I am no Caroline Ishii :(

Almost two weeks ago, Kyle and I FINALLY made it out to Zen Kitchen. It was embarrassingly too long - only more embarrassing was the fact that it was also our first date in more than four years! But I digress. Between watching them open their restaurant on the W network series to dealing with nursing and the allergy situation, we finally had a chance to go!

We were pretty happy to have a reservation. It was good to see how busy it was! The service was awesome, and I was really impressed how everything flowed. We never had to wait between courses - it flowed beautifully.

We decided to go with the chef's tasting menu. We would have several courses and had no idea what we would be brought! It was exciting! Mainly for me, since most vegan restaurants in Ottawa are self-serve, thereby eliminating the suspense. Also, unless something has changed in the last couple of years, I don't think they are all vegan - just vegetarian. So it was great to be able to eat everything off the menu!

Things got started with an amuse-bouche consisting of a cracker with crème fraiche with pickled ginger. Then a smoky mushroom soup, followed by a beet and lentil risotto. Our main consisted of a harvest vegetable pie with grilled lettuce and radicchio. Finally, we finished things off with a pecan pie topped with coconut ice cream. It was heavenly! We could have licked the plates. Kyle also had the wine pairing and he tried some awesome wines. Given the we are not wine connoisseurs at all, it was great that Dave educated us. Kyle was served Colaneri wine, and after he finished it, the winemaker herself presented him with an invite to their winery! It was a very cool experience!

I have to admit that I was eating so many things that Kyson is allergic to, and I felt guilty for it. Soy, legumes, nuts and coconut were prevalent in so many dishes and while it was great to eat them, I was sad that Kyse is missing so much and that our diet isn't as exciting as it could be.

In any case, I thought I'd like to try to replicate the risotto. 'Try' is the operative word here. It was tasty, but not like Zen Kitchen's - lentils aside.

Beet Risotto

5 beets, scrubbed
2 tbsp olive oil
1 large onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 cups arborio rice
3/4 cup white wine
2 1/2 cups broth
1 tsp dried marjoram
1 tsp salt
Pepper
8 ounces seitan, finely diced

Wrap each beet in foil, place on a cookie sheet and roast for 1 1/2 hrs at 425 degrees. Once cool, unwrap, peel skin and chop. Set aside. (note: I did this the day before).

In a pressure cooker, sauté onions and garlic in oil for about 5 minutes. Add rice and stir to coat, about 1 minute. Add wine, stirring. Add broth, salt, pepper and marjoram. Lock lid into place and bring to high pressure. Once at high pressure, cook for 5 minutes.

Release pressure quickly. Stir in beets and seitan and warm everything through. Serve!

The Best Seitan Recipe in the World!

I've been promising this for awhile, but I need to share now that I've gotten it typed up.  Based on VeganDad's Veggie Lunch Meat, this seitan loaf lasts us all week, and provides one of our main sources of protein.  You can slice it for sandwiches, dice it for stir fries, grind it for spaghetti sauces.  It's really that versatile.  And cheap!  I'll estimate that even with my having to use extra-special wheat gluten (I order from NOW Foods from the States which is so expensive to ship, yet safe with all our allergies compared to Bob's Red Mill), it costs about $10 to make.  That's a great price in these trying economic times!  While not gluten-free by any means, it is soy-free, nut-free and even legume-free (for maybe the only other two people in the world who are allergic to them like my son!).


Sarah's Seitan


2 cups water

1 cup cooked quinoa

½ cup nutritional yeast

1/3 cup olive oil

1 scoop of rice protein or hemp protein powder

1 tbsp maple syrup

2 tsp salt

2 tsp paprika

2 tsp onion powder

1 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp pepper

Few dashes of liquid smoke (optional)

2 3/4 cups vital wheat gluten

Place all ingredients except the gluten flour in a bowl process until smooth with an immersion blender. Add gluten flour and work into a dough.

Shape dough into a log and wrap in heavy duty foil like a tootsie roll. Steam for 1 hour.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Remove seitan from steamer and bake for 45 minutes.

Cool, then store in the fridge.  Freezes beautifully!


Some pics of this in action...

I've now entered 2012 instead of 2002...I'm on twitter!  And I just downloaded the Blogger app to my phone!  Hurray!

Sweets We Can Eat!

So a few more allergies to now add to the list:

Safflower
Mustard
Flax Seed

This is beyond ridiculous.

Things have actually been going OK...we are thriving (thanks for thinking of us Becky!) and more into the swing of things with this restrictive diet. It's not easy and I'm getting tired of acting like a pioneer making everything, but it's going and Kyson is growing. So I guess that's all that matters.

