Calzones, Stew, Juice

Talk about comfort food! In the week before Thanksgiving, Daiku and I did some batch cooking, knowing that it would be good to take it easy since we planned on making quite a bit of food for the holiday itself.

First up, calzones. May I say how exciting it was to make these from scratch, because I often crave calzones, and to be able to have whole wheat ones with healthy vegan fillings made them even more satisfying.

For the dough, I used the whole wheat calzone dough from The Vegan Chef website. We made two different fillings:

• marinara sauce with Gimme lean sausage

(for the sauce, we sauteed onions and garlic, crushed tomatoes, fennel seeds, oregano, basil, and balsamic vinegar and let it reduce a bit to thicken)

• vegan ricotta and broccoli

(we just kind of invented a vegan ricotta recipe that came out really well: crush some extra firm tofu with the juice of one lemon, 1-2 TB miso to taste, and a bunch of powdered garlic and dried basil)

A weird photo of the calzones coming out of the oven. Mine were little and stout, while Daiku's were long, we don't know how that happened- we used the same-size dough!

Here is a cut-out view of the broccoli/ricotta calzones, with the extra marinara sauce for dipping. They were so good! I haven't found too many vegan cheeses that satisfied me, but this ricotta played its role in these calzones PERFECTLY. Daiku and I even mused that we could serve these to our dairy-loving families and they wouldn't even realize they were eating tofu.

Another big batch comfort food we made was the corn, bean, and pumpkin stew from Fatfree Vegan. This was how Timmy the pumpkin went to pumpkin heaven. (Click here to see a photo of Timmy.) This stew had a really unique flavor, because of all the assertive spices called for. Daiku loved it, and I did too, although it was a bit too smoky for me. I added some lemon juice or vinegar to the leftovers to balance that out a bit. Really comforting food!

Last week, Daiku came down with a weird cold-type thing. He was freezing even when it was really warm in the house and he was wearing a bunch of layers. I figured what better elixir to kick a cold than some fresh organic carrot and ginger juice?

I juiced him this giant glass, using 7 big carrots and a 1-inch piece of ginger. It was pretty good!

Now, a word about our juicer. After hearing me mention wanting it for a long time, my mother was nice enough to buy me a Jack LaLanne power juicer. I already had a juicer, but the infomercial made this one sound out of this world. According to them, you could drop whole fruits in the spout, and the juicer is so powerful that you would hardly get any pulp waste. This sounded good to me, because the amount of pulp that has to be thrown away after juicing always gave me a complex.

So I finally had a power juicer, I was so excited! But guess what? This juicer pretty much sucks. You can drop a whole apple in the spout, if it's an unusually small apple! And the pulp? Just as much as my old cheapo juicer! If you want a really powerful juicer, go for a professional model. If you don't want to spend that much, you can get just as good quality as the power juicer in a much less expensive model. What I'm trying to say is, they say it's commercial quality but it really isn't. Buyer beware.

However, I have come to terms with this juicer. One tip I learned from an online reviewer is to use a large ziplock back to catch the pulp. This way, I have the carrot pulp sitting in the freezer, ready to go into a spaghetti sauce, carrot cake, bread, or muffin. No more waste (and lost fiber!)

Calzones, Stew, Juice