Happy Vday!

Belated, but I hope you had a love-filled day yesterday! I made some homemade Spinach-Mushroom-Tofu-Ricotta ravioli's (heart-shaped of course), and a key-lime pie for dessert.  I used Vegan Dad's pasta recipe and just kinda made up my own tofu ricotta with added mushrooms and spinach. Key-lime pie from Vegan Pie in the Sky! Delicious!

Honeymooning: Bangkok, Thailand Part 3

One of my most favorite things that we did the entire trip, was take a cooking class at May Kaidee's. Seriously, this was so informative, fun, DELICIOUS, and made me so excited. May Kaidee's has two locations, one in Bangkok and one in Chiang Mai. Our class was made up of nine adults and two little kids (one was a baby, and the other kid was around 3-4 yrs old.) Half of the class was from Holland and half was from the U.S. We all donned our aprons and went through eight different dishes, taking time to eat and enjoy each one after cooking it. It was so great. We were each setup at a wok, sharing it with one other person (so, Nik and I were together,) and they would demonstrate the recipe first, and then we would make it ourselves. We would switch places at each dish, so that one person would be assisting with ingredients and reading the recipe, and the other would be in control of the wok. We made Tom Yam soup, veg stir fry, Pad Thai, Massaman Curry, Green Curry, Fresh spring rolls, Som Tam, and Mango with black sticky rice. So, all the favorites! The class lasts the whole morning (or afternoon, if you choose that time slot,) and fills you up! Everything was vegan, except you had the option to put an egg in your Pad Thai, if you were vegetarian. 

I've already made a few curries and some soup since I've been back and I looooove how confident the class made me feel in making some very basic dishes. Very much looking forward to expanding on Thai cooking this year...

I took some photos, but only with my phone, so excuse the blurriness in some of these!

Making Tom Yam Soup

Tom Yam Soup

Basic Stirfry

Pad Thai

Making Green Curry, my fave!

I could eat Green Curry for weeks.

Nik making Massaman Curry

Massaman curry. Loved the surprise addition of pineapple in this dish. 

Aww.

We made spring rolls with a peanut sauce on top. They had us "decorate" our own. This was mine...

...and this was Nik's. Hee!

Nik shredding the young Papaya to make Som Tam, or spicy papaya salad

Som Tam in the making.

Plated Som Tam

Mango with Black Sticky Rice. This was SO GOOD. SO GOOD! 

Bits & Pieces

Vegan brunch! 

I have a love/hate relationship with Summer, with the love side mostly being that all of my favorite fruits and veggies are in abundance. LOVING all the fruits lately. Blackberries made an appearance in my CSA this week and I always feel a sort of nostalgia with them. My sisters and Dad and I used to go out in the late summer, dressed in long sleeves and pants, into the back woods by our house to pick ALL OF THE BLACKBERRIES. No seriously, we would pick so many. And then my mom would make pies of deliciousness out of them. A fond childhood memory!  

Whole Grain Sweet biscuits with homemade jam made from the above blackberries and strawberries

Mushrooms Out of a Box

So I recently acquired one of these fun "Grow Mushrooms Right Out of this Box" kits and I decided to chronicle the daily growth of the Oyster Mushrooms. Holy cow, they grow so fast! Seriously, nothing for the first 3ish days and BAM, there such a change from the morning to the evening in size. Once they started growing, I harvested them five days later! So much fun and they were super-delicious. After I harvested this batch, I soaked it again in water and turned it around and more are sprouting out from the backside.

First day of growth

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Day 4

Day 4

Day 5

Harvest

Turned into stirfry! 

Homemade Pasta!

Nik and I received a KitchenAid Stand Mixer with the pasta-making attachments as a very super-generous wedding gift (I do have some posts about my wedding last month coming up in the next week or so! Waiting for official photos!)  recently, so you can imagine my excitement to dig in and play around with them. I went simple for the first time, using Vegan Dad's recipe for homemade pasta, and it worked wonderfully. Seriously, this was so easy. I thought it would be this time-consuming thing that should only be reserved for Sunday dinners or special occasions, but no, this was way easy. I took my time and it was still under 45 minutes, prolly half hour now that I know what I'm doing. Woo! I don't have a pasta drying rack, so I just laid them out on a tea towel and that worked fine. So pretty! I made a simple lemon-garlic-butter sauce and lightly sautéed some asparagus and scallions to mix in. Delicious.

I can't wait to try some flavored pastas, like spinach or sun-dried tomato. And lasagna!

