Tag Archives: nut-free

May 15 2012
3 Comments
Recipes

“Chicken” Caesar Wraps

This is a post that I’ll alternatively title “things I miss from ‘before'”. Chicken Caesar wraps and chicken Caesar salads contain the big “no-nos” as far as my digestive tract is concerned: gluten, dairy and eggs. This is an incredibly simple recipe and delicious as well as being higher protein and lower fat than the traditional stuff.

I was inspired because I got some rad chili tortillas from the YummyMunch Bakery and decided we needed to have some Caesar wraps. Now, you might already know I’m not a fan of greasy oily things or fish smells so no cups of olive oil or anchovy paste in this recipe. In your blender or food processor combine the following:
juice from 1 lemon (at least 3 tbsp)
1 tsp to 1 tbsp Dijon mustard depending on the variety
1 block of silken tofu
2 tbsp garlic salt
1 tbsp onion salt
1 tbsp Italian seasoning
2 heaping tbsp nutritional yeast
syrup or sweetener as needed
salt and pepper to taste

Blend until smooth, adjust the seasonings as necessary. Be careful you pick Dijon mustard for your Ceasar dressing: some mustards will make your dressing taste weird. This is a low fat, no cholesterol and high protein version of your favorite with all the creamy texture and great flavor.

We combined it with soy curls prepared according to the package directions and baked until crispy, spinach, tomato and Eat in the Raw vegan parmesan and wrapped it up in Hayle’s red chili tortillas for a healthy vegan dinner. It was quite a treat!

This is Brent and Christie, signing off.

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May 12 2012
20 Comments
Snacks

Virtual Vegan Potluck!

In case you’re wondering, this particular post is part of a blog circle called the Virtual Vegan Potluck. This post is one in a series and we here at Turning Veganese encourage you to check out the other bloggers participating in the fun!

For the preceding delicious beverage in the Virtual Vegan Potluck go to Lorna’s Tearoom Delights.

For the next delicious salad in the Virtual Vegan Potluck check out Along Comes Mary….

Now for the submission part of the post: submit to our delicious bevergage!!!

Brent and I used to enjoy an Irish Car Bomb from time to time in our pre-vegan days. This is not an improvised explosive device but rather a 2 part drink meant to be mixed immediately before consumption and enjoyed as a party drink. Much to our vegan dismay, none of the ingredients (save for the whiskey) are vegan!
Irish cream and Guinness are 2 things that I miss but we’ve managed to replace Guinness with Boddington’s and the Irish cream and whiskey with a mix of almond milk and creme de cacao. If you want to get technical, Guinness’ stout is vegan but I’m not a fan of glass bottles: aluminum is cheaper to recycle.
To prepare this drink you’ll need 2 cups and 2 shot glasses. We use plastic because I’m incredibly clumsy and I have a secret fear of a heavy shot glass knocking out all my front teeth. Split the beer between the two glasses. Fill each shot glass halfway with creme de cacao and top off with almond milk. We add a little cinnamon to the top of the shot. Drop the shot into the cup immediately before drinking. We call this animal friendly drink a “Kaboo flower”.
This is Christie and Brent, signing off!
Keep Potlucking!

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May 11 2012
10 Comments
Cooking, Recipes

Pumpkin Lentil Lower Carb Burritos!

This is one of the easier things Brent and I have made in a while, all we needed was the following:

1 head of cabbage, raw

1 14.5 oz tin of pumpkin

1 cup of dry lentils

1 cube of veggie bouillon

1 tsp coriander

1 tsp cumin

1 jalapeño (optional)

chili powder or chili paste and salt to taste

Start by cooking the lentils. Combine them with 2 cups of water and your bouillon cubes and microwave at 2 minute intervals until all the liquid is absorbed. You can also cook them on your stove at low heat until the liquid is absorbed.

Now put them into a sauce pan with the pumpkin and spices. Heat until it’s all steamy. Adjust the seasonings as necessary. You can also add a can of diced tomato and a diced onion but this recipe is designed to accommodate a friends with tomato and onion allergies, respectively. It’s delicious and filling just as I’ve written it.

Now carefully remove a cabbage leaf, add a scoop or two of your burrito filling and whatever other things you like (we’re adding cilantro and Daiya cheddar cheese).

Roll them up and insert into your face.You might not even realize you’re eating a cabbage leaf. This is a great way to have a low carb, low calorie wrap for your sandwich or burrito and doesn’t cost a whole lot. I hope you like it!

 

This is Brent and Christie, signing off.

