn't measure because I never measure seasoning unless I'm following a recipe. I just know what I like, and I tend to know how to get there. I also made some simple guacamole, just avocado, lime juice, and seasonings.

My bowl had rice, beans, vegetables, guacamole, and some tomatoes. I also added some Tofutti sour cream and Cholula hot sauce. It was so good. I can honestly say that I would enthusiastically eat this every day. I mixed everything together, and it was so satisfying. That's the funny thing about me. I make these pretty bowls, I take pictures, I post to Instagram, and then I demolish them and mix them all together to eat them. The pictures of how it looks when I'm actually eating it would be nowhere near as pretty if I showed how it really looks.

Tony's bowl was a little bit different. We had some TVP taco "meat" left, so he had that in his bowl. He also had rice, beans, and veggies. One of the things that perplexes me most about Tony is how dry he often has his food. I'm a fan of sauces and dips and things. Tony dislikes all of those things. He said he doesn't like wet food. So, there you go. Just another one of the ways in which we differ.

I think this is another really easy dinner that we could make regularly. Right now, I'm also trying really hard to find meals that I can either make really quickly or make in advance. Since I'll be returning to school in the fall and my classes will be in the evenings twice a week, there will be nights that I won't have time to make dinner or will have difficulty making dinner. Lunch tomorrow is really the test as to how well this meal will reheat. If it does well, then this might be something that I prep in advance and make for those evenings when we're short on time.

I've made some really good food lately. I've made some very healthy food. Honestly, tonight's meal was probably the most enjoyable meal that I've made all week. It was a last minute decision on what to make that ended up really paying off. 

Buddha Bowls and Other Dinners

Things were a little bit busy for us last week, what with Easter and all, so I haven't had as much chance as I would like to really share what I've been making for meals lately. Of course, last week was also complicated by the pink eye that we all had. And, on top of that, Tony ended up with an ear infection that forced him to go to the doctor and get some antibiotics. Our plans have been mostly derailed in the last week, so it's been kind of rough going around here.

As you can imagine, with all of that nonsense going on and the holiday as well, things have been a mess food-wise. Thursday night, we ended up just needing to make a super fast dinner because we had an evening church service to go to. So I just sauteed some onions, mushrooms, and garlic and served that over a mashed potato and cauliflower mixture that I cooked in the Instant Pot. We had bought some naan at Costco that we heated up to go with it. There was no recipe to speak of, it was just something quick and easy to throw out there. I was pretty excited about this dinner, though, since mushrooms are among my favorite foods.

Friday was a whatever night. We had canned split pea soup that we buy at Aldi. I ended up going out for coffee with some friends, and Tony didn't feel good, so it was kind of a wash anyways. Saturday, Tony made a red lentil soup in the Instant Pot that we've been really enjoying lately, but I didn't really get to enjoy it on Saturday because the baby was inconsolable and that was the day that Tony went to MedPoint to see the doctor. The lentil soup was for lunch, and it will more than likely be the subject of a later blog post. For dinner, I had toast. That's right, toast. I told you it's been a mess. On the upside, the toast I had was sprouted grain toast, so it did at least have some nutritional value.

For Easter, we brought our own food over to my parents. Since we were both just not feeling well this weekend, we opted for simple. I made a pasta salad for everyone to share, baked up a couple of sweet potatoes, and brought the leftover red lentil soup. My parents made asparagus that we also shared. For Easter breakfast, I made peanut butter and banana overnight oats, which turned out to be really quite good. I'm seriously considering making some right now to take to work tomorrow morning (but I probably won't because I'm seriously just not in the mood to put any effort forth).

Monday, we got lazy. We just made Boca burgers and roasted broccoli. We also had frozen french fries that we just threw in the oven. My family made burgers for Easter, and it really put me in the mood to have a burger myself. Also, it was time to be lazy. I felt terrible, so Tony cooked, which was really awesome. I stayed in bed and watched Anastasia with the baby. I will say, roasted broccoli is quickly becoming one of my favorite side dishes, and I don't suppose I really realized that until Monday evening.

We had bought some really nice eggplant when we went grocery shopping this last time, so on Tuesday night I made eggplant Parmesan. I wanted to make sure that we got a chance to use the eggplant before it went bad. It wasn't exactly vegan, since I still had some eggs in the fridge that I needed to use up. So when I breaded the eggplant, it was breaded with an egg mixture before it was fried. Tony didn't approve of the thickness of the slices of eggplant, but he did really like the flavor. This was actually the first time that Tony had ever even tried eggplant, so I'd call it a successful introduction.

Note the large grains of kosher salt. It makes the food extra delicious.

I still feel a little bit crappy right now. I made coffee this morning, and since I couldn't decide on an actual breakfast, I just had what was left of the pasta salad. Then, for lunch, I had a smoothie. I feel like I mixed up my meals. The funny thing is, though, I made the smoothie just because I didn't feel like cooking and I didn't want to put that much effort into really thinking about food, and it ended up being everything that I didn't know I wanted. I made the smoothie with a banana, some frozen blueberries, kale, açai juice, cashew milk, and hemp hearts. It was so satisfying.

Fun fact, I actually dislike blueberries. I really only ever have them in smoothies because I know they've got lots of beneficial antioxidants. Otherwise, blueberries can stay far away from me. I'm not sure if it's the texture or the flavor or both, but I've never really liked them even as a child. In smoothies, however, I don't really mind them. I can tolerate them, we'll put it that way.

