VeganMoFo Day 27 - Puttanesca Sauce

When I make our Saturday pasta meals, I usually just toss on a package of Tinkyada pasta and open a jar of Walnut Acres sauce. 

It's only for VeganMoFo that I've been experimenting with more elaborate home made spaghetti sauces. I had jarred puttanesca sauce once, in my pre-McDougall days, and it was no better or worse than plain sauce with my own veggies tossed in with the cooked pasta. This one is from the September 2009 McDougall newsletter.

Puttanesca Sauce

This flavorful sauce should be cooked for at least an hour before serving.  The longer it simmers the thicker it will get.  Serve over polenta, pasta or gnocchi.

Preparation Time:  15 minutes
Cooking Time:  60 minutes
Servings:  6-8

4 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons vegetable broth
3  14.5 ounce cans fire-roasted crushed tomatoes
1  14.5 ounce can fire-roasted chopped tomatoes
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried oregano
1  14.5 ounce can hearts of palm, drained, halved, and sliced
½ cup quartered and pitted kalamata olives
½ cup quartered and pitted green olives
2 tablespoons small capers, drained and rinsed
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons minced fresh parsley

Place the garlic and vegetable broth in a large pot.  Cook and stir for about 1 minute until garlic softens slightly.  Add the tomatoes, red pepper flakes, basil and oregano.  Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer uncovered for 30 minutes.  Add the remaining ingredients, except the parsley, and simmer for at least another 30 minutes (longer is better).  Stir in the fresh parsley before serving.

My changes:
I couldn't find fire roasted crushed tomatoes, or any crushed tomatoes in smaller cans, so used a 28 ounce can of plain low-sodium crushed and a 15 ounce can of regular fire-roasted petite diced, as well as a can of no-salt added petite diced tomatoes. I debated about putting a capful of liquid smoke into the pot, as Chef AJ had suggested in some video to get the fire-roasted flavor, but decided against it. In the end, it didn't need it.

Hearts of Palm is an ingredient I've never had before. I found this can way up on the top shelf in the canned vegetable aisle mixed in with the cans of artichokes. Although the can says it's pre-cut, those things were in pretty huge chunks, so I cut them up into pieces about the size of the petite diced tomatoes. Because they weren't low sodium I also rinsed them a few times, too.

It looks simply amazing! The photo was snapped after adding the veggies, before the second half hour simmer. When I served it over whole wheat pasta an hour later, the olives and capers kept their size and shape but the hearts of palm kind of disappeared into the sauce. Maybe if I left them in larger pieces that wouldn't have happened. I have no idea.

This was such a full bodied sauce that it didn't even need the pasta to make it into a whole meal! If Ann Esselstyn had written the recipe she probably would suggest serving it over a bed of kale and been done with it, that's how rich this sauce is.

While it does take at least an hour to cook, it only takes a few minutes to actually put together. If I keep making sauces like these, my husband will never let me return to jarred pasta sauce ever again! 

VeganMoFo Day 24 - Spicy Cajun Sauce

Another day off, another quick meal. Rice is always easy and filling, and this sauce is ready before the rice cooker beeps, even if I make white instead of brown rice.

Spicy Cajun Sauce

Preparation Time:  10 minutes
Cooking Time:  15 minutes
Servings:  4-6

1 medium onion, chopped
¼ cup water
2  14 ounce cans Cajun-style stewed tomatoes
1  15 ounce can kidney beans, drained and rinsed
1  15 ounce can black beans drained and rinsed
1 cup frozen corn kernels
½ teaspoon chili powder
dash or two of hot sauce 

Place the onion and water in a medium saucepan.  Cook, stirring occasionally, until onion softens slightly about 3 minutes.  Add the remaining ingredients, mix well and cook for about 10 minutes until flavors are well blended.  Serve hot.

Hint:  To make a thicker sauce, combine 2 tablespoons cornstarch with 1/3 cup cold water.  Add to the sauce and cook and stir until thickened.

Couldn't find Cajun-style stewed tomatoes so used 2 cans of plain no-salt added ones and added 2 teaspoons of Penzy's Cajun seasoning blend. And my husband added some sriracha, of course. The only other change was to add the whole bag of corn instead of half of it.

When the sauce was all heated and the rice cooker beeped, I just dumped the sauce in with the rice, stirred it up, and it sat there on keep warm until we finished our rainy day movie and were ready to eat.

I hate rain on vacation days, but at least this was a great warmer-upper meal.

VeganMoFo Day 21 - Dijon Mushroom Potatoes

There's nothing like a great baked potato with a simple sauce over the top. Toss in some veggies and it's a complete meal.