VeganMOFO: Pub Cheddar with Chives

More kitchen experiments with Artisan Vegan Cheese! This book is so fun, seriously. I have been eyeing the Pub Cheddar with Chives for awhile, and finally took the plunge. For some reason, I had it in my head that this would be like a crock cheese (you know, like they used to make you sell in band, back in grade school, to raise money for new uniforms and whatnot? Did you have to do that too? They gave you a catalog of super-processed cheese logs, ew!)  Anyways, this was not a spreadable crock cheese that was bright orange, but instead was a very sliceable and tangy cheese dotted with bites of yummy chives.  This was SO good paired with pears or apples. Also pretty excellent cubed up and mixed into a salad. I was pretty into it.

VeganMOFO: Green Monster Bread

I've always felt like I have been some kind of a failure when it comes to making my own bread from scratch. The loaves never rise that much in the oven or they just come out super-dense and crumbly or have some other sad problem. Sigh. But these!  These are kinda awesome. The Green Monster Bread, from Vegan Sandwiches Save the Day, by the ever-lovely lady-duo of Celine and Tami, totally rose and did their thing all proper-like. Woot! I went and made the roll/bagel version, which requires you to boil them quickly in a baking soda/water pot. Love the chewiness and hard exterior that gives it. And Arugula is the best, so I appreciate being able to cram into more of my meals. Hooray for sammiches!

I made mine with white whole wheat and spelt flour, instead of all-purpose flour, hence the more of a Brown Monster Bread hue (2 cups WW and 1 cup spelt).

(Above sammich has a veganaise/hot sauce smear, tomatoes, avocado, and baked tofu for some ultimate yum-lunch.)

...Annnnd VeganMOFO Begins!

Pumpkin Pancakes, from Vegan Brunch

So it begins!  This is my 5th (?!) year participating in VeganMOFO, and I'm psyched! For the month of October, I'll be joining hundreds of other bloggers to blog about vegan noms. I'm combining illustration + food for my theme (which I guess is always my theme, really), because that's just what I do!  Last year I raised a butt-load of money for For the Animals Sanctuary, and that was super-fun, but a whollle lot of work that I realistically just don't have this year. So! I'm just going for simple this year. Keeping it fun!

And can I get a big "Of course" for starting off the month with something Pumpkin?! Hello Fall, you're the best!

Vegan Homemade Cheeses

Hello September! Did anyone wake up this weekend and have that holy-crap-time-is-moving-too-fast moment? I did. I think I do every September. It's like someone just hit the "play" button after the slow-moving sorta-lazy summer. Like BAM, get-a-move-on because the holidays are going to be on top of us any minute now. Maybe that's just me, prepping for my busy season and the psychology of the shift in seasons happening. Leaves were totally falling from the trees this weekend!

I'm down-right psyched for Fall. Bring it on. I've been feeling that itch to be in the kitchen again (after trying to avoid it in the heat of the summer), to organize my space and purge, and to work on five different projects all at once. That desire to cook and bake things again is exciting and as a result I bought a few new cookbooks recently. One of those was Artisan Vegan Cheese, by Miyoko Schinner, and I am having sooo much fun with it. I've made two of the cheeses so far, Fresh Mozzarella and the Sharp Cheddar. Both are made from culturing cashews, using the homemade Rejuvelac (also in the book.) The Fresh Mozzarella is very soft (like a soft tofu texture), very easy to spread, but stays in those little ball shapes nicely too. It has a really mild and creamy flavor that was pretty amazing paired with some fresh tomatoes, basil, olive oil/balsamic dressing. Like whoa.

The Sharp Cheddar is my favorite on it's own, and the author says this just keeps getting better with age. I'm heading out of town for a week on Thursday, so I'm really curious on how the taste will change when I'm gone. I cultured this one for four days and it was so fun to taste a little bit each day and see how much the flavor changed. It tasted very much like miso and nutritional yeast the first day and then it magically took on this very tangy cheesy taste after a few days. The texture changed, creating little pockets of air. It didn't get super-firm after refrigeration, but that's okay. It's tasty on it's own and spread on some homemade bean burgers in a wrap. I need to make some crackers to spread it on!

Next up, I am planning on trying one of the air-dried cheeses, perhaps the Brie, and the meltable mozzarella and muenster (just need to locate or order an ingredient). Nik was super-weirded out by my strange kitchen experiments, but he liked them both after I forced him to try them! I'm not really sure how close these taste to their dairy versions, but I do know that they are damn tasty in their own right and that they are super-fun to make. I will update on them as I make more!

xo,

Michelle

Vegan cooking

Not a tester! Just my breakfast this morning. It has some noochy tofu, red onion, jalapeño, radish, yellow zucchini, and swiss chard. Totally delicious. Seasoned only with a bit of salt/pepper/olive oil. 

I'm still recipe testing! Currently for Isa for her upcoming cookbook, Isa Does It, which is going to be super-amazing. Seriously. I thought I would show you a peek at a few things that I have made from it recently:

Chicky Tuna Salad Sammich

Island Black Bean Burgers

Beefy Asparagus Stirfry