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International Quinoa Salad

July 6, 2006
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Whenever my husband sees that I’m cooking quinoa, his eyes light up and he asks if I’m making “The Salad.” It’s our favorite quinoa dish, but for a while I made it only on special occasions because I couldn’t figure out how to make it without using olive oil. I was just afraid that it [...]

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Mexican Lasagna (or Enchilada Casserole)

July 1, 2006
Enchilada Casserole

When my daughter E. has a friend over for dinner for the first time, my first thought is often the same as what I imagine her friends’ parents think when E. comes to visit for the first time: “Oh no, what will I feed her!” Most kids come packing all sorts of food baggage: This [...]

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Okra and Lima Bean Masala

June 26, 2006

There’s a farm stand near my house that sells fresh produce throughout the summer. It’s the only place I know where I can get fresh, shelled lima beans, black-eyed peas, and several varieties of field peas. The last time I went I was happy to find vine-ripened tomatoes, peaches, sweet watermelons, and tender, young okra. [...]

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Thai-Style Basil Tofu and Asparagus

June 22, 2006
Thai Style Basil Tofu and Asparagus

We’re a family of basil lovers. I’ve found that I can get my daughter to eat just about anything if it tastes like “pesto” (witness the miracle eggplant and squash quinoa from a few days ago). So each year I plant as much basil as I can find room for. This year I have a [...]

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Farmers’ Market Quinoa

June 16, 2006
Farmers' Market Quinoa

I love this recipe because it’s full of vegetables. It started life as a pasta recipe in Robin Robertson’s book 366 Simply Delicious Dairy-Free Recipes. I’ve kept her technique of adding soy milk to the sauce, but in addition to substituting the very healthy quinoa for pasta, I’ve increased the amount of eggplant and herbs [...]

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Pasta and Vegetables with Peanut Sauce

June 14, 2006
Pasta and Vegetables with Peanut Sauce

When my family and I go on vacation, we either camp with our Coleman stove or stay in cabins or guest houses with kitchens so that we can prepare our meals and not have to worry about finding vegan food in remote places. But cooking can be tricky when we’re not in our own kitchen. [...]

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Zucchini Spirals with Fresh Vegetable Sauce

May 18, 2006

I love fresh tomato sauce with vine-ripened tomatoes that are cooked for only a short time. But, until the tomatoes in my garden ripen, I’ll make do with canned. My favorite canned tomatoes are Muir Glen Fire-Roasted, the sweetest canned tomatoes I’ve found. They’re more expensive than the store brand, but when you’re cooking something [...]

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Brussels Sprouts Go Asian

May 17, 2006
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Here’s a different way to use fresh Brussels sprouts. It’s tasty and can be served over rice or pasta as a main dish or alone as a side dish. It comes together in minutes, too! Some of you may notice that this week I am lightening up my menus a good bit (yes, even “fat-free” [...]

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Two Easy Dishes

May 14, 2006
Brown and Wild Rice with Asparagus

Mother’s Day 2006 Happy day to all you mothers! I’m having a good one myself. First, my wonderful family gave me a copy of The Candle Cafe Cookbook, which looks like it will be a great source of inspiration, the newest Pearl Jam CD, which is playing as I type, and a cute card that [...]

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Hot and Sour Shirataki Noodles with Tofu

May 11, 2006
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I gave in and tried a fad-food. While shopping in the local Asian grocery store yesterday, I noticed shirataki noodles in the refrigerated section. They may have been there all along, but I noticed them only because I’ve been seeing them mentioned on the internet as the next diet wonderfood. In case you’ve missed all [...]

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Vegan Onigiri

May 8, 2006

On Saturday, I made Onigiri to go with the Cabbage Nori Rolls I served to my family and our young guest. Though the rolls didn’t contain any rice, Onigiri are virtually all rice. They’re made by simply cupping sticky, hot sushi rice in your hand and pressing it into a triangle or other shape around [...]

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Cabbage Nori Rolls

May 7, 2006
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Here’s a recipe that proved to me that my daughter will eat anything wrapped in nori with baked tofu. Though the friend she invited to eat with us didn’t care for them (she’s not a fan of sushi either), E. couldn’t get enough of these. She must have eaten 12 of them by herself. If [...]

