Veggie Fritatta and Sunshine Smoothies

I've been recipe testing for Sara Beth Russert's upcoming cookbook for the past few weeks. I've been really loving everything I've made so far. I think you guys are going to love this cookbook. I've already found some things that will definitely be making it into a regular rotation at our place. Two of these are the Veggie Fritatta and the Sunshine Smoothies.

As I'm sure you can tell from the photos, there are greens in the smoothie being all sneaky and stuff. You can't taste the greens at all, which surprised me. It was so yummy, I've made these a couple of times since I originally tested the recipe. Perfect for an afternoon snack or with your morning breakfast. These smoothies aren't frozen, which is the way I typically make mine so no brain freeze first thing, either. Just lots of fruits and greens and vitamins and yumminess.

This veggie fritatta was crazy awesome. I don't know how many this is supposed to serve, but we ate half of it between the two of us for breakfast along with our smoothies. Then, a few hours later, I was still thinking of how good it was and ate the rest of it all by myself. I can't say enough times how good this was.

Maybe you shouldn't try and eat this all in one sitting like I pretty much did. You'll sure want to, though.

Vancouver Food Trucks: Mom's Grilled Cheese, the Sequel

I went back to Mom's Grilled Cheese on yet another gorgeous fall day to enjoy a sandwich and the nice weather. The truck was still mobbed, but not quite as much as the last time I was there. Good for them that they're doing so well! The food is really delicious.

 I got my sandwich in a cute little cone this time. There are some potato chips at the bottom under the sandwich. So cute!

I had the same thing as last time: marble rye with Daiya cheese, pickles, onions and tomatoes. I got mozzarella Daiya this time, though. That's my favorite. They had all three flavors this time, which is pretty rad. My sandwich had a little bit of olive oil brushed on it before grilling this time. That definitely gave it a bit more of that grilled cheese texture and flavor. So good!

Cindy was nice enough to give me a sample of the tomato soup. It's made vegan, but it comes with cheese on it, so just ask for no cheese if you order it. The soup was really tasty! It had such a nice flavor with some definite Italian herbs in there. I really liked it. I can see myself going back for a big cup of soup on a particularly blustery day or a day when I'm not feeling quite so great. This is not some crappy, boring tomato soup.

 

My sample cup of soup is balancing on top of my ginger tea.

I also ordered a ginger tea this time. It's pretty much just ginger and a bit of demerra sugar. Absolutely wonderful. I will probably stop by just for some of this tea sometimes. It's gingery without being too spicy and just a touch sweet, not too much sugar. It was a wonderful thing to have on a day with a crisp wind blowing.

Make Your Own Infusions

Since I've been canning so much this summer I thought I might also try my hand at making some infusions. Summer canning is partially about having fun, partially about having some delicious food for the rainy, grey Vancouver fall and winter (and spring, too, who am I kidding) and partially about making holiday gifts. I'm thinking that people might be tired of me giving them jam and such (even though my apple butter is the bomb). That prompted me to try my hand at infusing. I think some homemade flavored alcohol might make a nice holiday gift. I know I'd think that's pretty rad if someone gave it to me.

This is way easier than you'll ever guess that it is. Seriously. Even your cat could do this if s/he had opposable thumbs. Though your cat would just infuse everything with catnip, so maybe we're all better off this way, anyway.

You can infuse vinegar or alcohol in pretty much exactly the same way. You can use almost any fruit to do it, too. I bet there are a few veggies that would be kind of awesome in an infusion, too. Cucumber vodka could be really refreshing and delicious, I think. Vanilla beans would also work pretty much the same way as the fruit if you want to go that route.

Step 1. - Choose your weapon. Err... I mean flavor. Try and choose the best looking produce that has the least amount of blemishes. Blemishes can bring bacteria when it comes to preserving food so that's why you want to be a bit more careful about what you're choosing.

Step 2. - Scrub a dub dub. Wash your produce really well. If it's not organic, give it a little splash of vinegar to help get the yuckies off and then give it another rinse.

Also wash the heck out of your jars! Oh yeah, you need some 1 liter mason jars or those cool glass jar things with the rubber seals. Wash these in super hot water. If you have a dishwasher, run it through there on the hottest setting to make sure you've sanitized the glass. Yes, you need to use glass for this. Metal will end up tasting like metal and could put some rust into your final product which is gross either way. Plastic is not your friend, either. Plastic can leech mojo into your final product and I feel like it absorbs flavors. Glass is best. Just trust me on this.

Step 3. - Mix everything together in your newly cleaned jars. You're going to use 2 cups of produce for 2 cups of liquid be it alcohol or vinegar. If you're doing two kinds of things at once, make sure you label things so you don't accidentally give Aunt Edna the gin when you meant to give her the vinegar.

