Vegan MoFo: Creamy Baked Dill Mac'n'Cheez (D is for Dill)

Ever have one of those colds that just won't go away? You think it's gone, you're starting to celebrate feeling better and being able to half breathe again, and then bam! it's back! Yeah, I'm having one of those. I was feeling much recovered over the weekend, then I biked home from work in the rain on Monday and have been feeling crummy every since. Today I actually ended up feeling so gross that I left work a bit early and came home and slept on the couch for a while before getting up to make dinner.

I had planned on making something with dill from the beginning, because I just can't think of that many d foods. There's daikon, which I'd have to go up to San Jose to get, which just wasn't happening with all my other current time commitment. And of course, demerara sugar and dark chocolate... but I probably don't need a dessert-dinner right now. So I settled on dill and had planned on doing fancy savory crepes with dill and blah blah blah.

But like I said, I feel crummy. And who wants to eat crepes when feeling under the weather? Maybe you do, you nut, but I needed something a little more comfort food-y!

I realized early this afternoon that what I really wanted was mac'n'cheez. But I needed to use dill! Dill! Dill... mac and cheez? A quick google search assured me that I wasn't the first person to ever have this idea/that it couldn't really be that bad. So I plunged forward with the idea and ended up with a pretty good baked dill mac'n'cheez. Since it turned out pretty good, and since I pulled it out of my butt, I'm including the rough recipe here.



Creamy Baked Dill Mac'n'Cheez
serves 6+ (with 2 adults eating, we had copious leftovers)

1 lb whole wheat shells or other sauce-friendly noodle

Tofu ricotta:
1 lb firm tofu
juice of 1 large lemon
1 bunch fresh dill, minced
2 tsps olive oil
1/2 tsp salt

Cheezy sauce:
1/4c earth balance
3 tbsps whole wheat flour
2c unsweetened soy milk (divided into two 1c portions)
1 tbsp sweet paprika
8 oz mozzarella daiya

Topping:
1c whole wheat panko or other bread crumbs
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsps olive oil
olive oil spray

1. Prepare noodles according to package, then give them a rinse and set them aside to drain.

2. Crumble the tofu into a bowl. Add in all the other ricotta ingredients (lemon juice, dill, salt, olive oil) and mash together with a potato masher or other implement of squishing. Set tofu ricotta aside.



(I'm sure you've seen dill ricotta before but here's mine... mmm.... dill...)

3. Preheat oven to 375 and lightly spray a big casserole pan with cooking spray.
4. Melt 1/4c earth balance over low heat in a large sauce pan. (Everything is going to end up in this pan at one point, so really, bigger = better here.)
5. Add the flour and cook, stirring frequently, til it smells toasty and good. Mine took about 4 minutes.
6. Add 1c of soy milk, whisking as you pour. Whisk/stir until absolutely smooth. Reserve the rest of the soy milk for the time being.
7. Stir in the sweet paprika. This will probably make your mixture a startling color, but don't worry, it will mellow out.
8. Increase heat to medium and watch for the roux/milk mixture to approach a simmer.
9. Dump in the Daiya and stir, stir, stir. You need to stir a ton to get that stuff melting. As it begins melting, you will need to add more soy milk-- up to another cup-- in order to get this nice and creamy. Keep stirring and adding milk to that sucker is smooooooth.

10. Turn off heat and mix in your cooked noodles.
11. Fold in the dill ricotta.
12. Pour/scoop mixture into your prepared casserole dish and smooth out the top with a spatula.

13. Mix together the topping ingredients (bread crumbs, salt, pepper, olive oil) in a small bowl. Then sprinkle evenly over the top of the noodles in the casserole dish.
14. For extra crispy yumness, lightly spray the top of the casserole-- the breadcrumb topping layer-- with olive oil spray.

15. Pop that bad boy in the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes, til the topping is golden and crunchy.

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Whew. Sounds like a lot of steps but it took me less than an hour... and I bet it'd be less on a second go. I'm sure there are ways to streamline it.

I was surprised by how much I liked the combo of dill + mac and cheez. Really yummy. Not pickle-y at all, which is what I was afraid of. The whole thing would have been a little on the bland side without the dill, which kicked it up a bit.

