Pasta Puttanesca with Seasoned Ground Tempeh

Some nights you just need something quick and easy – everyone has a favorite go-to pasta with tomato sauce dish, right? Maybe the sauce comes from a jar; maybe it’s not even a sauce but just some chopped tomatoes with basil. Most of us refer to pasta when the hour is too late for a grand feast or when there is not enough time to prepare one. In our case last night, it was much to late for anything complicated and we were much to hungry for just chips and salsa.

In my younger omnivore years, we usually pulled out the Ragu and some ground beef to throw on top of spaghetti. I remember coming home from soccer practice really not wanting to wait for food and even waiting for the meat to cook was too time consuming. This was very much the sentiment when we got home last night from the first official volleyball match of spring followed by a beer to welcome the season (I’m in the fan club though I prefer the unofficial coach title). With only rutabaga and beets for exciting vegetables in the fridge, even I wasn’t really feeling the bulbous vibe at 9:30pm. I wanted to save those for a more intentional, playful meal. Referring to my sweaty, sandy, and hungry volley baller, he echoed my exact memories of coming home from games….how about some pasta? Sounds good. I had an open can of diced tomatoes to use up and a fresh package of tempeh.

When I think of traditional red pasta sauce, Bolognese comes to mind. This version is what we all typically think of when we see a red sauce with ground meat. When I think of a less traditional sauce but that can be made in a flash with tons of flavor, I think Puttanesca. Less familiar in the American crowd, it is devilishly delicious and takes hardly any time to prepare. Puttanesca is derived from the Italian word for whore (I’m not making this up) and is suspected of being name so for its enticing aroma – sounds like a G rated version of some saucy story, but who knows. Core ingredients in the classic recipe include onions, garlic, olives, capers and anchovies. With just a few herbs to top it off, this is a salty and sinful treat. Of course I unapologetically skip the anchovies, which doesn’t seem to harm its flavor. Instead of choosing, I decided on a Puttanesca flavor base with ground tempeh to get the feel of one and flavor of the other.

Just a quick note about cooking tempeh: when you buy tempeh raw from the store, it needs to be steamed or boiled to loosen it up before cooking. This will allow it to absorb flavor well and will keep it from becoming too tough when pan fried. I combine the loosening and flavoring in one step rather than steaming it first like most recipes suggest. The texture and flavor of the tempeh held remarkably well after browning it for a while. It gave just the right amount of herbal flare to the sauce which could even stand for some fresh parsley or oregano to top it off, though I didn’t have any at the time. I’m sure adding a dash of red wine vinegar would be positively wonderful as well.

Pasta Puttanesca with Seasoned Ground Tempeh
Makes 2-3 servings
Cook time: 30 minutes

Ingredients

5-6 oz. Whole wheat or gluten-free spaghetti

For the Tempeh
2 c. Water
1 tsp Basil, dried
¾ tsp Garlic powder
½ tsp Fennel seed
½ tsp Thyme, dried
½ tsp Onion powder
½ tsp Salt
¼ tsp Crushed red pepper
½ package plain Tempeh, cubed
1 T Olive or canola oil

For the Sauce
½ T Olive oil, divided
¼ Medium onion, chopped
1 Medium celery stalk, chopped
1 Large clove garlic (½ T)
4 Kalamata olives, chopped
1 T Capers
1/8 tsp. Crushed red pepper
1 ½ c. Diced tomatoes, canned in juice
Fresh parsley or oregano, chopped

Directions

Cook pasta according to directions on package. Set aside.

For the Tempeh
Combine all tempeh ingredients and bring to a boil in a medium sauce pan. Slight reduce heat to medium high and maintain rigorous boil until half of liquid has evaporated, about 15 minutes. Drain tempeh reserving liquid and transfer to food processor. Pulse a few times until tempeh is coarsely ground. Heat olive oil over medium high heat and add tempeh. Cook until brown, stirring occasionally to keep from sticking to pan. Remove from heat and set aside.

For the Sauce
Heat olive oil over medium heat and sauté onions and celery until translucent, 8-10 minutes. Add garlic, olives, capers and red pepper. Cook an additional minute or until garlic becomes very fragrant. Stir in tomatoes and remaining cooking liquid from tempeh. Lower heat and simmer for another 15-20 minutes. Taste the sauce and add additional pepper to your liking. While simmering, remove 1 cup of sauce and transfer to food processor. Puree until completely smooth and return mixture to sauce. Stir in tempeh and adjust salt and/or pepper if necessary. Ladle sauce over noodles and enjoy!