Tonight was another simple meal kind of night. We've been doing Buddha bowls that basically consist of quinoa, oven roasted sweet potato, roasted broccoli (see, there it is again), and black beans. I had some black beans in the freezer from the last time I made a big batch, so I just had to pull them out. The sweet potatoes and the broccoli roasted at the same time in the oven while the quinoa was cooking. This time, I made a sauce that was modified from a recipe I saw on Pinterest. Basically, all of the components get thrown into the blender and blended up. The ingredients are as follows:

• 3/4 cup of vegetable oil
• 1/4 cup of water
• 1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar
• 2 tablespoons of tahini
• 3/4 cup of nutritional yeast
• 2 cloves of garlic
• juice of one whole lemon
• dash of cayenne pepper
• salt and pepper to taste

The sauce in a jar. We reuse our jars.

I really liked it and I felt like it added a really great depth of flavor to the Buddha bowl, but Tony hated it. He felt like the flavor was too close to cheese because of the nutritional yeast. To be fair, it did have quite a bit of nutritional yeast in it. I really think the combination of the nutritional yeast and the tangy elements of the vinegar and lemon juice brought a great undertone to the overall flavor of the Buddha bowl. I would definitely make this again. The recipe made a pretty good amount of sauce, and you only have to use a bit of it at a time. So it seems like I'm going to have Buddha bowl sauce in my fridge for a good long time.

It only looks this good for about five seconds. Then it all gets mixed together and consumed.

I'm not sure yet what the rest of the week will bring. Our meal planning is actually a bit laissez-faire. We come up with a list of 14 meals, one for each night of the week, then we just pick one out and make it. We don't really plan certain things for certain nights. We just figure out what we need to make those particular meals happen, purchase, and cook. Sometimes, things get modified or omitted if we feel like it. For example, this week's eggplant Parmesan was supposed to be roasted eggplant, but Tony said he felt like having a pasta dish. So we just changed it up a little bit. 

One thing is for sure, eating with other people or eating out has gotten a lot more complicated since we've been eating vegan. I've been kind of surprised at the push-back we've gotten about it. People that I didn't think would be judgmental about it have been aggressive and almost belligerent. But then there are other people who actually are interested and ask questions, so I guess there's balance in that. What's been most surprising, though, is the stuff that people don't know. I thought that everyone knew that greens like spinach and kale are calcium sources, but they don't. I also thought that everyone knew that there was a lot of protein in certain plants, like peas and broccoli, but they don't. It's kind of cool to get to answer questions about it. I'll take questions over aggression any day!

Speaking of questions, I'd really like to know if you guys have any. I know that my blog is fairly small, but I'm really trying to grow it. If you have any feedback that you want to share or any questions or suggestions, I want to know! You can either leave a comment here or e-mail me at delicious.dilettante@gmail.com. I have some really good things planned out and some ideas for original recipes as well, so I'm looking forward to sharing more fun content.

Vegan Tacos

Confession: sometimes, I get in this experimental phase where I just keep playing with something until I'm over it for a while. For example, when I discovered that Korean beef recipe, I made it over and over again until I was tired of it. Right now, for me that thing is TVP.

First, you should know we've discovered that now all three of us have pink eye. The baby got it again after she finished her antibiotics, which means that all of the things we thought that we had disinfected will need to go round two on their Lysol bath. And, of course, Tony and I both got it, even despite the rigorous hand-washing and disinfecting (probably because the baby is going through this face-grabbing and face-slapping stage).

So begins the eye drops and hyper-vigilance. I have to say, this is not easy for me. I'm a pretty chill mom. I'll probably never be the kind of mom that totes along the hand sanitizer and freaks out about germs, but now I suddenly have to be. Just the very notion of it seems over-whelming and annoying to me. I feel tired already just thinking about the extra laundry and cleaning I'll be doing for the next week or so.

It should come as no surprise, then, that I wanted to keep dinner tonight easy, which is why we opted for tacos. I mean, what's easier than tacos? We discovered with the nachos that TVP actually functions really well as a taco meat replacement, so we decided to just go back to that for tonight. I know, it seems repetitive and not at all inventive of me. There's going to be more interesting stuff on the horizon, guys. I promise. For now, let's just talk about taco TVP.

Last time, I mentioned that I thought that the TVP would be much better if I'd actually used a taco seasoning packet with it, so tonight that's what I actually did. We used Bob's Red Mill TVP, and I rehydrated it with water and a few drops of liquid smoke. Our taco seasoning was actually in a big shaker that we bought at Costco, so I basically just used three tablespoons of it and 3/4 cup of water. I put the taco seasoning and water in the skillet, added the TVP, and heated it up until there wasn't a bunch of extra water hanging around and the seasoning looked evenly distributed. I wouldn't say it took much longer than it usually takes for meat to absorb taco seasoning.

Taco TVP "meat."

In my opinion, it's more the accouterments that make the tacos. We did the usual lettuce, tomato, red onion. I also mashed up half of an avocado with some lime juice (I just used the bottled stuff in the fridge because my limes always go bad on me before I can use them) for my tacos. We bought some Tofutti sour cream to try, and I can report that it tastes surprisingly like sour cream. I was kind of impressed with it. I will say, however, that the warmer it gets, the less it tastes like sour cream, so it's really best to have it cold. We also had taco sauce; we use Ortega mild because it is vegan and we like the flavor the best.

There are two things that I missed about tonight's tacos versus our usual non-vegan tacos. First, I should have taken the time to cut up some black olives like I normally would. I definitely missed their flavor. I thought about it, but I was too lazy what with the pink eye and all. Second, I really did miss the cheese. We bought some vegan cheese to try, but we bought the block stuff (because I refuse to pay more money for shreds when I can shred it myself at home for free) and again with the lazy.

