I enjoy creative constraints.  I like keeping up with my daily personal challenge of making and eating vegetarian.  Healthy vegetarian.  Healthy, yummy, bodyandsoulfilledwithjoy vegetarian.  But every once and a while I encounter a challenge gets me all pumped up, stretched out, bracing myself at the starting line, the gun goes off and POW: my head whacks the track because my shoelaces were tied together.

My attempts of thinking up a good dish to bring to the NYC Food Bloggers Potluck this past Saturday were a relay of false starts - as if cooking for other foodies isn’t pressure enough!  There was preference noted by a guest for vegetarian food – hey, cool, me too.  Another guest didn’t eat cheese - vegan is cool too. And another didn’t eat nuts – no prob, that’s common enough.  No olives.  No eggplant.  Shoot, someone already had dibs on making a squash dish.  And, drats, soup and chili were already spoken for as well.

All I wanted was to present a hearty veggie dish that everyone could enjoy.  I wanted to inspire, impress, dazzle.  I wanted my fellow NYC Food Bloggers to think, “that Vanessa: not only does she have a wittily-named blog and great hair, she also cooks a delicious, homey, and equal opportunity casserole.”

Ah well. After thinking long and I hard I came up with this Chipotle Sweet Potato and Black Bean Casserole – none of the comprising ingredients were taboo and the result is tasty and even Fall-ish.

I even received compliments in the form of dirty empty tupperware from those hungry savages formerly known as my sisters.  They devoured the leftovers I brought home from the potluck even though they made me shop and pay for own groceries when it was not my turn.  And they didn’t leave any casserole for me.

Serves: 6 (or 2 savage sisters)
Time: 1 ¼ hours

Chipotle Sweet Potato and Black Bean Filling

1 large yellow onion, chopped
olive oil
3 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1 ½ inch cubes
2 chipotle peppers plus 1 tsp of sauce (this makes it fairly spicy- add more or less to taste
2 (15 oz) cans of black beans, drained
1 (28 oz) can of crushed tomatoes
½ tsp cumin
½ tsp salt
2 bunches spinach

(more…)

I love Indian food.  Indulge my repetition: I LOOOOOVE Indian food.

If you were looking at me right now you’d be pretty convinced that I’m not of Indian heritage. At all.  Annnnnnd… you’d be right!  I have, however, for the last 5 years or so years been looking for a surrogate Indian mom to teach me how to cook traditional vegetarian Indian dishes. (No offence, real mom, but you’re not Indian either.)  My neighbors growing up were Greek, so Saag Paneer there.  My childhood girlfriends were Italian and Finnish, so no dal there.  In recent years I’ve considered trying to date men with good-cooking vegetarian Indian moms, but decided it could get awkward if I spent more time with boyfriend’s mom than boyfriend.

So I’m taking this yak by the horn.  I’ve signed up for an Indian (Ayurvedic, actually) cooking course and have begged my (non-Indian) friend Poundcake to hook me up with her old boss who I understand is a terrific Indian cook and a vegetarian to boot!  I’m looking to help her cook and in return she’d let me help her cook.  I’ll even do dishes.

This past weekend I tried my well-read but unapprentised Indian-cooking hand at an open-faced samosa (a chickpea wrap filled with a potato, chickpea, and green pea curry) and a vegan creamed spinach that I “creamed” with the extra cashews I had on hand from my trip to Trader Joes and left over from my Mango Cashew Stir-fry.

The results are in:

The Li’l Sis said, in a rather blasé way: “This is good, Ness.”  When I questioned her lack of enthusiasm she explained: “my tummy hurts.”  And then “I ate too much.”

Well, ladies and gentlemen, there you have it.  The following vanesscipes are so yummy they make you eat too much! I had some neighbors over too, and they clearly enjoyed their meal but declined to comment because I think they’re afraid that I’ll misquote them or something.  Or maybe they just overate as well.

Serves: 4
Time: 90 minutes

Potato, Chickpea and Green Pea Curry

3 large or 4 small potatoes
peanut oil
1 onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
½ inch of ginger, minced
2 jalapeno, minced
½ tsp cumin seeds
½ tsp mustard seeds
8 oz can tomato sauce or 3 fresh tomatoes, diced
1 can chickpeas, drained
2 cups frozen green peas
¼ tsp cayenne
¼ tsp garam masala
¾ tsp salt
chopped cilantro to top

(more…)

Ali From The Valley is a fellow event planner at The Met and a near-daily inspiration for vanesscipes.  We work our cute little tails off planning parties but we always have time to get slightly off-topic to talk about what we’re making for dinner, what we ate last night, what might mix with what, how to make an existing recipe healthier, what IS Tom Cruise thinking, etc.

