Every fall, the husband’s company holds a chili cook-off. While he always talks a good game about entering, the day always seems to pass him by, chili-less. (Not to imply that he’s bluffing; rather, he makes the hour-long trek into the office but once a week, leaving him out of the loop and slightly less motivated to drive in to enter when the day finally rolls around.) guess 2009 was his year, though, because he entered a dish and came in…*drumroll please*….second place! Out of, um, four dishes. But wait! It gets better.

As y’all probably already know, the husband is a vegan like moi. And his veganism is well-known around the office. (All those “team” and catered office lunches.) So of course he couldn’t enter the dish under his own name right? For starters, he didn’t want anyone to hold his chili’s “lack” of “meat” against him. (Call this the “weird vegan shit” factor.) Plus, he had another, hidden agenda – an agenda which was, dare I say, even more important than winning. He wanted to see if he could make a chili that might “pass” as not-vegan. Hence all the Boca Burgers and TVP in the recipe below!

Well, as I’ve already said, his chili came in 2nd out of four entries. His runner-upedness is due solely to the fact that he made his chili too damned spicy. Good for him, cause that’s his thing – but for his office mates, not so much. I told him: if you want to win the popular vote, you’ve got create a product/message/dish that’s watered down, inoffensive, palatable to the masses. In the end, he refused to compromise his culinary integrity, and 2nd place is his reward. Whaddyagonnado?

More importantly, no one suspected that his chili was vegan! Everyone thought his “meat” was the real deal. (Um, wait.) A few office mates even knew or suspected that he’d enter a vegan dish under someone else’s name, and so were on the lookout for an impostor. Vegan WIN!

Anyhow, here’s the recipe – as best he can remember it, that is. There’s a whole lot of taste testing and recalibrating involved. Also, it makes a rather large pot, so you may want to adjust the portions accordingly.

As I’m not one for excessive spice – some mild salsas are too much for me (!) – I did not go near this dish. Nope, it’s Chocolate Chili (hold the chiles and chili powder) for me, thank you very much. (Grounds for divorce, anyone?)

Shane’s Sweet & Spicy Chili

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I know, I know. Ice cream!? On a snowy January morning!? In the middle of a bitter, polar-like, transnational cold snap!? Am I kidding!? A sadist!? Ms. Freeze, maybe!? What gives!?

Nah, I’m just a vegan – a vegan with a little extra, week-past-the-expiration-date Silk Pumpkin Spice stashed in the fridge. And since this liquid yum is only available a few months out of the year, there’s no way I’m letting it to go waste.

Enter: ice cream! Make a batch or two now, and freeze it ’til spring. Or eat in it front of a nice, cozy fire. Wev.

Bonus: you can now enjoy Silk’s holiday flavors year-round. Just in a different state, yes?

Silk Pumpkin Spice Ice Cream

Inspired by my earlier Vegan Soy Nog Ice Cream! recipe.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons arrowroot powder
4 cups Silk Pumpkin Spice soy milk, i.e., one full quart container (divided into 1/4 cup and 3 3/4 cup servings)
1/2 teaspoon pumpkin spice spices
2 tablespoon brown sugar

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Yeah, I didn’t think so.

Vegan Soy Nog Ice Cream

Inspired by this Egg Nog Ice Cream recipe at VegWeb.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons arrowroot powder
1 cup soy milk (divided into 1/4 and 3/4 servings)
3 cups soy nog (I used Silk)
1 teaspoon nutmeg
3 tablespoons brown sugar

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Vegan Gourmet v. Teese: Who shall emerge victorious?

Spoiler: Each shall live to melt another day!

Originally, I’d intended this as a side-by-side comparison of Teese and Vegan Gourmet vegan mozzarella and cheddar cheeses, à la the Sweet & Sara v. Dandies showdown. Yes, I had it all planned out: I ordered exactly enough tubes of Teese to make a few batches of cheddary mac & cheese, with an extra tube of mozzarella and cheddar left over to cover a homemade pizza each. The fridge was stocked to nearly-overflowing with brick upon glorious brick of Vegan Gourmet. (Nom!) Unfortunately, we tried so many different mac & cheese recipes – and over such a lengthy period of time – that it quickly became impossible to keep track of the many cheese/recipe variations. (Seriously, I’ve been at this since early summer!)

