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!

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.

May the Elf Be with You

With a nod to the new Star Wars movie in our title this week, we have three dishes to talk about as we steamroll ahead into the holidays. Two are from the Kathy Hester Slow Cooking for Two cookbook—‘ceptin’ for one of the recipes, we doubled and used our big ole Crockpot.

The other is from a site called Oh My Veggies. And here we were thinkin’ that we’d not been that busy in the Kinky Elfery Kitchen this week!

We have had above average temperatures damn near all of December so getting into the soup mentality has been a struggle. That bein’ said, we always like soup so we pretended it was cold and made some anyway. Some for ourowns-elfs and some to share. We DID have promise of cooler/cold weather in the near future, so that just supported our kitchen and soup activity. By the way, that promise of cooler/cold weather came true in the form of THIS on Friday mornin’.

This is our mannequin, Mail Oder Annie, in the wee hours of Friday morning watching it snow! Can’t you see how excited she is?! If you check the Facebook page of anyone you know from Mississippi, Texas, Alabama and Louisiana, you will see nothing short of a billion pictures and videos. A December snow in the Deep South hardly ever occurs, so we were snappin’ pictures all day. Now, let’s get on with the cookin’. Our first recipe, which we have prepared before, is the delicious and super EASY Spicy Chickpeas and Grits from Kathy Hester.

http://healthyslowcooking.com/spicy-southern-chickpeas-and-grits/

It’s her vegan response to Shrimp and Grits, a very popular, though initially thought of as odd, pairing. When we first read this recipe, we didn’t ‘cotton’ on to it but when we looked a bit closer, we thought, “Why not?” Well, it’s fabulous. All you do is gather the ingredients and throw them in your slow cooker/Crockpot, turn it on low and BINGO! about 7 to 8 hours later, you have half of your main dish.

While her recipe includes a slow cooker recipe for the grits, we opted for cooking our grits the old fashioned way…in a pot. And, we used a very special type of grits…Brown Rice Grits. You know, a lot of folks don’t care for grits (bless your hearts) but these are quite lovely. They are grown and milled at Two Brooks Farm in the delta of Mississippi.

http://twobrooksfarm.com/

These rice grits are non-GMO, pesticide and fungicide free as well as gluten free. The grits most folks are familiar with (or hate) are made from corn or from hominy (corn treated with an alkali). Rice grits from Two Brook Farms comes in both white and brown. We opted for the brown because it’s has the whole grain. Who would have ever thought of Brown Rice Grits!!

The final product is so good! You just plop your grits onto your plate, smother it with the spicy chickpeas and dive in. We also had some slaw and a ‘fish’ filet from Gardein to round our meal out.

I mean, this is so very easy and so very good..it’s worth keeping cans of chickpeas and fire-roasted diced tomatoes and a jar of Cajun spice around. That’s pretty much it. If you are grits aversive (even after you’ve TRIED the rice grits), try it over brown rice.

Cooler weather always has Your Elf thinkin’ about Chili and Potato/Leek soup. Great for a light dinner or for a warm soothing lunch! So, we opted to cook both to have on hand. First off, we found a really good recipe for Potato/Leek soup at a site we’d not found before called Oh My Veggies. We liked the look/sound of this recipe because it had the word “CHEESY” in it AND it was vegan! So, we had to give it a try.

https://ohmyveggies.com/cheesy-vegan-potato-leek-soup/

And, it was so worth it with some ‘adjustments’. In fact, since we doubled the recipe, we were able to share with some friends AND have time for a bowl or two for ours-elfs.

We have to admit that Big Solid is not much of a Potato/Leek soup kinda man—all the more for Your Elf! As for our Chili recipe, we finally settled on the Kathy Hester slow cooker recipe titled Wacky Cincinnati Chili.

http://healthyslowcooking.com/wacky-vegan-cincinnati-chili-from-vegan-slow-cooking-for-two/

We had already decided that this recipe would be doubled and possibly tinkered with a bit, so we pulled out the full size Crockpot and commenced to cookin’. One reason we selected this recipe was that it called for Black (Beluga) Lentils which we just happened to have. Black lentils are very small, we’ll share a picture in a minute…but they are very hardy and can stand up to lengthy cooking. So, here you go.

