Spinach Lasagna

Tonight was lasagna night—mmmmmmm!  Here is my version:

Filling:
1 box hard tofu, drained
 2 cups mashed potatoes (I used instant flakes with just water and salt)
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 teaspoons dried basil
Mix it all together as smoothly as possible.

Sauce:
4 cups of your favorite marinara sauce.

Other:
1 box of oven-ready lasagna noodles(the ones that you don't have to boil first)
2 cups of chopped frozen spinach or 3 cups of fresh baby spinach leaves.

Put 1 cup of the sauce in the bottom of the lasagna dish.  Then put one layer of noodles, 4 of them.  Put half of the filling, another 4 noodles, and another cup of sauce.  Put 2 cups of spinach on, then the other half of the filling, a cup of sauce, the last noodles and the last cup of sauce.  Cover with foil and bake in a 375 oven for 40 minutes.

Anasazi Beans & Brown Jasmine Rice; Oatmeal Balls

The top picture is dinner tonight:  beans and rice.

2 cups Anasazi Beans
1 yellow onion, sliced
1 heaping Tablespoon chopped garlic
5 cups water
4 vegetable bouillon cubes
2 bay leaves
2 Tablespoons Hungarian paprika
1 teaspoon pink Himalayan salt

Put it all into a pressure cooker and cook for about 45 minutes.  Serve over brown jasmine rice.

The second picture is Oatmeal Balls that I made for my teenagers to eat with their friends tomorrow.

1.5 cups quick oats
1/4 cup dark cocoa powder
1/4 cup agave nectar
2 teaspoons vanilla
scant 1/4 cup smooth peanut butter, after pouring off the oil
3/4 cup of dark chocolate chips, finely chopped walnuts, and raw sunflower seeds

Mix all together in a bowl, then take a small handful, squeeze into a ball, and put on a plate.

This made 12.

As you can see from the two recipes above, it does not take a lot of money to eat a healthy, vegan, plant-based diet.  The dark cocoa powder could be any cocoa powder, agave nectar could be replaced with maple syrup or honey, Anasazi beans could be any of your favorite dry beans, Himalayan pink salt can be table salt.  It does not have to cost a lot of money or involve hard-to-get ingredients.

Try it!

Red Potato Salad

 

I am on a mailing list for weekly recipes from PCRM.  Today a recipe for Red Potato Salad came in my email.  This is a picture of it.  

Here is the link:

Red Potato Salad

Mushroom Risotto

I made this fabulous mushroom risotto a couple of days ago—no oil, no cheese or cream, just yummy goodness!  Here is a link to the recipe; it calls for oil or margarine, but I just left it out.

Dairy-Free Risotto Recipe

Oatnuts

I found this recipe on this website today:  http://www.thehealthyvegans.com/
 

I was out of applesauce so I used 4 ounces of pureed baby prunes; also did not have any tapioca starch, so I used acorn starch.  They turned out really nice!  Not very sweet, so if you want this to be a substitute for doughnuts, I would add more sugar and maple syrup.

Leftover Mashed Russets In Lunch Skillet

Lunch today is leftover mashed russets, kale, mushrooms, smokey tempeh, and nutritional yeast with sliced pickled beets on the side.  Yummy!  I just got a non-stick skillet out and put a couple of large spoonfuls of potatoes in the pan, then I added sliced mushrooms, ripped pieces off of several stalks of kale, cut 4 smokey tempeh slices into small pieces, cooked it all together, served and sprinkle on nutritional yeast and added some pickled beets on the side. 

This is so good!  The more you eat vegetables for your meals, the more your taste buds adjust to those flavors, until you crave the tastes. 

Acorn Bread

I made acorn bread this morning for the first time.  I have been reading about foods that are native to Texas and then expanded that to foods that early peoples might have eaten, especially hunter-gather groups.  Acorns came up frequently as a food source.  I read about how to make your own acorn flour, which involves removing the tannic acid from it, but it is a lot of work and I just wanted to try cooking with it. 

I ended up going to a Korean grocery store and buying Acorn Starch.  I am still not sure it is what I want it to be and have found opinions differ widely online, but I tried it and it worked just fine.  In all fairness though, it feels like corn starch and when it was in the bag, it had the "squeaky" feel when I pinched the package together, just like starch.  But I tried it anyway.

The dark color comes from the acorn flour.  I used Korean Acorn Starch, which some people say is the same as flour and some say is not.  I found a place online which quoted a man who teaches cooking with acorn flour who said that the Koreans grind their flour so fine it is as small as starch, but that you could still cook with it if used with some whole wheat flour.  So that is what I did.
 
There is a lot of interesting information on the web about acorn flour and how much it has been used for thousands of years.  I was intrigued and wanted to try it.  It is kind of cool to eat something that human beings have been eating since at least the Mesolithic period.  I watched a documentary by the BBC on YouTube called Wild Food.  It is a five-part show on hunter-gathers in Great Britains' history.

 Here is how I did it:

1 cup acorn flour
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup white flour
1/4 cup maple syrup
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 eggs worth of Ener-G Egg Replacer
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup soy milk

Preheat oven to 400F.  Mix all ingredients in a bowl and put into a loaf pan.  Mine is silicon so I did not have to oil and flour the bottom.  Bake for about 30 minutes.

It has a nice flavor.  Try it!