so i finally got around to making a meal from the much raved about cookbook, veganomicon. i picked what appeared to be the easiest recipe in the book (i cannot cook), did some ingredient hunting at the local health food store, and i was in business. special thanks to your vegan mom for pointing me in the direction of nature mart for their bulk bins of vital wheat gluten.

veganomicon’s black bean burger with sautéed mushrooms, sprouts, tomato, onion, avocado, vegenaise and colman’s english mustard.

in the end, these burgers turned out great…although i was a little worried during the process. after i had done all my fancy ingredient shopping at nature mart and whole foods, while in ralphs i realized i’d forgotten to buy bread crumbs. argh!!—all the varieties they offered contained whey, nonfat dry milk, or (shudder) egg whites. i decided it wasn’t worth the trip in la traffic to the nearest health food store just for one ingredient, so i used crumbled up hamburger buns instead. i think this resulted in my patties falling apart a little bit, but i just kept cooking them (longer than the recipe suggested) and they turned out just dandy.

more pix after the jump.

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One of the glorious things about pasta is that it’s really quick and easy to cook. It takes a lot of practice to get amazing pasta, but you have to try almost as hard to screw it up completely (overcooking it is about the only sin). One of our favorites is extremely fast to prepare and can be adapted in a multitude of different ways. Like most Italian recipes it’s simple and leaves little scope for error.

Tastes even better than it looks!

The key is to prepare everything separately, and then bring it together into a tremendous crescendo of flavor and texture right at the last minute. In that way you’ll keep the sausages crispy, the pasta firm and the sauce just tangy enough.

Yummy pasta in a bowl!

This is so simple to cook, you could do it with your eyes shut, but I don’t suggest you try that in case you get burned. That’s not good.

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because i have a traditional english husband, i decided to cook him a traditional english dinner…vegan style!

cornish pasty: a baked savoury pastry case filled with diced fake meat, potato, onion and peas.

the pasties came out wonderful. i’d never had one before, but my husband assured me they tasted authentic, as good as anything he’d had back home.

recipe after the jump.
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i write this post for two reasons: to give you a wonderful, hearty chili recipe that can be ready in no time, AND to show you a great new product i just discovered.

extra protein seitan and worthington chili

this chili recipe is awesome, and soooooo full of protein…but even more importantly, i hope it introduces you to a WHOLE NEW VEGAN PRODUCT that’s been right under your nose for years: worthington! 

have you ever even heard of this product? i hadn’t until recently. but now that i know it exists, i find it in every ralphs i visit, from city to city. 

recipe after the jump. (and even if you are familiar with worthington, you’ll wanna read how to make this ultimate seitan chili meal anyways!)
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We British love our curry. For sure, a vindaloo is the British national dish over fish and chips – factually, more brits eat curry on a regular basis than any other cuisine. They say “you never miss what you never had”. Well, I’ve had it and I miss it, yearning frequently for a rainy evening where I can pop out of my local pub into the Bombay Palace restaurant across the road, and order an onion bhaji followed by vegetable vindaloo with pilau rice and a roti. Don’t get me wrong – there are Indian restaurants here in LA, but none of them come remotely close to the taste, texture and experience of a British curry.

So, I set out to emulate the Great British Curry in my own kitchen, and I can tell you that I’ve come pretty close.

Here’s a close-up of what you can expect:

And here it is in a dish ready to be served:

Within an hour of prep time I can make a curry dish that tastes so similar to a curry house back home that I can close my eyes after eating it and hear the patter of rain on the streets of London.

