Breakfast food, comfort food

Pancakes from Vegan with a Vengeance, served Canadian style (or, at least, people tell me it's Canadian style, when you cut up all the pancake before eating it)

And now, just the pancakes

I love breakfast, it is without a doubt my favourite meal. Anyway, yesterday I was all excited to get up early and pick up ingredients to make tempeh bacon (from Vegan with a Vengeance), some sort of potato dish, and roasted vegetables for breakfast. However, this plan kind of fell apart after my alarm failed to go off (or, at least, I don't remember hitting snooze repeatedly) so I didn't have time to go to the grocery store and stuff before work. So I settled with pancakes, using the recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance. It promised 'straight-up pancakes, just like at the diner at 2am' and that sounded appealing at the time. They were pretty good, better than the classic pancakes recipe from How it all Vegan (previously my standard pancake recipe). They made a slightly smaller amount than the other recipe, which was a good thing because I could whip 'em up in 25 minutes (start to finish) and wasn't too full afterwards (Josh wished there were more, but he likes to stuff himself).

Saturday was a long day for me, and after working and then spending almost 6 hours painting, scrubbing floors and inhaling paint fumes (taking down an exhibition I was part of that did quite a number on the gallery that we had to put back to its initial state) all I wanted was some beer and potatoes. I don't like beer most of the time (actually, the thought of it usually makes me feel sick), but sometimes it has its place, especially blueberry ale. So we picked up some Pumphouse blueberry ale and I made Baked Cajun French Fries from Vegan with a Vengeance and roasted some zucchini and carrots to munch on and drink while settling down to watch an Art 21 DVD (yes, I am a nerd).

Baked Cajun French Fries from Vegan with a Vengeance with roasted veggies (blueberry ale in back)

Sunday morning's breakfast was slightly more nutritious than Saturday's:

Breakfast Veggie Chorizo from Vegan with a Vengeance, Cinnamon Cornmeal Muffin from The Everyday Vegan, steamed broccoli with Mi-So Good Gravy (also from The Everyday Vegan), and iced green tea (although not the best image of it)

For the tea, I just brewed some green tea, refrigerated it, and added a squirt of lemon juice and some agave nectar (I bought agave for the first time a couple of weeks ago and I think it's the only vegan non-sugar sweetener that tastes good with tea - it's very nice). The muffins were alright, but I wasn't too fond of the chorizo. It had a nice, meaty texture (although I don't know what normal chorizo is), but the flavour was just too strong for a side dish on its own. I think it would probably taste better mixed with rice or in a burrito or something. Josh agreed that the flavour was really strong, but it didn't bother him as much.

More of the muffins

More food, more vegetables

Today was, again, insanely hot outside. I had planned on doing schoolwork all day, but my mom asked if I wanted to go to the valley with her (a day trip) so I figured I could just go and do schoolwork in the car (yeah, right). As there's not much choice for vegetarian meals there (not that I know of, anyway) it was important to bring good food. I started off with eating a good macrobiotic breakfast.

Millet Porridge from The Self-Healing Cookbook: millet, turnip and leafy greens (I used swiss chard), seasoned with a bit of gomashio

Then, for a lunch I could take with me, I decided to use the Vegan with a Vengeance Chickpea-Hijiki Salad Sammiches recipe, which became (due to lack of certain ingredients) a chickpea/fava-wakame sandwich.

Chickpea/fava-wakame sandwich on ezekiel bread with balcony garden-grown lettuce

This sandwich is meant to be kind of like a tuna sandwich. I must say, the filling was very convincingly fishy-looking (as in it looked like fish). It didn't taste particularly like tuna, but I don't care, and that could've been because of my substitutions, anyway. It was alright.

