Meatless March

I once read about a funny, bot-generated list of the opening lines of blog posts, in which the blog authors had offered sincere excuses for why it had been so long since they last blogged. So I'm just going to move on without apology, acknowledging that the Earth's various environmental crises haven't somehow resolved themselves in the past six months. Therefore, you might still need motivation to eat less meat, because raising animals for food is environmentally problematic , and you want to be part of the solution. Oink Going forward, I will be offering you my thoughts on foods and recipes that are not only vegetarian and sometimes vegan, but also gluten-free. "Freedom" is an inspirational word, but achieving freedom from gluten is difficult and, frankly, often sad. Take cinnamon rolls, for example. Remember how I used to make cinnamon rolls that I described as GOOOOOOOOOOOOD ? I tried to make a non-yeast version with gluten-free (GF) flour to enjoy on Christma...

My sister made " Wild Rice Stuffing Balls " (Wholehearted Eats) for Thanksgiving, and recommended the recipe. Stuffing fairly screams "Thanksgiving," but if you're looking for a special alternative to a meat entree for Hanukkah or Christmas or New Year's or Arbor Day or whatever the kids are celebrating nowadays, this could be it. Around these parts, we're prepping for Christmas.  We make gingerbread cookies every year. The Stuffing Balls are quite a lot of work, so don't be a fool like me, and make them on a random Monday. By the time I got all those darned ingredients mixed together, I was wholly unenthusiastic about shaping them into rather slimy balls. There should actually be a name for that point at the end of the cooking process when I've lost whatever positive spirit I started out with, and I become convinced that the final result won't even taste good.  But fear not, they really did turn out well! I served them with a vegan gravy th...

I have a lot of random ingredients in my cupboard that I bought for a particular dish but serve no further purpose, so sometimes I just google those ingredients with "vegetarian" or "vegan" and maybe "slow cooker," and see what comes up. This time, the ingredient was pearl couscous, and the recipe that Google gave me was " Moroccan Slow Cooker Tagine with Chickpeas and Pearl Couscous ," which can be made with our without meat. Needless to say, I went without, and the dish is vegan that way. My squash was large so it yielded more than four cups, and I threw in four chopped carrots, and 1.5 cups of pearl couscous. If you're cooking it on low, as I did, you might want to turn it up to high when you add the couscous, or throw in the couscous earlier. And I added the raisins with the couscous, because dried fruit stands up well to slow-cooker treatment. I think more raisins would have been even better. I used just a little sprinkle of red pep...