a twist on the green bean casserole

A few years ago my vegetarian friend Russ was living with Jen Wa and I at one of crack house apartments and wanted to make us dinner. This was the first time I had the Famous French's Green Bean Casserole. He and I went to the store and I handed him a Pyrex dish and about half an hour later we had some delicious dinner.

Over the years though, I've made this recipe with a few tweaks, mostly to satisfy The Boyfriend who doesn't really like green beans, mushrooms or anything without a steak in it. Last night I made it again and for the first time ever, there weren't any leftovers! Triumph! Here's what I did.

WHAT TO USE:

1 can or 9 oz of green beans (I like the French of Fancy cut beans the best)
1 can of cream of mushroom soup
1 can of cream of potato soup
1 can of French's French Fried Onions (really these make the dish)
1 cup of crutons (I used garlic cheese flavor)
Milk
casserole dish

WHAT TO DO:

1-Open and drain green beans. Set aside.

2-Add can of cream of mushroom soup to casserole dish.

3-Add can of cream of potato soup to casserole dish

4-fill one of the empty cans with milk and stir into dish

5- stir in green beans

6- stir in crutons.

7- salt and pepper to taste. bake on 350 in oven for 20-30 minutes or until hot and thick.

8-remove dish from oven, add French's fried onions to the top of the dish like a crust

9-replace in oven and bake for 5 minutes or until top of casserole is golden brown.

10- remove from oven and let stand for about 5 minutes

The crutons and potato soup mask the mushroom soup and give the casserole more depth and texture, making it seem more like a meal than a sidedish. The Boyfriend had seconds and thirds, and he's a big meat eater, so I must have been doing something right.

Best of all, this is a fairly cheap dish to throw together and in our house, baking something in the oven is almost better than turning on the heater! Enjoy!

bento! (or holiday gift ideas for your veg friends)

So recently I've become kind of obsessed with the concept of Bento Boxes. I have a lot of time on my hands and like to cook. And I love anything cute. I joined a community for Bento and I realized a lot of people who are into Bento are also vegetarians. The community on LJ has all the entries tagged so you can click straight through to veg or vegan boxes and there are some really creative ideas in there for packing a more appealing lunch.

With the holidays coming up I thought I would start a series on gift ideas for you to ask for or to give your vegetairan friends! So today's idea is all about the bento.

Some examples of the boxes:



This is a pretty traditional Japanese Bento.
It comes with:
*2 tier lunch box
*Lunch box bag
*Chopsticks
*Erastic belt

Or if you want to go a little more cutesy, there is this Black Sheep box.

And as far as I'm concerned you can't talk bento without bringing Miss Hello Kitty into the mix.

There are alot of extras you can also throw in when introducing someone to the art of bento. Like rice molds, so that they can create rice balls or even use them to make sushi. Some people like egg molds for hard boiled eggs and another almost essential product is a sauce container.

The best part about the bento is its resuable and you save some plastic waste, especially if you make sure to get the sauce/condiment container.

There are also loads of cook books on how to make bento boxes that would make a handy companion for a first time bento maker. The Manga Cookbook comes with a bento box already while Vegan Lunch Box takes a more American and totally vegan take on making and packing lunch.

I'll leave you with some photos of delicious looking veggie bentos. Come back soon for more gift ideas....

A couple of lunches prepared by jokergirl

contents:
Vegan Korean stew, -with sihmeji and enoki mushrooms. Then there's tomatoes, carrots, a dumpling and a mini muffin, and rice in the top layer.

Big box (top): Millet and chili sin carne decorated with parsley. Millet is actually rather tasty, but not very different from couscous texture and flavour-wise. Mmm.
Small box (bottom): Tiny croquettes on picks decorated with oregano; mini chocolate chip muffin (made in a condiment cup with a tiny amount of muffin dough), star-shaped carrots and a cup of tsatsiki.