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Kale and Toor Dal

May 4, 2006
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As we sat down to a kid-free dinner last night, the conversation went something like this: “Hey, this is good. Really good.” (My husband, between bites.) “But it’s ugly.” (Me, tilting my head and looking at it from different angles.) “So? It tastes great.” “But it won’t look good. On the blog, I mean.” “So [...]

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Teriyaki Tofu and Vegetable Kabobs

May 1, 2006
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A beautiful Sunday afternoon inspires in many of us one thought: Get out the barbecue grill! Yes, even vegans like to cook outside on the grill from time to time, and I especially like it because my daughter will eat any vegetable (except pepper) if it’s cooked on a skewer. Yesterday’s decision to grill was [...]

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Hasty Tasty Pasta with Broccoli, Olives, and "Chicken"

April 30, 2006

Yesterday was a long day. My daughter E. had her birthday party (two weeks late because of her hectic soccer schedule) at a local amusement facility. There were arcade games and ice skating as well as the ritual cake and birthday presents. I found out something the hard way: it’s almost impossible to get kids [...]

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Chickpeas and Barley in Red Lentil and Eggplant Sauce

April 28, 2006
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Today’s recipe is based on a recipe in Madhur Jaffrey’s World Vegetarian, Anatolian Red Lentil Stew with Wheat Berries and Chickpeas, which I wound up adapting more than I meant to. The first adaptation was out of necessity: I didn’t have wheat berries so I used barley instead, and I served it over rice (jasmine [...]

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Red Lentil and Rice Patties with Coconut-Mint Sauce

April 26, 2006
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Have you ever played Telephone? You know, the children’s game where one person whispers a story to another, who whispers it to another, and so on, until the last person retells the story and it has lost all semblance to the original? I’ve been thinking that food blogging is a lot like that: Someone posts [...]

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Yellow Mung Beans with Summer Squash

April 20, 2006

I need to have a list of recipes that didn’t come out as well as I hoped they would. This one would be at the top, but I think that’s my fault, not the writer of the original recipe, Neelam Batra’s. This may just be one of those recipes that doesn’t work well without fat. [...]

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Spinach and Artichoke Pie

April 18, 2006
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I rarely rave about a recipe, or at least I don’t think I do. But I have to rave about this one because it was quite simply the best thing I’ve eaten in a long time. (And that is including decadent deserts, too!) This was something that was both long in the planning and thrown [...]

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Tofu and Broccoli with Pineapple Sauce

April 11, 2006

I was really excited about the meal I was preparing last night, until I got a call from my husband, in New York on a business trip. He was just sitting down to a meal at Sacred Chow, an all-vegan restaurant in Greenwich Village. He’d ordered three tapas–Orange Blackstrap BBQ Seitan, Mama’s Soy Meatballs, and [...]

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Fettuccine No-Fredo with Broccoli and Sautéed Mushrooms

April 9, 2006
Fettuccini No-Fredo

Subtitle: Adventures in Cauliflower Sauce! I was describing the Chickpeas, Potatoes and Green Beans in Cauliflower Sauce to some friends when it hit me that Cauliflower Sauce could be the best thing to happen to fatfree cooking since the invention of non-stick pans. A sauce made from cauliflower could be flavored in any number of [...]

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Santa Fe Spaghetti Squash Casserole

April 4, 2006
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A spaghetti squash has been sitting on my counter for about a week now while I’ve tried to decide what to do with it. It seems that most recipes for spaghetti squash treat it as spaghetti, with a marinara or other tomato-based sauce and lots of garlic, basil, and oregano. I was looking to do [...]

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Chickpeas, Potatoes, and Green Beans in Cauliflower Sauce

March 31, 2006
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One of my most recent cookbook acquisitions was Neelam Batra’s The Indian Vegetarian. It contains a wealth of information about Indian cooking, and I’ve been meaning to cook a recipe from it ever since I got it, but something always stands in my way. Either I don’t have all the ingredients or the recipe would [...]

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Zucchini Stuffed with Pinenuts and Herbed Basmati Rice

March 28, 2006
Zucchini Stuffed with Pinenuts and Herbed Basmati Rice

I know it’s finally Spring when my backyard shade garden becomes filled with mint plants. I decided to take advantage of my mint abundance and make a recipe I’ve been dreaming up ever since a photo in Paul Gayler’s A Passion for Vegetables caught my eye: 4 young zucchini hollowed into tubes and filled with…something. [...]