So while I don’t come bearing a chart or pro/con breakdown of each brand and flavor of vegan cheese, I can say that I prefer Vegan Gourmet to Teese. Teese is a little salty for my taste, and since it’s not available locally, it’s a tad more expensive than Vegan Gourmet, especially when you factor in shipping costs. Of course, I’m not judging either brand against its dairy-based counterpart, since I’ve never been able to eat the stuff. (Something for which I’m quite thankful now; it’s rather easy to “give up” non-vegan products when you never formed taste for/addiction to them to begin with!) My husband – who is not allergic to milk and found cow’s milk cheese the hardest foodstuff to relinquish upon going vegan – nominally prefers Teese to Vegan Gourmet. Take from that what you will.

In terms of cooking with Teese versus Vegan Gourmet, I think the two are tied for convenience, meltability, etc. Both seem to have their own “sweet spot” for achieving maximum gooeyness. For example, when sprinkled atop mini pita bread pizzas, Vegan Gourmet melts best when cooked at 450 degrees F for about 15 minutes. But, um, that’s in the Garbato-Brady oven; my sister has had slightly less luck at these settings. Likewise, the reason we tried so many mac & cheese recipes is because the cheese sauce congealed at different rates, depending not just on the brand, but also how and when the cheese was mixed with the soy milk, margarine and macaroni. So no matter which brand you favor, there’s no small amount of experimentation and guesswork that goes into cooking with vegan cheese. But hey, it’s totally worth it, dontchathink?

Anyhow, after months of laborious taste-testing, the Mr. and I finally came up with our perfect mac & cheese recipe. Again, grain of salt; mac & cheese is a highly personal and intimate subject, particularly in the vegan community, so perhaps you’ll try this dish only to discover that it tastes like dreck. But hey, that’s how I feel about mac & cheese dishes centered around nutritional yeast, and many fellow vegans swear by these recipes. To each her own.

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Since I received a copy of The Simple Little Vegan Dog Book for review, I’ve slowly been working my way through the recipes. I say “slowly” because I only cook meals for the dogs once every 5-7 days. There may be five of ‘em, but when you combine their weights, they only equal 2 or 3 medium- or large-sized dogs (or “real dogs,” as I jokingly call them).

Anyhow, I spent a good 1 1/2 hours in the kitchen last night; writing on Twitter, I noted that my mother did this damn near every night for nearly 20 years – how she lasted so long is beyond me. 16 hours later, and I’m still beat.

Why so intensive, you ask? The recipe – a canine Shepherd’s Pie dish – called for both low-salt, onion-free gravy and low-salt, onion-free vegetable broth, neither of which are staples easily found in the grocery store. I had to make each from scratch, so essentially I cooked three dishes last night. Add to this the fact that low-sodium, onion-free recipes are scarce, and – well, you can see where I’m going with this!

Since precious few vegans seem to be making their dog-kids gravy and veggie broth and/or sharing this culinary wisdom with the rest of the internets, I figured I’d record and share these recipes with y’all. The gravy is pretty straightforward; basically I adapted this recipe from eHow to make it low(er)-sodium and onion-free. It’s gravy, plain and simple, and is great for people and dogs alike.

The vegetable broth, on the other hand, was a little more complicated. Most of the DIY veggie broth recipes I found involve slow-cooking copious amounts of veggies, after which you strain the veggies from the broth, resulting in actual broth. What you’re supposed to do with the sad, soggy veggies, I know not. What I do know, however, is that I had neither the time nor the veggies to go this route. Instead, I relied upon spices and seasonings for the bulk of the flavor, and added in a few (non-disposable) veggies for extra flavor. In other words, my vegetable broth isn’t a broth, really, but more of a soup. Naturally, if you’re making a recipe that doesn’t involve chunks of veggies, this soup-broth won’t really work for you. But if you’re just going to mix a veggie broth with additional veggies (such as with the Barking Barley and Wheat Surprise I shared a few weeks back), look no further than my Low-Sodium, Onion-Free Vegetable Broth / Soup Stock!

Low-Sodium, Onion-Free Gravy

Ingredients

1/2 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon minced garlic OR 1 tablespoon garlic powder (optional)
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
4 teaspoons nutritional yeast
2-4 tablespoons Braggs Liquid Aminos OR 2-4 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce
2 cups water
1/2 teaspoon sage
1/4 teaspoon black pepper

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Since VeganMoFo is coming to a close, I decided to spend the afternoon experimenting with two recipes I’ve been meaning to try, namely, Green Tea Cupcakes and Black Bean Brownies. You may recall that I vowed to try the former at the beginning of the month – and what kind of VeganMoFo’er would I be if I broke that one teensy-weeny little promise?

