Butternut Squash lasagna

Each piece should have a tomato and piece of fried sage.

Black Irish White Bean Soup

Onion, Carrot, Celery, Navy Beans, Good Homemade Stock, Potatoes, Kale, Bell Peppers, Silk Soy Creamer, Garlic, Garden Herbs, Sea Salt, Pepper, Paprika.

Shepherd's Pie

Our Shepherd's pie is a vegetable rich mix of Local Mushrooms, Local Carrots, Celery, Local Parsnips and Local Beets and the greens that they came with.  The whole thing is topped with Local Leek Mashed Potatos We would like to make a casserole a day.

Rawcos

This is our Raw Taco, now named Rawco by popular demand.  The filling is local 'Shrooms (mixed with onion, jalapeno, local pecans and seasonings), Local Greens act as a taco shell and we top it with a baggie of cashew cheese, yum. 

It comes with a salad on the side.  A salad for which there is not yet a name,  Help me with a good name.  I'm thinking of calling it Farmer Hash, or Reaper Pickle, or Hillbilly Slaw.  Clearly I am fresh out of ideas.  I ask only for inspiation.  Something tells me I should  put it to a vote before I commit.  Your ideas will be listened to.


Now soliciting names for a raw local seasonal carpacio.

Vegan Houston Restaurant

Almost done!

Andouille Tempeh Dirty Rice

This is the first step towards Dirty Rice Tamales.  We copied the spice combination of an authentic Andouille sausage recipe and marinated the tempeh in that solution overnight.  Tomorrow we will add whole mixture and marinade to a pot with 2 cups of rice and 3 cups of water and some onion, celery and bell pepper. 

First we crumble the tempeh until it's crumbly.

Then  we add all of the herbs and spices. 1 teaspoon each of Oregano, Thyme, Paprika, Sage, Sea Salt, Thyme and File Gumbo (ground Sassafrass)

Then add 1/2  teaspoon each of cracked red pepper and black pepper

Then we add water to cover and 2 tablespoons Canola oil and mix well.  Refrigerate overnight.

Here is the finished Dirty Rice

Vegan Wedding

Ive been working on a vegan wedding for  J and B.  The wedding will be in October.  The following are the choices that will be offered to the couple at their tasting.  They will also get to taste a salad and two or three sides.  These are pictures of the practice entrees which could use a little tweaking.   The first picture is of the Butternut Squash Rotolo. This rotolo starts as a long piece of handmade sage pasta layed flat.  It is layered with a mild cashew cheese and roasted butternut squash, and then rolled up and boiled.  The finished roll is then cut crossways for individual servings.   It lays on a bed of wilted seasonal greens and is topped with grape tomatoes and fried sage.  This is a classic can't lose flavor combination.  When I crafted this one several months ago I just used plain flour to make the pasta (It was just for me and the old man).  Using semolina flour will give the pasta more bite and structure.  This rotolo was dee-licious though.

Next are the crepes.  These crepes are stuffed with a crazy assortment of exotic mushrooms (Beech, Maitake and Shitake) along with walnuts, spinach, ginger and sesame.  The sauce is a lemongrass kreem.  We will need to work on presentation.  I would like to see some nice plump goji berries on top of this and the crepes must be thinner.  Also, Lemongrass must be added to the crepe batter.   Nothing but the best.

And here is the puff pastry.  This is hand-rolled puff pastry. (Thanks Brittany of Sinfull Bakery) It's light and fluffy and speckled with rosemary.

The box is filled with artichoke bottoms, eggplant and tomato and topped with garden cilantro-basil pesto and a simple tomato sauce.  I will add cashew cheese to this recipe and more eggplant and tomato.  This box needs to be spilling over with veggies.

Vegan Superbowl

So happy to report that my cajun empanadas were just the good luck charm that the Saints needed to win the Superbowl yesterday. My (non-vegan)friends and I have a superbowl party each year. They know they can count on me for a few vegan options and this is this years fare. Above are the Geaux Saints Sweet Potato Maque Choux Empanadas (which came with a mango Chimmichuri) I'll give you the recipe below.

Next is the Annual Stadium cake made from My Sweet Vegan's http://www.mysweetvegan.com/ Lemon Lime Sunshine Bundt recipe and my stadium mold.

