Taco Night!

Monday nights in our house have become unofficial (or possibly official, by now) roommate night.  Some weeks that means house meetings, and it often involves chores (last night we cleaned out the fridge), but last night it also involved a pretty awesome dinner - taco night!  At last count, our dinner required 11 bowls, 2 plates, and a tub of sour cream just to serve, and the meal was a constant chorus of "could you please pass the ___", but it was oh so totally worth it!  What was in all those containers?  Taco meat (for the non-vegetarians in the house), awesome bean filling, two kinds of guacamole, tex-mex cheese, salsa, lettuce, tomatoes+red peppers, cucumber, green onion, and cilantro, plus soft (flour) and hard (corn) tortillas.   I personally like to eat one or two hard tacos before getting fed up with how small they are or how easily they break, then I tend to switch to crumbling the taco shells over a salad.  So tasty!

Given that a traditional taco involves a lot of beef and cheese, and occasionally some guacamole which has been spiked with sour cream, I thought I'd talk about some of the recipes I use to make taco night equally enjoyable but all-the-more vegan.  (Although for the non-vegetarians, adding ketchup, garlic powder, chili powder, hot sauce, and a pinch of curry powder to browned beef makes for a pretty tasty alternative to pre-packaged taco seasoning packages).

Macaroni & Cheese, Vegan-Style

True story: I learned how to cook because of macaroni and cheese.  Every Friday, my elementary school let out at noon, and my dad would pick me up and drive me home. Then, I'd wait for my mom to get home and make me President's Choice White Cheddar Mac n' Cheese (KD but better =P)  A couple of weeks she didn't get home until much later and I was SO hungry and SO impatient, that she finally told me that I should make it myself if I was going to complain that much.  So I did.  And then one week she got home early and offered to make it for me...and it tasted wrong!  I always used less butter and more milk, and when mom made it for me again (just the way she always used to), it just wasn't as good as when I made it myself.  For years, these were my two major motivations for cooking for myself - I could eat when I wanted, and I could make it just the way I liked it.  Half the mayo, twice the pepper in my tuna salad; extra pineapple on my pizza; mushrooms in my chili.  I guess in a way this suggested my eventual love of experimental cooking (every recipe could always be improved), but really at the time it was purely a matter of pragmatism.  I also loved the Food Network, and wanted to try and test out some of the new skills I picked up from the shows I was watching.

Gluten-free pasta

As a kid, I grew up with my mom trying different whole-grain or wheat-free kinds of pasta every few months.  I remember that corn pasta was utterly disgusting, rice pasta was mush, spelt and kamut pasta were tolerable, whole-wheat macaroni was tolerable, and white pasta was the world's biggest treat.  (I'd request white pasta for my birthday every year).  So when I suddenly found myself needing to find wheat-free pasta, I was pretty upset.  All the alternatives were terrible, I thought!  As I've discovered over the past few nears, not necessarily.  So I thought I'd pass along some suggestions for those trying to eat pasta wheat- or gluten-free.

• Rice noodles: I started out with Asian-style rice noodles, which I used even pre-allergies to make pad thai, or as a base for curry when I was too lazy to make rice.  I wouldn't recommend these noodles for Italian-style pasta recipes (they do not have nearly enough structual integrety to stand up to heavy sauces, and the flavour is very different).  But I do recommend trying some Asian-inspired noodle dishes, because they're very tasty =D

• Soba Noodles: Soba noodles are a Japanese noodle made in part or completely with buckwheat flour.  (Some soba noodle brands are pure buckwheat, but some cut with wheat flour, so check ingredient labels!)  For years soba noodles were my solution to all things pasta. They are delicious for stir-fries, or just to eat straight with some sesame oil and soy sauce as a high-carb comfort food.  They are also similar-ish in appearance to spaghetti and I used to use them as my catch-all pasta replacement. They don't taste exactly the same, but they were passable.  Now that I've discovered some better pasta substitutes, I tend to reserve soba noodles for more Japanese- and Chinese-influenced dishes, but I still keep them around and thoroughly enjoy them

• Rice pasta: Several companies make Western-style pastas out of rice flour, to very mixed results.  I know many people have had terrible experiences with rice pasta that falls apart upon cooking or turns to mush; I certainly had many such experiences as a child.  However, I am happy to report there is now a good alternative: Tinkyada Brown Rice pasta!  They make penne, fusilli, shells, elbow pasta (i.e. macaroni), and a really fun kids' mix that's all different shapes.  (I dare you to try and eat pasta shaped like sailboats and bunny rabbits and not have a good time).  I've found Tinkyada pasta at Save-on-Foods, and much cheaper at specialty stores (Greens on Broadway at Maple, Dollar Groceries on Commercial at 6th, and Tim's Fresh Produce on Broadway at Macdonald all carry it for $3.50-$4.00/lb; Dollar Groceries even sell it in bulk).  I'd be shocked if Capers & Choices didn't also carry it.  Unfortunately neither Costco nor Superstore stock it - SuperStore has a different brand of (white) rice pasta that I've never tried.  The pasta is whole-grain and rice, but holds up to overcooking very well and yet isn't tough.  Wheat-eating friends have really enjoyed it, and I'd say it's as good an equivalent to white pasta as whole-wheat pasta is.  And it's so easy to cook!  It takes longer than regular pasta, but the cooking strategy is to boil water, add the pasta, and then take it off the heat and cover - the residual heat in the water will cook it in <20 minutes.  I haven't yet managed to overcook it, which is something I'm usually very good at (I have made so many recipes with pasty, over-boiled soba noodles before...)  There isn't a spaghetti/linguine alternative I've managed to find yet, but I'm perfectly happy with fusilli or penne (it's what my family eats anyways); and I can't imagine a better alternative to wheat pasta.

