Irish-Italian?

By Monica on April 10th, 2008

A new fusion food?  No, that’s just what came out of my oven last night:  Tofu Stuffed Shells and Irish Soda Bread!

Every year as St. Patty’s Day approaches, my mother becomes exuberant over the availability of Irish Soda Bread.  After St. Patty’s Day passes, she mourns the loss of her favorite morning snack.  Growing weary of her complaints everyday, I tried making a loaf last night.

As it turns out, this is my kind of bread-making:  No rising, no kneading, no patience required.  It comes together in less than 5 minutes and goes straight into the oven.  Couldn’t be easier, pretty darn tasty, and using whole wheat flour makes it just a wee-bit more nutritious and filling for a morning snack.

Irish Soda Bread
1 1/2 cups plus 2T soymilk
1T plus 1 1/2t white vinegar
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups all purpose flour
1t baking soda
1t salt
1/2 cup raisins, optional

Combine soymilk and vinegar in a small bowl and set aside.
Sift together flours, baking soda, and salt into a large bowl.  Form a well in the center and add soured soymilk, stirring until the mixture becomes a dough firm enough to shape.  Knead raisins in.
Place dough on a parchment lined baking sheet and form into a n 8″ ball, about 1″ thick.
Make some crosses across the top, about 1/2″ deep, which will make it easy to tear the bread into portions after baking.
Bake 40-45 minutes at 425 degrees until you have a firm, golden brown top and bottom.

And onto the Stuffed Shells!

Above are the naked little fellas before being covered in sauce and sent into the oven.  I use this Joanne Stepaniak inspired tofu ricotta for stuffed shells, manicotti, and lasagna.  It’s easy, delicious, and I always have the ingredients on hand.  Plus, every omni I’ve ever served it to is amazed that it’s actually tofu, they’re actually eating it, and they actually like it!

Tofu Stuffed Shells
16 oz box stuffed shells
2 lbs tofu (I prefer 1lb extra firm, 1lb soft), patted dry and mashed
4 cloves garlic, minced
2-4T soymilk
2T olive oil
3T lemon juice
1T sugar
2T chopped fresh parsley
1T dried basil
2t onion powder
Salt & pepper to taste
1 package frozen chopped spinach, thawed and drained - or 3 cups fresh
4 cups of your favorite spaghetti sauce
Vegan Parmesan, optional

Prepare the stuffed shells according to package directions, drain, rinse, and cool.
In a large bowl, mix the mashed tofu, garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, sugar, parsley, basil, onion powder, salt, pepper, and spinach together.  Add just enough of the soymilk to give you a ricotta-like consistency.
Line a 9×13″ baking pan with half the spaghetti sauce.
Commit right now that the best way to do this is with your hands, and messily stuff each shell with approximately one heaping tablespoon of the ricotta.  Line them up in your pan.
Cover the shells with the remaining pasta sauce and sprinkle with vegan Parmesan if you like.
Cover pan tightly with foil, bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

Buchty

By Monica on April 2nd, 2008

Buchty, Czech baked donuts, also known as “a delicious, but gross misuse of butter”. If your arteries are just too clean these days, look no further.

These donut-style mini-cakes are extremely dense and rich, and stuffed with your favorite homemade jam or preserve. These aren’t quite as fluffy as the egg and butter laden buchty I ate as a kid, possibly due to the veganization, but they are still sinfully rich, flakey, and moist, with a very sweet, crunchy exterior… Kind of a donut-croissant!

Buchty
1/2 cup soymilk
1 packet dry yeast
2 cups flour
1/4t salt
4 Ener-G eggs
1/2c sugar
3/4c Earth Balance, separated
Your favorite jam or preserves
Confectioners sugar

Warm the soymilk slightly, add yeast and dissolve.
Into a large bowl, add flour and salt.
Whisk Ener-G eggs into the yeast-milk mixture, then add to the flour. Mix well.
In another bowl, whisk together the sugar and 1/2 cup EB until it is light and creamy. Fold this into the dough. Dough will be very sticky! Cover and let rise for 45 minutes.
After dough has risen, tear off a tennis ball sized chunk and work it into a round shape. Poke two fingers into the dough to make a small well, fill it with 1T of jam, then cover up the well and pinch it closed.
Fill up all the donuts this way and let them rise for another 15 minutes.
Grease a 9×13″ baking pan. Melt the remaining 1/4c EB. Place the doughnuts close together in the pan and drizzle the melted EB on top.
Bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes, until golden brown. When done, tear dougnnuts from each other and serve warm or cooled, sprinkled with confectioners sugar.