And this is the grid of guac. It's a whole bunch of big beautiful Haas Avocados, mixed with pico de gallo, lime, salt and pepper and the yardlines measured out in Vegan Cream Cheese

Geaux Saints Empanada Recipe:
1 big ole Sweet Potato
1/2 Onion, diced

1 Stalk celery, diced
1/4 cup diced red bell pepper
1/2 bag frozen corn or one can, drained (about 8 ounces frozen)
2 Tablespoons Canola Oil
1 teaspoon gumbo file
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano leaves
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 teaspoon white pepper

1/4 teaspoon cracked red pepper
1/2 teaspoon celery seed
2 teaspoons sweet paprika
1/2 teaspoon sea salt

1 Tablespoon Vegan Cream Cheese
Empanada rounds (check the label) Also if you find the ones that say "para horno" that have no beef fat you're in business.

Preheat the oven to 350. Set your Empanada rounds (discos) out to thaw

Cut your sweet potato into cubes and place them in a large bowl. Add all the spices and the oil and toss the potatoes to evenly coat. Put the potatoes on a large sheet pan and toss them in the oven.

Chop your onion, celery and pepper. Drop them in that same bowl that you used for the potatoes and give them a little toss in the residual spice. After 10 minutes pull the potatoes out of the oven and toss the onion mix on top and replace in back in the oven. Cook for another 5 minutes.

When your done return the whole mix to the same big bowl and stir in the frozen corn and the Vegan Cream Cheese. Taste the mix and make sure it's good.

Lay all of your discos out on the table and scoop about two tablespoons full of mixture onto each disc.

Pick up one disc and fold it in half making a semi-circle and matching up the ends so that you have about a half an inch of seal.

Make a small fold or crimp in the empanada and smash it into place. In fact go ahead and make five crimps(or four like the picture).

Place the empandas on a well oiled sheet pan or a well oiled piece of

parchment on a sheetpan and cook for about 15 minutes or until golden bown.




Serve with Chimmichurri or Mango Chimmichuri:

1/4 cup flat leaf parsley

1/4 cup cilantro

1/4 onion

1 clove garlic

1/4 cup olive oil

2 Tablespoons Balsamic Vinegar

1/4 Jalapeno (preferably red)

1/2 Tablespoon red bell pepper

1/4 tablespoon sea salt,

1/4 tablespoon paprika

Blend together in a food processor and serve. Add two tablespoons of fresh or frozen mango for mango salsa.

Watch as Matt takes them home from the party.

Butternut, Blue Cheese and Apple Casserole

Casseroles are hearty and satifying. They are great for both families and singles . Make one a little bigger than you need and later when someone needs a quick bite they can heat up one serving at a time instead of getting the whole kitchen dirty. Singles can make this in a loaf pan and use only 1/2 a sqaush. I'll show you what to do with the other half in my next post. This recipe is very nice and easy to make and will be even better when we tweak it. I will slice the apples with a mandoline and use less fake blue cheese. I've also thought about adding rosemary and cherries or grapes. The old man can't get enough of this one. Everytime I open the fridge he's swipped another piece.
You will need:

1 big Butternut Sqaush

3 tablespoons of fake butter

1/2 teaspoon each of cinnamon, cardomom, allspice and salt

1 apple

2 tablespoons lemon or lime juice

1/4 cup almonds, walnuts or pecans, chopped

2 tablespoons brown sugar

4 squares of Fermented Tofu Cheese









1. Slice your butternut squash in half lenthwise and put face down on a cookie sheet. We use wax paper sheets in my house or we just spray the pan with a little oil. Put these in the oven on 350 until they are soft throughout.





2. Dig the meat out of the squash and mash it together with the spices. It doesn't have to be perfect.

3. Throw all of this in

your oil sprayed casserole dish and smooth it down.

4. Now add your Soy Bean Cheese that you got at the Asian grocery store. This one has chilis but yours doesn't have to. Spread this stuff around the top. Holly go lightly because this stuff packs a whollup. It's like a stinky gorganzola. A little dab'll do ya.

5. Slice the apple, dipping each slice lemon or lime juice on both sides to keep it from browning. (This is a good way to use less than perfect looking organic apples). Use a mandoline if you can or just try to get some nice even slices, not like I did here.

6. Place the apples on top in a pretty pattern.

7. Sprinkle nuts and brown sugar liberally.

8. Bake it untill bubbly and hot in the middle.

Vegan Halloween, watermelon brains

It is Halloween and you are scared of this food. The Graveyard dip reminds you that zombies can rise up from the ground and eat you. You are frightened of the spinach and artichokes that are burried within. Everyone knows that vegan zombies will eat your graaains.

This Phyllo Ghost is filled with some very spooky mushrooms. Perhaps they are poisionous and you too will become a ghost if you eat them.

Just like these ghosts did.

Once I was driving down on Bomar Street and I saw a flying saucer. At first I thought it was my neighbors wife after he complained about dinner. Turns out it was this little green man made of green tea . He abducted me and turned my brain into agar agar arrgg.