Also, I think I finally understand crunchy topping... I hated that stuff as a kid but now I'm like crunchy mac? YES YES. It seems like all the crumb toppings I ever had on mac as a kid were kind of um, mushy. This one was so good tonight though. Look at it:



Crispy crunchy yummy good. Definitely helped bring me out of my cold-induced funk.

Oh, you know who else is in a funk today? The Emperor. He didn't nap at preschool and he was in a BAD mood. We had a big to-do over dinner-- which he would not even try. I eventually cut up a leftover seitan cutlet for him because I don't want to deal with him waking up at 2 a.m. because he's starving (nor do I really want him to go through that either) which was our compromise. It just slays me when I make something I know he likes (mac and cheez) and he won't even try it. Oh, 2 year olds.

Here he is looking adorable amid his sea of tantrums, though:

Vegan MoFo: Duo of cashew cheeses (C is for Caraway, Cumin, and Coriander!)

Oh my goodness. Are there ever a lot of delicious things that start with C or what? When I was making my list of MoFo dishes, I picked caraway for C because I love caraway seed and need to put it in my mouth more often. The first recipe I found when looking for something to use caraway in was a (non-vegan) cheeseball rolled in caraway seeds. That sounded really good to me, and I've been meaning to try the Vegetarian TImes Cashew Goat Cheese recipe for years. Literally years!

When I looked through the recipe and realized that I was going to be sinking 24 hoursish into making it, I decided to double the batch because hey, twice as much cashew cheese for the same amount of time invested seems like a good deal. On considering, I decided to roll the second cheese log in cumin & coriander seed because a) they're so delicious and b) they both start with c!

You know what else starts with C though? CATASTROPHE. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but I can't think of a word that starts with C for a minor calamity...

My cheese never really set up. The VT recipe is supposed to lead to logs of cashew cheese resembling logs of goat cheese. I think they're supposed to have a semi-solid skin on the outside, then creamy cheese inside. But I baked and baked and baked these... going for a full 20 minutes longer than the recipe called for... and it was no use, the cheese really didn't change in texture much at all during baking.

Oh well. I decided to just mix the spices in (since rolling was not going to happen) and eat these like creamy soft cheese spreads. They were still quite delicious.

Here's the caraway seed:



I really liked the caraway flavor, though it was very straightforward. I think I should have either chopped up the caraway seed or toasted it or both though... the pieces were just a little big for this application.

And here's the toasted cumin and coriander:



I toasted them in a dry cast iron pan until fragrant, then whacked them with the back of a (metal) measuring cup in order to crack the coriander up a bit and release a little more of the cumin flavor/scent. I thought this would taste really odd alongside the caraway cheese, but actually, it was a nice compliment-- my brain kept telling me that there was something very similar between the two. Maybe the earthiness of the cumin reflected in the caraway? Dunno.

Since I sank so much time (okay, most of it inactive, but nevermind that) into the cashew cheeses, the rest of dinner had to be basically 0 effort. So here's our spread, replete with other delicious C foods-- carrots, celery, crackers (whole wheat and rice), chickpeas (in the form of leftover hummus), and Corning olives (olives from Corning, CA).



Waaaay too much food for the three of us, even with a nice leisurely grazing dinner pace. That's okay. I'll take the leftover vegetables & olives to work with me for snack tomorrow, the leftover cashew cheese and hummus will go in the fridge and be snacked on, and the crackers can go back in the cabinet.

Not quite done yet though. We had dessert tonight. On a weeknight! You might think based on my MoFo posts this year that we have dessert at least 2/3rds of the time. This is, however, false. I am basically always too lazy to make dessert, it's just coincidence that we've now had it twice in a week. Today's dessert was inspired by the crummy weather... cold and rainy, right on the heels of an absolutely gorgeous weekend. C is for cheer up! and also cinnamon and cardamom and coconut milk, three key ingredients in this rice pudding:



It's the Joy of Vegan Baking rice pudding (week 3 of the PPK Cookbook Challenge!) made with coconut milk, with a little bit of cardamom (scraped out of the inside of the pods... I don't seem to have any straight up ground cardamom) and cinnamon in it. Very tasty. I got about a 1/4 serving because the Emperor mooched all the rest of it.

