The Elf Before Christmas 2017

Bein’ as it’s Christmas Eve and all, this will be a relatively brief blog. First and foremost, your Elf would like to wish everyone a beautiful Christmas, Hanukah, and holiday season. It’s a most special time of the year and sometimes we forget to kick back and celebrate the season of giving and love. Let go now of all the stresses, tensions, and rampant emotions this time of year elicits. We have a few things to share foodie and Kinky Elfery Kitcheny wise. Let’s start with one of our favorite Vegan Bowls from Zsu Dever’s book of the same title. We featured a picture of it last week, so no need to repeat. We have made this before and it’s out of this world. Sambal-Glazed Tempeh Bowl.

http://www.zsusveganpantry.com/p/vegan-bowls-table-of-contents.html

Wikipedia says, “Sambal is a hot sauce or paste typically made from a mixture of a variety of chili peppers with secondary ingredients such as shrimp paste, fish sauce, garlic, ginger, shallot, scallion, palm sugar, lime juice, and rice vinegar or other vinegars.” It is of Indonesian origin. Note in the description there is mention of shrimp paste and/or fish sauce. So you have to be sure to read the label to make sure the version you find is plant-based. Such is Sambal Oelek. We LOVE the stuff and use it a LOT…it’s pretty spicy, so just a head’s up.

And, this recipe is really quite easy and comes together deliciously. First, you combine a mixture of the sambal oelek, rice wine vinegar, tamari, fresh lime juice (is there any other kind),a bit of organic sugar, and grated ginger. (As we almost always do, we doubled the recipe.) This goes into a small sauce pan along with your cubed tempeh, brought to a boil and simmered until the liquid has reduced by half.

At this point, you’re supposed to grill it but since we don’t have a stove top grill, we sautéed at a high enough heat to get good sear marks.

As this is cooking down, your brown basmati rice is cooking away.

Your prepared vegetables

are ready to be cooked with a small amount of toasted sesame oil until crisp to the bite and finished with a bit of vegetable stock (and you know we ALWAYS use The Gentle Chef Chikun Bouillon powder dissolved in boiling water).

Then you build your bowl; the first layer being your brown rice, topped with you vegetables.

Next add your tempeh and top with a sprinkling of pepitas (pumpkin seeds) that have been lightly toasted and tossed with Chinese 5-Spice powder.

Then, dig in and enjoy the flavor assault on your senses.

This has got to be one of our favorite bowls!!

The next recipe we are sharing will be a participant in our Christmas morning with the kids and grandkids…a tradition for many many years. This year, we will be taking Sausage Biscuits and Cinnamon Rolls. Here you have the Maple Sage Breakfast Sausage, once again from The Gentle Chef. First, the sausage ‘dough’ is made with Vital Wheat Gluten and a bunch of spices.

Then the liquid ingredients are whipped into shape via the VitaMix. The picture is obviously with spices prior to blending.

The liquid is added to the dry ingredients, mixed well, and allowed to sit for about 5-10 minutes to allow the gluten to ‘get a grip’.

The dough you see in the picture above is supposed to be made into links that are then steamed but we typically roll it and bake it for a sausage log to be sliced. Eat your heart out Jimmy Dean!

You’ll see the end result next week!!

Our week would not be complete without at least one meal of a baked potato and whatever stuffs we can find to ‘dress’ it with. In this case, it’s the usual suspects of steamed broccoli and grated Daiya cheese. Then we found some sautéed mushrooms and the NEVER MISSED Delight Soy Chick’n Nuggets. Top it off with some Pinot Grigio and you have one wonderful meal!

And FINALLY, we have said for a while now we wanted to prepare the recipe we saw on Facebook called Creamy Spinach Palak Tofu. We here at the Kinky Elfery Kitchen LOVE Indian food and one of our favorite dishes has been Palak Paneer. Palak means spinach and Paneer is an Indian Cheese. So, this was an ideal recipe to try.

http://www.onegreenplanet.org/http://www.onegreenplanet.org/vegan-recipe/tofu-palak/

We baked cubed tofu with a coating of an emulsified soy and coconut oil base. This was drained and the cubed tofu dusted with arrowroot powder and baked until crispy. The recipe calls for the tofu to be fried but we took the baking route and it was quite nice. Yes, we forgot to take picture of that…stupid Elf. As the tofu was baking we prepared the brown rice

and vegetables by sautéing our vegetables in coriander, a smaller amount of coconut oil than the recipe called for. This included onions first then coriander, turmeric, garlic and chopped tomatoes

with the spinach leaves later.

When the spinach was nice and wilted, we added a fairly thick cashew cream to the pan, whipped out our hand-held blender and blended it into a fairly smooth mixture. The recipe called for soy cream but we opted for cashew as we had cashews on hand and had no CLUE how to make soy cream. No matter, this was delicious. To the blended ‘palak’, we added the baked tofu, stirred in well and consumed over brown rice.

Finally, just an update on the continuing kitchen re-do saga. We have engaged a contractor who has given us hope of fixing issues left undone (meaning walked away from without finishing) by the previous contractor as well as coming up with some delightful ideas to improve the whole kitchen! First was the installation of drawer gliders that allow the full drawer to be opened. You can see how much room we now how in our two spice/herb drawers.

What a totally awesome idea! And it took him less than a couple of hours to get almost all of that done! We still have some work to be done so we can once again move all of our kitchenery stuffs back in their respective places. At least they are keeping Annie company!

So there you have the week before Christmas here at the Elfery place. The rest of today and tomorrow will be filled with more COOKERY and family and friends. It’s just a magical time. So to all of you, be safe, be happy, be kind, breathe deep and DO EPIC!! See you next Sunday as we roll into 2018. With fondness and wishes for a healthy life, Your Elf!