No food posts lately

I acknowledge that I have not posted in a few weeks now, and I really regret the lapse.  I have been so busy planning this trip to Rwanda, and finishing off the school year, that I really have not had time.

Once the trip gets underway, however, I hope to make regular posts, but those posts will not contain recipes, rather they will be posts about maintaining a vegan lifestyle while travelling.

I'm looking forward to a vegan high-tea in London, and I will post a review about the restaurant that offers that, as well as a trip to The Coach and Horses, a London pub that serves only vegetarian and vegan food.   Looking forward to the tofish and chips!!!

Our meals on the airplane are listed as "vegetarian hindu"   I think that means vegan.   I hope it means vegan!

I'll keep you posted.

Party Post-Mortem

My SIL's birthday party at our house was great!

The cake was fantastic, and I have my sister to thank for that great recipe.

I also made a potato salad using small red potatoes - so small, in fact that I only needed to cut them in half before boiling them.  I bought them at my local Loblaw store.  They are called "Little Gems" and apart from being a pain in the neck to cut, they are great for salads.  Loblaws also sells white and coloured Little Gems. I added thinly sliced red onions to the potatoes, and then added the dressing.  I added a few dashes of Trader Joe's Everyday Spice mix to the bowl.

I made the dressing out of vegenaise and dijon mustard, a dash of vegan worcestershire sauce, and plenty of black pepper.

We also had a fruit tray and a veggie tray.  I made a dip from french onion soup mix (it's vegan!), silken tofu and vegan cream cheese.  It was great.

My SIL made a beautiful salad containing a mix of greens and kale, spinach and avocado.

We had a great day!

Leslie's Mincemeat Cake

Today is my sister-in-law's birthday, and my DH's family is coming over for a BBQ.  As well as burgers, I've made vegan potato salad, and an interesting salad with corn, black beans and hearts of palm.  My SIL is bringing a green salad.

In honour of my SIL's birthday, I thought I would make a cake.  My favourite cake right now is my sister Leslie's mincemeat cake.  She's an inventor in the kitchen, my sister, and one day she decided to put half a jar of vegan mincemeat into a cake she was making.  What a fabulous inspiration! Her recipe appears below, and below that, the adaptations that I made to make a gluten-free version that would be suitable for my niece and my MIL.

Leslie's Mincemeat cake

Dry ingredients
2.5 cups flour
1.5 cups sugar
.5 tsp salt
2 tsp baking soda
1.5 baking powder

Wet ingredients
2 cups soy milk with 2 tsp of apple cider vinegar -set aside to curdle
2/3 cup of oil
2 tsp vanilla

Half a jar of mincemeat

Preheat oven to 350. This makes a bundt cake or a two layers or a 16x9

Mix dry ingredients together til all mixed up.

Add all wet ingredients and the mincemeat and beat for about a minute or two

Pour into prepared pan or pans and bake for 25-35 minutes.

Gluten Free Version

I used Bob's Red Mill Gluten-free all-purpose flour.  I didn't know that xanthan gum or guar gum was needed, and I was worried about the thinness of the batter, so I added another 3/4 cup of the gluten free flour.  I had to cook the cakes (I used two 8" square pans) for an extra 15 minutes.

The cake came out fine!

Chunky Vegetable Soup

If I have not mentioned it before, I really love soup, even pea soup, and I'm not a big fan of cooked peas!

On Sunday I made a really nice soup without the use of any packaged vegetable broth, just with the broth generated naturally by the soup's ingredients.

Here is the recipe:

Lisa's Chunky Vegetable Soup

Ingredients
1 tbs canola oil
3 large cloves of garlic finely chopped
1 large onion, coarsely chopped- my favourites are Spanish onions, sweet onions and Vidalia onions
4 large carrots, peeled and coursely chopped in the food processor
3 celery stalks, chopped into 1/4 inch slices
1 zucchini, cut lengthwise in quarters, and chopped into 1/4 inch slices
1/2 head of cabbage, shredded or 1 bag of plain coleslaw
Black pepper to taste
Trader Joe's Everyday Spice Blend to taste

Instructions

1. Add the oil to a heavy soup pot, heat, and toss the onions and chopped garlic in to cook.  Stir frequently until the onion is mostly translucent.
2. Add the other veggies and add water to cover.
3. Add pepper and Trader Joe's Everyday Spice Blend to taste.
4. Bring to a boil, and let the soup boil hard for about three to five minutes.
5. Add more water to top up the pot and return to a boil.
6. Turn the heat down and let the soup simmer for about twenty minutes.

What about Protein?

Once the soup is made you can add rinsed and drained beans.  My go-to beans are black beans but white beans would also go nicely in this soup.

I also put slices of pressed plain tofu in the soup.  The tofu absorbs the flavours and becomes quite tasty.

You can serve this soup with crackers or a nice sourdough bread.  

I discovered quite by accident that this soup is also great when cold.

Can't Sleep

This doesn't happen to me very often: a sleepless night.  Generally speaking, I fall asleep within seconds of hitting the pillow and wake up only intermittently for very short periods of time.

Tonight I was asleep by 9:30 p.m. and then I woke up at 12:30 a.m. and have been awake ever since!  After tossing and turning for two hours, I decided to get up and read.  While reading, I thought I would make a blog entry.  The truth is, I am really tired, and now I'm afraid that if I lay down, I will not be able to get up in the morning.  Five o'clock comes pretty quickly when you are short of sleep!

