Normally my parents would host, but there’s a weird rash of kitchen remodeling going around my family and while their kitchen currently looks much more kitchen-like, it’s still not quite functional. Fortunately I live in an apartment and even though I would love to join the remodeling party it would certainly be a violation of my lease if I started ripping out the cabinets and the crappy white linoleum that constantly looks dirty no matter how much I clean it. I’m very happy that I’ve managed to feed my family enough good vegan food over the years that they don’t mind having an entirely vegan meal for a special occasion.

For appetizers I made an old favorite- artichoke dip, and a new favorite- cashew cheese balls. Except I called them “cashew spread” since my guests were people who actually eat cheese. It’s all about perception. I can’t seem to find the recipe I’ve been using online, but it’s just raw cashews, salt, lemon juice, and nutritional yeast all pureed together, and then you add some chopped chives and form it into balls and roll them in whatever coating you like. I made four different kinds- all had crushed roasted almonds- one had dried red and green peppers, one had smoked spanish paprika, one had crushed hot red peppers, and one had pink peppercorns. My brother-in-law asked me how long the cashew cheese keeps for, and I had to say that I honestly don’t know because it never lasts more than a day or two around me. So tasty!

I made asparagus soup but forgot to take a photo of it! It was really pretty and bright green and garnished with microgreens and chives and chipotle-roasted garlic-cashew cream. Oh well. Onwards. Salad included romaine lettuce, endive, microgreens, avocado, purple cauliflower, shredded purple and yellow carrots and an edible flower, with a vinaigrette of grapefruit vinaigrette and blood orange olive oil (which came from Filling Station in Chelsea Market- if you like trying different salts and vinegars and oils it’s a fun place to go).

It’s probably a bad idea to try something not from a recipe and that you’ve never made before on guests, but that’s what I did for the entree- shallot risotto cakes with roasted marinated red and orange peppers, leeks, zucchini, eggplant, and cremini mushrooms, preserved lemon and caper sauce, chive-basil oil, and sauteed cherry tomatoes. I forgot to put some pickled red onions in the salad so I put them on the side of the entree. The sauce turned out a little bit intense so I only put a little bit on each plate. I was happy with how the risotto cakes turned out and will definitely be doing more variations on those in the future. They were coated with panko and various seasonings, panfried, and then baked to heat them through (slightly blurry photo- sorry).

I also forgot to take photos of dessert! I came across this recipe for Chocolate Beer Cupcakes with Irish Whiskey Buttercream and thought “ooh, my sister will like those!” They turned out ok, although not quite as planned. I used Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout, one of my favorite beers, for the cupcakes. They were nowhere near done after the prescribed cooking time, so I left them in for a while longer, and then they were a bit crispy on the top which didn’t seem quite right. I’ve never had a crispy cupcake. My oven is weird and I have to set it at around 400 to get an actual temperature of 350, which I forgot to do, so I didn’t realize until I checked them at the end of the first baking attempt that the oven was actually only around 300. This is why I’m a better cook than I am a baker- I’m bad at precision. I’m also bad at making sure I have all the ingredients I need. When making a soup or stir fry it’s easy to compensate for realizations such as “oops, I don’t really have enough ginger.” However when baking it’s a bit problematic to discover that you have only 1 cup of powdered sugar when you actually need three, and that your vegetable shortening has expired, and you’d rather claw your eyes out than get in the car and drive to the store yet again. (You’d think someone who tries to live a car-minimal lifestyle would do a better job of actually planning what she needs from the store!) So I made only 1/3 batch of the icing from the recipe, using vegan margarine instead of shortening. I tried beating it using a hand mixer (which used to belong to my grandmother and is probably from the 60s or something) but that just made a splattery mess and the mixer fell off the counter when I went to get paper towels and some pieces of its plastic broke off and I thought I had killed it but I managed to fix it, but then decided to go for a good old fashioned whisk instead. All of this is to say that I ended up with a thin smear of frosting on top of the cakes instead of a glorious swirly pile like in the photo on the site with the recipe. They looked decidedly sad and un-festive and tasted way too bitter from all the beer since there wasn’t enough frosting to balance it out. The recipe called for a caramel sauce to be drizzled over the top, so I decided the best way to salvage the sad cupcakes was to plate each one without it’s paper and pour a whole lot of caramel on top. My brilliant boyfriend also came up with the idea of melting some chocolate chips to make a chocolate sauce to pour on top as well. So while it didn’t come out quite as planned I think the dessert ended up being pretty tasty. Call it an exercise in improvisational baking?