Speaking of which, my dinner spread picture was missing one of the original ingredients today, as shown in your bonus picture. I had a dish of kalamata olives out while I was putting the other stuff on the table, and this guy invited himself up for a bite:





He ate the entire dish, then asked for more. He's a kalamata monster.

Vegan MoFo: Spiced seitan tacos with bourbon reduction (B is for Bourbon)

Day two of MoFo! Yay! So I have something to confess to you guys. I sat down ahead of time and planned out the first full week of MoFos... A through G, what dishes I was going to make, what recipes I was going to use. Very responsible! Very organized!

Then I promptly lost the list, somewhere between making it and going to the grocery store to get supplies. Oops.

I realized I had misplaced it while we were in the car going to the grocery store. I mentioned it to my husband, who was half listening to me drone on about cooking/food the same way that I politely half-listen to him natter on about tanks and electronic music and such. "What," I wondered aloud, "starts with B that you can eat? Other than bananas? I think maybe I was going to do black pepper."

(Silence.)

"Or... bourbon?" I said. "Or berries or black beans or--"

"You could do a bourbon reduction. Didn't we see that on Top Chef? I have some bourbon. You could use my bourbon," Josh kindly offered.

And from there, we were off and running! He suggested doing tofu tacos with a bourbon sauce. I had already been planning on making the Savory Seitan out of American Vegan Kitchen for the last day of week 2 of the PPK Cookbook Challenge, so I suggested using that as the filling instead and he agreed that sounded tasty. We pulled out some swiss chard from the farmer's market and sauteed that as a side et voila, dinner was served.

J is practically peeing himself with anticipation over this post, he's so happy with how dinner turned out. But before I soothe his ego by posting about his masterpiece on the internets, I need to take a moment to talk about the AVG seitan.

The AVG seitan? IT IS GREAT. I kind of waffled on making it for this. I didn't have enough vital wheat gluten and didn't want to go to the grocery store and was almost like "let's just use tofu" and "jeez do I really need one more seitan recipe in my repetoire?" Answer to the latter: YES! yes you do! I am a biiiiig texture person and I have to tell you, this seitan has an amazingly excellent texture. Chewy, but not rubbery, or dense, or brainy, or gross in any other way. Just really great. The flavor's good too, good enough that you can just eat this stuff on its own.

And it's good that it's such great seitan because man, it is a lot of work. You have to fry and THEN bake the seitan! And this is after making them into cutlets! Here they are after the frying step. Aren't they beautiful?



By the way, you know how you make seitan cutlets if you are really lazy? Do not break out the rolling pin and the wax paper. That is way too much work for way too little pay off. Take out your tortilla press instead! Put a ball of seitan dough in it and squash it flat, just like you would a tortilla. Seitan will probably ooze out the sides of the press, but that's okay... you get a super thin circle and then when you open up the press, it'll spring back into exactly the right size and shape to form a nice cutlet.



Okay okay. Seitan, shmaytan. I know you want the good stuff, so on to the spiced seitan with bourbon reduction etc etc. (J says: UNCLE BOURBAN! ... no one will get the reference.)

This is really a simple recipe, but the bourbon lends it a certain je ne sais quoi-- it has nuances, people. Nuances! We based our version on an uncredited pork (yuck) recipe we found on the interwubs, so this is not an original brand new creation, but I'm posting our take on it anyway so you know that it veganizes really easily and really well.

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Spiced Seitan Tacos with Bourbon Reduction
makes 8 small tacos

Ingredients:

Bourbon sauce
1c bourbon
1/2c dark brown sugar
1/2c reduced sodium soy sauce (if you use full sodium, this will be salty as hell)
6 tbsps apple cider vinegar
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp ground black pepper

Seitan:
1lb seitan, cut into strips (a half recipe of Savory Seitan from American Vegan Kitchen, or your seitan of choice)
1 teaspoon chili powder
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 tbsps olive oil

To serve:

8 small corn tortillas, store bought or homemade

1. Put all the sauce ingredients (bourbon, brown sugar, soy sauce, ACV, garlic, pepper) in a small sauce pan and whisk well to combine.
2. Bring mixture to a boil.
3. Reduce heat to medium and simmer until reduced by half (leaving you with ~1c sauce), 15-20 minutes, stirring often.