In the top left corner, you’ll see regular ole brown lentils. These are the ones we are most accustomed to cooking, for sure. In the top right corner, you find French or Puy lentils. These are really great too for being able to tolerate a lengthy cooking time without getting mushy. And, of course, the Black lentils are in the middle. You can get an idea of how small they are. No  matter what color or type, lentils are a staple of vegan cookery. Here’s how we ‘tinkered’ with Kathy’s recipe. We did not go the full route of using spaghetti, so it really does disqualify it from being Cincinnati chili. Please feel free to follow the recipe to the letter! We also removed some of the cooked chili that was not very spicy to send to a friend who is not a fan of spicy stuff. Then we added a half teaspoon of the EXTRA HOT Red Pepper we got at Patel’s grocery…and when it says EXTRA HOT, it means just that! We started to go for a whole teaspoon; had we done that, we are pretty sure you could have heard some rather strong words or loud screams emanating from our house. Nonetheless, that half-teaspoon was just what it needed to give Big Solid and Your Elf that kinda kick we like! We defrosted some frozen vegan corn-sticks we’d made a while back and had us a fine little meal. We also had some Firewalker Hot Sauce on hand, just in case the heat wasn't enough. Y'all this is the BEST hot sauce EVER; lots of heat and lots of flavor!

Friday, we had the pleasure of having lunch with Sandi Herring, RDN, LD. Sandi is the Dietitian with the Ornish Program for Reversal of Heart Disease at St. Dominic Hospital in Jackson MS. We had SO much fun talking how plant-based eating can reverse heart disease and her activities with the Ornish Program that TWO HOURS went by like 5 minutes. We have plans to meet again and see how we can join to promote healthy eating. THANKS SANDI!!

Okey-dokey, friends, we are done for this week’s little bloggery. We always seem to wind up with more to write about than we initially think!

So, again and for always, 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.

My Kingdom for an Elf!

As the holiday rush, spirit, and energy begins to really launch into over-drive, it’s time for Your Elf to join in with some foodie stuffs. We are pretty low-key here in the Kinky Elfery Kitchen, so we don’t get into a lot of holiday bakin’. We used to but want to watch the food intake during these food-centered days. We’ll move on to our cookery for the week in just a second BUT FIRST, we wanted to tell you what fun we had last Tuesday speaking to some fellow Plant-based folks who are part of the Dean Ornish program. The group is called The Cohorts and provide such a great support system for Ornish’ers. For those of you unfamiliar, Dean Ornish has been at the forefront of healthy eating (whole food, plant-based, no oil) for decades. His eating regimen has helped literally thousands of people reclaim their health from cardiac disease.

http://deanornish.com/

To be totally frank, when one is told that in order to LIVE, dramatic changes need to be made in their eating habits, it’s not an easy row to hoe. For most folks, it’s a dramatic change in what people eat…going from, most likely, high fat, fast food, high calorie to a plant-based, extremely low fat diet. With so many eating/diet options/fads floating around out there, one can become so over-whelmed as to be completely stopped in their food tracks. With a proven record of reversing heart disease, the Ornish Program remains at the top of the list. So Your Elf was tickled pink to be able to speak to this group and offer some ideas, recipes and resources to help along the way. We’d like to thank Sam Vinson for inviting us and we hope to make a return visit soon. We talked so much the next group using our meeting room had to run us out! And, of course, we forgot to take a picture!

 Ok, so let’s get to cookin’ and eatin’… Last week Your Elf’s ‘Movie-Mate’, Terry Woosley, mentioned this awesome Lemon Lentil and Spinach Soup she’d made. So, since we LOVE soup and especially Lentil, we decided to give it a go!!  Well, we did and OH BOY!! We were Elfishly Delighted!! One of the things Terry said about the soup was that she thought she’d cooked it a bit too long, as the lentils got softer than she preferred. With this information in hand, we opted to use French (or Green) lentils, as they are a bit more hardy and stand up to longer cooking times. We searched the recipes and found one that sounded particularly delicious. It’s by Tori Avey and here’s the link.

