Vegan Recipes

As promised, I am relaxing on the couch while Vera is asleep for the night and Brett is in the garage working on her birthday gift.

This means, I have time to include some Vegan recipes!!! SO excited for this.  Speaking with a friend today, we realized how common the misconceptions about eating Vegan are!  A lot of individuals assume that eating Vegan is unworthy and distasteful. To us, it has been quite the opposite.  We have never had such amazing food! It has also been a joy to shop for it together, to prepare it all, and to cook it! We have even come up with our own tips and ideas in the kitchen which I am positive I will share in the near future.

First, I want to start with our grocery list.  We do make a list of things we would like to get but we also base our meals off of the great deals we find on fruit, veggies, and soy products such as tofu.

Our shopping trip usually involves several different stores. I know this can be a pain, but for now, since we live in the city, it's not too much of a hassle.  These are our go-to places: Aldi (fruits, vegetables, and oatmeal are always cheaper there), Costco (we buy rice and beans in bulk, almonds/peanuts, flax seed, as well as craisins and other things that they have on sale. It differs each time).  Trader Joe's- we buy a few packs of veggie burgers for quick meals as well as jarred coconut oil, tofu chorizo, dark chocolate, gluten free flour, and random other things. These are the three main places. We also have a bread store not to far from us where we can purchase whole grain, all natural, loaves of bread for 89 cents a piece! They sell things like pita bread, english muffins, etc. there for SUPER cheap. Brett can't eat these items due to the gluten but Vera and I eat it on ocassion and keep the rest in the freezer until we are ready to use it.I literally just made some cookies and icecream tonight that were gluten free as well as Vegan so I will go over those first.

the cookies:
oatmeal/craisin cookies.

preheat oven to 350.

3/4 cup of  uncooked oats (quick oats)
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt
2 TBS sweetener (I used some syrup stuff we bought today, can't for the life of me remember what it's called)
2 TBS craisins
1 TBS coconut oil
2 TBS nondairy milk (I used vanilla almond milk)

I mixed it all together in a bowl, formed little spheres, and pressed them into the cookie sheet. It doesn't make very much at all but I thought it was the perfect start to make sure we liked them, first.  I baked them for 15-20 minutes then took them out and placed them on cooling racks. It didn't take long before we devoured them. The end!

Icecream:

I always buy extra bananas to make our own icecream. I peel them, cut them into chunks, and place them in a freezer bag. I froze them when I got home from the grocery store (around 2pm) and got them back out of the fridge around 7:30pm or so. Not sure how long they have to freeze but this amount of time worked for us.  Once I took them out, I put them in our magic bullet and attempted to blend them.  This  didn't work amazingly well so I did have to add a few splashes of vanilla almond milk to get it to mix a little better. Once I blended it all into a soft-serve consistency, I added one spoonful of peanut butter and one spoonful of coco powder.  I blended it well and TADA! Done-zo. 

I served the icecream and cookies together and they were a hit. Again, it doesn't make the largest portion but it was enough to take care of our sweet cravings!

As for dinner:

Tonight, we had chorizo/refried bean nachos with a lot of fixings.

I made a little taco bar with the veggies and such that we bought today.  I chopped up some onion, lettuce, red pepper, put some tofu chorizo sausage into the frying pan, heated up some refried beans, got out the jar of salsa, and cut up some fresh tomato. I served it all separated in a veggie tray to keep it tidy and let the guys go to town.  Served it all on top of tortilla chips.  They loved it!

This meal was so quick and easy, even with a toddler demanding my attention.

Another favorite is:

zucchini lasagna.

Sound strange? we thought so too but we have made it a few times and LOVE it. Actually, I have sauteed it in a frying pan as well as baked it, and it worked better in the pan.  However, I will go with the baked recipe first.

It's so easy to make! I just take a few zucchini and slice them coin-like as thin as I can.  I then get some pasta sauce and add my own seasonings into it.  (you can also make your own pasta sauce, but I will get to that point eventually).  I layer a bit of sauce on the bottom of a glass pan then layer some zucchini on top of that. The last time I made it, I also added a layer of mushrooms onto that. I layer them all again and do this until the ingredients are out.  I bake it at 350 for about 20 minutes.  I do know that the pan gets a little watery so I drain it a bit once I take it out. 

If you want to do it the frying pan way, I just put some sauce in the pan, add the zucchini, add the mushrooms, italian seasoning, and sometimes, I add rice.  I add the rice only after the veggies are soft and cooked, though.  It was SO good the last time I made it. It's really hard for us to control ourselves and leave some for lunch the next day!

I will stick with these recipes today but will add on as we get more together. As I said, a lot of them are just inspired by other recipes but we do it in our own way with our own ingredients so it's hard to report exactly how we make it as of yet.

In the future, I'd like to add some photos, too, to add some flare!

Take care!



< lettuce wraps. Inside, there is home made hummus, white rice, and black beans.  kiwi, and a taco/rice side. We eat a lot of rice.

Over here -------------->
is an example of the lunches we pack for ourselves. baked sweet potato with some brown sugar in it, celery (with peanut butter in one of those small containers), tofu salad w/ salad dressing, and an orange.