4. While bourbon sauce reduces, prepare the seitan. Combine chili powder, cinnamon, allspice, and salt, then add to a medium mixing bowl along with seitan strips. Toss to coat.
5. Heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a pan (we used cast iron) over medium heat.
6. Add the spiced seitan strips and cook, stirring frequently, til browned on the outsides, 10 minutes or so.

7. If using pre-made corn tortillas, warm them while heating the seitan & reducing the bourbon sauce. Keep them soft by wrapping the heated tortillas in a towel.
8. When sauce is adequately reduced and seitan is browned, remove both sauce & seitan from heat. Divide the seitan evenly among eight tortillas and top with a couple spoonfuls of sauce.
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How was it? It was freaking delicious. A little on the salty side-- you definitely don't want to use full sodium soy sauce here, and I'd say that if you're not a salt person, you might even want to halve the soy sauce and make up the difference with water. It's also got a real sweetness to it that's part of its charm. Between the sugar and the bourbon, this tastes caramel-like at times. The seitan stands up nicely to the sauce without overpowering it (despite the huge pile o' spices). True delight.

The only disappointment was the corn tortillas. We used store bought and they were just too tough. I'm kind of spoiled on homemade tortillas ever since Viva Vegan came out and really we should have just made our own... next time!

We had dessert a few hours after this, because B isn't just for Bourbon. It's also for Berries! Strawberries! We had some that were on their way out, so I sliced them up and put them into Mom's Tapioca Pudding from American Vegan Kitchen. I added a little nutmeg on top because I put nutmeg on everything. (Guess what we're doing for the letter N people?!) Delicious.



Love how bright pink it was in the loaf pan I let it cool in.



Closeup of a serving... not as fantastically pink, but a little more appealing overall.

The Emperor loved both dinner and dessert. He kept asking for more seitan... more seitan... more seitan. And then more tapioca, more tapioca, more tapioca. He is really annoyingly choosy about food at home these days (though he'll eat whatever they put in front of him at preschool... what gives, kid?) so to have two nights in a row where he actually ate dinner-- that's exciting.

Here's your bonus picture of him, by the way, a little earlier in the day. He ate that entire pear, core and stem and all. He is cool like that.

Vegan MoFo: Apple Crisp (A is for Apple)

Hello blogging world! I'm back for my fourth year of MoFo blogging in a row! This year, for the first time ever, I have a THEME! An alphabet theme!

Maybe you can tell by my overuse of exclamation points above: I'm excited to be back and blogging. I always mean to keep doing it after MoFo but somehow it always peters out a couple days later. Maybe 2011 is our year, baby. We'll see.

Anyway: on to A. Aren't all things that start with A absolutely amazing? (Ach, ailiteration!) All edibles, anyhow. You have avocado, allspice, anise, ancho peppers, artichokes, arugula, almonds, amaretto... um, I can keep going like this for some time. So you might wonder why I chose to start off my alphabet challenge with the humble apple.

Well, three reasons:

1. Apples are awesome.

2. I had a big basket of them leftover from the Emperor's second birthday party last weekend. One of our wonderful friends brought these absolutely great apples from her apple trees and I think due to there being SO MUCH FOOD to start with, they didn't get eaten at the party. I wanted to do something cool with them before they started to get mushy.

3. It's fallllllllll! What says "October" more than the start of apple season? I know some of you are thinking "pumpkins." You people are wrong.

One of the many great qualities of apples is that you really don't need much to tart them up. They're just so freakin' GOOD on their own. I thought about a lot of different fancy things that I could do with my giant basket of apples and kept coming back to a very simple apple crisp. I used the recipe from Tamasin Noyes' American Vegan Kitchen (hey there, PPK cookbook challenge!) which produced this:





Thoughts on the recipe/how it turned out: the recipe makes a LOT of topping. Like, 3 times as much crumble as I usually put on top of a crisp. I'm not complaining... it was really delicious. Just definitely more of a "treat" apple crisp than a weeknight dessert (or in this case, weekend breakfast, heh) crisp.

