The Making of a Salad

Our good friend A2 was in town, and we cooked our asses off. Even when A2 was too smart to bottom line annoying, ultra time-intensive projects like vegan croissants. (J headed up that project, which is good, since I, as executive chef, was far too busy to head it up.)

This is a salad, step by step:

VEGGIES. (Duh?)


Organic salad greens.

With green peppers added.

The green peppers were feeling kinda lost in the forest, so they got some yellow friends.

Then the orange peppers barged in, and

some carrots crashed the party.

Then some GRAPEFRUIT(!) which I love in salad.

And who doesn't love ONIONS in salad?

No worry, A: when you come visit, we can cook MUSHROOMS!

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.

For my friends

Since I now understand that two of my closest friends whose names start with A detest onions and mushrooms, dinner two nights ago is a call out to both of you, A and A2:

Let's start with some white onions, shall we?

And how about some red onions?

Let's get those red onions up close, yeah?

And let's cook em! (not that raw red onions aren't DELICIOUS, since they are.)

Okay, sure: since you asked, we'll add the white onions to the cooking red onions.

Then toss it all together.

Then caramelize it all. YUM.

Let's cut up some delicious bell peppers: yellow, orange, red, and green.

And hey, how about some more ONIONS?!?

If A2 felt left out so far, here are some MUSHROOMS!

Oh, yum. Let's make a MUSHROOM based curry sauce.

WAIT! MUSHROOMS! YAY!

And if the MUSHROOMS weren't delicious enough, let's add some ONIONS!


And here is the DELICIOUS finished product: an ONION and MUSHROOM vegan curry! WOO WOO WOO!