I've decided to make a cup of tea because tea both relaxes me and energizes me.  My favourite teas? Irish Breakfast by Twinings, and Maritime Breakfast Tea by Just Us, which is a fair trade tea.  I also like the tea I bought in Rwanda.  I'm down to my last four tea bags of that, but I will be buying more this summer when I return to Rwanda.  I don't imagine I will return to Rwanda a third time, so I will have to buy a huge supply, several boxes at least.

I steep my tea for four minutes, and enjoy it with a touch of President's Choice Original Soy Milk. It's the best soy milk I have ever found: has a mild taste which does not overpower the tea, and it's a nice pale colour.

A Smoothie to Anticipate Summer

I have been suffering (and believe me, that's the operative word) with vertigo since Monday of last week.  That's a whole week of having the room spin if I turn my head the wrong way.  I've been cooped up inside our house because I can't really walk without holding on to something, and sure can't drive.   Yesterday I went for a pedi with my sister Linda.  Brought along my own vegan nail polish, but as it turns out, my esthetician uses China Glaze, and that's a line of vegan nail polishes.

It's really sunny out today, but a bit cold and windy for all that it's the beginning of may.   The sun made me feel like having a smoothie, even though I'm sitting in my house wearing long pants, a tee shirt and a fleece jacket.

There is no end to the variety of smoothies that can be made, as you well know.   There are even smoothies-only cookbooks available on the market, and I've read a number of those.  This is my go-to favourite smoothie recipe which my DH and I have developed and refined over a number of years.

Lisa's Best Smoothie Recipe

The Base:

• one frozen banana (make sure you always have two or three frozen bananas, already cut into chunks, in sandwich bags in your freezer)
• 1 cup of fresh strawberries, cut into chunks (frozen works well too)
• I cup of fresh mango, cut into chunks (frozen works well too)

Once you have this base, you can add any number of different liquids to the fruit to round out your smoothie.

• orange juice
• coconut water
• coconut milk
• soy milk
• almond milk

Extras:

From time to time you may wish to add some veggies to your smoothie, but you really need a high-speed blender to liquify them.

• spinach leaves
• chopped kale
• grated ginger

Finally, if you want your smoothie to be a whole meal, all you need to do is add a quarter cup of silken tofu to the blender.  Tofu is tasteless, so you would never know it was there.   This makes your smoothie even thicker than it would be on its own, and has the added advantage of adding a full serving of protein.  This would make a great breakfast-on-the-go!  Just a warning, though, you will need a sturdy straw to use to drink it.

• silken tofu  

Quick and Easy Soup

There are all sorts of soup recipes available on the internet, but this soup, invented by my sister Leslie, is one of my all-time favourite soups.   It's so easy to make, you could easily go from start to finish in thirty minutes, so it makes a great, quick dinner after a long day at work.   The longer the soup is simmered, the more flavourful it becomes.  It's also good as a cold soup.

Leslie's California Mix Soup

• 1 large Spanish or Vidalia onion
• vegetable broth (use a low sodium brand, or your own home-made, then add your own salt to taste)
• 1 bag of frozen California mix vegetables (this is carrots, cauliflower and broccoli)
• spices and seasonings of your choice - I use freshly ground pepper and rosemary and thyme and a touch of cumin and coriander

Directions

1. Add about a half cup of the vegetable broth to a heavy soup pot and bring to a boil.
2. Coarsely chop the onions and add them to the pot.
3. Saute the onions until they are translucent.
4. Add about a pound to a pound and a half of the frozen vegetables to the pot.
5. Add enough vegetable broth to the pot to cover the frozen veggies, add your seasonings and bring to a boil.
6. Let the veggies boil for about five minutes, then reduce the heat and simmer for about ten to fifteen minutes.
7. Using an immersion blender, puree the veggies.  You could also transfer the veggies in batches to a food processor and then return the puree to the pot.
8. Ladle into bowls and serve.

Options

• I like to open a can of black beans and add them to the soup after I have pureed the veggies.  This turns the soup into a complete meal.
• If you cut up a potato or sweet potato and add it to the pot with the frozen veggies, you will get a thicker and creamier soup.  

Easter Dinner

For Easter dinner my also-vegan sister made a very nice pie containing gardein beef tips.  It was excellent.

In my experience, all of the gardein products are really tasty, and certainly well worth checking out.

A Nasty Cough & Cold

Just when we thought that we would make it through the winter unscathed, a nasty cough & cold has hit my family.

It started with my DH, then me, then my DS.   Both my husband and son have been sick for much longer than I was, and with symptoms more severe than mine.

I have to think that I was not as sick because I'm a veg head.

That's the only variable.

My New Blog

This is the first post of my new blog!

I've been thinking about writing a vegan blog for quite some time now, but have always hesitated due to the sheer number of amazing vegan blogs that are already out there, and which were the inspiration for this idea.  So here I go.

I envision that I will be writing about my recipes, my travels, my art,  my family and my cats.   I hope to have some giveaways that might encourage people to look in to my blog on a regular basis.  And I hope to attract some followers who might be interested in what I have to say.

I have added an email feed to the blog so people can receive posts directly into their email.