Dad's Birthday Dinner

On the menu:

White Bean Soup with herbed potato foccacia

Cinnamon coffee cake with homeade vanilla icecream

 

Vegan Pizza, Increased creativity

 

I've been inspired by the vegan slices of pizza I've been eating lately at the pizzerias local to Portland.  At $2.75 a slice, I'm ready to make my own.

The sauce was simple but truly made the pizza, a gernerous combination of sauteed garlic, tomato sauce and herbs.  The dough was topped with sauce, nutritional yeast, more herbs, pepper, spinach, steamed squash slices, mushrooms and peppers.

Pumpkin Scones

These are amazing, I made them three times in  one week (the only can of pumpkin we had was huge and I didn't want it to go to waste).  My family gobbled up each batch within 12 hours of baking.

The original recipe can be found here.  Tthey can easily be made more healthy by using half whole wheat flour and replacing some of the oil with more pumpkin.

Tempeh Sushi

   

This sushi has the vegetarian basics with a little extra soy protein.  Tempeh is a nice touch to sushi.  The preparation method of the tempeh was quite simple.  I steamed it a little water and soy sauce for about 10 minutes and then sliced it into strips before baking it on a metal rack in a 400 degree oven until crispy.  You could infuse the tempeh and make it much more flavorful.  My use of tempeh in the sushi was somewhat spontaneous.

Other stuffings include steamed carrots, avocado, cucumber and brown rice.

COOKIES

I have been home from college for less than two days now and my seemingly endless energy for cooking and baking has yet to seize. I find baking for loved ones so rejuvenating. In the last 40 hours or so, I've cooked/ baked 3 kinds of cookies, fudge, sushi, garlice stir fry, lentil soup and vegan mac 'n cheese. (I don't think I will be missing the dining hall or cramped kitchens any time soon.)
*Pictures feature sugar cookies, chocolate chip adapted from Pillsbury Family Cookbook, Mint Chippers adapted from Sunset Magazine

Thanksgiving Dinner

Inspired by the authors of What the Hell does a Vegan eat anyway?, I decided to make seitan roulade as the main dish for thanksgiving dinner.
I used the seitan recipe from the PPK and filled it with a mushroom mousse and sauteed kale and shitakes. After baking it was slathered with gravy.

It turned out fine in the end and everyone thought it was amazing but making it was quite an adventure.
In my ideal world, advice hotlines for cooking turkeys on Thanksgiving would be unheard of and and hotlines for making seitan roulades would replace them.
However, the whole world has not yet gone vegetarian and so I had to solve my seitan roulade woes by myself.
Seitan is pretty simple to make. It gets harder, though, when the goal is to rolls it into long sheets for a roulade. (It likes to bubble in the most unfavorable places).

Other dishes from Thanksgiving dinner: Stuffing, Wild Rice Salad, Twice Baked Potatoes with Dill and Earth Balance, Apple Cake, Pumpkin Pie with Vegan Ice Cream and Chocolate Pudding Cups