Week 2 as Official Tuesday Lunch Cook

Tomorrow I jump into my second week as the official Tuesday lunch cook. Same meal I cooked last semester. I thought I posted last week's meal, but I guess I did not. Anyways, I should probably post what I'm planning for this week's meal.

• Spinach Chickpea Curry
• From the wonderful book Vegan with a Vengeance, I love this dish. In it's most basic form, it's onions, garlic, ginger, tomatoes, spinach, and chickpeas. There's a whole host of spices in there too, but I'm going to be limited to working with the co-op's sad state of spices for this week. Either way it shall be delicious. Always a crowd pleaser.
  
• Marinated Lemon Zucchini
• Taken from Vegan Italiano, it will involve prepping the zucchini tonight and letting it marinate overnight in lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper. Then broiling it for a few minutes on each side. The co-op ovens are kind of spastastic, so this will basically mean turning it on the highest setting and flipping them when it looks ok.
  
• Rice
• Not much to say. A definite must to go with the curry.
• Cookies?

Now, this isn't much of a cooking blog without pictures is it? My fellow co-oper next door took pictures of one of my meals but she has not yet gotten those photos to me. This is what happens when one only has a not-so-good camera phone.

Also, we have a raw foodist in the co-op this semester. She has a deal with the co-op in that she asks us to prepare salads a lot and then she'll take some co-op food back to her place and prepare her own food. However, I am incredibly interested in experimenting with raw food techniques and I would love to learn more about it because I don't like to have food at a meal that people can't eat. But it gets tricky in that I don't think we can sprout foods. Simple but delicious raw food ideas?

Back at School and Cooking for the Masses

I am back at school once more. Classes started this past week. I didn't cook for the co-op though because I'm iDLEC (interim dining loose ends coordinator) so that's been taking up a chunk of time. But I'm done as of this weekend so I'm starting to go around MPing stuff and planning my meal for next week (whenever dinner head cook elections happen to be).

So far I'm planning:

• Eggplant Tofu-Parm
• Breaded and baked eggplant with the most delicious tomato sauce and a tofu-ricotta to top it all off
  
• Roasted Brussel Sprouts and Cauliflower
• About half a box of brussel sprouts with the remaining cauliflower tossed in olive oil with some salt and pepper. Very simple, but very delicious.
  
• Focaccia (?)
• I want to try making focaccia for the co-op, but while exploring the food situation I discovered that we really don't have that much flour to probably last until then. But we'll see.
• ?
• I'd like to make one more thing (mashed potatoes?) but first I have to figure out what we have and don't have. I thought we were supposed to get more produce today (because it's looking kind of sad) but that might happen later today or tomorrow. It will still be delicious no matter what happens.
  

Last Meal before the Holiday Break

So I haven't really posted lately. I had my Geology final this morning, except not. My professor made it optional. That made my life a lot easier actually.

On to my last meal this semester! This week is known as "outerim" in the co-op, where everyone signs up for (in this case) 3 hours. I didn't cook my usual partial Tuesday lunch spot with another person. So this week on Monday I head cooked myself with only one other person and a KP (kitchen prep), and that went along quite smoothly actually. I'm actually quite proud of this meal and it's incredible simplicity.

• Rainbow Chard
• It was so pretty! And we haven't had enough greens in the co-op lately. I made it similarly to the Collard Greens from Dino's Alternative Vegan. I diced up about 10 onions and crushed a couple small heads of garlic. Then a bowl of lots of yummy spices - mustard seed, sage, turmeric, thyme, marjoram, basil, coriander, paprika, salt.
• Mashed Sweet Potatoes
• Sweet potatoes are probably my favorite root vegetable and I'm always roasting them with beets and/or potatoes. So I decided for a change to make them all mashed like. I just boiled them in chunks, used our massive hobart mixer, and added about 1 cup of earth balance, maple syrup, and a bunch of cinnamon.
  
• Baked Italian Style Tofu
• Ok, so I just made the name up. It may not really even be that Italian. I marinated the cubed tofu in oil, balsamic vinegar, rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage, salt and pepper and then baked it for about 20-30 minutes.
• Couscous and Quinoa
• No, I didn't make them together. I was brainstorming with some people studying the night before my meal and somebody suggested putting greens on top of couscous because they really liked couscous. I'm not such a big fan of couscous as I am of quinoa, and quinoa also has the added bonus of being gluten free. So I just made some plain couscous and some quinoa that was leftover for people to do whatever they liked with it (i.e. put greens on top of it)

And that was my last meal of the semester! Since it was finals and fewer people are actually eating at meals, it was easier to make since I wasn't cooking for quite as many people.

From here on out now will be my personal/family/holiday cooking and baking. If I'm lucky I'll be able to get my hands on a digital camera and post pictures of the food. Since everyone loves a yummy food picture.

