Mini Vanilla Strawberry Cupcakes

Cupcakes are really taking over. At least that what Groupon is telling me when today's coupon (for cupcakes!) sold out at 6:57am...

Sweet Potato and Pinto Bean Stuffed Tortillas

I made these in honor of a a recent air trip back home to San Diego. Plane flights and airports are always hard when it comes to food. As it is you can hardly get free water and airport food can be fairly pricey and considerably underwhelming. I made these potato stuffed tortillas as a meal for my travels. (Note: These photos don't do justice to how great this meal was.)

In picture above: Two open-face tortillas in the foreground and one finished product in the background.

Vegan Cinnamon Rolls

 When I started cutting meat and other animal products out of my diet, I kind of thought that also included sweet treats like ice creams, candies, and baked goods. Man alive, was I wrong: I can TOTALLY be just as unhealthy with my eating as before! I like to keep my health foods in check with Cinnamon Rolls. The recipe I used here advertises itself to be as close to those ridiculously huge, sticky, gooey, buns found at malls and airports throughout the country. You know the ones. And they do a pretty good job.

Meatball Subs

An easy go-to meal that I have had recently is the Meatball Sub. It's pretty basic, very fast and decidedly satisfying. Lately I've been getting a meatless alternative in the frozen aisle of my grocery outlet. I even stocked up this time around because you never know when the outlet won't have them for cheap anymore. Note: I get crazy about food reserves from the food outlet... you should see my canned goods!

My sub only has three main components: bread, meatballs, pasta sauce. Easy! Though, because I think I'm fancy, I usually make a nutritional yeast cheese sauce to add to it. I have no idea what measurements I use, but here's what always goes in the sauce: nutritional yeast, water, garlic, oil (to cook the garlic a little), salt and pepper. Other variants are: chili flakes, soy sauce, flour (to thicken). I usually cook everything until it gets warm (with a baguette sliced and put in the oven to brown) and then throw it all together.

Sweet Potato Bread

My friend Casey made some homemade ice cream. Even more exciting than the fresh ice cream is its main ingredient: sweet potatoes! After a visit with her this morning, I am the lucky recipient of all of her leftover pureed sweet potato. The internet has shown me that there are many websites dedicated to recipes for leftovers. I think a lot of this is directed towards holiday cooking when we might use things like pumpkin pie filling, cranberries, and in my case sweet potatoes, and then have the remnants that no one wants to eat a couple days later.

And so here I am making bread again. After my modestly successful Honey Oat Bread I guess I am feeling pretty awesome. Awesome enough to attempt a braided bread recipe. How fancy.

The initial mixing was beautiful:
In the bowl is soy milk, honey, pureed sweet potato (with a little yam for coloring), dried thyme, yeast, water and oil.


The next step was adding the liquids to the dry stuff: flours, salt, and some corn meal.

I kneaded the dough to the desirable soft-but-not-sticky consistency and let it rise for 1.5 hours next to my radiator. After doubling, I separated the dough into 6, foot long "ropes" and braided two loaves. They rose for another hour until they were very plump.

In the end they only needed to cook for 35 minutes in the oven until they were golden brown and had that hollow sound when tapped on the bottom. The hollow sound is still something of a mystery to me. I can probably convince myself that any sound coming from the bottom of my loaf sounds "empty". The sweet potato is hardly noticeable in the final product; I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but the bread turned out wonderful and even better, beautiful. Braided loafs are great because I get to play with the dough more than I normally would. Imagine the fun shapes my imagination can create! Circles, spiral buns, tricolors!

Warmed and slathered with Earth Balance this bread is a great morning treat.

Two Bean Wheat Berry Chili

Two Bean Wheat Berry Chili with fresh avocado, cilantro and lime! Also starring: kale, carrot and yellow bell. (Yikes, such a huge, blurry photo...)I left out tomatoes because I wanted to try a chili that wasn't dependent on a couple cans of diced tomatoes. I think it turned out okay even though it was a little visually underwhelming. The lime added a great tang to the chili that I'll have to do in the future.

Baked Tofu

While I mostly use various Tempehs instead of tofu these days, I thought I'd buy tofu when I saw it on sale. I was very fond of a spicy baked tofu sandwich at a Deli where I worked, so let's try to recreate it!

Marinade:
5-6 Tbsp Tamari Soy Sauce
1-2 Tbsp Rice Vinegar
1 Tbsp Olive Oil
1 tsp Red Chili Flakes (or to taste, I am going through a "spicy" phase of my life)
3 cloves pressed garlic

I am using one block of firm tofu. After pressing the tofu to get ride of the excess liquid, I sliced it length wise in pieces about 1/2 inch thick. This seemed like a nice, thin, size for a sandwich. It is pretty disappointing biting through a thick piece of tofu. This is only topped buy unseasoned pieces of tofu. Eww...

So! I let the slices marinate for at least 30 minutes, turning the tofu over halfway through to ensure that each bite is delicious. With the oven prepped to 350 degrees, I cooked the slices until browned and slightly crispy; about 45 minutes for this batch. I also saved the excess marinade to pour over the tofu halfway through cooking.