Technicolor Tapenade (recipe from Vegetarian Planet), water crackers, sliced baguette, stuffed peppadew peppers (stuffed with panko, garlic, dill), and cashew-chive “cheese” balls (recipe here). Both of the cashew-chive balls are coated in smoked almonds and pink peppercorns, and one also has crushed red pepper flakes for extra spiciness. These were one of my favorite things about the meal, and even our guests who eat milk-cheese thought it was delicious.  We decided to call it “cashew-chive spread” instead of “cashew cheese,” because if you set people up to expect what they think of as “cheese” they’ll be disappointed. Perception management is important. Similarly, it’s poor strategy to tell people that seitan tastes like chicken, because it’s totally different. If you can get rid of people’s expectations about what something is supposed to taste like, it’s easier for them to recognize that it tastes good all on its own rather than as some sort of substitute for milk or meat.

Roasted pumpkin and butternut squash soup with cashew-chipotle cream. I improvised this one- the soup contains oven-roasted pumpkin, butternut squash, and garlic, pureed with a broth infused with caramelized onions, garlic, cinnamon stick, peppercorns, bay leaf, dundicut pepper, and chipotle pepper. The cashew cream is made of raw cashews pureed with roasted garlic, the chipotle peppers from the broth, and a little bit of the broth. I put a little drizzle of the cream on top of each bowl of soup, along with some toasted pumpkin seeds.

Our entree was roasted root vegetables (baby potatoes, pearl onions, sweet potatoes, parsnips, turnips, carrots, beets, thyme, sage, rosemary) and fig and wild rice seitan roulade (recipe here). I attempted a roulade once last year and it was a complete failure. This recipe turned out really well. The rice stuffing was especially delicious and I think I’d even make it instead of the traditional bread stuffing for other dishes. The only changes I made to the recipe were to add some fresh sage to the cooking broth and also once the roast was done I brushed some Earth Balance on the outside and put it under the broiler for a few minutes. We also had cranberry sauce and gravy which D.’s mom made. I forgot to get a photo of my plate with everything on it.

For dessert, apple pie (granny smith, red delicious, jonagold, and mcintosh apples). Served with vanilla soy ice cream.

I added another panel to my magnetic spice rack, and now it is twice as awesome with room to expand

You can vary the seasonings depending on what you want to use them for. This time I used garlic salt, nutritional yeast, oregano, and spanish smoked paprika.

D. requested cream of tomato soup to go with the croutons, so off I went to the internet to find a recipe. I love canned tomato soup but don’t buy it anymore because it’s so salty and also there’s no reason for there to be high fructose corn syrup in soup! Bryanna Clark Grogan’s recipe for “Creamless Creamy Tomato Soup” seemed the most promising, and had the advantage of using bread to thicken the soup. Another way to use up old bread! I’ve never made a soup with bread in it and was a little skeptical but it worked really well. I just used a chunk of my stale baguette instead of the three slices of Italian bread called for in the recipe, and it was fine.

Instead of the canned tomatoes called for in the recipe, I used three jars of the tomatoes from our CSA that I canned over the summer. I also deviated from the directions and added the vegetable broth and sherry earlier in the cooking process, thinking it would be a good idea to let the flavors blend together. But when I put the soup in my VitaMix, I realized why the recipe says to wait until after blending to add the two cups of broth. Almost full! But it worked fine and didn’t overflow or anything. I didn’t turn the blender all the way up though.

For garnish I made a green herb sauce with olive oil, shallot, garlic, chives, chervil, marjoram, parsley, salt and pepper. This soup was delicious- easy to make and way better than anything that ever came from a can!

Extra bonus- today my Chocolate of the Month order from Lagusta’s Luscious arrived! This month brings a wine-infused ganache bonbon with juniper. I can’t even begin to describe these, so I’ll just cut and paste from Lagusta’s site:

These are elegant molded chocolates filled with a rich, silky smooth dark chocolate ganache saturated with homemade wine syrup. We wanted to capture the feeling of warming up with a nice glass of red wine after walking in the woods in late autumn, so we infused the wine with juniper berries for a hint of woodsiness. This chocolate is deep, deep burgundy in color and bursting with multi-faceted flavors.

Yep. I think I love these even more than last month’s maple cream chocolates. I love the gem-shaped ones in particular. It’s funny, you’d think we’d want to devour these all in one sitting, but we just eat one piece a night and it’s just right. More would just be too much somehow. Sometimes a single small perfect thing is better than a whole pile of mediocre things.

So I decided to make some sesame noodles with japanese rice noodles, soy curls, kale, spinach, onions, garlic, tamari, sugar, jalapeno, ginger, sesame seeds, sesame oil, siracha, carrots, and scallions. I only discovered soy curls a few months ago and they’re now one of my go to foods for a quick meal. I like that you can make as little or as much as you need, unlike something like opening a whole block of tofu.

I served the noodles with a little bit of kimchi. Much better than pasta!

It took a while to chop up the pumpkin, and I decided I didn’t need the butternut squash after all. Also not pictured but essential are some raw cashews, which were soaking when the photo was taken.

