MoFo Day 16: Breakfast

Witches' Brew (aka mocha oatmeal)

Halloween is almost here!  Chocolate and pumpkins and haunted houses and candy apples and trick-or-treating and costume parties and all that fun!  As you might have guessed, I love Halloween so this week my recipes will all have a Halloween component.

When I saw Vegan Yack Attack's recipe for mocha oatmeal, I knew I had to try it.  Caffeinated oatmeal?  Sign me up!  I used a scant 1 Tbsp of agave plus a scant 1 Tbsp of brown sugar for the sweetener.  This would also be awesome with some cinnamon in it.

MoFo Day 4: Snacks

I've been super busy with my new job, so although originally I'd planned to post a photo and description of one of my usual snacks, I'll give you the link to PETA's list of accidentally vegan foods instead.  This is a great resource if you like to have quick and easy to find snacks around for when hunger strikes.  I also like to use it when I shop for road trip/vacation food.  If you have a smartphone, you can even look it up while you're wandering a gas station in search of food.  Not that I've ever done that before... ;)

MoFo Day 3: Dinner #1

Oven roasted portobello cap topped with chipotle mashed sweet potatoes

Dinner tonight was pretty simple.  I used a recipe from Supermarket Vegan: 225 Meat-Free, Egg-Free, Dairy-Free Recipes for Real Peoplein the Real World, served with a salad.  To cook the mushrooms, I just brushed with olive oil and baked in a 375F oven for about 30 minutes, until tender.  The sweet potatoes I made according to the recipe, except I didn't have any canned chiles in adobo on hand, so I used chipotle chili powder to taste.

MoFo Day 2: Lunch #1

Minestrone with a toasted hummus, spinach, tomato and avocado sandwich

I live alone (well, at least as far as cooking goes - otherwise I live with a cat and 2 cockatiels, all rescues).  And while I love to cook, I don't have time to cook a meal from scratch every day.  My solution has been to freeze individual-sized portions of recipes - I don't get stuck eating the same thing every night for an entire week, and I can quickly pull a homemade meal out of the freezer on my more busy nights or to take for lunch.  When I made minestrone last week I knew I'd be freezing some of it for later.

To make the soup, I combined the 2 minestrone recipes from The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen (because I wanted to use canned beans, but liked the spices better in the classic recipe).  For the beans, I used Great Northern and shelled frozen edamame.  I cooked the pasta separately.  When ready to serve, I put the pasta in the bottom of the bowl and ladled the soup over it.  I only froze the soup (without the pasta) because pasta gets really mushy when frozen and thawed in liquid.

For the sandwich, I just toasted 2 slices of bread, smeared each with hummus, and layered on the spinach, sliced tomatoes, and avocado.  Perfect for a fall lunch!

MoFo Day 1: Breakfast #1

Breakfast burrito

Most mornings I don't want something sweet for breakfast, and I'm not a morning person so it needs to be quick and easy.  What could be easier than reheating some tofu scramble and wrapping it in a tortilla?  I usually make a batch of tofu scramble during my weekend, then use it throughout the week - over toast, on a bagel with cream cheez, in a burrito, etc.  My tofu scramble recipe is based off Vegan Dad's, with a few changes to suit my tastes.

Basic Tofu Scramble

1 Tbsp oil

1 lb firm or extra firm tofu, drained, pressed & crumbled

¼ c diced onion (or ½ tsp onion powder)

2-3 cloves minced garlic

¼ tsp turmeric

1 Tbsp soy sauce, or more to taste

¼ c nutritional yeast

½ Tbsp Dijon mustard

1 Tbsp nondairy creamer or milk, unflavored

salt & pepper, to taste

1. Heat the oil in a skillet over med-high heat.
2. Saute onions until softened; add garlic and saute until fragrant.
3. Add the remaining ingredients (except the creamer/milk, salt, and pepper) and mix well.
4. Stir often, lowering the heat if the tofu begins to stick.
5. Cook 10-15 minutes more, or until most of the liquid released by the tofu has evaporated and the tofu firms up.
6. Add the creamer/milk and mix well. Allow some of the liquid to evaporate, then remove from the heat.
7. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Variations (use one or mix and match several or all!):

• Mushroom-spinach: Add 1 c thinly sliced cremini mushrooms and 1 c baby spinach leaves when adding the garlic in step 2.
• Bac'n: Add 3-4 strips chopped cooked bac'n when adding the ingredients in step 3.
• Salsa: Add 2-4 Tbsp prepared salsa (or more to taste) and ¼ c (or more to taste) chopped cilantro when adding the ingredients in step 3.

The pictured scramble has mushroom, spinach, and bac'n - tofu scramble is pretty versatile, so don't be afraid to make changes and try whatever sounds good to you.

