It's been a long 7+ months since the last time I posted.  I had a major issue crop up in my life that took me completely away from the life I knew and led me on a new path.  I'm finally making my way back here.  :::smile:::

During the last 7 months, I have cooked occasionally.  Actually, I've cooked more than occasionally, but didn't take pictures or have the energy to blog about it.  I'll recap now, though.

In February, I made a Blueberry Streusel Cake with Lemon Icing.  While it was tasty, it wasn't a dessert that my sons appreciated, so only a couple of slices were eaten.  (I mean, really, how much could I eat?!?!?)

I would make it again, but before I did, I'd make sure that I was making it for a crowd that likes blueberries and lemons.  The combination is very refreshing.

In March, I made a chili that had a combination of veggies that I couldn't imagine would taste good together.  Why I made it, I'll never know, but I'm glad I did.  I LOVED IT!  I made Chipotle Chili with Sweet Potatoes & Brussels Sprouts from Appetite for Reduction (p. 238). Luckily, the recipe is on theppk.com, and I've included the link for you here.  I will be making this again this fall/winter.  It had such a great flavor and just enough zing for me.  I highly recommend this chili.  I know it sounds weird to put both Brussels sprouts and sweet potatoes in chili, but it was excellent.  Sometimes it really pays off to walk outside of my food comfort zone and try something totally new.

In April, I made Creamy Avocado and Sweet Potato Soup.  It was pretty tasty.  I like a creamy soup now and again.  It was a good way to use up the avocado that was reaching the end.  In fact, I have an avocado and a sweet potato that I need to use.  This would be an excellent soup for his week.

In May, I made New York Times Veggie Burgers.  These were quite tasty.  My oldest son loved them.  I made 6 regular burgers and 1 baby burger.  I got to eat one of the regular burgers the day I made them and the baby burger a week or two later (I froze the leftover burgers), but my son ate the rest.  I need to make these again.

In May, I also made a Banana Crumble (recipe at the bottom of the webpage). I added sliced fresh strawberries to it.  It would have been good with half or even a third of the crust listed in the recipe.  There was WAY TOO MUCH crust on this and not enough fruit/filling.

Finally in May, I made Ole-Fashioned Chili Beans (click on the 169 and it will take you to the recipe) from Quick and Easy Low-Cal Vegan Comfort Foods. The chili is a bit on the spicy side, but good.  I made it because I was going to make Chili Cheese Fries (page 165 of the cookbook), but I ended up just eating the chili.  I have some of the chili in the freezer and need to thaw it so I can make the Chili Cheese Fries.  All of the recipes in this book have less than 350 calories.  I still need to make the Seitan Cheesesteak that is pictured on the front of this cookbook.

This isn't something I cooked, but this dog is something I acquired.  This is Gumbo.  No, he is not my dog, but I have been fostering him since May 12, 2012, so just about 4 months now.  Fostering has been very rewarding and challenging.  Gumbo had been in a boarding facility for just about 6 months. At the time I brought him home, he had lived almost half of his life in a kennel.  (He was just over a year old.)  He's put on weight and is a loving dog to my family, but he has stranger issues.  He's good with my two girls (the black lab and rottie/shepherd).  Although we love Gumbo, he's not a forever dog for us. I'm really hoping that we can help him on his way to finding the perfect home for him.

These are two pictures of Gumbo in August.  He's relaxed a lot in the past four months.  I can tell he didn't know a lot of love early in his life because it took him a long time to connect with us.  Now, he has and he is an attention hound who thinks, at about 60 or 65 pounds, that he IS a lap dog.  :)

In July, I decided enough was enough with my appliances.  My oven stopped working.  The gas would come on, but the electronic ignition wouldn't light the oven burner, so I'd just smell natural gas.  That's not a good thing.  The oven did that once, but then lit up when I tried to light it again within a few minutes.  It worked for a week or two without problem, but then it started acting up again.  I couldn't mess around with natural gas.

My dishwasher was over 30 years old.  I believe my house was built in 1978, 1980 at the latest.  The dishwasher was the original one from when the house was built.  It hadn't been working well for a while, but I scrubbed the dishes before I put them into it.  It still left streaks.  I was just tired of it and knew I needed a new dishwasher.  Plus, it sounded like a jet engine when it ran.  It was extremely noisy.

I bought a stove and dishwasher in one sitting.  The stove crapped out for the last time on Saturday and I was using a small electric convection oven to bake.  Sunday night, I went online searching for a sale and found one at Sears plus 12 months no interest financing.  I bought a stainless steel stove with a black top and a black Bosch dishwasher that is so quiet, we can't hear it when it's running.  It has a red light that shows on the floor to tell us the dishwasher is running.  My fridge is black, so everything matches nicely now.  I swear the new appliances even make the 30+ year old cabinets look better.  :)  I love them both.

