A Gift of Cookies

I got a message from a friend. She sent me a package and wanted to make sure it had arrived. I hadn’t, so the anticipation began. She had sent me a necklace as a surprise this summer. What could it be?

It came next morning. It arrived early without announcement. My husband saw it as he was pulling out of the garage. I needed to go to work so I ran it in put it on the table and left. It was addressed to the whole family. I got the feeling that she made us something. I couldn’t guess what. The box was bigger than I expected. A plain brown box with some dents from it’s journey. At work as I packed other boxes full of gifts for others it was all I could think of. What could it contain?

Eight hours later I am at home with the family gathered around the box. We get the scissors and with some difficulty we manage to cut the tape from around the top flaps of the box and open them. First brown paper then finally a tin decorated with squiggly Christmas trees and stuck on top a red paper with a handmade calligraphy label. “Cookies Handmade by Sherri and Christie”

It is the first time I have gotten cookies in the mail since I was a girl. I cannot wait even with knowing dinner is waiting I pull the top of the tins and rustling through the tissue paper I pull out a green sesame cookie and a ginger snap. They are better than expected. My first taste of vegan cookies.

The above is a piece I wrote for the writing group I am involved in. Until this week I had not gotten homemade cookies in the mail for many years. It moved me so much that. I felt I should post it here. Many thanks to Sherri and Christie who both write for Vegan Cooking Club. Sherri Let me know that many of the cookies come from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I look forward to reading that Cookbook. The above Picture was taken after some have been eaten. Getting cookies at Christmas time was something I looked forward to as a child.

Many years We got a big box of cookies from my grandmother and I remember the wonderful Santa sugar cookies thick with icing detailing his outfit right down to his black boots. She was an artist. Living half way across the country from her I never got to see her make them. I can’t remember when she last sent some.

Meatless Shepherd's Pie

A few weeks back my Friend Sherri posted a vegan Shepherd's Pie over on Vegan Cooking Club. This got me thinking. I am a great lover of shepherd’s pie and cottage pie. I did some growing up in the UK and it is standard fare there--great pub food. In my quest for Meatless Monday recipes I decided that I would take a stab at making a vegetarian version.

From what I understand and have been brought up to think, shepherd’s pie and cottage pie were inexpensive ways to stretch out meat in herding communities by adding a bunch of other things and topping with potatoes. Shepherd’s pie usually made with ground lamb and a gravy sauce. Cottage is made with beef and a tomato sauce base.

I made shepherd’s pie in cooking class as a 12-year-old in my 1st year of my English school. I remember making it, but for some reason that recipe is not in my lesson book from then. I always look there and then make it up but since I was planning on converting it to meatless, I decided I needed to start with a solid recipe.

I looked through all my cook books. I finally found a recipe for cottage pie that looked good and easy to convert in Graham Kerr's Smart Cooking. (For background Graham Kerr was once the Galloping Gourmet, he started to cook low fat and then minmax.  This is a cookbook from that era and so I felt that the little meat in it could be easily substituted.) So I set out to make it.

I started with the basic recipe that Mr. Kerr wrote, substituting the meat and the bulgur with texturized soy protein (TSP). I measured and stirred and tasted. With the tasting I came up ...”Hmm needs something”. I opened my freezer and found both white puree and green puree from The Sneaky Chef. I added some of both. It needed more veggies and I added peas. This was a good improvement but it still needed something. I began to think that I shouldn’t have skipped the bulgur and next time I won’t. I looked in my spice cabinet and added garlic salt and basil (I wanted sage but could not find it). I saw sesame seeds and added about a tablespoon of those. This made a big difference. One more thing I may add in the future is mushrooms.

So here is what I made:

Vicki’s Veggie Shepherds Pie--Round 1.

2 cups TSP/TVP
Fresh parsley
Fresh thyme
2 Carrots
1 onion
1 garlic clove
Garlic salt
Marjoram
Olive oil
Vegetable bullion and 1 7/8 cup water to rehydrate TVP
1/4 cup white
1/2 cup green
Can tomato paste
1 cup veg stock
Soy sauce
Frozen peas
Lots of mashed potatoes made with buttermilk
Cheese
Basil
Salt
Pepper
Nutmeg

Rehydrate TSP with veggie stock and water. Meanwhile brown onions and garlic in olive oil. Stir in half tomato paste and TSP. Add seasonings and sesame seeds. Combine Green and White with remaining tomato paste and add to mixture. Bring to a bubble. Add frozen peas.

Put into oven-safe casserole top with mashed potatoes. Top potatoes with cheese. Put in oven until hot and bubbling


Everyone liked it but we agreed it needed something more. We are thinking mushrooms.

Beanie Weenies

During Holiday time when there are parties and food constantly involved in celebrations it is also good to eat simply.

I don’t know when or where I started making this meal. I think it may be a hold over from  beans on toast that I like to eat in the UK with a sausage (or banger) on the side.