Easy Breezy Beautiful Covergirl Shepherds Pie

I'm Irish and lord knows many traditional Irish recipes call for two things: booze and meat. So last St Patricks Day, I was newly veg, and planning a party. I had no idea what to make until I came across a recipe for Shepherd's Pie. Now I'd had the meat version before at a pub in Santa Monica and thought it was pretty delicious and filling and would make a nice dish for the party. However all of the recipes I found were really time consuming and too much work to feed to a house full of drunks who were probably just going to complain about the lack of meat. So I went on a mission to make it just a little easier...

What you'll need:

For the topping:

Mashed Potatoes. Yes you could totally go boxed on these, but gross. I made my own and I'm a lazy bitch, so let's assume you're going to need real ones. To make mashed potatoes you need:

1 1/2 lbs potatoes, peeled and quartered length-wise
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 Tbsp heavy cream (or milk substitute)
2 Tbsp butter (or vegan butter substitute)
1 Tbsp milk
Salt and Pepper
1 teaspoon of minced garlic

1 Put potatoes into a pot. Add salt. Add water until potatoes are covered. Bring to boil, reduce heat and simmer, covered, 15-20 minutes, or until squishy and mashable

2 Warm cream and melt butter, together, either in microwave or in a pan on the stove. Drain water from potatoes. Put hot potatoes into a bowl. Add cream and melted butter. Use potato masher to mash potatoes until well mashed. Use a strong spoon to beat further, adding milk to achieve the consistency you desire. (Do not over-beat or your potatoes will get gluey.) Salt and pepper and garlic to taste.

Okay now set that aside, you'll need it in a little while.

Most Shepherds Pie recipes require you to make the filling yourself. But when I'd like to be drinking Guinness with my friends, I'd rather not be constructing what amounts to a vegetable soup all flippin day. So I called on Amy... Amy's Kitchen that is.

You'll need about two cans of Amy's Organic Soup. I used chunky vegetable (pictured below) but she's got a few interesting veggie combos brewing in her kitchen, if you know what I mean. I chose this brand because they have an easy to read "key" on their products that tells you if it's veggie or not. If you're new to the vegetarian game as I was last year, you might not know a lot of the "vegetable" soups that are on the shelves still have meat products in them. So be careful if you're using another brand.

Anyway take the two cans of Amy's Soup and combine them in a large pot. Add one pint of Guinness Beer and cover to simmer. I threw in some more garlic and pepper just make sure there was a kick to it.

Traditional Shephard's Pie does have meat in it and some people use artificial crumbles or whatever to replicate that texture and flavor, but I'm not really a faux meat crumbles girl, so I skipped it.

After heating the soup up and waiting for the Guiness to cook off, pour the soup into a pyrex dish. Wait a second for it to cool, because it will give the soup some "tackiness" which you will need.

Take the mashed potatoes you made earlier and spread them across the top of the soup, like a frosting or pie crust. You can also add some cheese or vegan cheese sprinkles over the top of the potatoes once you get them sprinkled in.

Put in the oven at 350 for about 10 minutes. If the potatoes are browning and the "cheese" is melting, your dish is done.

This recipe made about a large pryex casorol dish and a half for us and served about 11 people. This could also be an excellent edition to your Thanksgiving table.

ThanksflippingGiving

This is going to be my first year as a Pescetarian at Thanksgiving. Now if I were hosting the dinners as Pescetarian we'd just have salmon or mussels or something but I am not and every where I am going to eat is tradition central. I came across an article at www.delish.com that has some veggie recipes so I thought I'd share that first.

http://www.delish.com/entertaining-ideas/holidays/thanksgiving/vegetarian-thanksgiving-recipes?GT1=47003

But also I wanted to share my easy as a box of cornbread dressing I mixed up the other day.

Ingrediants:

1-box Stove Top Cornbread Stuffing

1- can Swanson Vegetarian Vegetable broth <-- btw the only broth I found at my local grocery that is 100% vegetairan.

1/2 green granny smith apple

1 green onion

How to do it:

Dice up the onion and green apple before putting the stuffing on.

Prepare the stuffing just like the box says except instead of water, use the can of vegetable broth. Add the apple and onion when you add the stuffing mix. Five minutes later you have delicious.

