mushroom-asparagus risotto

I have been playing around with risotto for at least the last year. I love it! Every time I make it, I feel like I'm in a gourmet restaurant (or a contestant on Hell's Kitchen, but let's not go there right now). And I love the endless combinations of add-ins. I used to make my mushroom risotto with mushrooms, onion, and a little goat cheese. But I think I have found an even better combo! I'm excited to share it with you, and then to eat leftovers for lunch!

Mushroom-Asparagus Risotto

Prep and cooking time = up to an hour
Serves 4-6

butter or olive oil
1 small onion, diced
1 pound mushrooms, sliced (I used a combo of baby bellas and shitakes)
1-1/2 cups Arborio rice
1 cup white wine (optional)
1 quart vegetable broth
1 bunch asparagus, chopped and steamed
1 cup shredded smoked gouda
salt and pepper, to taste

In a small pan, heat the vegetable broth until simmering
In another pan (or the microwave if you're so inclined) steam the asparagus until bright green. This can be set aside, covered, until time to add to the risotto.
In a very large pan (a wok works great), heat 1-2 tablespoons oil or butter over medium-high
Add onions and mushrooms and cook, stirring often, about 7 minutes or until beginning to soften
Add a little more (1 Tbsp) oil or butter, then add risotto, stirring to coat
Let cook for just a minute or two, then add wine *if not using wine, start adding broth
Once wine is absorbed (3-5 minutes), begin adding broth 1/2 to 1 cup at a time

*The secret with risotto is to add the hot broth in small batches and allowing most of it to absorb into the rice before adding more. During this process, you must be constantly stirring
**When you are nearing the end of your broth supply, start testing the rice by biting into it. The risotto should offer a little resistance, but not be hard or crunchy in the middle, much like al dente pasta
***If you run out of broth and the rice is not cooked through, add hot water a little at a time

Once your risotto is the perfect texture, turn your burner off
Season with salt and pepper, if desired
Stir in a little butter, if desired, to add a little extra creaminess
Stir in asparagus and cheese
Serve and fall in love!

Happy, healthy eating!

hanukkah is not just for adam sandler

My almost-6 year old asked to celebrate Hanukkah this year. Not really knowing what to serve for our celebratory dinner other than latkes and challah bread, I turned to my trusted friend allrecipes.com. I get a lot of ideas for recipes from this site, though I rarely make them as posted. I find recipes with good reviews, read the reviews, then come up with something (hopefully) yummy on my own. I came across a recipe for Applesauce Noodle Kugel that sounded great and decided to put my own twist on it. Here's what I came up with...

Apple Cinnamon Kugel

12 oz (3/4 package) wide egg noodles, boiled until al dente
1-1/2 sticks melted butter, divided
1/2 cup plain greek yogurt
4 eggs
1 cup sugar
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup applesauce
2 small apples, thinly sliced
cinnamon, to taste
6-8 graham crackers, crushed

Preheat oven to 350 degrees while noodles are boiling.
Mix melted butter (reserving a few tablespoons), yogurt, eggs, sugar, lemon juice, vanilla, and applesauce
Stir in cooked noodles and apple slices
Pour into greased 9x13 glass baking dish
Sprinkle cinnamon over top
For topping, mix graham crumbs with reserved butter and sprinkle over top
Bake 45-55 minutes, covering with foil if top begins to dry out
Let rest for 5 minutes before serving

This is by no means healthy, but it is very happy to the tummy! Having no idea what kugel should look or taste like, I think it turned out great. It's more of a dessert flavor, although I have been eating leftovers for breakfast all week. Perhaps you will, too...

Happy, healthy eating!

vegan apple-carrot muffins

I am about to share with you one of my favorite recipes!  They're perfect for Fall and are my go-to item for school parties, snacks, playgroups, really anything kid-related.  Parents love them because they're full of healthy fruits and veggies. These are egg-free, dairy-free, and nut-free.  Fruit/veg ingredients can be adjusted (more or less) without changing the taste!  I haven't done it, but I bet the sugar could be reduced as well...  Makes about 2 1/2 dozen.