Happy MoFo!

Vegan MoFo 5!

Happy World Vegetarian Day!  Today also kicks off the 5th annual Vegan Month of Food.  I will be attempting to post every weekday for the entire month.  I start a new job in 2 days (yay!) which could throw a wrench in my plans, but with the help of post scheduling I hope to overcome that (potential) hurdle.  I also have a theme (kind of) which I have nicknamed "Food from the Rabbit Hole."

Back when one of my best friends from college and I had just met, he always used to ask me what I ate.  He's Italian-American and was raised in the Midwest, so he had a hard time imagining meals without meat.  Sometimes he would joke around and tell me I ate like a rabbit (I think he was being half-serious, but I didn't take offense).  Most, if not all, veg*ns probably have at least one person like this in their life.  So for all those people out there wondering (and worrying) about the veg*ns in their life, you'll see a sampling of the meals one veg*n eats.  Monday will be a breakfast, Tuesday lunch, Wednesday dinner, Thursday snacks, and Friday desserts and sweets.  Rabbits wish they ate this well...

Bom dia Brazil!

What should you do when there's a month gap between one job ending and another beginning?  Spend 2 weeks in Brazil, of course!  Especially when you know someone living in Brazil who will let you crash on their couch for free.

Gauchos

I spent most of my trip in Rio Grande do Sul (pronounced "hee-oh grahn-jay" locally), Brazil's southern-most state (because that's where the couch was) - with a visit to the Iguacu Falls thrown in.  Winter was coming to an end, not exactly peak tourist season.  Their winter is nothing compared to a Midwestern winter, however, so I thought the weather was lovely.  Rio Grande is the land of gauchos (South American cowboys), but at the same time the main city, Porto Alegre, has about 1.5 million people.

Porto Alegre at dusk

Brazilian food, especially in the south, can be very meat-focused.  Luckily, Brazilians (at least the ones I encountered) are very friendly and helpful, and most are aware of what a veg*n is.  One of my favorite meals was thrown together just for me at a cafe - brown rice, steamed veggies, and feijao (Brazilian black beans) with a sprinkling of farofa (ground cassava) on top.  You do have to be careful about the beans, because it can be quite common for them to be cooked in chicken stock and/or bacon.

I spent much of my visit seeing the country side.  There were lots (some might even say heaps) of state and national parks nearby, some of which I was able to get to.

Parque Estadual de Itapua (Itapua State Park)

Parque Estadual do Caracol (Caracol State Park)

 Gramado, Rio Grande do Sul

Foz do Iguacu (Iguacu Falls), Brazil/Argentina

Brazil is a beautiful country, and I look forward to going back and seeing more of it!

Life and MoFo

The vegan Month of Food of course!  Beginning 1 Oct, vegan bloggers around the world will blog every weekday (at least) about food.  I consider myself a MoFo lurker, as I've enjoyed others' blogging but have not participated.  This year I'm going to try to change that.

2 big changes have occurred in my life in a pretty short period of time.  Last month I officially began my 2(ish)-year stint as a house sitter.  The owners are overseas on a temporary job assignment and didn't want to sell their house, so I'm keeping it livable until they return.  I also landed myself a new job!  It starts 3 Oct, and it's my first supervisor job.  That's right - I'm now the head of a department.  I did a little happy dance when they called to offer it to me. :)  But I will have A LOT to learn (I haven't worked in this area of my field in over 4 years, so I'll have to transition back into it plus figure this whole supervisor thing out) so I'm not going to push myself about doing 20 days of MoFo.  It might just be once a week MoFo.

I also just got back from a trip to Brazil, but I'll save that for the next post!

Savory Veggie Bread Pudding

I have a cookbook addiction; I'll readily admit it.  I own some cookbooks I've yet to even use (and I have an entire Amazon wishlist devoted to cookbooks).  My mom makes fun of me when she comes over and sees all of them lining my shelves.  "Why do you need so many?" she asks.  The answer?  I like options.  And variety.  Each cookbook has a specific voice and point of view, based on the taste preferences of the author(s).  That inspires my cooking.  There are some amazing cooks out there, professional and not, and I'd like to learn from all of them.  So I buy their cookbooks (because I can't afford to hire them to teach me, at least not now).

OK, enough of me rhapsodizing about cookbooks... How about some actual cooking?  One of the recipes I made recently was Savory Vegetable Bread Pudding from The Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes Cookbook.  Spinach, mushrooms, dijon mustard and bread?  Sounds like something I need to try!  You basically saute the veggies and put them over the bread (like so - that's the sauce in the blender)...

Then you pour the sauce over the bread and veggies, and bake.  I left off the mozzarella slices, and it was fine.  Nothing burnt.