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May 08 2012
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Lazy Vegan, Snacks, Thoughts

The Other Lazy Vegans: SALAD!

We decided to give Follow Your Heart’s sesame miso dressing on some spinach, bell pepper and VegCuisine’s Mediterranean herb feta. We’ll tell you more about VegCuisine’s cheeses in the Cheese Post 2.0 because today we’ll tell you about the salad dressing.

Brent and I are both fans of the flavor. I do think that it’s terribly high in calories for ‘health’ food so I can recommend it for being vegan and having ingredients that aren’t too processed but I suspect most of you who are comfortable cooking can make something better and better for you at home. Munch away!

This is Brent and Christie, signing off!

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May 06 2012
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Cooking, Recipes

French Onion Soup Au Gratin, VEGAN style.

French onion soup is caramelized onions in beef broth along with bread (read: eggs, butter and milk) and cheese. Comfort food… are you surprised? This was a favorite of mine as a kid so Brent and I decided to make it ourselves. The only thing you might have to search for is “beef” bouillon and some good vegan cheese. I’m a big fan of Massel bouillon but most any wort will do.

We assembled the following:

4 onions, sliced

2 tbsp olive oil

1 tsp herbes de provence

juice from 1 lime

“beef” bouillon (I used Massel)

1/4 cup of red wine (optional)

salt to taste

You’ll also need bread and some sort of vegan cheese. We used some gluten-free bread we bought at a local market and Follow Your Heart Gourmet mozzarella. We just baked it in the oven on a tinfoil lined sheet for 10 minutes at 350F/175C until the cheese was melty and bubbly and the bread was toasty. The soup is only slightly more complicated.

In a medium put I sauteed the onion in lime juice and olive oil until the onions were lightly caramelized. Don’t stir them too much while waiting for them to caramelize or you’ll end up with a sticky mess.

When you find the amount of caramelization suits your taste, add about 1 liter of water, herbes, the bouillon and the red wine. Simmer 15 minutes, up to 45 if your guests are late… or you want to watch fireworks on your balcony. Salt to taste.

We put the melty cheesy bread into the onion soup and devoured it. This would make a great appetizer for a dinner party, especially if you put the bread into the bowl and bake it in ramekins so the cheese bubbles down the sides like it does in restaurants. For easier clean-up… do what we did. Happy comfort food that’s surprisingly good for you!

This is Christie and Brent, signing off!

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May 04 2012
5 Comments
Cooking, Main Dishes, Recipes

Sea Scallops, BEGONE!

I love sea scallops. Brent does not. Fortunately we both like daikon radish and we had a giant one hanging out in our fridge like a pale behemoth obscenity. I decided to cook it the same way I used to prepare sea scallops.You’ll need the following:

1 daikon radish, sliced thick

1 pinch turmeric

1 pinch sweet red paprika

juice from 1 lemon

olive oil

1/2 cup of veggie broth

additional water as needed

If you want to deglaze the pan after for a delightful sauce, I recommend using a cup of veggie broth and white wine with a pinch of herbes de provence, but that’s optional.

I sliced my daikon into 1-1.5 inch thick slices, they really look like sea scallops to me. That’s what inspired me. You don’t need to remove the skin.

I put the rest of the ingredients (only half the lemon juice) into my sauce pan and heated to a simmer. Then I put my daikon slices into the pan.

I turned them periodically with some awesome bamboo tongs that my sister got me for my birthday. They have been indispensable in my kitchen since I got them. The daikon slices will start to take on the color of the turmeric and soften.

When they’re suitably soft, let the water evaporate and allow the daikon slices to brown around the edges. The awesome thing about daikon is that they get more tender the longer you cook them. Sea scallops become tough and rubbery, bordering on inedible and approaching unpalatable if you cook them too long and that’s just sad. Also, all seafood contains cholesterol. Daikon has none and will keep in your refrigerator for longer than 2 days. WIN!

Serve them up with a sprinkle of sea salt and the rest of the lemon juice. The sweetness of the tender daikon balances beautifully with the tart lemon and herbal flavors the sea salt brings out, all without any of the fishy smells that make me think twice about putting something in my mouth. If I had this dish to do over, I would use the fond made from deglazing the pan over some steamed fennel and mashed potato.

This is Brent, jealously guarding the plate of daikon. Don’t worry; he shared.

This is Christie, signing off.

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May 01 2012
3 Comments
Snacks

Kohlrabi: refreshing and mellow

Kohlrabi is one of the coolest vegetables you’ve never heard of (probably). It’s a relative of cabbage and the waxy appearance gives it away. These are purple and green cultivars.

