Our Eggplant Had a Baby

And we ate it. Last night. And it was delicious.

I am dumb and forgot to take a picture of our home-grown eggplant baby before I cooked it, but I took some of the whole dinner.

I sliced the eggplant lengthwise and coated it in a mix of cornmeal and nutritional yeast and put it on the grill. It was perfectly creamy and tender, and the cornmeal gave it a nice texture. I served this with a grilled piece of tofu and asparagus.


I topped the tofu and eggplant in an extremely delicious pepper and onion sauce I whipped up. Very spicy! There were about 5 kinds of hot peppers in the sauce, including a few from our own garden. I caramelized the sweet, little local onion that we had, threw the peppers in, and simmered it in a little apple cider vinegar and a splash of soy sauce. I wanted to add a dash of nutritional yeast to thicken it, but ended up dumping in way more than I intended...so the sauce became a little beige. It ended up being extremely delicious, though. There will definitely be more variations on this sauce.


I'm not sure what I'm making for dinner tonight, but I will try my hardest to remember to take pictures. I'm really trying, guys. Just really, really forgetful.

Monday Night Dinner #16

Family dinner yesterday was extremely delicious. So delicious, in fact, that I forgot to take photos. Well, not really. The food was good, but I am just forgetful. I will share with you the three pictures that we did take.

I decided to make ravioli stuffed with grilled veggies yesterday. I had a ton of vegetables, though, and couldn't decide which to use. Soo, I ended up making four different kinds of ravioli. Yep. Haha. The four I decided on were asparagus, mushroom, summer squash, and sweet potato (which was Thom's delicious idea!) The first three were mixed with tofu ricotta and the sweet potato ravioli had dried cranberries. For the asparagus, I cut the tips off and left them whole for texture and mashed the rest of the stalks with the tofu ricotta.

After I had all of my fillings prepared, I recruited the ranks to help me assemble the ravioli. My dad and I had made the dough a little earlier. We just used about 4 cups of flour, 1-2 cups of water, and a little salt and olive oil. That's our regular recipe, and it's always great. Here we are assembling the ravioli after we cranked it through the pasta press and cut it. Thanks for helping, Dad and Thom! (And thanks, Mom, for taking the picture <3)

After we made the ravioli we let it dry for a while, flipping it every few minutes to make sure both sides dry. In the meantime, we ate an appetizers. I served this with little tiny toasts to spread it on. SO f'n good.


And here is the leftover ravioli. Yes, I forgot to take any more photos until we were packing up the leftovers. Sigh. But here is about 1/4 of the ravioli that I made. There was a ton, and there is still a lot left over. The sauce is a basil and kale pesto that I made--it also has lemon juice, nutritional yeast, s+p, and pine nuts. Healthy and delicious.


Overall, this was a wonderful meal. Both my mom and I really liked the mushroom ravioli the most. The mushrooms picked up a really nice, smoky flavor on the grill. My dad pounded the table over the sweet potato/cranberry ravioli, and Thom made good remarks of the asparagus. I think the summer squash was just too bland of a taste to make a very remarkable ravioli. It just tasted like the tofu. Regardless, this dinner was a success.

Recent Eats: Camera Phone Edition

Hello! Sometimes (a lot of the time) I forget to bring my camera over to Thom's, and sometimes I forget to bring it home from Thom's. These are the times that I get Thom to take pictures with his phone and then email them to me every once in a while. Today is one of those days. So, here are some of the things that we've eaten in the past week or two that I didn't have my camera for:

Grilled BBQ tofu and mushrooms with Swiss chard mac'n'cheese. This was last night's dinner, and it was especially delicious.


Open-faced (homemade) grilled black bean burger sandwich topped with lettuce, tomatoes, caramelized onions, and a spicy sauce. Also corn and Swiss chard mashed potatoes.


Night-time breakfast. Tofu scrambled with Swiss chard, hash browns, and Gimme Lean sausage.


Simple pasta sauce and spaghetti. We didn't have many ingredients this night, so I just made a really simple (but delicious) tomato sauce and served it over some spaghetti.


Grilled BBQ tofu, eggplant, and squash:


Grilled BBQ tofu, zucchini, mushrooms, and corn:


And here are things that I've made in the past month or two, but not that recently. The vague memories are like a delicious dream.

Grilled tofu, asparagus, and corn. The asparagus and tofu later had hollandaise sauce drizzled over it. The sauce was good---it was my first time trying to make it.


Oven roasted potatoes:


De-skewered grilled veggies:


And now for more food on a stick!

Grilled BBQ (homemade) seitan and veggies:


(Different) grilled BBQ seitan and onions:


Served with corn and herbed zucchini:


Aaand breakfast corndogs. Yes, I did say breakfast corndogs. Veggie breakfast sausage dipped in pancake batter and pan fried. Inspired by a product seen in the frozen food section of the grocery store in Florida. .....DELICIOUS.


Haha, so that's it for now. Cheers!