Other suggestions to add would be: dried cranberries, carrots, garlic, etc.

Later I promise to share my easy breezy beautiful covergirl recipe for Sheppard's Pie!

Review!

So yesterday I had lunch at a great place in Bakersfield, California.


(I'll wait while you recover from the shock of this revelation)

Mama Roomba's in Bakersfield is a Caribbean place that sprung up a couple of years ago and despite having a fabulous menu that isn't totally meat laden, and very authentic, it's stayed open. Praise the food Gods.



I stopped in with my friend The Loss Adjuster and had a few things from their menu.

We ordered some sweet potato fries, sauteed mushrooms, plantain chips, and some calamari (because as I have mentioned before, I do sometimes eat fish) and washed it all back with some homemade Sangira.

Everything was beyond fantastic. The real treat at the end of the Sangria being of course all the fresh fruit that had been soaking in the glass. They offer it by the glass or by the pitcher for 19 dollars. Also our lunch came up to be about 40 bucks for two people with drinks, so it wasn't expensive.

I had been to Mama Roomba's a few years back and have also tried their mojitos. They are pretty much to die for.

After having spent Monday evening at the Los Angeles Farmer's Market, marveling at everything there that was available for a vegetarian person to eat, I was thought I was pretty spoiled, but Mama Roomba's really took the "cake" if you know what I mean.


Definitely if you ever do something wrong and are banished to Bakersfield, California for an evening, check out Mama Roomba's. Once you're full and happy you can grab a drink at the Alley Cat bar next door and really see some wild life...

my breakfast cereal subsititute

Okay so everyone knows some cereals have animal products in them. And to be honest, I HATE OATMEAL. There I said it. Oatmeal is flippin' gross. Sue me.

So when I was a kid my mom made me something else on cold mornings and I finally reproduced it Vegan style yesterday morning and wanted to share.

Rice Cereal!

Now this takes about 10-20 minutes depending on how long your white rice takes to cook. My bag of white rice said 20 minutes but it was done in 10. I have a gas stove, so who knows, maybe it's hotter.

What you need:

1 cup of white rice

Soy/Rice/Almond milk

Vegan Butter

Sugar or sweetener substitute

How to do it:

Step 1 - Boil your rice. As mentioned before, this could take anywhere from 10 -20 minutes, so if you're busy in the mornings, you can always make the rice the nice before and stick it in the fridge. It works either way.

Step 2- Put rice in a bowl and add your milk product (I used Rice Dream Original) to taste.

Step 3- Add your butter product to taste

Step 4- Add your sugar product to taste

Step 5- Stuff in the microwave and heat it up like you would instant oatmeal. This should be good at about 1 minute on high (obviously you can do this on the stove as well, but this is all about the fast, it is BreakFast after all.)

Step 6- Pull out and stir around. Stick in face. Be full.

You can dress this mess up just like you do oatmeal as well. Brown sugar or cinnamon or fruit. It tastes very similar to oatmeal without the gross texture.

Plus this is a fairly cheap breakfast to make and as far as I know, kids like it!

GUEST RECIPE

Jen Wa and I have a great friend, TheGreatestStar, who is also going veg! Here's her guest recipe on our blog! Thanks girl! This looks delicious

Vegetarian Taco Soup

Ingredients

1 can pinto beans 1 can black beans 1 can corn 2 cans diced tomatos with chilis 1 packet Hidden Valley Ranch Seasoning Mix 1 packet taco seasoning 1 bag Morning Star Crumbles 2 medium raw onions 1 jalapeno (optional)

Directions

Sautee onions, chopped jalapeno (optional), crumbles, taco seasoning, hidden valley ranch seasoning and 1 cup water.
Add all other ingrediants without draining. Bring to boil and simmer for 30 minutes.
May want to add garlic and chili powder.

Number of Servings: 10

We're all poor, I get it

So today I was scanning some of the vegetarian blogs I read and someone posted a link to a website where you can feed your family of 4 for a week on 40 bucks. Now I know this is possible. Neither Jen Wa or myself are rich by any means, but it's always interesting to see someone else's take on it.

Over at HillbillyHouseWife, they've posted the menu that they use for this sort of eating and I was pleased to see it's almost entirely meat free and could be veganized with a few substitutions. Not that I'm all about converting others to my life style, but it's nice when others realize it's not all that bad.

election night nachos

So last night I had a last minute election party and had to make a nacho/layered dip out of stuff I found in my cabinets. My recipe is completely vegetarian but could be made vegan with a few adjustments.

Ingredients:

1- Can of Black Beans

2- can of Vegetarian refried beans. This brand is my favorite.

3- can of diced tomatoes. the kind I had on hand were diced for salsa or chili, I use them when making my veg sloppy joes.

4- Cheese dip. Now since I'm not vegan, I just used the Tostitos Salsa Con Queso but for you vegans out there, I looked up a recipe for 30 Second Vegan Chili Cheese dip. Since that recipe calls for beans, you could forgo one of the other kinds of beans I used, but I actually think this would work just as well.

5- jar of salsa

6- cheese (or vegan cheese)

How to make it:

Grab an oven safe casarole dish. (Pyrex is best, y'all) Add the black beans as your bottom layer, then cover with the diced tomatoes. After that layer on the refried beans. Cover that layer with your cheese dip of choice. Sprinkle real cheese over the top.

How hot you cook it, really depends on how fast you want it. Since I wasn't in a hurry, I put mine in the oven at 200 degrees for about 30 minutes. Once I saw something boiling up in the pan, I pulled it out.

I served mine over Mission Round Tortilla chips and everyone went back for seconds at least, even the meat eaters...

beating the fast food cravings

I've only been eating and cooking vegetarian for about 10 months now, so sometimes I get cravings for certain fast food things I used to eat when I was a meat eater. Namely the snack wraps at McDonalds. Gross, I know, but I was on the go a lot and there was a McDonalds right off the freeway near my old apartment.



Late for work? Grab a snack wrap! Going out and need some food? Snack wrap. After doing some grocery shopping the other day I figured out, that yep, I had the thing ingredients to make myself a "snack wrap" at home and I was pretty over joyed. It turned out pretty good and you can make it as simply or as complicated as you want. This recipe isn't Vegan, but it is entirely meat free.

What you'll need:

1-Morning Star Chikn Fingers (or another brand. I tricked my meat eating boyfriend with these though.)

2-Package of flour tortillas (or corn if you prefer)

3- Shredded cheese

4-Lettuce and whatever veggies you would like to throw in

5-Sauce of your choice. I made mine with honey mustard

What you do:

If you're looking to duplicate the McDonalds style snack wrap, you'll need one chikn strip per wrap. These can be microwaved, but honestly I prefer mine baked in the oven, it gives the faux chicken a crispier texture.

After your chikn is cooked, warm up your tortilla. Add the sauce of your choice, sprinkle in the lettuce and veggies and cheese. Add chickn piece and viola, you have something fast and easy, that you might miss if you're a recent vegetarian. Good drunken munchie food.

Also as an alternative, if you're a former Jack in the Box devotee, I suggest constructing your snack wrap in a pita to mimic their newest little "healthy" choice for the menu.

Vegan "Chicken" Fajitas

Not only am I vegan, I am also gluten intolerant. So cooking for me is always an extra difficult task. Nothing I cook is "fancy" but it all has to be from scratch, and it has to be quick and easy due to my busy schedule. Did I mention it also has to be cheap? I live on an extremely tight budget. Combine that with the fact that I only cook for myself and it gets to be a REAL challenge trying to add some flavor and live off on anything other than plain boring rice. I like to choose a theme for the week. For instance this week is mexican. A bag of corn tortillas can be used for numerous different recipes and leftovers can easily carry over to spice up new recipes the next day. It saves money and diminishes waste. For nothing irritates me more than having to toss out food. With that said, this is one of my favorite recipes.