While the end result wasn't quite that of my memory, it has a good salty flavor and a nice after taste of garlic and chili. Without much sandwich stuff, I chose to make some salad rolls! That's a peanut sauce I made with some crunchy peanut butter, fresh ginger, sesame oil and coconut milk. I even have enough left over to cut into appetizers for the Super Bowl tomorrow. Lucky me!

Grouping similar foods

As a person who cooks alone I can't finished all the food I make. My girlfriend contributes her best and my friends can also be counted on. But usually there are leftovers of various items that are unavoidable. Repeat offenders in my kitchen: cilantro (sold in the bunch), beans, lime, coconut milk. To combat these leftovers I will sometimes try to buy groceries that can all be used together in various recipes. An easy example presented itself today.

Last night I met with some friends for a fun dinner involving Cosmos (delicious!) and Sex and the City (hot!) and I contributed a dish of Vegan Polenta and Black Bean Enchiladas. What's left? Cilantro (awlays), nutritional yeast nacho "cheese" sauce, lime, black olive slices, and a little red enchilada sauce. Knowing this would happen, I grabbed corn chips and fresh salsa at the store and made a nice helping on Nachos tonight. Just adding in kidney beans and chopped onion.

Now, I understand that nachos are basically enchiladas remixed. But I'm okay with that. The polenta in the enchiladas was what was left after a potato scramble the other day.

With finished product leftovers, I make "grab and go" containers for myself so that I don't make bad food decisions in a hurry (i.e., an entire bag of Veggie Booty for lunch), or I convince people to take them with them to work the next day.

Winter popsicle experiement

I recently acquired (found for free in the lobby of my apartment) a cute plastic Popsicle tray. How fun, right?! It is very cute and colorful and I'd love to make seasonal frozen treats with fruit and maybe veggies. Some ideas I had:

-Watermelon Basil (or mint, or lime)
-Tangerine Lime
-Cucumber Lime Chili
-Raspberry Lemon
-Strawberry Coconut


(Note: The dinosaur returns to the blog! He's had a bath since we last saw him.)


I pretty much want these all in my mouth! Unfortunately it is winter and these fruits aren't locally available unless they are shipped from distant lands and handled by many people. So I got to thinking about what I have in my home that I can use: chocolate, lime, peanut butter, almond butter, ginger, avocado (questionable for my abilities), soy milk. Well creamy chocolate ginger sounds awesome. Ginger lime is a good combo, too. Chocolate peanut/almond butter? Sure!

Let's see what happens!

Tempeh Tacos

I found a new kind of tempeh that I have never seen before: Spicy Vegetable! It inspired me to make some, kinda spicey, but no less awesome Tempeh Tacos for dinner tonight.



Sauteed green bell pepper, onion and strips of tempeh. At the very end I threw in some kale so it could get softer. Uncooked kale can be a little hard to handle for me sometimes.

There were also black beans seasoned with garlic, ground pepper and red chili flakes.

All wrapped up in a corn tortilla and topped with jelepeños, Tapatío hot sauce, and fresh lime!

I'm actually still sniffling and wiping my runny nose. They were good and next time I'll not add the chili flakes... or so much hot sauce...

Oh, Tempeh Bacon, you're good

A friend recently mentioned having Tempeh Bacon for breakfast and it sounded so delicious that, obviously, I had to run out an make it. After review of a couple marinade recipes here is what I did:

4 Tbsp Tamari Soy Sauce (GF)
1 Tbsp Tapatío hot sauce
1.5 Tbsp Liquid hickory smoke
Garlic powder
Ground pepper

1 package Five Grain Tempeh sliced thinly (like bacon!)

I mixed the ingredients then marinated the sliced tempeh until most of the liquid was absorbed (let's say 20 minutes), then cooked them in a little olive oil on medium heat until they were brown and slightly crisp on both sides (let's say 3 minutes per side). If I felt like some of the slices weren't bacon-y enough, I poured a little extra marinade on them while they cooked.

Yesterday was a great day of food with both Vegan BLTs for lunch and a mixed veggie and bacon salad with homemade vinaigrette for dinner. Check out that BLT: avocado, lettuce, tomato, onion, and tempeh bacon on toasted bread.

Weekend food

A couple more photos of food that happened this weekend.

Reheated Three Bean Chili with Cornbread and that homemade ginger ale from a couple days ago. I used cilantro for the first time in my recipe and it added great flavor when cooked in my funny red Crock Pot.

I'm still getting the hang of picture-taking and I see, now, that these photos are blurry. Sorry.



Roasted Seasoned Yellow Potatoes. Raw onion is my main squeeze these days so I added that along with avocado, jelepeño and Tapatío hot sauce to the final product. The yellow is nutritional yeast flakes.

Instead of adding seasoning after I place the potatoes on the cooking sheet, I have learned to season them in a bowl first. With the help of olive oil the spices more evenly coat the potatoes.

The pill bottle is one of many that I use to hold spices. They are much better for grab and go cooking than the plastic bags they come in when I buy them from the bulk bins.

The day I found a camera

I have been given hand-me-down digital cameras for years from friends and family and never use them. It's a good thing I started this blog, because now I have a use for the cameras.

For your viewing pleasure: Peanut Butter Oat cookies with a Chocolate Drizzle... and a small red dinosaur I found in the lobby of my apartment building.

The dinosaur was covered in dirt and I probably shouldn't have put in on the cookies. But, oh well, I think it's funny.