Vegan Mofo- day... whatever: cooking catchup

So, I really did sign up for Vegan MoFo with the best of intentions... but then again, there is probably a reason that I don't blog all that frequently. That reason being, life is freaking busy! So, although I have not been posting every day, I sure have been cooking.

Above is a pic of our CSA farmshare I picked up last week: lots of kale, raspberries, yellow beans and radishes. The only thing that I haven't used any of yet is the radishes... there are just so many and I'm not a huge radish fan, so I'm a bit overwhelmed with them. I'll figure something out though, I kept thinking I'll try roasting them.

Here's another loaf of breadmachine bread, yep, we eat lots of bread and love it. This is a fluffy white loaf, if anyone is interesting in recipe, just let me know :)

Here's a big bowl of salt and vinegar kale chips. Kale chips are the best! I chopped up a bunch of kale, tossed with 1 Tb olive oil, 1 Tb malt vinegar and cooked at 350, for 20 min, turning once. Then I tossed with sea salt. So yummy!

Here's some more of that gooey cheez (leftover from the Tempeh Tuna Melts), I added some diced red onion and chili paste in it.

I made some "naan" bread (not authentic... probably more of a roti). Rolled out little rounds of it.
Then put some of that spicy cheez on the middle of one dough round, topped with another round , sealed edges with a bit of water.

Then fried up in my castiron skillet. Again... I'll post recipe if anyone wants it.

Wowza! Delicious!!! I also made some naan bread without the spicy cheez (the flat bigger ones in the pic). This was brought as a contribution to dinner at the hubby's dad's house. It all got gobbled up along some killer chickpea-cauliflower curry (yay! for non-vegan family cooking awesome vegan food).

Oh, and I contributed dessert for that dinner too :) Raspberry cobbler! Damn damn damn. This was good stuff. I used the berry cobbler recipe out of The Joy of Vegan Baking (super awesome cookbook!!!).

Vegan MoFo day 4- kale time!

Sorry we missed yesterday... but we're back!!!

Tonight's dinner was quite yummy and nutritious. I picked up our CSA farm share yesterday and it was full of kale (4 bunches), radishes (4 bunches---what the heck am i going to do with all these radishes? do i LOOK like a Fraggle?), 2 big bags of yellow beans and 4 little tubs of raspberries!

So... I knew dinner was going to include kale, I also had sweet potatoes. So I tried my old technique of typing "kale sweet potato" into Google and seeing what inspiration found me.

I found this recipe, and (since I had pretty much all the ingredients on hand) I got to work. Came out great :) I served it over basmati rice.

sweet potato-chickpea curry with mellow yellow rice

Have I ever told you how much I love Indian food? Well I do, but I have NO CLUE how to cook it authentically, my lack of knowledge doesn't stop me from trying! I think my attempts are yummy :)

Last night, I satisfied the Indian craving.. I made a curry with a sweet potato, chickpeas, onion, garlic, ginger, curry powder and coconut milk. (I also added in other spices... like cumin, cinnamon, salt and pepper). I basically started with the aromatic veggies, added in the spices and coconut milk, chopped sweet potato and chickpeas.. then let it come together on the stovetop for 45 minutes.

I also made a yummy mixed yellow rice. I had like 3/4 cup of brown rice and 2/3 cup of basmati rice left in the cabinet, so not really enough for a full dinner, I decided to combine them into a sort of pilaf. During my lazy sunday afternoon, I had cooked the rices separately in the rice cooker, then let cool. When it was almost time for dinner, I cooked up a lil onion in some earth balance, added a teaspoon of turmeric, then fried the rice in. I used my regular chinese fried rice technique, and it worked great! I think saffron would have been an awesome flavor, but I'm too poor and the turmeric did the mellow yellow job. I also steamed some kale for a nutritious side of greens.

I wish I could have posted a "recipe" for this... but whenever I make a curry I never measure, and just keep adding random spices until I'm happy with the flavor.

Kale and Peanut Noodles

I wanted to cook up some kale that I got from the Greenmarket last weekend, so I steamed it, then sprinkled a lil salt, nutritional yeast, grated some nutmeg and ground some black pepper. Delicious! Kale is so nutritious and really yummy!

The peanut noodles are multi-whole grain angel hair tossed with my easy peanut sauce :)

ingredients: (these are estimates, I'm not really into measuring...)
about 1 cup crunchy peanut butter
3 cloves garlic- pressed
1 squirt Siracha sauce
2 Tb brown sugar
2 Tb Bragg's
1 Tb tomato paste
2 Tb fresh chopped cilantro
1 Tb rice vinegar
2 cups hot starchy pasta water (more or less)

-stir it all together and put on pasta, yum yum!