I didn't invent any of these, but all are awesome

So all of you bloggers and blog-readers may have noticed that I am not participating in "vegan mofo" ("vegan month of food"). I cannot find the time to update every day... but I am enjoying everyone else's posts! My readers should definitely check out some of my favorite vegan blogs (see links at right>>>>>); most of them are participating and doing a great job ^_^

Anyway. Everyone has a tofu quiche recipe. I myself have tried quite a few vegan quiches, some tofu based, some chickpea based, and of all of the ones I've tried, the following recipe remains my favorite. It's not innovative or inventive, and it would never fool someone into believing it is anything other than tofu. But it is simple, easy, and delicious, especially sice you can adjust the herbs and veggies to whatever you're in the mood for or have in your kitchen.
Tofu Quiche

1 9- or 10-inch pie crust
2 Tbsp Olive oil
1 onion, sliced
2 cups chopped veggies (I like broccoli and mushrooms, but you could go for anything)
2 Tbsp chopped fresh herbs, or 2 tsp dried herbs
1 lb (one block) Tofu
Juice of 1/2 Lemon
2 Tbsp tamari
1/2 tsp turmeric (for color)
1/2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp nutritional yeast (optional)

Preheat over to 350.

In a medium pan, saute the onions in the oil until translucent. Add the other veggies and cook until tender.

In a large bowl, crumble the tofu and add the herbs, lemon juice, tamari, salt, turmeric and nutritional yeast (if using). Add more salt/pepper to taste. Stir in the veggies.

Pour the mixture into the pie crust, pressing it here and there with a spatula or the back of your spoon so that it's flat. Bake for 40 minutes, allow to cool for about 5 mins before serving.

Yum! Also in the brunchy/tofu category, my boyfriend made me Tofu Benedict a couple weeks ago! He made a vegan hollandaise sauce and we used the Yves brand of canadian bacon.
I never actually had eggs benedict before I went vegan, so I don't know if it tasted "authentic," but it tasted good!

I'm still on a mission to make every cupcake in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. My only problem is that I am afraid to attempt the filled cupcakes. There are a bunch I can make before I have to get that far, though. Including:
Green Tea Cupcakes (with special thanks to Bazu for helping me find the matcha)

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cupcakes with Cinnamon Icing

Finally, this is not food, but it is also awesome: a picture of the kitty my roommate and I are fostering! His name is Ziggy and he is staying with us until december. I was iffy on the idea of having a cat, even temporarily, but then I met him:
ADORABLE.

no recipes, but lots of pictures. It's a fair trade.

I've been making lots of stuff from cookbooks these days, so while I don't have any recipes for you today, I DO have some pretty pictures!

In approximate order of healthiness:
Golden Squash Rings from christina pirello's cooking the whole foods way (yum!).

One of my favorite scrambled tofu recipes: Garam Masala Tofu from 101 cookbooks.

Quinoa from eat, drink and be vegan.

Blueberry Carob pancakes from... vive le vegan? One of Dreena Burton's cookbooks.

Cashew butter cupcakes from vegan cupcakes take over the world.

Toasted coconut cupcakes from the same.

Dulce Sin Leche cupcakes, pre-glazing, from -- you guessed it. Nothing will replace the lychee cupcake in my heart, but these came close.

Also, apparently if one leaves a kiwi next to garlic for about a week and then eats said kiwi for breakfast, it will taste a little garlicky and garlicky kiwi will put one a bit off one's breakfast. Just thought I'd let you all know.

filo cups!

I like working with filo. It tends to take a lot of time to make something out of it, but whatever you make ends up in such a cute little package, or crisps nicely when you bite into it - it's worth it. I recently had 4 sheets of filo in my freezer. 4 is not enough to make a pastry of substance. What, then, could I make?

Remember my french toast cups? I have since decided that anything you can bake in a muffin tin is 1000x more fun to eat than something you can't. AND SO:
I was so relieved when these came out of the oven (and then out of the muffin tins!), because I wasn't sure it would work. I've seen them in restaurants, but I always suspect that restaurants use magic in making pastries. You know, like in that scene from Sleeping Beauty, where the fairy godmothers break out their wands to make a birthday cake?

Filo Cups

4 filo sheets
canola/veggie oil for brushing

Preheat the over to 350. Lightly brush the insides of a muffin tin with oil.

Lay one filo sheet on a piece of parchment paper. Lightly brush the top layer with oil, then put another sheet on. Oil that one. New sheet. You get the idea. Oil the top of the 4th sheet, then carefully cut the pile into 12 squares. Place each square into a muffin cup. The edges are floppy, but there's probably a prettier way to arrange them than I did above.

Bake 10 minutes, until lightly browned. Remove from oven; allow to cool completely before pulling out the cups.