In the ‘other food that won’t kill you’ category this week, we had a Mexican Pasta Casserole from VegWeb. I used TVP as the taco “meat”, added black olives, omitted the vegan cheese, and doubled the recipe to make an extra casserole for a rainy day. Easy, easy, easy!

I also found a recipe on VegWeb for a seitan “Chicago Italian Beef”. I went into this pretty skeptical. I tried the recipe as written, then doubled the giardiniera, added more garlic, and more fennel. I was still disappointed, though the seitan did improve drastically after letting it marinade in the “aus jus” for 2 days after cooking. Looks good though, no?

And then with some melted vegan mozzarella, which I am absolutely done buying. This cheez had been sitting around in my refrigerator for a long time and now I’m finally rid of the waxy, flame retardant crap. Good riddance! (The ‘beef’ was also better without its overpowering grossness!) But again, looks good, no?

Cranberry Pear Snackcake

By Monica on March 27th, 2008

This is one of my favorites from the “Grandma Files”. A versatile little cake, you can easily alter this to fit whatever you have in your pantry at the time. No cranberries? Use raisins, or any kind of fresh berry. Buy too many walnuts? Throw them in! And I truly feel sorry for those who do not have 30+ jars of homemade pearsauce in their cold cellars, but if you don’t, applesauce works too. The combination of delicately sweet pears and tart cranberries is tough to beat though, this is what I always come back to. As usual, Grandma was right.

Cranberry Pear Snackcake
1/2 cup canola oil
1 cup brown sugar
1 1/2 cups flour
1t baking soda
1t cocoa
1/2t cinnamon
1 cup pearsauce (unsweetened)
1 cup fresh or frozen cranberries

Cream canola oil and brown sugar. Sift together flour, baking soda, cocoa, and cinnamon, then add to the oil/sugar mixture. Add pearsauce, cranberries and mix until blended. Pour into a lightly greased 9×9″ baking pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes.

In other food this week, I took advantage of affordable fresh asparagus and added it to Joanna’s Penne Alfredo from Yellow Rose Recipes:

And lastly, SusanV’s ridiculously easy, ridiculously delicious Smoky Refried Bean Soup. I have made this twice since she posted the recipe this month!

A Return To College Food

By Monica on March 25th, 2008

Well, almost. Like most people, my undergrad years were filled with unrecognizable cafeteria food and late night take-out garbage. In my years at NIU, the late night, post-drinking, junk food of choice was Beer Nuggets - fried chunks of dough you dipped into pizza sauce and/or powdered cheese sauce. One could purchase an entire brown grocery bag full for about $4, a bargain for any poor, hungry, inebriated college student.

Despite how terrible they must be for you, let’s face it: fried dough tastes good. When I saw Bryanna’s 5 Minute No-Knead Bread & Focaccia, I was immediately inspired to make imitation, healthier beer nuggets. Here is the intact focaccia, made with whole wheat flour, and covered in garlic and fresh dill - luxuries never afforded to the greasy beer nuggets of my memory.

The focaccia was sliced up into approximate nugget form and served with pizza sauce and “Gee Whiz” spread from the Uncheese Cookbook, an idea from Zuckerbaby at ZB’s Vegan Recipes.

Perfectly nuggetlicious, but without all the grease and mystery ingredients. 2 entire focaccias disappeared within minutes; anything dipped into cheez is always the crowd pleaser! Bryanna’s recipe made two focaccias and two loaves of crusty bread, all with no-kneading!

But lastly, if we’re talking about college food, you can’t beat nachos. Here is the heap I prepared for my junk-food loving crowd, using Nacho Cheese Sauce from Yellow Rose Recipes. Certainly not health food, but definitely an improvement with tons of black beans, fresh tomatoes, avocados, jalapeños, scallions, and black olives.