Some yellow food

I grew cauliflower for the first time this year and opted for a yellow variety.  I roasted a head the other night and it was delicious.  Just a little olive oil, salt and pepper.

And September was Vegan MOFO (month of food), so the bloggers were hard at work churning out fun new recipes.  Vegan Yack Attack's theme was mac and cheese, which is a most noble endeavor, in my opinion.  I decided to give the Buffalo Chickpea Mac 'n Cheese a crack.

I found it to be quite delicious.  The recipe called for Teese, which made me wary because in past experience I didn't care for it and found it to have an odd taste.  But I bought the creamy cheddar vegan sauce and found it nearly perfect for this application.  It wasn't difficult at all to make and came together well.  The only other issue I had was with the ranch sauce, which called for plain vegan yogurt.  I can't find a plain unsweetened yogurt, so the ranch sauce had a slightly sweet taste to it which wasn't awful but I'd prefer less sweetness.  Next time, I might sub sour cream for the yogurt.  Or just more Vegenaise.  Can't go wrong there.

Anyway, definitely enjoyed this one and will make it again.  It's amazing that any of the roasted buffalo chickpeas made it into the dish.  Seriously addicting.  Way better pictures and the recipe can be had here.

Vegan Bulgogi

Long time, no write! It's not that I haven't been cooking...but the recent hot spell around here pretty much sucked the culinary inspiration right out of me. My motivation level hasn't allowed me to spend more than 15 minutes prepping dinner, so my posts would have been decidedly uninspired. And if I did make anything interesting, I was too lazy to take a damn picture and post it. How sad is that? It's just an indicator of how much I HATE heat. Hopefully we are done with the 90+ degree days and have moved into more reasonable climate territory. But then again, maybe not, given the floods and wild weather we've had here in Colorado the past few days. While my house, its contents and occupants managed to stay dry, not everyone was so lucky. And this situation is far from over, especially since it rained all day today, which we definitely did not need. This dreary, rainy day did inspire me to post something I made a few times this summer and it has become a favorite. I ran across the link to the recipe here. I gravitate toward Mexican food, which is no surprise to the 3 people who read this blog. But, I do enjoy Asian food and try to incorporate new recipes when I can.

Really, really wonderful. I made sandwiches with it, but also found myself shoveling pieces into my mouth before they even made it into the sandwich. The recipe is here. The recipe calls for vegan cheese but that seemed not quite right to me so I just did Vegenaise on a bun and called it good. Coleslaw is also quite good in this application. I did make 2x the marinade the second time I made this and found it to be perfect. Guess I'm just a saucy gal.

Taco Lasagna

Yet another variant on the Mexican layered casserole thingy that never fails to appeal to me.

Recipe via Veg News, see it here.

Delish and satisfying.  Leftovers, too, always a plus in my book.  It didn't plate very well, but definitely edible.

One note is that the online recipe does not include a baking time.  I baked mine for 40 minutes and that was just about right.  The top layer of tortillas was starting to crisp and and it was hot throughout.

Keeper.

Get Thee Some of This

I stopped at Whole Foods mid-week and had a few samples of this:

Hol-ee cow, it's delish.  I am new to the almond butter game, and this is a delightful intro.  Kind of like candy cigarettes are the gateway to real ones, fruit and flavor-laden almond butter is the gateway to full-on almond butter.  Or something like that.  Lots of flavors to choose from, too.  I have been enjoying this on banana slices, thin on banana, heavy on the almond butter.  This would also be excellent stirred into oatmeal.  Or just eaten by the spoonful, and I can't say I haven't done a fair amount of that, too.

Dessert fail

It's such a bummer when something like this happens. You see a recipe and it looks really good on paper (and in pictures, in this case), so you go to the effort of assembling the ingredients and then preparing it and then...disappointment. For some reason it's worse when it's a dessert.

So I ran across the recipe a week or so ago. Chocolate, peanut butter, pretzel crust, what could go wrong? Not to mention that I was spurred on by my already-professed love of these:

 

But go wrong it did for reasons I haven't been able to specify. They sure looked tasty, though.

Maybe it was too much of  a good thing.  The crust was a little mushy and overall I think it was just too much.  These things filled a regular-size muffin cup, so they were the size of a cupcake.  Even a Justin's pb cup would be too much in that size.  Granted, these were not purported to be a pb cup, they are pb pies.  I couldn't even finish one.  Lori finished hers but later said she did it so she wouldn't hurt my feelings.  Oy.  I mean, it's dessert.  It's optional.  If it's not good, for Pete's sake, don't eat it!

 

I'll be backing off the peanut butter desserts for quite awhile.  I didn't blog about it, but I also made a peanut butter ice cream pie a few weeks ago (with a Nutter Butter crust, no less--again, what could go wrong?  But it did), which you'd think would have taught me a lesson.  But, no.  I shall stick to what I know, and that is Justin's pb cups are the gold standard.  Lesson learned.



Do it

Get thee to Beet Box Cafe and have a turtle brownie.  I would have taken a picture, but the brownie was less than picture perfect by the time I got it home in the bike bag.  However, it did fare better than the peaches I picked up at the farmers market.  Anyway, it was exquisite.

Fajitas!

Fajitas for dinner last night.  I used Beyond Meat Chicken-Free Strips and they were delicious!

I'm excited about another faux meat option, especially since the Beyond Meat products don't have gluten in them.  It's becoming more and more evident that I have gluten issues, so I've been avoiding it as much as possible.  The stuff is spendy, though (although you do get a decent amount), and there's a lot of packaging, but I am willing to overlook these issues in order to eat fajitas.

Some yummy Mexican-style rice on the side.  Recipe here.  And the requisite sour cream and guac to top it all off.