I turned one into a cute little salad cup for lunch:
It reminded me of a cuter, healthier version of those big deep-fried tortilla things some restaurants use for edible salad bowls.

But the other 11 went on to become dessert! Fruit fillings are pretty standard for filo cups, but I had just found a recipe for Vegan Lemon Curd, so I made that!
This is it right off the stove. It's pretty viscous-y; it solidifies a bit further after it's chilled a while. I used arrowroot instead of cornstarch, but it turned out great. So I poured that into the filo cups, added a bunch of chopped strawberries, and voila:
Fruit cups fit for a dinner party!

Warning: Filo cups do not store well; they get stale, or, once filled, they get soggy and lose that fun crispyness. So 1.) make them the day you want to eat them and 2.) once you've made them, EAT THEM ALL.*

*-Enlist friends.

a garden entry (aka a couple ideas for a glut of zucchini)

This is my garden:
It is a basil plant whom I have named Gary Snyder (I name food plants after literary figures). Gary and I have been cooking together for a while now, and I find him to be quite impressive.

But I was lucky to be able to visit my family's homestead in Upstate NY, where my father has raised a much fuller, organic, composte-fed garden:
Parsley, Basil (don't be jealous Gary Snyder), Chard!
Tomatoes!
Potatoes!
Butternut squash!
Buttercup squash!
Broccoli
Wheat!
And oh, wait, what's below all this green stuff...?
Yellow Squash!
And of course, zucchini. That's my father, holding his biggest find yet. His garden makes me wish I had a lawn. Carrying any/all of these things on the train home to boston would've been impossible, but the thought of that zucchini made me decide to work (store-bought) zucchini into every recipe I've made lately, from
a simple chick pea pasta
to (even simpler) veggies covered in peanut sauce (my default "healthy" snack [I make an approximate 2:1 ratio of sauce to veggies])
to Heidi Swanson's Lemon Chick Pea Stir Fry (can you tell I've also had quite a bit of chick peas around lately?).

BUT the [vegan]creme-de-la-creme of zucchini-containing recipes I made lately were my Veggie Gyoza - aka Potstickers!
30-40 dumpling wrappers (thanks, Super 88 Market!)

1 box silken tofu (Mori-Nu, for example)
1 small zucchini, grated
1 small carrot, grated
2-3 scallions, finely chopped
1/2 cup spinach, chopped or shredded (optional)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 1-inch knob ginger, minced
2-3 Tbsp sesame oil
2 Tbsp rice vinegar or 1 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
1/4 Cup say sauce/tamari
salt and pepper
In a large bowl, combine all of the ingredients (except the wrappers) and stir savagely until it is one big mush.
Take a wrapper.
Put on 1-2 Tbsp of the filling.
Wet the edges of the wrapper with a bit of water. Crease one side of the wrapper so it bunches nicely. Repeat until you run out of filling. At this point, you have three options: 1.) freeze the potstickers for later use. 2.) Steam the potstickers for 10 minutes, or 3.) the more-work-but-more-tasty way: lightly oil a pan and fry the postickers, flat side down, no stirring, on medium-high heat for 5-10 minutes, or until slightly browned. Pour 1/4 cup water into the pan, cover it quickly, and cook for 5 minutes, until all the liquid has turned to steam. Serve with a 2:1 mixture of soy sauce and vinegar, with a touch of mirin/sugar (if you like).

I froze about a bazillion of these when I made them, so I'm sure you'll see them again.

And let's be honest, you are all just reading this far because you were hoping for a chicken update. Fear not! The chickens are doing well. The pullets are now full grown, grumpy hens:
And the rooster and old chickens are doing well, though apparently the rooster may have some chickeny version of pneumonia. Poor fellow!
I'll be visiting NY again sometime this month; I'll try to refrain from too much chicken news, but I'll let you know if Rooster's pneumonia clears up.

ALSO, in good news, this whole "quitting the 9-5 to go back to school" thing means I will probably have a little more time to update this blog! Hopefully we'll be back to once a week starting this month.

A celebratory cupcake.

I quit my job on Friday. I am starting grad school TOMORROW!
Maple Walnut cupcake from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.

a breakfast post

I was just thinking to myself, you know, self, it has been a while since I have written a breakfast post. And then I realized that's totally wrong, since my previous post starts off with me making brunch. And the post before that includes oatmeal. And the post before that is about grits. And the post -- well, you get it.

You may be under the impression that I like breakfast food as much as I like cupcakes*. THIS IS TRUE. But I am not a morning person and getting to work on time is daunting even on the best of mornings, so my weekday breakfast is almost always the same thing: flax/raisin bran cereal with soy yogurt and soymilk, and a banana. I will never take a picture of this breakfast because it is appallingly beige by the time I'm through mushing it all together. WeekdayMorning Vegetalion cannot be bothered with making her food look good. But even WeekdayMorning Vegetalion gets bored with the same thing every day. So sometimes I forgo the banana and try other fruit:
Like Korean Melon! It sorta tastes like honeydew, but a little crisper. And so cute!