Ingredients:
1 Package Tempeh (found next to the tofu)
1 Tablespoon Olive Oil
1 Small Onion
1 Small Green Pepper
1 Package Fajita Seasoning Mix !!Always read the ingredients on the back to ensure it's vegan!!
Corn Tortillas

optional:
Tofutti Sour Cream
Vegan Gourmet Cheese



Slice onions, peppers, and Tempeh into thin strips. Heat up olive oil in a frying pan on medium high. Add onions, peppers, and Tempeh. Heat, stirring frequently until Tempeh is a golden brown. Add one cup of water and immediately mix in fajita mix. Turn heat down to a low to medium heat. Stir frequently until the water has boiled down. Heat up tortillas, fill with fajita mix, add cheese and sour cream if you so desire.

Quick, easy, and tasty! I like to later use the left over fajita filling to top nachos.

-Jen Wa

my baked mac and cheese

I made this the other night because my boyfriend was craving baked mac and cheese. I did not make it vegan however. This is just a meat free recipe.

I made this early in the day and left it in the oven to keep it warm. I knew we were going out for cocktails later that night so I said "hmm, better make this now" as I generally don't like to handle boiling water when I'm drunk. I'm just sayin...

What you will need:

1-Can of Condensed Cheese Soup

Milk

3 cups of shell shaped macaroni

shredded cheese

crutons. I used ranch flavored.

I used two pans to get this done faster, but if you're trying to save dishes, you can easily prepare this in one pan.

Step 1:

Boil your macaroni. I don't boil mine down to exactly to the softness I would like because they will cook more when you bake the dish. I leave my noodles slightly al dente.

Step 2:
Heat the soup on stove. The can of soup I had asked to me to add a can full of milk as well. I've served condensed soup without the milk before and it's just richer. However I wanted to make sure I had enough cheese, so I used the milk this time around. Also if you want to add cheese to melt in the soup, its pretty tasty. I also added butter and garlic to it. Delicious!

Step 3
Strain the noodles and put them in an oven safe pan or pyrex dish.

Step 4:
Take your desired amount of crutons and crush them down. You can also use bread crumbs, but I like the texture of the crutons better.

Step 5:
Pour about half of the cheese soup into the pan with the noodles. Stir around until your noodles are covered.

Step 6:
Add layer of crutons and shredded cheese to the noodle mixture.

Step 7:
Add more of the cheese soup to the pan, making a layer over the crutons and shredded cheese.

Step 8:
Add more crutons and shredded cheese.

Step 9:
Bake in oven at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. Obviously this might change depending on your oven. I cook with gas in pyrex and 400 is perfect.

After 20 minutes, you have a nice cheesy dish, which actually reheats very well. Good comfort food. And since it's all foggy and rainy where I live today, I might be making it again.

Vegan Cheese

Since Stephanie posted a recipe that uses vegan cheese recently, I had to pipe in with my 2 cents worth. Vegan cheese is difficult to use. Plain and simple. For the most part it's kind of a joke and not worth the hassle. It doesn't really melt, the flavor can be lacking and within a day it dries up in the fridge and becomes even more unmanageable. It's like working with a virgin who finally gives it up (which ends up be quite lackluster since they don't know what they're doing) and then decides to go back to holding off since it's just too much to handle. That is how I view vegan cheese. Sometimes it's a near neccesity though.

When using vegan cheese though, I only use "Vegan Gourmet" this shit actually MELTS! It's the only vegan cheese I've found that does so. It also has a really good flavor. It still dries out and gets nasty if left in the fridge longer than a day though. Which is completely wasteful and annoying as all hell. Recently I had one too many glasses of wine before making dinner and got a bit carried away with my cheese grating and grated too much. Nothing other than my drunken haze compelled me to make this decision, but I ended up freezing said cheese. I knew I wouldn't be using it again for a while, and in the state that I was, sticking it in the freezer seemed like a perfect solution. After all, when you pay as much as you do for vegan cheese, who the hell wants to waste it? Little did I know, it actually was the perfect solution! Freezing it allows it to hold it's moisture and you can just take out a little bit at a time as you need it. It completely eliminates the waste! So now everytime I buy it I cut a few slices out of it, then shred the rest, put it all in a ziplock bag and shove it in the freezer. When I need it, I just take out whatever amount I need, let it sit at room temperature for about 5 minutes and then it's all set use! It's the perfect solution and makes for no waste which saves you money that can be better spent towards booze.