I have to admit that I find resources for our specific allergies to be particularly challenging...most allergy cookbooks feature gluten-free items (can't avoid gluten now! It's my lifeline!) and they all seem to include every other allergen that we have to avoid. And raw cookbooks aren't much help since there are so many nut recipes. Most vegan cookbooks are just a tease - they are filled with soy in so many ways. Thankfully cookbooks like Vegan Lunch Box and Veganomicon/Appetite for Reduction feature a soy-free recipe index that helps eliminate some of the recipes we have to avoid. I think I have to write a soy free vegan cookbook! I think it might be the only vegan cookbook not currently out there!

Getting back to food, just because Kyson is severely allergic doesn't mean he can't enjoy his birthday! He celebrated one year with a tweaked agave cupcake from VCTOTW topped with an avocado/melted chocolate chips/agave mousse-like frosting. Here he is eyeing up the goods:



I think he enjoyed it:


I realize this is pathetic blogging about this now, but I only recently uploaded all the pics from my iPhone and camera onto the PC. I made mini-cuppies for Canada Day that I presented in a maple leaf flag:



The base was my strawberry cuppie from a recent post and the icing was a mix of avocado, icing sugar and strawberry jam. I have to work on the frosting since I'm not sure if it was the recipe or the heat, but it was a little too glossy. I topped each cuppie with a homemade white chocolate dipped strawberry - I basically melted some cocoa butter and added icing sugar and scraped vanilla bean bits. Of course each was also adorned with a little Canadian flag!



In the past I've been used to finding new recipes to try week after week as I prepare my meal plan. I've been adjusting to sticking to some tried-and-true things that picky toddlers and preschoolers eat (different noodles with homemade pasta sauce with every veggie under the sun tucked in/homemade pizza) and rotating between some other recipes. Having said that, week after week I have to make a few staple items:

Blue Ribbon Bread from Vegan Lunchbox - it makes three loaves which is great for freezing and pulling out all week, never mind changing up the shape to breadsticks, burger buns, loaves and mini-loaves. I use quinoa as the grain in the recipe.

Vegan Lunch Meat from Vegan Dad - this is pretty much my only source of protein. I've changed up the recipe quite a bit since I can't use beans but I'll blog about that shortly. You wouldn't believe how I can use this all week in different ways!

Spaghetti/Pasta Sauce - I throw in lots of veggies and fruits in both fresh and jarred baby food form, puree and presto! Instant yummy sauce that the kiddos gobble up on pasta or pizza.

I'll devote a future post about my seitan dishes, but for now this is Jerk Seitan using my veggie lunch meat as the chunks - I prefer this texture more that making seitan the traditional boiled way.

Happy St. Patty's! Low Fat and...Healthy?

Theme day! Before bed last night I cut up veggies for dinner tonight, and made the slow cooker seitan pot roast from Vegan on the Cheap. Instead of using my big crockpot and using all the veggies, I just made the seitan dough and put it in my little crockpot that I normally reserve for steel cut oats. I couldn't believe how much it puffed up today - it looked like a souffle! But I really should have added some more water to account for the water the poor roast didn't get from all of the veggies that would have otherwise surrounded it. I just had to cut off some dry bits but other than that it was perfect! Cooking it overnight worked out really well and cut down on the prep required at a busy time in the afternoon.



So what did I use the roast for? Appetite for Reduction's Irish Stew. Made with vegan beer, I can't get over how authentic this tastes! Now when I say authentic, I mean Puritan Irish Stew from a can. Tracy and I seemed to have that often when Dad was in charge of dinner. Can't say I've ever had it from a real pub. Anyways, I'm sure this tastes like what would be served in one! I included some of my oatmeal bread (see this post) as it contains Irish oats, or steel cut oats. Yummy combo!


But the real showstoppers were Chloe Coscarelli's Chocolate Beer Cupcakes with Irish Whiskey Buttercream...yummy! I do admit that I love Isa's cupcakes as they turn out so reliably (I had these ones in the oven for 10 minutes longer than specified since they wouldn't cook!), but this flavour combo was pretty cool. Anyways, for the buttercream, I wanted green, and since I'm not a fan of artificial colours, I added a scoop of my Vega Smoothie Infusion powder. Spinach anyone? It gave a pale green hue and didn't impart any weird flavouring. Healthy cupcakes? Kinda. Sweet? Omigod...I swear I developed a cavity eating these! I also made the caramel drizzle...I don't know, but cooking sugar stresses me out. Seems like there's this fine line between soft ball and hard ball (?) and I always seems to mess it up. I found her instructions a little unclear for the slight moron I can be, so to salvage a crunchy hard sugar mess, I added about 1/4 cup of soymilk and cooked over medium heat. Seemed to work! It resulted in a sticky taffy-like confection. Anyways, it looked good.