Sometimes, to keep with my mushy, beige weekday morning theme, I make oatmeal instead of cereal. You have seen my Coconut Cashew Kiwi oatmeal.
(Look at the time! almost late for work, and yet taking pictures for this blog? that is true devotion, dear readers. I like "dear readers" because it is nearly a palindrome.)

And once in a GREAT while, I branch out and try other cereals or new foods. Like Chia Goodness, a chia seed "cereal" that has buckwheat groats and hemp seeds for extra protein.
Have you all noticed the recent popularity of chia seeds? They are apparently very good for you, but they lodge themselves in one's teeth and also get sorta congealed like flax seeds. Plus all I can think, while I'm eating them, is of the Chia Pet commercial jingle. "Ch-ch-ch-chia!" It is an odd way to start off one's day.
Here's a close-up:

But as you've seen in other entries, I do actually make breakfast food that isn't mushy or weird. WeekEND Morning Vegetalion loves exciting breakfast foods. And my boyfriend is even more obsessed with brunch food. So this last picture is not something I made, but a culinary experiment he made for me.

I couldn't decide whether I wanted french toast or waffles for brunch. He suggested both. We can't have both, I said. He suggested we combine them and make some sort of hybrid French Toast Waffle thing.

It will never work, I said, and left the kitchen to call my mother.

I was wrong!
(For comparison, the French Toast Waffles are on the left (you can see the batter splatter); normal waffles are on the right.)

He made waffles, then dipped them into a french toast batter (I think it was just soymilk and cinnamon? maybe some sugar?) and fried them like French Toast in vegan margarine. I thought they were DELICIOUS; he thought they were too much work. They're definitely something WeekdayMorning Vegetalion could never pull off, but WeekEND Morning Vegetalion looooved them ^_^


* - Speaking of which, there have been blessed few cupcakes on this blog recently, and yet a great many cupcakes in my kitchen and/or belly. I will remedy this soon.

fixing failures

I had a crepe failure a couple weekends ago. I thought I'd just whip some up for brunch, but my trusty crepe recipe (the really simple one from the voluptuous vegan) failed me. I think it was just too thick. Anyway the crepes were thick and clung to the pan like two-year-olds with separation anxiety.
A rather awful picture of me scraping rather awful crepes from the pan.

Ultimately I would've just given up and stormed off to pout in a corner, hungry, had my boyfriend not recommended adding some more flour and some baking powder and calling them pancakes. He fixed brunch!

Bu I still needed reminders of times I didn't fail at crepes! Fortunately I had these pictures saved from a little while ago to fix my mood...
Crepes with a sweet red-wine-and-pear filling, made just like my dried fruit compote, only with canned pears and raisins. Topped with soy yogurt!

Savory Collard crepes! Finely chopped collareds, sauteed in olive oil with pumpkin seeds, mushrooms and a lot of salt. Topped with tofutti sour cream and an olive.

And sticking with my "fixing failures" theme: a recipe! I tried veganizing and de-alcoholing (since we didn't have any) a Chocolate Kahlua Pie recipe. The recipe called for straight milk, not cream, so I thought I'd be okay, but the soymilk didn't thicken enough and it ended up being chocolate soup in a pie crust instead of a thick pudding. I'd even added used some of my vast stores of mimiccreme in place of some of the soymilk! but no. It was not even goopy, just liquid.. After refrigerating it a while and realizing it would not resemble anything cream-pie-esque, I stuck the whole thing in the freezer. And later that night, I discovered it was not a failure!

Fudgesicle Pie

1/3 Cups cocoa powder
1 C sugar (or 3/4 C agave nectar, but decrease the milk by 1/3)
1/4 tsp salt
2 3/4 Cups non-dairy milk
3 TBsp coffee (I used instant dissolved in water)
2 TBsp margarine
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp chocolate extract (optional)

1 pie crust (graham cracker's good, especially if your mom has a natural food store and gives you 3 because the are past date)

In a saucepan, combine cocoa, sugar, cornstarch, salt. Stir in milk over medium heat. (If using agave, add it here instead of in the beginning). Continue to stir until the mixture boils. Reduce heat down to low, add coffee. Stir 1 minute more. Add margarine and extract(s), then pour into the pie crust. Freeze overnight, or 4-6 hours.
When you serve it, let each piece sit for a minute or two after removing it from the freezer, so it's not too hard. It goes great with berries, especially the berry sauce you had originally made for crepes that failed miserably (see above).