vegan

Recipe: Vegan Taco Filling

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I’m moving apartments, so I decided to look for simpler things to cook during this time.  This fantastic vegan taco mix is one of my discoveries.

This is repurposed from a vegan Sloppy Joe mix – it makes a great taco filling. You could also use it on Burritos or similar dishes. Place it in a taco shell or a wrap, and maybe a few other ingredients and you’re good.

Makes 4 servings

Ingredients:

  • 1Tbsp Garlic
  • 1 Small red onion
  • 1 ½ cups diced tomatoes (about 2-3, or one 14.5 oz can, drained)
  • 1 ½ cups black beans (one 14.5 oz can drained, rinsed)
  • 1 ½ cups pinto beans (one 14.5 oz can drained, rinsed)
  • 3 Tbsp soy sauce
  • 1 Tbsp maple syrup
  • 1 tsp liquid smoke
  • 1 Tbsp nutritional yeast
  • 2 tsp dried oregano
  • 1 ½ tsp ground cumin
  • 1 tsp dried thyme
  • 1 tsp smoked paprika

 

Preparation

  1. Dry sauté onion and garlic in a non-stick pan, adding 1-2 Tbsp of water as needed to keep it sticky. Stop when onion is soft.
  2. Added tomatoes, beans, and other ingredients.
  3. Continue to dry-sauté, mashing the beans slightly. There should be enough liquid to do this without adding water.
  4. When enough liquid evaluates that you have more of a mass and the beans are frying slightly, remove.

 

  • Steve

Not-So-Depression Cake

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This is a variant on Depression Cakes – cakes made without eggs or milk. They also have a parallel in cakes made during wartime, which used a variety of smart substitutions or interesting innovations. Frankly I consider it proof you can makes cake without milk or eggs – and applaud the innovators.

This one is made with chickpea flour for more protein and maple syrup for sweetness – not exactly things available in the times mentioned. The major challenge is stirring the flour to make sure it doesn’t lump up – try sifting it first.

Taste-wise it’s decent. Essentially think “scratch-made homemade cake” and you’re there. Nothing to write home about, until you realize you’re eating a gluten-free, vegan, chocolate cake made from bean powder.  Then it’s pretty awesome.

Ingredients:

Dry ingredients:

  • 1 ½ cup chickpea flour (you can use regular flour too)
  • 3 Tbsp cocoa powder
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • ½ tsp salt

Wet ingredients:

  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 1 cup maple syrup (you can use 1 cup sugar, but then mix it in with the dry ingredients and use 1 cup water below)
  • 1 tsp white vinegar
  • 4 tbsp oil
  • ¾ cup water

 

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees
  2. Mix all the dry ingredients together thoroughly. The cocoa powder helps determine if you blended it well – if the color is uniform, you’re good.
  3. Hollow out the center and 3 corners. In the center put the maple syrup, in one corner the vanilla, one the vinegar, and one the oil.
  4. Stir the ingredients together, blending the maple syrup and other “ends” together – saving the vinegar for last.
  5. Place in oven. Cook for 35 minutes until a toothpick comes out clean.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

Failcess – Vegan Pizza

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So this is probably one of my weirder experiments. I tried to make a totally vegan cheese pizza. It also happened to be gluten free or potentially gluten free if you want to go for the whole pop hypochondria thing.  If this sounds weird, you don’t know me.

So, this potential mad creation of mine was . . . failure and success.  Let’s take a look.

Cheese

The cheese is purely from the Forks Over Knives Cookbook. It’s simple and it was “cheeseque” – good enough to use as cheese in something that needs a taste kind of like cheese.  It wasn’t cheese but, well, close enough for this.

  • One white onion, diced
  • One red pepper, seeded, diced
  • One tablespoon peanut butter
  • 1 cup nutritional yeast.

Just puree all of these in a blender- it’s surprisingly easy. I puree the red pepper and onion in batches, and it’s surprisingly “liquidy.” I then blend in the peanut butter and then the yeast.

Sauce

I used a can of tomato sauce. Because I was being lazy.

Crust

  • 3 cups besan (chickpea) flour (by the way, this awesome high-protein flour is great for nutrtion, cooking, chips, pudding, and more)
  • 6 tsp xanthan gum
  • 1 tbsp baking powder.
  • 1 cup water

Mix the dry ingredients together, then slowly stir in the water. Finally coat your hands with chickpea flour and knead it a bit. Then place it in a nonstick pizza pan.

To cook this, I tried

  1. Cook the crust for 8 minutes.
  2. Remove, add tomato sauce as needed (about a cup)
  3. drizzle cheese sauce (about 3/4 of it)
  4. Cook for 12 minutes.

And how did it come out?

Imagine an extremely lame homemade pizza. Dough wasn’t quite done, the tomato sauce soaked in, the sauce didn’t cook in well, everything was drippy. It tasted “eh” but didn’t quite blend so was ultimately unsatisfying.

Except . . . it was recognizable as a pizza. Just a really bad one.  It was a failure as a pizza, but a success in that I made a completely vegan low-fat pizza that still had quite a protein kick due to the chickpea flour and nutritional yeast.  It was just a bad pizza.

Failure as a pizza, but at least it was a pizza.

So I think there are ways to improve this:

  1. The crust probably needs a bit of a sweetener and/or salt.  Not a bad idea as the only sodium source was the sauce – and next time i’ll use homemade.
  2. I’d also flip the crust over before adding toppings so they don’t soak in so much and the other side gets to cook.
  3. Go easy on the tomato sauce.  Also crushed tomatoes may work as well.
  4. I wonder if I could thicken the cheese sauce a bit, perhaps chilling it, cooking it and then adding some arrowroot.
  5. Overall it needs to be baked longer – probably 8-10 minutes, flip it over and add toppings, and then 15 or so.

So a failure on one level, a success on another.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.