Fun with Bok Choy

I'm still wading through my CSA box and have miraculously used up most of the lettuce, spinach, garlic scapes, and rhubarb. But today is Thurday - which is almost Friday - which means another CSA box to tackle!

Tonight (and lunch and dinner tomorrow) I'm endeavoring to use up all of the bok choy.

Of course I will be making a stir fry (typical and unimaginative, I know, but I really like stir fry for using up lots of veggies) and I'll also be making Spicy Thai Soup.

I wish I could give credit to whoever came up with the soup recipe, but it's one of those photo copies that has been lying around the house for eons. It may well have come from Alice (my step-mom, kinda) or it may have come from a Jane Brody or Moosewood cookbook. I really have no way of knowing.

In any case, I've had a summer cold that will not go away and soup sounds like a wonderful idea to me - even though it has been in the high 80s this week.

If you're looking to use up a little bok choy like I am or if you are in the mood for Thai, I hope you'll give this a try.

You will need:
1 TBSP finely chopped fresh ginger
(I just use a micro-plane because I'm too lazy to chop it)
4 cups vegetable broth
2 tsp minced garlic
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and finely chopped
(you could use just half if you don't like the heat)
1 cup sliced mushrooms of your choice
1 cup broccoli florets
(cut into bite-sized pieces...you don't want a knife with your soup)
1 cup finely chopped bok choy
1 green onion, finely chopped
1 TBSP finely chopped fresh cilantro

Place broth, ginger, garlic, and jalapeno in a pot and bring to a boil.

Add mushrooms and simmer for 2 minutes.

Add broccoli and bok choy. simmer until the broccoli is tender but still bright green and crisp - about 3 to 4 minutes. Do not overcook!

Stir in green onion and cilantro and serve immediately.

Enjoy!

Light, Bright, Citrus Dressing

Remember that CSA I talked about in my last post? 

Well, it has blessed me with an overabundance of lettuce.

Seriously, there is only so much you can do with lettuce!

I've tried pawning it off onto unsuspecting guests, I've made filling for numerous lettuce wraps, and I'm wading my way through troughs of salad.

The good news here is that having a truck load of salad greens means that I'm getting to try our a bunch of salad dressing recipes that I've been meaning to get around to.

Now I know that salad is the LAST thing you want to see on a vegan blog but I promise that I wouldn't share any salad with you if it weren't absolutely amazing...and this dressing truly is!

It's light and refreshing. It's bright and citrus-y. It's dressing but it blends in so well with your salad that it doesn't taste like you've covered it in dressing!

Because I have so much salad I made a giant amount of this dressing, stuck it in a canning jar, and popped it into the fridge for future use. Please feel free to half the recipe for smaller mountains of lettuce.

You will need:

1/2 cup orange marmalade

(I used organic orange preserves - my market didn't have orange marmalade)

1/4 cup lemon juice or 2 lemons, juiced

4 tsp Dijon mustard

2/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

(I used about 1 1/2 tsp salt and a generous amount of freshly ground black pepper)

Whisk all of your ingredients together using a fork and voila! Your dressing is ready.

I will warn you that if you use orange preserves like I did, the dressing looks completely unappetizing - it's lumpy and clumpy and kind of gross looking. Trust me - you want to get past this initial gross-out factor because it tastes marvelous!

Name That Produce

I am so stinkin' excited!

Friday was the first pick-up day of this year's CSA box.

WOO HOO!

For those of you who are new to the lingo, CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. You buy a share of crops from a local farm and all throughout the summer and into the fall you get a giant box of produce every week.  

Price-wise, it's incredibly reasonable. I'm taking part in the CSA from Red Manse Farm this year and I'd highly recommend you check out their web site for info on joining in next year (or join your local CSA, if you're not in the area).

The fun thing about joining a CSA is that you never know exactly what you're going to get. It's exciting to know that you're getting the freshest veggies that are local and in season. You get to experience produce that you definitely will not find in the supermarket (there are no seasons in the grocery store) and it stretches your ability to cook using new ingredients. It also makes you hurry the heck up and use it all (or freeze it) since you know you'll be getting a bunch more in just a week! 

This week's CSA box included something I have never encountered and it had me playing a little game of "Name That Produce:"

A couple of Google searches for things like "long curly green vegetable" later and...

...voila! I discovered that what I had were garlic scapes. 

After several more internet searches I discovered that a LOT of people like to make pesto out of it...apparently I am not the only one with an over abundance of garlic scapes from my local CSA.

So I did what many others did and made a giant batch of Garlic Scape Pesto.

For the pesto, you will need:

2 1/2 cups roughly chopped garlic scapes

1 cup pine nuts, toasted

Zest and juice of one lemon

 1 1/2 tsp salt

3/4 cup vegan Parmesan cheese

1 1/2 cups extra virgin olive oil
freshly ground black pepper to taste

Place the pine nuts in a dry skillet over medium heat and toast until lightly brown and fragrant. Remove from heat and add the pine nuts and all other ingredients to a food processor.

