When I made up the dinner menus for the month I assumed we would be having typical October weather and nice hearty soups and stews would hit the spot. Instead, we're still having summer temps, at least through Wednesday. Oh, well. Nobody will complain about a heavy meal after a hard day at work or job hunting.
My only problem is deciding which stew to make. Irish stews are simple and there isn't much of a difference between various recipes. This one, Irish Potato and Cabbage Stew, is pretty straight forward, whereas this one, Irish Peasant Stew, has a bit of a bite to it from the V-8 Juice. Knowing my husband, this is the one he'll prefer.
I'll make this — Joe’s Ridiculously Good Irish Brown Bread That Takes 5 Minutes To Make posted by Desdamona to the ElizaVegan blog — to go with it. 
It's a new-to-me recipe, and I usually don't make soda bread to go with any soup or stew, but this one looks too easy to pass up. That's her photo of the bread on her blog - doesn't it look delicious? Mine never look that good, they're always so pale in color, pasty white like my own Irish skin.
Breakfast instead of dinner today. I noticed a few VeganMoFo bloggers posted their own tofu scrambles so here's mine. The recipe can be found here, but it's not much of a recipe, to be honest.
A problem that crops up frequently when making a recipe that makes 6 or more servings is that there are a heck of a lot of leftovers when only or 3 people are doing the eating. That means if those leftovers aren't eaten for lunch the next day or shoved into the freezer they accumulate and take up precious refrigerator space. So every other week or so we wind up with a leftover meal, and today is the day. We have tomato soup, Winter Stew, Italian bread and some sauce, even some tofu loaf. It's never a pretty meal, and sometimes the kid takes one look at the leftovers and puts a pot of (non-veg) mac and cheese on for himself instead, but the leftovers usually get finished off.
Sorry, nothing new and exciting to wrote about. And tomorrow starts the weekend routine. We have the same things every weekend - pizza on Friday, (usually) spaghetti with Julie's sausage recipe made into either sausages or meatballs, and Sunday burgers. My boys like monotony some times.
Damn. I was just over on the Everyday Dish web site to get the recipe to link to it and see the whole site has been reformatted. Sure, it looks more professional and all, but for people with slow computers like me it's harder to get around. And you have to search for the recipes! It's not intuitive to have to click on the "Watch video" button to get the recipe AND the video. I'd rather have them back on separate pages again.
I wish we could afford a new computer, one that we could connect wirelessly to the cable modem in the kid's room. This computer is 10 years old this November still running Windows 98 (and not SE - Second Edition, either) so the only way to connect it to that modem is with a 100+ foot long cable running form the kid's room around doorways, windows and ceilings, from one end of the apartment to the other. Then the kid wouldn't be able to close his bedroom door and I wouldn't be able to close the door to this room. We're not even allowed to hang pictures in this place so I'm sure the owner doesn't want us drilling holes for cables. The NJ lottery is our only hope.
The loaf recipe I use the most 
comes from Mary McDougall and was originally posted in one of the McDougall newsletters. My notes don't say what issue and if it was the free on-line one or the former paid printed one, but it really doesn't matter. I'll bake up a bunch of potatoes and maybe roast a few other veggies to go with it, as long as the oven will already be on. Salad and soup will probably be on the menu, too.
I know loaf recipes are a dime a dozen, but I'm still searching for the one recipe that will make a really firm loaf, one that will stand up on its own after cooking and can be easily sliced without crumbling to pieces. Most loaves I make wind up better suited as spreads. Tasty, but gloppy.
If you love to experiment, try using the Magical Loaf Studio 
on the Vegan Lunch Box blog. You'll never make your loaves the same way twice. Bryanna Clark Grogan also frequently posts her loaf recipes on the Beginners board on VegSource. Well, that was a smaller version of it - the original loaf file has nearly 50 loaves, including ham flavored. I guess she no longer offers them because many have appeared in her monthly paid newsletter or in books, either her own cookbooks or as the contributor to books by others, like Dr. Barnard.
I don't make loaves that often any more since the kid graduated college and is home for dinner every night. He doesn't like my vegan loaves and much prefers the dead meat variety, but he said it's more of a texture thing than the vegginess of the food, that they taste okay, just the mouth-feel gags him. He always was a picky eater.
I'm a product of the generation that remembers the "Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti Day" commercials. Within walking distance of our apartment house we had no less than 4 stores that sold homemade pasta, including one whose owner encouraged us kids to come over and help her mix and cut.. The store is long gone, but the woman, now over 100 years old, still does volunteer work with kids. It was through her that I learned pasta comes in shapes and flavors other than plain old elbows and spaghetti.