The red onions are hiding under the lettuce.

A word on vegan cheese: so far, I've had three experiences with vegan cheese. The vegan cheese on Whole Foods vegan pizza is tasty, but it does not taste of cheese per se, nor does it have the texture of cheese. I also made the mistake of buying a cheap vegan cheese just to try some vegan cheese, and I can honestly report that vegan cheese is not something to cheap out on. The results will be lackluster if you get the cheap stuff and you will be afraid to try again. The third result was much better. I tried some Follow Your Heart provolone today actually. It was pretty good. It smelled exactly like cheese and had the texture down. It tasted like cheese, but like a mediocre quality cheese, which is pretty good for something that doesn't contain any dairy whatsoever. Someone had to science the shit out of that stuff to get even a mediocre result. I have bought some other brands to try, but I'm trying to go sort of one at a time on them. I'll report more on my experiences with vegan cheese as they come up.

One thing that Tony and I both found surprising about these tacos is how quickly they got us full. Actually, that's something we've been surprised about since going vegan in general. We both get full more quickly and end up eating less food in the long run. On a normal non-vegan taco night, I'd usually eat three tacos. Tonight, I only ate two and felt full and satisfied. The good thing about that was it enabled me to make a taco salad for lunch with the leftover toppings and TVP. My easy dinner transformed itself into an equally easy lunch, which will enable me to get a little more sleep in the morning tomorrow.

I have about one more meal worth of TVP left in my pantry. I'm going to make it my goal to use that TVP in a way that doesn't revolve around tacos or nachos or something like that. I'm going to try to think outside of the taco-type box that I seem to have put the TVP in in my brain and focus on doing something different. What that will be remains to be seen at this point, but I swear I'm going to try to make it a fresh, new thing! Like I said, I'll try to be more interesting.

Cheap and Easy, My Ideal Dinner

Let me just tell you about my night last night. First of all, let me preface this by saying that I love my daughter. Having her is the best decision I've ever made, the best thing I've ever done. Watching her tiny little face light up when she sees me is both the most amazing, heart-filling thing and also a thing that I have never and will never be able to do enough to deserve. It's crazy awesome having a tiny person depend on you and look up to you and to know that they love you. Genetics, man.

That said, my kid was a jerk last night. She wouldn't stop getting into things she wasn't supposed to. She wouldn't be appeased by any food offering or by her bottle, but wanted to practically crawl across my plate when I tried to eat. She refused to go down last night, and when we did finally get her down, she woke up in the middle of the night and stayed up for several hours. Maybe this is my comeuppance for bragging about what a great baby she is and how she sleeps so well.

I'm sure, then, you can understand when I say that I did very little today, out of sheer exhaustion. (The amount of mental clarity needed to even do something as simple as document my dinner in this blog is almost more than I can bear right now, guys. Seriously.) About halfway through the day, it occurred to me that at some point I was going to have to make dinner. So I started to think about the easiest thing I could make that I already had all the stuff to throw together.

I found a recipe on Pinterest a few months ago for this Mexican rice and beans. I've made it enough now that I just know how it goes, so it doesn't require me to look it up anymore which makes it an even faster dinner.  I use pinto beans because I tend to buy a two pound bag, make them for a beans-and-cornbread night and freeze the leftovers into servings about the equivalent of a can of beans, give or take. Also, dried beans are so much cheaper. You could probably use black beans or other beans here, though. The flavor isn't as much from the beans as it is from the salsa and spices, so I'm inclined to think it would work with other beans too.

It couldn't be easier than this. You heat up about a quarter of a cup of oil in a pan, add your salsa and let that cook for a bit. I probably used a little more salsa than this recipe calls for, but I didn't have much left in the jar and I wanted to just finish it up. After the salsa has cooked a bit, you add your spices--which are garlic powder, chili powder, paprika, and cumin, a teaspoon of each. Once those spices cook for a bit in the salsa/oil mixture and get fragrant, you add your beans. Then, you throw in your cooked rice, and that's dinner. It's seriously that simple.

I cooked the rice in the Instant Pot because the more that time goes on the more I wonder how I ever cooked rice before I owned the Instant Pot. The rice mode cooked my rice perfectly. I don't know why I ever doubted the rice mode. I never should have. It's just that the brown rice I have been making lately uses a manual setting, so I hadn't had occasion to use the rice mode until tonight. But I can say with confidence that it works wonderfully.

We also just threw together a quick kale salad and had some steamed veggies. It probably took Tony longer to clean up after dinner than it did for me to make it. In that regard, I suppose you could say I was on the right side of the dinner/clean-up trade-off tonight. This was a really good no-fuss dinner, and it reheats really well the next day for lunches, so you know what we're going to be eating tomorrow too. I got two meals out of my twenty minutes of effort. Not bad for a day that I spent as a mom-zombie on the couch in between feeding and changing my tiny terror.

Sushi Bowls

Lately, I've been thinking about the stuff that I'll really miss in going vegan. I've thought about family holidays and how this change will impact those functions. It's hard for me to conceive of a Thanksgiving without a turkey. It's hard for me to imagine Christmas without the Polish sausage that we've had ever since I was a small child. I know that it will be healthier to go without those things and that I'll feel better, but I'm still having trouble envisioning how these meals will work without the meat and dairy.

Because this is my thought process lately, especially with Easter fast approaching, I thought that it might help to ease some of my stress a little bit if I was able to find some decent replacements for things that I already love. So, with that in mind, I decided to try my hand at making sushi bowls.