A note about your liquid choices. If you're using vinegar, just get the plain old white vinegar, that's best for this. If you're using alcohol, you can just use the el cheapo brand since your final product will taste like the fruit anyway. That is hard for me to say. I'm a bit of an alcohol snob. I refuse to drink the cheap stuff because it tastes like crap, but this is one exception. You're making it taste better right now, anyway!

Step 4. - Mash! At this point you can either take a wooden spoon and mash the crap out of your produce or you can blend it up a bit. You'll decide this depending on what kind of thing you're using as your flavor. For example, if you're using roasted garlic or cucumbers, you'd probably just want to smush them with a wooden spoon. If you're using berries, you could blend them if you want. It doesn't actually make much difference which way you choose. I tried one batch of blended and one batch of mashed fruit and they came out pretty much the same in the end.

Step 5. - Put the lids on tightly and shake!

Step 6. - Put your jars in a dark place and take them out once or twice a day to shake them. That helps to keep the flavors blending together and makes a better infusion. Usually 1-2 weeks will do the trick.

Step 7 - Strain! I used a jelly bag, but you can use a sieve or some cheesecloth if you want. Strain your shiny new vinegar or alcohol into a super clean glass container. You can use another jar, the original bottle or get some fancy containers, however you want to do it.

The jelly bag in action

Squish the liquid out of the fruit as you're straining it. I ended up almost filling up that other half of the jar with liquid from just what was in that bag.

Step 8. - Sit back and admire your awesomeness.

Fresh Orange Juice

Well, we've had our juicer for a little while now and we're still using it quite a bit. Our favorite juice is definitely the apple-carrot-beet-ginger juice but I think fresh orange juice is a close second. We've become completely spoiled now. I don't ever want to drink juice anymore unless it's one we make ourselves.

I'm wondering if we're getting any extra vitamins since some of the white part of the orange gets juiced doing it this way. I think that's where bioflavanoids and stuff like that hang out. I don't know, but it sure tastes delicious.

The coolest thing about orange juice made through a juicer instead of just being squeezed is the frothiness. It sounds kind of odd when you think about frothy orange juice, but it's awesome. It tastes almost creamy or something. I mean, just look at those awesome little bubbles!

I think my cats like juice, too because they always seem to be hanging out when I'm taking pictures of it. I think I might go make a glass of carrot juice right now, actually.

And Then They Bought a Juicer

Last weekend we bought a juicer. It's one of those things that I've been wanting for years. As I'm trying to find ways to cram in more servings of fruits and vegetables in my day, I've been buying more fresh juice. I've also been really interested in making some juices with greens added to them. I can't really find anything like that locally so our answer was to suck it up and go buy a juicer.

This thing is awesome! The first juice we made was an apple-carrot-beet-ginger juice. We had no idea how much juice would come out of the produce so we actually ended up with about 5 huge glasses of juice. I know it's best not to refrigerate the juice and drink it later, but that's what we had to do with most of it. So crazy. I'm still getting the hang of how much fruit and veggies to put in to get just one or two glasses of juice.

So far we've made the apple-carrot-beet-ginger juice quite a few times, once with some kale added even. We've made lemon juice, apple juice, orange juice and pear juice, too. It's amazing. We realized that we'll never have to buy store-bought lemon juice again. That's something we use quite a bit at our place, too. The pears actually ended up making a bit of a pear puree. We cut it with some apple juice, simmered it all with a couple of cinnamon sticks and had the most amazing hot pear cider. Yum! I froze a bunch of the pear juice to use later. I think I might make a raw pie with that as the top layer.

Phoebe was posing, too so I thought I'd get a photo of her as well as the juice.

If you've never had freshly juiced oranges, woah. Putting an orange through a juicer is much, much different than just squeezing all of the juice out of it. The juice is really foamy and so delicious. I like it so much better this way than out of a carton from the store.

We've been juicing pretty much every day now. I'm looking forward to trying some green juices. We've gotten a couple of recommendations from friends and I'm reading Crazy Sexy Diet right now and I think Kris Carr has a few recipes for them as well.

Things That Are Awesome: Green & Black's Hot Chocolate

I've decided to start a semi-regular thing on my blog. Things that are awesome. Frequently I find gadgets or yummy packaged foods that I think everyone should know about. First up - chocolatey yumminess.

I have a love affair with Green & Black's chocolates. They're all fair trade and organic and almost all of them are vegan. You have seriously never tasted chocolate this amazing. You don't want to chew it, just put little pieces in your mouth and let it melt on your tongue. It's really unfair to yourself to eat it faster than that. Plus, the chocolate lasts a little longer that way because you'll end up eating less each time.

