Cannelini Bean Meatballs

One of the good things about the Engine 2 Extra website is the recipes that are shared by its members. There hasn't been much forthcoming from the site itself lately except some teleconferences that aren't even saved like they used to be so members who couldn't participate can see what was said. There wasn't even anything special for the holiday season this year that I noticed except an "Iron Chef" type contest, which seems to have been going on in various forms for a year now.

Anyway, a member named Kirsten shared this recipe for bean balls made from cannelini beans that she revised from a recipe on the Cookin' Canuck website a year or so back:

CANNELLINI BEAN VEGETARIAN “MEATBALLS” WITH TOMATO SAUCE
YIELD: SERVES 4

1 ½ cans (15 oz. each) Bush’s Cannellini Beans, drained and rinsed  (I added half can black bean)
2 roasted red bell pepper (2 halves), roughly chopped
½ medium yellow onion, grated
2 cloves garlic, minced
¼ cup chopped Italian parsley (I used Italian seasoning...forgot the parsley!)
1 ½ tsp dried oregano
Crushed fennel (tsp or so)
Tomato powder (tsp or so)
Paprika (dash)
 1 tbs flx/3tbs water
Nutritional yeast (1/4 cup or less)
½ cup dried breadcrumbs (see note)
½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
3 cups marinara sauce (your favorite kind)
Cooked spaghetti (whole wheat)

I topped with my 'parmasan cheese' which is nutritional yeast ground up with some sesame seeds...stored in fridge...makes a great 'cheesy' topping for pizza and Italian dishes.

 Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Cover sheet with parchment paper.
In the bowl of a food processor, combine beans and roasted red peppers. Pulse until chopped, but not smoothly pureed.
Transfer the mixture to a medium-sized bowl and stir in grated onion, garlic, parsley, oregano, flaxmeal/water combination, breadcrumbs, salt and pepper until well combined.
Using a rounded 2 tablespoon portion of the bean mixture, form “meatballs” by rolling between the palms of your hands. Place the “meatballs” on the prepared baking sheet, spacing evenly.
Bake until the meatballs are firm to the touch and have developed a light golden brown coating, 15 to 20 minutes.
In a large saucepan, heat you favorite marinara sauce over medium heat until simmering. Add “meatballs” and stir to coat. Simmer until the sauce thickens slightly, stirring occasionally, 10 to 15 minutes.
Serve over spaghetti .
Notes

The amount of breadcrumbs required can change depending on the climate (dry vs. humid). If you find that the "meatballs" are not holding together firmly as you are shaping the first few, add more breadcrumbs, then reshape.

My variations:
Instead of 2 cannelini or cannelini and black beans, I used a can of cannelini and 3/4 cup of pinto beans.

The roasted red peppers I used came from a jar. The recipe says 2 peppers, I'll assume she herself revised this to 2 halves. I used 2 peppers, as written.

Instead of grating half an onion, I tossed about 3/4 cup of frozen diced onions into the food processor with the beans and peppers.

I never have parsley or cilantro around the house except in dried form, so like Kirsten I used dried Italian seasoning, a heaping tablespoon of the Pasta Sprinkles from Penzey Spices. It has the same ingredients as their regular Italian seasoning, and that was just what I filled my jar with the last time it emptied.

The tomato powder I used was once again Dr. Fuhrman's Mato Zest. I really should hit the HFS or order from Just Tomatoes and get plain old tomato powder, but this jar just seems neverending!

For breadcrumbs I used Ian's whole wheat panko. That's all I have in the house right now.

Here they are right out of the oven:

I had to put them in an additional 10 minutes, because after the first 20 they were still very soft and moist, and when I tried to turn them over to let the bottoms air out and dry, they stuck to the parchment paper. After the additional 10 they turned right around with no sticking.

They taste delicious, and probably would have made a tastier burger than the McVeggie burgers and would make excellent meatball sandwiches, especially topped with a nooch sauce, but as far as bean balls to add to pasta, no. Even after a half hour they just fell right apart on the plate when a fork is stuck into it. I'll be sticking with the Mediterranean Lentil Meatballs from Sarah Matheny when I want something to go with spaghetti: 

Vegan Dad's Corned Beef

Saint Patrick's Day is coming, and with that comes Vegan Dad's Corned Beef sandwiches. Here's the video and link to the recipe for those who missed it when I last posted about it. 