I've always really loved sushi. In fact, the thing that I craved and missed the most when I was pregnant with Josephine was probably sushi. Spicy tuna roll sushi is my jam, so it's hard for me to face the idea of saying goodbye to that. But I've seen a lot of videos on YouTube lately of other people making sushi bowls, so in the interest of replacement foods, I decided to give it a try. It has all of the same ingredients as sushi but without the complicated rolling process.

We're trying to focus on whole grains, so for our sushi bowls we started out by making some brown rice in the Instant Pot. (Seriously, guys, brown rice in 22 minutes. How could you not?!) While the rice was cooking, I cut up a cucumber into thin strips, used a peeler to peel off strips of carrot, and microwaved and shelled some edamame. For my bowl, I also cut up some avocado and some strips of sea weed, but Tony left those out of his because he doesn't care for them. Once the rice was done, I piled everything up in the bowl--nothing scientific here, it was pretty much all to my own taste and desires. I also topped my bowl with sesame seeds and some Korean teriyaki sauce.

A note here about the Korean teriyaki sauce: we buy a local brand from Sunny's Gourmet Products. A lovely woman who runs a local restaurant here is actually the creator of this brand. Her teriyaki is totally vegan, gluten-free, and contains no MSG. It can be ordered on her website, and I highly recommend it. I'm a notorious hater of most things teriyaki, but this teriyaki sauce is probably the only one that I've ever enthusiastically enjoyed.

It was actually the teriyaki sauce that really pulled the sushi bowl together for me. I have to be honest, until recently I've never much cared for brown rice. In the last few weeks, I've actually had more brown rice than white, so I'm growing to like it more. I truly love all of the vegetables involved in this sushi bowl (with the exception of carrots, which I have always hated and eat only out of a sense of nutritional obligation), so this was actually a pretty satisfying dinner. I do wish that I still had a box grater (ours rusted and had to be disposed of) so that I could have just shredded the carrot instead, but I suppose if it was really that important to me I could have also done that in my food processor.

This is definitely something that I would do again. I don't even think there needs to be any modification. In the future, I might add tofu and see how I feel about it just to give that a try or maybe try to make a spicy sauce for it, but I honestly don't even think that these modifications are needed. The only thing that I truly can't stress enough is the teriyaki. I don't think this sushi bowl would be nearly as good with just soy sauce or tamari. I would definitely stick to making it with the teriyaki sauce mentioned above.

I'd definitely call this little replacement a success. It also worked really well for a lunch the next day for me, so it's something that could easily be doubled in recipe in order to have it for more than one meal. It was also crazy easy to throw together. I could see this being a really easy busy night sort of meal for us. It satisfied my cravings for both another successful substitution and sushi--all in all, a win.

Pink Eye and Leftovers

Just when you thought it was safe to settle down a little, there has to be yet another little thing that gets thrown at you from left field. This morning, the baby woke up cranky and with a little bit of gunk in the corner of her right eye. By 9:30 AM, her daycare is calling me to tell me that she has pink eye and that I need to come get her. At 10 AM, when I got to the daycare, both of her eyes had gunk in them, were bright red, and her right eye looked swollen with red circles underneath and on her eyelid.

Needless to say, there was a pediatrician appointment this afternoon and a trip to the pharmacy. Of course, my insurance--for whatever reason, maybe just because the universe decided it was my time for something stupid today--didn't list the baby's information on file correctly, so I ended up having to pay full price for her eye drops.

By the time I got home, the baby looked like she had two black eyes, and I was ready to call it quits for the day. Tony got home, we gave her the eye drops, and we both just mutually understood that dinner was catch-as-catch-can tonight.

The good news is that since we had friends over yesterday (which I mentioned in the post about the chocolate cake), we had leftovers. Yesterday, I had made vegan mac and cheese, barbecue soy curls in the Instant Pot, and coleslaw. I was feeling the spring barbecue vibe since the weather here is back up in the 50s, which is practically shorts weather for Indiana. It was a good night for reheating and just throwing together on a plate, given the events of the day.

The coleslaw was a throw together vinaigrette since Tony hates all things mayonnaise and mayonnaise contains eggs. Basically, I used 1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar, 2 tablespoons of olive oil, a tablespoon of sugar, a few liberal splashes of lime juice, and salt and pepper to taste. We used a prepackaged coleslaw mix, but I added red onion and some yellow bell pepper to it just to give it a bit more flavor. The flavor of the bell pepper really came through prominently, and it ended up being a really wonderful addition.

The barbecue soy curls were the product of a recipe that I found on Simple Daily Recipes by Jill McKeever, but I did mine the lazy way. If you guys have never seen any of her recipes or videos, I highly recommend her YouTube channel. She's really entertaining, and watching her videos gave Tony and I a lot of inspiration about what kind of meals and things we want to eat and play with and try in the very near future. Also, she's 110% right about how awesome the Instant Pot is, and I am so glad that I bought one! I normally feel somewhat ambivalent about fancy kitchen things because I can create so many awesome things without fancy crap, but there are three things that have become indispensable to me now that we're doing the vegan thing: food processor, decent blender (we use the Ninja Mega kitchen system for both), and Instant Pot. Seriously, guys. All of these items are worth the money if you want to eat more healthily.