For those who aren’t in the know bangers are not American sausages in the Midwest they are more like Brats, but very different in flavor.

My kids like to make or help make this meal.  It is very simple and cheap.
1 large can of baked beans (I buy vegetarian beans to cut back the fat and not mix too much meat.)
1 package of hot dogs (some times we use a whole package some time we use half depends on the day. We use either turkey or all beef hot dogs.)
1-2 packages crescent rolls.
Salad.

1. Cut hot dog and put in sauce pan with baked beans. Here is Griffin cutting the hot dogs.

He is using a “lettuce” knife. I bought it for him at the grocery store for a couple of Bucks Holly had a pink one I got through Pampered Chef. They don’t cut little fingers but have plenty of cutting power for fruit and veggies (not carrots) as well as other soft food like hot dogs.






Prepare the rolls. Holly’s favorite job here.

Cook it all. Stirring the beans and dogs. Beans and hot dogs are done when the cut ends are no longer flat and dome out a bit.


Simple easy and a quick lunch or a light dinner and it is always

Thanksgiving Day.....A week late(r)

An American eating blog with out an entry about all that was eaten for Thanksgiving. What was I thinking. Well I was eating.

We cooked and cleaned and ate. Poor Holly and her newly metal filled mouth (she got braces the day before) only ate olives, nuts and bolts (Kix, Cheerios, mini pretzels, and Goldfish crackers), mash potatoes and chocolate ice cream.everything else she tried just hurt too much.

There were few leftovers after Thanksgiving. Always a good thing.
Here is a quick round up in photos (not the best pictures but they will need to suffice):

Holly and Griffin ate snacks before dinner.









You can see the nuts and bolt on Holly's lap and corn chips, cookies, and baby carrots on Griffin's. I am proud to say he mostly ate the carrots.

PIES!

Bill's Blueberry pie and two stages of his Chocolate Ribbon pie before and after the top layer of Cool whip.

And then my cranberry mold next to Holly's olives.

 No pictures were taken of the rest of the food. I wish I had but all I wanted to do was eat.

We left for home sated. The kids slept and Bill and I chatted about how in comparison there is a lack of pies at his families events compared to my family (last year there was 11 pies and 13 people counting the 4 month old. The report from this year there was 7 pies and 9 people!

Thanksgiving Countdown

As I write this The gathering at the Elder Dunn's homestead with the Williams clan is about 13 hours away (12 from when I posted)

Our contributions are 3 pies, a plate (or two) of cookies and a cranberry mold.

Bill has made (and I may get him to write about it later) a blueberry pie and is getting ready to finish making his favorite Chocolate Ribbon Pie.

I made a pumpkin pie. I have been experimenting with recipes for a few years now. The most disastrous one was the year I used the recipe from my mother-in-laws Joy of Cooking. It never set up. I followed the directions, I cooked an extra 30 minutes when it wasn’t set when the described time came ans went. It was still pumpkin soup. I even tried to bake it longer once we got there. It was still pumpkin soup .

This year we have a Bittman (How to Cook Everything By Mark Bittman). I had good success with a quiche of his so I tried his this year. He has a good trick of cooking the filling while you pre-bake the crust to give it a bit of a kick start.  As usual I had some left over filling after filling the crust. So I fill little ramekins with it. I have now eaten one of the Ramekins. It set up well. It was tasty but a bit on the under seasoned side. The texture is good not too smooth but not grainy. Holly helped make it. She won’t eat it unless I can convince her that it will won’t hurt her newly braces filled mouth and she is hungry enough.

The cranberry mold came because I was sad to discover that my guilty pleasure of the nice jellied cranberry sauce (you know the one that comes out in the shape of the can) is full of high fructose corn-syrup. As I am trying to avoid that I thought I would make some sort of cranberry mold. I found a recipe at Williams-Sonoma. I enjoyed making it. It talks about cooking the mixture until the sauce thicken and the cranberries burst. Well they pop and can do so loudly. I didn’t follow the directions as well as I should and to try ad make up for my mistakes I added a second packet of Knox Gelatin. I hope it turns out well. I used my Tupperware jello mold as I don’t use it that often.


Now for the cookies. Griffin has been asking me to make “people” cookies with him for several weeks. After much discussion we determined that he meant gingerbread cookies. He decided that he wanted to bring them for Thanksgiving so I threw in the idea to make turkey shaped ones.
Now I looked at all the recipes that I have and got the general ingredients. I have used many times a recipe I tore out of a magazine many years ago. It was sitting on the table as I was getting ready to make the cookies and I grabbed it only to see one of our children’s cookbooks with a picture of a gingerbread man poking out of a stack of paper. I have used ‘The Children’s Step-By-Step Cook Book’ by Angela Wilkes cooking with kids many times. No only my own kids. Kids like the pictures to follow as well as the really nice photos of the ingredients at the start of every recipe. Knowing that Griffin would be “helping” I opted to use this version although I substituted molasses for the honey or golden syrup it called for as I didn’t have either in the house. After sending Bill out twice once for more cookie sheets and another time for currents. We got the cookies  made.

