Birthday Food: Homemade Bread, Muffalettas and Cake!

It was Mr. Bananas for Smoothies's birthday the other day, so I decided to go all-out and make him a birthday feast of his favorite foods.

I haven't made them in a couple of years, but I remember how much my hubby loved the Veggie Tempeh Muffaletta sandwiches from Eat, Drink & Be Vegan. It's a delectable mix of chopped olives, capers, red peppers (raw & roasted), sauteed tempeh, celery, green onions, garlic, red wine vinegar, and olive oil. It's salty, tangy, and uber-delish.

The filling is layered on crusty bread and topped with some avocado, spinach, and sliced tomatoes. Lousy baker that I am, I would normally have bought some bakery bread, but I took a chance and tried to make my own bread - the Sunflower Artisan Loaf from 1,000 Vegan Recipes.

Success! It rose beautifully and was super-easy to make, even for a novice like myself. In fact, the dough rose so much that I ended up splitting it into 2 loaves before baking. I just cut 5 minutes off the baking time and it came out perfectly.

I sliced one of the loaves horizontally, like so:

Then I scooped out much of the middle part in order to make room for the yummy filling:

Next, I added some sliced avocado:

Then I topped it with some sliced tomatoes and baby spinach:

Finally, I put the top back on and pressed down hard to smoosh everything together:

Finally, I used a serrated knife to cut the sandwiches in half. Here's an inside look:

I was tired after all my bread-and-muffaletta-making, so I just threw some sweet potato tots in the oven for a side dish:

My hubby was thrilled to have his beloved muffaletta sandwich again :) And he was very impressed by my attempt (and victory!) at bread baking!!

We made sure to save some room for birthday cake and ice cream. I don't make cakes very often, but I immediately thought of the delicious Apple-Cardamom Cake with Lemon-Maple Frosting from Vive Le Vegan!:

This cake is as healthy as cake can get - it is made with oat flour, whole wheat pastry flour, applesauce, spices, and a minimum of oil and (natural) sugar. The frosting is silken tofu-based and includes maple syrup, lemon juice, lemon zest, and agar powder. The best part is that you can eat an two enormous slice of this cake and not feel gross afterward. Yay for natural sweeteners and whole-grain flours!

The only thing I didn't make was homemade ice cream. Hey, that's what Trader Joe's is for! Cherry Chocolate Chip Soy Creamy....oh yeah!

Happy birthday to my sweetie!

Quinoa Salad, Two Ways

Quinoa, quinoa, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways....

You cook in just 15 minutes.

You are a complete protein.

You can take on any flavor.

You are a superfood.

Quinoa, you're pretty cool stuff.

I especially . love making quinoa salads. They are endlessly customizable, so you can take them in virtually any direction you want. One night, I was craving Greek flavors, so I made this Mediterranean Quinoa Salad from 1,000 Vegan Recipes. 

It's cooked and cooled quinoa tossed with grape tomatoes, scallions, cucumber, olives, basil, and toasted pine nuts. The dressing is made with shallot, garlic, Dijon mustard, white wine vinegar, and EVOO. It was really fresh and light, and I served it over some mixed baby greens.

The night before I left for recent vacation, I had a hodgepodge of veggies in the fridge that I needed to use up, including zucchini, baby carrots, cucumber, scallions, celery, lime, chives, and cilantro. I made some Cumin-Lime Vinaigrette from Vive Le Vegan! (to use up the lime), then tossed it with some cooled quinoa and all those veggies. You know what - it was DELICIOUS!!! Totally rocked my socks, and I was thrilled to use up that completely random assortment of veggies. 

It was so good that I wrote it down!

Colorado Cumin-Lime Quinoa Salad

2 cups cooked and cooled quinoa

1 medium zucchini, cubed

1/2 lb baby carrots, sliced

1/2 large English cucumber, cubed

6 scallions, sliced

4 stalks celery, sliced

fresh chives and cilantro, minced

Cumin-Lime Vinaigrette (I used the recipe in Vive Le Vegan!)

Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and eat!

It was so nourishing, so water-rich, and so nutrient-filled...it was the perfect thing to eat the night before a long plane ride!

Vegan MoFo Day 6: Memories of Montreal

It's sort of notable that even though I've lived in Rhode Island for 30+ years, and Canada is only about 8 hours away by car, I've only been there twice in my life. This seems wrong. It's a whole other country that I could (and should!) be exploring, and I wouldn't even have to cough up the money for a plane ticket!

Not only have I made just two trips to Canada, but both trips were to the same place: Montreal. The first time I went was with my high school French class on a field trip, circa 1995. It was a lot of fun, in the way that overnight trips with your underage classmates in a foreign country can only be fun. I mean, the drinking age is 18 in Montreal, and my classmates and I were mostly ages 16 and 17. You do the math.

What I remember most from my first trip to the Great White North are the things that typically register on the radar of most teenagers (or at least, teenagers in the mid-90's): our teacher/chaperone brought her new boyfriend along, which was...odd, and they wore matching Boston Marathon warmup jackets the entire trip, even though I'm pretty sure neither of them was a runner; we saw an IMAX movie and mostly just took pictures of each other wearing the Canadians' version of 3D glasses (which were, by the way, ENORMOUS); we saw lots of horses in the country and declared that each of them was named Maria Chapdelaine; we ate dinner at a dive bar called La Cage Aux Sports; our teacher put masking tape across our hotel room doors at night so she'd know if we tried to "escape"; someone "escaped" and tore the tape off everyone else's doors, foiling our teacher; and I woke up one night to find one classmate crawling into my hotel room through the balcony window (hi, Trevor). Let's just say that although the purpose of the trip was educational, the cultural highlights didn't exactly register in my adolescent mind. I mean, yeah, we did visit Notre-Dame, Olympic Stadium, and some weird place called the Crypt ("Please, DO NOT SIT ON THE RUINS!!"), but mostly, it was just a fun time with my school mates.

