My friend's stuffed peppers (not a euphemism)

My friend made stuffed yellow peppers for lunch last week. Don't they look delicious??

Satisying a craving: chipotle breakfast burrito

I was reading Vegan Sandwiches Save the Day last night when a breakfast burrito craving hit me. BAM! It was their Scrambled Burrito recipe that inspired me, but it calls for tempeh, which I can't find without making a major effort--and on a dreary, rainy October day, I didn't feel like straying too far. So I went on a major grocery mission to the store about a 5-minute walk away, and came back with, among other things (many other things), onion and red pepper to supplement the ingredients I already had.

One of the first breakfast burritos I had was in New York, at 'Snice, a veg cafe near my hotel both times I've been to NYC. It had turmeric (making the tofu yellow) and black beans and favoured crumbled tofu. I prefer to cube it (I find it easier than crumbling) and my flavour palate tends toward Mexican-style spices most days. So while I was cooking, I found myself myself reaching for cumin, chili powder and chipotles, knowing I could top it off with some salsa when assembling the the deliciousness. So here's what I made, with the addition of kale to help me get my veggies* for the day. Enjoy!

Chipotle breakfast burrito
Makes 2 to 3 burritos,  depending on how large your shells are and how much stuffing you cram in

a dollop cooking oil 1/2 red pepper
1/2 a medium onion, diced
1 block extra-firm tofu, cubed or crumbled, as you like
1/2 teaspoon dried chipotle peppers, or 1/2 chipotle in adobo sauce
cumin, paprika, and chili powder and black pepper, to taste
a few dashes liquid smoke

1/2 cup cooked kale (about 1.5 to 2 cups chopped raw kale)
dash salt
salsa, to taste
2-3 large tortilla shells

Heat pan, add oil and saute red peppers and onions until translucent. Add spices and stir to combine and heat thoroughly. Add tofu and a few dashes liquid smoke and stir to combine and heat thoruhoughly. Watch out, the tofu is prone to sticking! But I didn't want to add more oil so I kept stirring until the tofu was warm and then turned off the heat. I took a tortilla shell out from the package and laid it over the mixture and the spatula in the pan to steam it--I use sprouted grain tortilla shells so they can be a bit stiff right out of the fridge.You could also microwave them for 30 seconds or heat them in the oven (be careful not to burn them!! I ALWAYS toast my tortillas when I try to heat them in the oven. Just sayin'--learn from my stupid-ass mistakes). I spread the tofu mixture and the kale on a shell, added some salsa, folded it up and toasted in my panini press. If you want a toasty exterior but don't have a press, you could dry-fry it in a pan, again being very careful not to burn it. I thought I would use about half the mixture in today's burrito, but there are a good 2 tortilla's worth left. Like most burritos, you end up with a fair amount of filling on your plate by the time you're done eating, but that's half the fun.

*Does anyone actually eat 7 servings of veggies a day? Tell me if you do, I'll pick your brain for tips.

Your hands were made for making bread

Everyone should make bread. If you haven't made bread yet, do it. It's satisfying in a way that cooking other things isn't. It feels primal, even though agriculture and then grinding grains into flour was probably one of the first hallmarks of civilization. You have to get your hands into it, it involves mysterious processes with yeast, and it magically changes from pale and raw to brown and perfect. And it's perfect as it is--all you need is a smear of Earth Balance or even hummus if you're into wanting actual nutrition with your carbs. You can make into baguette or focaccia or buns or good-old sandwich bread and enjoy it for days. If you've never made bread before it'll be a revelation, and even if it's the hundredth time it's still perfectly magical.

Vegan empanadas FTW!

Vegan empanadas from a food truck in Times Square, NYC. Nom!

Vegan food will save the world

I make vegan food for sharing a lot. We have potlucks at work, and I bring food to bookclub, and last week someone came in to see me at the office and as a thank-you I brought home-made biscotti. Yes, I brought darling little green tea biscotti from vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. As a bribe, I can tell you baked goods are very effective. It's especially great when people don't know it's vegan initially--they pronounce it delicious (of course it's delicious! It's free goodies that someone gave you--hell yeah, that's always delicious!) and then you're like, "It's delicious, and it's vegan. BAM!" Because they are only so many reasons why vegan eating is hard. Animal products are the default, they are subsidized and artificially cheap and get added to everything; and people think vegan food can't be delicious. Once people realize that eating vegan is easier than it used to be, that you should know what's in your food and that adding, for example, a milk ingredient to potato chips is weird and wrong and why the hell would they need to do that anyway?? ...and also how easy and delicious vegan food is, then we're halfway to eliminating animal products. And saving the world, of course.

