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.

Simple Brown Gravy

I just realized that I said I'd post a simple brown gravy recipe and then never did. Oops. I don't have any pictures of, but it pretty much looks like you'd expect a brown gravy to look. This is great to go with the Vegan Holiday Roast or stuffing or pretty much anything you need gravy for.

Here is a picture of two of my cats instead. These two are sisters and I always catch them snuggling. This was probably one of the funniest contortions they've been in.

Here's the great thing about this gravy. You can make it just bare bones and it tastes great or you can add a thing or two to jazz it up a bit if you want. I like to add mushrooms to mine so I'm going to give you the recipe with the mushrooms added. If you don't like mushrooms or don't want to do that, just leave them out. Add some fresh herbs if you want. Thyme, marjoram or sage would be nice with this. Also, if you're out of vegetable broth you can either add in some broth powder with water or just use water instead.

Brown Gravy

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
3/4 cup mushrooms, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 cup flour
3 cups vegetable broth
2 1/2 cups water
1/2 cup soy sauce

Saute the onion, garlic and mushrooms in the oil over medium heat until the onions are transluscent, about 7 minutes. Meanwhile, mix together the broth and water and whisk in the flour.

Slowly add the flour mixture to the pot with the onions and mushrooms. Turn the heat up to medium-high and stir constantly until the mixture comes to a boil. Turn the heat down to simmer, still stirring often as your gravy starts to thicken. Add the soy sauce and cook for about 5 more minutes.

Remove from heat and blend the gravy until it's almost smooth. (Or make it totally smooth if you don't want any bits of onions and mushrooms in your gravy.) An immersion blender is great for this but if you don't have one, a blender or food processor would be fine.

Return the gravy to the pot and cook for another 10-15 minutes as your gravy finishes thickening. Whisk in some more water if you find it's getting too thick.

A Halloween Round-Up

I've been thinking about making something fun and festive for dinner on Halloween night. Those cute little pepper jack-o-lanterns I discovered yesterday might just be the thing. If I make that, I still need something spooky for dessert. I've done some neat cupcake things in years past so I might do something like that again. As I've been thinking about all of this, I decided to do a bit of a Halloween round-up today. Here are a bunch of things that I've made before and I'm seeing on other people's blogs right now. Are you making anything Halloweeny this year?

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Spiderweb Cupcakes and Chocolate Spider Mini Cupcakes - I brought these to work a few years ago and they were quite the hit.

Vampire Cupcakes! They "bleed" when you bit into them. These are really easy to make, too. I included the tutorial on how to do this in the blog post.

Hannah made these adorable little pumpkin candies over on Bittersweet.

Ghosts are popping up everywhere at Fancy Flours!

VegSpinz made her own Candy Corn last year and now you can, too!

Aren't these falafel spiders just the cutest?! There's a great recipe for falafel on this page from Veggie Bellly's site, too.

How about some sweet potato-chocolate swirl muffins from the Vegan Cookbook Afficiando?

I would swear there were some more Halloween things popping up in the MoFo this year. Maybe I'll do another round up this weekend if I find some more. 

The Cutest Jack-O-Lanterns Ever!

Is this not the cutest Halloween dish you've ever seen?!

These are Spabettie's Carrot-Ginger Quinoa Pepper Jacks. Otherwise known as the most adorable jack-o-lantern food ever! That's her picture, not mine. I just can't get over how cute these things are and I had to share.

Edit: I just realized these are in a Halloween recipe contest. You can vote here if you want.

A Wayward Brunch

After getting quite a few great suggestions for breakfast in Seattle, we decided to try out Wayward Vegan Cafe. Seriously, holy cow. I will definitely be going back there again. The food was amazeballs. I want to try one of everything on the menu. I also always forget how large the portions are in the US so we ended up with a ton of food. I can never say no to grits with my breakfast, though so that's partially my fault. Ah, well.

This was my plate. Country fried seitan steak with hash browns and tofu scramble. So good. The gravy was really good, I kept scooping it onto my hashbrowns to eat it with them, too. I think that if I ever order this again, I'll ask for extra gravy just for that very purpose. I don't eat a ton of seitan because it has a tendency to set off my allergies, but sometimes I like to throw caution to the wind. The delicious wind. The seitan was lightly breaded and crispy and tasted great. I really liked it, but I think I actually prefer the country fried steak at Georgetown Liquor Company more. No worries, there are tons more things to try on this menu so it'll be a while before I get back around to this, especially considering that I don't live in Seattle.

Now let me speak of this tofu scramble. At first I was all oh, yeah, whatever. Boring tofu scramble on the side. But no! Even though this is just plain tofu scramble with no frills, it was really tasty. It's really fluffy and light and full of flavor. I think I mowed through that first, actually. I couldn't get enough. Yum, yum, yum!

James ordered the seitan hash. The blurry seitan hash as it were. I've learned my lesson about trying to take photos in the morning before I've eaten. This is the second time in a week I've done this. But, I digress. Here's the thing about the seitan hash. We were tricked! It doesn't look like anything all that special, but it tastes amazing. Somehow they've mixed the seitan in with the tofu so you barely notice it in there when you're looking at it. They used some kind of tasty herbs and spices when making the seitan to make it even more awesome. There are also huge chunks of potatoes, green peppers and onions. He kept saying how good the toast was, too. It'll be hard not to get this and try something else next time we're there.