Today was another late summer 90 degree-plus day so the casserole I had planned went out the window. I had gotten another rare bag of perfect potatoes, and since my husband's favorite food right now is a good baked potato, supper ideas came streaming in. All that needed to be done was to toss a few of those russets in the microwave and get started on this flavorful sauce from the McDougall Program for Maximum Weight Loss book.

Dijon Mushroom Potatoes

Serving Size : 4     
Preparation Time :0:20
Cooking time: 1 hour


  4             medium  baking potato -- scrubbed
     3/4           cup  water
  1             medium  onion -- chopped
     1/2         pound  mushrooms -- sliced
  1             medium  green bell pepper -- chopped
  1              small  carrot -- shredded
  1         tablespoon  soy sauce, low sodium
  1         tablespoon  Dijon mustard
  1         tablespoon  cornstarch
                        freshly ground pepper

     Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.  Prick potatoes in several places with a fork.  Bake for 1 hour or until tender, or microwave on high power for 15 minutes, turning once.  Let the potatoes rest while preparing the sauce.

In a large saucepan place 1/4 cup of the water with the onion, mushrooms, green pepper, and carrot.  Cook, stirring, until the vegetables are tender, adding a little more water if necessary.

  Meanwhile, combine the remaining ingredients in a bowl.  Stir into the vegetable mixture and cook, stirring, until thickened.

 Serve the potatoes hot, passing the sauce separately.


Well, I just skipped that whole first part about roasting the potatoes in that hot oven. Neither of us cares if the skin is crispy or not, so the moister microwave cooking is just fine for us.

I used a bag of frozen onion and peppers from Bird's Eye, and as luck would have it, I also had some frozen mushrooms in the freezer today, too.

Shredding up a carrot using a hand grater was the pits. Usually I just pull out my mini food processor for this job but didn't feel like climbing around the storage area where I keep it for just one carrot. For the first time in ages I scraped my knuckles. That's what I get for taking the "lazy" way out.

And one tablespoon of Dijon mustard is never enough. This meal got close to three tablespoons. My husband likes mustard so much that one year I bought him a book about mustard and a gift box of gourmet mustards for Christmas. Those jars were empty before New Year's Day. This was in the dark ages, when the only mustard varieties grocery stores sold was yellow or brown, and occasionally they carried Dijon, usually around the holidays. Now stores carry dozens of versions, from sweetened honey mustard to spicy horseradish or wasabi-infused ones. For this dish I used plain old Grey Poupon.

Cornstarch - my nemesis! At least this time I added a wee bit more at the beginning and it was just right. 

Just added a bit of Brussels sprouts to round out the meal.

Another great meal. I had this plateful, my husband wound up with 3 potatoes total, and we had just enough of this sauce for all of them with no leftovers.

This triggered something in my husband - he asked if I would concentrate on making a lot more baked potato meals like this after VeganMoFo meals are over. Of course I would! I always hesitated to make these super simple meals for fear he wanted "more", but he says he likes these better than some meals that I spend lots of time on. I see a lot of tater toppings and simple gravies in my future. Hopefully by then the stores will have this year's batch of potatoes in and they'll be in better shape than in previous years (green, spotty, full of mold and/or eyes, etc.). 

VeganMoFo Day 14 - Golden Gravy

No list of favorites is complete without gravy!

This is one of our favorites as well as Mary McDougall's. It appeared in the January 2013 newsletter, but I've had it in my recipe cardfile for years, so it must have appeared on-line or in one of the books before that.

CREAMY GOLDEN GRAVY 
This gravy literally takes minutes to put together. Sometimes my boys eat just a bowl of mashed potatoes and gravy for a snack. For dinner, we serve this meal with sautéed broccolini or green beans.

Preparation Time:  5 minutes
Cooking Time:  10 minutes
Servings:  makes 2 cups

2 cups vegetable broth
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons tahini
¼ cup brown rice flour
freshly ground black pepper

Place all the ingredients, except the pepper, in a small saucepan.  Stir well to mix.  Cook over medium–low heat, stirring occasionally until smooth and thick.  Season with freshly ground black pepper to taste.  Serve at once.

Hint: This may be made ahead and refrigerated.  It will thicken slightly more when refrigerated.  To reheat, place in a saucepan, add a small amount of water, whisk to combine and then heat slowly, stirring occasionally, until hot.

For purposes of VeganMoFo I did use the tahini this time, but usually leave it out. It's a wee bit less creamy without it but tastes just as great.

I never use rice flour but always use either white whole wheat or whole wheat pastry flour. I never have a problem getting this to thicken, unlike recipes that call for cornstarch.