Monday Night Dinner #15

As (I think) I said before, this past Monday night I made pasta. The inspiration for this week was the garlic sauce on one of the pizzas last week. Everyone liked that sauce so much that they requested it on something this week. My first thought was pasta. Making pasta is always a family affair, so my dad joined me in the adventure.

This is what the kitchen ended up looking like. We eventually filled up that back row, too. (And don't worry, the pasta isn't that close to that stuff over there. It's just paper recycling, anyway.)


How did we do this, you ask? Yep, that's wood taped to our table. I love cooking with my dad.


This is what pasta making looks like. Dad was feeding the pasta through the top and turning the handle while I caught the cut pasta from the bottom and laid it out on the table. We've done this a few times together now, and we make a pretty good team.


And THIS is what went into the sauce. Four roasted heads of garlic. Heavenly.


And this is what it ended up being. I tossed the pasta with a little earth balance and nutritional yeast. I topped that with the sauce, which consisted of those four heads of garlic, a caramelized onion, almond milk, nutritional yeast, diced fresh tomatoes, and salt and pepper. This was topped with grilled asparagus and grilled mushrooms (oyster, shiitake, and baby 'bella).


The mushrooms were extraordinarily delicious. There are really not many things that are better than a grilled mushrooms. Bonus points for oyster and shiitakes. SO GOOD. It all came together really well, I would say.


I served the pasta with a little salad with a small salade à la Norma. Norma is my mother's mother and this is the salad that she eats almost every night. It consists of lettuce, diced raw red bell pepper, chopped carrots, and sometimes tomato. Dressed with oil and vinegar. You can see the little salads over on both sides of this photo. And! You can also see that Thom made some delicious bread. YUM.


And here we are, minus Thom. He took the photo, duh.


It was an all around pleasant evening. We are making pasta again this Monday. It's fun, carb-alicious, and always enjoyable.

Cinnamon Rolls

So I've been thinking about it, and I'm pretty sure that I've been vegan for about 3 years now. Maybe four? Certainly more than two. (I can remember what classes I was taking when I transitioned, haha.) But, I'm just really bad with...remembering things. Sometimes! Only sometimes! Point is: cinnamon rolls were a long time coming. I've been without them for...a number of years! And I'd only ever had the prepackaged kind to begin with, so last week was my first time baking my own- vegan or otherwise.

Now, baking is the one kind of cooking that I always have to use a recipe for. I'm pretty clueless as to how that science works, so I rely on those who know what they're talking about. For the cinnamon rolls, I used this recipe from VeganYumYum. And it was delicious. I used my own icing recipe, but it was pretty similar to the one included with the recipe.

This is half of the recipe. I kept the other uncooked half in the refridgerator for my parents to have for breakfast the next morning.


With icing, fresh out of the oven:






Okay, so these were SO GOOD. Like, better than most other things ever. Um, I've been craving these every single day since I made them. I haven't made them again yet, though. But soon.

Monday Night Dinner #14

As I mentioned before, I'd decided that last week's MND would be a redo on grilling pizza. Unfortunately, our grill died in the middle of this one. Haha. We have a propane grill that apparently had something wrong with it (my dad has since fixed it) so I just ended up slooow-grilling the veggies and then baking the pizzas in the oven. Not what I wanted, but we did end up getting our thin crusts. And, man, were they good.

This was one unforgettable pizza right here. Everyone was mmm-ing and exclaiming in delight while eating it... I am even being seduced by it just looking at the pictures right now. Oh man, it was good. It had caramelized onions and a mix of grilled mushrooms. There were oyster, portabella, shiitake, and brown button mushrooms. Grilled. Smoky and delicious and grilled. And the sauce. It was so rich and delicious. It was a creamy roasted garlic sauce sprinkled with Daiya. I would eat that sauce on just about any food. We ate the entire pizza! I will definitely be making this pizza again.


Thin and crispy:


The other pizza was also extremely delicious. There were thin slices of grilled eggplant, fresh local tomatoes (ours haven't come in just yet), a jarred tomato sauce, and mozzarella Daiya. The eggplant was perfect, it really made the pizza. This one wasn't as foodgasmic as the first pizza, but was still wonderful.


So, everyone loved the garlic sauce on the mushroom pizza so much that it was requested again for this Monday. So I am going to use it as a pasta sauce. I plan to make fresh pasta with grilled veggies. I know, I know, I'm just addicted to grilling! But I am looking forward to this pasta, I think some partially non-grilling cooking will be a nice change of pace. Cheers!

Recent Eats

If you've been reading this blog at all, you'll know that I love grilling. Because I do. And I've been doing it a lot lately. Here are some things that we ate two nights last week.

Grilled Spicy BBQ Tofu. Did I mention that I love making sauces? Especially barbecue sauce. And we like it spicy. YUM.


De-skewered veggies and asparagus. The skewered veggies were onions, green and red bell peppers, baby 'bellas, and zucchini.


