Vegetarian Times Recipes (& One from Cooks Illustrated)

So! In the last two weeks or so, I've been busier than I can remember being for MANY years. I have the honor and chore of helping my beloved yoga teacher with a huge international yoga festival and conference that he is organizing. I am in charge of finding housing for 20 Iyengar yoga teachers flying in from different countries. It's a lot of work! The festival is next week, and I am looking forward to meeting everyone I've been emailing with... not to mention the 9 hours of yoga class per day for 5 days in a row. YEAH! How awesome! It should be very interesting to study with so many new teachers... hopefully I'll learn lots of good stuff & get pushed in all sorts of new and challenging ways. With all the emailing and organizing and phone calling, I haven't done a ton of cooking - but I do have some goodies to share.

These first two pictures are the "Hot Tamale" Burgers from the most recent issue of Vegetarian Times. I don't know why, but they really caught my eye. Aren't those beautiful grill marks? Have I mentioned how much I love our new grill? It rules! These burgers have corn, masa harina, bell pepper, chipotle chili, lime juice... they were fantastic!!! I really, really loved them and can't wait to make them again. The batter is a bit spicy, but with all the fixins it's definitely no big deal. Try them!

ps. I skimped on the rice a bit, and they still turned out great.

This was the Grilled Lemon Herb Chicken recipe from the recent issue of Cook's Illustrated, made with Real Food Daily "Chicken-Style Seitan." It was just okay. I guess I need to learn about grilling seitan. It looked like it was getting so dry, so I brushed on more marinade, and they turned out quite oily. The grilled corn was awesome though!

I am never sure about Cook's Illustrated. Every time I try not to renew my subscription, I cave in at the last minute and renew it. There's some great information and tips and even some good recipes... as long as I just ignore all the detailed images of how to carve up your pet cat or whatever. Ha!

With the seitan, we had some yummy roasted potatoes. Chop them up in chunks, throw in a couple of crudely chopped garlic cloves & a sprig of rosemary, spray with oil, sprinkle with salt. Wrap the whole business in tin foil & then grill it for a while. MMMM!

Apparently we were not the only ones who liked these potatoes, because when I went back to put the dinner leftovers in the fridge about an hour after we had finished eating... there were no potatoes in sight. Our tiny little 13-pound Snoopy had apparently jumped up and eaten them. Amazing! If only I had thought of taking a picture of his belly. It was hilariously HUGE!! Then he had the nerve to come sauntering into the living room with another potato in his mouth. Ha. He didn't even put up a fight when I took it from him.

It was only the next day at lunch when I went to get the left over seitan to make into a sandwich when I realized that he had also eaten 3 very large slices of grilled seitan. Oh my. This little stunt earned him the nickname "seitan and potatoes" for a few days. :)

Here's another Vegetarian Times recipe from the most recent issue. It's the "Green Bean and Corn Salsa Salad" on page 40. Wow! It's really great. The corn is uncooked, so you've got to have great fresh corn on hand. Lucky for me, this delicious corn is organic, local, and only $.50 per ear. Right on! This salad is really fun to eat - healthy and full of interesting flavors: sweet corn, mild green beans, tangy red onions and lemon juice, hot jalepeno, and cilantro. I eased up on the olive oil with no harm done. Musty and I both really loved this recipe. Try it out!

Yet another from Veg Times! I don't know what got into me. :) I don't usually make much - if anything - from that magazine, but there were lots of good looking ideas in the last issue, I guess. This is the Vegan Feijoada on page 77. Guess what? I made the black beans myself! Yeah! Thanks to my loving bloggy friends, I am conquering my fear of homemade beans. I thought this was a nice recipe, a nice & flavorful way to prepare beans. I needed some veggies in my life though, so I ate it with a couple nice yellow tomatoes. I also gave it a big squeeze of lime juice for some tang. Also, my friend Jocelyn, who is a nutritionist & a vegan taught me that adding vitamin C (like a citrus squeeze) to a meal with beans helps your body get more iron out of the beans. Cool, huh?

This recipe made a LOT, and I probably ate this exact meal 4 times this week. I love having healthy leftovers in the fridge. ahhhh.


More of that corn from the farmer's market. It's pretty insanely good.


Here's our family feast from the 4th of July. We had a nice little gathering - complete with a giant vegan feast. Once again, I'll express my love & gratitude for a family that so happily celebrates nearly all family gatherings with vegan meals (except Thanksgiving and Christmas at this point... maybe a bit of cheese here or there). This was a great green salad, fresh corn, grilled veggies, and a yummy butternut squash-brussel sprout concoction. Plus, really great veggie burgers from the grill. I think they were the Amy's California ones.


here was our dessert for the 4th. I made the Rustic Plum Cake from the recent Cooks Illustrated. I guess my plums were too ripe and the cake didn't really rise right. No worries though, it was still extremely delicious. I have another recipe from a Jacques Pepin TV show that I prefer, and that always works out well - so in the future I'll stick to that one. Still, it was yummy & we all enjoyed it.

My aunt & her boyfriend brought along their Champion Juicer & a ton of frozen bananas & we had banana "ice cream" with the plum cake. Yummy! With it we had the Oh Fudge fruit-sweetened chocolate sauce from Wax Orchards & chopped almonds. That Oh Fudge stuff is so good! Have you tried it?

Check out this chard from my garden. It's freaking enormous!!! Some of those leaves were at least 18" long!! I cooked up this stuff with a tiny spritz of olive oil & some garlic with dinner tonight. It was great. Musty thought it tasted like fish, which was weird. But then he had Corn Pops for dessert (I know, I know...) and thought THEY tasted like fish too. So, obviously, he's just got something weird goin' on right now. Ha!

For dinner tonight I made the Chicago Diner Veggie Burgers from that same Vegetarian Times issue. I still have a TON of the goo in the fridge. I'll make up the rest of the patties tomorrow and freeze them. I was very pleased, thinking I would be the first person to share this wonderful recipe with you - until I finally had time to surf some blogs last night and found out that quite a few people have already blogged about these. They really are great. Mine were a bit moist, but I had rushed the cooling process a bit. That's why I"ll be making the rest of them tomorrow. All the same, I followed the grilling instructions and they turned out great. Musty loved them too.

By the way, how could you possibly only make 8 patties with that recipe? Those would be some crazy-huge patties!!

Anyhow, sorry for the sporadic postings these days. You won't probably hear from me for little while now. I'll be yoging my brains out next week, then we're off to a wedding in Boise, then 5 days in Florida with Musty's family. Then I'll be home for a week & gone again. Phew! Hope you're all doing well out there.