Soups & Stews Challenge and Veggie Duck

After a long hiatus, we completed our first cooking challenge since January! Coincidentally, my friend Lake challenged Kargie & myself to a cooking experiment the same week our Iron Chef cooking challenge group also decided to do our first challenge in months. So of course, we teamed up once again to complete both challenges this past weekend.

Lake's challenge was for us to replicate the Smoked Veggie Duck from Alice & Friends Vegetarian Cafe. The duck was taken off the menu when they completely veganized everything on the menu (the duck contained whey protein), even though it was a very popular dish. Our Iron Challenge for the weekend was to create a healthy, nutritious soup or stew - just in time for fall! We chose to do a Moroccan Lentil Soup.

Both dishes turned out fairly well, though we agreed that both recipes could stand to use a few more adjustments and further experimentation in order to make them even better! See the individual posts about each dish for more details! :)

Morroccan Lentil Soup
Smoked Veggie Duck (Take 1)

Three Vegan Pizzas

Sorry, I got a little sidetracked and never got around to completing my last series of posts about the Home Made challenge! I last left off posting the pizza dough recipe, but never got around to the actual pizza recipes. But now, after long last, here they are!!


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White Mushroom & Rosemary Truffle Pizza

The Whole Wheat Pizza Crust recipe we got from the Chopping Block worked really well for this pizza, since we were able to spread out really thin. It ended up being an almost cracker-like crust.

This was a real easy one to make. First, take a round ball of dough, and spread it out as thin as possible in the shape of a circle, and place it on a pizza stone or baking sheet.

Next, bake the crust in the oven at 350 degrees until crisp. Then we topped it with mushrooms, rosemary, truffle salt, and truffle-infused olive oil. We placed it back in the oven until the mushrooms were cooked. It made a great appetizer pizza!

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A Cheeseless Veggie Pizza

This one was a little more labor intensive. First, we had to make a sauce. We cheated a little and used some fire-roasted canned tomatoes. We seasoned it to taste with salt, pepper, oregano, basil, and garlic.

We had some frozen spinach on hand, so we microwaved that to thaw, and also chopped up some fresh red pepper and white mushrooms. We rolled the dough out into a rectangle to fit our baking sheet, but didn't make it as thin as the first pizza. We wanted to keep the crust thick to be able to handle all the toppings we were using. We rolled the edges over to make a crust and hold in the sauce.

Again, we pre-baked the crust for about 10 minutes, then piled on all the toppings. Bake until cooked through.

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A Vegan Cheese & Sausage Pizza

This one took the longest to make, despite being pretty easy on the preparation. We used the same dough and sauce as the veggie pizza, but added some vegan substitutes for more traditional pizza toppings.

For the sausage, we used Upton's Naturals Italian Sausage Seitan Crumbles

And for the cheese, we used a half block each of Follow Your Heart Vegan Gourmet Cheddar and Mozzerella cheeses.

After pre-cooking the dough as before, and layering on the sauce, we generously sprinkled the sausage crumbles and shredded cheese on top of our circular-shaped pizza dough. We left some of the crust exposed on the edges for easier handling while eating ;-)

The part that took the longest was getting the cheese to melt. We had to cover the exposed crust with foil to prevent burning, then turned up the temperature to 550 degrees. It took a while to start melting, but once it did, it went fast! We had to take turns watching it to make sure we didn't end up with a burnt pizza!!

But it was definitely worth the wait! It was a pretty awesome vegan pizza, and I didn't even have to worry too much about over-indulging since my lactose-intolerant self can handle vegan cheese no problem :D

Home Made Challenge

Happy New Year! Sorry I've been MIA lately. . . I guess I took a bit of a hiatus from blogging after the holidays. But now I'm back, and reporting the results of the latest cooking challenge that my cooking buddy & I entered for our Iron-Chef style group blog! This time, the challenge was dubbed the Home Made/Deprocessed Reader's Choice Challenge.

The challenge was suggested by one of the Iron Blog's participants, who commented on the habits of people who've successfully accomplished healthier lifestyle changes:

One of the things that it seems like a lot of successful people here have done is limit the amount of processed foods eaten.

How about a challenge to make something from scratch that you usually don't

So for our de-processed meal, my friend and I decided to get ready for the upcoming Super Bowl by making veggie burgers and vegan pizza from scratch!