My one possibly negative comment (and this is really more of a preference than something negative) is next time I would probably just cook the veggies and sauce in the casserole dish, and then serve that over toasted bread (think frittata on toast).  It was too much soft food for me, but then again that's what bread pudding is.  And it was still delicious!

Pancakes and a homemade card

 I woke up this morning feeling like cooking (which is usually how I wake up on Sundays, now that I think about it).  After browsing through a few of my cookbooks, I settled on Coconut Pancakes with Pineapple Sauce from Vegan with a Vengeance : Over 150 Delicious, Cheap, Animal-Free Recipes That Rock.  Delicious!  I'm not a fan of traditional pancakes slathered with maple syrup, at least not for breakfast.  I just don't like that much sugar to start my morning.  These were perfect, though; the tart pineapple cut some of the sweetness and the batter was just right.  The only thing that could make it better would be eating it on a beach somewhere tropical and warm.  :)

I've been meaning to post this, but just keep forgetting.  I made a Thank You card for the lady who watched my pets while I was gone over Thanksgiving.  Pretty simple layout.  I just a patterned piece of paper 1" smaller all around than the card (so for my 4x6 card, I cut the patterned paper to 3x5).  The strip is 1" thick and also paper, but you could use ribbon instead.  I combined 2 stamps (thank goodness for clear stamps!) - the cat was from a 4-pack by Studio G, and the Thank You was an Archiver's Snag 'em Stamp Duos (appropriately named the Thank You Combo).  I traced the You with glitter pen and used foam adhesive squares to pop up the stamped part.

Hello 2011!

Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday!  My Christmas was amazing - I got to spend time with family and friends, plus I got a few new toys to enjoy in the coming year.  My kitchen adventures can now include an immersion blender and a waffle iron, and I can get some more reading done (hopefully) with my new Kindle.  I consciously took some time to relax and enjoy the holidays, so I'm starting the new year feeling revitalized and excited for what's ahead.  There are definitely going to be some changes in my life this next year (I'm not talking the resolution-type).  Starting in May, I'm going to begin a 2-year house-sitting job (well, between 18 and 24 months) - meaning I might actually get to feel settled in one place for a while.  These last 2 years things with my job have been very up in the air, and I've never known how much longer I might be there so I've sort of always remained packed and ready to pick up and move again.  And I have to say, I don't know how military and other more mobile people do it!  It's very mentally taxing to never be sure whether you're staying or going, at least for me.

Speaking of my job, it ended last month.  It's just no longer going to be funded, but that's alright.  I loved my job, but it wasn't what I wanted to settle permanently into (which is a good thing, since it never was permanent).  I had hoped it would continue a little longer, so I had more time to get some other pieces into place, but oh well.  That's how things go sometimes.  My main goal this year is to get on track for a masters degree, so I'm going to do some temping to pay the bills while keeping my eyes open for opportunities more related to my career track.  And I'm going to do some volunteering to hopefully get my foot in the door, as well as build some more contacts for the grad school application process.

As for my free time, I wouldn't say I have resolutions or goals so much as aspirations - a list of things I'd like to see/try/do in the coming year:
- Canning: Last year I canned jam and applesauce.  This year I'd like to try salsa, pasta sauce, and pizza sauce.  And I'd like to make enough that I can share with friends and family.
- Gardening: I'd really like to join a CSA, but since I'm currently unemployed I can't justify spending such a large chunk of money.  If I can start working in the next week or two, then I might change my mind.  Regardless, I'd still like to work on improving my container gardening skills (because believe me, there's a lot of room for improvement!).  I'm thinking of making my own self-watering containers and trying to keep it simple - tomatoes, peppers, green onions, and some herbs.  Maybe some salad greens as well if I feel ambitious.
- Composting: House-sitting means I'll have a yard in which to start a compost bin!
- Baking: Simply put, I want to experiment with bread baking - especially making rohlicky (Czech crescent rolls) and baguettes.
- Knitting: I'm comfortable knitting and purling.  In a straight line.  I've yet to try anything more complicated than a seed stitch, and I haven't knitted in the round.  So this year I'd like to get more adventurous with my knitting.
- Scrapbooking: Make time to scrapbook.  Period.  I'm ashamed to say, I haven't scrapbooked since April!
- Social: I love doing stuff with friends, but my current space is too small to have more than one person over at a time, and I feel bad about my friends always having to host.  Since I'm watching my money, I don't want to always go out to dinner or a movie.  Once I'm moved into the house, I'd like to start up regular potlucks/game nights/social events where we all take turns hosting (and don't worry, the homeowners already know about this and are fine with it).

I can't wait to see what 2011 brings!