Now all I have to do is find where I put that cheesecloth and that rye bread recipe since the last time I made this.

Dr. Neal Pinckney - Healing Heart Foundation

Since he's home, my husband's appetite has been poor. Granted, before all this he would rarely eat breakfast - maybe once a month, lunch at work consisted of a white flour potato roll and a slice of yellow American cheese (usually) or a slice of seitan (once in a blue moon) or leftovers on weekends. Dinner was always our big meal for the day and aside from his weekly cheese & pepperoni pizza, would be WFPB, no SOS (Whole Foods Plant Based, no sugar, oil or salt). I think I already mentioned his evening potato chip habit.

None of the old tried and true meals appealed to him this past week, and he's just been picking at everything. He would eat most of his breakfast, but some days skipped lunch and just had some applesauce. At dinner, if he ate about a cup of the meal offered that was it. As a result, the weight is dropping off of him. He's also weak and fatigued probably more than other post-op CABG patients because this is on top of his expected post-op fatigue and anemia. Add to this the effect of being on both a beta blocker and ACE inhibitor so his blood pressure is hovering around 86/50. Unfortunately, I suspect his cardiologist will be happy with the weight loss, even if it does mean he's too weak to even walk around the apartment without feeling like he's about to pass out. My husband's BMI was officially in the overweight category, but he's been at the exact same height and weight since he graduated high school back in the 1960's. The only time he lost was when he had the "Martian Death Flu" back in the early 1970's, before we started dating, when he and his mom were both so sick neither had the energy to get dressed to buy food so they went hungry and slept all day until it was over. As soon as they were both well, the weight came back on within days.

So I went looking through my cardfile for different recipes to make. I looked through Susan V's recipes, Jan Tz's, all the Esselstyn's and McDougall's, the nutritarian ones, Marla's and Sandy's and Jeff's, the EDTV ones, HH and the people she first ripped off, the PPK.

Then I came across a row of recipes that had been neglected for a while, those from Dr. Neal Pinckney's Healing Heart Foundation web site and his book, The Healthy Heart Handbook (available in its entirety at the web site). As I looked over the recipes I realized I hadn't made some of these in ages, that maybe that's what hubby needs to whet his appetite. I went back to the web site's recipe page to see what else is there, and was pleasantly surprised at how many I had passed up in the past that now look appealing! I spent over an hour just copy/pasting recipes, and will most likely spend even more time there later gathering more.

So now I have a list of meals I'm going to be trying as the weeks go on. For this week, hubby already warned me not to make anything fancy, in fact, not to plan on making anything at all, that he has no idea what he'll feel like until the time comes to eat. Really makes it hard to shop and prepare, you know! I do have a container of Jeff's Longevity Soup in the fridge we've been working on, and my freezer is full of veggies and the pantry filled with a variety of grains and pastas, as well as several forms of tomatoes, so most meals I can make up with no notice. For instance, today I hope to make Ann Esselstyn's Potato, Pea and Couscous Hash for dinner, but I won't know until it's time to start cooking if that's what I wind up making. But by next week his appetite should be back and I plan on making a menu to stick to, and I know a number of Dr. Pinckney's recipes will be included on it, like Lima Linguini Diablo and maybe even Okonomiyaki if I feel adventurous. Well, if the doctor eases up some of the sodium restrictions, that is. I'm sure that sauce is pretty high in it, even if I do use only the lower-sodium version. If I do wind up making some new dishes, I'll be sure to pop fresh batteries in the camera and take photos and notes on them.

Turkey Seitan In A Bread Machine

I love seitan. I've been making this stuff since I saw my first package of gluten mix from Harvest Direct, then found vital wheat gluten in bulk in The Mail Order Catalog and have been ordering it from there ever since.