Vegan Apple-Carrot Muffins

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
4 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
2-3 medium (ripe) bananas, peeled and mashed
1 1/4 cup natural applesauce
1/4 cup vegetable oil
2 cups finely grated carrots (3-4 carrots)
3 apples, peeled and grated

Preheat oven to 400 and prepare muffin tin with liners
Mix together dry ingredients in a large bowl (flour, sugars, cinnamon, baking soda and powder, salt)
In a small bowl, mix mashed bananas, applesauce, and oil.  Stir into dry ingredients until well-combined
Grate carrots and squeeze out excess moisture with paper towel.  Mix into batter.
Repeat above step with apples.
Spoon batter into prepared pan(s)  * fill 1/2 to 3/4 full - these will rise a lot
Bake for 20-25 minutes until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean.
Cool in pan for 5 minutes then remove to wire racks to cool completely.

Happy, healthy eating!

eggplant napoleon

We're having one of my recent favorites for dinner tonight!  This recipe is highly adaptable, so feel free to adjust to suit your tastes.

Eggplant Napoleon

1 eggplant
salt
1/4 cup ranch dressing
1 cup almond flour (or panko, or breadcrumbs)
1 small log goat cheese or fresh mozzarella, sliced
1 ripe tomato, sliced

Wash and slice eggplant into 1/2 inch rounds. Salt both sides and set aside for about 30 minutes
Rinse eggplant and pat dry
Preheat oven to 350
Brush ranch on eggplant rounds then coat in almond flour or breadcrumbs (both sides)
Bake for 15 minutes in a greased glass casserole dish
Flip then bake for 15 minutes more
Top with cheese and tomato slices then return to oven for 5-10 minutes, until cheese is warm and bubbly
* Make sure eggplant is soft, but not too soft!

So good!  Mine are ready to flip - only 30 minutes left til dinnertime!

dreamsicles and fuzzy navels

Yum... I'm going to a martini party this week where everyone brings a different type of martini and everyone samples it. Basically, a bunch of girls sitting around drinking froo-froo shots. Last year, the Blueberry Martini won by a landslide! Could be because it was the 15th one and everything tastes good after 15 shots! Anyway, this year I looked to the internets to help me find a good drink. I found a recipe for the Dreamy Martini and had to try it out over the weekend - to make sure it was good. And it was! Tastes just like a creamsicle. I think what made it even better was that the kids were at Grandma's for the night. Here's the recipe:

1 part vanilla vodka (I used absolut)
1 part triple sec (use grand marnier for a high-end drink)
4 parts orange juice (I used pulp-free valencia)

Shake with ice and serve in chilled glasses. Mmmmm...

And since I had leftover OJ, I decided to add some to my morning smoothie today. The result came out tasting like a fuzzy navel! So good! Here's how you make a Fuzzy Navel Smoothie:

1 banana
1 peach
1/4 pineapple
1/2 cup (or more) OJ
1/2 cup (or more) soy milk
water, if desired
baby spinach - fill up the blender!

Blend and enjoy! Tastes like the real deal, but won't leave you with a headache in the morning!

Happy, healthy drinking!

zucchini brownies

Happy birthday to me! Since I am the primary (read only) baker around here, I doubt I will be given gifts of homemade vegan goodies from my hubby and preschoolers. So, out of the freezer come... Zucchini Brownies! They taste just like regular brownies but are a whole lot healthier. I did miss the crusty top one would get with a traditional brownie, but I will gladly give it up for only 5g of fat per brownie - the trick is not to eat half the pan in one sitting! Been there, done that. I got the recipe from recipezaar and didn't change a thing this time around. The last time I made them, I used some applesauce in addition to the oil, and they turned out a bit moister and sweeter.


