52 Churches

I really have/had no intention of becoming vegan. For that matter, I still don’t. When I was a vegetarian (college, graduate school), I used to explain that I wasn’t an “ethical vegetarian” . . . I just didn’t eat meat, because my body doesn’t really like it.

So here I am, having convinced my omnivore husband to try Fuhrman, accidentally vegan for the past month. There’s a couple of things that I don’t think we’ll stick with as we move into the next phase. I think we’re pretty set on not having meat as the main focus of meals, but we’re missing cheese and cream and eggs. I really miss coffee, too.

It’s another intuitive non-recipe from Jen.

I sauteed onions and portabello mushrooms in vegetable broth with just a touch of olive oil, then added food-processor shredded kale, and used the whole thing to warm the field roast slices, then served it, all warm and pungent, in a bowl.

I think I’m going to try Kusherie tonight for dinner. I’ll let you know how it comes out.

I don’t think I would add the vanilla in again, if I were doing this recipe for the blueberry sauce on broiled cantaloupe. I would also reduce the amount of honey.

Instead of grilling the cantaloupe, I broiled it for almost 5 minutes. It doesn’t brown, but it changes and deepens the flavour of the cantaloupe, which is rather pleasant, if not a little strange (since it’s warm).
We had the cantaloupe with Mar-a-Lago Vegan Burgers, which are a variation on the Turkey Burgers Oprah so loves.
I got a little too carried away with the food processor, and ended up taking my bean smush and turning it into a beanloaf instead of shaping patties out of it. I will post a recipe when I have something that works better. I put the bean loaf in whole wheat pitas with lettuce and stone ground mustard.

I was really hankering for comfort food. It was the kind of night where I could have really gone for some corned beef and cabbage, and a big bowl of mashed potatoes with cream and garlic. But I’m pretty committed to seeing out the 6 weeks of Fuhrman, so I resisted the temptation, and instead bought two beautiful heads of cauliflower: one gold and one purple.

The roasted up beautifully:

The golden cauliflower doesn’t significantly change colour, but the purple goes from a bright lavender to a deep, rich purple.

We had it with risotto, which was heavy on the vegetables and light on the rice (one cup of rice to about 5 cups of vegetables and four cups of water. The risotto cheats just a bit, as it also has chardonnay in it, but I reduced the amount of olive oil one would traditionally include.

Yup. Both golden and purple cauliflower.

Field roast is a strange-but-wonderful concoction by the Field Roast Grain Meat company that we first had at Mizuna, a local Spokane restaurant that includes vegan offerings that aren’t just a salad-and-pasta after thought.

I served it with a red lentil mixture and salad.

The lentils involve:
1 diced yellow onion
2 cloves of garlic
olive oil
Heat until the onion is translucent, and beginning to brown.
Add:
1 tsp tumeric
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp coriander
Stir for about 1 minute to roast the spices.
Add:
1 cup of red lentils
2 1/2 cups of water
1 tin of green chilis

Cook until the lentils have absorbed the water, stirring frequently, because those puppies will stick to the bottom of your pan if you give them half a chance.

The whole wheat quick bread I made for dinner was not vegan. It included milk. I also substituted honey for the molasses, though as it turns out, I do have molasses in the house.

The corn chowder involves picking a pot, and then, with a little bit of olive oil, start adding onions and garlic, cooking until the onions are translucent.

Then add water or vegetable stock, and start adding chopped vegetables: carrots, celery, potatoes, corn, bell peppers. How much of each is up to you. I pick a pot that matches the amount of soup I need, and go from there. This is a 4.2 quart pot. When the vegetables are tender, add the beans (so they haven’t over cooked). When the beans are cooked, turn off the heat, and add soy milk and chopped parsley.
I was a little concerned that the soy milk would ruin the taste. It didn’t. It is a little thinner than chowder (two reasons: one, soy milk is similar to skim, and two, it was a gluten-free chowder, so I didn’t add crackers to thicken it). Cream makes a much thicker chowder. You could also remove a few potatoes and blenderize them to thicken the soup.

As we’ve been exploring beans, I’ve found ones I’ve never even heard of before. Most recently, Lentilles de Puy, French green lentils.

After I bought the fennel, I waited another day for the food processor Michael ordered with AmEx points to show up, and it was the first recipe I made using the food processor.

In the foreground is a red lentil salad. I added the juice of one orange to it, and I think I would reduce the amount of cloves to 1/8 tsp. or less, as I find it a little overly-clovey.

To the left is a Gratin of Sautéed Cauliflower, Tomato, Pine Nuts & Saffron whose recipe I followed with little variation. I needed to roast the cauliflower a little longer, but it came out all right. I think I will cut the cauliflower into smaller pieces next time, and maybe use gluten-free bread, so my mom can have it, too.

The greens are sautee’d red chard with a little parsley-cashew pesto.