Herbed Butternut Squash Cakes with Wild Rice Pilaf

Visiting my family is one of my favorite ways to spend a weekend particularly when the snow has melted in Minnesota and I don’t have to brace myself for the bitter subzero shock that inevitable freezes my poor Arizona-adjusted body. Aside from being lovely, intelligent, humorous and incredibly entertaining, my family members are also pretty adventurous eaters. They have embraced my crazy vegan ventures with open minds for the most part and limited judgment, seating whatever I put on the table and listening to my veggie banter with genuine, if not sometimes divided, attention. I am amazed by how my personal decisions and adjustments regarding food have actually impacted their diets, even if I continue to harp sometimes about a stray high-fructose-laced box of cereal bars (ok they would tell you it’s all the time). I truly admire and am deeply grateful that they’ve taken so many strides to be conscious consumers – it’s a long and hard road to health in this country, that’s for sure.

So with each Minnesota visit comes a somewhat elaborate vegan feast. I, more or less humbly, secretly dote on demands that I cook at home, because I am more than eager to produce another plant-based meal on this planet that may have otherwise been meat-infested. Menu planning can be positively challenging, however, particularly when the northern farmers markets are in the last stages of hibernation before the first spring picks are ready. I say “positively” because it’s not necessarily difficult to plan and the available resources are generally inspiring: the bulbous root vegetable bunch, the cruciferous crew, and the beloved winter squash family. Wild rice is another valuable ingredient, not to mention a local specialty that is delicious and gluten-free (still trying really hard to limit wheat these days). The challenge lies in the timing and the crowd. When it feels like spring before it actually is spring, how do you make a bright meal out of winter crops?

The more personal challenge lies with the audience. The real menu planning challenge is making a meal taste un-vegan and family friendly without putting a plate in front someone that looks completely foreign. Though my family is generally open, I don’t typically cook outlandish, exotic meals unless we have a themed night plan where everyone knows we’ll be eating Ethiopian or Indonesian. The chef in me often wants to prepare a 5-6 dish gourmet spread. The daughter, sister, and aunt in me brings me down reminds me though that the best way to have an effective vegan influence is to prepare not necessarily omni-preferred analogues, but something that is equally familiar as it is exploratory. Though anything foreign has to be snuck in gently, it pays dividends to both eager-to-please chef and hesitant eater.

Results: the taste and feel of this meal matched the chilly but sunny limbo weather perfectly! It wasn’t a spring meal in terms of crunch pods or baby greens, but it was a far cry from a heavy winter goulash. With a side of steamed broccoli, it was a delectable brightness to inspire enough freshness to tide everyone over until spring comes in a couple of weeks. As for the other challenge – when your meal has gained the approval of a 14-month old and his incredibly wary mother, you know you’ve pulled of some special vegan magic.

Tip: To make this all together, use one medium or large butternut squash. Cut in half and scoop out the seeds. Leaving the peel on, microwave the bottom half (the round half) in a glass dish filled with ¾” water on high for 6-7 minutes or until very tender. Peel the top half, cube and use in the wild rice pilaf.

Herbed Butternut Squash Cakes

Makes 10 small cakes (3” diameter)

Prep time: 40 minutes

Cook time: 15 minutes

Ingredients

1 tsp. Sage, dried
¾ tsp. Garlic powder
½ tsp. Marjoram, dried
½ tsp. Thyme, dried
½ tsp. Onion powder
Dash of ground cloves, nutmeg, or allspice
2 T. Soy sauce
½ c. Boiling water
1 c. TVP
1 ½ c. Butternut Squash, cooked and mashed
2-4 T. Corn flour or masa (as needed)
Pepper to taste
¼ c. Canola oil

Directions

Mix together first 5 ingredients in a small bowl. Whisk in soy sauce and mix until well blended. Pour hot water into herb mixture and whisk well.

Place TVP in a medium bowl, pour seasoned water over TVP and stir to blend in herbs. Let hydrate for 5-10 minutes or until TVP has absorbed all of the liquid and is soft in texture. Mix in the mashed squash and pepper to taste. Add flour as needed if the mixture does not hold together well. Mix with hands and form into small patties. Transfer cakes to a medium baking dish coated with cooking spray and refrigerate patties 15-30 minutes to set. Preheat oven to 450˚F.

After cakes have set, bake in oven 10-15 minutes or until the cakes feel firm to the touch. Remove from heat and set aside. Heat canola oil over high heat in a large frying pan until oil is very hot. Place each cake carefully in oil and fry until cakes are browned and crispy on the outside, about 2 minutes per side. Remove from pan and set on a paper towels to absorb excess oil.