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ahhh…sunday morning breakfast. what better way to begin the end of the weekend than with a stomach full of homemade vegan food?

fantastic frittata: quarrygirl.com’s veganized version of the monterey frittata

i REALLY love a leisurely sunday breakfast. 3 cups of coffee and a calorific vegan feast sounds like the perfect way to prolong the agony of the forthcoming week. but in a world where most restaurants are packed on sunday mornings and/or pride themselves on the fact they shovel heaping piles of eggs onto peoples’ plates, it’s hard for me to get morning meal satisfaction on the day it matters most. 

this week, i found solace in this amazing recipe…located right under my nose, in the back of my cupboard, on the back of a tofu scrambler box. all it needed was to be veganized…
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Ordering pizza was one of my favorite activities before I became a vegan. Now, though, that avenue of pleasure is firmly closed off to me since I don’t eat dairy. All is not lost, though — if you live close to Hollywood in LA, there’s always Damiano’s, but their delivery customer service is appalling (last time I ordered it took them nearly two hours to deliver a cold pizza — and that was when I lived under two miles away). There’s a reasonable frozen pizza option, but nothing beats freshly made pizza with ingredients you can select and add at will.

So, I set about creating a similar experience to delivery pizza in terms of taste, timing and effort. I succeeded in two of those (taste and timing), but on the effort front, nothing beats the convenience of calling a ‘phone number to get hot food delivered to your home, just as nothing beats not being milked to death if you’re a cow.

When I used to order pizza, it would take around 40-50 minutes from picking up the ‘phone to the local Pizza Hut to when it arrived on my doorstep. This method of preparing this pizza takes a little less time, but the end result is very comparable to delivered pizza if you’re happy to put in the effort.

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There’s a sushi restaurant in West Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard called Ari-Ya. It is descended from an identical restaurant in the same location called Murakami. I remember when Murakami became Ari-Ya: the only thing that changed was the name, even the menus were the same, with sticky labels gracefully replacing Murakami with Ari-Ya. It’s still that way, if you check it out!

They have a regular sushi menu (the veggie rolls are a perfect vegan treat), but the reason I go there is a totally unique salad that’s SO GOOD. While, technically, this should be an Ari-Ya salad, I’m calling it by its maiden name of Murakami salad. Why? Just because.

In keeping with the Quarrygirl modus-el-operandi, I decided to emulate said salad at home, and hopefully improve the recipe to my own taste. The secret to a good salad is proportion: too much of any one ingredient throws the taste off balance quickly.

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every time i go to the uk, i try new and wonderful food that i wish i could take back home to los angeles. well guess what? turns out i can!

spicy dumpling noodles (the quarrygirl version): steamed vegetable gyoza, asian vegetables, udon noodles, and miso broth

on a recent trip to london, i felt so out of my element. i was wandering the streets looking for any one of the vegan restaurants i’d so carefully researched online…none of which i was finding. to make matters worse, i was with my ex-vegetarian (now vegan) english husband who was kindly patronizing me as i promised to show him all the “vegan friendly” restaurants i’d bragged about finding in his hometown that he’d failed to notice, because he must have been blind!

2 hours later…no vegan restaurants. he’s late for a meeting…and his stupid american-girl-of-a-wife, who doesn’t even know from which direction the traffic will be crossing, is aimlessly pulling him around the west end looking for a restaurant that understands the difference between vegan (vg) and vegetarian (vo). disaster.

15 minutes left before the lunch window slams shut and my husband has take off, we happen across a little shop called itsu on regent street, and he convinces me to give it a try. completely pwned, i agree, and follow him in and try to make the best of the situation.

and boy am i glad i did!

recipe after the jump…

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Mr Meaner’s mantra about restaurant food is “If they can make it, so can YOU!”. And the corollary is often “BETTER”. Here’s an example of creating a dish from scratch with nothing but the taste memory of some truly outstanding airport food.

On a recent trip back to LA from wine country, we happened to hang around in SFO for an hour or so while waiting to board. The post-vineyard pangs of hunger began to set in, so I was wandering between Baja Fresh, Subway and a minimalist food court in Terminal 3 when I happened upon “Tomokazu Japanese Food”. An unassuming little place with two very helpful Japanese serving ladies who were only too happy to explain that the only “non meat” thing on the menu was Curry a with a choice of Chicken, Beef or Tofu.