We made the veggie burgers by loosely following the recipe for Simplest Bean Burgers from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman. They definitely have a lot of potential, and can be modified in various ways to give different flavors!

The pizza recipe was also pretty free-flowing. We got a recipe for a very thin whole wheat crust from the Chopping Block, and we were able to use it to make various types of pizza, such as:

A White Mushroom & Rosemary Truffle Pizza

A Cheeseless Veggie Pizza

And A Vegan Cheese & Sausage Pizza

We had such a blast with this challenge, we decided to re-do both recipes the week after to test and incorporate improvements that we thought could have been made to our original recipes.

Stay tuned, and I'll post each recipe separately:
High Protein Southwestern Vegan Black Bean Burgers
Whole Wheat Pizza Dough
Vegan Pizzas

Holiday Challenge

This month's challenge for our "Iron Chef"-inspired group cooking blog is Holiday foods, dishes, and edible gifts! Once again, I teamed up with my friend/cooking buddy for this challenge. And as a side project, our other friend challenged us to make the ultimate gingerbread house. Since that fit nicely with the Holiday Challenge theme, we'll be entering that as well.

We did three recipes this time around. As a tribute to the Chicago Holiday tradition, we made a vegan version of the Marshall Field's Chicken Pot Pie. Being lifelong Chicagoans, we both hold a place in our hearts for the Field's Pot Pie, especially now that Field's is no longer, and despite the fact that neither of us eat chicken anymore. We got the original recipe from the Marshall Field's cookbook, and made our substitutions accordingly. It turned out so well that we'll be featuring it as the main course at our holiday dinner party next weekend.

We also made some warm Glogg to go with it, which is warm Swedish spiced wine. My Swedish-American uncle used to make Glogg for our family New Year's Day party every year, so it's definitely been part of our family holiday tradition. He passed away this year, so I decided I wanted to try my hand at making it, in his memory.

The recipe we tried out turned out ok, but we decided it could stand to use more liquid (ie, wine) since the garnishes seemed to overwhelm the final product. In fact, there was enough "garnish" left over for our friend to make another dessert out of the extras!

Finally, our most time-consuming recipe this round was definitely the Gingerbread House. Since the friend who came up with this challenge is vegan, we made vegan versions of everything. The gingerbread itself turned out really yummy (and stable), but the frosting recipe we used was not that great. The "glue" was very drippy, so our whole diorama looked very melty :( And yes, we ended up making a diorama, not a house.

See the above links to view the individual recipes! :)

Cooking Light Challenge - Part 2!

We had so much fun doing the Cooking Light Challenge last week that when the deadline was extended, we took advantage by taking on another "Iron Chef" challenge night. This time, it was my friend's turn to find recipes for us to use, and he'll be the one reporting our results to our group blog. I'll report my own take on things here!

This round, we did the following recipes:
Zucchini and Fennel Soup with Roasted Red Pepper Puree (Cooking Light, May 2005)
Spaghetti Squash with Edamame-Cilantro Pesto (Cooking Light, March 2005)
Sesame Quinoa with Tofu (Cooking Light, March 2002)
Oranges with Caramel and Cardamom Syrup (Cooking Light, October 2008)

Unfortunately, these recipes did not turn out as well as last week's :( But we did have a good time, and perhaps we can use some of the things we've learned for future cooking challenges! The quinoa dish and the oranges were very good, and I'd definitely put them both on my list of recipes to do again. The soup was fine, but I'm not dying to repeat it. The squash with edamame-cilantro pesto ok, but tasted a bit odd together. It would definitely need some tweaking before I eat it again.

The links above will take you to my more detailed review on each recipe--complete with commentary, changes, and pictures :) Hopefully something will interest or inspire you (or at least, tell you what to avoid!) Happy cooking!!

Odds & Ends Challenge

I might as well put up the entry I submitted for the first cooking challenge I participated in for the group cooking blog I'm in. This one took place mid-September, right before my trip to New York.

The challenge was dubbed the "Odds & Ends Challenge." Rather than having a theme ingredient, the goal of the challenge was to use up ingredients you already had in your fridge, pantry, or freezer. Click the link below to continue reading what I had posted:

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September 8, 2008
This challenge was perfect for me, since I'm leaving town in a few days and needed to use up all the fresh veggies left in my fridge! As I was looking through my pantry to figure out what else I could use up, I found a box of kasha I bought a long time ago that I never got around to trying. . . so I'm also using this to fulfill Des's "try something new" challenge.

