Meatless March

Happy Vegan Vednesday! My backup dancer and I now have a firm routine going with slow-cooker oatmeal on Vednesday mornings, and then I enjoyed tea with oat milk as my hot beverage a little later. Lunch was pasta with a little olive oil and a sprinkling of Maldon salt flakes and some diced fresh tomato (what in the sam heck am I going to do when the farmer's market ceases after next week?!!! I don't want to think about it). Oatmeal for breakfast I love that the author of our dinner recipe, " Cozy Autumn Wild Rice Soup " (Gimme Some Oven), provides directions for vegan and non-vegan options, and instant pot or slow cooker* or stovetop options. I used the slow cooker. With vegetable oil substituting for butter, and coconut milk for cow's milk, I was flying non-stop to Veganville. Wow, that was corny. Sorry about that. Isn't this little onion cute? The soup turned out to be a hit among all three of us. Definitely a winner. Definitely going on t...

Another Vegan Vednesday is drawing to a close and I'm just (yawn) gonna give you the quick rundown before I hit the hay. First, remember how I recently added fake sausages to a pasta , and also recently made a dish with mini-potatoes for brunch? Finding myself with leftover fake sausage and potatoes a couple days ago, I made "Crispy Sautéed Potatoes with Rosemary" (How to Cook Everything, Mark Bittman) and simply added fake sausage pieces with seven minutes remaining in the cook time. Right after adding "sausage" Two thumbs up. Recipe below. That was vegan, and I had the leftovers for Vegan Vednesday lunch today. For dinner, I made a soup based on " Slow Cooker Vegetable Barley Soup " (Cookin' Canuck), with a bunch of substitutions: faro for barley, all veg broth and no H20, 1 large fresh tomato instead of canned, frozen peas instead of beans, no sweet potato. Was it even still the same recipe, in the end? Probably not, so t...

I'm not a big fan of the Beyond Burger , but I know someone who reported that Beyond Sausage was pretty good, so I bought some. Guess what? It IS pretty good! I started with a recipe for "Cherry Tomato Sauce with Olives" from a cookbook called "Pasta Sauces," which I use fairly frequently . You will see that when I first made this recipe, a shocking fifteen years ago, I noted that it was "excellent + easy," and I stand by that. I used to be such a rigid follower of recipes. But in the past year or so, making constant cooking mistakes has emboldened me. Because the dishes usually turn out edible, even if I use the wrong quantities or leave things out or I'm forced to substitute things. So why not wing it a bit? In that spirit, I measured nothing when I made the dish a few days ago. I had some cherry tomatoes, I had some (kalamata, not canned black) olives, I had about half a box of pasta, and I had two Beyond Sausages that were be...

For brunch this morning I gave " Huevos Rotos (Broken Eggs) " (NYT Cooking; subscription required) a whirl, and it turned out great. I did need to cook the potatoes a little longer than recommended to get them soft, and I cooked the eggs all the way through per my backup dancers' preferences. I used red pepper flakes and the spiciness was subtle and delicious. I recommend them with English muffins (yep, I made them for the 2nd weekend brunch in a row) to mop up the juices. Sharp-eyed readers will spot a cinnamon roll on Pat's plate. After making them last weekend , I froze a bunch to reheat today. I have to say they were inferior when reheated, but still good. You may recall that thanks to my compost, we accidentally grew a small melon in our front garden this year. It finally ripened and was ready for harvest on Friday! You can tell it's ready to harvest when it smells fragrant and comes easily off the vine, I learned from Google. Yesterday we s...

Fennel continues to fill me with bafflement , so I am not sure why I was so eager to cook " Creamy White Bean and Fennel Casserole " (NYT Cooking; subscription required), but it's been on my list for a while. I guess I thought it looked like a warm and comforting dish for a chilly day. While we haven't had a lot of chilly days lately, fall finally arrived really very suddenly around 6pm on Wednesday, so Thursday's the day I retrieved this recipe and pulled out my cast-iron skillet. And that was actually the only way in which I screwed up this dish: it's annoying when your recipe calls vaguely for a "large" skillet and then it turns out your skillet isn't large enough. I figured it out quickly, and proceeded in a Le Creuset pot instead. But that meant later having to wash the skillet AND the pot, and for the extra dish to wash, I shall never, ever forgive NYT Cooking's Aaron Hutcherson. I had doubts by the time I got the dish into t...

I always jump at the chance to make a dish that contains carbs, veggies, and protein all in one package, and " Spaghetti With Cauliflower, Almonds, Tomatoes and Chickpeas " (NYT Cooking; subscription required) fit the bill. There are still big, deep red, lusciously juicy tomatoes available from the farmers market, so I used two large fresh ones rather than canned, and it turned out perfectly. I used orange cauliflower just for kicks, and I bought my almonds pre-blanched and -skinned, which I highly recommend. The whole dog-and-pony show, including chopping, and heating water, took about 40 minutes - doable on a weeknight for me. With it being Vegan Vednesday, I ate mine with a sprinkling of salt rather than cheese. Tomatoes and garlic Finished product. I used tricolor pasta rather than spaghetti. Vegan Vednesday went well yesterday. I have honed my slow-cooker overnight oatmeal recipe to the point that Emma asked for seconds: Overnight Steel-Cut Oatme...