One of those shapes, fusilli, is what I'll be needing for today's dinner, Pasta Twists with Cauliflower and Spinach, from Vegan Express 
by Nava Atlas. Sometimes I use a three-color whole wheat radiatore from Hodgson Mills instead of fussili. 
That's the beauty of the shaped pasta - substitutions don't detract from the dish and can sometimes enhance it.
Now I have to decide what soup to make with it. I was re-watching the McDougall cooking videos yesterday - that's why I suddenly decided to make that oh, so delicious Black Bean Soup - so perhaps I'll choose another of Mary McDougall's soups to go with today's dinner.
By the way, those two videos - McDougall Made Easy and McDougall Made Irresistible - are one sale right now, both DVD's for $25. Grab 'em while you can!
Hmm, they all look a bit too heavy for what I want. Instead I found this one, another Nava Atlas recipe - Tomato Rice Soup with Snow Peas and Mushrooms. It'll need some substitutions, say regular peas instead of snow peas and I'll be slicing up the baby bella mushrooms I have in the fridge that I bought for another meal that I never made. And of course, I'll do my sautéing in water instead of oil. The recipe is from her book Vegetarian Soups for All Seasons. 
And because it's being served with pasta I'll leave out the rice, too.
We spent the day with an elderly relative who kept pushing sweets (non-vegan) on us, so it's nice to come home to healthy foods. Dinner will be a mixed green salad with honey (agave instead of honey) mustard dressing (McDougall recipe), brown rice, broccoli and cheese soup (another McDougall recipe), and baked beans consisting of a can of Bush's vegetarian baked beans, a can of no salt added diced tomatoes, and a can of fat-free no meat chili (check labels - some have dairy). I have some leftover spinach & garlic in the refrigerator so I'll reheat that, too. Hmm, looks like a lot. Perhaps I'll skip the rice and if The Boss (a.k.a. hubby) wants something more substantial there's always some baked corn chips in his snack closet.
Snack tonight will be bananas. Again. The kid is learning how to drive (He's had his license 6 years but hates to drive) and is finally making local solo runs, and decided he'd hit the grocery store for me the other day and grab "some" bananas. He came home with 2 bunches of 5 each. For three people. Looks like I'll be making a banana bread tomorrow or Monday.
Sorry, but this sore throat and fever are still hanging around so mo biggies when it comes to food.
I'll make up the pizza dough in my breadmachine and after that it's a snap to make the rest of the pizza. I load the pies up with veggies and add a salad for a complete meal.
The dough recipe for 2 large pies:
1 1/2 cups water (may need a bit more during kneading depending on what flour you use, weather conditions, and loads of other factors)
2 tablespoons olive oil (can be omitted for fat free food plans)
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons sugar
2 cups semolina flour AND
2 cups whole wheat flour
OR
4 cups bread flour
OR
4 cups whole wheat flour (Pastry flour works good, too)
OR any combination of all purpose, bread, whole wheat, semolina, even toss some corn meal in
1 tablespoon of vital wheat gluten for every cup of whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons bread machine yeast
I add some or all of the following as the dough kneads:
1 tablespoon dehydrated onion flakes
1 teaspoon dried minced garlic
1 tablespoon Italian herbs mixture
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/4 cup diced sun-dried tomatoes cut into 1/4 inch pieces with scissors - do not rehydrate first
When the dough is ready in 90 minutes, separate in half and roll out each half and place on pizza pans. Pop into the refrigerator for at least an hour. This helps those nice big crust bubbles form when the pie is doing its final rise. I love bubbles in pizza crust.
Preheat oven to 400ºF.
Top each pie with your favorite toppings.
Bake each for apx. 15 minutes. Our son likes his crust soggy so I take his out in 13 minutes.
My son, now in his mid-20's and eager to learn home economics, has been helping me out a lot this week, and might even offer to do the pies for me today. It's scary realizing that by this time next year he may be living out on his own, or at least with a few of his friends, in their own apartment. That is, if he ever finds a job. He even offered to go to the laundromat yesterday! I didn't take him up on that offer - I wasn't that sick - but maybe next week I'll drag him along with me and let him take over.
Still running a slight fever so another easy meal tonight - Jan Tz' Minnesota Hot Dish. Instead of Boca burgers I'm using a bag of Morningstar Farms beef strips that I got on sale, a bag of store-brand hash brown potatoes instead of slicing up spuds, and 3 cans of lower salt vegetarian vegetable soup. The onion is already chopped up - I did a bunch over the weekend. You do NOT want to open my refrigerator! Even 2 boxes of baking soda don't touch the onion odor!
BTW, the official VeganMoFo feed is on Bloglines. I'm trying to figure out how to get it to appear on my Bloglines page, and as soon as my head clears a bit I can fix this page so when you click on the VeganMoFo graphic to the left you'll be take to the feed.