Gluten-free vegan apple pie for all!

No text tonight, just a picture: gluten-free vegan pie from bookclub last weekend. Delicious food for all!

Old food, new way

Yes, I found it in the veganmofo reader feed: smashed potatoes. I was like, hell yeah, I can eat a potato any day of the week, so if you give me an excuse to eat it because I cooked it in a new way, I'm totally in! And it was really good too--nice and crispy on the edges. So I added some Earth Balance and hot sauce and enjoyed my 5 servings of smashed carbys at once.

Vegan's in the name

I got a last-minute invitation to something tonight, but I realized we were going a few blocks away from a vegan place I love, so I was excited for the invitation but also for the amazing dinner that was sure to follow. One of the friends who also got the last-minute invitation decided to join me. (The picture is of her dinner, since I always get the same burrito and frankly, neither a whole burrito nor a half-eaten burrito are particularly photogenic.) The restaurant is Hot Beans, in my beloved Toronto’s Kensington Market. Part of what I love about this restaurant—and the other one from the same owners, Hogtown* Vegan—is that vegan is in the name. I also love restaurants like Fresh because there isn’t the same emphasis on the fact that mostly-vegan food. Its brand is more about being natural/healthy/often organic. Those types of restaurants are omni-friendly because they’re not so in-your-face about being vegan, it’s just delicious food that happens to be veg. But Hogtown Vegan and HotBeans Vegan are letting you know—this food is vegan and it’s effing delicious so just eat it already!
 
*I know, it’s a weird nickname for a vegan resto. “Hogtown” is an old nickname for Toronto. Supposedly, pigs used to run in the streets a couple hundred years ago. I think it was shocking to the old-worlders who moved here back in the day to see how primitive it was here. Sheesh, with pigs running in the streets!

Non-passive-agressive soup

You know what goes best with passive-aggressive muffins? Butternut squash soup! Not really, but the appropriate follow-up post to complaining about that person who always tells me i can eat the non-vegan thing she brought or slowly starve to death at bookclub* is of course celebrating the person who always go out of her way to make something vegan and gluten-free even though she's an omnivore with absolutely no dietary restrictions whatsoever! She's a superstar. And her gorgeous soup was damn good too--there were even cranberries and walnuts to sprinkle on top for some extra flavour and texture. It was extra-yummy, and extra nice of her.



*I may be exaggerating. My fellow bookclubbers may go so far as to say that bookclub is basically a food-trough with a given discussion topic. I would say it's a food-trough with a book to discuss and people's personal lives to dissect. But I'm exaggerating for effect, so there.

Passive-agressive muffins

I went to bookclub on Sunday. It was like any other bookclub meeting: we gossiped, we managed to talk about the book a bit, and I was offered a shitty and/or non-vegan food to eat.
There's one person who always brings non-vegan things. The first time was when she brought cornbread to our Christmas meeting: she said she was trying to get through her new gluten-free vegetarian cookbook in the year, and if she made a vegan cornbread, she couldn't have used one from the book. So she just didn't bring anything I could eat.
The next time I recall was when she went to a gluten-free bakery. She noted the gluten-free cookies she brought were the best GF cookies she had ever had. And she brought some vegan ones from the same bakery, but they were healthy monstrosities, full of oats and flax and dates and nuts the taste of unfulfilled potential. I couldn't even bring myself to try them.
And the  on Sunday, she brought home made muffins. They had eggs in them, which is not surprising since she eats eggs and generally doesn't make vegan things to bring to bookclub. However this time the preamble was a little different. It went something like, I brought muffins with eggs in them, but they're eggs from my chickens, and I don't know why you're vegan, if it's ethical or.... And I said, "Thank you for offer". And no fucking way did I eat those muffins. Because I don't eat eggs.
The next day, I was talking to another friend from bookclub, and she eloquently articulated my outrage, despite not being vegan. It was something like, She doesn't agree with your ethical standpoint, so she made a food based on her ethical standpoint and thought you should eat the food she made.
And yes, I was pissed. We didn't get into it at bookclub, but if she'd asked me, I would have said: no, your backyard chickens are not independent of the pain and suffering I reject by being vegan. You adopted female chickens, but the male chickens that hatched with them aren't sitting happily in your backyard, they're dead. Which is why I don't eggs, period.
So I responded by making muffins. Monday night I made mocha muffins from Vegan Diner just so I could take a picture and blog about how easy it is to make vegan muffins. I call them passive- aggressive muffins--it's my specialty!