https://toriavey.com/toris-kitchen/lentil-spinach-soup-with-lemon/

Since Your Elf has a tendency to jump the preparation gun and rush into a recipe BEFORE reading through it a couple of times, we REALLY did go through it carefully. First to assure that we DID have all the ingredients on hand, to look at the comments from folks who have prepared it for any tips they may have, and to make sure we understood the cooking order of things. We also determined to tinker with the recipe just a bit by adding some sautéed oyster and shiitake mushrooms as well as a little liquid smoke. But HEY!! We are getting ahead of ours-elfs! After chopping and dicing and all that prep stuffs, we finally got underway by sautéing the onions and carrots in EVOO until they were getting soft, then adding the garlic.

Next up we added some tomato paste, cumin, cayenne (which we doubled), salt and freshly ground black pepper. This was sautéed until the aroma indicated the flavors were really beginning to mesh.

Then the recipe calls for the addition of vegetable stock but, as you know Your Elf, we used The Gentle Chef’s Golden Chikun Bouillon.

(Quick digression:  the chikun bouillon recipe is from Chef Skye Michael’s wonderful meat analog cookbook, Seitan and Beyond. It’s a mix of dry ingredients that are blasted into a powder with a high speed blender and transformed into a wonderful stock/broth.) Also added were the lentils.

This cooked for about 30 minutes on a simmer as the lentils and veggies softened. The soup was taken off the heat, the bay leaves removed.

Using a hand-held blender, the soup is then pureed ‘halfway’, meaning the blending stops when the soup has substance but not totally ‘mushed’ and maintains some texture. Then we added the greens…we used a package of power greens which included spinach, baby kale, baby chard and arugula.

Those cooked down pretty quickly at which time we added the mushrooms in a departure from the recipe! In the Kinky Elfery Kitchen, you can never have too many ‘shrooms.

To this we added the juice of two Meyer Lemons…we love the lemony tang and a bit of liquid smoke. The finished product was quite a lovely, thick, tasty, and healthy soup.

You know, as more and more folks become interested, intrigued and/or otherwise curious about plant-based eating, Your Elf fields more questions about ‘how to become plant-based’ or ‘what do/can you eat’. We are only TOO happy to be a resource for folks as they explore changing the way they eat. For instance, we do NOT cook a wonderful recipe every night. We are just like any other person when it comes to preparing meals, only we DO love to cook. But sometimes, the day slips up on us and when it comes time for dinner/supper, we are standing in the KEK (Kinky Elfery Kitchen), staring into the refrigerator saying, “What are we gonna eat tonight?” There are staples that we keep ALL THE TIME for just such an occasion and Wednesday night was ripe for a ‘throw-together’. We cooked some whole wheat pasta…one of the many pastas in the Elfin Pantry; steamed some broccoli florets, another vegetable we keep always at the ready, cooked some Delight Soy Chicken Nuggets and some Gardein Meatless meatballs, and invaded our stash of sautéed mushrooms. In less than 20 minutes, we had a terrific meal.

Instead of a heavy sauce, we grabbed a couple of lemons and the EVOO and drizzled the dish with that combination. Big Solid added some shredded Daiya cheese and the dish was consumed with gusto. And finally last night, we explored how to replicate our favorite salad from a local favorite restaurant, Anjou. Called the Bistro Salad, the restaurant version has bacon and blue cheese (which they know to NOT put on ours), Hearts of Palm, various greens/lettuces, and avocado slices. We also added the Delight Soy chicken nuggets which we LOVE! Thankfully, Anjou allows us to bring them with us when we dine there.

So, this was really easy to replicate using butter lettuces and topping with Susan Voisin’s wonderful Fat Free Balsamic-Raisin Vinaigrette. To get to the Vinaigrette, scroll down as it’s found at the end of the Salad recipe. It is delicious as are the variations you can try.

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

So, if you are of a mind to explore eating plant-based, BRAVO!! It’s not as hard as you may think and there are so many easy ways to give it a go that offset many of the challenges. And like we said, we are here to help as well. We aren’t credentialed or licensed, but we do know a thing or two we can pass on to help you along the way. And it appears we’ve come to the end of yet another week and as the holiday crush continues to build, keep in mind the following and take every opportunity to practice it. 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