I chopped the pumpkin up into little chunks and roasted it with some salt and pepper and macadamia oil. I bought the macadamia oil today on a whim, which was a bad call because it didn’t taste as good as I hoped. Maybe it has been sitting in the store for too long- it just tastes a little bit like old oil. I roasted a big head of garlic while the pumpkin was roasting, and the seeds of the pumpkin tossed in oil, salt, smoked paprika, and hungarian hot paprika.While all this was going on, I made a broth with the celery, onion, shallot, Better than Bouillon, Marmite, chipotle pepper, and a dundicut (one of those whimsical purchases on my last trip to Penzey’s- they’re a pepper from Pakistan). After it had simmered a while I also tossed in a cinnamon stick and some apple cider and a sundried tomato.

I then made a chipotle cashew cream puree with the raw cashews, roasted garlic, some chipotle chili paste, and the chipotle from the broth with the seeds removed. By then the pumpkin was done roasting, so it and the broth (with the tomato, dundicut, and cinnamon removed) went into the blender, along with a few spoonfuls of the cashew cream. To serve, I put the pumpkin soup in bowls with a dollop of the cashew cream in the middle, and then swirled the end of a spoon around to make pretty patterns. The effect might have been better if the two things weren’t almost the same color! The soup came out really well, if a bit thick. I’m new to this whole pureed soup thing since I haven’t had a proper blender for years. But the flavor was really nice, and it looked pretty!

Oh, and here’s my new magnetic spice rack, hanging on the wall! I’m a little nervous about it falling down because the walls are weird and sometimes the plaster stuff sort of cracks and nail holes become larger than you intend them to be. Fingers crossed. I think I’m going to make a second one, since I have those large tins just balanced on top there, and a few things that aren’t even in their new containers yet.

(I actually made all this stuff Sunday night, but since I posted breakfast for Sunday I’m counting it as Monday’s food! We did have leftovers for dinner tonight!)

This was another one of those fridge-cleaner meals, mostly to use up two huge heads of napa cabbage from the CSA. I ordered two because I use napa cabbage for kimchi, but it seemed leafier than the kind I’ve gotten from the market before and I wasn’t sure it would hold up to the kimchi treatment. I decided on a really simple stirfry of red onions, ginger, cabbage, soy chicken, and miso-butter sauce served with Bhutanese Red rice. I was also craving hot and sour soup, so I made some using the recipe in Voluptuous Vegan as a rough guideline.

Here are most of the ingredients for both stirfry and soup-

The soy chicken-stuff is this brand:

It’s amazing how much the cabbage cooked down. When I first put it all in the wok it looked like way too much, but it reduced nicely:

The sauce was just miso paste, Earth Balance, soy sauce, a little sherry, and cornstarch. I didn’t get any good photos of the soup in progress. Here’s everything all plated:

There used to be a vegan restaurant in Philly called Sunwishes, but unfortunately it closed. It got really good reviews in the local press, but I guess the restaurant business is tough. I only got to eat there once, but I had a bowl of the only beet soup I’ve ever had in my life that I actually enjoyed. Recently my boyfriend found a copy of their menu (we like to file away menus from restaurants) and requested that I try to replicate a sandwich that he had there and loved: “Tropical Grilled Tempeh Burger,” which is described as “Seasoned grilled tempeh topped with avocado, red onions, and a mango salsa mayo on a caramelized onion foccaccia.” Ok, easy enough! I’ve been meaning to make foccaccia and get over my fear of tempeh anyway.

Well, the first problem I ran into was that while my little corner grocery store had tempeh, they did not have any fresh mangos. I think one of the most important skills a cook can have is the ability to improvise, so I grabbed a bottle of mango nectar, which I reduced on the stove until most of the liquid was gone. Then I mixed it with some of my dad’s chili relish and some Veganaise. It turned out to be a pretty yellow color.

Next up, the caramelized onion foccaccia. I’ve had this foccaccia recipe that I printed out in my giant binder of recipes to try for months. The only change I made was to add caramelized onions instead of the olives the recipe calls for. I put the onions in the center of the bread and then folded it over, which I think may have caused it to deflate a little bit, but it was still delicious. I definitely see more foccaccia in my future! We had a little bit left over today which we ate with some soy cream cheese and sliced tomatoes, the perfect quick lunch.

Oh tempeh, I want to like you and know I should, but I’m just not so sure. I think the last time I cooked tempeh was in 2002. I’ve ordered it in restaurants a few times and it’s sometimes ok, but still not my favorite thing. I looked around online and decided upon this tempeh burger recipe from Veg News.

I actually ended up liking these burgers a lot! I’d make them again, maybe tweak the seasoning a bit. I topped them with big chunks of avocado and red onion, and some fresh CSA lettuce leaves.

Served with some oven-baked onion rings, recipe courtesy of Post Punk Kitchen. I used panko instead of breadcrumbs and regular yellow onions instead of vidalia and they were still tasty!