Vegan Bacon Roll-Ups

According to Wikipedia, a slice of pig bacon has 44 calories, 3.5 grams of fat, and 2.9 grams of protein. According to my Tofurkey smoked maple tempeh bacon package, a slice of vegan bacon has 18.6 calories, .14 grams of fat, 1.7 grams of protein, and 0 dead pigs. I'll give up a gram of protein to save 3 grams of fat and the life of one piglet any day. That's just what I did last week, but I drew a blank on ideas for how to use my vegan bacon. 

I came across a few other straggling ingredients in the fridge-- a vegan sausage, an open can of green chilies, and half a tub of vegan cream cheese--and that set a lightbulb off in my head. For my vegan bacon roll-ups, I cut 6 inch pieces of vegan bacon and spooned a layer of cream cheese evenly on the upward facing edge of the bacon. I topped the cream cheese with an layer of green chillies and set the strips aside. Then I cut the sausage into thin slices and rolled the bacon around the sausage, sealing the roll with a toothpick. I think these would be good prepped on a grill, but I fried them in oil over medium heat and they turned out fine. Next time we'll make our own sausages and be sure there's a football game and friends to share this protein packed vegan hors d'oeuvres with.

Roll-ups with vegan creamed spinach

Green (and red) green curry

We got the idea of brussels sprouts in a curry from the Fojol Brothers Volathai food truck here in DC, which offers a "Green Green Curry" with brussels sprouts, green peppers, and other greens. We made our own twist on this, with red peppers for a slightly different color palette.

What we eat

Here's some samples from the past few weeks of what we've been eating, besides pie. Maybe we can make this a weekly thing, if I can remember to take photos (Facebook friends probably think I'm heavy on the food photos, but that's probably less than half of what we actually cook/bake...)

Soba with greens and veggies

This is a soba noodle stir fry, with bok choy (or pak choi or what have you), peppers, onions, and carrots, mixed with a homemade sauce and topped with toasted almonds. This was a recipe from the book Wild About Greens, which was a gift from my mom. Bok choy is one of my favorite greens.

Wonton soup and scallion pancakes

We also made our own scallion pancakes (recipe; we subbed about 1/3 of the flour with whole wheat) and wonton soup last week. We made our own wontons filled with tofu, scallions, and ginger. The broth was made with soy sauce and some miso paste, as well as other seasonings. The soup and the pancakes were both really yummy but kind of labor intensive, but I'd make them both again. 

I made these cookies yesterday, the chocolate coconut cookies meant to resemble a certain Girl Scout cookie. These are from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, one of the most awesome cookie-cookbooks. These are really good and actually pretty easy to make. The cookbook has other good recipes as well, like peanut butter chocolate pillow cookies, which I've made many times...

We've also been eating some good food we didn't photograph, like caramelized cabbage and onions with macaroni and Daiya, sautéed squash burritos, fried zucchini sticks, and marbled vanilla & chocolate cupcakes. Unfortunately, we've also been kind of sick as of late, which means today my lunch was nuts and tea. Hopefully that will pass soon!

Italian "sausage" sandwiches

So good!

Imagine an Italian version of a Philly cheese steak, with italian sausage, peppers, onions, and marinara sauce... ok, maybe more of an Americanized Italianized Philly cheese steak. Anyway, doesn't that sound good? I thought so, too, so I decided to make some seitan sausages and mix them with onions and peppers to try it out. It was great! The sausages turned out really well, and since I love marinara sauce, the sauce-topped sandwich was fantastic. I know some seitan-skeptics, but this one is flavorful and comes out tasting great when thinly-sliced and sautéed with peppers and onions. Alternatively, you could buy Tofurkey's vegan sausages, or another type, and save yourself some time. Recipe follows, for the sausages and sandwich assembly.

Starting the summer off right with pie and ice cream

I grew up pretty spoiled, but my biggest privilege was probably my mom's pies. She is a master of the lattice crust, always cooking it to crispy golden perfection. She's also an outdoors(wo)man and would put in the work to pick delicious fresh berries. Since moving out for college, it's been hard to find anything close to the pies I grew up on. This weekend we came close.

Vegan fruit pies are not any more difficult than pies with dairy, eggs, or lard ingredients. Why should they be? The real star of a good pie is fresh fruit and a well made crust.

The fruit part of our pie was easy. During our weekly pilgrimage to the Columbia Heights Farmer's Market (blocks from our apartment) we picked up some rhubarb and some of the last strawberries of the season. The strawberries were a deep red, ripe and juicy. Good fruit is essential for a good pie.

For the recipe we consulted our cookbook library and chose a recipe from Vegan Pie in the Sky. You can't really go wrong with this handy little cookbook that has recipes for 75 pies, tarts, cobblers and more. We followed the strawberry rhubarb crumb pie on page 67 and it turned out very nicely.

To top off our pie, we made a batch of ice cream. A future post will delve more into our ice cream churning, but we received an underutilized ice cream maker from a parent and have been putting it to good use. We follow the cookbook Vegan Scoop. This cookbook has also served us well. We tend to follow their recipes almost exactly, but we add a quarter teaspoon of xantham gum to keep ours creamy. Since our pie was heavy on flavor, we chose a plain vanilla ice cream recipe.

Vegan pie and ice cream, what could be better?

For the full recipes, checkout the two cookbooks we used.