We even made one armless and one with a light saber.  We tried them and they taste really good!


Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Meatless Mondays And the Wild and Wooly Dunns.

As I have said before we as a family are trying to eat healthier. Our busy lives don’t always make it easy and I look for things with a way to build a tradition or a good habit or something along those lines. So I found a campaign about eating Meatless on Mondays. There is more to the whole movement than just eating vegetarian for one day a week.

Meatless Mondays has many a websites and an articles on the subject and I will post soon a list on links to things I have read or want to read on the subject. We are doing it and here comes the predicament.

We have some standbys that are meatless and I find that we are eating them a lot! Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t bad meals but I get sick of repetition and I think the kids do too. I like it when Holly is really exited to eat something because it has been awhile since we have had it. I think the kids would not care if we ate the same thing every week. But I like to vary it up for better nutrition and variety.

Our stand-bys include spaghetti just a jar sauce or this sauce paired with garlic bread (usually store bought). A version of my mom’s lasagna the recipe is will come soon or penne rigate casserole from the Family Nutrition book by William and Martha Sears. They are all pasta. We used to eat a lot of pilaf--almost a red beans and rice dish--that we adapted from Amy Dacyczyn and her Tightwad Gazette recipe. But we had a flying bean problem for a while which had us stop making it.

Back to the predicament. Not too long ago I was drawing a blank and needed some help fast I was planning the weekly menu and couldn’t think of anything to make for Meatless Monday. So I did what any mom home alone with her computer would do these days. I posted to facebook and Twitter the following:
“I really need some non-pasta, kid-friendly, vegetarian recipes or ideas.....grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup is passe too. HELP!”

I started to get responses right away I want to thank Mark, Nancy, Kate, Sherri, Stephen, Lynn, Viveka, Kristin, Heather, Karen, Jacqui, Renee, Mary, and Maggie for all the suggestions. Well maybe not the lima loaf.

I got many suggestions for dishes here is an edited list:
Quinoa
Pilaf
Fried rice
Soups and Stews without meat
Fake chicken nuggets
Tacos / burritos with out meat
Pizzas
Veggie Chili
Omelets (and other egg dishes)
Potato pancakes
Turnip Au Gratin
Quiches
Broccoli Cheese Casserole



And a few for cook books:
The Imus Ranch cooking for Kids and Cowboys
any cookbook by Jeanne Lemlin

And a few for Websites:
Vegetarian Times 
http://pdxvegancookingclub.blogspot.com/
http://veganlunchbox.blogspot.com/
http://www.fatfreevegan.com

So the first thing I did was MornignStar Farms Chick'n Strips and Buffalo Wings with Green beans and French Fries. Griffin Said they were the best Chicken Nuggets I had made. And he knew they were fake. I call that a win.

I also went to the library and Checked out The Imus Ranch cooking for Kids and Cowboys. We tried the Cowboy Sloppy Joes. We all liked them. Holly was so pleased with it that when she was unpacking groceries and saw TVP she was really exited.

Menu Planning

It’s Tuesday and as is the case of many Tuesdays I have the day off work. Among the many things I need or want to get done is planning a weekly menu, and doing the grocery shopping. I find this usually daunting. There are so many things to consider from time to meatless monday to what we still have on hand from last week and what we may be getting from our CSA on Thursday. And of course my picky kids. In fairness I know much more picky kids but one is under weight and we need to keep him eating and the other is a hollow athlete 11-year-old who gets stomach aches that sideline her and make her crabby if she doesn't eat enough.

I have many sources for ideas. Rachel ray publishes a weekly menu on her website as well as in her magazine. Women’s day publishes a Monthly Menu. and of course my large cook book collection and the food blogs I follow.
The good news is that this week I have no evenings to work. And the only thing we are getting from our CSA this month is fruit so I don’t have to consider that. But that 11-year-old is still swimming almost every night.

So here I sit with only the following:
Tonight will be a recipe from Rachel ray: “Chorizo Hash and Eggs” as published in her December/January 2010 magazine (Although to please the kids we are substituting bacon for chorizo)
From the November Woman’s Day November 2009 I am using the Friday 11/6 suggestion of Soup and ham and Cheese Quesadillas, for Wednesday
Thursday I will make meat loaf as the kids have been asking for it for a while. Probably from the Sneaky chef I am considering lentil bolognese from Meatless Monday for Monday but I am concerned that the timing might be off to get everyone fed on time. I wonder if it will work in a crock pot.

But I have been sitting her for almost 2 hours and I haven’t even considered Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

I also want to make some cookies this week. I picked up an copy of Martha Stewart's Holiday Cookies from 2006 at work when a coworker was getting rid of it. (Did you think I would go 2 blogs with out mentioning cookies?)

I think I will make some tea and clean up a bit an come back to the menu planning.