Of course I needed to try out my stove, so I made Curried Cauliflower and Sweet Potato Soup from the Fat Free Kitchen Vegan blog. This is one of my favorite soups.  It hits the spot no matter when it's made during the year.  I also made Smoky Refried Bean Soup from this website, but I have no pictures of it.  I made it during the summer (June), and I liked it very much.  It's a heavy soup though, and really best suited for the winter months.

I made Vegan Patties Like You've Never Had in late August.  These are made with nuts, refried beans, and oatmeal.  I made the burger mixture on one day, threw it into the refrigerator overnight, and then formed the burgers the next day.  The mixture was very sticky and soft the first day, so the overnight refrigeration was perfect.  I pan fried them for 5 minutes on each side, but they were still very soft burgers, so I ended up baking them at 350º for about 20 minutes.  That helped, but I ended up putting them back into the oven (it had been turned off for 15 or 20 minutes and had cooled down a lot) and just let them sit in there for another 20 minutes or so.

They froze nicely.  I had one tonight and it was firmer, but I wouldn't call these really firm burgers.  They are very tasty, though.  This recipe made 12 burgers for me, 12 good-sized burgers.

Last week, I made Leek Mushroom Potato Stew.  OK, I didn't have any leeks, so I used more onion and a huge handful of chives (I have a huge plant on my deck).  I put in 24 oz. of button mushrooms because those were the only mushrooms I had.  I used Yukon Gold potatoes, because I didn't have purple potatoes.  AND, while I had chorizo sausage that I could have used, I decided to use two links of Field Roast Apple Sage Vegan Sausage, that actually seemed to go perfectly with the flavor of the stew.

I liked this stew, BUT, I hated the pasta in it.  I will make it again, but I will not put pasta in it.  It was mushy and did not reheat well.  Otherwise, it was a lovely stew. I will look for some Field Roast Chipolte Vegan Sausage to use in it. I might like the extra zing.

Tonight, I roasted broccoli, Yukon God potatoes, and baby bella mushrooms in a splash of olive oil, French gray sea salt, and pepper.  OMG!  I love roasted veggies and could have eaten the entire pan of them.  I tried to restrain myself and I saved a generous portion for tomorrow.

I ate them with one of the Vegan Patties Like You've Never Had smothered in pickles and a generous squirt of mustard.  It was a lovely dinner for a Monday night after a dentist visit in the afternoon.  bah!  I'm not a fan of the dentist, but I go when I'm supposed to.  I never want to have any kind of serious periodontal disease.  My ex-husband had perio gum surgery and it looked absolutely torturous.  

OK, that's caught me up to today.  I'm leaving you with a picture of the three dogs together.  As you can see, Gumbo (the lightest dog) thinks he fits right in.  :::smile:::

BBQ Seitan Ribz and Mushroom Chicken Burgers

Today, I made two more BBQ items.  I made Susan Voisin's Barbecued Seitan Ribz from her FatFree Vegan Kitchen blog.  I also made another burger from Joni Marie Newman's cookbook, The Best Veggie Burgers on the Planet.  Today, I made Mushroom Chicken Burgers on page 96.

The ribz were definitely the easier of the two to make.  Basically, I mixed the ingredients together, kneaded it for a minute and a half to two minutes, and then baked it.  After that, it was smothered in BBQ sauce and put on the grill.  You can see one of the Mushroom Chicken Burgers next to the "ribz" wrapped in foil.

The Mushroom Chicken Burgers were a multi-phase item.  I only had whole flax seeds, so the first order of business was to grind them in my food processor attachment that came with my immersion blender.  I don't know why, but I hate grinding flax seeds.  It's really unreasonable as it's so incredibly easy to grind them.  I ended up grinding all of the rest of the flax seeds I have and put the majority of them into the freezer.

I had to reconstitute the TVP in veggie broth, chop mushrooms (baby bella mushrooms that I got at the Farmer's Marker yesterday) and garlic, and then saute the mixture.  I crumbled the tempeh (which I had to use before next week sometime) and added it to the mushroom mix and sauted it for an additional 5 minutes, then added all of the ingredients together.  I will say, I did NOT like the way these came together.  I will also say that my cooking method is probably to blame in part.

