Pumpkin Alfredo

I am having some technical difficulties the past few days. My computer has been going really slow and keeps giving me the 'magic beach ball of death' so all typing and computer activities has been taking longer than I would like. 

Secondly, my camera decided that working was over-rated. While I was making the below recipe I started with my real camera, but it decided to stop working and not turn on so the pictures below are all from my phone. I apologize for the poorer quality and missing the beginning steps of the recipe. 

My motivation for this recipe was SHOCKINGLY not Pinterest... I don't actually remember how I stumbled upon the website- but I wound up on Organic Authority   looking at pumpkin recipes
that all looked amazing.. especially this one for Dairy Free Pumpkin Alfredo

Since it is already a free recipe I think it is ok that I share it with proper citations. I barely changed anything from the recipe - and it came out awesome!

Ingredients:

•  1 spaghetti squash
• ½ pound whole grain fettuccini **(You can omit this and do all spaghetti squash to cut down the carbs if you want.)
• 1 pound spinach or other green (kale, chard, collard greens, mustard greens) 
•  3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 tablespoons flour (All purpose, brown rice, whole wheat, whatever)
• 4 cloves of garlic minced 
•  1.5 cups non-dairy milk (I used unsweetened, plain almond milk)
• 1 cup pumpkin puree
• 1 tsp Dijon mustard
• Fresh ground salt and pepper to taste
•  Nutritional yeast or parm cheese (optional: note parm cheese if not doing a vegan version!!)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350*

2. Half and seed the spaghetti squash. Drizzle with olive oil and put on a baking sheet. Roast for about 1-2 hours.

3. Near the end of the roasting, boil fettuccini.

4. Add in the greens vegetable of your choice to the boiling fettucini near the end.

5. Drain pasta/ greens into a colindar and set aside.

6. In a pan over medium heat, heat olive oil

7. Add flour to olive oil, mixing CONSTANTLY until smoothish

8. Add in garlic and cook ~ 1 minute to flour and oil mixture, continuing to stir.

9. Add in the milk slowly.

 

10. Then add pumpkin, salt and pepper. Continue to stir. Mixture will thicken.

 

11. Add in extra milk/ pumpkin as needed to adjust consistency.

12. Remove from heat.

To Serve:

Portion about half spaghetti squash with half fettuccini/ greens mixture and serve with pumpkin alfredo sauce. Sprinkle with nutritional yeast or parmesan cheese.

I found it was also very good with a splash of hot sauce, but that is pretty much my opinion on every food.

 Of course my favorite Sous Chef was there to help supervise!

Vegan Chili

It's hard for me to post recipes, as I tend to not use them...

I've had a week off before I go back to the grind of working two jobs, starting classes full time, and starting internship again, so I decided with my free time it might be a good idea to make some food and freeze it. Today I made one of my staples: Vegan Chili.

I love making chili and soup type of dishes because they really do not require a recipe at all, you just throw in whatever you have on hand. I pretty much always have dried beans, and canned tomato around, so I generally always have the basic ingredients. the recipe below is what I happened to use today, but definitely feel free to add/ take away anything you like, dislike or just don't feel like buying. This makes a really big batch, but its great for dividing up and freezing for the future.

Vegan Chili
2 large cans whole tomatoes
1 can diced tomatoes
1 can pumpkin
1 onion (I used red today)
2 hot chili peppers
1 cup/can chickpeas
1 cup kidney beans
2 cup black beans
1 cup corn
1 cup peas
1/2 cup edamame
green and red bell peppers (I just used 1 whole bag of frozen chopped mixed peppers)
2 tb olive oil
garlic
oregano
chili powder
black pepper
red pepper
hot sauce

Prepare any beans by cooking them if they are dried.
chop any raw vegetables (be careful with the hot peppers, getting hot pepper juice underneath your nails is no fun. I usually wear gloves.)

heat oil in a large pot, add garlic and onion, and cook for about 5ish minutes.

Add all other ingredients to pot.

Simmer for an hour or longer. The longer you simmer it the softer all of the ingredients will be and more blended together.

Viola! Vegan Chili!

It makes a great meal on its own, or I personally love to use it as an extra chunky spaghetti sauce. It can be topped with low fat cheese or sour cream/ regular or nondairy versions, to add a little bit of creaminess to it and cool it down if you made it a bit to spicy.

Vegan Pumpkin Bread

I love all things pumpkin.

Pumpkin oatmeal, pumpkin pie, pumpkin ravioli, pumpkin flavored coffee, .. and lately I have been craving pumpkin bread.

Since I have been experimenting with Vegan baking I decided to attempt a Vegan Pumpkin Bread recipe. And a whole wheat bread would be even better.

I couldn't find any recipes I really liked so I kind of combined a few and here's what I came up with:

3.5 cups flour (I used 2.5 cups whole wheat, and 1 cup all purpose)
1/2 cup sugar
2 TB baking powder
1/2 ts salt
cinnamon (~ 2 TB)
pumpkin pie spice (~ 1/2 TB)
all spice (1 ts)
1 cup apple sauce or vegetable oil (I used 1/2 and 1/2)
2.5 cups canned pumpkin
~2/3 cup water
4 TB ground flax seeds


Mix flour, sugar, powder, and spices. Then add everything else. Mix well. if it is too watery add more flour.

Put into a greased baking pan/ bread pan. (this is too much batter to fit all into one bread pan.)


Bake for about 50 minutes at 350*

You could also add some chocolate chips to the batter for some delightful chocolate pumpkin bread.

Enjoy!

Snobby Joes!

