Elves Rush in Where Angels Fear to Tred

It’s the penultimate Sunday of July and it’s an astonishing thought that yet another month has literally blown by! It’s a Beautiful Day in the KEK (Kinky Elfery Kitchen), so let’s celebrate another week of cookery with The Elf.

This week’s FatFree Vegan Recipe ALMOST didn’t make the cut! We got so caught up in other stuffs (bakin’ cookies, mostly) that we didn’t even put it together until yesterday! BUT, it worked out perfectly so we could share with a friend. So, here we go. We prepared the Elfy winning delicious Creamy Broccoli and Brown Rice Casserole.

http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2011/11/creamy-vegan-broccoli-and-rice-casserole.html

We made this a couple of times last year and it never fails to be excellent.  So, we got out ‘mis en place’ (well, sorta, more about that later) and got it all going. We started with cooking the rice…now, y’all remember last week we wrote about The Elf’s latest discovery…Mississippi Blue Rice! Well, we purchased some and determined that it would work great in our recipe. In the packaging, it already looks good!

Now, we deviated slightly from their cooking directions to a method that my paternal Grandmother taught my little Mama who taught me. It works every time, so if it ain’t broke, we don’t try to fix it. WE measured out the 1 1/2  cups of rice and 3 cups of water and brought it to a boil. We don’t cover it and let it boil.

When all the water has boiled down (you gotta be careful here and not burn it up), we turn the flame down till you practically can’t see it, cover it and let it cook another 5 minutes or so. Then turn the heat completely off. The result is lovely rice that is not over cooked or stuck together and squishy..ugh. 

Our sauce ingredients were blended and set aside 

and the onions, pepper, and celery sautéed. 

Then it was time to add the chickpeas, the broccoli that we had steamed lightly, and that wonderful MS Blue Rice. And, we added one more thing this time. We’d made some seitan to have for sandwiches and other stuffs, so we cubed some and added as well. Of course, that took the dish out of the gluten-free zone but we love seitan and this batch turned out really well.

Then we added that awesome MS Blue Rice

and the creamy sauce that we’d blended, swished all that around till everything was nicely coated.

We knew this would make a pretty big casserole, so we opted to split it and have two small casseroles. One to gobble down ourownselves and one to share. So, we readied our pans, divided the yummy stuff. NOW, here’s where the ‘mis en place’ fell apart. Susan Voisin’s wonderful recipe calls for slivered almonds (as optional but they add a nice crunch) and we just KNEW we had some. Even passed them by at the grocery. Well, of course, we did not. HOWSOMEVER, we DID have some cashews that we crushed up a bit and sprinkled on top. Whew!  Then we threw those babies in the oven. 

After about 20 minutes, we took a peek and saw a nice brownness; time to pull them out. 

We will enjoy ours tonight, but your Elf did take a test bite to make sure that it was not only OUR table worthy but also share-worthy.

Next week, we will feature a story about MS Blue Rice AND we may even have another MS Blue Rice recipe to share with you.

Now, we’ve run the table (pardon the pun) on our Elf Winners from 2015. So now it’s time to return to Susan’s fold and select some new recipes to fix. And, for next week. we will be preparing Savory Swiss Chard Pie. 
http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2009/06/savory-swiss-chard-pie.html

Boy, can’t wait for Big Solid to ask ‘what’s for dinner?’

The other thing we’ve been trying to do is catch the sale bins at Kroger to find fruits and veggies that we can slice/chop and freeze. This week, we found two big ole sacks of navel oranges and a sack of lime. We love to throw a lime or an orange in our mornin’ smoothie, so we snatched them up, peeled and froze them. 

Actually, had a pineapple, orange, grapefruit and blueberry smoothie this morning. Threw in some hemp hearts and nutritional yeast…delish!

So this last week of July will see your Elf bakin’ lots of cookies and doin’ some other Elfery cookery to explore and expand our vegan horizons. We know we’ve mentioned this before but one of our most favorite resource sites is One Green Planet. We get a daily update on all sorts of great food/vegan ideas.

http://www.onegreenplanet.org/

So, until next week…we are hope you laugh a lot, eat plant based, practice kindness with abandon and DO EPIC. 

Your Elf