But back to the soy curls. First of all, we had never even heard of these until we watched Jill's channel, but they are actually really good. Like a lot of soy products, they don't have a great deal of their own flavor, so they can take on the flavor of the things you put on them incredibly well. I treated ours similarly to Jill's recipe, but the main difference was that I got hella lazy about the sauce. We had some store-bought Stubb's original sauce (which is vegan, according to their website!) that we used instead of making our own sauce, but the rest of the process was the same. Tony was not crazy about their texture, but he liked the flavor overall. I thought their texture was actually pretty good. We had whole wheat buns to eat them with, and I actually really loved how delicious the combination of the soy curls and the buns were together.

The mac and cheese, to be fair, was kind of a big cheat for me. About two months ago, Tony and I made this vegan mac and cheese from a recipe that we found on Pinterest. It was so good, and it made so much sauce that we ended up freezing about half of the sauce that it made for later use. So, really, all I had to do was make more of the macaroni, and then pour some of my left over sauce on it. I did end up thinning the sauce out a little bit with some cashew milk since the sauce was a little bit thick. I also added a few tablespoons of nutritional yeast just to boost the cheesy flavor. Honestly, though, this sauce doesn't need nutritional yeast. It's actually really good on its own, totally untampered with. In fact, I didn't think that Tony would even notice a difference, but when he tasted it, he surprised me by saying that it tasted different than the first time we had it. He didn't dislike my improvised change, but he did notice. So I guess that should be a sign that the first time we had it, it actually made an impression on him.

Really, I'm just grateful that there were leftovers to be had today. Everything went so awry that I don't really know what we would have eaten if not for the leftovers. If my leftovers could be like this all the time, I would have no problem at all with having leftovers. This food was just as good today as it was when I made it yesterday--I might even say that the coleslaw got better, but coleslaw often does when given the chance to hang out for a while. Let's just hope that tomorrow isn't as crazy. But if it is, there are still leftover soy curls and vegan mac and cheese...

Chocolate Cake

Confession: I love chocolate. Dark chocolate is actually my favorite, but I like most chocolate in general unless it's cheap and crappy. So you can imagine how sad it makes me that the majority of the chocolate that I really love contains milk, which is a vegan no-no.

Let me be straight up with you here: I can live without dairy if I have to, despite being raised on milk and cheese in true Midwestern fashion, but what I'm not sure I can live without is my chocolate. Especially around a certain time each month (you know what I'm talking about, we don't need to be crass here).

Before you give me guff, I already know that there are vegan chocolate options, and I plan to indulge in those. I just don't have any of them right now. And since Tony and I make a point of grocery shopping only at specific times to avoid spending too much money, it'll be a little while before our next shopping trip rolls around. Plus, we have tons of food right now, and I simply can't see going to a grocery store just to find chocolate without milk because there's no way that that will be the only thing I buy. I know myself way too well for that!

So, in the mean time, the chocolate is all on me to figure out. I will be honest, I wasn't really even thinking about chocolate when I ran across this recipe for vegan chocolate cake. What I was thinking was that I needed to find something delicious that I could impress some friends with because we had friends coming over for dinner (and, really, what's dinner without dessert?).  And since I was going to be serving them vegan food, I wanted it to really shine. You know how it is, you make the best dishes when you have people over so that you can really show them how well you can put a meal together. It ain't no time for boxed mac and cheese when company's coming, let alone boxed cake!

The recipe seemed really simple, which was what sold me on this cake. I wanted something that I could put together while the baby was napping. Minimal fuss, but maximum flavor. The liquid component in this cake comes from warm coffee, vanilla, and vegetable oil instead of containing eggs. I had a bit of a concern that it would taste too much like coffee, but the flavor of the coffee was really very minimal here. It was a nice undertone, but if you didn't know that there was coffee in the cake, you probably would never have guessed. Tony actually didn't know that coffee was one of the ingredients until I started to write this and asked him about the flavor of the coffee in the cake. His response was, "What coffee?"

It was a really nice, moist cake. It released very easily from the bundt pan. It assembled easily, baked easily, presented easily. This is a really good recipe, guys! It's perfect for a time when you want to put out minimal effort but still have something really good. I'd say it's exactly the kind of vegan desert that a busy mom can work with. And everyone who ate it tonight enjoyed it. We still have half the cake left, and I am really looking forward to having another piece tomorrow.

A little powdered sugar on top, and you've got a winner!

This cake could definitely get me through those chocolate cravings. Until I can find a vegan chocolate that I know I enjoy and can reliably find, this cake will make things a lot easier for me. It'll probably make things a lot easier for Tony too. Just sayin'.

Satisfying a Kale Craving

Ok, so I had every intention of holding off on more blog posts for a few days just to ensure that I had something of actual value to write about, but then something weird happened to me today: I had a craving for kale chips. I know that probably doesn't seem that weird, but it was weird for me. I don't usually crave kale. I crave things that are obscure. I crave sweet. When I was pregnant, I craved crunchy. In the past I have craved, and this is a direct quote from my grasping-at-straws struggle to vocalize my desires, "something cold and sweet, but not ice cream...but also soft..." Yeah, I know. It's weird. I'm weird.

Surprising, then, that I should crave something so definite. I also know how fake it sounds when people say things like this when we live in the junk food era, and believe me, no one is more surprised about my new-found love of kale than I am. I used to hear people say that they loved things like kale and glare at them skeptically. My mom, on the other hand, would tell you that she's not surprised by this behavior from me. She tells a story of how, as a two-year-old child, to the disbelief of our waitress, I ordered a salad. When it came, the waitress set it in front of my mother, I snatched it from her, and exclaimed, "Salad!" in an excited and adorable way. Maybe you can detox from all the crap food and actually start to crave healthy foods again. 