Wild Rice Pilaf
Makes 6-8 servings
Prep time: 10 minutes
Cook time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Ingredients

2/3 c. Wild Rice
3 c. Water

½ T. Olive oil
1 ½ c. Butternut squash, uncooked and cubed
Salt and pepper

1 T. Olive oil
½ Medium onion, chopped
2 Large celery stalks, chopped
4 Garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp. Thyme
½ tsp. Salt
1 Red bell pepper, chopped
Vegetable broth (as needed)
Pepper to taste.

Directions

Bring water and rice to a boil. When water starts to boil, turn heat to low and simmer until rice is tender, 50-60 minutes. Drain (if necessary) and set aside.

Preheat oven to 450˚F.

In a medium mixing bowl, coat squash with olive oil and season generously with salt and pepper. Roast in oven 25-35 minutes or until brown and crispy on edges. Set aside.

Heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Sauté onions and celery until transparent, 8-10 minutes. Add garlic, thyme and salt and cook an additional minute. Add red bell pepper and ¼ cup of vegetable broth to deglaze pan if too dry. Cook mixture until vegetables are just tender, 5-6 minutes. Mix in wild rice and butternut squash and let cook until all liquid has evaporated. Season with pepper and additional salt to taste.

Comfort Food: Mac N' Cheese!

Oh the Lord of Comfort Food, the Make Everything Better Dish, the Sick of Cooking Entrée, the Nostalgia for Childhood Course, the Dorm Room Gourmet Cuisine, the Cream of the Crop Casserole….Macaroni and Cheese. There is nothing like a bowl of Mac n’ Cheese to take you back to a vast number of fond memories that usually involve some kind of synthetic, plastic cheese hanging on to those little bleached elbows.

I love comfort foods and I like them even better when they're vegan. If I can get a little gluten free edge in there too, I'm in heaven. Regular noodles are fine, whole wheat noodles are ok, but I do favor quinoa elbows. This time around, I only had some gluten free fusili, or spirals, on hand, but they turned out famously. One of these days my grocery store will sell a whole wheat or gluten free version of the pin wheels. Those were by FAR my favorite shape growing up. And of course, as a kid, I swore they tasted better.

I don't typically use a recipe when I make Mac n’ Cheese, but this was claimed to be the best batch yet. My habit, much like most recipe research I engage in, is to read through other vegan chefs’ techniques and ingredient lists to muster up some ideas. Then I usually end up dumping various, inconsistent amounts of herbs or spices to jazz up my version. Here are the basics: Nutritional yeast is the "cheese" of most vegan cheese sauces. It can also be used as a parmasan sprinkle to top off pastas and is the main ingredient in any store-bought vegan parmesan substitues. Flour is the key thickener, and pretty much any standard non-dairy milk can be used as the milk base - I've used both soy and almond milk with great results. From there, some vegan flavoring staples like garlic and onion powder are essential to giving the sauce some pizzazz and some sharper flavors are crucial to mimicking the powerful cheesy essence that makes this so addicting. The sharper ingredients are usually mustard and/or soy sauce. But I turned to the lovely miso in this case with very good results.

The sauce will always take some tasting and tweaking before it becomes just they way you'd like it, but I found that this recipe captures the right silky-but-edgy cheesiness of that Mac n’ Cheese from days gone by.  The touch of miso really gave it a certain je ne sais quoi… or call it that enzymatic flare that is characteristic of real cheese (you know, the mysterious stuff in cheese that recent research is claiming keeps us addicted and incapable of restricting its consumption for some speculative reason). There is just something that it does to take this up a very important cheesy notch. Bon Appetit!


Mac N’ Cheese
Serves 4

Prep Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 10 minutes

Ingredients

8 oz. Elbow macaroni, rotini, or fusili (gluten free or whole wheat)

2 T. Earth or Smart Balance
¼ c. All purpose flour
½ heaping cup Nutritional yeast
2 c. Almond or Soy Milk
1 tsp Garlic powder
1 tsp Onion powder
1 tsp Salt
1/8 tsp Turmeric
2 tsp Mustard
2 tsp Miso
2-4 T. Water
Pinch of white pepper
Pinch of nutmeg

Directions

Cook pasta according to directions. Drain, set aside and mix with a bit of olive oil to keep from sticking.

In a sauce pan over medium heat, melt margarine and add flour. Stir until well blended and add nutritional yeast. Whisk in almond milk, stirring constantly until smooth. Add garlic and onion powder and mustard, continuing to whisk mixture. Let sauce come to a slow bubble and keep whisking to prevent clumps from forming. Let simmer until sauce thickens, 3-4 minutes.

In a small bowl whisk miso with 2 T of water and add to sauce. Add more water if sauce is too thick Add a pinch of both white pepper and nutmeg at the very end.

