Orange You Glad I Made Crispy Tofu?

The completed stir-fry!

Tonight for the first time, I made a recipe from Chloe Coscarelli's new cookbook, Chloe's Kitchen, which I bought on Saturday.  It took me a while to figure out what to make. The kitchen is kind of sparse at the moment, and I was feeling crappy and very picky about what I was in the mood for.  I seem to have this problem where I hyper-focus on my work, staring at the computer screen for hours on end, and I truly forget to eat lunch.  So when I finally do eat, I end up eating too fast, and it's like I'm suffering some kind of screen-withdrawal/food hangover.  Even typing this, now, is a little nauseating.

BUT.  But.

Chloe's food made me feel a lot better!  It was so delicious, it just cheered me right up.

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Chef Chloe's Mac and Cheeze

This was really truly one of the best dinners I've ever had.  Oh man.

Pretty much my favorite food in the entire world is macaroni and cheeze.  Isn't it pretty much everyone's?  I don't even need to wax poetic on this.  You are all on board with me.

For a long time, I had a quite possibly self-destructive obsession/addiction to Road End Organics' mac and chreese boxed mixes.  I also have an affection for Amy's frozen, gluten-free, vegan mac and cheeze.  When I discovered Chloe Coscarelli's vegan mac and cheeze recipe, however, I realized I could have it all.  I could make mac from scratch, at home, whenever I desired, using basic ingredients I almost always have in the kitchen.  And I can do it for so much more cheaply than if I were to keep buying boxed mixes.  Furthermore, making your own cheeze sauce is pretty easy and fast.  What's not to love?

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Lentil Soup and Cornbread with Greens

I'm doing a bit of a recipe-dump today, in which I play catch-up and post photos of things I've made over the past couple of months that I've been meaning to write about, but haven't yet.  Oops.

This soup also freezes well!

I probably made lentil soup twice this winter.  It is one of those things that I never think I am in the mood to eat, because I'm still conditioned to think "lentil" means "bland and gross."  But the reality is, when you season it properly, lentil soup is truly one of the most yummy things you can eat.  It's also packed with protein and iron, and it makes a great canvas for adding whatever vegetables you'd like.  Lentil soup also goes great with cornbread.  It's such a cozy, simple, homey dinner, that takes only about 30 minutes to make.  It's the culinary equivalent of wrapping up in a sweater.  Oh, lentil soup.  Maybe I'll write a love song about you.

(Sorry, I'm listening to Jason Mraz, and it's doing something to me.  I am romanticizing the world.  Oh wait, he's another celebrity vegan, isn't he?  How serendipitous.)

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Pasta Alfredo with Crunchy Orange Bell Peppers

On Friday night, I was delighted to be suffering from alfredo-sauce withdrawal, so I decided to make pasta alfredo, using the sauce recipe I posted here.  I kept it simple: I used thin spaghetti, and added contrast with some colorful, cool, crunchy raw orange bell peppers.  It was a great, easy, fast meal.  And not only that, but I discovered (quite by accident), that if I subbed in coconut milk for half the soy milk, an incredible illusion occurs, in which the extra fat in the coconut milk makes the sauce taste eerily like it has cheese in it.  It's unbelievable.  I really will never need another alfredo sauce recipe for the rest of my life, but I will be sure to experiment anyway, just for fun.  (After all, I bought Chloe Coscarelli's cookbook on Saturday!)  I was worried the sauce would end up having a coconut flavor, but it didn't.  The other flavors in the sauce are enough to disguise it.

A picture with flash...

Without further ado...

Pasta Alfredo with Crunchy Orange Peppers

Serves 2-4

Ingredients:

1/2 pound thin spaghetti

1 raw orange bell pepper

kosher or sea salt

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Butternut Squash Manicotti with Basil-and-Oregano Alfredo Sauce and Toasted Walnuts

A plate of butternut squash manicotti
with alfredo sauce and toasted walnuts
(I need to take a photography class).

Good evening, gentle readers!

I type this as I absent-mindedly take in a Big Bang Theory re-run, my feet comfortably nestled under my legs, which is a relief after being on my feet so long in the kitchen.  Ah.  You know the feeling?

[On that note, when will Mayim Bialik win a tiara an Emmy for playing Amy?!  And how great is it that one of my favorite TV actresses is also vegan?]

I've decided to ditch the title "Dinner Dish," because, well, I think it's stupid.  Hopefully I'll come up with a better one soon.

Tonight, I made up the following recipe, inspired by this find I made on Pinterest.  It's full name is "Butternut squash-stuffed manicotti with a hint of nutmeg, smothered in basil-and-oregano non-dairy alfredo-style sauce so good it'll make you smack your mama, sprinkled with toasted ground walnuts."  See?  I am REALLY bad at naming things.

