The Inconsistent Blogger

What an auspicious start to my blog... 4 posts in, and then almost a month off?! I may not have been writing about it, but I have been cooking! I'm comforting myself by remembering that this is all just foreplay; the rigorous blogging will come later when I go whole hog.

Speaking of which, I think I'll do that soon. I've made some progress on the lunch front and some useful observations about my own habits:

• I'm a lazy cook. If I don't plan in advance, I'll eat a box of crackers for dinner instead of using my brain while I'm hungry.
• Cooking isn't as hard as I think it is! I followed a curry recipe the other day entirely using stuff that was already made and in the fridge. I shouldn't build it up so much.
• I sure do go to the bagel store a lot.

I'm off from work during July AND August (hooray!), so that seems like an ideal time to go for it while I'm not down the street from my beloved bagel store every day. I'll have plenty of time to compile menus for the week and shop in a leisurely fashion, and maybe if I'm lucky, I'll have some awesome habits in place when I start back to real life in September!

Below are some of my test runs from the last few weeks. Some are not pictured because they were disasters. Others are not pictured because they were so insanely easy that I forgot to take a photo. Some items from the latter category include:

Coconut Quinoa and Sweet Potato Curry
The only cooking I had to do here was dump everything in a pan and heat it up. We already had quinoa with sweet potatoes and chickpeas waiting in the fridge!

Sloppy Joes
I didn't even use a recipe here. Browned some soy crumbles in oil and dumped on some barbeque sauce. Shockingly satisfying and an excellent lunchtime sandwich option.

Palak Dahl
I love dahl(/dal/daal??). I love aloo palak. I love combining them and losing the nutritionally empty potatoes even more! (You have to replace the butter with margarine or oil, of course.)

Pigs in Blankets
Again, stupidly easy. I didn't even feel like making the dough, so I just got some prepackaged crescent rolls after double checking they were vegan. Another good lunch option. (My lunch options may not be the healthiest vegan options ever, but they have to be better than my standard buffalo chicken wrap... right?)

The ones I do have photos for are mostly sweets... I guess that kinda shows where my real interest is, huh?

Very Simple Blueberry Muffins

Chocolate-Chip Blondies

(They're made from chickpeas! Chickpeas!)

Fudge Babies

Pad Thai
(Insanely easy and soooo good!)

Rainy Day Mug Cake
(Just what I need. Chocolate cake that takes 5 minutes to make.)

A 3-course meal (kinda)

Family was over this weekend (the vegan-friendly, or at least vegan-curious, side of the family), so I had people to feed without resorting to popcorn for dinner if things went awry. The pressure!

Calling this a "three course meal" may be a bit grandiose for what it is, but I was still pleased to leave everyone full at the end of the evening.

I made an appetizer of salt & vinegar potato crisps and french onion dip. The potatoes, honestly, I hated. And I mean hated. Admittedly, I used the wrong kind of vinegar so that may had everything to do with it, but I didn't even take a photo to document them because I thought they were so awful. Everyone else seemed to like them and they all got eaten, but I don't know if that was just politeness or what. Anyway, google it if you want the recipe. Maybe you'll have better luck than me.

The dip was great, though! We had it with the potatoes, with crackers, with veggies, and with some badass bean chips Mr. IV found somewhere (seriously, check those things out, they're amazing). Sayeth brother-in-law's girlfriend: "I could eat this stuff with a spoon." Success!

I adapted it from a couple different recipes I found to better suit my own laziness and general lack of planning. I'm sure it'd be better with freshly caramelized onions, but who wants to wait an hour or have to cook when you could be eating onion dip NOW? So without further ado, I present:

IV's Lazy French Onion Dip

1 12-oz tub vegan sour cream (e.g. Tofutti)

1 tsp onion powder

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

1 tsp salt

1/2 tsp soy sauce

1/4 tsp thyme powder

ground black pepper to taste

1. dump ingredients in a bowl

2. stir

3. eat

The actual dinner part of dinner was VeganYumYum's lemon pepper pasta, which was delicious! I tweaked it a little bit to suit Mr. IV, who doesn't eat wheat, tomatoes or oil, but it was delightful all the same.

 

(Disclaimer: dinner was actually supplemented by a soup that mother-in-law made and a crazy Thrive-style pizza Mr. IV made, but I only ate what I made and was quite satisfied by it.)

And then, dessert! My favorite part! This chocolate mousse was yummy, easy, and a big hit with the masses. I'm really getting to be a big fan of agar.

And that's it! My first successful vegan cooking for non-vegans!

B-

I'm giving myself a B- on this batch of attempts. I tried really hard to get away from dessert, and told myself I succeeded by having this banana smoothie for breakfast and not just because it seemed yummy. 

I'm not a huge fan of the resulting texture... I think next time I'll replace half the banana with a little peanut butter and more almond milk to see if I can get it less thick but still one serving.

Banana Smoothie

Flavor: delightfully light

Texture: a touch chewy

Difficulty: doable at 7am

Speediness: eating 5 minutes later

Overall Grade: A-

After that, I have to admit I regressed a bit. I saw this recipe for raspberry sorbet and just couldn't resist. Seriously, who could? It's a super easy recipe, and it's basically just fruit, so why even try to resist?

Well, maybe because I don't want to chip a tooth. I ended up with a giant raspberry ice cube instead, albeit a deliciously colored one.

I find it impossible to believe that the photo on the recipe page is actually a result of the recipe as written. I could hardly even chip mine, much less make it look all pretty and scoopable.