(Actually, funny story. When making the black bean brownies, I spent five+ minutes trying to coax the cover of the food processor to lock into place. Turns out I had it on backwards the whole time. But wait! That’s not all! Later on, I set the oven timer to what I thought was 30 minutes. It went off 30 seconds later. Oy. Turns out I’m not much of a MoFo’er after all!)

First up: Green Tea Cupcakes with Matcha Glaze from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. Two words: Fucking. Awesome. Seriously, these things rock. Assuming you like green tea, which I totally do.

The Matcha Glaze is kinda funky; before looking the recipe over, I thought the frosting would be a variation of Isa’s iconic vegan buttercream concoction, but as the name implies, it’s really a glaze. It’s different, but nicely so. Also a bit of a relief, because the sugar-heavy buttercream tends to give me a sugar headache. (Any tips for reducing the sugar content? Should I just add more shortening/less sugar? Anyone?)

Matcha is on the expensive side, but most recipes don’t call for all that much. I originally purchased a small box to try out in the Green Tea recipe from Wheeler del Torro’s The Vegan Scoop (also awesome, btw); now, methinks it’ll remain a pantry regular.

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Though I’ve been focusing on healthy, frugal vegan foods this month, I have a confession to make: I’m a pizza addict. The Mr. and I have pizza for dinner several times a week. And it’s not exactly the healthy, low-fat, veggie-loaded, cheeseless kind – not even close!

Usually, we make these cute lil’ mini-/personal pizzas using pita bread as the base, but every few weeks or so, we go all out and make large pizzas from scratch.

Okay, well, not totally from scratch: the dough is fresh, but the sauce is canned, as are the black olives. I guess you could say that the faux pepperoni and soy cheese are made from scratch, just not by us (our artisans of choice are Lightlife and Follow Your Heart, respectively). The sundried tomatoes may or may not be homegrown and homemade (read: dried); while I still have a batch from 2008 stashed in the freezer, our garden was a huge fail this year, and we’ll probably deplete our stores by the end of November. But it’s too painful a subject to discuss quite yet. Sigh.

Anyhow, the pita pizzas make for a quick and convenient meal; not only does the pita bread allow you to forgo the dough-making step, but the pita is also small enough that the pizzas are edible as-is, no cutting required. The larger pizzas are another story.

While fresh-made dough requires some planning ahead, it’s more time-consuming than difficult. Rather, we’ve found ourselves plagued by a problem of a different sort: namely, slicing the layer of thick, gooey vegan cheese and through the crispy crust underneath. Though I’ve never had dairy-based cheese (I’m allergic to milk, making the transition to veganism that much easier), Shane swears that pizzas with vegan cheese are infinitely harder to cut than their non-vegan counterparts. For a while I assumed that the problem lay in our cheap-ass cutlery, but we always manage to make a mess of our pizza toppings, no matter the sharpness (or dullness) of the knives used. We even tried a few of those charming little pizza-cutters-on-a-wheel, with little luck.

About twelve months ago, Shane started going on about an idea he had for “the perfect pizza cutter.” I rolled my eyes not a few times, especially since he was going through this Billy Mays* / Anthony Sullivan fascination phase. But he kept on with it, contacting local metallurgists and welders in his spare time. I more or less humored him, thinking that it would be so insanely expensive to commission a custom-made piece from a professional that the idea wouldn’t go anywhere. And a few metalworkers did give crazy high quotes – we’re talking $500 and up (thanks, but no thanks). Still he persisted, and got in touch with a welder – with experience in kitchen utensil development, to boot! – who was willing to do the job for fee low enough that I couldn’t say no.

And so the Perfect Pizza Press was born!

I have to hand it to him: he came up with a really kickass idea.

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Okay, so this might seem like a rather obvious tip, but it’s been a long, exhausting day, and I just have to do this one last thing before I can retire to bed with a pint of Purely Decadent and the remote control. I will have a perfect VeganMoFo III record, dammit!

