9 Days of Valentine's: Part 9....

Sadly our 9 days of celebration have come to an end. Part of me is really sad about it because we were having so much fun and eating so much delicious food. But, the other half of me is really happy to finally go back to eating salad, like... just salad... till like.... the end of time. Ha.

Our last hurrah was quite the meal indeed. It had everything you could ask for in a grand dinner. A salad, a hearty main course, a decadent dessert, and a bottle of good wine.

We started with the Italian Chopped Salad from Chloe Coscarelli’s book “Chloe’s Italian Vegan Kitchen.” Now, if I’m being honest I wasn’t expecting much from this salad. I made it because it had a nice picture and it was super easy and I had everything called for on hand. I figured after a week of vegan meat and decadence we could use a little veg. But man, oh man was this salad fantastic! Seriously, it was about 1000 times better then any Italian Salad I’ve had in any Olive Garden type restaurant.

The salad contains romaine, tomatoes, green onion, kalamata olives, basil, chickpeas, salt, pepper and crumbled tofu. The dressing is a simple mixture of olive oil, red wine vinegar, agave, salt, Dijon mustard, and garlic. It sounds so easy but you wouldn’t believe the flavor. Normally I don’t like raw tofu in my salads but I liked this a lot because it was just 7oz and it was just enough to give the salad a texture of cheese. If I didn’t have a main course that needed digging into I would have eaten this entire salad myself it was that good.

But speaking of main courses, for our final celebratory meal I chose another dish from Alicia C. Simpson’s book “Quick and Easy Vegan Celebrations.” Truly the Fusilli in Cabernet Sauce with Portobello Brisket sounded too good to pass up. There are a few steps involved in making this meal and I ended up not evening getting started until after 8:30pm but surprisingly the whole thing came together really quick.

First things first, make your portobello brisket. Lucky for me sometime in the afternoon I went over the recipe and saw that while you could get away with only marinated the shrooms for 20 minutes it was best to do it longer. So I think I ended up letting these marinate on the counter top for about five hours. Turning them over occasionally. The marinade is made with olive oil, red wine, garlic, shallot, Dijon Mustard and tarragon. Once you’re done marinating you roast these guys in the oven for 20 minutes then slice them up when they cool down a bit. The smell is heavenly.

While your shrooms are roasted make your sauce. It’s fairly simple, shallots, garlic, Cabernet Sauvignon, agave, basil, red pepper flakes, rosemary, salt, stock, crushed tomatoes and tomato paste. Combine all that in a pot, then let it simmer.

That’s the hard part, once all that’s done you plate your pasta, drench it in some sauce, scatter some sliced shrooms on top and serve. I actually decided to drizzle a little of the extra mushroom cooking liquid over top of my pasta. The marinade sauce was too good to go to waste and when combines with that meaty, earthy mushroom liquid that seeps out during cooking - OH MY!  My husband and I really had to control ourselves and not go back for seconds because we knew a great dessert was in store for us.

For dessert I went back to “Chloe’s Vegan Italian Kitchen” and made her Tiramisu. This was actually a super last minute decision that kind of hit me for no reason. I was just flipping through the book and the picture looked so good, and I thought it might be a nice finish to our celebratory week and I just happened to have everything on hand - except the ingredients to make the coconut whip cream but I did have a tub of So Delicious Coco Whip in the freezer! - The thing is, it’s strange that I would want to make a Tiramisu in the first place because it’s never been a dessert I was crazy about. Sure I’ve had plenty of non-vegan versions in the past and thought they were so-so. I’ve made a couple of vegan versions myself and thought they were better then their non-vegan counterparts but still kind of hum-drum. Chloe’s Tiramisu though, is out of this freaking world! No lie. Probably, hands down the best tiramisu I’ve ever made and ever eaten anywhere! My husband who’s also never been a huge fan of Tiramisu agreed completely and had we not already been so full from dinner we might just have finished off the entire bowl.

I love how ridiculously easy Chloe’s version is. You make a vanilla cake, cut it in cubes soak it in coffee and rum, layer some whip cream over top, dust it with chocolate and repeat. She says to leave it in the fridge overnight - which we did. - and then it’s ready to eat. Of course I used store-bought whip so it might taste different with home-made, but I’ve been using Chloe’s book for a while now, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a recipe fail from her. She is amazing, and she is especially amazing at dessert. Seriously, this girl should be right up there with Vegan Cook Book Goddess’s such as Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, Isa Chandra Moskowitz, Terry Hope Romero, and Joni Marie Newman.