The good news is that I had kale at home! In fact, I had two different kinds of kale at home, red and green kale. I bought them for the kale chips that I made here and for a lemony white bean and kale soup that I found here. I hadn't made the soup yet, but I figured that it was as good a time as any since the baby is still getting over being sick and Tony got sick too.

The recipe was really good, but it was not vegan the way that we made it. We had leftover chicken stock that needed to be used, and it also called for a tablespoon of butter. But two small tweaks, and this soup would easily be vegan. I just had at least two and a half cartons of chicken stock that we had bought in bulk at Costco that I didn't want to waste. The butter could easily be omitted. It didn't really contribute to the flavor of the soup in too meaningful a way, and it make the surface a bit oily. That or it could be replaced by another tablespoon of olive oil.

The lemon in this soup is the thing that really makes it extraordinary. The burst of freshness that it contributes is the real star here. It pairs so well with the rosemary, thyme, and oregano that it makes you wonder why you never thought to put lemon in a soup before--or it did for me because I've never put lemon in a soup before! The only thing I wish I had done differently with this is tear the kale into smaller pieces so they were a little easier to get in a bite. The kale stands up really well to the heat of the soup, so it's an ideal green for this sort of application. The recipe suggested that spinach or chard can be used instead, but I feel those would be far inferior in both mouth-feel and flavor. The kale and lemon go so well together that I cannot conceive of replacing the kale here.

Each night that we try a new recipe, Tony and I have a discussion about it. The discussion always ends with me posing a question to him: is this a do-over? Because if he doesn't like it, then there's no point in me making an entire meal that he won't eat. Tonight, I didn't ask that question. Tonight, I said, "Oh yes. OH YES. This is a keeper." There was no debate. I'm definitely making this one again. It was also really filling. We each had one bowl and that was enough to satisfy us both.

The other good news is that this soup only called for about a cup and a half of kale. Since I had a whole bunch of kale, I had plenty of extra kale to use to make some kale chips. Overall, I would say today was a culinary win. I satisfied a craving, and I found something new that was really awesome, cheap to produce, and quick to make. Not a bad way to spend an evening. 

Nachos and TVP

Sunday is my favorite day, always has been. It's a day for chilling out, meal prepping, catching up on some TV and emails, and just generally being low-key. And since Josephine is still pretty snotty, it's a good time to be resting and doing as little as possible. She spent at least two hours this afternoon sleeping on me. It was a really nice moment.

Now, when it comes to food, this weekend has been less about meal prepping and more about using stuff up--whether that be leftovers or just previously purchased ingredients before they go bad. Since we've decided to transition into vegan, we've been buying a lot more produce and beans (obviously). You know what doesn't keep for very long? Avocados. I got really excited to see avocados on sale the last time we shopped. Per Alton Brown's advice, we let them ripen to perfection on the counter and then put them in the fridge when they were ripe. This kept them from getting too ripe, and it helped to keep them fresher for longer since we can only shop every two weeks.

Even despite the fridge trick, my avocados were close to being at the end of their lifespan. So what do you do when you have avocados on the edge? You make guacamole. There's really nothing all that special about the way I do it. Yesterday's guacamole was really in keeping with the using-up-some-stuff theme. I had tomatoes and avocados that needed to be used, some red onion I bought for one recipe that needed to be put to another use, and half a lemon to use up. It was the perfect collection of things to make guacamole, though I would normally use lime juice, Throw into that salt, pepper, and garlic powder, and you're in business. (Pro-tip: if you put cling wrap on the surface of your guacamole when you put it away, it won't brown. That's my trick for making it last longer!)

What I really wanted to do, though, was find something else to put that vegan nacho cheese on. If I didn't make it clear before, I really enjoyed that vegan cheese. But leftover vegan nacho cheese and guacamole does not exactly nachos make, and what I wanted was nachos. It needed something else, something meat-like. So I thought this might be a good time to experiment with the TVP we bought.

If you're not familiar, TVP is texturized vegetable protein. It's a dried food that simply needs to be rehydrated to be eaten. I rehydrated ours with vegetable stock according to the package directions (ours was the Bob's Red Mill variety, but there are other companies that offer it as well).

After that, I seasoned it with some cumin, onion power, garlic powder, chili powder, cayenne pepper, and liquid smoke. I didn't measure anything, just seasoned to my own taste. I was going for a taco meat kind of flavor, but I didn't have any taco seasoning on hand. Next time, I think I would just use taco seasoning because it would be easier and probably have a more traditional taco meat sort of flavor. Even with my improvisation, the results were good.

For the record, it also bears noting that the vegan nacho cheese actually heats back up really well when left over. I was concerned that it would get much too thick, and it did thicken up more over time, but it thinned back out very nicely. All we did was heat it up in the microwave, add just a splash of water, and stir. It worked out.

I started out just making it for myself because I was hungry after work, but Tony took an interest in it too after it was made. He actually voluntarily ate some. I have to give him credit. Lately, Tony has really been branching out with food. Eating cheese is way out of his comfort zone, vegan or not, but he was willing to try it. This morning, despite his hatred of coffee, he was willing to try a new coffee that we bought, and he discovered that he liked it. He also really liked the TVP with the vegan nacho cheese. I know because he ate a full plate of his own nachos, minus the guacamole.

Finished product on my plate. Picture this without the guac for Tony's plate.

