Ah... Vegan comfort food!

I have been so incredibly lazy today.  I did spend about half an hour cleaning up the kitchen (kind of…), and I started a load of laundry (at 5:00), but other than that I haven’t really done much of anything today except up my post number on PPK’s forums.  Shameful…

In an effort to redeem myself, I decided to make a nice dinner for Sean and me, since the kidlets are with their dad this week.  I really wanted mashed potatoes, and I knew I had a few left that needed to be used pretty soon before they started sprouting.  I made them with some soy milk, Earth Balance margarine, and about a clove or so of minced garlic.  I made the basic broiled tofu recipe from Veganomicon.  Then I steamed some broccoli and cauliflower.  I put fresh garlic pepper over everything and sprinkled some crushed red pepper over the tofu.  Simple flavors, easy preparation, and delicious to boot.  And lots of leftovers!  All those things make me happy.  ☺

Creamy and delicious!

Sean put himself in charge of dessert.  He really wanted to try the whole Vita Mix ice cream thing again.  This time, we left the lid on.  *grin*  Yay no more broken tampers!  He was going to make strawberry, but we didn’t have quite enough strawberries for what the recipe called for.  So he added some peaches and a frozen banana to get the fruit weight up to where it needed to be.  Then he added some coconut extract.  I think that almond would have been nice, too.  He used what was left of the vanilla soymilk we made yesterday.  Despite running the blender just a bit too long (it shut itself off—yay overheating!), it ended up perfect as soft-serve ice cream.  The coconut extract was a little stronger than I would have liked—maybe we should scale it back a little bit next time.  But it was creamy and light without being overly sugary sweet.

I have decided that in the name of keeping myself sane, I’m going to start making a monthly meal plan.  I’ve had to throw away so much stuff that I bought and never used because I either forgot about it or changed my mind, and it’s just sickening to me.  I’m still going to try to incorporate at least one or two new recipes a week since we’re embarking on this vegan journey, though.  After all, when you eat the same stuff for 36 years, a drastic change like going vegan means you have to experiment to find what you like and what you don’t.  Without some wiggle room for experimentation, this new lifestyle could get really boring really fast.  And it requires more than just veganizing old recipes.  Doing this is going to make grocery shopping a lot easier, too, which will hopefully save us some money in the long run.

I’m not expecting myself to turn into June Cleaver overnight, but I am hoping that I’ll have made a decent dent in my new stay-at-home-mom persona by the end of the year.  So now I’m armed with a master shopping list, a 30-day meal planning calendar, and a dream…  Wish me luck!

Chana Masala--the gateway Indian food.

This is what I made for dinner tonight—a rip off of the Chana Masala recipe on VegWeb.  I made it fully expecting a fight from the children.  After all, it looks a little weird, especially for kids who have grown up with the whole meat-and-potatoes mentality (ideally, chicken nuggets and French fries).  I dished it up over whole wheat couscous, gave them each a big glass of water (for the subsequent gagging that I fully expected), and settled myself in at the dining room table for the fight to ensue.

Daniel got to the table first.  He sat down, asked what was in his bowl, took a deep breath, and lifted the first forkful.  Sylvie plowed through it after she asked what was in it—tomatoes, carrots, onions, and chickpeas with some Indian spices.  Not one complaint.  Not a word was spoken to the tune of, “I don’t like it…”  They both finished their dinners, and I wondered if I should have given them more since I only gave them about a quarter of a serving each in the interest of cutting down on the food waste.  I’m totally going to make that again for them sometime soon.  It’s one of my favorite dishes, and now that I know that they’ll eat it, I might start to branch out with some other Indian food.  Victory is mine!  Hah!!

On a sad note, though, I broke the tamper for the Vita Mix tonight.  Only had the thing for two days, and I broke it already.  ☹  From what I read when I was looking on Amazon for replacements, though, it’s a pretty common occurrence.  The review that made me feel the best about my stupidity was this one:

“So you dropped your Vitamix tamper into the blender?” February 2, 2009
By Jeff A. Stucker “Jeff A. Stucker” (Eagle, ID United States)
Well, join the club. This is the replacement for that chewed up part. Next time, let’s make sure the lid is on when we use the tamper, okay? (Doh!)”

Thanks, Jeff—I’ll definitely remember this little piece of advice!

The disaster happened when I was trying to make ice cream, which looks incredibly easy on the videos.  Either I did something wrong, or I’m just too impatient for my own good, but I messed up.  I pulled the lid off while it was doing its thing to check on it, and then tried to use the tamper to mix things up a bit more.  Sean told me afterward that he tried to say something to me like, “Hey, maybe you shouldn’t do that…”, but I couldn’t hear him over the noise of the blender.  And then the tamper ended up hitting the blades—not good.  This is what happens when the tamper hits the blades:

There's a reason they tell you not to use the tamper with the lid off...

The good news was twofold:  Amazon offers a replacement tamper for about $11 plus shipping, so we should have one here before the end of next week.  Sean also read somewhere about a guy who used a carrot in place of his tamper when he was in a similar situation, so at least we have a back up method while we’re waiting for the new one.  The other good news was that the ice cream actually came out okay (once I dug the bits of plastic out of it, of course):

I promise that any black flecks you may see are actually Newman's Own cookie pieces, not broken tamper bits.

And somehow, after this Adventure in Kitchen-Land, Sean convinced me to make a pizza.  At first, I thought he wanted to bake it at 10:00 at night, which I thought was completely insane.  Then he mentioned something about Alton Brown’s suggestion to freeze a pizza crust overnight and then bake it the next day.  Ah.  Well, fine.  But I still ended up with dough all over my hands and much more mess than I had really wanted to deal with after everything else today.  And now that I actually read his suggestions, I see that AB actually said to refrigerate the dough overnight, not freeze it.  And to refrigerate it in ball, not spread out on a pan like I have mine right now.  Darn.  Oh, well.  It’s Sean’s baby tomorrow, I think. 

I’ll be sure to post pictures of that monstrosity masterpiece—right after I get back from a Whole Foods run for more vegan mozzarella.