One of our favorite meals. My husband calls this Unchicken Dinner, because it has everything a down-home chicken dinner would have except for the chicken itself. During the rest of the year I usually make this meal every Sunday, alternating the veggies and gravy. This time it's the Golden Gravy with baby carrots and cooked mixed greens.

Comfort food at its finest.

Chef AJ's Quick Sun-Dried Tomato Marinara

Ever since Chef AJ posted her video on how she lost her last 30 pounds

I've been giving her older recipes another look over. Some have had to be adapted to be more in line with Dr. McDougall's MWLP guidelines, others are fine as-is. This is one that needs the slightest adaptation. This recipe is in her book, Unprocessed, and can also be found at various sites on-line.

Quick Sun-dried Tomato Marinara
This sauce takes minutes to make but tastes like it was slow simmered for hours. The best part is, there are not pots
to clean or vegetables to cut up.

INGREDIENTS:
1 cup oil-free sun dried tomatoes, soaked in water
3-4 fresh Roma tomatoes (approximately 12 ounces)
1 red bell pepper, seeded (approximately 8 ounces)
1 -2 cloves of garlic, peeled
3-4 pitted dates
one shallot (approximately 1 ounce) or red onion equivalent
1 Tablespoon Sun Dried Tomato Powder
3-4 fresh basil leaves
crushed red pepper flakes, to taste (optional)

PREPARATION:
In a blender, blend all ingredients until smooth. If you prefer a chunkier consistency, use a food processor fitted with the “S” blade and process all ingredients until desired consistency is reached. 

Serve over your favorite healthy noodles such as those made from rice, tofu, sea vegetables or zucchini. To make zucchini noodles peel zucchini then make noodles using a Spiralizer, Saladacco or vegetable peeler.

Chef’s Note:
If you have a high powered blender, you can make this sauce hot right in the blender.

The adaptation? Omit the dates. I made this for the first time and decided to leave them in, but if you're used to making tomato sauces without added sugar, leave them out. I never add sugar to other tomato sauce recipes so will leave them out from now on.

I used slightly more than a cup of sun-dried tomatoes because that's what I had left in the container. It was maybe one or 2 pieces of tomato more. I also had 6 very small plum tomatoes that needed to be used to there was a bit more of those, too. These are really small tomatoes, maybe only 3 inches high. I figured 6 of those would equal 4 regular sized plum tomatoes.

For the sun-dried tomato powder I used Dr. Fuhrman's Mato Zest because I still have more than half a jar of it and always forget to use it in other recipes.

Like Jeff Novick and Chef AJ, we love garlic in this house, and used about 8 cloves. I may use more next time.

And it wasn't until we sat down to eat when I realized I forgot to add the basil leaves. Stupid! I had them all ready in the refrigerator, too. Oh, well.

OMG! This stuff was fantastic! This is how it looked in the pot before I added the spinach to it. It's so thick, rich and creamy! My husband asked if it was too much work to make, because he really would prefer to have this as our basic pasta sauce from now on. I told him it would be no problem at all.

For the record, I made this in a Ninja blender and was as smooth as can be. I tried letting it run 5 minutes on high to see if it would heat up the way people say soups and sauces do in the high priced blenders. It got a little warm but certainly not hot. That's okay with me, because when I use jarred sauce I never heat them, just open and dump. The hot pasta (and spinach) warms the sauce up nicely.

Beans and Rice

We've been eating a lot of this lately.



And of course, a side dish of veggies and some kind of sauce to go with it. Most of the time I use Chef AJ's Yummy Sauce, some variation of a nutritional yeast based cheese sauce, Mary McDougall's mushroom gravy, or just dump some store-bought salsa on top.

It's not always plain old beans, either. One of our new favorites is Chef AJ's Red Lentil Chili.



While she enjoys hers over potatoes, we prefer rice or Happy Herbivore's cornbread.



I still can't get our son to go along with this meal (He's still as picky an eater at 30 as he was at 3), but now my younger brother and his wife eat this way a couple times a week for dinner and he said he takes leftovers with him to work every day. I'll make a McDougaller out of him yet!

As you may be able to tell, now that summer's heat is here I'm not doing as much experimenting in the kitchen. I've made some of the simple recipes Chef AJ demos in this video:



but mostly it's been some old tried-and-true sauces over beans and rice, beans and potatoes, beans and pasta, beans and quinoa, beans and faro, etc. with veggies. I pop the rice into the rice cooker, the veggies into the microwave, and when all is done, mix them together in the rice cooker to keep warm until my husband and I feel like eating. People have told me I could also cook the veggies in the rice cooker at the same time, but I prefer the softer bite from microwaving. So one extra dish to wash, no biggie. My kitchen stays a bit cooler (it stays a steady 85 during the summer months, thanks to being on the top floor with a flat roof overhead), and every degree counts. 

Casseroles and other dishes that require the oven will have to wait for October again. With the Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease Cookbook coming out in early September, I'll be itching to try new meals about then. For now, we're happy with our monotonous meals of beans and rice.

Fast Food 4: Marinara Sauce

As time goes on I feel a little more human and want to get back in the kitchen. Only strong enough for pasta the other day, but instead of the jarred sauce my son had been using I wanted something a bit healthier. 

At the beginning of the Fast Food 4: Beyond the Basics video, before the Fast Food Twins come in from their day at the beach, Jeff makes up some basic recipes - vegetable broth, salsa, tahini sauce, and a basic marinara sauce. It's really pretty simple, and again, he says this is a "double batch" of the sauce. From the PDF file:

2 boxes Pomi tomatoes
1 cup diced frozen onions or onion/pepper frozen mix
3 teaspoons Mrs. Dash (or other brand) Italian seasonings
3 teaspoons Mrs. Dash Table Blend
2 teaspoons dried basil 
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/8 teaspoon red pepper flakes (optional)
1/8 teaspoon oregano (option)

I had some boxes of strained Pomi near their expiration date so used one box of chopped (what Jeff used) and one strained,

I don't remember now if onions were included in the video but think Jeff said they can be an optional addition. I always add onions when making sauce from scratch, either frozen or fresh, and used a bit more than half a bag of frozen onions because that's what I had left in the freezer. In the past, I've even nuked them in the microwave or browned them up in a pan first and then added them to jarred sauce.

In the video Jeff said he doesn't use Italian seasonings blends because he prefers to use the individual spices and herbs for this particular recipe. I have a supply of Penzy Italian herbs and used that. As for the Table Blend, I didn't measure and it may have only been 1 teaspoon. I should have used more.

He used a lot more than 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder in the video and admitted he never measures. I, too, used a lot more garlic, mainly because we love it but also because it's good for what ails you, and I needed some strong healing! I also dropped in 2 cubes of frozen Dorot crushed garlic.

I don't like red pepper flakes so skipped them, and since oregano is in the Italian mix, I didn't add that, either.

Jeff also used a lot of dried basil. He said he prefers fresh
sweet basil but the store he went to didn't have any that looked good, so he was using dried sweet basil. I added a little of this, even though it, too, was included in the Italian mix.

I made one more addition to the sauce and dropped in 2 cups of defrosted and squeezed frozen spinach. I try to get greens into this family every chance I can, and this is one of those easy occasions to do so.

I served this sauce - the whole batch - over a pound of cooked rice pasta. That pasta really soaks up the sauce and even a one-quart jar usually leaves quite a bit of un-sauced pasta, so I figured this would be a great amount, and it was.

Now I've made pasta sauce very similar, maybe even identical, to this for years now, and always have the same reaction - it's too bland and tasteless. Because of my cold and the fact that my son had been using full sodium sauce when he made pasta for us during the week, this tasted even blander yet. My husband said it was fine with him, tasted just as good as any other pasta sauce I've made in the past. Our son, who made his own pot of pasta and used his own sauce on it, sampled a small bit and said he's glad he has his own stuff to eat.

Will I make it again? Probably. When I use jarred pasta sauce I use the Walnut Acres Tomato Basil lower sodium jarred sauce @ $4.99 to $5.49 a jar. It's only 25.5 ounces, so I have to add to it to make enough fluid for the pasta. Add a can of tomatoes @ $1 a can; sometimes a can of paste @ 33 cents a can; hearty amounts of dried herbs and spices; vegetables, cost depending on how many and what types I add. Sometimes I just use an entire second jar of sauce. Now add a loaf of bread. Maybe some homemade crumbles, meatballs, or sausages or packaged Soy Curls. A "simple and cheap" pasta meal can sometimes cost over $20! For us, that's a lot. 

I really wish sodium didn't affect my blood pressure and I could grab a jar of cheaper, all veg no-oil added pasta sauce!

Sorry there's no photo. I forgot to take it when I made the meal, and I was going to grab a shot when I reheated the container of leftovers but my husband grabbed it and ate it before I knew what happened. He did say it tasted better the second time around, though. 

Chef AJ's Purple Passion Cauliflower Sauce

I wish I could find the kinds of produce that Chef AJ and others have! Here she is using purple cauliflower to make a creamy sauce for a friend of hers who can't eat beans. I suppose it would taste just as great with ordinary white cauliflower, but man, I wish I had access to the purple stuff!