Tasting the world

One of the best things about travel is tasting foods from wherever you are: so far I've tried pasta e fagioli in Rome, and chevre chaud in Paris*.One of the things I love about Toronto is that you can eat the food from just about every place on Earth in the various restaurants around the city. And it's that way in one of other favourites places too, New York: on my last trip there, we went to a vegetarian dim sum place in Chinatown. I know, you're thinking dim sum is already one of the best things ever, but the restaurant was vegetarian too? Yes, it was, and it was awesome.
The hotel I stayed at both times I was in New York had a Moroccan-style restaurant on the main floor. It was there I first ordered the avocado on toast that has become a Rogue Avocado breakfast staple. (My mom even requests it, though oddly she never makes it for herself!) One of the things on the menu that I only finally ordered on my second trip was dukkah, a Middle Eastern dish make of ground roasted nuts and spices. When I googled it, I did find a few recipes, as well as references to it being THE trendy dish a few years ago...in Australia.
I cannot vouch for its trendiness, on this continent or any others, but it is delicious. You dip crusty bread in olive oil, and then in the ground nut mixture. IT is like savory squared, with a healthy helping of fat to take it to the next level. It's pretty easy if you have a food processor, just don't take your eyes off the nuts while you're roasting them, lest you burn the whole thing and have to start over again...hypothetically of course.







*The chevre chaud was before I was vegan. Actually, it was overdosing on cheese in France that convinced me to go vegan!

My vegan heart, part 3

There's this Middle Eastern restaurant near my office that has an amazing appetizer plate. Hummus, babaghanouj, tabbouleh salad and falafel, and I actually moan when I eat it. The first time I had it, I told my date (!) I was going to go in the kitchen and make out with the chef. And the best part? On the menu, it's clearly labelled "vegan." Be still my vegan heart! With food like that, that is so clearly and considerately marked safe for yours truly, you better believe I'll keep coming back. And maybe I'll even  threaten to make out with the chef.

Tamales are awesome, papusas are awesomer

Have you ever made tamales? They're a lot of frickin' work.  Make the dough, soak the corn husks, make the filling, spread the dough in the husk, add the right amount of stuffing, close the husk, tie it up. And then cook it. Phew! Are you tired yet?? Tamales are so much work people get together and make tamales assembly-line style.
But I have a secret for you: papusas are like tamales, but faster. All the ingredients are the same, but you spend less time fiddling with husks. Instead you make a little circle on your palm, add the filling, then form into a filling. And you fry them instead of steaming.  The ones pictured are with black bean and sweet potato filling (and store-bought salsa). Delicious! I got the recipe from Viva Vegan, which is also an awesomer cookbook. Enjoy your papusas, my vegans!

Don't give up on dumplings

I had given up on dumplings. I love dumplings, so I tried to make them a couple times, but I got frustrated. You need a tablespoon each of 8 different things, but they're not things I have on hand. So I'd spend $20 bucks or something like that to get $4 worth of ingredients to make $15 worth of dumplings. And what's more, chopping all the ingredients took me an hour and then lovingly stuffing and sealing all the dumplings took much, much longer. And then I still had to cook them. No! I gave up. I realized you could order dumplings from a variety of restaurants. It was more expensive but it was well worth saving the time. It was pretty much a done deal: I'd never make dumplings again. 
Then somehow I discovered this recipe for edamame dumplings. I almost couldn't believe it at first: only a few ingredients, all of which were cheap and easy to procure, which required minimal prepping on my part? Yes, I still had to stuff and seal the little darlings, but I could live with that.
And they were easy. Cooked edamame practically puree themselves, and they were so adorably green inside that they won me over. Take it from me: it'll be the only dumpling recipe you ever make again.

