American chop suey | tangy carrot and cabbage salad

My mother grew up during difficult economic times, and money was tight in her household. I don't know exactly what her diet was like, but I do know she developed an aversion to foods she thought of as the foods one would have to eat if one were poor. She despised foods she thought of as "filler foods" which generally included things like grains or pasta. Pasta was not comfort food to her, it was something you had to eat if you couldn't afford to buy anything else. When we ate at Chinese restaurants, for example, I was told not to fill up on the steamed rice, and when she made things like meatloaf or hamburgers she never added breadcrumbs or other fillers. She added eggs and seasonings.

During the early years of raising a family, my parents didn't have much money. My mother ran the household on a strict and tight no-frills budget. I wore a lot of hand-me-down clothes from my cousins (which I loved, by the way). However, the one thing my mother wouldn't compromise on was her idea of what we should eat. My mother trimmed corners in other areas in order to put meat on the table nearly every night. We had good cuts of meat every evening that my father was home for dinner, and chicken, hamburgers or occasionally fish when he wasn't. My mother favored eye roast, steak, pot roast, chops and such — no spaghetti on our plates. There also was always a fresh salad, and sometimes frozen or canned vegetables. (I didn't even know fresh vegetables existed.) She seldom spent food budget money on soft drinks, chips or other junk food, saving it all for the good stuff. Lucky me, right?

Naturally, all I wanted was noodles, and for that I had to turn to my father. My father was not much of a home-arts kind of guy (this is an understatement in the extreme) but there were a few things he would cook if hounded enough. He could make pizza from scratch (learned from owning an Italian restaurant), grilled chickpeas (learned from his mother), and American chop suey (learned when he was a cook in the army). American chop suey was a mix of ground beef, tomato sauce and macaroni that I believed was something only my father made, and I loved it, though my mother wouldn't touch the stuff. I recently had my memory jolted by a post on Mitten Machen in which Mary provided a description and veganized recipe using tempeh, for this homey dish. What a shock! Naturally, I had to make it as soon as possible, and although I only had linguine instead of the small pasta traditionally used in the recipe, it was fabulously delicious. (Both Mary and I used quinoa pasta for this dish. Ancient Harvest Quinoa pasta has become my husband's and my favorite pasta, and we use it for most of our pasta recipes.) You can see the American chop suey in the photo at the top of this post, and you should visit Mary's blog and make some! Thanks, Mary.

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As I've been mentioning lately, we've had a bit of company, and our last guest, my brother, left Monday morning. On Sunday evening our son and d-i-l hosted a dinner for the family, and prepared some wonderful food.



Our d-i-l made Jamaican red bean stew (from Robin Robertson's "Quick Fix Vegetarian") in the slow cooker she found at our last Goodwill excursion. It was really great — spicy, fragrant and filling.



Our son made his excellent version of long beans and tofu. And I brought a salad. I hadn't actually planned to post a recipe so I didn't measure anything, but the salad turned out so well I wanted to share it. It was both beautiful and delicious, and I've reconstructed it as best I can, estimating when I didn't know exact amounts. It's the kind of recipe where a little more or less of one ingredient or another won't make or break the dish — lots of room for improvisation and customizing to your taste!



Tangy carrot and cabbage salad serves 10

• 3 to 4 large carrots, peeled and coarsely grated
• 1/2 small purple cabbage, core removed, finely shredded
• 2 to 3 green onions, cut fine
• 1/2 to 1 small cucumber, sliced into thin spears (opt. but refreshing)
• 1/2 cup dried cranberries
  
• 5 to 8 ounces mixed baby salad greens
• 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
• zest and juice from 1 lemon
• 1 tablespoon dijon mustard
• 1 to 3 teaspoons umeboshi vinegar (to taste)
• 1 to 3 teaspoons agave syrup or other sweetener (to taste)
  
• fresh ground black pepper and salt (if needed)
  

1. One to two hours ahead, prepare the carrots, cabbage, onions and cucumbers. (The cabbage should be halved lengthwise, leaving you with two identical halves. You will only need one half.) Place the carrots, cabbage, green onions, cranberries and cucumbers into a large bowl and combine.
2. Make a dressing from the oil, lemon juice and zest, mustard, vinegar and agave. Mix until smooth, then mix the dressing into the vegetables. Marinate in the refrigerator for 1 to 2 hours.
3. Just before serving, add a few grinds of black pepper to the slaw mix and stir in. Taste for seasonings and adjust if necessary.
4. Add the fresh salad greens to the bowl and carefully but thoroughly mix the salad together.