The First Tuesday of December

Today was probably one of the easiest meals I have ever prepared. It's the end of the semester so it's getting to crunch time and as such, I don't put quite as much effort into cooking as I could. The produce this past weekend also consisted of very wintery vegetables. There is a joy in seasonal cooking I must say. So anyways, on to what was for lunch:

• Leftover Vegan-Alfredo-Risotto-like dish.
• My special meal was over the weekend and there were massive amounts of this leftover. So I just heated it up in our Cleveland. (beautiful industrial kitchen gadget. it's my favorite co-op toy.)
• Squash
• Exactly what it sounds like. Come to think of it, I'm not quite sure what kind of squash it was. I didn't even do anything fancy to it. Just roasted it in the oven. It even cooked all the way through! Now that's a co-op miracle. (cooked squash and cooked beans are two very things to get excited about in OSCA. for some strange reason people sometimes can't cook such things all the way through)
• Lentil-Vegetable Soup
• We had onions, turnips, potatoes, green beans, and lentils. So why not! I think it actually turned out quite nicely. I probably could've waited to add the green beans and potatoes a few minutes later, but it was still fine. That's part of what's so fun about massive cooking is you get to re-learn how to cook. Yes, it can be frustrating. But at the same time it's rather interesting.

And that's pretty much it! I only have two meals left semester. And then I'll be glad to get back to cooking for only 4-6 people for the next 6 weeks after that. With the ingredients that I really love to work with to. (Mirin? Miso? Fresh rosemary? Kosher salt? What?)

Sorry about the lack of pictures. I guess it's not really a cooking blog without pictures huh. Oh well. Perhaps I can manage to get some over break. I should also get some of the co-op kitchen. (Note to self: blog post with a co-op kitchen tour)

Post-Thanksgiving Break Lunch

Lunch today was very minimalist. It had to be... we didn't really have any produce. Luckily, during the first hour of cooking we got in some produce including carrots, bell peppers and spinach which I so lovingly used.

So today we had:

• White Rice
• Chili-like Bean Concoction
• Kidney & garbanzo beans
• carrots
• green bell peppers
• Two 54-oz cans of diced tomatoes
• chili powder, salt, pepper, cumin, onion powder
• Salad
• Spinach
• Carrots
• Dressing: olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt & pepper

This is generally not a huge variety for a co-op meal. It was going to be just beans and rice until the delivery came in. It kind of saved the day. Granted, it also made for a fairly stress-free meal. I just don't get to cook as extravagantly and I would like to sometimes.

This weekend: the special meal of awesome.

Vegan Thanksgiving Delicious

Now usually, I tend to kind of hate this holiday. What with the genocidal and colonizing implications and the needless killing of millions of turkeys. However, to avoid angering the family members who do enjoy today, it is nice to just have one day where everyone you care about gets together with a bunch of yummy food. Preferably vegan.

And it doesn't hurt that it's snowing right now.

So in honor of having lots of yummy vegan food, last night my friend and I made some vegan alternatives for foods that will be so deliciously vegan today. The first item?

Sweet Potato Pie of Delicious
We used the recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance and left out the topping portion and omitted the walnuts from the crust. We also discovered that there's probably a typo in regards to how much oil one should put in the crust because we ended up making two crusts with the first one coming out as disaster piece. Eventually I shall post the recipe we ended up using with the adjustments.

Up next, we then stayed up until 1:30 in the am instead of waking up early to make a (hopefully) delicious seitan-tofu roast thinger. It took forever to cook! There's still one last stage in the cooking process though and we're going to do that later this afternoon at the grandparents' house. I found the recipe on the vegancooking livejournal community. The recipe is too long to include here so I'm just going to add a link to it here.

We're working on a vegan version of mashed potatoes right now. That's pretty damn simplistic in my mind, and I'm not actually the one making them right now. So I'm just going to say that they include a few potatoes boiled to mush and then add some soymilk, earth balance, salt and pepper delicious. Possibly with some garlic as well.

So enjoy your delicious vegan foods. Adopt-a-Turkey with Farm Sanctuary. And remember - tomorrow is Buy Nothing Day as well as Fur-Free Friday.

Success?

So today's lunch was very basic, but still delicious. Although I wish we had ketchup. We never have ketchup in this place. Anyways, the meal:

• Rice
• I think it I usually end up making about 20 cups uncooked rice
• Roasted Root Veggies
• I feel like I make this all the time!
• 1 pan of sweet potatoes
• 3 pans of sweet potatoes, beets & onions
• Black Bean Burgers
• This seem so much more delicious when I don't have to cook for 100 people.
• Made 4 pans worth
  

The OSCA health inspector also came by while we were cooking the meal and noticed that we had an entire container of not-vegan cookie dough that expired tomorrow, so we made massive cookies. Unfortunately, they weren't vegan. =(

Upnext:
What happens when you take a vegan transman to visit his (vegan) partner's extended family (full of omnivores) for Thanksgiving? Stay tuned and find out the details.