 I'm a bit relieved to see Tony trying to be more adventurous with food because it would be pretty hard for us to go vegan if he wasn't willing to be more open about it. To be honest, I was bit skeptical when he suggested that we go vegan. It was a battle just to convince him to go for meatless meals a few times a week for the sake of our budget. Tony is a creature of habit. He likes to stay carefully ensconced in his comfort zone, and anyone who suggests he come out of it is usually met with irritation and attitude.

I'm not trying to disparage him; obviously I love him or we wouldn't have a daughter together and a relationship. It's just that going vegan is a big lifestyle change. I don't want it to be something that we do for a week and then just go back to the old habits. And I don't want him to feel the need to go sneak a hamburger on the sly. This relationship is not one where we force each other to do things or guilt each other, and it's counter-productive if we feel like we have to hide things from each other. If he's going to do the vegan thing, I just think it's going to be more successful if it's something that he actually wants to do. But I would be lying if I didn't admit that I'm really relieved to see him being so open and receptive to it.

Anyway, the other stuff we've made this weekend has been part of the continuing effort to use up our remaining meat and dairy. I did finally make the chicken wings. They were good, but I truly don't feel like I'll miss them. I also made some popcorn earlier today since I couldn't really decide what I wanted to have, but I wanted something. Tonight's dinner was more vegetarian than vegan since it contained butter and cream. I made garlic asparagus pasta. It was good, but I'm not going to really get too detailed with the recipe. Why? Because I want to find a way to make the recipe vegan, and then share it here! So expect that to be coming in the near future.

For now, we're closing out this Sunday night with some tea and fresh fruit in bed while Tony catches up on Fuller House--I finished binge-watching it earlier today. Our nightly routine lately has revolved around sharing a bowl of sliced fruit and having some herbal tea once the baby is in bed. It's a new routine, but I find that I really enjoy it. It's a nice way of winding down, so I'm just going to let the winding down commence right now.

Vegan Nacho Cheese

The last few days have not exactly gone as planned. And by that I mean that they were a total mess. Wednesday, the baby ended up with a fever, I had a doctor's appointment of the unpleasant feminine variety, and I had to take the baby to a last minute doctor's appointment. I also completely forgot about a board meeting, so I had to sort of re-plan my evening. Then, after the pediatrician appointment, I had to go to the pharmacy, drop off the baby, and head straight to my meeting.

It should come as no surprise, then, that dinner sort of fell by the wayside. I had every intention of making the chicken wings so that I could just be using them up and getting rid of the last remnants of meat from our freezer. Yet, by the end of the evening, we couldn't be bothered. We ordered in Mediterranean food from a local restaurant, Elia's, instead.

Vegetarian (but actually vegan) combination plate.

In fact, if I'm being perfectly honest about it, dinner has been a bit of an after-thought the last few days. Thursday, I had a funeral viewing to go to. Tonight, we went to Costco after work while my parents watched the sick baby for us. This entire week has been a bit of a wash for me, food-wise. It could have been worse, but it also could have been exponentially better.

Here's the thing: things are getting busy and I feel a bit on edge about the fact that I now have less food options to fall back on when they do because we're going vegan. It's easy to stop and get a burger. It's easy to pick out literally any restaurant and get chicken or some other form of meat. It's ridiculously hard in northern Indiana to find vegan options on a menu. I went to a restaurant with my parents this week and everything had meat or dairy. There wasn't even a salad that was free of meat. The sad thing is that this is not unusual. This is how it is in our area.

So, this evening, I just felt like I needed a few things. First, I needed a snack because I was still hungry after the take-out Chinese dinner we had with my family. Second, I needed to prove to myself that I could still have good snacks in a shorter amount of time without really feeling the sacrifice. In that spirit, I decided to give a try to a recipe that we found on a YouTube channel we follow called Hot for Food. Tonight, I made vegan nacho cheese.

Feel free to ignore my terrible cropping and the mostly empty baby bottle.

That's right, vegan nacho cheese. I'm not going to get into the specifics of the recipe, but you can find the video here. The video also contains a link to their website, where you can find the written recipe if you don't feel like watching the video (or click here if you're really lazy).

I was pleasantly surprised at how delicious this recipe happens to be. I will say, first of all, that it does not taste like the nacho cheese sauce that it looks like. It has some cheesiness to the flavor, but I wouldn't say that it tastes like cheese. But then, who really expects vegan recipes or products to actually taste like cheese? I just think this happens to be a really delicious sauce with some cheese-like undertones.

I think that the reason this cheese sauce is so good actually has a lot more to do with the jalapenos and their brine than it does the nutritional yeast. It wouldn't be nearly as good without the jalapenos. The texture of it, especially when pouring it out of the blender, was actually surprisingly cheese-like. The mouthfeel was a bit less smooth than it looked, but I think that may have more to do with the fact that I don't have a Vitamix than it does anything else.

We bought some multigrain tortilla chips at Costco tonight from a company called Food Should Taste Good that I had with the nacho cheese sauce. Those chips were also surprisingly good. They have flax seeds and sunflower seeds, so the flavor is a bit more nutty. Most importantly, the paired really well with the nacho cheese. Tony, the notorious cheese-hater, actually tried them together and liked them.

Ultimately, I think I accomplished what I set out to do tonight. I wanted to create something delicious in a shorter amount of time and prove to myself, after a week of crappy eating and disappointment in my food, that I would still be able to eat tasty, easy things while vegan. I think, including time to cook the potatoes and carrots, that this nacho cheese took about 15 minutes to prepare. It also made quite a lot of cheese sauce. I don't even think I ate a quarter of what it made, so there's still quite a bit left.