 I have so many recipes for the stuff in all sorts of flavors, but for decades I made it the plain, semi-chicken flavor simmered in a pot of water, because recipes that claimed to make your seitan taste like corned beef, roast beef, even kielbasy, well, didn't. Then I discovered Bryanna Clark Grogan's chickenish cutlets. And Julie Hasson's Italian sausages. And Chef Brian McCarthy's turkey roast (encrouton, of course, for the holidays).


But the main problem with all of those recipes is that they took time to make after the dough is mixed. Cutting and shaping and wrapping and steaming/baking/frying. I wanted something as simple as old fashioned simmered seitan that was even easier to put together on days when I feel sluggish (like now, after almost 2 months of passing the flu back and forth).

Enter this recipe from Lazy Dave! I first read about it in a post on the PPK forums, where the people who tried it loved it. I filed it away to try in the future, a time that never came until the other day. Life has been hectic around here, between the flu and the impending death of the elderly relative I've mentioned in previous posts. She's been hospitalized twice in the past month, and the other day she was sent back to the nursing home in kidney failure and now receiving hospice/palliative care. Since my husband and I are about the only family she has left and we're the ones who have been responsible for her care the past 5 years, we're also the ones who will take care of her burial and estate when she's gone. My husband's job has been crazy the past few months (Remember me mentioning mandatory overtime? That's now going to go on indefinitely.) so we're trying to get as much prepared ahead of time as we can, so that means trips to banks, phone calls to various agencies and departments, and even a trip to the funeral director to finalize the arrangements. The funeral parlor is owned by the aunt's best friend, too, so we spent a lot of time talking with her reminiscing about the fun she and the aunt had over the years. All this while I'm sitting there with a box of tissues and a bottle of hand sanitizer coughing my head off. I'm still not allowed to see the aunt because of this flu but at least yesterday the nursing supervisor on duty deemed my husband non-contagious and allowed him to spend some time with her while I was relegated to a corner of the lobby.

Anyway, I needed to make something to have on hand for quick meals grabbed and eaten on the run, and seitan sandwiches was my former go-to meal, but I didn't have any in the freezer at the moment, and since I really needed to take a nap the other day (I'm still only getting a few hours sleep each night, thanks to this cough) I wasn't able to make traditional seitan because I knew I would fall asleep with it on the stove, and that's not good. Then I remembered the seitan in the ABM recipe I had and dug it up.

My changes:
Wet stuff - there was no way I was going to use an entire half cup of soy sauce! Even the lower sodium stuff has way too much sodium, so I watered it down to half strength, so 1/4 cup soy sauce and increased the water to 1 3/4 cup.
Dry stuff - And I skipped the added salt.

Those were the only changes to the ingredients.

I first started putting the ingredients into my Mini-Zoji bread machine and then thought this may be too much dough for the machine and dragged out my old full-sized Oster ABM. Next time I think I *will* use the Zoji, because the seitan loaf really wasn't that high at all, maybe 2-3 inches, sort of like a slab of over-cooked corned beef on Saint Patrick's Day. Here's a photo of half the log with some chunks I couldn't slice any thinner. The chunks will get chopped up smaller and tossed into a pasta meal later in the week.

One more change I'll make next time I make this recipe (And I WILL make it again) is to use the Light setting on the ABM. Dave used the Medium setting so I did, too, but fresh out of the pan the crust was so hard my sharpest bread knife had a hard time cracking through it. After spending a night in a ziplock bag it softened a bit, but it would be much better with a softer crust to start with.

As far as taste goes, my husband loves it and made himself three sandwiches. He said if I didn't tell him it was seitan he would have thought it real turkey. I didn't think it tasted anything like turkey because all I could taste was the soy sauce. I think that was all in my head, so to speak, knowing how much of that stuff was in there. In fact, I was reminded of it all afternoon and all night, as I'm so bloated my wedding ring and shoes are all tight on me this morning and my mouth has been so dry that glass after glass of water still hasn't quenched my thirst. But of course, some of that may be because of the flu and my constant coughing and frequent sneezes, and another part could be that we did a lot of running around yesterday and the only time I drank anything was when I took my medications in the morning. I wasn't going to be stuck in a car an hour from home and no clean restrooms in sight with a full bladder!