The vegan's dilemna

I was at an event last week. It was in the middle of nowhere, two days long, and I was there for every meal. The first night was a potluck, so I brought a quinoa salad (chickpeas, veggies, avocado, dressing) to be sure there would be a least one thing I could eat. There was luckily more than one things I could eat: there were also raw veggies, green salad, couscous salad, and a soup that the organizer told me was vegan. Huzzah! I was a happy vegan.
I was less happy the following morning, when I discovered the only thing I could have for breakfast was peanut butter on toast. Okay, fine--I had that for breakfast almost every day for two weeks when I was on vacation in Italy. (An American expat we met while there said that for breakfast, Italians eat "a cookie." Not so vegani. Hence pb and toast for breakfast.)
By lunchtime I was really hungry. Lunch that day almost the same as dinner the night before, assorted salads, veggies, and soup, with only the addition of bread. That night for dinner, the vegetarians got veggie lasagna (with cheese), and the omnivores could choose between roasted chicken and stuffed cabbage rolls. I however got the same plate I'd had for the last three meals, with the addition of a few roasted potatoes (only after discussing whether the potatoes had butter on them). While I was checking out the spread, the organizer actually sad, "I guess I forgot to order something for you." So I ate my potatoes and my leftovers, again.
More pb and toast for breakfast the third day, and lunch was--guess what? Leftovers! I must have made a face when the organizer confirmed we were having leftovers--the same leftovers I'd had for what for me was the fourth time since we'd been there--since she turned away and made a frustrated pfffft sound.
So I apologized to her. I said, "I'm sorry if I made a face, but I'm hungry. The others get to choose 10 things for lunch, and I get two". I forgot to add that they were the same two things that I'd been eating for every meal since we arrived. She said she didn't know what to get for me; I replied that if she didn't know, she could have contacted me--since we speak on the phone a couple times a month anyway, and email at least as often, this would not have been a big deal--but even then, hummus would have been fine. "Oh, I forgot hummus."
This is the vegan's dilemna: how assertive do we be in demanding that we have food we can eat? No one wants to be the cranky vegan, whining about how our choices aren't being respected (when there are people starving, far away and close to home). But no one wants to be hungry either. And frankly, being hungry often leads to being the cranky whiner.
As far as this particular event is concerned, I think I've learned to contact the organizer in advance and just double-check. And in November, when I'll be at another event, in the middle of nowhere, this time for four days, I'm bringing some fucking hummus.

A photo of olives

It has been a long day, and I am tired and have nothing original to say, yet the blank page of my blog stares at me accusingly. So today I give to you a photo of olives. Don't they look delicious? I assure you they were.

Lay off the Tofurkey

People tell me all the time, "Someone told me one time they don't like eating fake meats. And they were probably vegetarian once, so it must apply to you too!" Seriously, I must hear this a couple times a month. Even a close friend of mine says she doesn't like fake meat--it's so long since she ate meat or chicken that the fake stuff weirds her out. (But she still eats fish, so I'm not sure how she's feel about the fake fish at that awesome Chinese place that has a vegan version of every kind of animal flesh ever eaten.)
But the short answer is: nope, I love me some fake meats. You'll have to pry the Gardein from my cold, dead fingers. You take something that is vaguely shaped like a "chicken finger", bread it and fry it, and I'll dip that in some sauce and chow down before you can say "meat analog". I readily confess to craving chicken wings regularly. I don't miss chicken wings themselves--let's face it, they are weird and gross even to those who eat meat. What I miss about them is the wings themselves, it's the sauce and the fried goodness and the fact that you can get them everywhere--grocery store, pub, and a dozen places in between. It's the convenience dammit! And the same goes for Gardein, and veggie dogs, and Tofurkey--which I, according to the tradition of my people (vegans, not Canadians), had as Thanksgiving leftovers this morning, with bread and the included gravy. Analog meats are one of the few vegan "convenience" foods, that you can heat up and enjoy. Unlike the other 95% of the meals that I eat, which are hand-prepared by yours truly.
So lay off the Tofurkey. You're eating the original, which is nasty, cruel and shortens your life--don't question me for eating a version which is cruelty-free, convenient and just as delicious.

Simply delicious

Sometimes we try really really hard. We re-read and edit an email to our bosses ten times, we check our hair and outfit even when the object of our affection thinks we're gorgeous, we worry our homes aren't nice enough, big enough or clean enough to host anyone except our cats. And our the interwebs, that pressure goes up. "Look, here's a pic of the pizza I made. But the toppings are from the farmer's market and the flour is heirloom and local and I ground it myself using an artisanal mortar and pestle handmade made by a vegan unicorn!"
I do that sometimes. Well, not a unicorn's mortar and pestle, but we do what we can to make our food interesting, special, and noteworthy before sharing it with the world (or our 17 followers on Tumblr). But food, as all things, is sometimes better when it's simple. Simple pleasures are there for the taking every day: a purring cat in your lap, a silly laugh with a friend, a great bike ride or a run on a beautiful autumn day. We don't have to go all-out for our food either. So when I found myself without a lunch planned for the next day at work--and determined not to spend money on a mediocre lunch--I put some chickpeas to soak, went through my fridge and cupboards, and planned to-buy items for the next day's lunch. What I didn't have on hand, I bought from the grocery store around the corner from my office. And lunch was simple and delicious: flat bread and hummus, and a satisfying salad of arugula, chickpeas, quinoa and white mushrooms with basic Italian dressing. It's not a five-course menu carried in on the wings of vegan fairies, but it was a great lunch.

