Pasta and Salad

I did a bit of shopping today and then went set about cooking dinner. I love bagged salad mixes--they're prewashed, so all you need to do is dump them in a bowl and toss in the rest of your salad fixings. I grated a couple of carrots, cut up a couple of Roma tomatoes and a Gala apple, threw in some golden raisins and some peanuts, and made a lovely Sesame Ginger dressing from Garden of Vegan. I love these little condiment bottles I get at Bed, Bath & Beyond. They're the size of your average bottle of dressing, but you can use them over and over. The only thing I don't like about them is there is no removable tip, so I have to cut off the tip of the lid to squeeze. They also work well for frosting cupcakes if you aren't doing any fancy swirly stuff.

I found a couple of really neat recipes in last Wednesday's Washington Post Food section. This is a recipe for Udon Noodles with Baby Bok Choy. Wow--a vegan recipe from the Post. What a shocker. Well, I didn't have udon noodles (or the sub of linguini), so I used whole wheat fettuccine instead. It was pretty tasty, although I don't eat pasta enough that I have a handle on the taste and texture of whole wheat pasta. And since I had more pasta than the recipe called for, I could very well have used that third head of bok choy that was in the package I picked up at Trader Joe's last week. Still, with the salad, it was a very nice dinner. I topped that off with a bowl of Purely Decadent Pomegranate Chip "ice cream" (well, they call it non-dairy dessert, probably because they can't legally call it ice cream). This was some seriously good stuff. I typically put chocolate syrup on my ice cream, but when I discovered I was out of syrup, I ate it plain. This is some good stuff. You must get some NOW (oh, okay, if the store is closed, wait until it opens and get it then).

I have become a bit of a pomegranate freak since they became popular. I love pomegranate blueberry juice and pomegranate molasses flavoring. Clif Nectar bars, their almost raw division, has a new pomegranate cherry bar that rocks. I think I love it almost more than their dark chocolate and walnut flavor, which has served as my chocolate fix at work on a few occasions.

And I totally forgot to mention in my post of last week that if you're a guy, you should eat lots of cooked tomato products. Pasta with marinara sauce (and veggie meatballs), pizza with tons of veggies (no cheese), recipes with tomato sauce, tomato paste, or processed tomatoes--eat up. Tomatoes have lycopene, an antioxidant, and eating them helps prevent prostate cancer. It is most bioavailable when the tomatoes are cooked or processed, but it's still not a terrible idea to put some in your salad anyway. Even ketchup on your veggie burger will provide you lycopene.

I wonder what special benefits it has for women. Either way, I'll try to eat more of them.

'Bobs on the Barbie

Okay, so it's not really a barbecue, but "Grilling Kabobs" would have been a really dull title, don't you think? I bought a container of mixed up chopped onions and peppers (and a couple of mushrooms--what's up with that? I want more shrooms, dammit!), threaded them with some tempeh chunks on leftover skewers from the last kabobs I bought, brushed on some Annie's Naturals Paradise Marinade and grilled them in my lovely grill pan that I so adore. I had way more veggies than I had room for on the skewers, so after the skewers were done, I just tossed the unthreaded veggies in the grill pan and stirred them around for a bit until they had cooked up some. I also had some Lundberg's rice pilaf and cooked that up, for a nice, healthy (I hope) dinner. The rice could use a little more flavor--maybe next time I'll use half broth and half water to cook it or toss in some seasonings. But it's still pretty good, and I'd get it again.

Earth Day was yesterday, Sunday. And everyone talks about global warming and how to be environmentally friendly. The local paper was asking its readership for their tips, so of course, I wrote in. I said, go vegan and gave a few stats on just how wasteful the animal products industries are and how horribly they pollute the earth. And yes, I backtracked a bit; I realize not everyone can or will go vegan. But just sharply reducing your consumption of animal products will help. And to my suprise and delight, they published my letter, although a little hacked up. The EPA itself states that runoff from factory farms pollutes groundwater more than all other industrial sources combined, and the UN states that raising animals for food generates more greenhouse gases than all the cars and trucks in the world combined. Don't believe me? Know a skeptic? Have them Google "animal products global warming" and see how many hits you get that say, yes, meat production causes some serious environmental problems. And just because meat production is worse than SUVs, that doesn't give you a pass. If you must own a car, find a more fuel-efficient one. The supply of oil on the planet is finite, and your monstermobile isn't helping matters.

Pizzaaaaaa

So I finally tried the newish vegan cheese called "Sheese", a European cheese substitute that has made its way onto our shores. I had the Mozzarella flavor hanging around my fridge, and I made a fabulous pizza with it. I used a recipe from Sarah Kramer's La Dolce Vegan, but needed to double the recipe to cover my nice large pizza pan. It also says to bake for 10 minutes before putting the toppings on, but it seemed crumbly, so I may not bake it before putting the toppings on and try it that way. I opened a can of tomato sauce, cut up some mushrooms and an onion, mashed a coupla cloves of garlic (needs more garlic), and grated the cheese under and over the toppings.

And maybe saute the onions before putting them on the pizza, I don't know.

As you can see, the cheese doesn't get very melty, but I kind of appreciate that, as I've had pizza with the Follow Your Heart cheese at a couple of local restaurants, and I don't know why, but the FYH comes out practially liquified--blech. I like it sort of chewy but melty.

It comes in rounds, sort of like a brie, and I have read that it's best to grate or melt it. At one point I just held the grater over the pizza and ran the piece of Sheese over it, which I should have done in the first place instead of using a prep bowl--save a dish to clean.

Sadly, the pizza totally fell apart while I was putting it away, but I'm sure it will still taste good. I also think the Sheese sort of an acquired taste, but many things worth eating are.

Anyway, we had a lovely taste of spring, and then it turned unpleasantly cold around the beginning of the month. We even had a dusting of snow last weekend--snow! in April!--that vanished by the end of the day. I have read that Washington in April is really weird weather-wise. It has gotten as low as 15 degrees and as warm as 95 degrees. I suppose one thing to be grateful for is it hasn't gotten to 95 (yet) because in my apartment building they don't turn off the heat until mid-April; if the temp climbs above 65, I'm almost too warm!

If you want to get some Sheese for yourself, both Vegan Essentials and Pangea carry eight or nine Sheese flavors, but they both say you don't want to get it too warm. I wonder if the hour-and-a-half Metro trip up to Rockville would be problematic...

Smokin'

If you like smoked foods--and I guess I don't, or I didn't cook it correctly--check out Smoke & Fire Smoked Tofu. It was sitting around my fridge, so I decided I may as well heat it up (sauteed it in a pan) for dinner. I was at Whole Foods today and picked up a couple of vegetable skewers (and fruit because there are chunks of pineapple in there). I slathered them in Annie's Smokey Maple Bar-B-Q sauce (which I do like). There are two skewers per package, and I stored the second one in the container in which it came. And of course, I had my old standby, a baked potato with Earth Balance margarine.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with prepackaged, precut veggies. If it gets someone to eat more fruits and veggies, then precut, packaged fresh (or even frozen) veggies are fine by me. Just avoid most canned veggies as they are lacking in nutrients. Yes, I buy canned tomatoes and tomato sauce and paste, and I buy canned beans (such as black beans or kidney beans, always checking for a low sodium level), but I wouldn't touch canned green beans, carrots, peas or corn. And sure the precut veggies are a little more than whole veggies, but if you're unsure how to cut up a butternut squash, or you want to make sure you like it (I kinda do), consider it a savings of time instead.

That said, I still make my own seitan. It just tastes better and has a better texture when I do.