Swiss chard with udon, raisins, garlic and toasted pumpkin seeds / baked marinated tempeh

First, I should mention that I've never really liked Swiss chard. It's just too beety tasting, and I'm not thrilled with beets. That said, I will eat these things if I come upon them at the table. My son and d-i-l in Seattle are very fond of Swiss chard and when they cook it it always tastes much better than I think it will. It tastes good, and makes me think I don't dislike it after all. But it's not something I would buy on purpose at the store. I'd rather have kale.


The garlic is added to the wok.

However, this year when we planted the garden - a garden that will be beneficial mainly to our renters since we'll be gone before most of it is ready to eat - I decided to plant Swiss chard because it grows fast, and the thought that I might be able to actually eat something from the garden other than lettuce, was enough to get me past my true feelings. Well, yahoo, the chard is indeed ready, and today I gathered a huge bowlful of thinnings. (The pole beans are also doing well and who knows, maybe we'll get a few of those. And the broccoli plants have tiny broccoli heads forming. And the Tumbling Tom tomato is covered with green cherry tomatoes, so there's a glimmer of hope that we might get to harvest something besides Swiss chard before August 15.)


The Swiss chard gets stir-fried in the wok.

Anyway, faced with this giant bowl of fresh greens, I had to cook something. I made a simple dish from the chard with crimini mushrooms, lots of garlic, raisins and toasted pumpkin seeds, and it wasn't too bad. It was seasoned with Shark brand sriracha. (I read that Shark sriracha is a more traditional chili sauce than the commonly used rooster brand. It's what is used in Thailand, and unlike Rooster sriracha, it has no preservatives. Now if only it didn't have 20% sugar. In Australia, my husband was able to find chili sauce that contained neither preservatives or sugar, but we haven't found anything like that here. If you know a good brand, please let me know.)

This is a very flexible recipe, and in keeping with that theme (and because I didn't measure), I'm going to be a little vague with ingredients and cooking directions. It's the basic idea that counts.



Swiss chard with udon noodles

• about 2 cups crimini (or whatever) mushrooms, sliced
• handful of raisins (1/4 cup?)
• olive oil
• lots of fresh garlic, minced fine (at least 1 tablespoon)
• 1 tablespoon sriracha chili sauce (more or less to taste)
• handful of grape tomatoes, halved (I would have added these but we didn't have any!)
• BIG bunch Swiss chard, leaves and stems, roughly cut
• 10 ounces udon noodles
• fresh ground black pepper
• handful of pumpkin seeds (or sunflower seeds), toasted
• chopped green onions might be nice added at the end, though I didn't add any
  

1. First toast the pumpkin or sunflower seeds in a wok until browned and fragrant. Set aside in a small bowl.
2. Cook the udon. Drain it, rinse it well with cold running water and drain again. Place it in a bowl and toss with toasted sesame oil.
3. Cook the mushrooms and raisins for a minute or two in oil in a wok. As they begin to soften, add the garlic and cook for a minute. (Add a little more oil if needed.)
4. Mix in the sriracha and tomatoes, then add the chard and stir fry briefly until the chard is wilted, mixing ingredients together.
   
5. Add the noodles to the wok and toss for a minute until noodles are heated.
6. Place in serving bowl and grind pepper over the noodles.
7. Sprinkle the toasted pumpkin seeds over all.

We had our chardy noodles with Basic Oven-Baked Marinated Tempeh from Crescent Dragonwagon's "Passionate Vegetarian."

Weeds and feeds

©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

I was really meaning to create a good recipe for a post today but I've been gardening to exhaustion, and we ended up eating leftovers of a not so great dinner. I would like to be planting and refining new garden spaces, but what I'm doing is WEEDING. I'm sure I've mentioned our invasive-vine woes before, but really, it's so depressing. Every time I think progress has been made, new shoots of these hideous stucco-wreckers start emerging from the ground. There are thick roots deep under the ground and no matter how I dig at them, they won't budge. Sometimes I manage to withdraw a large section of root and spray myself with a pound of dirt in the process. Last year we paid professionals to remove them and they rototilled the perimeter of the house, and removed a startling quantity of roots, but many large roots are still there. I've got a bunch of plants ready to go into beds but we still have a lot of pre-planting work to do. Actually, I think my husband is still out there digging.