My mom pampered me. On the way out of the city I had asked if we could stop in at the Bulk Barn so I could stock up (it's a pain in the ass to take the bus there), and she insisted on paying for everything I got. I bought short-grain brown rice, millet, barley, cornmeal, prunes, walnuts, coconut, bulgar, sunflower seeds, black beans, and I don't remember what else. Large amounts, and the bill was around $20. Very good deal, and apparently students get a 10% discount on Wednesdays (not that today was a Wednesday), which is even better.

Later on we went to a little farm market and got lots of local vegetables (corn, tomatoes, cucumber, broccoli, green beans, onions, garlic & turnip) as well as local raspberries and plums. Mmmmm.... Now I don't have any reason to get up early and go to the farmer's market downtown tomorrow morning because I've got everything I need. Which means that I have the morning off. And what do I do when I have the morning off? I make brunch!

More on that later.

No new recipes but lots of food

Well, I've been cooking a lot lately, but since I've got two new cookbooks in my hands right now, I've been more interested in trying out new recipes than creating my own. I had said that I would post some more strawberry recipes, but I've had enough of the junk for a while. Last weekend I got the urge for sweets (which happens WAY too often) and decided to make this blueberry oatmeal breakfast cake from vegweb, subbing the blueberries with strawberries. It wasn't bad, but I ate too much and decided to take a break from sweets for a few days. Here's something healthier I did with the strawberries:

Strawberry-apricot oatmeal, cooked in half-soymilk/half-water for added creaminess...mmmmmm...

I've just discovered the greatness of baked tofu. I don't know why I took so long to try it, but it's awesome! So easy - just marinate the tofu in something tasty and then bake it in the marinade for 30 minutes, turning half-way through. One version I tried (although I forgot to take pictures) was the lemon-herb tofu from Dreena Burton's (author of the Everyday Vegan) cooking blog, and the other was the baked tofu from the ppk website.

Baked tofu over whole-wheat spaghetti with olive oil and garlic as part of my lunch on Monday

Then my friend Jeanna lent me The Self-Healing Cookbook by Kristina Turner. It's wonderful! The author advocates a macrobiotic diet, but she is very positive and encouraging. Rather than restricting lots of foods, she emphasizes whole grains, beans, certain vegetables, seeds and seaweeds. She suggests minimizing things like sugar, fats, tropical fruits and flour, but doesn't say you must cut them out forever to be healthy. There are a lot of nice, wholesome meals in the book, some of which I've tried but forgotten to photograph. I've been inspired to try to reduce my intake of sugars and tropical fruits and eat more whole grains, beans and vegetables. I'm not much interested in using the cooking methods in macrobiotics or cutting out eggplant, tomatoes and peppers, but there are a few things I would do well to eat more of.

Breakfast of brown rice with cinnamon, raisins and toasted sunflower seeds, from The Self-Healing Cookbook. The sunflower seeds were a really nice addition - I should use toasted seeds more often.

So this macrobiotic-ish thing lasted until today and then temporarily stopped for two reasons:
1) it was insanely hot weather and I couldn't imagine eating anything besides a smoothie, and it went downhill from there. That's ok though.

My boyfriend, Josh, made up a pasta salad (pretty tasty) which we ate accompanied by some steamed swiss chard, on the balcony. Nice hot-weather dinner. And yes, I'm aware of how many chips are in my bowls. They're well-loved.

The 2nd reason why I decided to break the macrobiotic-ish diet is because I bought Vegan with a Vengeance by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. I've seen this book mentioned many times on the internet but it's fairly hard to find here, so I had to special-order it, and it just came in. Yay! I had another craving for sweets (although I've been fairly good with that all week) so I made this:

Glazed Orange Scones from Vegan with a Vengeance

I tried to make them a bit healthier by substituting half of the white flour with spelt (I slightly increased the baking powder), using applesauce in place of the oil, and reducing the sugar. They still turned out pretty good, although I don't really want to know how much better they might've been if I'd followed the recipe exactly. I was happy with them.

Anyway, it's getting late now and I'm very tired, but I shall post again very soon!