So that’s it, I hope y’all have had as much fun following our celebration as we did creating it.  I’m definitely sad it’s over, but don’t worry, I have a few more cool posts planned in next week and a half before I leave for Europe.

PS: And incase anyone was curious though we loved every meal of the past 9 days our favorites were. Coq Au Vin. Osso Bucco. Seitan Parmesan with Garlic Green Beans, Potatoes with Germolatta and Red Velvet Cupcakes and Italian Chopped Salad, Fusilli in Cabernet Sauce with Portobello Brisket and Tiramisu. In no particular order, they were all fan-freaking-tastic!

9 Days of Valentine's: Part 7, The Big Day...

So, this is it, what we finally ended up having on the big day. We started off with a bang - did you expect anything less? - I got home form work Saturday morning to find my husband had decked-out my desk in all sorts of Valentine’s Day love. A bouquet of flowers, a Valentine’s Day balloon, a stuffed skunk holding a heart, some heart-shaped decorations strung up across the desk and the bookshelf and a card. I really did marry the most amazing, thoughtful man in the world. After I marveled at his little surprise I set about making breakfast.

Crepes were on the menu, Chocolate Hazelnut crepes to be exact.  The recipe comes from the French chapter of Mark Reinfeld’s book “The 30 Minute Vegan’s Taste of Europe.” I am not a skilled crepe maker. I love to eat them, but they always fall apart on me. I like to say it’s because I don’t have a proper crepe pan, but that’s just an excuse. In the end though some of my crepes fell apart I at least got enough good ones out of the deal for a halfway decent picture, and broken or not they were all freaking-delicious! Also, much easier then one might expect crepes to be. The batter comes together quickly and because they’re so thin they cook up fast too. The chocolate hazelnut filling is simply made with hazelnut butter, cocoa powder, soy milk, and sweetener. I thought these might be too nutty for my picky husband but he loved them. They were just perfect. Really the recipe should have been served with strawberries, but I was fresh out and so I used blueberries instead and I think it worked just as well.

So that was it until dinner. We went French for breakfast and decided on Italian for dinner. For our feast I used Alicia C. Simpson’s book “Quick and Easy Vegan Celebrations” which I’ve come to realize I don’t use often enough! And I made the Seitan Parmesan as well as the Garlic Green Beans from her chapter on Valentine’s Day. I chose the seitan Parmesan because it sounded sexy, and Valentine’s Dayish, also because there was a time when my husband loved Chicken Parm. Personally I have never really liked Chicken Parm, I’d never eaten it until I moved to Chicago and I wasn’t particularly impressed. I made the non-vegan version a couple of times on my husband’s behalf but I was never crazy about it. Holidays though - at least for me - are about making things you don’t normally make, and about finding something special to cook for your loved one. This seemed to fit the bill on both counts and so I was curious to try the recipe out.

First you need to make a seitan ‘chicken’ which Alicia provides a very quick and simple recipe for making. Actually this is probably one of the simplest ‘boil’ version seitan’s I’ve made, and probably one of the most delicious too. Seriously, the broth SMELLED like chicken. I also loved that her recipe only called for water and seasonings unlike so many other boil recipes that call for 6 cups of broth. Honestly, I don’t have the money to waste on using 6 cups of broth to make a few chunks of seitan. This is probably one of the most economical recipes I’ve made.

So, once that’s done you bread your seitan, bake it, then cover it in sauce and vegan mozzarella, bake some more and voila! Amazing! Seriously, dish wins second place in my favorite for the week, and actually, might even tie for first place. It was incredible! Trust me when I say the price of the book is worth this recipe alone!

Of course the green beans were damn good too, but then I have a soft spot for sauntered green beans. She uses garlic, oil, shallots and almonds in the recipe as well, only I left out the almonds since my husband is not a fan. I have to say these were super flavorful and a good accompaniment to the seitan.

I also decided to make the Roasted Potatoes with Germolata from Chloe Coscarelli’s book “Chloe’s Vegan Italian Kitchen” these were super simple and yet super delicious. It’s just potatoes roasted in olive oil, salt and pepper, then once cooked they’re tossed with a mixture of minced garlic, parsley, oil, grated lemon peel, and more salt and pepper. It sounds simple, but these were some of the best potatoes I’ve ever had.

