vegan | Domestic Bliss: The Empty Nest

Vegan? Catholic who abstains from meat on Fridays? Or just looking for a hearty fall recipe?

The Star posted a recipe for Old Style Pinto Beans the other day from a cookbook called Decolonize Your Diet: Plant-Based Mexican-American Recipes for Health and Healing (affiliate link), and if you’ve got a reasonably stocked kitchen, you probably have everything you need.

There are instructions for both slow cooker (yay!) and stove top cooking, and uses dried beans with no pre-soaking required. (Well, they have to cook for a long time, but with a slow-cooker, that’s no problem.) I didn’t have pinto beans on hand so used my stash of romano beans instead.

There’s a facebook group and website that can help you find other ways to pump up the health factor in your diet. I’ll be checking them out.

9 Low and Slow Recipes for Autumn Meals

I posted recently about my interest in Mark Bittman’s Vegan Before 6 eating plan and have been slowly making my way there. I’ve eased of dairy with my cereal, opting for yoso’s Soygo yogurt. My grocer doesn’t carry the unsweetened version so I must request it, or perhaps I’ll move to almond milk with my granola. I’ve stopped using cream in my coffee, and have had a few peanut butter based sandwiches for lunch.

But I don’t really like sandwiches, in general, so need to amp up the vegetarian evening meals so that I have leftovers for lunch. I have determined that it’s pretty hard for me to get a decent vegan fast food meal as the moment I walk in to, say McDonald’s thinking about a salad, the smell draws me inexorably to the forbidden. So for the time being, I’m eating at home. Which is a good thing.

I did a Costco run yesterday and picked up some Veggie Patch Mediterranean Chick Pea and Spinach patties which I heated up for lunch today. Yummo! I have a recipe for a similar made-from-scratch patty so must dig it out, but these ones are great for a quick meal. I’m using lentil hummus in place of tzatiki, but there must be some vegan way to make the latter. I also picked up a jumbo (to me) pack of four blocks of tofu so will be scouring my recipe books for ideas. (Please post or link to your fave tofu recipes in the comments. Please!)

Besides the VB6 book which has lots of recipes, I picked up a couple more at thrift shops:

The New Vegetarian Gourmet by Byron Ayanouglu
Fresh from the Vegan Slow Cooker by Robin Robertson
Detox Dieting by Nicola Graimes

I already have The New Enchanted Broccoli Forest but have found most of those recipes to be very time consuming. I will also dig into Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi which like so much of the food from that region, has a wealth of vegan options.

The wonderful food-blogger Jenny Newlon at Dinner of Herbs has lots of great ideas, and I’m hoping for more videos from vegan chef Anita Shepherd, like this one: