I Want Bread

Well, being a gluten free vegan means lots more cooking than I normally do. Although I love to cook, I hate having a big pile of pots and dishes when it is just me eating. So usually I'll cook a few days a week and supplement with leftovers and prepared stuff. But lately I cook almost every night, and eat the leftovers for lunch (along with rice cakes with almond butter and apple butter from a local farm, yum!)



Can I tell you how very delicious this dish is? It is from "A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen" by Jack Bishop. It is the Green Lentil and Roasted Vegetable Salad with Mustard-Tarragon Vinaigrette. I was looking for something to do with the turnips left over from $127 Vegetable Soup. Here they are roasted with some red onions, and mixed with lentils (didn't have the fancy French green ones so used plain old supermarket brown) and a wonderful dressing. I almost ate the whole bowl by myself, it was that good. The dressing called for fresh tarragon, which I didn't have. Can I get in a plug for good spices? I had dried tarragon from Penzey's, a huge spice store in Wisconsin. It is far superior to the supermarket variety, and I think really made the dressing. We used to have a retail Penzey's where I lived in NY. They don't have one here in Chicago, but they do have mail order. Check it out!




This is jerk sauce that I put over baked tofu. It's made mostly of scallions and lime juice and spices.



Since we were having Carribean/Cajun food that night, I made red beans and rice. They were good - they have a little peanut butter in them. And lots of red and white pepper. The white pepper is kind of smoky, eh? The recipe is from of Nava Atlas's old books - can't remember the name. It has recipes from all different regions of the country. I had white rice to be traditional and it was really good!




These are chickpea crepes from the new "Moosewood Restaurant Cooking for Health." I have never worked with chickpea flour before. They were nice and spicy.



Curried Yellow Pepper Soup from the Moosewood Book. Nice and sweet - a little bland, even though I inadvertantly doubled the spices!

Here is the jerk sauce recipe. It's really good with tempeh or seitan (marinate and grill).

3 cloves garlic
4 scallions, chopped
1 small yellow onion, chopped
1 large jalapeno
1/4 c tamari
1 T worcestershire sauce (or Pickapeppa)
1/4 c fresh lime juice
2 T oil
2 T brown sugar
1 1/2 t dried thyme leaf
1/2 t nutmeg
1/2 t allspice

Blend all until smooth.

Well, all that good cooking and what I really want is a PBJ on whole wheat!

Pan Seared Artichokes

Usually I make this dish in a non-stick skillet, which doesn't do much for browning foods. All my non-sticks were occupied, so I used my old-fashioned plain stainless steel. I was surpised and delighted to find that the artichokes actually caramelized in the pan! Maybe because of the sugars from the sun-dried tomatoes? It was delicious over brown rice ziti. (And the pan wasn't any harder to clean than a non-stick pan.)

Cawfee Tawk

This is the East Coast Coffee Cake from Vegan Brunch. I thought it only appropriate to present it with the proper accent. Yes, we really do tawk like this in New Yawk. I have had to lose my accent here in Chicago - they don't much like NY'ers here! This was pretty good, although I like my own crumb recipe better (see Thanksgiving post).



Of course I made the chocolate chip version.




I am trying to do my gluten free, sugar free, alcohol free, (fun free) diet again. A little too much celebrating over the holidays! This gluten free cereal is yummy. It is a blend of rice, corn, sorghum, and buckwheat. Perfect for these single digit temperatures we've been having!