Revamping Recipes

 A few posts back I waxed poetic about how much we loved Seitan Piccata recipe from Veganomicon.  It was so tasty.  I really like that recipe, but it uses regular potatoes for the mashed potatoes and you need to have seitan on hand to make it.  I decided to revamp this recipe using cauliflower steaks and sweet potatoes instead of russet potatoes.

Making mashed potatoes out of sweet potatoes is pretty simple: boil chopped sweet potatoes for 30-45 minutes until soft.  Drain the water.  Mash in a bowl with some almond milk and Earth Balance.  Season with salt and pepper.

To make the cauliflower steaks, I cut the head of a cauliflower parallel to the table while sitting stem down approximately an inch thick.  I don't know if that was the best approach as many of my "steaks" fell apart.  Next time I may try cutting them perpendicular to the counter to see if that works better (it may not).  I then dredged them in WWPF (whole wheat pastry flour) and fried them in oil like the Veganomicon recipe.

The whole thing turned out quite tasty.  It was nice to be able to eat a slightly healthier and easier version of this dish. 

Asian Sensation

I've been going hiking up in the mountains on the weekends before going to the local farmers market.  I love the farmers market.  I was up hiking around the other weekend and saw this drawing on the water tower thing up there.  I thought it was pretty funny.

While at the farmers market I picked up some tasty veggies.  Among which was this enormous zucchini.  It was the size of a baby's leg!  I was looking for some fun ideas for the veggies I purchased and came across Chef Chloe's blog.  She had some fun Asian inspired meals that looked tasty and I wanted to try.

Curry Chickpea Salad

I've always enjoyed a good chicken salad back during my meat eating days.  Since becoming vegan I've eaten plenty of egg-less salads using tofu in the place of the eggs, but never made a chicken-less one.  The recipes I've found typically use tempeh, but I am getting tired of constantly using soy in my meals.  Lately I've been scaling back on those ingredients and looking around for possible replacement.  Chickpeas seemed like a good start.

I always found it funny how many names there are for chickpeas.  There's chickpea, garbanzo bean, Indian pea, and Bengal gram.  Chickpeas are also considered one of the longest cultivated vegetables in the world.  I also found out, via handy dandy Wikipedia, that India produces the most chickpeas in the world by quite a large margin.  About six times as much as the country in second place: Pakistan.  And of course, chickpeas are an excellent source of protein.  Now on to the recipe!