Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Easy Peasy Spring Eatin'

Spring is time for enjoying the outdoors and throwing quick, good food together so you can get back out there and garden, play, swing, you know what I mean.

Vegan African Sweet Potato StewOkay, I realize this looks like it could be the cat's dish (we don't currently have a cat so it isn't), but get past the picture. I rarely if ever use RecipeZaar, but I needed to use up a sweet potato and coconut milk so I searched and found this recipe. The kids always like African stew, but I didn't have all the ingredient for the recipe I usually make. I served this over coconut quinoa (just use the rest of the coconut milk in the quinoa and reduce the water by that amount) instead of brown rice and it was so good I didn't get a picture until I was packing the leftovers for Rob in his To-Go Ware for lunch the next day. I ran out of quinoa and did use brown rice for the boy's lunch, but it was just as good. I would probably add kale next time, but it was very good as is.
This is a sort of typical lunch or quick dinner this time of year. We made pasta with a basic tomato sauce earlier in the week and I used the leftover sauce and leftover steamed broccoli from Dema's favorite snack (steamed broccoli dipped in tahini dressing), added some carrots and put it all on a Vicolo corn pizza crust with a little nutritional yeast sprinkled on and some minced garlic. While the oven was preheating I made some "popcorn chickpeas". I think I got this idea from Eat, Drink, and Be Vegan, but I'm not sure since I am literally always reading a different cookbook these days and I used some All-Season Blend (nutritional yeast, salt, onion granules, paprika, garlic granules, dried parsley, turmeric, dried thyme, dried marjoram, ground dill) from The Uncheese Cookbook to coat the chickpeas after putting a little olive oil on them. You could use use olive oil and nutritional yeast and red pepper flakes or a little Bragg's or whatever you like. Ever since making the vegan feta, I keep some of the All-Season Blend in recycled glass jar in the fridge. I use it for coating tofu and frying it and all sorts of other things I would use just straight nutritional yeast for. The boys can't get enough of the chickpeas and they are done about the time the oven is ready for the pizza and nothing could be easier. We added some strawberries and almonds and raisins to round out the meal. The picture is Parker's plate, but he ate about twice this amount of everything and Dema also had seconds.

3 comments:

fredbunch said...

Hey - Hope you and your crowd are all doing good. I had a question for you: I found a recipe for lentil spaghetti and it called for 2 cans of lentils. The only lentils I could find at Wal-Mart were dry in a bag. Will these work? Maybe you can't answer unless you see the recipe. You always seem to be able to modify recipes with no problems, so I thought I'd ask.

In our efforts to eat healthy and conserve money, we tried our first tofu dish tonight. It was less than a hit! I could eat it but continued to follow it with large spoonfuls of Annie's mac and cheese. The children definitely didn't like it but at least they tried it. It was baked with the following items all mixed up for marinade: barbecue sauce, peanut butter, canola oil, and minced garlic. There's another recipe in that book that's called Tofu Marinara. Maybe we'll try that one.

I've tried written-out journals of all the funny things that happen around here, but never could stick with it. Now I'm going to try blogging. My blog is called fredbunch, though I'm not sure of exactly what to type in to get there. It's the same Google blog as yours.

Tell Rob and the children hello.

Shawna said...

Linda,
Could you detail the popcorn chickpeas recipe (or send to me directly)? Darshan loves chickpeas.
--Shawna

VeganLinda said...

Shawna, I sent you an email because I hate to post recipes out of cookbooks, but I've also used just a little sea salt, a lot of nutritional yeast, olive oil, and red pepper flakes with good results. I made some today for lunch while the water was boiling for pasta I heated up the chickpeas in the oven and some tomato sauce on the stove. It all gets done around the same time and the kids have something quick before they are out on their bikes again.