I would describe the flavor and texture is being like an apple without the tart and sweet flavors. Brent describes it as being a radish without the spice. Either way, my favorite way to prepare it is skinned, sliced and dusted with salt.

This is the purple one.

This is Christie, signing off!

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Apr 29 2012
1 Comment
Cooking, Recipes

Sauted Spinach with Garlic and Nuts!

I eat spinach just about every other day and while the iron and vitamin K is important for women, it’s not as important for men. Fortunately, Brent likes spinach too so we added spinach as the third element to our BBQ dinner. We used the following:

3 cups spinach (one package frozen is fine)

1 tbsp sun dried tomato, minced (opitonal)

2 tbsp vegan margarine

6-7 cloves of garlic, minced

1/4 cup nuts or squash seeds, toasted

Melt the butter in a nonstick pan over medium heat. Add the garlic and nuts or seeds and heat until it becomes fragrant.

Add the spinach and stir until it wilts.

Butter and garlic make anything delicious. Fortunately spinach is delicious all by itself. We served it up with tangy BBQ butternut squash ribs, savory mushroom wild rice and it was a great meal.

This is Christie and Brent, signing off!

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Apr 27 2012
2 Comments
Cooking, Recipes

Mushroom Wild Rice: What’s not to like?

We served this along with Brent’s BBQ butternut squash ribs and the savory earthy mushroom wild rice was an excellent addition to the sweet, spicy, smoked tartness of the “ribs”. You’ll need the following for the rice.

1 1/2 cups of wild rice blend

1 cube of vegetable bouillon

3 cups of water

salt and pepper to taste

Brent did this part while I made the mushrooms because I’m too impatient to make rice. We buy our rice at our local farmer’s market and I like to add extra long grain wild rice to a basic wild rice mix but any rice will do. I collected the following veggies to saute:

5-6 cloves of garlic, minced

1 medium onion, diced

2 tbsp olive oil

2-3 small red chilis, minced

2 cups mushrooms

1/4 cup fiddleheads or chopped asparagus (optional)

1/4 tsp sage

1/4 tsp thyme

I sauteed the garlic, onion, peppers and herbs in olive oil over medium heat until it became fragrant and then I added the mushrooms.

I stirred until the mushrooms were reduced and then I added the fiddleheads and turned the heat to low to allow the fiddleheads to soften lightly. They can turn brown quickly, so be gentle.

We mixed the mushroom mixture into the rice and served. The herbal flavors of the thyme and sage brought out the earthiness of the mushrooms and complemented the flavors in the fiddleheads. The nutty and savory flavors in the rice rounded the whole thing out and made it really rich and decadent.

This is Christie and Brent, signing off!

 

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Apr 26 2012
7 Comments
Cooking, Main Dishes

Butternut Squash Ribs or: How I Learned to Stop Hating and Love the Squash

Before becoming vegan, I wasn’t a huge fan of gourds. I wasn’t a fan of the texture or the flavor of those I sampled. But as I say about tofu, I probably didn’t like it because it hadn’t been prepared properly.

The butternut squash we used for this culinary experiment sat in our veggie bowl for well over a week. I’d venture to say more than two, even. What I’m trying to say is it kept really well in spite of our best efforts to ignore it. When it finally came time to disguise the gourd as something delicious, a simple and elegant plan formed in Christie’s brain : enter butternut squash ribs.

Prep for these badboys is deceptively simple:

  1. Cut the squash  into rib-like shapes
  2. Coat in barbecue sauce
  3. Toss in the oven
  4. Wait.

That being said, the star of the show will be the sauce (pronounced sow-suh). We’d encourage you to make your own. We cheated. We got two sauces from OrganicVille; a tangy and a regular variety. This particular brand’s sauces are tasty. Tasty and gluten-free, that is.

Preheat your oven to 400ºF, and once you have properly covered the ‘ribs’ in sauce, arrange them on a baking sheet and toss them in. The objective here is to heat up the ‘ribs’ so the sauce caramelizes a bit and helps soften up the squash, as this variety is decidedly hard uncooked. So, leave it in there for a half hour or until you are satisfied with the softness as gauged by stabbing it with a fork.

Finally, enjoy dem ‘ribs’. The texture for ours was slightly chewy, but harder approaching the rind. Add more sauce as necessary, of course, and don’t be afraid to spice it up if it doesn’t meet your oral expectations.

Peace out, my vegans.

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