So, where were we? Ingredient prep. When you purchase ingredients that have been prepared beforehand – for example, lettuce that’s already been shredded, pre-mixed spices, growth-stunted carrots, etc. – you’re paying not just for the price of the food, but also for the additional handling and processing, as well as the added convenience to you, the consumer. Sometimes the cost is negligible; other times, the markup can be significant. By purchasing raw, unprocessed ingredients and preparing them yourself, you can save a little extra money every week. Time spent in the kitchen translates to cash in the wallet.

For example:

- Baby carrots usually cost more per pound than full-sized carrots. Whereas you have to peel, wash and slice large carrots, baby carrots just require a quick bath in the kitchen sink before they’re ready to eat. Luckily, peeling carrots: not that hard. Just invest $5 in an ergonomic peeler, and you’re good to go.

- A whole head of lettuce is cheaper than bags of shredded lettuce or pre-made salad. Again, lettuce isn’t that hard to prepare for use. However, unless you’re able to consume a whole head before it goes bad, bagged lettuce might prove less expensive in the long run. On the downside: all that wasted packaging.

- Corn that has been pre-husked and tethered in plastic to a Styrofoam board: just don’t do it. Seriously, no.

- Spice mixes are sometimes (but not always) marked up more than the cost of their individual spices. Before you buy a seasoning blend, ask yourself if it’s something you could make on your own. The most egregious example of this I’ve seen is a newer phenomenon: cinnamon and sugar packaged together in a blend. I bet I could teach my smartest dog-kid to combine 1 part cinnamon with 1 part sugar in a small tupperware container and shake ’til mixed. Hell, I do it in a half-groggy morning stupor once every few weeks – and I don’t function well before 10 AM.

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Green Giant Steamers, I can’t believe this is the last week of October – and of VeganMoFo 2009! It’s been rather exhausting, this daily blogging, and yet I feel like I’m just getting started – there’s so much more to say! It’s all good, though; since I’m vegan 365 days a year (366 in 2012), I can get my VeganMoFo on whenever, wherever, with whomever I want. (Um, just don’t tell Shane I said that.)

Anyhow, for our very last Monday Mashup of the month, I decided to go with a frugal vegan theme. All of these dishes are made with relatively inexpensive, readily available ingredients. You name it, we’ve got it: veggies, fruits, pasta, grains, beans, tofu, pancakes, cookies, pie, breakfast, lunch, brunch, dinner and dessert – represent! Veganism: truthy, yes; inconvenient, not so much.

Now if you’ll excuse me, those twice-baked potatoes are calling my name…

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Freecycle ™ is a network of local groups (primarily hosted on Yahoo, though the renegade/breakaway chapters aren’t necessarily) that allow members to request items they need, and offer items that they need to get rid of. It’s much like Craigslist, with one significant difference: everything offered and requested must be 100% free. Membership is also free, as are all ads. (Full disclosure: I founded and moderate my local group – a fact which doesn’t necessarily bias me in favor of the concept. I kid, I kid.)

Of course, you can’t get any cheaper than free! While food isn’t necessarily the most popular category of freecycled goods – methinks that honor goes to secondhand clothing, or perhaps household items – it is possible to score some yummy vegan finds.

- Expired food is perhaps the most popular edible commodity, and while I recommend caution when buying/trading/eating expired food, many non-perishable foods can be consumed well beyond the expiration date. Even perishable goods, such as soy milk and yogurt, are usually okay for up to a week after the expiration date. Just be sure to do your homework – and when in doubt, throw it out.

- Occasionally you’ll also see members offer up specialty vegan or vegetarian foods. Perhaps someone decided to give Meatless Mondays a try, bought a box of Boca Burgers at Sam’s, and decided they didn’t care for them. While this is certainly a hit for Team Vegan, there’s no need to let perfectly good food go to waste. Their loss is your gain.

- The summer and autumn months are an especially fruitful time for vegans on Freecycle: it’s not uncommon for green-thumbed, kind-hearted members to offer up excess fruits, vegetables, nuts and even plants on the list. Among the fresh vegan foods I’ve seen change hands on my local list are green and red tomatoes; walnuts; pecans; apples; peaches; pears; strawberries; and all manner of fruit, veggies, herbs, and flowering plants. Trees and shrubs, too!

Naturally, vegan freecyclers need not limit themselves to food! Commonly freecycled items include secondhand clothing; hand-me-down furniture; small appliances, including the very popular but rarely used bread machines; larger appliances, usually older and displaced due to renovations; books; and crafting materials.

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