Finally, a healthy meal

With Trey being laid off and me doing various temp work, dinner has been, well, not blog-worthy for sure. We haven't been eating gluten free, and I am getting us back to it. I guess my new goal is to figure out how to eat gluten free cheaply! My kiddos are bouncing off the walls, and I'm thinking duct taping them to their chairs isn't such a bad idea. LOL. So, tonight, I actually cooked a healthy, gluten free meal. I made BBQ tofu (just drained, pressed, cut tofu baked with BBQ sauce), mashed potatoes, Marilu Henner's soba noodles, and a green (very green - lettuce, green peppers, green onions, avocado, and tomatoes) salad. It was so nice to have us all sit down to a healthy, home cooked meal together again.

Chocolate pudding

I made a yummy pudding tonight. This recipe started our as Chocolate Pie from Vegetarian Times. I've made it as a pie before, but we prefer to just make the pudding. Here's how I make it.

8 oz unsweetened chocolate
2 10 oz pkgs silken tofu
10 oz jar blackberry preserves
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 C agave nectar

Melt the chocolate and process everything in the food processor. Chill and enjoy!

Yogurt lament

Is it so hard to make a good tasting vegan yogurt? Apparently. Whole Soy is the best by far. I can't for the life of me understand why Silk is the yogurt that you can buy anywhere. I mean, yes, they are a huge corporation, but how can you sell a product that tastes so badly that it makes you puke? I don't get it. When I tried Silk yogurt, I literally had to run to the sink, spit it out, rinse my mouth out, and get something else to eat, and I very nearly vomited. It's not like it was just bad, it was HORRID! You can buy horrid, runny, puke flavored vegan yogurt anywhere, but high quality, good tasting vegan yogurt you have to fight to find. It blows the mind.

Not hard to figure out that I am ticked at Whole Foods again. They now sell only one kind of vegan yogurt in big containers, and it is - you guessed it - puke, uh, I mean Silk. The only Whole Soy they sell are these little cups.

I'm having a very hard time justifying buying these little cups of yogurt. There's so much trash involved. But - darn it - I DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO LEARN TO MAKE YOGURT! It sounds hard and messy and well, I like Whole Soy. In the end, I know I'm going to be making soy yogurt - I'm just going to have to bitch about it along the way.

Taco meat

Okay, so I made the TVP taco meat again tonight, and I liked it better this time. It's basically the recipe from The New Farm Vegetarian Cookbook. The biggest difference is DO NOT add the sugar. I know sometimes it cuts the acidity - yadda, yadda, yadda. In this recipe, it just adds a weird sweetness that is yucky. Everyone chowed on tonight's dinner, and the kidlets were excited to have it in their bentos tomorrow, so I guess it's a hit! Here's the recipe.
Soak 1 1/2 Cups TVP in 1 1/3 boiling water for 10 minutes.
Saute 1 medium onion in olive oil, then add:
1 14 oz. can tomato sauce
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp chili powder
1/2 tsp pepper
1 tbsp garlic powder
1 tbsp Bragg Liquid Aminos
Mix with the TVP and enjoy!

Here's the kidlets bentos for tomorrow!

Scrambled Tofu Burritos

This meal didn't do much for my goal of adding more living foods into our diet, but it was full of veggies. I'm just glad I felt like preparing food! After many weeks of feeling crappy from the pregnancy, then I got strep throat. Not fair! LOL. Oh well, I'm feeling better, so at least we got a real meal tonight. It was yummy, too.

The scrambled tofu consisted of carrots, celery, red pepper, and onion sauteed in olive oil. Then I added the crumbled tofu with garlic powder, chipotle powder, mustard powder, turmeric, nutritional yeast, and no-salt seasoning. After that cooked a bit, I added some cooked hashbrown potatoes, chopped tomatoes, and chopped green onions. When it was completely cooked, I threw in some chopped fresh spinach. We put all of that in corn tortillas with salsa and hot sauce. Super yummy! The second picture is really blurry - sorry. My camera doesn't do close ups very well.

Pancakes again

I already posted the pancake recipe (it's in the recipe index on the left if anyone is interested), but I made them again this morning and added blueberries this time! They were really good. I got a good picture of them this time though, so I wanted to post that. (yea, yea - I know - food geek)

The quest for interesting salads...

Trey and I had an interesting Thai salad today for lunch. It had a fantastic peanut dressing that I have to learn how to make. I love salads. We tend to get stuck in the same old-same old rut sometimes though. The salad today had iceberg lettuce (I think you could sub romaine or even half romaine, and it would be yummy), cabbage, tomato, cucumber, carrot, tofu, and peanuts. It had this yummy peanut sauce covering it. I think the kidlets would devour a salad like that. I need to come up with some good salad combos to keeping things interesting for everyone. If anyone reading this blog has some good ideas - please pass them on! My first goal is to get my living foods intake up to 50% of my diet. I'd like to get it higher than that eventually. Coming up with creative salads will help me reach that goal!