This here is a collection I keep of all the fingers that try to steal the vegan shortbread cookies from the bowl before the

party has started. Don't they know

there are plenty of other ways to kill time.

Mummy told me my vegan diet would never amount to anything so I put a curse on her.

Beans and Barley in Milwaukie

This restaurant is merely so so.

Pretty Empanadas with Hatch Chimmichurri

Vegan Pozole Rojo

Pozole is like chili with hominy. Although it's made throughout Mexico, I think of it as a Native American (Indian) dish. We opt to make it with the most exotic sounding ingredients we can like avocado leaves and such. It makes us feel very fancy and we get to talk to the nice ladies at the Latino produce market who have given me lot's of tips and recipes over the years. Pozole is traditionally made around Christmas time. It requires a ton of different chilis pulverized into a paste using a morter and pestle, chilis like guajillo, ancho and chili de arbol. Pozole can be made white (blanco), green (verde), red (rojo) with beans (de frijole) or with corn and squash (elopozole). Hominy is made by a process called nixtamalization. Traditionally this meant soaking corn in lye until the hull is gone and the germ is left. Nowadays limewater is used (calcium hydroxide). This is the same process used to make tamale masa so now you know that tamales are essentially made with dried ground hominy.

I'll tell you another little tidbit. Achiote is a strange little tree/shrub that grows like a weed all over the southwest straight through to South America. I first encountered it in the Ecuadorean rainforest (I know that sounds exotic doesn't it) where the natives use it to dye their hair. It wasn't til I returned to the states that I realized it's culinary uses. Achiote is the same thing as annato which is the dye used to make cheddar cheese orange. I use this to to give the Pozole a rich color. This is a good tip for a vibrant chili as well.

Another thing we do with the Pozole is a little pork substitution using Shitake mushroom stems. We shred the stems so that they look like shredded pork and then we soak them in a little liquid smoke (which is actually a natural thing. They basically just condense water in a smoker and viola, liquid smoke). This is a labor intensive ordeal but we think it's worth it.

I first got the idea to make Pozole from a cookbook I bought at the American Indian museum in DC where I also puchased some dried blue hominy which really ups the fancy factor.

I think next time I'll make a Pozole blanco.

4 Guajillo Chillis, rehydrated


5 Chilis de Arbol, rehydrated

2 Ancho Chilis, rehydrated



1 lb dried hominy, soaking in water

2 onions, diced

1 head of Garlic, cleaned

2 Avocado Leaves

2 T. dried Oregano

1 T. Achiote

1 T. Cumin

1 cup shredded mushroom stems soaking in a little soy sauce and a dash of liquid smoke

Sea Salt and Black Pepper

Vegetable Stock



Start by cooking the hominy in a big pot with the onions, salt, oregano, avocado leaf and cumin. Cover the hominy with just enough veggie stock to cover it. It may take at least 30 minutes for them to start getting soft. You can add small amounts of stock as needed but I like my pozole thick.

In the mean time grind up all of your chilis in a chop chop with the garlic. When the pozole is soft, add the chili mix and continue to cook. It should take about an hour from start to finish. When the hominy is done it will split and crack. Add the mushroom stems and a little achiote for color. Cook for another 10 minutes and your done.



Garnish with radish, avocado and shredded cabbage.

Breakfast Tamales

I've been making a lot of tamales lately. They've been a big hit at the Bayou City Farmers Market

This one is pretty cool. When people ask what's in the tamales I tell them that it's migas ( a Mexican scrambled egg dish) Then after they've tried it and said, "wow" or "yum", I tell them that it's tofu migas so it has no cholesterol. I'm surprised by the number of big burly meat eatting types who buy them anyway.

We make the tamales in three steps and we make giant batches so I'll try to estimate a smaller batch but it's not exact.

Start off by soaking your corn husks!

Basic Tamale Dough

2 cups Masa

1and 1/2 cups warm Vegetable Stock

1/2 cup Peanut Oil

3 teaspoons baking powder

4 teaspoons salt

1/4 cup cold water

Start by putting the masa in your mixer and turning it on. Add the veggie stock and let it mix for 3-5 minutes. Add the peanut oil and let it mix for another 3-5 minutes. While that's mixing combine the rest of the ingredients in a little bowl. After five minutes add the rest of the ingredients and mix again for 3-5 minutes.

The Creative Part

At this point in our tamale process we add some kind of vegetable. For the breakfast tamale I add about a half a can of tomato sauce and a half an onion ground up in a blender. I also add fresh sage to this tamale dough.