I didn't want to add a bunch of oil to the mushrooms, garlic, and then tempeh when it was added.  I initially started with maybe 1 tablespoon to 1½ tablespoons of olive oil to saute the mushrooms.  But when I added the garlic, I didn't want to use more oil, so I added a splash of veggie broth.  Once I added the tempeh, I added more broth.  I don't think I let it cook long enough to cook off all of the broth.  I should have sauteed it a couple of minutes longer to dry it out.

When adding all of the ingredients together, it wouldn't come together.  The dough was too moist.  I kneaded it for a few minutes (good grief, it was like glue on my fingers), but it still didn't want to come together.  I ended up adding 1/4 cup of wheat gluten.  I tried 1/8 cup first, but that did nothing.  So, I added another 1/8 cup.  It still didn't seem like it did much, but I figured if I added more, it would change the integrity of the burgers.  SO, I used a paper towel to coat my trusty tupperware hamburger press with olive oil, grabbed a spoon, and began making burgers.

Surprisingly, the burgers held together OK (with minimal handling) once I put them in the press and formed the burger.  I wrapped each burger loosely in foil so I could steam them on the Weber grill.  The burgers really didn't stick to the hamburger press, which I thought was a good sign.

The Mushroom Chicken Burgers are a moister burger.  They did well in the foil method on the grill.  These burgers would not hold up being put directly on the grill, in my opinion.  I enjoyed the flavor, which is definitely on the "chicken" side, but not really like chicken.  I had mine with mustard.

Overall, my grilling experiences with vegan burgers and ribz was a good one.  I will make both of the burgers from this weekend again.  I'll definitely make the ribz again.  It was nice to cook my food on the grill along with my sons' food so we could all have BBQ for the holiday weekend.

Mushroom Barley Soup and Strawberry Ice Cream

I've been very blog lazy lately.  I made a couple of tasty items, but did I take pictures?  Nope!  I will of the Mushroom Barley Soup and post it, but I'm afraid the Strawberry Ice Cream is long gone.

First, the soup.  I belong to the Eat 2 Live Yahoo! group founded by Susan Voisin.  Recently, Susan posted a link to her recipe for Mushroom Barley Soup with Cannellini Beans and Cabbage on her website FatFree Vegan Kitchen.  I had two packages of mushrooms in my refrigerator, so this was the perfect recipe to use one of them.

I made this soup using organic mushroom broth to replace the vegetable broth.  Also, I used pinto beans instead of cannellini beans, and I used two cans versus one can.  I upped the mushrooms to 8 oz. of sliced baby bella  mushrooms and I used green cabbage instead of red cabbage.  

I don't ever have sherry in my house.  I had some Tokay Port Wine, but the bottle was unopened and it's a sweet wine, not a dry wine.  So, I used 2 tablespoons of Pinot Noir instead.  No, it's not the driest of wines, but the measurement was small and I figured it would do in a pinch.  I don't have spicy hot paprika, so I just used a teaspoon of the smoked paprika that I do have and added some red cayenne pepper and dried jalapeno flakes.  It had enough of a kick.

The soup is very thin and very light.  Normally, one wouldn't think soup would be an ideal meal in June, but it's been rainy and in the mid 60's here in Chicago, so it worked.  I like the lightness of the soup as it saves on calories.  I wouldn't make this soup in the coldest winter months unless I altered the recipe to make it into a creamy mushroom soup.  It's a good cool summer day soup.

I've been on a frosty dessert kick for the past couple of weeks in a determined attempt to use my ice cream maker more often.  After reading through several dozen ice cream recipes, I settled on Vegan Strawberry Ice Cream by David Lebovitz.

I altered the recipe a bit as I don't buy rice milk.  I decided to use 3/4 cup unsweetened original almond milk and 3/4 cup SO Delicious Coconut Milk Creamer.  Instead of honey, I used agave and I used slightly more than 1 1/2 pounds of organic strawberries.

The ice cream was icier than commercial ice creams.  I thought the texture was between ice cream and a sherbert.  The strawberry flavor was more pronounced than in commercial ice creams. The appearance was very close to the picture on David Lebovitz's recipe page.  It was a very deep pink.  I did have leftovers and it froze very well.  While the ice cream did get a bit hard, it wasn't like a rock and 30 seconds at 60% power in the microwave softened it to perfection.

I did a nutritional analysis on the version I made and the calorie count was under 170 calories per CUP.  It was about half of the calories of the watermelon sorbet I made a couple of weeks ago.  Shocking!  That was just an added bonus to an already tasty treat.  I'll be making this recipe again. 

My next frosty treat adventure will be some type of vanilla ice cream.  I have some Newman O's and I think I'll throw some of those in during the last 5 or 10 minutes of processing to make Cookies and Cream Ice Cream.  I promise to take pictures of that.