Seize your whisks, my vegans!

I made choclate pancakes last week. No big deal, of course, I just MODIFIED A RECIPE! Which is a big deal for me. When it comes to standard dishes I have learned to follow the recipe the first couple times I make it, then modify away. Leek and bean cassoulet (from Veganomicon, I think?) was modified from the first time I made it. I know, I'm such a vegan foodie bad-ass!
But with baked goods, I hesitate to change a thing. The first time I subbed cornstarch for tapioca flour, I googled like crazy. I see cookbook authors and adventurous friends going crazy qwith experimentation, and I feel envy. So when I made pancakes last weekend, I went crazy too. I added 2 tablespoons cocoa powder to the recipe. It was great! I added blueberry sauce too, becuase blueberry-choclate combo is music to my tongue. So I think we should experiment more. But a word of advice--start small, with single batches only, or you could be eating your mistakes for days. Seize your whisks, my vegans!

(Partially) Illustrated Things I can Always Eat.

I asked a colleague out for lunch last week. She said, "I was going to suggest sushi but you just had some on Friday." First of all--good memory on her, no? Secondly, I can have sushi anytime.  Breakfast, lunch, dinner, brunch, midnight snack, post workout...I hope you get what I'm saying. There are a few things like that--if someone asked, "How about this for dinner, again?" I would say, hell yeah! So for my first post of VeganMoFo 2012, here is my very informative list, of (Partially) Illustrated Things I can Always Eat.

Sushi, obviously
The elegance of Japanese food is inherently appealing. The focus on the aesthetics is so different from the meat-potatoes-veg dinners so many of us grew up with. Hallelujah for that! And plus we get to use chopsticks, which is how I measured when I became a fully-formed city girl.

Pizza
Generally speaking, I have to make it myself. So I do. If I am especially disciplined, I will make a pizza and take it to work with me for a couple days' worth of lunch, health-ified with a salad on the side. Sex is like pizza, right? I can't remember how exactly, but it sounds right.

Dumplings
They're tiny and varied, they're stuffed with things, and they come with sauces. If dumplings aren't on your list of OMNoms, you must have been born without taste buds.

Grilled Cheese
Since going vegan, grilled cheese wasn't a popular item on my menu rotation. But then there was Daiya; and I discovered my panini press makes grilled cheese extra awesome. (It's all the extra space for crispy-ness that the panini press makes.) Now there is now going back. 

French toast
This has much the same appeal as grilled cheese--it's fried and it's carbs, so gimmeh! Only with French toast, it's not the gooey cheeze that make it extra nom-worthy, it's the stuff you eat it with--fruit, fruit sauce, maple syrup, icing sugar, or completing the full-on hot-breakfast trifecta of hash browns and meatless sausage/bacon. Weekends are made for this, people.

Falafel
Another food that builds on the basic fried carbs, falafel kicks it up a notch. Not only do you have the fried falafel balls and the pita, some food genius decided that contrasting this with cool, crisp parsley and adding some tahini for depth of flavour would take this food to a whole new level. And it did. 

Mexican

There is something about the flavour palate and the often vegan-ness of Mexican-style food that I can't get enough of. And seriously, anything I can add avocados to has my heart. Furthermore, chipotle peppers are the perfect addition of heat, and leave me teary with delicious joy--and a burning tongue.


Avocado
Do I really need to explain this one? If anything with avocados has my heart, then avocados themselves must be amazeballs. It's like this: if movies with Ryan Reynolds are inherently awesome, then Ryan Reynolds himself must be awesome squared. Hard to argue with my impeccable logic, right?
Avocados are smooth and creamy and go well with everything. If you're not convinced, look at the picture and try not to imagine how tasty that is.

Hummus

Humans have four basic needs: air, water, food, shelter. This being the 20th century, we can add Facebook and funny photos of cats if we wanted the list to be truly accurate. Vegans can add hummus to the list of necessities. How many sad, hungry vegan, lost and forlorn--on the road or at an event--has found that delicious saviour, hummus, and become instantly rejuvenated? Hummus is a vegan food that can be found so many places now that it frequently saves us from "just the salad". And thank hummus for that!