Since this is a cooking blog and not a gardening blog, I won't bore you with pictures of evil, inedible weeds. I'm posting some of the stuff we've cooked and eaten lately. We had some fantastic marinated tempeh that was made from a recipe from "Lorna Sass' Complete Vegetarian Kitchen." Also, a delicious coleslaw that came from "Vegan Deli" by Joanne Stepaniak. These two dishes were served with linguine with green pea pesto. (We won't be making the pesto again because it tasted too much like . . . green peas, but that's my personal taste preference.)


©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

My son made his excellent black bean burgers and potato salad. We had sweet potato fries with a simple tofu and broccoli stir fry and we made a great stir fry with mushrooms, kale and rice noodles. (The fries were roasted with lots of rosemary which added a fantastic flavor.


©Andrea's easy vegan cooking


©Andrea's easy vegan cooking


©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

I baked a 100% white whole wheat no-knead bread with toasted black sesame seeds.


©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

One night, too tired to cook, we got salads from a nearby Middle Eastern restaurant, called Lulu's. They have a deli service at the back of the restaurant and we purchased tabouli and fattoush.


©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

I would love to pass along the marinated tempeh recipe but I don't have permission to do that so I'll just say what was in it and a offer bit of prep info. For Marinated Pan-fried Tempeh, a package of tempeh is cubed and marinated for several hours in lemon juice, apple juice, tamari, dry mustard, fresh grated ginger and minced garlic. It's then fried in a small amount of oil until browned. Everything we make from the Lorna Sass cookbook turns out great, and I highly recommend it as a basic vegan cookbook.

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If you are a fan of Silk soymilk and Whitewave tofu and tempeh (owned by food giant Dean Foods), you might want to read this disturbing report from Organic Consumers Association and Cornucopia Institute. Most Silk products are no longer organic and the soybeans used for production are now mostly from China, not North America. Dean Foods is also heavily into inhumane factory farming. Thanks to LK Sisters for blogging about this.

©Andrea's easy vegan cooking

Tempeh salad

Spring seems to finally be here at last, and that means lots of you are probably thinking about digging, planting and growing flowers, herbs and veggies. I was outside yesterday digging weeds, moving plants and thinking about the advice I wish someone had given me when I was just beginning to garden. So, for anyone new to gardening, thinking plants are hard to grow, worrying whether you have a green enough thumb, I'm about to give you a bit of advice that you should heed. As you peruse the garden centers, farmers markets and catalogs, beware, be cautious, watch out for the three words that can spell disaster. These words are: easy-to-grow. Easy-to-grow. Sounds so promising, doesn't it? Actually, easy-to- grow can be a euphemism for invasive species. That's right. They hook you with that easy to grow jargon and sell you something you will regret planting for a long, long time. Just google "plants I wish I'd never planted" and you will find lists of easy-to-grow plants. Plants like Lysimachia clethroides, otherwise known as gooseneck loosestrife. Ahem. Just do your research to make sure the easy-to-grow plants you've selected aren't also on an invasive plants list.

My house suffers from what I call the "sleeping beauty effect." Some day I fear I'll oversleep and have to hack my way out through the vines with a hatchet. The person who lived here before us planted every invasive plant in the universe, and we've spent countless hours (and dollars) trying to remove the tenacious plants that wreck our stucco walls and grow with abandon throughout the yard. Vines have damaged our phone lines and covered our windows. One thing is true of all the invasive plants on our property — they are easy-to-grow! Easy, easy, easy to grow.

Of course not all easy-to-grow plants are bad. Some are great. On a positive note, here's a tasty plant that's easy-to-grow and recommended! It's not hard to control if you give it its own area in the garden. Egyptian onions look like normal green onions at first, but grow bulbs at their tops, fall over and plant themselves, to reproduce and spread. They come up early in the spring and are used like green onions. I harvested two to use in the tempeh salad I'm about to describe.

We recently hosted a party for my husband's grad students and one of them graciously brought a vegan cake from Whole Foods. As I was putting the leftovers away, I noticed that the cake had come from The Chicago Diner, a favorite vegan restaurant in the windy city. It's been years since we've been there, but we have "The Chicago Diner Cookbook," and for old times sake, I got it out and found some recipes to try. I've changed the quantities and added an ingredient or two, but this recipe for tempeh salad is based on one from the cookbook.



Tempeh salad

• 1-2 tablespoons olive oil
• one 8-ounce package tempeh
• 1 tablespoon tamari or soy sauce
• 1/2 cup finely sliced green onions
• 2 heaping tablespoons chopped parsley (about 1/2 cup)
  
• 1/2 cup grated carrot
• 2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
• 1/4 - 1/2 cup vegan mayo (I used Veganaise.) I think 1/4 cup, or even less, is enough but you might like more. Try the smaller amount first.

1. Split the tempeh through the entire cake so you have two, thin, large pieces. Cut these pieces into small squares.
2. Sauté the tempeh in the oil in a wok or heavy skillet until it turns golden, about 5 minutes. *see note.
   
3. Turn off the heat and stir in the tamari to coat the tempeh evenly.
4. Place the tempeh in a bowl and add the chopped vegetables and the mayo and mix well.
5. This is delicious as a salad on a bed of lettuce, or as a sandwich filling. Even my tempeh-resistant son ate it and said it was really good.

*Note: My tempeh was frozen so I simmered it in a small amount of water for about 10 minutes until it was defrosted, before I sautéed it. Simmering or steaming tempeh gets rid of any bitterness and gives it a milder flavor, so you might want to do this even if your tempeh isn't frozen.

EXTRA EXTRA: Ricki over at Diet Dessert and Dogs is giving away copies of her newly published cookbook, "Sweet Freedom." Click over to DDD and enter to win your copy.

MORE GIVEAWAYS: You can enter to win a new 6-quart Crock-Pot Slow Cooker at Mudpies and Mary Janes.

Spinach and tempeh pie from Celine

Not exactly pie-shaped pie a la Mr. X (read on...)

I printed out Celine's recipe for spinach and tempeh pie because it looked so delicious, and imagine my surprise to pass by the kitchen to find "Mr. X" (identity protected due to content) preparing to make it for dinner. Seeing mutilated oranges on the counter top, I paused to observe. "Is orange zest the white stuff inside the skin?", he inquired. "No, it's the orange stuff on the outside — not the white stuff," I replied. I returned a short time later to observe Mr X trying to scrape off the zest with a pastry crimper. "Here, use this zester, it will be easier," I suggested, offering a quick zesting demo. Everything under control, I was off again, expecting to be called back for the crust-making. Mr. X had never made any sort of pie before. The next time I passed by the kitchen, Mr. X could be seen intently scraping dough out of the food processor with his fingers. "Be sure to use a light touch with the dough," I said. Mr. X is lacking the "light-touch" gene when it comes to baking. He's been known to produce cake with the texture of a yoga mat. But I went away, thinking it was probably too late anyway. And I'd had such high hopes for making this savory pie.



The next time I saw the pie was when it came out of the oven. Mr. X baked it on a piece of waxed paper instead of parchment paper, as called for in the recipe (which could account for the burning smell in the kitchen). He also shaped it kind of like a loaf of bread instead of a pie, but in spite of everything, IT WAS GOOD! And the crust, though perhaps a little harder than intended, was delicious in texture and taste. You should definitely go to this blog and get the recipe so you can make it, too. But don't use waxed paper!

p.s. The crust is made with spelt and tahini.

Be sure to visit Ricki's brand new blog location (Diet, Dessert and Dogs), and enter her contest to win a bottle of wonderful maple syrup! If you live in the Toronto area, you can also win a fabulous custom made chocolate layer cake. Click here.

Tempeh with mustard sauce,bok choy,mushrooms

On a recent post I made a dijon mustard sauce from Simply Ming, and used it to make a chickpea salad. I saved the leftover sauce to use in a tempeh dish and here it is. I don't have an actual recipe, just a photo illustrated description of what turned out to be a wonderful dish.

First I cut the tempeh in half widthwise and then split each piece to make four thin tempeh cutlets. I coated them with sauce and marinated them in a glass dish for about 10 minutes while I sliced mushrooms and cleaned bok choy. Olive oil was added to a heated wok and the tempeh and mushrooms were placed in the wok.



The mushrooms got stir fried and the tempeh was left to cook until it looked like this on both sides and was removed to a plate with the mushrooms.



Meanwhile, the bok choy was separated into stems and leaves. The stems were sliced into diagonal pieces and cooked in the wok until they started to taste good. The shredded leaves were added, cooked briefly until almost done, and then the tempeh and mushrooms were laid on top. A lid was applied and the food was allowed to steam for a few minutes until the veggies were finished and the tempeh hot.



The remains of the sauce was drizzled over the top and the tempeh, bok choy and mushrooms were transferred to plates with a side of perfectly steamed brown basmati rice.



It tasted great!