It took me until Friday night, but I managed to redeem myself with just a simple, satisfying snack. I feel like I can do this again after having spent the last few days worrying about how I'll be able to find things to eat that don't just consist of raw vegetables or scornful glances from meat-eaters. After all, one cannot subsist on judgement alone.

Life's Little Updates and Kale and Banana Experiments

Ok, so it's clearly been a long time since I've posted on this blog. BUT I didn't forget about it. Life happened! So, let me tell you what's been going on.

In the past, I've written about my relationship with Tony and the kind of cooking that we did together. The biggest thing that's been going on since my last post is that WE HAD A BABY! Yay!

To be fair, this picture is somewhat misleading. She's about three days from 10 months old today. This is more current.

My pregnancy was somewhat difficult. I was considered high risk, so we saw a specialist frequently. Josephine was a c-section baby, so there was quite a recovery time too. And then there's all the new mama drama!

The good news is that I'm ready to jump back into the blog. The bad news (maybe?) is that Tony and I have decided to make some pretty serious changes with our lives. In my last post, I talked about how we've made more of an effort to choose responsibly when it comes to food. That said, we've decided that we're going to go vegan.

Now, I know what you're thinking. There's a lot of criticism about the vegan lifestyle. There's the ever-present question of where the protein comes from, and there's also the fact that it seems like a really big sacrifice. So here's some background. The main reason that Tony decided to give vegan a try is that he wants to feel better. He's got some digestive issues and these issues are definitely exacerbated when he eats processed foods and high-fat foods. For him, it's really all about feeling better. For me, there are actually a lot of reasons. I feel like a vegan lifestyle is more healthful. There's also a large part of me that wants to do this for ethical reasons.

Let me be a little more specific about what I mean by ethical reasons. For one, I don't want you to think that I'm a card-carrying member of PETA or that I'm all about animal liberation. I don't think the meat industry is an "animal holocaust." I don't want anyone else to feel bad about eating meat. However, I do think that factory farming animals is having an incredibly negative impact on our world and our environment. I also think that, while there are companies out there that treat animals with respect and use Temple Grandin designed systems for compassionate slaughter, not all meat companies operate ethically. All you have to do is a quick Google search to find hundreds of videos of people gleefully abusing animals that are being bred for meat. I'm not naive enough to think that my abstinence from meat will change an entire industry, but I do feel that it will clear my conscience.

The point of all of this is that we wanted a platform to catalog our journey to the vegan lifestyle. We're not just jumping in with both feet. We're trying to sort of transition into the vegan lifestyle. Right now, we're in the process of using up the meat and dairy products that we still have. As it gets used up, we'll just be replacing those animal products with plant-based products.

Obviously, then, our goal is to get more creative with food in order to keep the positive momentum going. So we've been doing some great experimentation lately with trying new things. Sunday, I made kale chips for the first time, which really were just as easy as the internet said that they would be.

If you've never done it, it's super simple. You wash the kale and let it completely dry. Then, you toss it with a small amount of oil, lightly sprinkle it with salt, and bake it at 350 degrees for 10-15 minutes. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a snack that's easier to produce than kale chips. My entire family loved them, so we'll definitely be repeating this recipe. In the future, though, I think I'll experiment with different flavors and seasonings for them.

Tonight, we actually enjoyed a vegan dinner. We had some veggie burgers, roasted broccoli, and salads. Tony had never had a veggie burger before, but veggie burgers and I are old friends. We found some veggie burgers at Aldi that were cheap and also contained only vegetables and no funky ingredients, which I was pretty impressed by. Tony found them somewhat bland, but he did like them enough to have them again. The real star of my dinner was actually the broccoli. I oven roasted it after tossing it with some minced garlic and salt and pepper. To be honest, I really put an obscene amount of garlic on the broccoli--which is why it was so good!

Those little brown bits are the garlic.

For dessert, I decided to try making ice cream out of frozen bananas--another little thing that I've read about countless times on the internet. I'll be honest, I was skeptical about how this would work, which was only exacerbated by the way it initially looked before it came together. At first, the bananas were crumbly and strange until they started to get creamy. It was just a food processor full of frozen banana shards. I should have taken a picture because none of the things that I'd read had prepared me for the weirdness of those bananas before they got creamy. The finished product, however, was delicious. It does still taste like banana. Everything I'd read about it before said that it would taste more ice cream-like, but it really just tasted like cold, chocolately banana (because I put cocoa powder in it, which was a fantastic choice).

I don't want to underplay how enjoyable this was despite my criticisms. I really love bananas. Cold, processed bananas with cocoa powder and raw, shredded coconut on top is no exception to this rule. It also paired really well with the cashew milk that I'm having tonight. Tony didn't like it, but he thought that might have had more to do with the cocoa powder than the banana flavor.

Tonight was probably a bit more vegan than we've been for a while. We've been eating much more plant-based meals in general just because beans are a really good dinner solution when money is tight, and a great deal of our budget now is dedicated to formula and diapers. Lately, we've just been trying to get rid of the rest of our meat. So tomorrow, we'll be eating chicken wings for dinner because I have to use them up. We don't really have the money to be wasteful and just throw out food, and even if we did, the frugal little psycho portion of my brain would be launched into a twitching, drooling spazz attack. (If you did't know this about me, I hate spending money. The only thing I hate as much as spending money is wasting money or things I've spent money on. If I'm willing to spend money on something, it's because I think it's a viable and useful item that I actually believe in.)

I'm looking forward to sharing the ups and downs of this new chapter in our lives. Be prepared, guys, because it's going to get real honest!