One of our plates:


Where we ate: (Outside at Thom's house)


Guido being cute:


How's this for Stuck in Your Beard?: (Haha! Very funny. Sorry, Thom!)


We had leftover tofu and veggies from that night, so the next night I made a new sauce and simmered it all for a bit, and served it with some local corn and steamed local green beans. Yum.


There has been a lot more grilling lately, but these are all the pictures I have for now. Raise your hand if you're also a grilling fanatic! Cheers.

Monday Night Dinner #13

Two Mondays ago, the day after Independence day, was our 13th Monday Night Dinner (MND). You may notice that I skipped 12 the week before...I mysteriously lost the pictures! We had black bean and grilled butternut squash tacos. The were delicious. Trust me. But these have been a delicious few months, we all love spending time together, and my parents eat vegan every Monday. How much better can ya get?

Two weeks ago I ended up GRILLING PIZZA for MND. My dad saw Alton Brown do it, was intrigued, and requested it. He offered to help, of course. And I'm so glad the he asked for it, 'cause grilled pizza is freakin' awesome! I'd never had it before! And it was easier than you'd think.

We used our regular pizza dough recipe and made two pizzas. And it was actually just as easy slipping the dough off onto the grill as it is to put it on the pizza stone. We cooked it for a few minutes on one side, 'til it bubbled, and then flipped it. That was actually really easy too---I'd been worried! But it was a cinch. Here is Dad about to put the dough on the grill. I wimped out---I didn't want to ruin it!


This is the dough being all nice and bubbly, about to be flipped. It got really firm and substantial, so there was no worry of ripping it! I unfortunately didn't get a post-flip pre-topping shot, though. Believe me, it was nice. Grill marks, smoky cornstarch...MMM.


So we grilled the dough on one side, flipped it, and then added all of our toppings. I had pre-grilled all of the veggies right before the dough, so they were still warm and all nice and roasty-toasty. One pizza featured squash, zucchini, onions, Dayia mozz., and tomato (jarred)sauce. The other one had asparagus, onions, and spinach, basil, and garlic (homemade)pesto.
Grilled veggies, pre-pizza:


And, assembled on the grill: (It was cooked with the top closed for 2-3 minutes more after this.)


Both finished pizzas, about to be cut:


Mmmm. They were so good. The asparagus pizza was definitely my favorite, but they were both delicious. The only thing was that we like crispy thin crust and these crusts beefed up a little when they grilled. They were still nice and stiff (rather than floppy) but they were chewy rather than crunchy. Spoiler alert: The next week (now last week) we tried this again just to see if we could get better crusts. I will tell you about that another time. But regardless of the crust thing, these were great. An overall success.

I am going to continue blogging (instead of writing a paper) so keep reading, and I will be all caught up soon.

4th of July

Hello people, I'm sorry I'm so behind on blogging. No, really! I am. I will try to make it up to you now.

Ahem.

The week of the 4th was a great food week here at Stuck in Your Beard. Busy and great. Sunday was the holiday, Monday was Grandma's birthday (which we celebrated a few days later) and Monday night dinner, and the next day was my first day of summer school. (I will SOON be a degree-having individual. But never soon enough...) So it was a busy week, and I will start with the beginning. Sunday:

This year we brought back old holiday traditions for the 4th, both in our venue and menu. (Accidental rhyme, I assure you...) Dad, Mom, Thom, and I all went out to Great Meadow to eat, drink, and watch fireworks. Our awesome neighbors came with us as well and brought their two young children. It was a blast!

Back when I was a kid, my dad would always make these giant baked cold-cut sandwiches when we went to Great Meadow for the 4th. They would be delicious, warm, and cheesy, and a pretty weird thing to bring to a picnic. But we loved it. It hasn't been done in quite a few years, so I decided to bring it back vegan style.

I decided to make two of them---a recreation of the original sandwich made with fake lunchmeats (peppered tofurkey, smoked(?) tofurkey, and fake bologna) and (Daiya mozz)cheese, and one with grilled veggies (mushrooms, red bell pepper, zucchini, squash, eggplant, onions, spinach) and cheese. They were both delicious. Here they are being assembled:




And here they are baked, cut up, and on a plate:





And as you can see I also made (red, white, and blue) potato salad and Mom made fruit salad.

We also made a big pitcher of sangria and brought a lot of beer. Whee! Here we are having fun:
Me and Mom-


Thom and his (awesome)hat-


My Dad playing checkers with our young neighbor-


America-


We are all fun people so it was quite the fun time. So fun, in fact, that Thom and I ate midnight sandwiches when we got home. The leftover baked sandwiches were SO GOOD heated up in the toaster oven. They got nice and crispy, as seen here:


Bonus pic: This is what I look like when I'm eating a sandwich at midnight.


Haha. So, that's it for Sunday. It was definitely a great holiday experience, I barely even felt the need to voice any political outrage about anything. Kidding! (Maybe.) Well...this is pretty long already, so I should probably just start a new post for Monday. See ya!