Green & Black's is a UK company and they have some flavors across the pond that we can't get over here. I've actually had a friend of mine from over there send me some because she knew how much I like it. And let me say this, too: I'm not a chocolate fiend. I don't eat chocolate very often, I have to be in the mood for it. I'm more of a salty craving gal. Give me some fries or plain potato chips or Tings over chocolate any day. Unless you're going to offer me some Green & Black's.

Loving Green & Black's the way I do, I was intrigued when I saw that they had hot chocolate. I actually found this the first time in the drug store. Sometimes it pays to walk down an aisle randomly. I never ever buy hot chocolate because I'm rather partial to the way I make it from scratch. It's so easy to do it yourself and hot chocolate mixes always pale in flavor in comparison to homemade. Until now!

Check out what it looks like, too. This is no wimpy powdered mix, this is little tiny pieces of chocolate. You know what else is awesome? If you ever wish you could have hot chocolate when you're not at home, you can use this. Get some of those little single servings thingies of soy milk and keep them at work along with this and you can have a nice afternoon snack.

I actually really like to cut up some Sweet & Sara marshmallows and let them swim around in the chocolateyness. That is a fantastic way to give yourself some dessert after dinner without eating those last 3 cupcakes that are calling your name.

Even Piper wants some!

Flowering Tea

Because today is my birthday, I'm gonna talk about tea. Well, really, I'm gonna talk about tea another time, but I'll leave you with a picture of one of my new obsessions - flowering tea.

I forget exactly what kind this is, but it was in a variety pack of Numi tea. The flowering stuff is not only super yummy, but it's also really fun to watch. The tea leaves are sewn together, so you don't always know what it will look like until it blossoms. Put the little tea package into a clear glass teapot and then pour almost boiling water over it. Put the lid on so that it steeps and wait. It'll start blooming almost immediately.

Yes, the tea is a bit on the expensive side, but you can use each blossom 3 times, so really it works out to be not so bad when you think about it like that. Just make sure not to steep the tea longer than 3-4 minutes each time and you can definitely get 3 uses out of it.

Also, my cats like to watch the tea blossom also. They're fascinated by it. And that amuses me.

Veganlicious Hot Chocolate of Doom!

Okay, there's really nothing doomriffic about this hot chocolate unless you count that I was watching Hellraiser while I made it. Yay for AMC's Monster Fest! It is veganlicious, though. Yeah, I totally made that word up. I dare you to use it. I dare you! See, if you don't, that's where the doom part comes in.

So you're sitting at home watching a marathon of horror movies like all good boys and girls on Halloween week. Suddenly you think that you would really like to have some sort of dessert. Then you realize that it's 9pm and you don't really feel like baking something this late. And if you're like me, you don't have any sweets in the house unless you made it yourself. Tiptoe into the kitchen so the cenobites don't hear you and make yourself a cup of hot chocolate! This is such a great substitute for those times when you're wishing for something sweet, but either don't have anything or are trying to watch what you're eating.

You can add all kinds of crazy stuff to this, it's pretty much a bare bones hot chocolate recipe. It's more of a European style, though. Treat it like you would coffee and add sugar and soy cream to it to suit your own taste. Sometimes I'll splash in some Grand Marnier or Kahlua or something equally naughty.

Add a little dash of cayenne and cinnamon to make a really kick-ass Mexican hot chocolate. I do it that way more often than not. I don't tend to measure out the cayenne and cinnamon, but if I had to guess, I'd say that I add anywhere from 1/8 to 1/4 of a teaspoon of cinnamon and just a pinch of cayenne.

I have to add a disclaimer about the measurements as well. I usually measure how much soy milk to use by fill my mug about three-quarters full and then dumping that amount into the pot. I think it's usually around a cup, though.

Veganlicious Hot Chocolate of Doom!

1 Cup soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, etc.
1 Tablespoon cocoa powder
1 teaspoon sugar or agave nectar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

In a small pot add the soy milk and turn the heat to medium. Add the cocoa powder, sugar and vanilla. Whisk everything together until the cocoa has completely dissolved. This might take a minute or two. You shouldn't have any little pieces of cocoa floating around in your soy milk anymore. Keep whisking every minute or so for about 10, or until everything is almost boiling. If your hot chocolate starts to boil, turn the heat down, that's too hot!

Pour into your favorite mug and add soy cream or sugar if you want. I usually add soy cream to mine to make it a bit creamier. I don't like things that are to sweet, so I don't add any more sugar but you may want to.

See how easy it is to make your own hot chocolate? And it tastes even better than any mix you could buy as well.