Blend until mostly smooth. This will make a rather thick pesto, so if you want yours a little runnier, experiment by adding a little more liquid.

To see how I used the pesto, visit my friend Abby's blog, where I am the guest post today!

Cheesy Vegan Popcorn

 I have a sweet tooth like you would not believe. Even more pronounced, however, is my love for all things salty.

Since the chocolate chip cookies haven't been cutting it lately, I turned to my old standby: popcorn.

It's been kind of hectic the last few days and when that happens, I tend to snack or graze more than stop and have a full meal. 

To satisfy my grumbly belly the other day I popped up a bag of microwave popcorn (the kind with no butter).  Immediately upon finishing, I ripped open the steaming hot bag and tossed in a tablespoon of nutritional yeast. Then, shake-n-bake style I shook it all together to coat.

The result was popcorn that was cheesy and salty without any guilt, animal products, or extra fat.

I highly suggest you try this for your next snack or movie night!

Flat Chocolate Chip Crackers

Do you ever have those days where you just NEED a chocolate chip cookie? 

Silly me, of course you do.

I've been on the hunt lately for a vegan chocolate chip cookie recipe lately that actually meets my approval. I've tried several overthe past few weeks to no avail -Skinny Bitch in the Kitch, Babycakes (x2), and a few versions I found online - and they all fall flat. I mean this literally, of course, as they all end up like flat, hard, crunchy chocolate chip crackers. They're all truly horrible!

Back before I went vegan I had a truly marvelous recipe for chocolate chip cookies. They were crunchy on the edges and soft and chewy in the middle without being so soft they were under cooked. They were puffy and didn't spread out and glom onto their neighborswhen you baked them.

I am jonesing for my old cookie recipe in a bad way.

I've been trying to experiment with ways to veganize the old recipe to no avail. 

Please help:  

If you know a really wonderful chocolate cookie recipe (or a recipe for a cookie base that I could use for multiple cookies - that would be fantastic) please share! 

Leave it as a comment or e-mail me at rn6productions@gmail.com.

I'm desperate!

"Chicken" Seitan Round Two

As promised in my last post, this recipe for chicken-style seitan uses nearly the same recipe but a completely different cooking method. I had been using the first version with much success for weeks when I realized that there was absolutely no way that it would hold up as "chicken"salad, which just happens to be the boyfriend's favorite.

The issue with the first method is that, for some applications, it is just too soft. If you want to make kebabs or sausages (or "chicken" salad, for that matter), then you need a much firmer seitan. In order to achieve this I followed the instructions I found online about making seitan sausages. In the most basic sense, you mix up the seitan and the broth and bake until firm. This allows you to cut it into cubes that actually retain their shape.

For the oven-baked version you will need:

1 cup vital wheat gluten

3 TBSP vegetarian chicken broth powder

2 tsp garlic granules

1/2 cup nutritional yeast

1 cup water (or a little more if you need it)

Just like you did for the stove top version, mix all of the dry ingredients together first. 

Add the water and mix with your hands until your dough forms. Turn the dough out onto the counter and knead a few times - remember this is gluten you're working with so don't overdo it on the kneading.

Form the dough into a log about 8 inches long and wrap it tightly in tin foil. The log will get longer as you wrap it, so make sure you have plenty of tin foil on each end.

Bake at 325 for 1 hour and 15 minutes, flipping it over once about half way through.

When you remove it from the oven, let it cool completely in the tin foil. Then you can stick it in the refrigerator or freeze it until you plan to use it. 

Tip: If your seitan tends to come out a little dry, freezing it and then thawing it helps to make it moist.

Look for my "chicken" salad recipe in the next post.

"Chicken" Seitan Round One

In my last post I mentioned that I have a recipe for chicken-style seitan that I use all the time.

I should have said that it is a recipe that I used it all the time.

As many new veggies will tell you, when you decide to make the switch you spend a lot of time initially trying to recreate new, "safe" versions of your old favorites. I think this is normal, as you're still getting to know how to do things differently and learning a whole new way to cook and eat. 

If this didn't happen, I honestly have no idea what I would have eaten in the first few weeks.

This recipe is one I used all the time in the early days - so much so that I got really sick of seitan.  For a while I had three separate posts in the pipeline all about seitan and every time I went to edit them I just couldn't hit "publish." 

Now, after literally months seitan-free, I am ready to once again delve into the archives and pull out my chicken-style seitan recipe. (I know I make this sound really terrible and I swear it isn't - I just Oh-Dee'd on seitan for a while.)

I make this one of two ways, depending on what I plan to use it for. If I'm looking for something that resembles cutlets or tenders, I will make it the first way, on the stove top. When I want to make the boyfriend's favorite "chicken" salad, I make it the second way, in the oven. Today's post is all about the first way. The next post will teach you how to do the second version.