I think I sliced the apples too thin though. About half of them totally disintegrated into almost apple-sauce like liquidiness. Maybe I was a little overzealous with the mandoline.

Didn't manage to get a good picture of the Emperor eating this, but he loved it. At one point he was chanting "more more more please! more more more please!"

Back tomorrow with More More More MoFo!

PS: your daily bonus picture of the Emperor. Doesn't he look like a million years older than he was at MoFo last year?

I know, I know...

Thursday and Friday gave me the old 1-2 punch. Boy, has it been a busy week.

But guess what? We had actual good food (at least for dinner) both days, and I took pictures of it. I'm just too tired/lazy/etc to post about it right now.

Tomorrow I will do a WHIRLWIND three day post and you will MARVEL.

2/2/11 - Wednesday is still market day

Another rush job tonight. The Emperor had a late nap and is still awake at 9 p.m. so I need to go try to convince him to sleep more vigorously in a moment.




We got off to a late start, so we stopped in at Trader Joe's and got a Clif bar. The Emperor ate one bite of this and then handed it back to me. He wasn't impressed. I didn't really like it either... some of the flavors are okay, but this one tasted like moldy apple crisp. Yuck.



We got this cherry-cashew food bar thing at TJ's as well. This was actually a hit with both of us... he ate a bit over half of it and I ate the rest. I think I could recreate this based on the ingredients... it's mostly dates, dried cherries, cashews, and brown rice protein powder. Simple, but tasty.



Burrito from PlanetFresh in downtown Santa Cruz. The burrito-- in the foil-- is a brown rice and black bean burrito on a whole wheat tortilla with smoked tofu added. The salsa is their very delightful smoky chipotle salsa, which I could literally drink out of a cup. It's so good. The burrito seemed extra huge today... the Emperor ate almost a third of it and still, I was so stuffed that we left all of the chips except the one he's eating here. For $5, I think their gigantic burritos are really a steal of a lunch deal.



A clementine. This is actually the second clementine we'd eaten today. He at the first at the farmer's market, along with half of my white guava. And two bites of two different types of pear, and a bite of blood orange, and a bite of navel orange. He really hit the fruit HARD today. He also had a banana this morning. Fruit monster!



Our farmer's market haul. The butternut squash is old, and some of the onions are from last week, but all the other produce in this picture came from today.

Not pictured: a New Orleans iced coffee with soymilk from Lulu's at the market. Cold brewed coffee made with chicory, plus housemade vanilla bean syrup, plus milk. So freaking good. This might be my new weekly market treat.



Another sinkless dinner, sigh. We had a baguette with baba ganoush, roasted garlic and olives, marcona almonds, korean spinach, and wine. Delicious, but neither particularly healthy nor particularly cost effective.

Today's bonus picture: the Emperor's lunch is interrupted by a very important phone call!

2/1/11 - We're baaaack!

Hey! Guess what! I've decided to food blog daily again. My long-term goal is to do it three months running, because I'm crazy like that. But my short term goal is just to get through February.

This is part of my ongoing healthier living attempts which I'll talk about some other time. You're going to have a laugh about that when you see what we ate today... but I can explain. Our kitchen sink has been out of commission for about three days now and we're trying to create as few dishes as possible. So eating things at home that require any prep at all is kind of out. It's a major bummer, but we're hoping the sink will be better soon.

Anyway, here's today!



Toast with tofurky!



A clementine! The Emperor loves these suckers and ate about 85% of this one. We split another one later in the day, and an apple too.


Crackers and coffee. Crackers for the Emperor, coffee for me. These crackers are really nice... they seem to consist mainly of sunflower seeds. I've got the huge urge to see if I can recreate them at home. To that end, I bought a cup or two of sunflower seeds from the bulk bins today.


BEER.


Take out from The Red Pearl in Boulder Creek, CA. It's a pretty nice tempeh vegetable stirfry in spicy garlic hot sauce on a bed of brown rice. I asked for it extra spicy, and they delivered. One of the best things I've had from them. They're pretty basic Chinese food, but the service is excellent and the staff is beyond nice. We're glad they're just up the street from us for nights like this.

More tomorrow!

And PS, just because... here's your bonus picture: