Weeds and feeds

©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

I was really meaning to create a good recipe for a post today but I've been gardening to exhaustion, and we ended up eating leftovers of a not so great dinner. I would like to be planting and refining new garden spaces, but what I'm doing is WEEDING. I'm sure I've mentioned our invasive-vine woes before, but really, it's so depressing. Every time I think progress has been made, new shoots of these hideous stucco-wreckers start emerging from the ground. There are thick roots deep under the ground and no matter how I dig at them, they won't budge. Sometimes I manage to withdraw a large section of root and spray myself with a pound of dirt in the process. Last year we paid professionals to remove them and they rototilled the perimeter of the house, and removed a startling quantity of roots, but many large roots are still there. I've got a bunch of plants ready to go into beds but we still have a lot of pre-planting work to do. Actually, I think my husband is still out there digging.

Since this is a cooking blog and not a gardening blog, I won't bore you with pictures of evil, inedible weeds. I'm posting some of the stuff we've cooked and eaten lately. We had some fantastic marinated tempeh that was made from a recipe from "Lorna Sass' Complete Vegetarian Kitchen." Also, a delicious coleslaw that came from "Vegan Deli" by Joanne Stepaniak. These two dishes were served with linguine with green pea pesto. (We won't be making the pesto again because it tasted too much like . . . green peas, but that's my personal taste preference.)


©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

My son made his excellent black bean burgers and potato salad. We had sweet potato fries with a simple tofu and broccoli stir fry and we made a great stir fry with mushrooms, kale and rice noodles. (The fries were roasted with lots of rosemary which added a fantastic flavor.


©Andrea's easy vegan cooking


©Andrea's easy vegan cooking


©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

I baked a 100% white whole wheat no-knead bread with toasted black sesame seeds.


©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

One night, too tired to cook, we got salads from a nearby Middle Eastern restaurant, called Lulu's. They have a deli service at the back of the restaurant and we purchased tabouli and fattoush.


©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

I would love to pass along the marinated tempeh recipe but I don't have permission to do that so I'll just say what was in it and a offer bit of prep info. For Marinated Pan-fried Tempeh, a package of tempeh is cubed and marinated for several hours in lemon juice, apple juice, tamari, dry mustard, fresh grated ginger and minced garlic. It's then fried in a small amount of oil until browned. Everything we make from the Lorna Sass cookbook turns out great, and I highly recommend it as a basic vegan cookbook.

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If you are a fan of Silk soymilk and Whitewave tofu and tempeh (owned by food giant Dean Foods), you might want to read this disturbing report from Organic Consumers Association and Cornucopia Institute. Most Silk products are no longer organic and the soybeans used for production are now mostly from China, not North America. Dean Foods is also heavily into inhumane factory farming. Thanks to LK Sisters for blogging about this.

©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

The day I became a vegetarian / Black bean and tomato stuffed sweet potato

©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

We were listening to a re-broadcast of an interview by public radio host Joy Cardine with Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of "The Face on Your Plate," "When Elephants Weep," and "The Pig Who Sang to the Moon." The host said she was a vegetarian, and proceeded to relate a brief story of the moment she knew she could no longer eat meat. It got me thinking of the moments we remember in life — usually traumatic national events that we can never forget. But what about the other, more personal life-changing events we experience, like deciding to become vegetarian, for example. Do people remember "the day they decided not to eat meat anymore?" Well, I do.

I was in my 20s and had been going through dietary changes for a while. First I decided to eat healthier. I'd been reading about diet and health and the dangers of the "Standard American Diet" and decided to make a clean sweep of all the unhealthy food in my (and by default, my husband's) diet. I went through the pantry and bagged up all the white stuff — you know, white flour, white pasta, white sugar — all of it. Being a frugal person by nature, I was filled with anxiety about what to do with all this stuff. I didn't want to contribute to another's ill health, but I hated just throwing it away. So, I hauled it across the street to my friend Suzanne's apartment, explained that I wanted to improve my diet and not eat this stuff anymore because I believed it to be unhealthy, and asked if she wanted it. After all, everyone has their own ideas about what's healthy, and can make up their own minds. I told her what I knew. She looked at me intently for a moment, and then said, "SURE!" Then, with great enthusiasm, she started unpacking the bags. I assuaged my guilt by thinking that she would just go out and buy this same stuff anyway.

Eating healthy was going well, and I began to think about a vegetarian diet. We'd been attending meditation retreats where there were lots of vegetarians, and I'd been doing more reading and thinking about food issues. Then we went on a camping trip to Canada, and one evening we attended the nature program at the campground where we were staying. A film was shown about the plight of prairie dogs. One of the struggles facing this little animal was its misfortune to be living on cattle ranches, where the prairie dog tunnels cause injuries to the cattle who step into the holes. There were graphic shots of ranchers blasting the prairie dogs with their rifles; no gory detail was spared, and it was horrible. You can probably see where this is going. Anyway, I just couldn't get those images out of my mind.

We were in the supermarket checkout line after our return home, and I was staring at a package of stew meat in our cart. I picked it up. "Do we really want this?" I asked my husband? "Probably not," was his reply, and I took it back to the meat counter. And that was it —the day I decided to be a vegetarian. And do I remember the day I became vegan? Of course, but that's another story for another day.

