Easy and delicious vegan food at our house

Not glamorous, but a tasty and filling lunch can be made from leftover rice, pan-grilled tofu, and frozen broccoli. Frozen broccoli isn't my favorite, but sometimes it's just what I need. There are days when even cutting up broccoli seems like too much effort. The tofu is Wildwood organic super-firm sprouted tofu — the firm texture is very easy to work with, and satisfyingly chewy. 'Chewy' is a food group, you know.

Roasting chickpeas or cooking them in a skillet or wok, for a snack or part of a meal, is so easy and delicious. Click here for a basic recipe, but you can season the chickpeas with any of your favorite herbs and spices. I like smoked paprika and a grind of pink salt and pepper, but only you know what taste you are craving.



If you have leftover chickpeas, roast some carrots, cook quinoa or rice, steam kale, make a tahini sauce and enjoy a wonderful bowl. Click here for a link to a tahini umeboshi dressing. If umeboshi is too exotic, you can make tahini sauce with a couple tablespoons of tahini,  a tablespoon of lemon juice, a little garlic, salt and pepper, and enough water to make a drizzleable sauce. Mix all together with a fork until smooth and creamy. Adjust the ingredients to your taste.



On our last trip to Costco, we bought our usual large box of mushrooms, and an unplanned two-pound bag of organic green beans. I started eating green beans for practically every meal so as not to be faced with the shame of having them spoil before they were all used. A stir-fry with mushrooms, green beans and tender, fried tofu is simple and good! I seasoned it with liquid aminos, bee-free honey. fresh ground pepper and five-spice powder. The tofu is fried tofu from one of the local tofu shops — a rare treat bought at an Asian market. (And if by chance it becomes obvious that the green beans might not get used up — if you can't personally eat any more — you can always hand over the leftovers to a willing relative. That's what I did.)



This is tempeh, obviously, but that's all I remember. My husband prepared it, and I don't remember what he used to flavor it.



Last but not least, there's nothing like a giant plateful of beautiful, orange, sweet potato oven fries to perk up a meal. Cut them into 1/2 thick fingers and mix them with 2 to 3 finely minced cloves of garlic. (about 1 tablespoon) Spread them in a single layer on an oiled baking sheet, spray them with olive oil (or toss with a tablespoon of oil before spreading on the sheet). Bake in a pre-heated 475˚ oven for about 40 minutes or until soft but slightly crisp. Sprinkle lightly with sea salt and freshly ground pepper. And eat.

A dedication...

I came to the computer early yesterday morning to write a post about our first week in Seattle, but instead, I received heartbreakingly sad news that a dear, old friend had died in a bicycle accident in Colorado. Everything suddenly became trivial compared to this. I can barely process this information and understand it. He was so full of life and adventure that it's impossible to imagine he's not kayaking a wild river, running a marathon somewhere, playing his violin in the community orchestra or tending his extensive gardens.

I'm going to put up a short post that I wrote previously but never used, and dedicate it to Stanley, a wonderful and compassionate man who enjoyed life, and who will be terribly missed by everyone who knew him.

We used to have a great Ethiopian restaurant within walking distance of our house. We were really disappointed when it closed, as it was so convenient and delicious and had lots of great vegetarian food. Plus the restaurant emphasized healthy cooking, which was a real bonus. Thinking about this restaurant recently, my husband started craving Ethiopian food and decided to make some. His first attempt was, shall we say, forgettable, but his second try was really good.

Berberé Stew (Ethiopian Lentil Stew)

He made a lentil dish and a green bean and potato dish and served them with brown rice. Both were excellent and not too difficult. If you'd like to try these recipes, they can be found here. The link will take you to the lentil recipe, and you will find the link to the green beans and potatoes on the same page.

Ethiopian Green Beans and Potatoes

Random meals

From our garden!

I work on a mac, and until I cleverly spilled a mug of peppermint tea onto and thoroughly into my mac keyboard, I had an un-noteworthy typing experience. When the keyboard became toast, so to speak, my husband handed over a keyboard that had come with one of his PCs, and had been lying around the house unused because he preferred his old keyboard. The letters and numbers on this keyboard type out just as you would expect, but the symbols are all wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. When I type an ampersand or quotation marks, I never know what to expect. I've had to learn a whole new system of finding the right keys. I've learned to type the right parenthesis when I want the left, and the equal sign when I want the right. If I want a "@" I have to type "a." This is all OK as long as I'm using symbols that I use a lot, and have memorized the correct keys, but when I have to type something that I don't type often, like a "&," I have to type all the upper keys until I find it! The "&" looks like "/." Now I find when I use a normal keyboard, I get confused and type the wrong symbols.

This is kind of how I feel in our house right now as everything gets packed up. I go to the spot where something I want should be, and of course it's not there anymore. And I can't remember where it is. Like my favorite shorts. Did they get packed or accidentally donated? Or did they go to the attic? They were supposed to be available to wear on the trip but I haven't seen them in quite a while. Tsk.