All the credit for this recipe goes to Ali, who has my thanks for providing it to me, free of any event planning duty.  I was a little put off by chopping chick peas (A little over the top dontcha think, Ali?) but the sisters passionately devoured their salad and, bits of chopped veggies falling ecstatically from their mouths, declared it’s fun-ness, fresh-aility, and filling-ocity.

By the way, the cat-grass looking stuff in the photo is actually chives from my fire escape garden.  I feel like the photo needed extra whimsy to capture the true feeling of this eclectic salad.

Serves: 4-5
Time: 1 sister = 40 minutes.  3 sisters = 20 minutes

Salad

½ a regular-sized head of romaine lettuce, shredded
1 cluster of scallions, chopped
1 small red onion, chopped
1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes halved or quartered
1 can drained garbanzo beans (yes, need to be chopped)
1 ½ cups of pitted cured olives chopped
1 large cucumber, diced
4 to 8 oz of reduced fat feta, crumbled
2 avocados, diced
¼ regular sized head of red cabbage

As I like to say: chop, chop, choparoo.  Chop everything and put into a large salad bowl.  Douse with the dressing.

Dressing

4 Tbl olive oil
4 Tbl balsamic vinegar
1 Tbl mustard
2 cloves garlic, minced
½ tsp salt
pepper

Combine everything in a small tupperware and shake!

Remember Jalapeno Indecision 2006? I’ve finally decided on a recipe to use them up (most of them, anyway.)

I wanted to make a main dish, so recipe Runners Up for the Jalapeno Challenge are:
Peanut Butter Stuffed Jalapeno Poppers (!)
Jalapeno Brownies
How awesome do those sound?!

Many thanks to Melody of the very excellent Melomeals for being the unwitting inspiration for this dish. She gave me an awesome vegan baked jalapeno “popper” idea using cashew cream (see the comment here), and them my mind drifted to cashews, Thailand, juicy mangos, exotic men in hula skirts, and (focus, Vanessa!) this recipe idea.

Adding to this exotic adventure is my friend The QueenBee. She whisked me out of Brooklyn for a suburban ingredients-gathering safari to Whole Foods, Trader Joes, The Cheesecake Factory, and Old Navy. Old Navy was her idea, I swear, and she made me buy that faux-Members Only jacket under penalty of walking my carless butt home 50 miles. The trip really was pretty exotic: we spotted a Great Blue Heron gliding over the expressway and, morbidly, what looked like a dead penguin on the side of the road.

The safari was successful and I was able to gather ingredients to make the hot hot hot Mango Cashew Stirfry.

Serves: 3-4
Time: about 1 hour – lots of chopping!

Mango Cashew Stirfry

2 cups raw cashews
peanut oil
4 jalapenos (green OR red, red would be prettier), deseeded and minced
1 ½ inches ginger, minced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbl minced lemongrass
2 mangos, peeled and cubed
3 large handfuls green beans with the ends snapped off (buy 4 handfuls so with the ends off it’s closer to 3)
1 bunch of green onions, sliced
3 Tbl soy sauce
3 Tbl vegetarian stirfry sauce (found it next to the oyster sauce in the Asian section)
juice of 1 lime, more wedges to serve
handful of cilantro, chopped

Serve with jasmine rice

(more…)

I think every Puttanesca recipe likes to start out scandalizing the reader by explaining that Puttanesca comes from the Italian word for “harlot.” Horrors! What’s not to love about this sassy sauce that likes to shake her bacon into the wee hours of the night? Just because she’s hot, spicy, and voluptuous, doesn’t she need love too? Doesn’t she?!

Well, I’ve decided to be matchmaker for the day and set her up with a tasty quinoa ball. He’s got a strong, tanned, weathered exterior with a soft, sensitive middle. It’s a match made in Italian harbor-front heaven.

P.S.: Puttanesca sauce is such an awesome, easy, vegan sauce that if you don’t have the time to make the quinoa balls, this Puttanesca recipe can easily be paired with a pound of whole wheat pasta (two-timing harlot!) And although I’m quite fond of the saying “freshest is bestest,” if you don’t have good ripe tomatoes or the time to let the sauce cook down, substitue a 28 oz can of chopped tomatoes for the fresh. Mangia!

Serves: 4
Time: 1 hour

Quinoa Balls

1 cup uncooked quinoa
1 ¾ cup water
2 stalks celery, diced
1 leek, diced
2 cloves of garlic, minced
olive oil
1 cup seasoned breadcrumbs
1 egg or equiv of vegan egg substitute
fresh basil, oregano, etc (optional)

(more…)