Meatless Monday: Easy-Peasy Burrito.

Meatless Monday!

I am supposed to be working on my photography website right now, but I forgot to post for MM last week so I didn't want to miss it again. This will just have to be quick! But, that's okay...because it is a quick and super easy-peasy recipe idea for eating without meat.

Refried Bean Burrito! 

When I was a vegetarian the first time around (before I had kids) I lived off of Harvey's veggie burgers, sour cream and onion potato chips, and Taco Bell Burritos. Nice, huh? (sigh). I tell you, though, I really did love those burritos...so here is how to make one, yourself.

Just get a can of black beans (do yourself a favour and buy from "Eden Organic"!! Their beans have no salt added and their cans are BPA free). {Thanks for caring Eden Organic company. I Heart You}.

Okay...put a wee bit of olive oil in the bottom of a sauce pan and heat up some chopped onion until soft. Throw some garlic in there, too, why dontcha? Now, open up your can of beans (drain and rinse) and throw them in there. Add a little water or, hey, even some veggie stock if you have some around (just enough to keep things from sticking) and warm your beans through. Now, open up a can of tomatos and roughly cut them up (always buy whole tomatoes and cut them yourself as required...they were only "cooked once" so their flavour is always better). Add those to your beans (I added about half a can). Now, what kind of spices do you like? We want this to be a little hot 'n spicy, no? You can add a bit of cumin powder and some cayenne for heat or even some chili powder. You may even want to add some hot sauce if you have it and, as always, a touch of salt and pepper. Taste, taste, taste. Does it need more of anything? Throw it in. Now grab your potato masher and take out all your frustrations on the stuff in the pot. Turn it into a nice mushy-mush.

Now, do you have any left over rice? Great! Throw that in there, too. What about cilantro? Are you a fan? I sure am! Chop that up fairly well and throw that in.

I love preparing meals that involve "throwing stuff in". Can you tell?

Okay,
warm up your whole grain tortilla wrap between a couple of paper towels in the micro for just about 10 seconds and then top with your beans. Add a bit of sour cream or even plain yogurt (if your aren't vegan) and then put a bit of chopped lettuce and salsa on top, too. I even added some strips of red pepper for extra colour and crunch. Wrap 'er all up and you are good to go!

So easy. So yummy.

I love these!

Need more cool veg. ideas? Check out How it all Vegan. It's where I got the ideas for this delicious Meatless Monday!

See ya' next week!
p.s. I can't find the spell check in blogger anymore. So, sorrie for any missteaks.

Meatless Monday: Seitan

maddie cookt this wondurful dich for the famaley!yay for maddie. (Hahahaha! I had to leave the computer for a little bit, and when I came back the above text was there. Very funny, Maddie) This week's recipe idea for Meatless Monday is Seitan. That is pronounced "Say-tahn", by the way. This is a high protein, meat substitute that you can make yourself at home. It is denser, and chewier, than tofu and my hubby, for one, prefers it's texture. I also find that it is easy on my tummy (I guess I'm not a celiac!) and it doesn't turn me into a "bloat-goat" like tofu does.  So, how on earth do you make this stuff? Well, it's super-duper complicated... Get yourself some Vital Wheat Gluten or HIGH, 80%, gluten flour (around here you can get this at the "Horn of Plenty" or at the "Bulk Barn"). Take one cup of the flour and mix it with 1 cup of water.  Yep, that's it for step one! You need to knead your dough (which will come together very sticky, very fast...because of all that gluten) well in order to produce a nice, dense, seitan (vs. a puffy, light version). So, if you are hand kneading...work away on it for about 5 minutes.  Once you've got your dough ready, roll it into a bit of a log and cut off 1 inch chunks to throw into your awaiting broth...  As for the broth...well, most that I have seen call for about 4-5 cups of liquid along with flavour agents. The one I just used was from the book "How it all Vegan" and it used mostly water with a 1/4 cup soy sauce and some spices. If you use soy sauce make sure it is low sodium and very good quality!! The seitan is going to soak up the flavours of your broth like crazy and me, not being a huge soy sauce fan, well, I didn't love how this turned out...so I will be trying out different versions of a broth for mine. I think I'll also try out adding some spices to the flour right at the beginning. I'll let you know how that goes (if you have a great broth recipe you'd like to share...please do!!!).  Anyway...once you've got your seitan dough cooking away in the broth you just have to stir it every 10 minutes or so until the broth has reduced. This will take about an hour.  Now you can go ahead and use your seitan as a (already cooked) meat subsitute in many recipes. Just cover it in whatever sauce you like, serve it with some veggies, and/or some rice or pasta, etc. It will be great! As long as you like the flavour of your broth! :0) 

Happy Meatless Monday!  
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Meatless Monday: Sweet Potato Badi

It's Meatless Monday, Everyone!

Today's recipe is from a great vegetarian cookbook by Didi Emmons, "Entertaining For a Veggie Planet". This is a follow-up cookbook to her "Vegetarian Planet". I got the "Entertaining" one first, for some reason, and I liked it so much that I just picked up the "Planet" one at Chapters last week.