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Somen with Tofu and Asparagus in a Chinese Dressing

March 27, 2006

Once again, I’d fooled around too long reading about food and it’d gotten too late to cook any food! Or maybe I wasn’t reading but enjoying some time with my husband or working in the yard. Whatever the reason, dinnertime on Saturday came, and I was totally unprepared for it. But at least there was [...]

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My Favorite Lasagna

March 24, 2006
Easy Vegan Spinach and Mushroom Lasagna

Last night I had the pleasure of having dinner with a group of people taking a Civil Rights Tour through the South. The menu for the night was barbecued pork sandwiches and pork-and-beans, the idea being to give them a little taste of local cuisine (which revolves around pork, apparently). The only problem: Several of [...]

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Yin & Yang Tofu with Bean Sprouts Salad

March 23, 2006

Dinner for One I enjoy cooking for others, and I rarely go to much trouble on the rare occasions when I’m on my own for dinner. Last night, however, I went to a small bit of trouble and treated myself to a dish I’d been creating in my head for a couple of weeks: Yin [...]

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Beefless Stew

March 21, 2006
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Yesterday was supposedly the first day of Spring, but you wouldn’t know it from our weather. It’s been raining for days and the temperature has been pretty chilly for Mississippi. So last night I resorted to a favorite family comfort-food: Beefless Stew. I try not to use many processed “meats” in my cooking, but every [...]

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Korean Tofu and Vegetable Stew

March 19, 2006

I’ve been eager to use the new bowls I got from the Korean grocery store, so I looked around the internet until I found a stew that looked perfect at Vegetarian Times. I have to admit that I hardly changed anything about this recipe, just made a few substitutions for ingredients I didn’t have. The [...]

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Tofu Jambalaya

March 11, 2006
Tofu Jambalaya

I’m going to be away from the computer for a few days, but before I go, I’d like to share with you a couple of recipes from my native state, Louisiana. First up is a somewhat non-traditional jambalaya, based on a recipe for Chicken Jambalaya that I used to love in my omnivore days. It [...]

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Tamale Bites

March 10, 2006
Tamale Bites

A recent post at Vegan Lunch Box actually had me out looking to buy a Twinkie pan! Jennifer, inspired by a tip from a reader, made vegan corn dogs for her son using a Twinkie pan. This, I thought, was brilliant. After all, if you can put a veggie dog inside of corn bread, you [...]

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Tostadas

March 9, 2006

This qualifies as a “Fatfree Tip” rather than a real recipe. Many of you already know this, but for those of you who don’t, you can make a great, almost fat-free tostada by taking an uncooked corn tortilla and crisping it in the oven for a few minutes. I baked mine at 400 F for [...]

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African Pineapple Peanut Stew

March 7, 2006
African Pineapple Peanut Stew

Several years ago, my husband and I were thumbing through Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home when my husband stopped at this recipe and said, “Let’s try this one.” I looked at it. . . and then I looked at him like he was insane. Pineapple, onions, and kale? And peanut butter? What kind of crazy [...]

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Spiced Moong Dal

March 5, 2006

Thanks again to Sailu’s Foods, I have found the ultimate in fast foods. Split yellow moong dal (pesara pappu) are tiny lentils that have been split and de-hulled; they cook up super-fast with no need for soaking or pressure cooking. Last week I went looking for these in a local Indian grocery store, and I [...]

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Hurry-up Hoisin Tofu and Vegetables with Rice Noodles

March 1, 2006

I debated whether to post this recipe at all because it wasn’t a big success. D. and I liked it, though I thought it could have been better; E. hated it, which is a shame because she loves noodles and tofu. It was a bad night for cooking at all because I had to leave [...]

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Real Louisiana Red Beans and Rice

February 25, 2006
Real Louisiana Red Beans and Rice

It’s Mardi Gras time again! I’ve been craving red beans and rice ever since last weekend, when my husband and daughter left me alone for some much needed quiet time while they went back to New Orleans for the first parades. They came home with loads of beads, doubloons, stuffed animals, and MORE beads, and [...]

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Vegan Bibimbab

February 22, 2006
Bibimbap

When I moved here from South Carolina a little over 5 years ago, I had no idea that what I would miss most would be the Korean restaurants and grocery stores available to me there. If I had known that there were no Korean restaurants anywhere near here–and only one grocery store in a town [...]