Pour cheese sauce over noodles and stir to coat completely.

Quinoa Stuffed Peppers

Entertaining is a feat I take on as often as possible. I constantly look for excuses to have people over, whether for the social aspect, a reason to drink wine, or to justify elaborate menu scheming. Moving into a new house is the perfect excuse for multiple events: extended family dinner, ladies night of course, mid-week happy hour with co-workers, and finally the big bash with everyone. Our new home is cozy and spacious at the same time. The open kitchen is perfect for preparing food and socializing (my two favorite activities in the world). This week we started with family dinner – nothing too large or fancy. However, I was met with the additional challenge of making this meal gluten-free along with other allergies of sorts - no tomatoes, peanuts, or chocolate.

My favorite whole grain to cook is quinoa, hands down. It is also my favorite grain to prepare for others who are looking into wheat alternatives, less adventurous, or skeptical of how vegans get their protein. Quinoa is a complete protein which means it has all the amino acids the body cannot produce itself. When a big criticism of plant-based diets is that plants cannot give you complete proteins, I usually pull the quinoa card. It has a nutty taste and is often mistaken for couscous because of its similar shape, though it has a more pearly consistency. It can be used as a breakfast grain, in a bean and grain salad for lunch, or as a base to a warm stew. This was the first time I had used it for stuffing.

There are so many stuffed pepper recipes floating around that it’s hard to settle on any particular approach. Somewhere along the line I had decided to cook up a southwest themed dinner with two kinds of salsa, vegan nacho cheese and seasoned stuffed peppers. Growing up, my mom always made stuffed peppers with ground beef and rice. I never really cared for them, but I felt like with a good spice combo I could jazz it up. Instead of beef, I used tempeh. Much like quinoa, I often use tempeh to showcase meat alternatives to omnivores. It has an intriguing texture and will take on any flavor you lend it. I looked up a good chorizo spice mixture and read up on a few ideas of how best to cook the spices into tempeh, rather than just cooking it up in a pan with oil. This boiling/simmering technique worked really well and it took on a fabulous flavor. I topped the peppers off with Daiya cheese, the newly famous vegan cheese alternative. The Daiya didn’t add a whole lot to the peppers, but in combination with the vegan sour cream I whipped up – the condiments were lovely together. This recipes responds well to variations.

Quinoa Stuffed Peppers

Serves 5-6
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 45

Ingredients

3 Large bell peppers, halved with stems in tact and seeded
4 T. Oil, canola or olive
½ Medium red onion, diced
3 Garlic cloves, minced
1 c. Red bell pepper, diced
1 c. Corn, thawed if using frozen
½ tsp Salt
1 ½ c. Quinoa, cooked
1 ½ c. Tempeh Chorizo (below)
1 T. Red wine vinegar
¼ c. Cilantro, chopped
1 c. Vegan cheese, shredded (optional)*
Vegan sour cream (optional)

Directions

Preheat oven to 450º F. Place pepper halves facing down on a glass baking dish or roasting pan. Coat pan and peppers with cooking spray. Roast in oven 10-15 minutes or until softened (but not blackened). Lower oven temperature to 400º F.

Heat oil in a heavy skillet over medium high heat. Add tempeh chorizo and cook until browned, 8-10 minutes.

Add onions, garlic and bell peppers. Sauté until vegetables are nearly tender, 8-10 minutes. Add corn and salt and cook an additional 5 minutes until corn starts to brown. Remove from heat.

In a large bowl, combine quinoa, tempeh, sautéed vegetables, vinegar and cilantro. Toss well to incorporate all flavors. Fill each pepper half with about ½ cup of the filling. Bake in oven about 20 minutes. Add shredded cheese if using and bake an additional 5-10 minutes until cheese has melted. Serve with salsa and a dollop of vegan sour cream.

Tempeh Chorizo
Serves: 5-6
Cook time: 30-45 minutes

Ingredients

1pkg Tempeh, cut into ½ - 1 inch cubes
1 c. Vegetable broth
1 c. Water
2 T. Apple cider vinegar
4 Garlic cloves, chopped
2 tsp Chili powder
1 tsp Cumin
1 tsp Paprika
1 tsp Salt
½ tsp Cinnamon
½ tsp. Cayenne pepper

Directions

Combine all ingredients in a sauce pan and bring to a boil. Lower heat to medium and cook at a rolling boil uncovered until almost all liquid has evaporated, about 30-45 minutes. When the sauce is thick, stir tempeh and remove from heat. When tempeh has cooled slightly, transfer to food processor and pulse until tempeh is ground (but not to a complete mush).