My second foray to Montreal was over Labor Day weekend in 2006. I wanted to go back and experience Montreal again (paying actual attention, this time), and my hubby was excited to make his first visit to Canada. We spent our first evening walking around Old Montreal and taking in an amazing evening light show at Notre-Dame.

I don't have any pictures of the light show itself, but here are some pics from the inside of Notre-Dame. It is, without question, one of the most beautiful churches in the entire world! It is primarily turquoise and gold on the inside (if I remember correctly), and it is exquisite.

On Saturday morning, we went for a nice long run in Mont Royal Park and then spent the day wandering around the city. I had my first real vegan meal ever at Le Commensal, a Canadian vegetarian restaurant franchise. It's the kind of place where you choose your food buffet-style and then pay by the kilogram (although now it's apparently a load-your-plate-for-one-fixed-price kind of joint). I remember having tofu for the first time here and really liking it. I also remember getting a juice-box-thingy of soymilk, which I thought was really fun. Yes, I'm five years old.

I think one of our fondest memories of Montreal, though, was running uphill from our hotel to Fairmount Bagel for Monday's breakfast. We must have run about 4 miles in the rain just to get to this little hole-in-the-wall bakery, which is renowned for having some of the best bagels around (take that, New York). We grabbed a couple of bagels and cream cheese (for my hubby), stuffed them in a paper sack, and then ran downhill in the rain back to our hotel. We sat in our room, still wet, and enjoyed the best-tasting bagels of our lives. I'm not sure if they tasted so good because 1) we were starving, 2) they were warm, and we were wet and cold, or 3) they actually were the best bagels around, but we enjoyed them nonetheless.

In honor of my two trips to Montreal, I decided to make two sorta French-Canadian-ish recipes for  dinner tonight. Okay, it's a stretch, but whatever.

First up: the Bistro Broccoli Chowder from Appetite for Reduction. Broccoli, potatoes, parsnips, onions, garlic, and rosemary are simmered together, then partially blended with some almond milk for creaminess and body. It was really tasty and the perfect choice for a cool autumn evening. And I could totally picture them serving this at a cute little bistro in Old Montreal. So there ya go.

I wanted to pay tribute to my first-ever taste of tofu at Le Commensal, so I turned to my favorite vegan Canadian cookbook author - Dreena Burton. Her recipe for Lemon-Herb Tofu in Vive Le Vegan! is one my favorites, and it was a great accompaniment to the soup. And she's Canadian. Wait, I said that already.  

I hope you enjoyed notre petit voyage a Montreal. Tomorrow we'll be making a quick stop in my home state of Rhode Island! See you then :)

My Son's First Cooking Lesson, Inspired by Mama Pea

I always love seeing an Amazon.com box on my doorstep. Yesterday, I got to witness the actual delivery itself...with gritted teeth, as I watched my mailman shove my watermelon-sized package into my cantaloupe-sized mailbox. *Sigh* At least it was only books and a CD.

The semi-mangled box contained three things I have been eagerly anticipating: Mama Pea's first cookbook, Peas and Thank You: Simple Meatless Meals the Whole Family Will Love; Vanessa Carlton's new CD (finally!!! FINALLY!!!), Rabbits on the Run; and Kristen Suzanne's Easy Raw Vegan Soups cookbook. Squee!

I immediately threw Vanessa's CD into my laptop and got it cranking while I started perusing Mama Pea's cookbook. I just love Mama Pea. I love her style and reading all about her two adorable and funny little girls, Gigi and Lulu. I showed their pictures to my son, and he declared that they were both pretty, but he was especially partial to 3-year-old Lulu :) Anyway, Mama Pea is always cooking with her girls, and it got me thinking that it was really time to start cooking with my boy. He's only 2, but he loves to help and he has lots of enthusiasm. I figured he'd be game to start his first cooking lesson.

What to make was actually a very easy decision - I wanted to make some healthy snacks for my son, so I decided we'd make two things out of Dreena Burton's second cookbook, Vive Le Vegan! I'd already made both recipes before and knew that they were not only tasty and nutritious (and toddler-approved), but also really easy to make.

First up was the Apple-Hemp Muffins:

These are wholesome, whole-grain muffins sweetened with maple syrup, cinnamon, cardamom, and applesauce. They also contain my favorite little nonpsychoactive plant, hemp. The USA is the largest importer of hemp products, and yet, it cannot be (legally) grown here. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Tee hee.

But really, the muffins were just a warm-up for the main event...the Energy Cookies.

These are so delicious, it almost seems wrong to call them healthy. When people hear "healthy cookie," they probably think of those Snackwell's cookies that taste like *$!#%^&. These actually taste GOOD. For realz. They are called Energy Cookies because they are loaded with good-for-you-stuff like sunflower seeds, hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds, raisins, carob chips, flax meal, maple syrup, and blackstrap molasses. Yes, even carob, maple syrup, and blackstrap molasses have nutrition - carob contains protein, B vitamins, calcium, and iron; maple syrup contains zinc and manganese; and blackstrap molasses is loaded with calcium and iron. All three contain more than what I listed, but these are just a few examples. Reach for these natural sweeteners and throw out the Splenda!

I wish I could say I got pictures of my son stirring the cookie batter, but let me just say, it was a struggle to keep the cookie batter in the bowl and not in my son's mouth.

Here are the cookies and muffins, chillin' out on the cooling racks.

My son was very proud of his first cooking effort, and so was I. The cookies and muffins were delicious, and he's ready to take on his next cooking challenge. I will be, too, once I finish cleaning up :)