Solo:


With all her buddies:


I'm so happy for daylight savings time and the fact that spring is here! I can use natural light for pics! Hooray!

Where to Start...

(Note: This is obviously being written by the sister that is not going raw, as I think each one of the photos below would not be included in the raw food diet. Just thought I'd clear than up right now, in case anyone reading this thought that Tracy had changed her mind!)

I made Wheat-Meat Cacciatore from Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker. It was OK, but found myself thinking back to a comment I remembered before about slow cookers. On someone's blog, I think they said that all slow-cooker stuff tastes the same. I disagreed at the time, but found that this recipe tasted exactly like my Half-Day Ratatouille from the same book, despite having completely different ingredients. I didn't find that it reminded me of my mom's cacciatore that we ate as kids (with gross chicken), so I'll have to try and re-create that with seitan instead.

For my snacks this week, I made these fantastic Chocolate Banana Muffins from a recipe I found on the Fat Free Vegan's site. I had my doubts that were was no oil, but they were great! Since Kyle would also be snacking on these, I also threw in some chocolate chips. They were SOOO good!

Speaking of Kyle, it was his b-day this past week, and he asked me to make a cake. He loves carrot cake, but I knew that I couldn't take that on. As a result, he asked me to make my applesauce cake into a b-day cake. So I multiplied the recipe by 1.5 and poured into two 8-inch cake pans (lined with parchment paper with pan sides oiled), and baked for the same amount of time. For icing, I used the Vegan Buttercream from VCTOTW, and piped some chocolate ganache from a parchment paper tube (note: those blobs with squiggles are supposed to be balloons). It tasted great.

On Friday night, Kyle and I ate burgers, and I made Potato Subji as a 'different' side dish to our regular potato wedge fries. No idea where I got the recipe from originally, but it's one of my comfort foods. I don't think Kyle would consider it to be one of his however :( I think I used too much turmeric. In case you're wondering what the black things are, they are popped mustard seeds.

And finally, la pièce de resistance...I did my first gym workout of 2007 today. Sam and I decided to do a workout, then treat ourselves to Starbucks. On the way to Starbucks, I was starting to feel a little guilty about working out, then ingesting a calorie-laden drink, but somehow got over it. What I was not expecting was this:

A VEGAN LOW-FAT CHOCOLATE BROWNIE!!! I couldn't believe my eyes. I had to order one (and clearly I'm the only one in Barrhaven that had, since the edges were quite dry). It wasn't horrible, but tasted like a brownie I would make, so my $1.95+tax was not wasted. I was just so surprised and excited to see something vegan in their dessert case!!!

Southfork Ranch Creations

While watching one of my fave TV shows on DVD, I whipped up some muffins. In my last post, I had indicated that I was going to make a Banana Split Loaf from Vegan Planet. Upon reading the recipe, I discovered that I didn't have any pineapple, as specified in the recipe. I should have known that it would call for that, as my childhood version of a banana split never included pineapple, and I've noticed that our family was likely the only one to not include pineapple judging from many other banana split-inspired recipes.

I then modified my own recipe for banana muffins to include walnuts and swirls of homemade strawberry jam. They were tasty, but very sticky.


I also had made a Glazed Orange Seitan stir-fry from January 2007's issue of Vegetarian Times. It was awesome! I thought it tasted like a yummy homemade version of something take-out (this is supposed to be a compliment). It was very sweet and sour-ish, and I loved it. With seitan, edamame and cashews, it was very high in protein.


A couple of nights ago, my mom made one of my fave recipes from the pressure cooker - Chickpea Vegetable Medley from The Complete Vegetarian Kitchen by Lorna Sass. I love how it gets so much flavour from the onion, garlic, celery, carrots and butternut squash. Served over rice, it's definitely one of my comfort meals. It was also nice not having rely on a microwave to make it, since mine broke this week, but I'm not looking forward to reheating the leftovers in a toaster oven.

Sister's Seitan Saves Dinner!

Kyle told me that I need to improve my time management skills when it comes to grocery shopping, as I'm there what feels like a million times per week. The man had a point. So this week, I decided to plan out my meals for the entire week, and vowed to wait a whole seven days before heading back to one of the many grocery stores that I frequent.