2 cups flour (I use a blend of unbleached white and wheat flours)
1 1/2 cups sugar (I use organic cane sugar)
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup cocoa (use a good-quality, premium brand)
2 Tbsp vanilla
1/2 cup oil (or applesauce)
2 cups finely grated zucchini (peel first if you want to "hide" the zucchini)


Mix dry ingredients
Add vanilla, oil, and zucchini and stir until well-mixed
If it seems a little dry, let it rest (to let some of the zucchini's moisture out), or add 1-2 Tbsp applesauce
Bake in an ungreased 9x13 pan 30 min at 350 degrees.


Happy, healthy (birthday) eating!

simply summer

When I was young, my mom used to marinate cucumbers in Good Seasons Italian dressing, and we would eat them like they were going out of style. Those cucumbers are the inspiration for the recipe I created below. This fresh salad, bursting with summery goodness, can be eaten as-is. Add more vegetables to your liking. Or, for more variety, toss in some pasta for a healthy pasta salad, or serve over greens with a little extra dressing for a delicious meal.

Thanks to my mom, not only for the inspiration, but also for all the delicious veggies that went into this salad! She gave us cherry and roma tomatoes, cucumbers, red and green peppers, and onion. I usually don't like raw onion, but I thought it was so little and cute, why not? I added a purple pepper from the farmer's market and a few yellow cherry tomatoes fom our garden. Voila! The At-Home Vegan's Simple Summer Salad...

Veggies:
1 cucumber, chopped
1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved or 3-4 vine-ripe tomatoes, seeded and chopped
1 bell pepper, chopped (optional)
a little chopped onion, if you wish

Dressing:
2/3 cup Red Wine Vinegar
2 Tbsp Water
2 Tbsp Oil
seasoning of your choice, to taste (salt and pepper, italian spices, or the old standby Good Seasons Italian packet)

Chop veggies to desired size and place in large bowl
Combine dressing ingredients in small bowl
Toss half the dressing with veggies until veggies are well-coated
*Use all dressing if making pasta salad
Serve chilled

Happy, healthy eating!

shrooms and spinach skillet

For dinner last night, I threw together one of my quick and easy favorites. It takes 20 minutes, tops, and tastes delish!

At-Home Vegan Shrooms and Spinach Skillet

1/2 onion, chopped
2-3 Tbsp minced garlic
1 cup baby portabellas, sliced
1 cup sundried tomatoes OR roasted tomatoes OR 2-3 ripe tomatoes, chopped
approx 1 bag or 4 huge handfuls baby spinach
salt to taste, if using fresh tomatoes
1 box whole wheat couscous

1. Over medium high, cook garlic and onion until onion begins to sweat
2. Start boiling water for couscous (once water boils and you add the couscous, it can sit covered until ready to serve)
3. To skillet, add mushrooms and tomatoes and cook until tender
4. Add spinach, by the handful, until wilted
5. Serve over couscous

Simple. Delicious. Dinner.

Happy, healthy eating!

success at the dinner table!

As a mom of two preschoolers, I tend to turn small milestones into huge events. Take, for example, my picky eater. She used to eat only bread, cheese, and blueberries. The cheese could not be on the bread but had to be eaten separately. The day she ate a grilled cheese, I may have wept openly. Needless to say, the peanut butter sandwich was a huge accomplishment, as was the salami sandwich earlier this summer. Imagine, salami AND cheese in between bread!

But I digress. My kids, as you may have guessed, are not vegetarian and neither is my husband. This has made dinnertime a huge hassle for me, the Maker of the Dinner. This past week, I decided to try an experiment. I said, "I am going to cook one meal for everyone, and everyone is going to eat it." And guess what? They did!

I made my delicious Black Bean Burgers, and they were a huge success. My husband and I ate them sans bun with a little salsa and guacamole, and I turned them into "cheeseburgers" for the kids. Miss Picky was skeptical after a few bites and feigned a tummy ache, but I was able to bribe her with a frozen yogurt. This went over so well that the next day she requested to try couscous - and liked it! Then the planets must have shifted because when my parents took us out to dinner last night, she refused a piece of salami in the antipasto salad... But we focus on the positive around here!