Saint Patrick's Day is fast approaching. Maybe instead of the cabbage dish I have planned I'll tackle Brian's corned beef seitan again. It's another one of those simmering seitan recipes, so I hope I have some degree of health back by then!

Lentil Meatballs

I have been watching videos on Everyday Dish TV since its inception many years ago. I even bought their DVD, which I can no longer find for sale on the site or elsewhere except used. When some of the recipes went behind a paywall, I spent the money and bought a yearly subscription, because there are very few sites out there with videos of how to make tasty, many times low-fat, vegan foods. I even renewed my subscription, and I don't renew that many things nowadays, even letting most of my print magazines lapse!

The latest goodie from the website I've made is Sarah Matheny's Lentil Meatballs:
Lucky for you people it's not behind the paywall and can be nabbed by everyone.

In the video, Sarah says she uses the already-cooked packaged lentils, IIRC from Trader Joe's, or maybe Whole Foods. Of course, this is weight, not volume. It took a whole lotta web searching and finally me digging out my rusty old kitchen/postage scale that only goes up to a pound to find out that my freshly cooked and well drained lentils come to a cup and a half for 8 ounces in weight. When I made them I used 1 cup of plain old Goya lentils to 2 cups of water and they made a tad under 3 cups total. I used half and put the rest in the freezer for the next time I make these.

I always have plenty of old-fashioned oats on hand.

She calls for reconstituted dry sun-dried tomatoes, not the oily ones in the jar. I also keep a supply of these on hand and started soaking them about a half hour before I started making the meatballs.

Instead of Kalamata olives (too expensive and only come in a big can around here) I used a plain old 2.5 ounce can of sliced black olives, store brand. Instead of chopping I tossed them into the food processor and gave a quick pulse after everything else was mixed and pulsed up.

And lastly, I rarely have fresh herbs around here and today was no different, so no fresh basil. Instead I used a heaping teaspoon of dried basil leaves. To be honest, the next time I make this I'll be sure to have fresh basil at the ready, because it could have used the bit of bulk the fresh would have given.

Like Sarah, I used a cookie dough scoop to make these meatballs, and got 17 out of the recipe. After baking for 15 minutes I took the tray out to flip them over and was a little disappointed to find them still pretty mushy and had to use a butter knife to scrape the soft stuff off the parchment paper and squish it back into the now flipped meatball. Instead of putting them back in for a total of 20 minutes that the recipe called for I left them for 25. Here's the result:

You can see the bits of tomato and olives in the finished product, as well as the oatmeal bits. They did firm up quite a bit in that last 10 minutes of baking, and maybe when they're cooled they'll firm up even more. Of course, they're not as firm as a store-bought or gluten based meatball, but a heck of a lot better than most other vegan meatball recipes I've tried over the years, and if you leave out the olives, they're even McDougall MWLP safe.

They're now in the fridge, awaiting our usual Saturday night pasta dinner. I won't tell my husband these are home made and see if he can tell.

Ginger Peanut Tofu Salad

In my last post I mentioned I'm making that Cheezy Kale Soup to go with sandwiches for today's supper. I guess it would help if I also showed you where to find the sandwich filling recipe.

The  Ginger Peanut Salad is form Julie Hasson's Everyday Dish TV web site.

You can find the video of Julie making it on YouTube:

This will be my first time making it so I can't comment on it. I just figured it's quick, easy, and COOL for this hot July day. I'll be serving it on whole wheat Kaiser rolls with Romaine lettuce and sliced tomatoes. Knowing my husband he'll also be very liberal with the sriracha sauce.

Holiday Seitan Loaf

This is what I made for Christmas this past December. I've seen this recipe's video at Everyday Dish TV for a while now and always wanted to make it but thought it was too much trouble. Know what? It's really not!



It's from chef Brian McCarthy from his book The Vegan Family Cookbook, and although it does take a few more steps than just simmering some seitan, it's totally worth it. I'll be making it again for Easter in a few weeks, too.