Problem was - I did my meal planning just for me. I totally didn't do meal planning to account for my boyfriend eating at my house (which is not a rare thing) nor the fact that I would have to serve Sam a meal as well. This oversight came to my attention tonight, when Kyle indicated that we would hang out, and I realized that he probably wouldn't want a Tofurky-avocado-tomato-red onion-lettuce sandwich, which I had planned on eating myself tonight.

So I decided that I would make a salad that caught my attention from Healthy Cooking for Kids, as I had purchased the ingredients as part of my grocery time management plan. But I was stumped as to what else to serve, since I had originally planned on eating that with my sandwich! I had been eyeing a recipe on the PPK site, but by the time I would get home from work, I wouldn't have time to make, cook and cool the required seitan from VwaV. Fortunately, Tracy e-mailed me today and indicated that she'd made way too much seitan for her and Pete to eat in a week, so I managed to snag a few pieces! Problem solved!

The result: Amazing Sham Chowder thanks to Pamela on the PPK. I also added some chopped onions to the celery/pepper combo, then added the flour to make a roux before adding in the liquids. I also seasoned it with thyme, celery seed and bay leaf, since I didn't have Old Bay seasoning and didn't even know what goes into that. It was AMAZING! Kyle thought it was good. I told Tracy and Pete to swing by on their way home from work tomorrow night to get a couple servings as a thank-you for the seitan.


And the salad was pretty tasty too. It was called Garden's Gift Salad from the aforementioned Shelley Null book. It featured cucumbers, cherry tomatoes and avocado with a lime-rosemary-basil balsamic vinaigrette. Tasty! I plan on serving it again tomorrow night when Sam comes over before we go see The Holiday movie!

Looks like my grocery time management plan worked out after all, since I'll be able to entertain twice - all unplanned!

Day of (Un)Rest

I was a busy girl today! Kyle is feeling a little under the weather, as he is busy at work installing the ice for the curling rink. So I wanted to make him a yummy dinner to help lift his spirits. I cooked up 1/2 a recipe of Seitan from Vegan with a Vengeance, then used two of the three seitan chunks to make Jerk Seitan. I use red onions and red peppers instead of what the recipe calls for to add more colour. This was my second time making it, and I wish I had more time to marinate it (the recipe says to marinate the seitan for one hour, but the first time I made it I marinated it overnight - much better). Nonetheless, it was great! I served it over steamed brown rice, with some broccoli on the side. Kyle really liked the broccoli - all I did was sauté it with garlic-seasoned rice vinegar and soy sauce, and sprinkled it with sesame seeds.


For Dessert #1, I pulled out some of my Peanut Butter Chip Ice Cream from yesterday. My mom and stepdad came over and taste-tested this earlier in the day, and were very complimentary! My mom isn't a fan of soy, and she said that she never would have guessed that that was a main ingredient!

I'm posting a new pic of the ice cream, since my aunt had logged onto this blog earlier in the day, and said it looked like dog sh*t. I had stuck it in the freezer overnight, and scooped it out today. I'm a bigger fan of it this way, rather than the soft serve, sh*t style :)


And now on to Dessert #2...earlier in the week, I finally received my copy of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. I am on the Post Punk Kitchen site rather frequently, and have been very jealous of everyone else making tons and tons of cupcakes - it was now finally my turn! I haven't eaten a boston cream donut for I don't know how long, so I knew that this was the first cupcake I would make! I got a little scared when I read that the filling required agar - I have not ever had any luck with that stuff. It either never dissolves, or it does absolutely nothing to thicken or glossen (I don't even really know what it's supposed to do). I followed Isa's instructions for when using flakes instead of powder, and it seemed to turn out A-OK. I was however getting a *little* worried, since there was only like 1/3 cup of soymilk in my pot with the agar, and after 10 minutes of cooking, there wasn't much liquid left. I stirred that thing the entire time, just like the recipe said, because I knew that if I stopped stirring for just one minute, it would likely burn and crust on the bottom of my pan.

When it came time to fill the cupcakes, I tried to think of something else to use instead of a pastry bag. I was expecting to use a Ziploc bag with the corner cut off, but I then remembered back to Xmas of 2001 or something, when I asked for and received a Tupperware 'decorating' tool. I have no idea why I wanted that back then, as I certainly didn't plan on decorating cakes or anything. But man, that tool was perfect for filling the cupcakes! It comes with a variety of tips, and you can stick on the lid and store the contents in the fridge. I had extra filling left over, so I'm going to make a second batch of cupcakes on Tuesday night.


After like 3 hours of slaving away at these cupcakes, I was SO pleased with the final results:



Needless to say, I didn't do my vacuuming :) There's always tomorrow...