Your Vegan Mom

Dinner with My Nonna

My nonna has a blog. It's taken me awhile to admit this. I don't like to think of my nonna belly dancing or living in Canada or being named Bryanna Clark Grogan or not even being old enough to be my nonna. It really makes it hard to keep up my little imaginary relationship. My nonna is supposed to live in a cobblestoned hillside village where she keeps a mule and is a bit stooped from years of hovering over that giant simmering pot on the stove. I call her up and she gives me advice on making ragu alla bolognese or a basic genoise, and I think about how lucky I am to have a vegan Italian grandmother.

Well, yesterday, I finally had to admit to myself that there's more to my nonna than that ancient stove and pasta advice, yesterday, I allowed her to be who she really is: Bryanna Clark Grogan, vegan chef and cookbook author, Canadian mother and grandmother, no actual relation to me, and prolific blogger. She taught me to make this Palestinian lentil dish. So easy and comforting. Like every recipe of hers that I have ever followed, I imagine it will become a house staple.

Also, we made grilled baby eggplants with a roasted tomato sauce. I diced some tiny romas and peeled a half dozen cloves of garlic, added maybe a teaspoon of salt and a drizzle of olive oil and threw it in the oven at 450 for about half an hour. When the lentils were creamy, the onions were brown, and the eggplant was soft and smoky, we took the tomatoes out of the oven, spooned them over the grilled eggplant, and finished with a confetti toss of fresh basil. I like to think that my nonna would approve.

Quick Quinoa Picnic Salad, Again! But Different!

I think that I've already written about salads similar to this at least twice already. I just can't help it. It's like soup in December. Tis the season of picnic salads. Right now I want something quick and light and portable. Here was yesterday's version enjoyed at the park with Kiley and Roxy.

Recipe:
1 c. quinoa
1 can garbanzo beans
1 cup shredded carrot
dressing:

1/2 cup orange juice
1 Tbsp. Balsamic vinegar
1 green onion, thinly sliced
1 small handful basil, (I snip both the onion and the basil with kitchen shears into thin shreds)
pinch of salt
dash or two cayenne
drizzle of flax seed oil

Cover quinoa with two cups cold water in a small sauce pan with a lid on high heat. When the pot is boiling, turn it down to low and let simmer for 20 minutes. Remove from the heat, fluff with a fork, and toss with the beans, carrot, and dressing. Serve at room temperature.

I used a medley of carrots. Aren't they gorgeous? I just can't get over those colors.

Hippie Sauce

The night before we left on our weekend adventure, I wanted some serious sustenance to give us the vegan power to survive a roadtrip through the non-veggie friendly heartland of California. (Did I tell you about the lard chips in Santa Maria?) I wanted hippie sauce. I wanted hippie sauce with brown rice, and tofu, and kale. I wanted vegan power food.

And I got it. The sauce was inspired by that ubiquitous vegetarian health food restaurant sauce. It's tahini based, with lemon juice and garlic. You know the one? I added to taste:

tahini
soy sauce
lemon juice
garlic
roasted sesame oil

This was so good, we should really just move to Santa Cruz already.

Provencal Pizza

It started out as pizza, just with a creamy white bean sauce topped with summer vegetables and herbs. But it came out of the oven tasting like the south of France. So, it's not at all a traditional recipe, but we'll call it Provencal Pizza.

Start with pizza dough, stretched thin. Spread with white bean sauce:

1/2 can canellini beans
1/2 head garlic
1 Tbsp. olive oil
1/4 c. white wine
1/4 c. vege broth
salt and pepper

Heat the oil in a small skillet over medium-low. Add whole cloves of garlic. When the garlic cloves have lightly browned, add the wine to the pan, turn the heat down a bit, and cover. Let the garlic braise for about 8 minutes, until soft. Put beans, garlic, and half the broth in the blender. Add more broth if necessary to make a saucy consistency. Season with salt and pepper. Blend until creamy.

Atop the white bean sauce, arrange slices of zucchini (Though it's kind of hard to tell form the photo, we used alternating slices of yellow and green.), halved cherry tomatoes, and minced kalamata olives. Sprinkle with fresh rosemary and basil, and a little salt and pepper. Drizzle with good olive oil. Bake at 450 for about 15 minutes, until the edges of the crust are lightly browned, the sauce is bubbly, and the vegetables are a little wrinkly.

Coconut Tapioca Pudding

Upon my friend Maryanne's suggestion, Desmond and I had lunch yesterday at the gigantic new Whole Foods in El Segundo. As I wandered the sparkling aisles looking for nutritional yeast and tahini, I found 6 bins of dried chilies, bins and bins of beautiful produce that was labeled as local and organic, a wine bar, a small children's play area (!), a sushi bar and an Argentinian lunch counter with two kinds of vegan empanadas, and a pudding bar. A pudding bar!! I started doing a little dance inside as I scanned the varieties with their clearly labeled ingredients. Surely with 9 different kinds of pudding, there...will..be...(milk)...one...(milk)...for... (milk)...me, but no, not a one. As I kicked a rock and walked away, not even the huge neighboring diplay of vegan sorbets could satisfy me. I wanted a creamy childhood treat. I wanted pudding. I decided, however, to be the tiniest bit adult about it and attempt to finish my shopping. As I tried the baking aisle for the aforementioned elusive health food items, I came across a box of organic tapioca with a recipe on the side for a coconut pudding containing no eggs. Victory. I headed to the check out line with three bottles of wine, a bamboo spoon, and nothing on my shopping list.

While you will still find me experimenting with pureed tofu and various thickeners to try to recreate the tapioca pudding of my youth, this is a good, easy, coconutty vegan version:

Coconut Tapioca Pudding (adapted from the box of Let's Do Organic Tapioca)

2 c. water
3 Tbsp. small Tapioca pearls
3 Tbsp. sugar
tiny pinch of salt
3/4 c. coconut milk

In a saucepan, bring the water to a boil, and add the tapioca pearls. Turn the heat down to medium-low and allow the tapioca to simmer for 17 minutes. Periodically stir with a whisk or fork to prevent the balls from sticking to one another. In a seperate bowl, whisk the sugar, salt, and coconut milk. At the end of 17 minutes, whisk the coconut mixture into the tapioca. Once it has returned to a simmer, allow it to continue cooking for 5 more minutes. Stir and chill.