I'd never had kasha before, so I had no clue what it tasted like or how to cook it. I had some brussels sprouts, kale, tofu, and red peppers in the fridge that really needed to be eaten, so I figured I could just throw everything together and hope for the best :)

I ended up just steaming the brussels sprouts, turning the kale, peppers, and tofu into a stir fry, and using the kasha as a side dish. It turned out pretty well!

I started off by quartering and steaming the brussels sprouts:

Then I followed the package directions to make the kasha. I boiled two cups of veggie broth (which was also just something sitting in my pantry that needed to be used). While that was going, I beat an egg and coated 1 cup of kasha with it.

Then I cooked the kasha/egg mixture in a dry skillet until it was no longer sticky and the grains separated. By then, the broth was boiling, so I could pour it onto the kasha, cover the skillet, and let it simmer until the liquid was absorbed.

While the kasha was cooking, I chopped up the tofu, and tossed it with some tamari, Bragg's, and liquid smoke:

I sauteed the tofu in a skillet, and steamed the kale. Once the tofu was brown, I took it off the heat, and used the same skillet to stir fry the red peppers. I transferred the steamed kale to the skillet, and added a little tamari and Bragg's to flavor the kale & peppers. Then I added the tofu back to the stir fried veggies.

Once I was done with the kale/pepper/tofu stir fry, the kasha was done, so all I had to do it plate it! Voilà!

Butternut Squash w/Quinoa & Veggies

In October, I participated in the Winter Squash Challenge for the group cooking blog I'm a part of. For your viewing pleasure, I've copied and pasted my entry below:

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October 29, 2008
I ended up making a huge quinoa pilaf with butternut squash, red and green peppers, onions, and seitan sausage. It turned out really well! I'd definitely make it again :)

So I'm a lazy bum and didn't feel like doing anything too complicated, which included cutting up a squash. So I bought about a pound of pre-cut butternut squash, along with a pound of asparagus, one red and one green bell pepper, and some fresh thyme. When I got home I rummaged through my pantry and decided to use some quinoa I had in storage, along with an onion, veggie bullion, and dried rosemary and savory.

I chopped up the onion and peppers, sprayed it with some olive oil spray, and sprinkled the thyme, rosemary, and savory on it. I decided to cook the asparagus separately with some olive oil and garlic. I roasted everything at 425 degrees for about 1/2 hr.

While the veggies were cooking, I re-constituted some veggie bullion into 2 cups of water. I brought the veggie broth to a boil, then stirred in the quinoa. I let it simmer, covered, for 15 minutes over low heat.

The quinoa and the veggies were done around the same time, so I just mixed them together. . . except for the asparagus because I decided I wanted to just eat that separately.

In the end, I decided to throw in two apple-sage seitan sausages for extra protein. And because they taste good :)


This makes four servings. Here's the nutritional information of just the quinoa dish (without asparagus, and before adding the sausage):
250 calories
3 g fat
50 g carbs (4g fiber)
7 g protein

Adding the asparagus & sausage, it becomes:
390 calories
8 g fat
60 g carbs (7g fiber)
22 g protein

Cooking Light Challenge - Part 1!!

I tried out three recipes for a challenge I'm doing for a group cooking blog. The challenge was to test out a recipe from the Cooking Light website or publication. I decided to do 3 recipes instead of just one, since I had a friend helping me out.

I found all three recipes from the Cooking Light Website, but the last one was from Sunset, not Cooking Light, so it won't count in the challenge :( (I'm still reporting about it, though, because it was good!)

Here are all of the original recipes:
Roasted Root Vegetables with Walnut Pesto (Cooking Light, November 2007)
Velvety Squash Soup (Cooking Light, November 2007)
Chocolate Tofu Mousse (Sunset, October 1998)

All three recipes turned out to be a huge success!! My first time cooking parsnips and turnips turned out fairly well AND we made a nice fall/holiday soup AND we even got to have a decadent dessert :) Not only that, but all of the recipes were pretty easy to make, and we finished all three within an hour and a half (including chopping/prep, about an hour in the oven for all the veggies, plating, and clean-up).

So that it's easier to search the recipes later, I'm blogging about each one separately. See the following related posts to read about our adventures in making the Roasted Root Vegetables, the Velvety Squash Soup, and the Chocolate Tofu Mousse.