On a side note, Buddy's Pizza now has a multigrain crust that is just as great as the original, AND you can order lactose-free veggie cheese! Choirs of angels started singing when I opened my menu. Yum...

I digress again! Here is my original recipe for At-Home Vegan's Spicy Black Bean Burgers. I don't measure much when I cook, so all measurements are guesstimations.

1 sweet onion, finely chopped
A couple cloves of garlic, minced
1 bell pepper, finely chopped
1 cup mushrooms, chopped (I like baby bellas)
2 cans black beans, drained and rinsed
1 Tbsp chili powder, or to taste
1 Tbsp cumin, or to taste
A few shakes hot sauce, to taste
1+ cups oats

1. Saute onion, garlic, bell pepper and mushroom until soft
2. Meanwhile, coursely mash black beans
3. Add spices and hot sauce, to taste
4. When veggies have finished cooking, combine with black beans
5. Mix in oats until desired texture
6. Form into balls and flatten slightly
7. Wrap individually in plastic wrap and refridgerate (up to one week) until ready to cook

This makes up to 12 small burgers

To cook:
Spray a pan with cooking spray and heat on medium-high
Cook until a blackened crust begins to form, about 3-5 minutes per side
Serve hot with desired toppings

Notes about bean burgers:

• This recipe makes a great dip! Omit the oats.
• You don't need oil or water to saute the veggies - they naturally sweat while they cook.
• I use Quaker Multi Grain Hot Cereal, which is a blend of rye, barley, oats, and wheat.
• These taste best when allowed to sit a few hours or overnight so the flavors can meld and the oats can suck up some of the moisture.
• If you're hoping for a hamburger-ish substitute, keep looking. These are definitely "veggie" burgers with their own unique and crumbly properties. A lot of bean burger recipes will use eggs as a binding agent, which makes them closer in texture to "real" burgers.
• That being said, you can dress them up like burgers and no one will be able to tell the difference until they bite into the yumminess.

Happy, healthy eating!

what's in the blender? breakfast!

When I first decided to "go veggie", I intended to follow Joel Fuhrman's Eat to Live plan. It's a strict vegan diet with almost-unlimited amount of fresh fruits and veggies, limited whole grains, and no oil, salt, sugar, processed foods, etc. While it didn't end up being my bag, baby, it taught me a valuable lesson in vegan breakfast food... the green smoothie! Almost every website and blog I visited while researching the Eat to Live diet had "recipes" for green smoothies. And while I wasn't too keen on drinking a salad, I decided to follw the crowd and give it a try. I'm so glad I did! I love making smoothies in the morning, deciding what fruits to pack in, and feeling awake and energized after polishing it off.

Here's what's probably in my At-Home Vegan Smoothie on any given day:

• large banana
• handful blueberries
• 1/4 of a peeled, cored pineapple (I buy them cored - they're the same price as a whole pineapple and I don't have to do any of the work. Plus, I save the containers for leftovers of other yummy vegan meals!)
• a couple tablespoons of ground flax seed (a healthy fat, full of great omegas)
• a little green tea (I just started adding this - I used to just use water)
• a little light soymilk (for creaminess and B vitamins)
• lots and lots of spinach - enough to fill the blender the rest of the way

Blend until yummy and enjoy!

A few notes about green smoothies:

• You can't taste the spinach - promise!
• You can add absolutely anything to these! Watermelon adds a light, sweet flavor. Strawberries are surprisingly un-sweet so you may want to pair them with another sweet fruit. Fresh peaches are awesome, frozen are not so great. Experiment until you find out what's right for you.
• I freeze my spinach, the whole bag of it! I buy the big bag at Costco and throw the whole thing in the freezer. It doesn't go bad and it's always there when I need it. You can't make a salad out of it once it's frozen, but it goes nicely into sauces, stir frys, and pizza.
• Keep a balance of frozen and fresh ingredients. I personally like my smoothie cold but not icy or slushy, so the spinach is typically the only frozen ingredient I use. If you use any frozen ingredients, you don't need ice.
• You don't have to have a top-of-the-line blender. Many vegan sites will say you can't get by with a regular blender, and I think they're just trying to sell you a $400 blender. I'm sure it would help, but mine is of the mid-range under $100 variety and it works just fine. You can still see little flecks of spinach, which I guess some people have a problem with. But, if you get creeped out at spinach in your smoothie, why put spinach in your smoothie?!?