Anyway, even when I'm not posting recipes, we're still eating around here. It's just that we're not being especially creative, or we're being creatively repetitive or whatever. Plus, we're in the midst of preparing to move nearly 2,000 miles away, and have a lot on our minds. So, here's some stuff we've been eating with links back to where the food appears on this blog, if it does.

Red lentil soup with cauliflower, green beans and cracked pepper

Pad Thai

Fabulous wax beans from Claire's gard

I think planting wax beans instead of green ones was an excellent idea that I wish had occurred to me. The green ones are almost impossible to see on the garden plants but the yellow ones stand right out, making them a lot easier to harvest. These wax beans were served with enchiladas.

Tofu and Swiss chard burritos

We usually make these with kale but the garden is overflowing with Swiss chard. In either case, they are really delicious. I first had the kale version in a café in Santa Fe, and immediately tried to recreate them when we returned home. I left it unrolled for the photo, but of course I rolled it up to eat.

Saturday is our scheduled date of departure when we head to Seattle. Through the miracle of modern technology (scheduled posting), blog posts will continue to appear while we're en route. I'll be taking photos along the way as we head west from Wisconsin and will post about our trip (if there's anything to say!) when we get set up in our new digs. Hopefully I won't be too grumpy! It's not too late to offer last minute tips on places to eat in South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. We'll have a laptop with us.

Potato, green bean, kidney bean curry

Whenever my son announces he wants to cook dinner I'm delighted because I know we'll be having great food. He doesn't use recipes in a conventional way or measure ingredients, so it's usually hard to pin him down on just what he's added; but this time he was inspired by a recipe from one of my favorite Indian cookbooks, and I grilled him on what he did, so I could share his interpretation of the recipe.

He started with "Spiced Green Beans" from Lord Krishna's Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking by Yamuna Devi and David Baird." With this recipe as inspiration, he changed spices and added ingredients to come up with a truly delicious main course dish.


Potato-green bean-kidney bean curry

• 1 – 2 tablespoons oil (or half oil and half Earth Balance margarine)
  
• 2 teaspoons black mustard seeds
• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
• 1 small onion, chopped
• 12 ounces fresh green beans, stems trimmed
• 12 ounces canned chopped tomatoes in their juice
• 1/4 cup water
• 4 small potatoes, cubed and steamed until half cooked
• 1/2 teaspoon turmeric
• 1 can kidney beans, drained and rinsed
• 1/4 teaspoon sugar
• handful chopped fresh cilantro
• salt to taste

1. Heat the oil and fry the cumin seeds and mustard seeds until the cumin seeds darken and the mustard pops and turns gray, about a minute.
2. Add the onion and saute until it softens, about a minute or two. Add the green beans and cook about 2–3 minutes.
3. Add the tomatoes and simmer about a minute.
4. Add the water, potatoes, turmeric and kidney beans, cover and simmer 10 minutes.
5. Add the sugar, some cilantro and salt to taste, cover and simmer about 10 minutes until the vegetables are cooked and the sauce reduces and thickens.
6. Garnish and serve with brown basmati rice.

Oven roasted green beans

I love oven-roasted vegetables, but have always roasted root vegetables and winter squash. The night we ate at my son Aaron's apartment in Seattle, along with a spinach salad and sandwiches, he also served roasted green beans. They looked very weird—all shrivelled and shrunken, but they tasted fabulous. I'm definitely going to make these—as soon as it cools off enough to run the oven! After a string of days so beautiful I hated to leave Wisconsin, we headed to a Seattle heat wave. Now I'm back home and the heat wave has struck here. I think I'll stick to foods not requiring much heat. But if your weather is pleasant or you have air conditioning, try these green beans. It's a simple dish with great taste.

I planted scarlet runner beans this year because I wanted the beautiful flowers to make the garden prettier. Well, they do look great and taste great but they are infested with Japanese beetles. Ugh. The beetles seem to prefer the foliage, which leaves the tender pods for me, but I find the beetles creepy. When I was a child living in Philadelphia, we always had a large population of Japanese beetles every summer. One of our neighbors, who had lots of roses, used to pay the neighborhood kids to pick the beetles off his bushes. He told us his wife made them into "beetle cookies," and while I didn't quite believe him, part of me wasn't sure. He always gave us a certain kind of flat raisin cookie after each picking session that he said were his wife's beetle cookies. I remember years later, as an adult, I came upon these cookies in a store and was shocked to discover they were packaged cookies, not homemade. I think we should be more honest with children, or at least make sure they know when we're joking.

The beans Aaron likes to use for this dish are the long skinny ones.
Oven-roasted green beans
Preheat the oven to 450˚
Toss a pound of long, skinny green beans, washed and with stem end removed, with one to two tablespoons of olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Place the beans in a cast iron skillet and roast in the oven until shrivelled and cooked. This takes about 30 minutes. Halfway through cooking, stir the beans. A few minutes before they are done, stir in a clove of minced garlic. The beans will be crisp-cooked and brown in spots when done.