Friday Food Round-up

Welcome to the Friday food round-up, everyone! This week had some good food, but also some, uh, interesting food experiments. You will see them all...

[click on any photo to enlarge]

On Sunday, we wanted a special breakfast, and decided to go for pancakes. We had buckwheat pancake mix, and made it with "buttermilk" (a teaspoon of vinegar in a cup of soymilk) and chocolate chips. You can't see the chocolate chips very much in the photo, but we topped the pancakes with raspberries and a bit of maple syrup.

Later, it was time for a serious sandwich. We had some nice crusty bread, but didn't know what to put in it. We decided to make falafel burgers topped with onions and tomatoes sauteed with fresh oregano, avocado, and fresh basil.



The sandwiches were served with "apple fries"... fresh apple cut to look like fries. It was a nice crisp accompaniment to these huge and messy sandwiches!

Daiku picked up some fresh beets and a head of romaine lettuce at the co-op one day (both organic.) These made it into a really refreshing and tasty dinner. We roasted the beets in the oven. We decided to put the beet greens to good use (did you know that beet greens have more nutrition than the beetroot that we normally eat?) and sauteed them with some balsamic vinegar. These went with some potatoes roasted with garlic and rosemary. Our romaine turned into an incredibly crisp salad made with cucumber and purple pepper (from the garden) and some daikon.

All of this week, I'd been craving cookies. I finally decided to bake some, and I honestly don't know what went wrong! I used this recipe from Vegweb, replacing the walnuts with hazelnuts and adding a bit of hazelnut syrup.

We call these gimp cookies, and you can see why!



Yikes! I decided to go biscotti on them and bake them again, because they were fluffy, uncooked monstrosities. After being separated and baking 3 or 4 times as long as they were supposed to, they ended up ok. They were great with a hazelnut latte (sense a theme?) made with coffee and hazelnut milk.

I love the Whole Foods recipes website. They have a huge selection of vegetarian recipes (even a lot of their recipes that are not filed under vegetarian are actually veg- or can easily be adapted) that are healthy and often use flavors or combinations that I would not have thought of. I've never made any of their recipes that I'd been unsatisfied with. For dinner one night, we used a couple of their recipes but modified them quite a bit based on what we had.

Recipe 1: "Thyme for Tempeh"
This recipe called for tempeh cooked with mushrooms and onions, served with fettucini and a side of carrot and cabbage. Daiku cooked the tempeh together with the carrots and cabbage, and we had it with brown rice instead. The flavors of this recipe were amazing- the thyme gave it a very savory, winter-like flavor, the sauce was a rich gravy, and the tempeh was really tender. Daiku thought it was like a tempeh moo shoo.

For dessert, I made Recipe 2: "Apple Pie" but I made it without the crust. Since it had a topping, I decided a crust was unnecessary, and so it was more like an apple crisp instead. The flavor was great! I might have sliced the apples too thinly, though, since they were a little dry. Whole foods is my kind of recipe site: "peeling the apples is optional"-yes! You guys will quickly learn about me that I have an aversion to peeling anything- beets, apples, potatoes, kiwis, carrots... I obsess that peeling gets rid of nutrients and other good things! I know it's a bit much, but I'm grateful that Daiku puts up with it.



Here is a coconut trembleique (pudding) that Daiku made one night. He followed this recipe from Vegweb. The result was tasty, but very firm- perhaps less cornstarch next time.



And now, I present you with a Friday food flashback. This meal was from August, but it was one of the funnest dinners we've had, and I would hate to not blog about it!

This summer I found a line of very "Le Creuset-looking" enamelware at Ikea. I've always wanted to have a few Le Creuset pieces, but they are way out of our price range. These Ikea pieces, which are made in France, look beautiful and are very heavy-duty. When I noticed that they included a fondue pot, I had to grab one. I had always wanted to make the fondue recipe from the Vegan Lunchbox, and now I could finally try!



Here was our first fondue meal. I can't get over how fun it was, and if a 27 year-old could get that excited, imagine how an actual kid would feel!

For dipping, we had green beans, zuchini, baby carrots, grape tomatoes, mushrooms, potatoes, bellpeppers, and white and whole grain bread. The fondue was really tasty, but the original recipe was a little bland for our taste. We added more miso, more mustard, more lemon juice, more spices. If you haven't tried this yet, I would totally recommend it.

Finally, on a slightly sad note. Last night, after waiting as long as possilbe, Daiku and I knew it was time to pick the final harvest from our garden, since there was a very high chance for a frost during the night. What is sad about it was that we had several heirloom tomato plants that had produced late in the season, so we were faced with the prospect of picking gorgeous, but green heirloom tomatoes. This whole summer, we only had 3 that made it to ripeness, and now we had to pick 10 or more that never had a chance. Booo. Here's the sad harvest:





So here is my question/plea to all of you bloggers... do you know of any good fried green tomato, pickled tomato, or other green tomato recipes? Please help us! Some of the bigger ones may ripen a little, but most of them are hard, and we will cry if they go to waste.

Lastly, I came across this website called Weird Foods, where people have written in some of the unusual or crazy foods that they have had. While I found the list interesting and informative, I also found it frustrating and even offensive! A lot of these "weird" foods are foods that I eat regularly. If someone who has never tried these foods reads this list, it would turn them off forever! For example, I think of Miso as one of the most sophisticated and nuanced tastes ever, but if you read that it's "fermented bean goo soup" would you ever try it? Yikes!

Have a great Friday and a great weekend, everyone!

Friday Food Round-up