My first attempts at cooking vegetarian food were pretty grim. The very first dish, chuck full of brewers yeast, got ditched. But it's a lot easier to be vegetarian now, and even vegan, than it used to be. There are countless amazing cookbooks and blogs with recipes and ideas. I recently reviewed Peta's Vegan College Cookbook, and although it wasn't generally suited to my style of cooking, there were a few recipe gems that I really enjoyed cooking and eating. This recipe was inspired by one of them. If you use canned beans and tomatoes, you can throw it together with almost no effort. Or, if you prefer, you can cook dried beans and roast your own tomatoes. I like to make the bean and tomato mixture pretty spicy because I love the contrast between the spicy beans and the sweet potato, but you can just leave out the chilies or jalapeños if you don't care for spicy food.


©Andrea's easy vegan cookingBlack bean and tomato stuffed sweet potatoes (updated 11-21-16)

• 4 medium sweet potatoes, scrubbed
• one tablespoon oil (I like avocado oil) or two tablespoons broth or water
• 1/2 cup sliced green onions, white and green parts
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 15-oz. can black beans, rinsed and drained (or 1-1/2 cups cooked black beans) or 3/4 cup of dried beans, cooked and drained
• 1/2 teaspoon smoked Spanish paprika
• 1 15-oz.can diced tomatoes with green chilies, (or a can of tomatoes plus 3 tablespoons of diced green chilies from a can, or 1-2 finely chopped fresh jalapeños)
• 1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley or cilantro (opt.)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt (if needed)
• fresh ground pepper, lots
• 1 small avocado (or vegan sour cream)
• 4 tablespoons lemon juice, divided

1. Slice a very small piece from the end of each potato. (Or, you can prick them all over with a fork.) Bake at 425˚F for about 40 minutes or until nice and soft all the way through. You can bake them right on the oven rack. I like to use the toaster oven for this unless I'm using the big oven to make other stuff, too. When they are ready, place them on a plate to cool slightly while you finish up the filling.
2. Cook the the onion, garlic and oregano (and jalapeños, if using fresh) in the oil (or broth or water if you don't use oil) for one minute. Add the beans, tomatoes, canned chilies (if using), paprika, salt and pepper. Heat gently until hot. Stir in two tablespoons lemon juice, and the parsley or cilantro. Taste for seasoning.
3. Open the avocado and scoop out the pulp. Mash and mix with two tablespoons lemon juice, a tiny pinch of salt and fresh ground pepper.
4. Split the potatoes lengthwise and gently push the ends towards each other to create a pocket.
5. Fill the pockets with the bean mixture and top with avocado or vegan sour cream.

©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

Africana restaurant review

okra sauce, maffe (peanut sauce), tomato sauce
©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

In the distant past, we've been members of two different vegetarian dinner groups. The first one was a macrobiotic group, and we met once a month for a potluck, usually at our house. It was a lot of fun and the food was always wonderfully delicious and healthy. And I loved that our kids could take part, and see that yes, there were other people who ate like we did. After the demise of that group, we joined another one that alternated between potlucks and restaurants. It was organized by a woman who was upset that we wanted to bring our children. (always well-behaved) An informal vote was taken and everyone wanted the kids included except for the leader. We tried to compromise by only bringing them once in a while, but the leader eventually decided not to come anymore, and guilt caused me to assume the role of organizer. She'd said it was a lot of work to keep the group going, and she was right. There just weren't enough interested vegetarians around to have more than 8–10 people show up for events, and even that was hard. We didn't have the benefit of a Web site, and organizing an event involved LOTS of phone tag. Eventually I passed on the "leader" role to someone else, and he gradually gave up. Many of the regulars moved away and it was hard recruiting new members.

We finally, now that we're just about to move away ourselves, found a new veg group with lots of members. We read about it in the local paper, which just goes to show you how (almost) mainstream vegetarianism has become. We recently attended our first event — a dinner at Africana that attracted 50 people! Africana is a restaurant specializing in West African cuisine. The food was interesting and tasty but there were a few rough spots concerning quantity, menu substitutions and slowness. I think the restaurant staff may have been overwhelmed with serving so many diners at once. The main dishes were basically sauces with a few veggies, served over rice and/or couscous. There was a 45 minute wait between finishing the first entrée and beginning the second, which made for a very long weeknight event.


alloco (fried plantain)
©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

For an appetizer we had alloco, or fried plantain, which tasted good but was very greasy. Then we were served three saucy dishes with rice and couscous. There was maffe which is a peanut-based sauce with veggies, okra sauce, and a piquant tomato and onion sauce with veggies. The last dish to arrive (after a 45 minute wait) was a vegetable stew.


vegetable stew
©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

Everything was vegan, which is always a treat in itself. Would I recommend Africana? If you are dining with omnivores, it might be a good place to go because of the wide variety of interesting food choices, but it doesn't specialize in providing vegetarian food, meaning the meat dishes look a whole lot better than the vegetable ones! The dishes were tasty, but basically seemed like sauce over rice. There wasn't anything to compensate for the lack of meat, like chickpeas or other legumes, and the veggies were a bit scarce.

To make your own version of a delicious peanut stew, try Spicy peanut stew.

©Andrea's easy vegan cooking