Vegan food posts for Starchivores who follow Dr. McDougall, Dr. Esselstyn, Rip Esselstyn, Chef AJ, and others - recipes or links to them and photos when available.
I found this slide show on another blog, a person who had attended this Engine 2 Farms2Forks Immersion weekend. Looks like they had chilly weather there! I was thinking of attending the one this coming August at the Esselstyn family farm in upstate New York, about 33 miles away from where I live, but OUTDOORS in AUGUST?!?! Not me! Not with my asthma, especially this summer, when we've had a number of 100º PLUS days already in June and July! Now if they had an *indoor* venue . . .
Looks like they had a great time, though.
Here's Rip explaining what they do at an Immersion:
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.
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.
1/2 cup yellow split peas 1 onion, chopped 1 cup white button mushrooms 2 cups carrot juice 15 ounces no-salt tomato sauce 1 1/2 pounds kale, tough stems and center ribs removed and leaves coarsely chopped 1/4 cup cashew butter 1 teaspoon nutritonal yeast
Instructions: In a pressure cooker 1. Cover yellow split peas with about 2 1/2 cups of water and cook on high pressure for 6-8 minutes. 2. Add remaining ingredients except cashew butter and cook on high pressure for 1 minute. 3. Release pressure and blend soup with cashew butter. 4. Sprinkle with nutritional yeast before serving.
To make without a pressure cooker: 1. Precook the split peas until soft. 2. Combine cooked split peas with all remaining ingredients except cashew butter. 3. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer until kale is tender (about 15 minutes). 4. Add water as needed to achieve desired consistency. 5. Stir in cashew butter. 6. Sprinkle with nutritional yeast before serving.
My changes:
I used a bit more mushrooms because that's what I had left in the box. It was almost 2 cups.
The tomato sauce came out to 16 ounces, as I used 2 small cans of no-salt added sauce.
Instead of fresh kale I used half a bag of frozen. It's a one pound bag, so half a pound of cooked/blanched kale.
Skipped the cashew butter but used about 1/4 cup nutritional yeast, as we like things cheesy here.
This is one delicious, creamy soup! So what if it was 90º outside, this
soup was worth it! And because it was made in the pressure cooker it
didn't really heat the kitchen up that much, either. I forgot to take a photo of it fresh and warm, so this pic of it cold in the Rubbermaid container will have to do:
DH didn't want any over the weekend, but I plan on making it again today
to go with tonight's sandwich supper. just to use up the other half
bottle of carrot juice, so he'll get a taste of it then. He'll see what
he's been missing out on.
He did make one comment on it when he first saw it. If you ever saw the Kevin Bacon/Fred Ward creature movie Tremors, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100814/
you'll know the scenes he compared this soup to. For the rest of you, consider yourselves lucky you don't know.
If you DO want to know, watch this video (you may want to mute it - the song is annoying) and the scene it at 1:16
The day it arrived 2 weeks ago, when I was still feverish and hubby was just starting the coughing with this darn flu, I made my first batch. Quick and easy and they were on our plates within 10 minutes from draining the can of beans.
Hubby and I are still coughing, more than 3 weeks after this darn flu started in this house, but at least we've been able to have quick, healthy burger dinners as a break from the pasta or rice bowls I've been able to put together after dragging my butt out of bed for a few minutes in the afternoons. Maybe by next week I'll have enough energy to spend a bit more time in the kitchen. But for now, these burgers are literal lifesavers.
The Nelson twins Nina and Randa, Jeff's helpers in his 2 videos - not the *other* Nelson twins, Gunnar and Matthew, sons of Rick Nelson - are currently in Hawaii on vacation, and with the help of their brother made a music video praising these burgers, called Burgers in Paradise:
Now I have another song acting as an earworm! At least it helps drown out the tinnitis hiss that's been a constant companion. Thanks, girls!
Dr. McDougall's latest book, The Starch Solution, is being released in May, 2012, and the web site for the book has just been activated. You can see some of the Star McDougallers' stories, see what foods you can eat that will help lead to weight loss and better health, but not much more.
And I really don't like how Prevention Magazine is marketing this - a free gift upon ordering, 4 payments of $6.75 each (It's only $17.81 on Amazon when pre-ordered), return at any time for a refund ("even 20 years from now," says the ad). All the links that appear to go to recipes all go to the order form. Sounds like a huckster instead of a serious promotion of an important book.
I already pre-ordered mine, but don't think I'll be reading anything Dr. McDougall has already written before or said in a free on-line lecture. I hope for his sake that Prevention really promotes this, including getting him appearances on the talk shows, and he doesn't blow it.
This was the first time I used my pressure cooker in probably 3 years. In fact, last year when I went to use it I noticed the ring was tacky so had to order a new one from Amazon. Although the ring came within a week or so, I never put it on the pot but had it hanging around the house all this time. A few weeks ago I was going to make a different pressure cooker recipe and when I grabbed the lid realized I never put the ring in, but when I went to get it from where I thought I put it when cleaning for Christmas, it was gone. Those gremlins like to hide things in the house and sometimes it takes weeks before they reappear. I recruited both my guys to help look for it, but when none of us could find it I just ordered another one. They're supposed to be changed about every 18 months, anyway, according to the package, so when it turns up I'll use it for the next scheduled change.
So, the soup smells wonderful and has a nice spicy kick to it. I used less than one tablespoon of the curry because we don't like things *too* spicy around here. Yeah, I'm a spice wuss. So what? LOL See how creamy that soup is? That's how great the peas fell apart after pressure cooking. Usually I use the immersion blender for pea soups but this one doesn't need it at all, and it's fun to see those tiny bits of carrots. Next time I'm already planning on defrosting the cauliflower first and chopping it up into smaller pieces. We don't like big chunks of stuff in our soups if we can help it. I had nice fat carrots so sliced them into quarters before chopping to keep the size down.
Susan, if you're reading messages here, thanks for a wonderful soup and thanks for getting me to use my pressure cooker again. I stopped using it when it got stored in an out-of-the-way area in this cluttered apartment. Now that things are arranged differently and I can easily get to more of my kitchen stuff, like the food processor and this pressure cooker, I plan on using it much more often. Heck, I may soon unpack the "new" Crockpot I bought almost a year ago and finally break that in, too! LOL
Vegan Pie in the Sky is the third book in the dessert series by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. The book has been out since last September.
Ever since Jeff announced on the McDougall forums that he had 3 new videos in production I've been waiting for his next in the Fast Food series. Although I'm a little disappointed that it's NOT another video full of more one-pot meals as promised but the burgers one, instead, I'm still going to get it.
The video is now available for pre-orders on VegSource, and here's the promotional video with the Nelson girls and their teen friends having a BBQ with Jeff as the burger chef:
I wish I had seen Mark's blog post sooner and we would have had pizza instead of Irish Stew this past Saturday!
Mark Sutton, a familiar name on the various fat free vegan mailing lists and forums, has written a cookbook dedicated to making pizza that's safe for us McDougallers and Nutritarians and Esselstynites and all the other people who follow a no added fat vegan lifestyle. The few sample recipes he posted on a few Yahoogroups Groups look amazing, and people who already own the book already and have tried the recipes have nothing but praise for him. Even Robin Robertson, author of over 20 cookbooks (many of which reside on my own book shelf) has written about this book on her own blog. Go on over and see for yourself the gorgeous photos of Mark's pies from the book!
After experimenting with those recipes, we're all gonna have to do a Mary's Mini to recuperate!
Thanks, Mark, for making tasty pizza available again.