Moving on from the “non meat” Chicken or Beef curry, I focused on the Tofu option asking if it had anything animal-derived in it (chicken stock, cream, milk powder… The usual questions). One of the servers pulled out a flip book with the ingredients listed, and showed it to me. Indeed, it had nothing remotely animal in it, so I went ahead and ordered the dish.

Two minutes later I was eating one of the most satisfying tofu/sauce/rice bowls I’d ever come across. It was spicy, yet very flavorful and the bed of rice (which the sauce soaked into) was absolutely divine. After boarding my flight back I spent quite a while thinking about how to emulate the feast.

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i’ve ruined 2 blenders in 2008…both were the victims of this exact hummus recipe. i won’t go into detail about how i wrecked them, because it’s far too embarrassing. i think i’ll just give you the recipe and some tips to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to you. trust me, the hummus recipe is amazing…and if you follow some simple guidelines, you can prepare it with out sacrificing any of your kitchen appliances. i, on the other hand, had to learn the hard way—so the hummus pictured was never actually eaten. i’m sure it would have been damn good though…

step #1, the ingredients.
here’s what you’ll need to make the perfect hummus:
1 can of chickpeas with 1/4 cup of their liquid
2 tablespoons of tahini paste
4 tablespoons of lemon juice
2 tablespoons of olive oil
2 cloves of garlic
1/2 teaspoon of salt

step #2, the mixing.
now that you’ve got the stuff, combine it all in a blender or food processor…

step #3, don’t be a dumbass.
now, here comes an important bit…
before you blend everything together, check to make sure no foreign objects (or loose pieces of the blender itself) are inside the blender. that may lead to hummus that tastes like plastic and smells like burning metal.

step #4, blend.
once you’ve checked all the other boxes, blend the ingredients for about 5 minutes, or until your hummus is a smooth and creamy texture.

(i don’t have a picture of the finished product because while i’ve definitely got steps 1,2, and 4 down, i failed to follow step 3)

good luck! this really is the best hummus if you actually finish it!

There comes a time when one has to make a choice about a superlative that will stay with one for the rest of one’s life. “Best” is right up there with “Worst” as an all-encompassing word that leaves the recipient in no doubt about your opinion.

It is with this post that I tackle the “Best Salad in the World?”. I put the question mark at the end as it’s the best salad for ME, but it might not be for you. But it probably will be if you make it.

There’s a nice northern Italian restaurant on the ground floor of a building in West LA that I used to work in, and one day I ended up eating at my desk, yet forgetting about a lunch meeting at the restaurant (called “Il Moro”, pidgin Italian for “Tomorrow”). So, upon ordering at the restaurant, I decided to eat light and ordered a salad called the “Garga del Moro”. I enjoyed it so much that I set about creating it at home. Here’s my version of the “Best Salad in the World”. NO ifs, ands or buts.

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i love food that causes me pain and makes my eyes water. so naturally, i find a typical potato salad rather dull. last night i came up with this recipe (adapted from many others) that’s extremely spicy, rich with flavor, and 100% vegan.

here’s what you’ll need to make it happen:
2 pounds of red potatoes
4 stalks of celery
1 red onion
1 1/2 cups of vegenaise
5 tablespoons of colman’s english mustard
1 teaspoon of salt
black pepper to taste (i use lots!)

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i don’t like mondays! nothing is worse than waking up after 2 relaxing days filled with downtime, vegan meals, and alcohol, knowing it’s time to go to work and start a brand new week. luckily, today i knew i wouldn’t have to stress out about making dinner…i had all the ingredients on hand to make crescent pups, the perfect monday night meal that can be ready in minutes.

this is a really quick & easy recipe to make, and all the necessary ingredients have months of shelf-life. that being said, if you keep your fridge stocked, you can have crescent pups ready to go anytime as an impromptu appetizer, a hurried dinner, or an unexpected snack. they come in especially handy after weeknight gigs—-nothing beats coming home tired and half-drunk after rocking out and having pups to turn to.

recipe after the jump…

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