Okay, fine: here's some food porn

I tossed this together after deciding that the recipe I bought most of the ingredients for, Spicy Mafe Tempeh, on p.95 of Vegan Soul Kitchen, was entirely too involved and time consuming to begin at 8:15pm. So, rather than go with J's time-tested and delicious Spicy Thai Peanut Sauce recipe, I decided to experiment a bit.

What I made is VERY loosely based on 1,000 Vegan Recipes, p.557. It's doubled, uses prepared crushed garlic instead of fresh (which I didn't have), uses less than double soy sauce, uses bottled lime juice, halves the water and then substitutes vodka for it, skips brown sugar, and then uses fresh jalapeños instead of crushed red pepper. Hey, I told it was loose, didn't I?



Oh, and I decided to knock out some fried tofu.

All of the ingredients except for the jalapeños, blended.

Ooooh, yeah: let's get some jalapeños in there!


Some peanut sauce and some tofu, greedily eyeing angel hair pasta.

As could be expected, the tofu and peanut sauce had its way, and it was delicious. Next time, I'd probably add more vodka to thin it out a bit, and probably top it with finely sliced scallions or chives for some color and a little flavor.

Food food porn porn!

Another installment from 1,000 Vegan Recipes: J and I wanted to cook together, and as we'd spent much of the day cleaning, we wanted to use up stuff that we already had on hand. So we picked a couple things: the vegetable paella from page 320 of 1,000 Vegan Recipes, and the chile rellenos from page 234 of 500 Vegan Recipes.

I'm also pleased to file another report for A and A2 that both recipes include COOKED MUSHROOMS, and ONIONS!

First, the vegetable paella:

Pretty good looking set of prepped ingredients, if I do say so myself: clockwise from bottom left, marinated artichoke hearts, celery, carrots, red ONIONS, MUSHROOMS, garlic, and red bell peppers in the center.

We ignored some of the directions about what stuff to cook first and what to add later.

Let's see those ONIONS and MUSHROOMS! WOO WOO!

Getting the artichoke hearts in.

Mix it all up.

With kidney beans, the red bell pepper, garlic, and vegetable broth.

All mixed up, about to add the rice:

Rice added, and now just cooking it down.

All bun! All bun!

Since it never hurts to totally massacre your previously clean and organized kitchen, we decided to make the chile rellenos simultaneously. Unfortunately, with multiple pans now in the fire, I didn't get step by step prep shots, including roasting, stemming, and seeding three poblanos and three anaheims, and mixing tofutti with soyrizo for the stuffing.

Nevertheless, moving on to some really damn oily looking pan frying.

Those look the same, right?

Looking good. Try to ignore the oil here,

and here.

This more well done one was for me. The streaky orange-ish stuff is the tofutti & soyrizo mixture.

Plated, with the paella, fresh cilantro, and soy sour cream. Yep, folks: we were living large.

And since I had some leftover red peppers, batter, and hot oil, I fried some delicious red peppers rings.

Unfortunately, the fried red pepper ring (upper right part of the plate) doesn't photograph anywhere near as delicious as it tastes.

Rest easy, A and A2: I'll curb, however temporarily, my mushroom-y and onion-y ways when you come visit. And since they will be my pillows your heads are resting on, I assure you there won't be any surprises under them.

FOOD PORN! from 1,000 Vegan Recipes

You just can't get enough, can you? C'mon, admit it: you LIKE it when I do three posts in one day with food porn. (And if you ask nicely, you just might get that third post.)

This is another recipe I cooked from 1,000 Vegan Recipes, which I mentioned in a post earlier this month, when I made seitan with chipotle sauce.

This time around, I had some broccoli I need to use, so I considered the broccoli heavy options, and went with Chinese noodles with spicy black bean sauce, on page 239. I largely follow the recipe, though I used angel hair pasta instead of Chinese noodles (I didn't want to pay $4 a box for the noodles at Whole Paycheck, and I had a ton of angel hair sitting around.) I also added tofu, which was a very good call.

Stock shot of stock tofu, just beginning to fry.

Frying the broccoli stem first, since it needs a little more time than the florets.

Did somebody say broccoli florets?

The broccoli canoodling with the tofu. Hey, give them a little privacy, would ya?

Frying up some ONIONS! Who doesn't love onions? Not any reasonable person I can think of!

The onions get a bunch of fresh grated ginger.

Then you add a mix of soy sauce, spicy black bean sauce, chili paste, and cornstarch dissolved in water.

And you reduce it down a bit.

With the broccoli and noodles added.

Overall, it was very good, though I would ratchet up the heat next time.

And still more food porn! Seitan with chipotle sauce

Roughly, this is the seitan with ancho-chipotle sauce from 1,000 Vegan Recipes by Robin Robertson, on page 310. Except that I couldn't find ancho chiles (hey, I live in midtown Atlanta, not precisely a hotbed of ethnic grocery stores.) And I didn't have dried chipotles, so I just used a defrosted chipotle from the chipotle-painted baked tofu I made last week from the same cookbook.

The basic seitan recipe (p.305), fresh from the food processor, and looking pretty damn unappetizing. Kinda looks like rubber, which was roughly its consistency as well.

And oh, it can get even less appetizing looking.

And simmering it in the water, soy sauce, and garlic doesn't do it any wonders.

Brief interjection: the random groceries are pretty appetizing looking. I had to buy bread, since J is the chief baker (and I'm too lazy to learn to bake great bread) and the fire-roasted tomatoes are an important component in the (ancho)-chipotle sauce. The cilantro just looked good. And I might whip up some potato leek soup tonight. (Does it seem like I feel the need to justify my grocery choices? Weird.)

From unappetizing to borderline alien.

And now taking on a rather unpleasant swiss-cheese look.

Okay, starting to look much more appetizing, after slicing, and dredging in cornmeal, salt and pepper and frying. Bonus points for anyone who can pick out Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Mississippi.

Alright: now this is starting to look much more like something I'd actually want to put in my body.

Here is the sauce, simmering.

And this is what happens to sauce that doesn't play nice.

The seitan cutlets, looking creepily chicken-like.

And a largely duplicative shot of the seitan cutlets post-frying.

On balance, it was delicious. The sauce recipe made way too much, but provided a nice pizza sauce for last night's pizza. (Patience, patience!)

Chipotle!

No, not the burrito chain that used to be majority owned by McDonald's. Though yesterday I was thinking about Chipotle as I was eating a mediocre burrito at Moe's Southwest Grill, since I actually would have preferred Chipotle. At Moe's they nickel and dime you for things like guacamole, resulting in your burrito costing almost $7, while at Chipotle guac is included with the vegetarian fajita burrito.

Okay, no, really: fast food burrito chains really aren't what this post is about. Rather, it's about the chipotle painted tofu I made from my recently purchased 1,000 Vegan Recipes by Robin Robertson . (Incidentally, a more interesting blog about the book called Cooking From 1,000 Vegan Recipes is available here, where six cooks are chugging their way through the recipes, with nice food porn pics to go with it.

I made the Chipotle-Painted Baked Tofu on page 288, and it was pretty delicious. I won't give the recipe, as I actually like the book enough that I think you should go out and buy it (or check it out from the library) but it basically involves making a sauce of chipotle, soy sauce, and oil, "painting" the tofu, and baking it. I did bake it on both sides, and applied more of the sauce than the recipe called for, both of which I'm happy about. When I make this again, I'd use an additional chipotle, or find two really big ones.

Enough of the blah blah blah, and on to the images:

Relax, little tofu: you'll be saved from your blandness soon enough!

The book has the helpful hint on what to do with the rest of those chipotles: wrap them up in portioned sizes, and freeze them for future use. A excellent idea, 'cause an entire can of chipotles in adobo will knock your damn block off, and most recipes call for just one or two chilis.

Here is the chiptole "paint" in the food processor. It's kinda swampy and not real attractive looking, but my picture of it isn't real good.

Here is the tofu mid-bake. The four on the right have been turned over and re-painted, while the four on the right have not yet been turned.

Since no good recipe is complete with ONIONS!, I set the extra onions from my veggie stock prep to carmelizing.

Here is the final product, ready to assemble:

And here is the plated product, on a chili-lime tortilla with carmelized onions. It was delicious, and has me pretty excited about making more recipes in the book. Speaking of which, I also made roasted vegetable stock using the book, so another post is coming up quick.