•   If you can eat spelt or kamut, both have been made into very decent pastas.  I personally prefer the brown rice for shaped pasta (like penne), but for people who really want long noodles like spaghetti, both spelt and kamut brands have very good alternatives to offer.

Happy pasta-making!

"Banana and Pancakes are Pretty Much the Greatest Thing Ever"

Better rise than I expected!

So spoke my friend from Manitoba who's visiting for several days and was hanging out in the kitchen while I made my latest batch of gluten-free, vegan pancakes.  I'm not entirely sure I agree (I am a huge fan of strawberry and/or apple pancakes as well), but I think they're definitely in the top 10.

I've gone through many iterations of trying to make pancakes I could eat.  First I wanted them dairy-free; then vegan; finally, vegan gluten-free.  I've used some very weird substitutions that led to some very weird-tasting pancakes, but I think I've finally arrived on a recipe that works!

(I should also add that these pancakes passed my critical test for awesomeness: roommate approval.  None of my roommates have crazy food restrictions, so when they eat a gluten-free vegan anything and proclaim it delicious, I know that it's truly good, and not just a pale imitation of out-of-reach delicacies).

Best Bean Chili (Fully Roommate-Approved)

My apologies for a lack of posts this week, I just finished moving!  My new place has my first proper, house-sized kitchen in years, and I am very excited to make use of it and its extensive shelf space.  So, today, in order to properly break in the new house, I made one of my absolute favourite dinner-for-friends-plus-leftovers dishes: all-bean chili!

Chili was one of my favourites growing up.  It was my mom's stand-by vegetarian recipe, and for years she would make it any time we had vegetarian guests over.  My first memory of her chili was New Year's Eve: every New Year's when I was little, four families (all close friends from before they had kids) would get together and do a big dinner, thanksgiving, year-in-review and celebration.  Every year my mom's friend made rainbow tortellini with alfredo sauce for the kids (a huge treat), and mom made chili for the adults.  Initially my mom made her chili with tofu; as we got older and started to turn our noses up at this weird white stuff in our chili, she switched temporarily to ground beef.  Then, with the advent of veggie ground round, the recipe once again became vegetarian.

The secret to mom's chili lay in using cans of Campbell's concentrated tomato soup mix as a thickening agent.  The chili was thick, and slightly sweet, and generally utterly delectable.  However, Campbell's soup tends to be very high in salt, and as I discovered recently, also contains gluten.  Clearly that was something I needed to learn to work without.  I also can't eat ground round (I have a soy allergy), so I wanted to increase the number of beans.  And I have much more of a love for spicy food than most of my family, so I played around with the spice mix as well.  But I love chili, for the taste and also because a big pot of chili can last me a week in leftovers.  So I've been playing around with customizing this recipe for the past two years, and I've come up with a combo that I personally think is pretty awesome.  If you try it out, let me know your thoughts too.

Brownie sagas!

Brown rice banana brownies!

One day earlier this summer I went into Capers because I had a couple of hours and wanted to chill out over a coffee.  As I was ordering my mocha (decaf with almond milk!), I noticed that Capers carried vegan spelt brownies*.  I was over the moon!  A real, cake-y, chewy, brownie I could eat!  Now, a brownie + a mocha ended up being way too much chocolate, but it didn't matter, I was inspired - if Capers could do it, so could I!  It was time to try making brownies!

*(Note for those of you who want to try the store-bought version - Capers in Kits no longer sells them, but Whole Foods on Cambie has them in their bakery)

My intentions were great, and I set off googling recipes for spelt brownies, which I could then vegan-ize.  The results: a lot of failures.  This baking endeavor, more than any other, reminded me that allergen-free baking really is an experiment, and often it can go very, very wrong.  Why so disastrous?  The answer: no eggs.  Brownies rely so much more on eggs than flour for their chewy texture - most recipes call for two eggs but only 1/2 cup of flour.  Sometimes, vegan substitutes just don't work, as I quickly proved.

Cookie Shenanigans!

Brown rice flour cookies!

Last week was a week of crazy baking.  A couple of weeks ago, I decided that I wanted to learn how to make wheat- and gluten-free cookies.  Since giving up wheat, I'd primarily restricted my baking to cakes & muffins, but I was starting to crave a good cookie.  So I went on a googling spree.  After finding a surprising number of good recipes, I made a short list, and on Monday last week I went shopping.  And Wednesday I started baking.  Well, by Friday, the cookies were all gone, so what was I to do to make more?  So many cookies...by Saturday I definitely had a headache from eating cookies in place of real food.  But, both recipes turned out pretty well, so I thought I'd pass them along.  (Both recipes contain almond butter, by the way, so anyone with nut allergies may want to pass up on this post - sorry!)  See below for spelt-flour super-energizing cookies, and my first stab at a (pretty much) gluten-free chocolate chip cookie (seen above)