I've tweaked her recipe just a bit to suit my tastes (I think I like things with a little more kick than she does...so I add in way more spices. I also add more lentils, more tomatoes, and more peas. Oh, and some onion and garlic, too! I even put in a few splashes of tabasco because after tasting, my dish still didn't have enough kick. That is one of the great things about veggie cooking: it's all good! Just add in more of what ya' like!!)

So here it is...

Sweet Potato Badi: MP-Style.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup dried, unsweetened coconut

1/4 cup canola oil

3/4 cup raw red lentils

1 small white onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 tbsp ground cumin

1 tbsp curry powder

1 med. "white" potato (cut into 1/2 inch cubes)

1 large sweet potato (cut into 3/4 inch cubes)

2 small zucchini (cut into 1/4 inch rounds)

1 can plum tomatoes (take out the tomatoes and chop them up then throw them in along with the juice)

1 cup frozen baby peas

1/2 cup plain yogurt

1-2 small, skinny chile peppers, minced (mine weren't hot enough so I added about 5 or 6 dashes of Tobasco sauce)

salt and pepper to taste

Directions:

In a small, dry, skillet toast the coconut over medium heat, shaking the pan regularly, until it is uniformly brown (watch carefully it goes from white to brown suddenly! At least it does on my stove!). Set aside.

In another *big* saute pan, heat the canola oil over medium heat. Add the onions and garlic and heat until the onions have softened. Add in the lentils and saute until they begin to brown (this also comes on suddenly...so watch carefully! At least it does on my, stupid, stove). Stir in the spices and add the potatoes. Add in your tomatoes and sauce and about 1 cup of water (you want enough liquid in there to cook the potatoes), and bring to a boil. Reduce to simmer, cover, and cook for about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add in the zucchini and peas and cook until all the veggies are fork-tender (about 10 minutes more).

Put aside about 2 tablespoons of the toasted coconut (for garnish) and mix the rest into a bowl with the yogurt, chiles, and about 1 teaspoon of kosher (big grain) salt. Remove your pan from the heat when all your veggies are ready and stir in the yogurt mixture.

Done!

Now you can serve over your favourite rice (mine is Basmati! yum! I think I may have to start lovin' brown, though...) with the reserved cocunut sprinkled on top for the fancy-schmancy factor.

Totally Yummy. Totally Meatless.

Who would want to eat a pig???

Happy Meatless Monday!

See ya' next week!

Meatless Monday: Curry Marinated Tofu.

I haven't had a chance to do a blog post about my New Year's Resolutions, yet...

but one of them is to eat more Meatless Meals. The "goal" is to switch over to a healthy vegetarian diet (the key word being healthy), but if I make that a resolution I know that I will find myself starving and then just wolfing down a bag of potato chips to fill the void. So, all I'm resolving to do is to try out more meatless recipes, figure out some things to do with tofu to make it taste good, work on my homemade seitan, and discover what to do with the package of tempeh that is sitting in my fridge. I'm going to try to post a Meatless Monday recipe idea every week, but don't hold me to that, either. If I learned anything from last year's "Pie a Week" resolution it's that...I tend to change my mind about doing stuff. Sometimes with (very) good reason!

So, let me just tell ya' that I actually have been eating a LOT of Meatless Meals over the past couple of weeks. Since Christmas I have only had chicken once! The rest of the time I have been eating beans, and lentils, and tofu! The hubs has even made a few tofu dishes that have been really good! He made a vegan soup with lentils and a vegan stir-fry with crumbled tofu. If you are a tofu hater because of the texture...then you should definitely try it crumbled. Even helps more if you freeze it first, then thaw, then crumble (into your stir-fry or...whatever). Then the "rubbery" texture is completely gone!


My absolute favourite new discovery when it comes to cooking with tofu is....

MARINADE!!!


Of course, tofu is just chalk full of water - so, if you press all that water out (between some paper towel with, say, a plate and some cans stacked on top...for about half an hour) you can then put your tofu into a marinade and it will just soak all those yummy flavours up like a sponge. I have read about this technique before, but I never actually tried it. Until now.



I got my Curry Tofu marinade recipe from Isa Chandra Moskowitz's and Terry Hope Romero's book, "Veganomicon" (pg. 127), which is really simple--consisting of just some veg. broth, rice vinegar, olive oil, soy sauce, and spices. I cut my tofu up into eight equal pieces and let it marinade for the afternoon.




I then heated up my grill-pan to about medium high and cooked the pieces on top for about 5 minutes on one side and a couple more minutes on the other -- making a nice cross-hatch pattern on the first side (fancy shmancy!). I also took the reserved marinade and heated it up with an equal amount of veg. broth to make a delicious sauce for my tofu steaks and served it all on a bed of basmati rice.




Let me tell you...it was DELICIOUS!! My hubby even loved it. He said if meat was an "8 or 9" (he is a carnivore) then the tofu was a "7 or an 8". That is really, really, good...because he isn't a tofu fan.




I will make this one regularly from now on (in fact, I'm having it for lunch again today...so good!!), but I'm going to keep experimenting with other veggie dishes so I can bring you another episode of Meatless Monday next week. ;-)


Stay tuned!!
;-)

*painting by Rachel Maguire (www.rayarray.com)