After a little time in the fridge, it thawed into this sad looking state (what happened to the delicious, vibrant red??):

...at which point I turned to the internet, which gave me all sorts of ideas for making a sorbet with the correct consistency (ice cream maker, food processor after freezing, something crazy about throwing around a trash bag filled with ice) and made it pretty clear that fruit juice in a tub in the freezer will not, in fact, produce sorbet. Sigh. It's a great way to make popsicles, though. I think I'll just stick with Purely Decadent ice cream. They're better at this than me.

Raspberry Sorbet

Flavor: raspberrylicious

Texture: ice cube-like, then melted ice cube-like

Difficulty: for incorrect results, super easy! for correct results, unknown

Speediness: for incorrect results, super quick (except for freezing time)!

for correct results, unknown

Overall Grade: D+

Luckily, a failed dessert was what it took to finally induce me to make real food for once. I went for aloo palak with a side order of naan. I looove Indian food, and if there's no butter involved I'll be able to stuff myself that much more!

The aloo palak was the winner of the evening. Other recipes I found had photos of potatoes with a little spinach stuck on them here and there. I wanted an ooey-gooey creamy delicious spinach gravy in which to drown the potatoes, and that's what this recipe gave me. Also, I love that she posts photos for every step of preparing the dish; how wonderfully beginner-friendly!

I generally like my food spicier than normal human beings, so I'll dial up the seasonings next time. Also, I won't undercook the potatoes just because I'm starving. There will be many next times.

The naan, while tasty, didn't puff up the way it does at the Indian restaurant I frequent. This being my first time making bread sans bread machine, that very well could have been my fault at any of 100 points along the way. It definitely warrants more research. Naan is one of my favoritest things in the universe.

Aloo Palak

Flavor: delish! though a little mild for my tastes

Texture: PERFECT!

Difficulty: just enough multitasking between spinach and potatoes to make me feel like a real cook

Speediness: should've taken longer, but I wanted to eat NOW dammit

Overall Grade: B

Naan

Flavor: a little bland, could've used garlic?

Texture: a little too cakey, but still enjoyable

Difficulty: so easy! I thought naan would be hard!

Speediness: very quick actual doing + much more time letting dough rise

Overall Grade: B-

Vegan eating is sweet

I'm only the tiniest bit into collecting recipes, and I've already discovered the dark secret of vegan cooking: it's WAY easier to make dessert than dinner. This is something I didn't expect. I mean, how could you possibly expect to make a reasonable sweet without eggs, milk, or butter? As it turns out, quite easily.

My first foray was innocent enough, and I even filed it away in the actively-good-for-me file in my brain. Virtually Vegan Mama's date truffles are delicious, nutritious, and introduced me to some sweeteners that aren't just cane sugar. Sadly, I didn't think to take a photo, but I promise they were very pretty during the brief period between when I made them and when I ate them.

I did remember to take photos of my equally innocent second dessert: strawberry pudding based on Chocolate Covered Vegan's basic pudding. (The name of her blog should've been the first clue as to the dangerous road I was heading down.)

I was a little terrified of combining such a monstrous looking concoction...

...with such an innocent and beautiful bowl of strawberries...

...but the result was light, delicious, and even sweetener free!

It's here that the saga takes a dangerous turn. Neither of the previous recipes strays much from naturally-occurring substances. A little rice syrup, a little almond milk, sure. But I was still (somehow) safely under the impression that vegan chocolate, pastries, or creams cannot be.

How wrong I was.

The beginning of the end was No Meat Athlete's lemon bars. I was intrigued by this crazy agar stuff that was used in the pudding and curious about what else it could do. And I love lemons. How could I resist?

At this point, it's important to understand that I am not a cook. I don't cook. My standard diet contains a lot of bean burritos and boxed mac & cheese. Baking is a complete mystery to me. So when I (me!) managed to produce a pan of glorious lemon bars (every time I got one out to take a photo of, I just ate it instead), it was like a floodgate opening. What else is possible when I (me!) can make lemon bars?

Homemade "cadbury" eggs, that's what. 

These things are roughly comprised of sugar, sugar, sugar, oil, and sugar. It turns out that after you've been inducted into the mysteries of making vegan sweets, it's really damn easy and all you want to do. At least, if you're me. I've got a folder of bookmarked recipes that's about 50/50 dinners and desserts. I should try something nutritious next. I think I'll go for girl scout cookies instead.

Eating vegan will make me lose weight... right?

Prologue

Let's see where we're coming from, shall we?

First of all, to set the tone you can check out the Wtf? page for why we're here in the first place.

Then you can take a look at what I had for lunch today.

That's a buffalo chicken wrap with extra cheese. Man, was it delicious. You see why I'm a little concerned about premature death. There are approximately 8 billion things in that photo that are going to kill me one day.

It's lunch that really worries me. I've grown rather close with the guys who run the bagel shop down the street. I get special rates for buying in bulk. One of them is helping me learn spanish. They don't even ask what I want when I walk in anymore; they just toss me a quick "hola" as they head for the grill in the back. I'd hate for their business to suffer because of my change in diet.

Furthermore, I share a lot of Liz Lemon's feelings and philosophies about food.

(I tried to find the clip where she explains how the perfect sandwich could end all war, but I failed.)

The sandwich is, in my mind, inherently a meat and cheese construct, and what is lunchtime without the sandwich? Yes, I know, there are other kinds of sandwiches, but I won't be convinced that any of them can be as good until I see them in action. My recipe research has turned up some fun looking dinners so far, but not much in the way of sandwiches.

So, lunch is my big hurdle before I go for it. While I work through the planning on that, I'll use this space to test recipes for the great experiment.