You can add all kinds of veggies to your dough. I've added onion, chayote, spinach, herbs, sweet potato and beets at one time or another to my different masas. I find that this does gives the masa character and tenderness so the masa doesn't come out dense like a hockey puck, or bland like a corn tortilla.

Tofu Scramble

about 1 cup finely diced onion, bell pepper and hot pepper combo (easy on the hot pepper, Tiger)

2 large packages of medium or hard tofu (crumbled up really good)

1/4 cup lemon juice

1 tablespoon dijon mustard

2 tablespoons miso

1/4 teaspoon turmeric

1/4 teaspoon paprika

1/2 teaspoon each freshly chopped oregano and parsley (most herbs can be used here)

2 cloves fresh minced garlic

This can all be mixed together and it doesn't need to be cooked. It will steam in the steamer.

OK now your ready to assemble. Take a nice big corn husk and lay it out on the table. Spread a thin layer of masa onto the husk in a rectangular shape about 3" wide and 5" long. The masa should be about a 1/4 inch thick. Now add a strip longways down the middle of the tofu filling.

Now you want to fold the two exposed masa sides together so that in the end you have a tube of masa surrounding your delicious filling. Fold the extra flap of corn husk up and lay the tamale down so that the flap doesn't pop back up

Steam that tamale for 30-45 minutes.

I realize that this is going to require some better pictures so we will do that next time we do tamales (every week) so stay tuned.

One Vegan Night in Denver

Mmmmm vegan chocolate cake !

I've just returned from Denver where I was lucky enough to spend an evening with these two lovely ladies, Diva and Erin as they joined me on my vegan Denver adventure. Though not vegan themselves, they were completely open and awesome. They learned what seitan was and made up some cute jokes, like if you could make Devil's food cake with seitan. Very clever Diva, you go girl.

The first place we hit was the Mercury Cafe which is not completely vegan but more of a local sustainable organic kind of a place. There were all these cool flowers out in front and a compost pile. There was a bike rack in the front entryway and uber-cool toilets which I'll talk about later. http://www.mercurycafe.com/

The Mercury Cafe is not just a restaurant. It's quite subversive. They have extra rooms that they can do extra stuff in. They have an upstairs for dancing, yoga and what not and an extra room adjacent to the dining room for other stuff, like movies. When we got there they were watching a film about copyrighting but the girls and I decided that we had too much to talk about and we didn't want to disturb the other movie watchers.

We ordered the Vegan Grill (which I forgot to take a picture of until the end) and I must say it was some of the best tofu I've had. The flavor reminded me of chicken fried steak. It was served with a black bean sauce and a spicy kind of a duck sauce. Unfortunately, we wanted to keep the party moving but I know that anything else we would have tried would have been awesome.

The bar-none best thing about the Mercury Cafe was our fantastic server, Aimee (sp?). When we probed her about everything vegan in Denver she finally admitted her part in the soon to be world famous group Underground Carrot. http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=270751408

This group of cool kids has an underground food delivery and weekend restaurant business that is totally worth checking out. They are trying to raise money to open their own place by hosting underground dining parties which are becoming more and more legitimate. I will definitely go to one of their double top secret temporary dining sites next year if they don't have their own place by then but I hope they do.

The other cool thing about Mercury Cafe is this awesome toilet which pours the water that is destined for the basin over the top first. That way you can wash your hands after you flush. The water is perfectly good for hand washing, tooth brushing etc...

The Mercury Cafe got three thumbs up!

The next place we went was to Water Course Foods.

This picture is the mural (or painting ) that they have in the front entryway. This place is all vegetarian / vegan friendly and had a huge selection of goodies. http://www.watercoursefoods.com/menu.php
This was our sweet server Jenn (hello Jenn!)
We tried as much as we could but the menu was huge. Pictured on top are the Vegan Buffalo Wings. One of the other servers was eating this and was kind enough to offer me a bite. The wings were very good but cold. I thought they had a bit too much black pepper. I prefer mine with Louisiana Hot Sauce and nothing else. The Ranch was great.

Then we tried the Seitan Philly, The Juan Wrap and the Country Fried Seitan. The Juan Wrap was the hands down favorite. Erin experienced vegan nirvana. It was fun to witness.
We then had to explore the dessert tray which had ho ho's cupcakes, tiramisu, gluten-free chocolate cake, apple pie, and so many goodies that we had to order four even though there were only three of us. My fave was the tiramisu which was even better two days later.

I also ordered the Green Chili soup which I thought needed some tvp for more body. Other than that I believe Water Course also gets three thumbs up from the gals.

The prairie dogs give Vegan Denver two tails up!