Easy Chick-peasy Lunch

Another day at the races!  I decided to make one of my favorite easy lunch recipes:  chickpea salad.  It's great on sandwiches, a salad, or on crackers.  It's very simple to make from ingredients that you probably have around your vegan pantry.  I like to use celery, some sweet Mayan onion, fresh parsley, and orange peppers in mine. Make sure you chop them somewhat fine because you really don't want big chunks of them in your chickpea salad. 

Now you want to smash your chickpeas. I usually used canned organic ones from Giant Eagle.  I drain and rinse them then use a fork to mash.  You want them to be really really mashed!

  

Thank you hubby for mashing my chickpeas!

So the old stand by in our fridge is some Vegenaise.  Vegenaise is great because it takes place of mayo without the added eggs.  I use it in potato and macaroni salads and to make vegan ranch dressing (which I could drink a gallon of!)  I add a big blob of this to the combined chickpeas and veggies and give it a stir.  I also add pickle relish to kind of give it that sweet taste.  I wouldn't recommend making this chickpea salad without because it WILL taste like something is missing.  Something else I usually like to use in my salad is capers, which I was out of :-(

I like to eat my chickpea salad on toast, but my darling husband likes to eat his with either crackers or on a big salad.  Even my oldest loves this recipe!

<----- Your finished product!

         My yummy lunch  ----->

Oh yeah, and while I had all that extra time from making a super, terrific, easy lunch, I decided to make some chocolate chip Macadamia nut cookies!

Spring Is Just Around the Corner!

Today is a BEAUTIFUL day in Pittsburgh.  The sun is shining, the birds are singing, and I smell SKUNK!  That means spring is just around the corner and soon we will be in store for produce galore!

I had some strawberries in my fridge that I picked up for a decent price around Valentines Day and I needed to make use of them.  Nothing screams spring and summer more than strawberry shortcake!  I love strawberry shortcake and so do my wee ones so I decided to make some.

I started out by making a simple dough recipe with a stick of margarine, flour, salt, baking powder, and hint of vanilla-sugar.




You cut the flour into the dry ingredients making pea-sized bits of flour and butter.   I added about 3/4 cup of soy-milk to the dough and dug my hands right into the dough until it was ready to roll out on a floured surface.  Now, the biscuits will rise a little bit, but you need to make them about 3/4 inch thick to be the consistency you want for strawberry shortcakes.  You roll this out and then you can use a biscuit cutter to cut out round circles but I'm inventive so I used a peanut butter jar lid....

You put the biscuits in a 425 degree oven for about 10 mins.  I sprinkled them with a little bit of vanilla-sugar.

Into the oven my pretties.....

Then I got started with the strawberries.  I used the best of the best and sliced them up real nice and sugared them:

The baby couldn't wait to have some.  Neither could her pony-friends:

Anxiously awaiting shortcakes for our tea-party.....

And out they came golden brown and moist. 

So I hear I sit with the window open, enjoying my little taste of spring; and hopefully this will take me until I see those little crocuses and tulips poking out of the earth to greet me with another six months of warmth!

Soup For the Soul

First day on here and I have to say that I'm excited to share my food, family, and most importantly a bit of myself on here.  I'm a mom from Pittsburgh that just happens to have a couple of kids and a hubby that are vegan that I love to cook for.  I'm not the greatest cook, and I'm novice at best, but I'm always up for trying new recipes/improvising in the kitchen.

One of my greatest issues is cooking for my five year old son.  He is Mr. Picky Picky.  He refuses to eat anything good for him and sticks to his daily regiment of tofurky, pastas, tofu pups, soy cheeze, cracker, chip, peanut butter, jelly, juice, cookie, and cereal.  I try to make him eat new things, and occasionally he will oblige me, but he usually starts whining and immediately spits it into the nearest garbage can.  *sigh*  Do any other moms have this problem?

My oldest is a pretty good eater.  She needs to be because she's a gymnast.

My youngest eats whatever my hubby eats.  She likes to eat a lot of raw stuff.  So does my husband.  His ventures into the raw world send me into a tizzy and make me realize there's much more to food than meets the eye.

So it has been frigid.  Like two-hour delay frigid here in PA and I was really jones-en for some kind of bean stew.  You know, not the kind of bean stew that you empty the can of beans into the pot...... I wanted to actually cook the beans and do it right.

So I bought a bag of white beans from Giant Eagle not knowing if the beans would even be fresh because hey, who actually buys beans in a bag when you can get them in a can?  Around 2AM last night I realized that I forgot to soak the beans *GASP* so I drug my butt downstairs and put them in a pot and covered them with water.

I came downstairs today and my beans were somewhat soft (good sign) so now all I needed to decide was what to do with them.  My hubby introduced me to kale in his raw-adventures; but usually the kale went right into his smoothie which totally turned me off of the idea of this foreign green.  So a couple of weeks ago after a trip to Trader Joes I came home with their soy chorizo.  It was delicious.  I cooked it with onions, white beans and kale and ate it off of a tortilla.  I was really surprised how much I liked the kale so I've started to purchase it on our bi-weekly shopping trips.

Now the thing about kale is it is forgiving.  This last bunch of kale has probably been in the crisper for at least two weeks.  I decided to use it in the bean stew I was making along with the Gimme Lean Sausage-style crumbles I had.  I made a soup base with the beans and this awesome soup base (which I use for almost all of my soups)

I added onions and LOTS of garlic (maybe five or so cloves) and sauteed them in olive oil.  I add the sausage style crumbles and lots of seasonings.  I guess I was going for the soy chorizo flavor (I was out of it) so I added smoked paprika, cumin, turmeric, some curry seasoning (okay so maybe I was going for more of an Indian flavor) salt, fresh parsley.  I let that come together and then added the chopped up kale.  I added the liquid I reserved that I cooked the beans in and finally the beans.  I covered everything in water and added more spice.  

Simmer, simmer, simmer, little soup.

Now I read somewhere to thicken up the soup, reserve some of the beans and smash them up, so that's what I did.  I let the spices meld together in the pot on low for a little while and served myself up a bowl.

I must say it was a pretty good lunch.  I really wish I had some crusty bread with it though.  I would make that too, but I have a sink full of dishes to do.  :-(

Oh the work of a mom is never done.