Off to fill up my wine glass!
Jen Wa

PRODUCT REVIEW

I went grocery shopping the other day and picked up a premade Vegetarian sandwhich from the frozen section. I was shopping at Foods for Less and let's just say their selection is pretty crappy, but I don't always want to make myself a meal. I don't think I should be denied pre-made frozen crap just because I don't eat meat, so any time I see a quick and easy entree I have to try it.



This product is NOT Vegan. It does contain cheese.

I microwaved one of these puppies this morning and really my only complaint is the bread. The bun is pretty dry, small and very easily overcooked. The Chik'n patty though isn't bad. It's pretty flavorful and didn't dry out when I cooked it. I looked for traditional oven directions, since most frozen food is better if you cook it in the oven but is a strictly microwave product.

I don't think this would ever be something I bought on a regular basis, but hey, when the munchies strike and all you have at your disposal is the 24 hour grocery store, this isn't so bad. It's like the vegetarian equivalent of those bad gas station hot dogs and burgers people buy when they're drunk and trying to sober up. Not really that good or good for you, but sometimes needed.

Vegetarian Sloppy Joes? Oh yes, it can happen

A long time ago before I decided to become a vegetarian/pescetarian, I dated a guy who was a veg for the first year we were together. I wasn't, but that didn't stop me from eating loads of yummy vegetarian things to try them out. One night we were drinking wine in a bar in North Hollywood and he confided in me that he really really missed Sloppy Joes.

Coming from a white trash taste palate myself, I love me some Sloppy Joes. So I ran right out and figured something out for him.

Since I was drunk and it was late we went the instant route, which is what this blog is all about. And we bought two more bottles of wine in the process.

Anyway what you will need to construct these drunken deliciousness is this:

1-Can of Sloppy Joe mix. I used Del Monte when I made these last night. Yes you can make your own sauce if you're that kind of uppity cook, but the point of this recipe is the simplicity with which you can make and eat something while wasted. Check the ingredients on any canned item before buying it to ensure it does not have animal products in it.

1-box of Rice O Roni Spanish Rice. (Or substitute the Spanish rice of your choice. Trust me though, Spanish rice is the way to go, so stop being a rice racsist and get back on board.)

1-14 oz Can of Tomatoes. You can substitute salsa here as well if you need a bigger kick in your Joes. However the chopped tomotaoes give the sandwhich more depth and a better consistancy.

1-package of the hamburger buns of your choice

1-sliced vegan cheese

Preparation:

Step 1- Have a cocktail. Walk around the house drinking and swearing and turn on some music. I like to cook to Tom Waits and Billie Holliday. I know Jen Wa prefers Rancid.

Step 2- Have another cocktail. Put the Spanish rice on the stove and cook it how the freakin' box says to. Don't forget to add the tomatoes. This is going to take about 20 minutes, so you might as well have another cocktail.

Step 3- After the rice has simmered down to the right consistancy you add the sloppy joe mixture. Stir it around and cover the rice with it just like you would if you were making the meaty version.

Step 4- (optional) toast the buns in the oven or toaster. I have a gas oven so I just toast them in there.

Step 5- Take toasted buns out and add your vegan cheese slices.

Step 6- Add the "sloppy joe" mix on to the bun according to how hungry you are. Be careful, these are actually very sloppy. But delicious.

Step 7- Have another cocktail and eat this goodness

I found this Vegan Sloppy Joe mix on the internet you can buy as well. I've never had it so I don't know if it's worth the 7.95 though. I've also never used a subsitute meat product instead of rice. Most faux meats gross me out to be quite honest, but I'm sure if you really wanted to grind up a Boca Burger and soak it in sloppy joe sauce, you could.