For dessert we had the Red Velvet Cupcakes with Cream Cheese Frosting also from Alicia’s book “Quick and Easy Vegan Celebrations” I can’t tell you how good these were, the cakes were super moist and so full of flavor I loved every bite. However I had a bit of a problem, actually I had several problems all day. 1) I didn’t have enough gluten to make a full recipe of Chicken Seitan, so it’s a good thing I always keep seitan on hand in the freezer. I used a chub of Mediterranean Seitan from Terry Hope Romero’s “Vegan Eats World” for the Parm. In the picture the Big cutlet is Alicia’s and the two small cutlets are the chub from the freezer cut in half. 2) I didn’t have any lemon so my husband had to go to the store on the way home. 3) I ran out of powdered sugar. I thought I had enough but I was wrong. So instead of cream cheese frosting I had a cream cheese glaze - still delicious though. 4) I also ran out of cream cheese! I thought I had enough and I might have only when I opened the container it had got moldy! So instead of cream cheese I used vegan sour cream, it may not be exactly the same but similar enough that an unsuspecting pallet may not notice. In any case it turned out and none of these problems are any fault of the authors.

To wash everything down I made the Ginger Champagne Cocktails form Alicia’s New Years Eve chapter. These were super good. Loved the ginger bite!

And that was our Valentine’s Day. Of course Valentine’s should have been the last hurrah but I started cooking my 9 days a little late, so I have 2 post Valentine’s meals to talk about. Check back tomorrow to see Day 8.

Zuppa Toscana...

This may come as a surprise to ‘die-hard’ Zuppa Toscana fans but I have never had a bowl of this - seemingly - famous soup, until today. Unbeknownst to me this is everyone’s favorite soup at the ‘Italian’ Restaurant chain Olive Garden, and though I’ve eaten there many times I’ve never had it. So why did I decide to make a vegan version? Well, the answer is really quite simple, this past week I kept seeing recipes for homemade Zuppa Toscana popping up on Facebook and other social media. My first reaction after reading the ingrieients list was ‘gross’ and ‘so unhealthy’ as the original contains loads of sausage, bacon and heavy cream, but then my second thought was ‘but what if it was vegan?’ and so for the past few days I’ve been dreaming of a veganized version of a soup I’ve never eaten, crazy right?

Today, as it happens was also a perfect day for soup as it’s quite damp, cold and rainy outside. Wonderful soup weather and so I happily set to the kitchen to try my hand at this unknown delicacy. I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, something creamy, salty, smokey and spicy I guess, and really this soup did not disappoint. It’s loaded with so much delicious flavor, and made me go back for a second bowl. Further proof that food doesn’t need animal flesh or secretions to be tasty and decadent.

Zuppa Toscana 

1 Tbsp Olive Oil
1lb Vegan Italian Sausage Sliced - I used Field Roast
1 Large Yellow Onion diced
12 Garlic Cloves minced
1 tsp Red Pepper Flakes
1 tsp Fennel Seeds
4 ½ C Vegan Chicken Broth - or Vegetable Broth
6-8 Russet or Yukon Gold Potatoes diced- I used 8 and made a  mix of both
1 tsp Sea Salt
2 C Kale torn into bite-sized pieces
½ to 2/3 of a 15oz Can Full Fat Coconut Milk - How much you use depends on how many potatoes you use.
1-2 tsp Liquid Smoke - I used 2 tsp.
Ground Black Pepper to taste
1/4 C Minced Parsley

- Heat half the Olive Oil in the medium sized sauce pan over medium-high heat.

- When sizzling, add in the sliced Italian Sausage and cook until browned. About 5 minutes. Remove the sausage from the pot, and place on a plate, set aside.

- Heat the remaining oil in the pot, and add the onions and garlic. Saute for 3-5 minutes until golden and fragrant.

- Add in the red pepper flakes, and fennel seeds, saute another 2 minutes.

- Add in the Vegan Chicken broth, the potatoes, and the salt. Bring to a boil, and cook for five minutes. Reduce to a simmer and cook an additional 10-15 minutes until the potatoes are tender.

- Using a potato masher or the back of a wooden spoon crush some of the potatoes to thicken the soup. Leave some potatoes whole because you want the soup chunky, you want to crush just enough to get a nice creamy thickness.

- Once potatoes have been crushed, add in the cooked Italian Sausage, and simmer for five minutes.

- Add in the Kale, and coconut milk and simmer for an additional 6 minutes until the kale is wilted and tender.

- Turn off the heat, add in the minced parsley, and liquid smoke and stir to combine. Add in black pepper as desired and taste for seasonings, adjust as needed. Let stand 10 minutes before serving so that the flavors have time to develop.

- Enjoy with some nice crusty bread and a glass of red wine.

*** Note - Field Roast is NOT gluten-free, but you can make this soup Gluten-Free buy using a GF Vegan Sausage.***