Every Elf has Her Day

It’s a bit awkward to sit at a desk in front of a big ole Mac to write our blog with a Chihuahua named Ed in our lap but we’ll tough it out. It’s cold outside, he’s cold and bundled up in his purple leopard fleece and we wouldn’t move him for the world. His Daddy has been calling him "Sissy" for wearin' a sweater.

This week in the KEK (Kinky Elfery Kitchen), we had a little bit of everything…the Good (our Vegan Bowl, the Taco Salad and the Andouille Sausages), the Bad (still no resolution of finishing the kitchen redo), and the Ugly (the explosion of our ‘Chikun’ Shreds during the last 15 minutes in the oven). On that last item, we thought the whole house had blown up; consequently, we were so ‘shook up’, we failed to get a photograph of the event…and  it was indeed an event. Big Solid came in from wherever he’d been and said, “HOLY SH*T! What the hell?” There was ‘chikun’ everywhere. We managed to salvage SOME of it, thankfully and then took an hour to clean ‘chikun shreds’ from all parts of the oven. So, we are now on a quest to see how we can rectify what we are doing to prevent yet another event such as this.

But, we digress…on to the Good! In an elf-fort to cut down on the number of times we eat out weekly, we are trying to make Saturday night an eat-in night and make something different. We LOVE the Vegan Bowls cookbook by Zsu Dever;

so we decided to spend a few Saturdays exploring the various ‘bowls’. We had made our first choice once before, the Cajun Tofu and Artichoke Bowl was such a hit and so very delicious, we wanted to start off with a bang (unlike the bang in the kitchen yesterday). We actually blogged about this dish when we first prepared it.

http://the-elf-in-the-kitchen.blogspot.com/2017/07/elfin-is-as-elfin-does.html

This recipe was our first and ONLY encounter with Celeriac (Celery Root). Since we are now Celery Root Aversive and do not wish to ‘wrassle’ another one anytime soon, we opted to use a much less difficult vegetable as our puree base. Cauliflower! First of all, we pressed our tofu using the BEST TOFU PRESS EVER!

Yep, it’s a big ole brick thing and it works great. We halved our tofu lengthwise, wrapped it in some paper towels, layered old newspaper on the top and bottom and applied our press! Doesn’t take long for that tofu to be just right. It’s then sliced into 8 ‘bars’ and put into a spicy Cajuny marinade. As we did before, we doubled the marinade recipe AND added time for the tofu to absorb more of the flavor.

In the meantime, we fixed our puree using cauliflower that we cooked to al denté.

Here’s the end result of the puree-ity.

Next up, we patted some artichoke hearts dry

and sautéed them until nicely browned.

Finally, we ‘built’ the bowl by the bottom layer of puree (looks like we shorted ours-elfs a bit), then the artichoke hearts and topped with the sautéed tofu. It’s supposed to be ‘grilled’ but we don’t have a stove top grill. Sautéing will have to do…and it does, actually, quite nicely.

This is an awesome bowl!!

Our next Good was a Taco Salad we had on Sunday night. It’s easy as pie and quite yummy. We used a Power Greens combo for our salad part and topped it with Simple Truth Crumbles flavored with some seriously hot Taco Seasoning.

Actually, we supplemented the “hot and spicy” seasoning with some ultra seriously HOT Red Pepper/Cayenne AND added the tiny remains of the Black Lentil Chili from the week before.

We topped all that with some Blue Corn chips, shredded Daiya cheese and a bit of Fat-Free Balsamic-Raisin Vinaigrette from Susan Voisin’s Fat Free Vegan Kitchen.

http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/

We love this dressing, only we’d be less than honest to say that we followed her recipe ‘ZACKLY. We did add a tablespoon of EVOO. Don’t think it added THAT much fat but did add a bit to the consistency. However, if you don’t need, want, or can have fat, stick with her original recipe. We linked it last week, but here it is again in case you are a first time ELF-ER.

http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2012/03/spicy-apple-walnut-salad-with-fat-free-balsamic-raisin-dressing.html

The final Good this week was finally getting into the routine of making plant-based sausages, namely Andouille, compliments of The Gentle Chef’s book Seitan and Beyond.

We LOVE these sausages and use them to make Red Beans and Rice as well as other goodies..in fact, we will be using it to make a dish to take to our Pajama Christmas this year. Here’s a picture of the dough prior to rolling and being steamed.

Forty-five minutes later, they are ready to cool off, sit overnight in the ‘frig and then be CONSUMED with glee!

Now this isn’t exactly the Bad we mentioned BUT you can get some idea of the things left undone by the folks we hired to re-do the kitchen (paint, paint, sand and replace cabinet doors). Notice the unpainted blocks of wood that were inserted to compensate for new hinges that did not fit. This is a picture of the cabinet to the right of the stove after we restocked from having to take everything out.

We have decided to replace as much plastic storage as we can with glass. You can get a better feel for that with this panoramic shot of the pantry.

We are still in the hunt for a contractor to come finish the multiple things left undone.

We’ve already commented that we did NOT get a photo of the Ugly ‘Chikun Shreds’ 'event', which is probably a good thing….you may never read The Elf again.

The coming week will be a busy one for your Elf but we will, hopefully, have some good dishes and pictures to share. So, as we wind this week up and anticipate the next, which will no doubt be filled with frenetic activity, high emotions, and additional stresses, so please take deep breaths and realize you can only do what you can do…no more, no less. Go easy on yours-elf.

AND by all means, LOOK for the GOOD, be an EXAMPLE of the GOOD, and ACT for the GOOD as HARD as you can, in as MANY WAYS as you can, EVERY DAY that you can. 

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to YOU ALL!

Your Elf.