For the stove top version you will need:

1 cup vital wheat gluten

2 TBSP vegetarian chicken broth powder

1 tsp garlic granules

1 cup water

To start, mix together your dry ingredients until the spices are evenly distributed.

Add the water and stir with your hands. The dough will form almost instantly - gluten is desperate to get to some water and make dough; it just can't even wait it's so excited. When the dough is pretty much mixed together, turn it out of your bowl and onto the counter. 

The dough will be very wet. Don't worry, this is totally normal. You will notice that it's definitely springy and spongy but it doesn't hold together terribly well. Knead it a few times until it starts to hold together a little better but stop before it starts to get tough! 

Remember Baking 101 - DO NOT OVER MIX. Bear in mind that when you bake and you mix your dough/batter/whatever, you're basically activating the gluten to hold everything together. Over mixing your dough/batter/whatever will make your baked goods tough and elastic-y. Now think for a second about what you're working with - GLUTEN. VWG is just flour with all of the starch removed so be really careful that you don't mix it too much. The results are unappetizing, believe me! The best thing to do is just try it a couple of times until you get a consistency you can live with.

Next, form your gluten into four cutlets that are roughly the same size. Making them the same size will help them to cook evenly. Last you're going to add the cutlets to a broth to simmer them.

For the broth you will need:

4 cups of water

1/2 cup nutritional yeast

1 TBSP vegetarian chicken broth powder

Mix the broth together in the biggest skillet you have. Trust me when I tell you this - the seitan grows when you cook it and will take over your skillet. If you don't have a huge skillet, I suggest splitting the broth between two skillets and cooking the seitan in two batches.

Heat the broth over medium heat and add the seitan cutlets. On my stove I put the burner on 4. Make sure you don't boil the seitan. Boiling will also make your seitan turn out tough and rubbery.

Simmer covered for about 35-40 minutes or until the broth is nearly all absorbed. You can make the seitan ahead of time and store it in the rest of the broth or you can use it right away. You can keep it refrigerated for about a week and since this recipe makes a TON of seitan, you'll definitely need to refrigerate some of it.

Some serving suggestions:

1. Instead of making cutlets, make the seitan into nuggets. Dip them into soy milk, followed by the bread crumbs of your choice, and fry in a little oil for nuggets.

2. Slice into strips and mix into your stir fry.

3. Butterfly the seitan, fill with whatever you like, and roll to keep everything inside. Secure with twine or toothpicks and bake.

4. Slice the cutlets open so you create a pocket. Fill with the mixture of your choice and suttee on both sides until golden.

5. Follow the same steps in #1 but serve with spaghetti sauce and "mozzarella" like a hurried-up version of "chicken" parm.

However you decide to use this, keep in mind that this method of cooking your seitan isn't perfect for everything, but it is super versatile in your old recipes that used chicken. The second method will allow you some additional cooking options so stay tuned!

Old Bay

I know, I know, I've been away for a while. I've been trying a ton of new recipes and, mostly, failing miserably. 

The thing is, when you try new recipes - other people's recipes - you have to take a leap of faith that they'll actually be worth eating once you've finished the dish. Lately, I've been choosing some real failures....but more on that later, I promise.

Today I discovered Old Bay Seasoning, largely thanks to this recipe for seitan chicken from Vegan Yum Yum (go buy the cookbook - the recipes and the photography are great and she does a wonderful job guiding even the novice cook through recipes to find success).

I have heard of old bay before but mostly associated with seafood. It's not the kind of thing I grew up with and I have always thought of it as a regional spice blend...you know, from the south. I grew up eating cuisine form all over the country and the world but, for whatever reason, southern food was a complete mystery to my household.

Grits were mushy and flavorful at best, everything else was fried, and it left a lot to be desired. It was not until earlier this year that I had ever purchased, let alone cooked, greens.

So, as a very recent convert to southern cooking I thought I'd give the southern fried seitan a shot.

BOY OH BOY WAS I SURPRISED!

I have a wonderful recipe for seitan "chicken" that I modified from Vegetarian Carnivore's recipe and I use it all the time but this new recipe that is built around Old Bay totally blew my mind! And here I thought I only needed ONE seitan "chicken" recipe.

I made the seitan as directed but then added my own little twist at the end.

I butterflied the seitan "cutlets" and stuffed them with a mixture of caramelized onions, sauteed mushrooms, parsley and goat cheese (more on that later, too, I swear).

The result was utterly fantastic. I highly suggest you try it!

Incidentally, I served it with fiddle head ferns in a lemon garlic sauce and a side of couscous. It was one of the best meals I've made in a really long time. I'll post the lemon garlic sauce recipe later and also the fantastic peach cake that I made for dessert, which is quickly becoming my favorite dessert and overtaking my beloved linzor torte.