I wish it were Monday already.
I suppose thats not something you hear everyday, but that will be the first time in a week in which I get to "sleep in" past 6 am. This is a work weekend for me, which means working over 30 hours in 3 days. I am already so tired. I don't mind getting up early, if only my neighbors would let me get to sleep before 3 am, then I would be much less grumpy about it!

Today started at 6, with some last minute studying, over a bowl of oats, it was basically the same as yesterday, but not quite so pretty this morning.
1/2 cup oats
1/2 medium banana
1 tb peanut butter
about 1/2 cup sliced fresh strawberries
vanilla extract
7 butterscotch chips

My Dev. Psyc Test went so-so. It was again harder than expected, despite my expecting it to be hard and studying a lot.

Lunch was the last of the kale (about 4 big leaves), about 1/2 cup cooked fresh spinach, some roasted eggplant, zucchini, and peppers, and some left over brown rice and lentils and rotini, and of course, hot sauce, the cure all to any bland meal.


And about a cup of grapes
After doing a Student Food Run I had an apple on the run, before another appointment:
And afterwards a honey tangerine. Check out my awesome walking and photographing skills.


Unfortunetaly the fruit was just not filling me up, so I snacked on a Trader Joes Chocolate Chip Chewy Bar. It was very tasty, and chocolatey.


I also enjoyed some more Canadian Maple tea with soymilk, and a caramel calcium chew.



I decided to skip Public Health tonight, I'm a slacker, what can I say.
So instead, I made Snobby Joes! from the Veganonicom Cookbook. I halved the recipe and then neglicted to actually measure anything, so it was roughly on the idea it consisted of:
1/2 cup uncooked lentils
1/2 onion
1/2 large green pepper
tb olive oil
1 clove garlic
oregano
cayenne pepper (book said chili powder, but I don't have that)
1/2 cup tomato sauce
1/4 cup tomato paste
mustard
maple syrup

Bring lentils to a boil in 2 cups of water, and then turn down to a simmer for 20 minutes.
In a frying pan, cook the onion and pepper in olive oil until softened. Add garlic, cook 1 minute longer.

Once the lentils are done cooking add them to the onions and peppers, then add spices.
Add Tomato sauce and paste (my sauce had been mixed with my roasted peppers so I had some additional roasted red peppers in the mix).
Add mustard and maple syrup to taste.

the finished product:
And a close up served on TJs whole wheat bread:


I probably had about a cup of snobby joe mix, on 2 slices of whole wheat bread, and a half cup of cooked spinach on the side (its sad how much spinach shrinks up when its cooked.) I wound up adding some hot sauce to the sandwich to give it a little more zing, but over all it was very good!

I may have had another half of a TJs Chocolate granola bar after dinner as well... but no need to be repetitive with pictures. I have a chocolate addiction.

Baking Vegan

I am not a vegan. I have, however, developed a new love of vegan baking!

In general, I am not the best baker, because I refuse to measure ingredients, and in normal baking, the measurements are actually pretty important in order to get the correct chemical reactions, such as between the eggs, and sugar and baking soda. Vegan Baking still has some of these factors, but not nearly to such a great extent as regular baking.

My roommate has this fabulous Vegan Cookbook: Veganomicon.

(http://www.amazon.com/Veganomicon-Ultimate-Isa-Chandra-Moskowitz/dp/156924264X) We have both made quite a few delicious recipes from the book so far, but I must say their cookie recipes are definitely some of my faves.

Making vegan cookies is really simple, really the only difference from regular cookies is substituting real milk for soy or almond milk, using oil instead of butter, and using flax seeds instead of eggs.

I really like that this cookbook suggests using some healthier ingredients such as substituting whole wheat pastry flour in place of plain white flour. You can’t even taste the difference in the cookies and you’re getting in a serving of whole grains!

The best part of vegan baking? Eating the uncooked batter without a fear of salmonella :)

I wouldn’t want to be giving way these great authors recipes, but here’s one cookie recipe I typed up for a friend (who I made these biscotti for, and they received excellent reviews). It’s really like publicity because once you try these babies, you’ll definitely want to go out and buy the cook book!

Chocolate HAzelnut Biscotti Form Veganonicon: The ultimate VEgan Cookbook by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero

Makes 18 cookies

Ingredients:

1/3 cup soy or almond milk

2 tb ground flaxseed

¾ cup plus 2 tb sugar

½ cup canola oil

½ ts vanilla extract

½ ts almond extract

1.5 cups all purpose flour or whole wheat pastry flour

1/3 dutch processed unsweetened cocoa powder

2 tb arrowroot powder or cornstarch

2 tsp baking powder

½ ts salt

1 cup whole raw hazelnuts (I made then with whole one time- but I found that lead to them breaking a lot when I cut then- so if you can find chopped I would recommend that)

Preheat over 350*

Lightly grease cookie sheet

- In large bowl whisk milk and flaxseed about 30 seconds

- Add sugar, oil, extracts until smooth

- Sift flour and cocoa powder, arrowroot/cornstarch, baking powder and salt

- Stir to mix until dough comes together

- Knead in hazelnuts very briefly to form a stiff dough.

- On a baking sheet form a rectangle about 12” long and 3-4” wide

- Bake for 28 minutes

- Top may crack slightly

- Remove from oven and allow to cool for 30 minutes

- Turn up oven to 375 *

- Transfer biscotti to cutting board

- With a sharp knife cut ~1/2” slices

- Put back on to baking sheet cut side down

- Bake 12-15 minutes or until desired crispness is achieved.

- Remove from oven, cool, store in air tight container.

Enjoy :)