I'm going to spin class tonight, so I don't like to eat too heavy or have too many veggies before class. For lunch I had celery with Bean Dip (bonus recipe: warm a can of veggie refried beans mixed with about 1/2 jar of good-quality salsa, then stir in a little guacamole for a quick and easy lunch or snack). For dinner I'm going to have a fantastic rice, lentil, and fruit salad a la Moosewood. I can't wait to eat it! When I get home tonight, I might snack on a banana with peanut butter. In the meantime, I am going to try to not eat too many blueberry muffins. The zucchini bread is safely tucked away in the freezer - for now at least. Sweets are my downfall (last month I made a butter and egg-filled Barbie cake for my daughter's birthday and ate practically the whole thing), but at least these ones are vegan :)

Happy, healthy eating!

blueberry bonanza

Welcome to the my very first post! While I'm very excited about joining the blogosphere, I'm even more excited about all the baking I've been doing today! I took my girls blueberry picking yesterday, and we came home with 5 pounds of blueberry goodness.

After eating til we turned blue, giving some away, and making blueberry freezer jam I still had a ton of berries left. I pulled out my handy homemade vegan cookbook (recipes I collect from the internets) and found two awesome recipes.


Here's the first recipe, for Vegan Blueberry Muffins. I found the recipe on recipezaar, but it was credited to a 2005 edition of Vegetarian Times. So, props and credit to both!

1/4 cup vegan margarine
1 cup sugar (I used organic cane sugar)

1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/2 cup soymilk
1 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp baking powder
2 cups flour (I used 1c unbleached all-purpose and 1c whole wheat flour)

2 cups fresh blueberries

1. Preheat oven to 350 and grease or line muffin tins
2. Cream margarine and sugar in a large bowl
3. Add remaining wet ingredients and mix until combined
4. Add dry ingredients and mix in with a wooden spoon
5. Toss blueberries in a zippered bag with a little flour - this will prevent them from sinking to the bottom of the muffin
6. Gently fold in blueberries
7. Spoon into muffin tins, about 3/4 full
8. Bake 30-35 minutes, until tops are firm
9. Remove to racks to cool

Yields 1 to 1 1/2 dozen delicious muffins!

This next recipe is for zucchini bread from Hell Yeah It's Vegan! I modified this one (and by "modified" I mean "added blueberries") to create Zucchini-Blueberry Bread! So moist and flavorful, and the blueberries add a gooey dimension. Yum!

2 cups all-purpose flour (I used unbleached)
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 Tbsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 Tbsp cinnamon
2 tsp nutmeg

2 cups light brown sugar
1/2 cup applesauce
1/2 cup oil
1/2 cup + 1 Tbsp warm water mixed with 6 Tbsp flax seed (this is used in a lot of recipes as an egg substitute)
1 tsp vanilla

2 1/2 cups grated zucchini (I used a zucchini from my mom's garden that was as big as my forearm)

1 cup fresh blueberries (or more, depending on how blueberry-y you want it)

1. Preheat oven to 350 and grease 2 loaf pans
2. Mix dry ingredients
3. In a separate bowl, mix brown sugar, applesauce, oil, flax-water mixture, and vanilla
4. Stir in zucchini
5. Add dry ingredients to wet and stir with a wooden spoon until combined
6. Toss blueberries in a zippered bag with a little flour to prevent sinking
7. Gently fold in blueberries
8. Pour batter into prepared loaf pans
9. Bake 45-55 minutes, until a knife inserted into loaf comes out clean
10. Cool in pans until able to handle, then transfer to wire racks to cool

Yields 2 yummy loaves - one for you and one to share!

Thanks so much for reading! I'm excited to share these recipes with you - there are many more to come. Stay tuned...