Chickpea Apple Salad

1 can chickpeas, rinsed, drained, and mashed with a fork
1 apple, diced (I used a Gala, but I suspect a Fuji or a honeycrisp would be good too)
1 stalk celery, diced
1/4 yellow onion, finely diced
1/2 tsp Old Bay seasoning
1/2 tsp dried rubbed sage
1/2 tsp granulated garlic
a few grinds of black pepper
1/3 cup veganaise
handful of raisins

When you mash chickpeas, you get a delightfully flaky texture reminiscent of canned tuna fish. You can do it by pulsing in a food processor, but I've found I like the texture better when I mash the beans by hand with a sturdy fork. Mix all of the ingredients together and serve tucked into a pita with a couple of lettuce leaves, or in a sandwich roll, or spooned over a bowl of mixed baby greens. If you want to cut back on the fat in the recipe a bit, use less mayonaise and splash some white balsamic vinegar on to the salad to add more moisture.

Old Bay seasoning can be purchased pre-mixed in most good grocery stores. It's a mix of a number of spices, including bay leaf, celery salt, cayenne, black pepper, paprika, cloves, allspice, mustard, ginger, mace, cinnamon, and cardamom.

Welcome!

Hello and welcome. After years of posting recipes and photos to LiveJournal, I appear to have discovered an easier photo-upload interface. I'm a 37 year-old homeschooling stay at home mom who loves to cook. We're headed into the holiday season, and that means that I'm pulling out a lot of favorite recipes and dusting them off. Here are some archived photos of foods from my kitchen, which I'll be filling in recipes for in between new recipes and photos. None of the foods in my kitchen ever contain meat, dairy or egg ingredients.

First off, let me introduce you to a favorite weekend brunch around here: Tofu Florentine. Instead of the more common nutritional yeast-heavy sauces, I've veganized this lowfat hollandaise sauce.

1 1/2 Tbsp cornstarch
2/3 cup plain soymilk
2 tsps Earth Balance
2 1/2 Tbsp fresh lemon juice
2 tsps Nutritional Yeast
Salt and (preferably white) pepper to taste

 Simmer soymilk and cornstarch together until thickened and hot, whisk in remaining ingredients, and serve over fried tofu, spinach and an English Muffin.

This was K's 4th birthday cake. Vegan vanilla cake, from Joy of Vegan Baking, vegan buttercream icing from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. The towers are ice cream cones, the crenellations are gumdrops.

Thanksgiving appetizers from 2008. Hummus and stuffed cremini mushrooms with a balsamic reduction.

Vegan With A Vengeance Fronch Toast in fall with fresh, local organic kiwis, raspberries, and Satsuma mandarins.

Vegan caramels made with this recipe. I'd been eyeing the selection at Allison's Gourmet, but my husband is too cheap frugal dedicated to settle for purchased ones, so he found the recipe and made these. The chocolate dipped ones were amazing.

Chickpea cutlets (Veganomicon) with a roasted root vegetable medley, steamed broccoli and sweet mustard sauce.

Chocolate cupcakes and raspberry buttercream icing straight out of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World.  And I must say, the folks at Romano's Macaroni Grill in Seal Beach were very nice about letting us bring these in for dessert. We were visiting relatives in Southern California and settled on a restaurant that had enjoyable vegan options for me and my immediate family, and other choices for my not-so-vegan friendly extended family - for the record, I have 3 cousins that are vegetarian, and 2 aunts, plus an aunt and my brother who are very nearly vegetarian - eating less than one serving of meat a week.

Toast, an organic local blood orange, Vegan With a Vengeance tofu scramble plus kale, and a cup of homemade chai tea.

K's 5th birthday cake. Cake is 3 batches of the magic chocolate cake from Joy of Vegan Baking cooked in 8x8 square pans, and an octuple batch of the buttercream/chocolate buttercream  icing from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. The secret to fancy cakes is to make loads and loads of icing, because you will need more than you think.

This is a favorite summer breakfast- iced coffee, a cherry almond muffin (Vegan With a Vengeance), and muesli: 1/3 cup oats soaked for half an hour in 1/3 cup vanilla soymilk, a handful of raisins, chopped fruit (this had strawberries, peaches, apricots, cherries and blueberries) and a sprinkling of chopped toasted almonds.

 

Finally, I had seen several links to this photo essay floating around the internet. This happened to coincide with a day that I did all of my weekly shopping in one day. So I decided to make my own version. This is a week's food in January 2008, with the top of my almost 3 year-old's head in the shot.