And, of course, I can't go without my grits. You can pretty much tell what was going on with the grits. I mixed it all together, added some salt and pepper and a little nooch and ate until I thought I might burst. Good times.

As I'm trying to write this, James is sitting behind me reading some old song lyrics that he wrote in 1992 in high school. He just found this notebook that has written on the cover: "DO NOT: read, look at, take, open, abuse, touch or go near this book" Greatness. So if none of this post makes any sense, you can blame him.

Is It Like Trick-Or-Treating If You Pay For It?

We were in Seattle this past weekend, where I always get into so many kinds of trouble with food. And I mean trouble like sneaking out at night to go the best party every and not getting caught sneaking back in trouble. Eating is one of the highlights for sure. I always go to Mighty-O on my way out of town on Sunday mornings so I can grab a dozen donuts to take back home with me. Sadly, I came down with the flu on Sunday morning so we had to skip it this time even though that totally breaks my heart.

However, we did go for an awesome breakfast at Wayward Vegan Cafe on Saturday morning (more on that tomorrow) and then got pulled in by Sidecar across the street. Since it's the end of October I sort of felt like we went trick-or-treating after we left that place. I bought so many delicious goodies. The funny thing is that we don't typically eat sweets except for every now and then. I think this'll keep us set for quite a few months.

Some of this stuff I can get in Canada, but only if I make the trek out to New Westminster where the only vegan store is. It's a bit far so I don't end up going there as much as I'd like so I'm honestly not sure if they now have some of the flavors/brands that we picked up. I know that some of this stuff I've never seen in Canada at all. I pretty much bought a bunch of stuff that looked delicious that I can't easily get up here. This is what happens when I go into a vegan store on a whim, I guess.

I can't wait to be done with this flu so I can get to eating some of this stuff! I'm really excited to try the Nacho Mama Queso. We're big fans of tortilla chips and salsa and/or guacamole at our house so this'll slip right into our snacking quite well. I always say that nachos are one of my favorite food groups! The peanut butter cups we tried when we were in Hawaii and I regretted not buying a bunch more to bring home. That explains why we bought an entire box of them. I mean, come one. Organic, dark chocolate peanut butter cups. What isn't to love?!

Vegan Holiday Roast

I've had quite a few requests for the Vegan Holiday Roast recipe, so here it is! I originally got this online but the recipe isn't there when I go back to my bookmark. I can't remember exactly what it was called before, so Vegan Holiday Roast, it is! Luckily, I have a little notebook where I copy down recipes from the internet, so I still have it.

I've been making this for just over 4 years now and it's been a hit every single time. Even the omnivores end up having seconds. Personally, I think that one of the keys to success with this is to have a really delicious gravy with it. My favorite for the past couple of years is the Punk Rock Chickpea Gravy from Vegan with a Vengeance. If you don't want to bother with making your own gravy, the Simply Organic Mushroom Sauce packets are quite good. You'll just want to make sure to buy 3-4 packets so you have enough for the entire roast. I'll put up a brown gravy recipe tomorrow if you want something that's more traditional.

You can make this roast stuffed or not. I've never made it not stuffed, but I imagine it would be sort of like a big slab of seitan if you did it that way. Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily but for me, I think part of what's great about is that it doesn't seem so heavy with the stuffing in the middle and it's not nearly as scary for any non-veg*ns you might be eating with. If you're not going to stuff this, you can just put it in a loaf pan to bake if you want it to retain its shape. Otherwise, you can just form it a loaf shape and put it in a baking pan like you'll do with the stuffed one.

If you're stuffing this, and I think you should, you can always use my stuffing recipe. It's fast and super easy and tastes great with this roast.

Vegan Holiday Roast

roast:
2 cups wheat gluten
1/2 cup soy or chickpea flour
1/2 cup nutritional yeast
2 teaspoons onion powder
1 teaspoon garlic powder (not garlic salt)
12oz firm tofu
1 1/2 cups water
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon olive oil

broth: (use 1 1/2 times the amount of broth if you're stuffing the roast)
2 1/3 cups vegetable broth
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon each, fresh chopped sage, thyme and rosemary

Preheat your oven to 325 F.

Mix the dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. Add the tofu, water, soy sauce and olive oil to a food processor and blend until combined. Add the dry mixture to the food processor. Mix it until a ball forms.

If you're not stuffing this, form into two loaves and place them in a baking pan.

If you are stuffing this (my favorite way), divide the dough in half. Roll out half onto a clean surface using a wet rolling pin. You want to make about a 15" circle. Mound 3 1/2 cups stuffing in the middle. Fold dough up and around the stuffing into a loaf shape, pinching to seal. Repeat with the second half of the dough and place your loaves into a baking pan.

Pour 1/2 cup of broth over the top of your roasts and cover the pan with foil. Bake for 30 minutes and remove the foil. Add half of the remaining broth. Bake for another 30 minutes, basting occasionally. Remove the pan from the oven and flip the loaves over. (I usually need to use two spatulas together to do this without tearing the roasts.) Pour the remaining broth over the loaves and bake for 30 more minutes, basting often.

Your roasts should completely soak up the broth by the end of the cooking time. If they don't (and mine rarely do), just cook in 30 minute increments, basting every 10 minutes or so until there is little or no broth left. I usually end up needing another 60 minutes.

Remove the roasts from the pans, let cool for at least 5 minutes then slice it up and serve.