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Vindaloo Vegetables

February 16, 2006
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I’m a big fan of one-pot meals. If I can put a lot of veggies and some beans into a stew and serve it over a whole grain, it’s less work for me to prepare the meal and less clean-up for my husband, so we’re both happy. Last night I fell back on one of [...]

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Non-Traditional Sushi (Brown Rice and No-Rice Sushi)

February 9, 2006

First let me say that what follows is not traditional sushi. Perhaps I shouldn’t even call it that. For those purists out there who think that you have to use white sushi rice in order to make sushi, I officially rename this meal Interesting Stuff Wrapped in Seaweed. But for brevity’s sake, I will refer [...]

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Chili with Baked Lime-Chipotle Tortilla Chips

February 8, 2006
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Like most cooks, I’m endlessly adapting recipes. Last night, I took a favorite recipe that I had already adapted to be fat-free and adapted it even more, this time to use a whole grain instead of the bulgur wheat originally called for. The results were satisfying, though more time-consuming. The original recipe, from Moosewood Restaurant [...]

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Rotini All’Arrabbiata

February 4, 2006
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First disclaimer: There’s oil in this recipe. Olive oil. Not a lot of it, but it’s there. So, if a little oil on a blog with the word “fatfree” in the title is going to send you into fits of apoplexy, please stop reading now. I don’t want to be responsible for any heart attacks [...]

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A Simple Stir-fry

February 2, 2006

Stir-fries are one of the dishes that my family and I usually have regularly, about once a week. But for the past 3 weeks, we haven’t had it once. Why? This blog. You see, though I know how to make a stir-fry and think I make a pretty darn good one, I don’t use a [...]

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Cauliflower Mushroom Marranca

January 31, 2006
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Last night I adapted the Cauliflower Marranca recipe from Mollie Katzen’s The New Moosewood Cookbook, and though it had some problems, I think it’s a keeper. The problem was that the top dried out. I had foreseen that dryness might be a problem and tried to correct for it by adding a sauce and shortening [...]

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Rigatoni with Zucchini and Eggplant

January 29, 2006
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If you’re a vegan and you’re invited to a dinner, banquet, or other large party involving food, you usually have two choices: either eat before you go and find a lettuce leaf to nibble on or offer to bring some of the food. Last night I attended a dinner at our local Unitarian Universalist church, [...]

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Mexican Sushi

January 26, 2006
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Even kids aren’t immune to the power of the internet. Ever since my daughter saw the Vegan Lunch Box blog, she’s wanted me to post a photo of her lunch. Today she took this photo of her favorite lunch-box meal, which we call Mexican Sushi (because she wishes she had a mother who would get [...]

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Vegetable Couscous

January 24, 2006
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Last night’s dinner was a cooperative effort: D. chopped the veggies, E. opened cans and boxes, and I threw everything together on the stove. As a result, this old favorite of ours came together in record time, about 20 minutes from start to finish. While it was cooking, I threw together a salad to complete [...]

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Ethiopian Night

January 23, 2006

I’ve loved Ethiopian food since I first had it on a visit to Washington, DC, years ago. Ever since then, I’ve looked for Ethiopian restaurants every place I’ve traveled because I never seem to be fortunate enough to live in a place that has one. The closest one to me now is about 3 1/2 [...]

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Monterey Frittata

January 22, 2006
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Last night I decided to give myself time off for good behavior. After being on my feet all day, I did what people down through the centuries have done when they’re too tired to cook: ordered Middle Eastern food. Or at least that’s what our ancestors would have done if they’d known the joys of [...]

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Over-Stuffed Baked Potatoes

January 18, 2006
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Last night was a quick meal night, so I baked potatoes, sautéed some mushrooms with garlic and a drop of red wine, steamed broccoli, heated chickpeas, and made a “cheezy” sauce. Simple and relatively fast. The only hitch was, instead of going with one of the vegan cheeze sauces we’ve tried before, I decided to [...]

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Thai-Style Vegetable Curry

January 15, 2006
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We had a wonderful meal last night, and I found the recipe purely by accident. We hadn’t gone to the store in days, so our selection of produce was running low. Basically, all we had in the fridge was broccoli. I also had a partial can of coconut milk I wanted to use up (from [...]

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