The sauce is a (pretty successful, if I may be so immodest) attempt at replicating RoadEnd Organics' gluten-free alfredo sauce, except I didn't make it gluten-free.  I've heard that ingredients are listed proportionally, greatest to least.  I followed that rule and guessed at the quantity of each ingredient.  I'm very happy with how it turned out.  This sauce will change your life.  I will definitely be making it again to toss with fettuccine.

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Dinner Dish: Sick Food

Tonight is supposed to be the night I veganize an existing recipe I found somewhere in the ether, and post the results here.  However, my schedule this evening has been wonky, so instead I'll be posting a dish I made about a week and a half ago: chickpea noodle soup.  I had some kind of weird cold/sinus thing going on, and I wanted to make something super-lazy that didn't have a particularly strong taste.  I had seen recipes for chickpea noodle soup before, but they all looked too complicated for my purposes that night.  So I did this:

1. Boiled about half a can of chickpeas in 2 cups' vegetable broth
2. Cut up 2 carrots
3. Dumped in WAY too much whole wheat penne (I was accused of being a noodle slut, and banned from using the spaghetti)
4. Overcooked the penne
5. Undercooked the chickpeas
6. Boiled off about half the broth

Yum.

Here's a picture:

I ate it with a fork AND a spoon.  Because I plan so well.

You're welcome, America.

And Russia.  Apparently you're reading, too.

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Blogger Spotlight: The Zero Waste Home

There is really no way I can begin this series without writing about my favorite blogger of all time: Bea Johnson, of The Zero Waste Home.

So pretty.

Bea (pronounced "Bay-uh") lives in a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful world. She is a Frenchwoman living in the greater San Francisco metropolitan area, married with two boys who appear so perfect, they don't even watch television.  She is a minimalist.  She lives in a clean, white, light-filled home.  All her dry goods are stored in glass jars.  She has solar panels.  Her family is down to one car.  She fights junk mail, and she wins.  She makes lovely, plantable, filled-with-seeds stationary from notices her sons' teachers send home from school.  She makes epic fashion choices with a sparse wardrobe of thrift store finds.  Did I mention she's an artist?

Her blog is clean, sparse, and easy to navigate.  It is everything mine isn't.

She is not vegan, but her family is weekday vegetarian.  They generally eat meat and fish only once a week each.  So why am I writing about a non-vegan?  Because her life is just so eco-friendly and admirable.  She reminds me that being vegan isn't enough to curb global warming.  Her life is aspirational to people who are fed up with consumerism, the rat race, and environmental degradation.  She represents hope to people who have so much clutter they can't find clarity.  She is a beacon of serenity.   She embodies the New American Dream to many in this time of crisis.  She is casually leading a revolution.  Escaping into her blog and dreaming of her lifestyle is, well, escapist - but it's attainable.

The Johnsons' living room, with a view to the dining room.

How often can you say that about your wildest fantasies?

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Dinner Dish: Spaghetti and Beanballs

"On top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese...I lost my poor meatball, when somebody sneezed..."

Whew, good.  I got that out of the way.

(But I'm sure it will come creeping back...)

I wasn't a huge spaghetti fan as a child.  I liked the noodles, the sauce, the meatballs, the cheese.  The garlic bread.  Not so much the salad, so I skipped it tonight (I think I'm going to hell).  I liked all the components of spaghetti.  So why didn't I like it?  It was the noodle.  The noodle shape.  There was just something too messy about it, and it didn't mesh with the meatballs.  It wasn't working for me.  Wasn't crazy about it.  I also had this weird thing where if I couldn't see the cheese I'd sprinkled on top, I wouldn't taste it.  If it disappeared into the sauce, it was good as gone.  So I would constantly pile more and more Parmesan-Romano onto the top as the meal progressed, until it distinctly affected the texture.  My spaghetti, as a child, was practically gritty.

But there's something about growing up that makes you nostalgic for crap you never really liked in the first place. So tonight, I tried a recipe from Veganomicon I'd been eyeballing for almost two years, but had never gotten around to trying until now.  And that would be, obviously, the spaghetti and beanball recipe found on page 189, and the marinara sauce recipe on page 205.  The cookbook promised an hour from start to finish, and it took me two and a half.  But that's how I roll.  I'm pathetic like that.  Good thing I so bravely soldiered on, cause THIS was my almost comically cliched yet beautiful payoff:

Mmm.  You like that, don't you [dirty words redacted]?  

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