Dinner and a Movie!

My friends Ryan, Shilpa, and I decided to start having themed dinner and movie nights! We started off with Howl, the new biopic of Allen Ginsberg. (It was a good movie, by the way. James Franco deserves all his accolades.) We wanted a 50s-ish vibe for the food, so we had vegetarian shepherd's pie and blueberry pie! It was delightful!

My friend Ryan made this pie:

Doesn't it look pie-y?? It was delicious. But it's not Ryan's blog so I'm not going to tell you about the pie.
 
I made the shepherd's pie and it was also delicious. Shepherd's pie used to be a fave comfort food for me before I went vegetarian, and it never occurred to me to make a vegetarian version. My friends had never had shepherd's pie before in any form, and this recipe made them believers. It's a super easy, yummy, filling recipe. I adapted it from this recipe.

Ingredients:
2 bags of Morningstar Farms Mealstarter Crumbles (You could probably get by with 1 bag and some extra vegetables, but personally I liked having a pretty big layer of fake meat)
1 onion
8 small potatoes (or 4 big ones)
2 carrots
1 cup frozen corn
1 15 oz can of vegetable broth
Olive oil
Butter/margarine
S&P

First up, peel and quarter the potatoes and boil them for 20-30 minutes.

MEANWHILE cut the other vegetables and start browning the onion in oil, for about 10 minutes. Then add the fake meat crumbles and let them get warmed up. Then add the corn and carrots, and stir in about half the can of vegetable broth. Spread this mixture into the bottom layer of a casserole dish.

THEN mash the potatoes. Add a smidge of butter and the other half of the broth. Pat them lovingly over the top of the fake meat layer.

Bake it at 400 for about 30 minutes, until the potatoes form a golden brown crust.

Then eat it!!

This recipe serves like... 4 people who like to eat, or 6 skinny people.

PS for our next Dinner & Movie party, we're planning to watch The Birds. Let me know if you have any vegetarian bird-themed meal ideas!

Creamy Portobello Mushroom Soup

This is from the Student's Go Vegan Cookbook and it is way, way better than canned cream of mushroom soup. Which, who even eats that? No one.

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1/2 onion (you guys know how I feel about the partial vegetable issue... I used a whole onion and it was FINE. But I just thought I'd let you know that the cookbook says a half)
• 1 minced garlic clove
• 1 thinly sliced carrot
• 1 diced celery stalk
• 1 chopped portobello mushroom
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 1 tsp dried marjoram (I didn't have marjoram and I looked on the Internets and found that you can use ~1/3 the amount of oregano in place of marjoram, so I did that)
• 2 cups vegetable broth
• 2 Tbsp flour
• 2 cups soy milk
• 2 tsp soy sauce (I think I might reduce the it to 1 tsp next time I make it--to me it tastes a little too soy saucy as is)
• 1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

I bought these cute Porteenie mushrooms since they were cheaper, and I was going to cut them up anyway! I used three of them instead of 1 grownup portobello.

Also, I just used all the leftover carrots and celery from a veggie plate at party so I think it was too much carrot and not enough celery, but whatevs! It tasted great and got all those veggies outta my fridge.

Anyway, what you do is heat the oil in the bottom of your soup pot and sautee all the veggies with the garlic, salt and marjoram (or oregano) for 10 minutes, stirring frequently so they don't burn to the bottom of the pot.

MEANWHILE set aside 1/4 cup of broth. Add the flour and stir into a paste.

After the vegetables have sauteed, add the rest of the broth, the milk, the soy sauce, and the cayenne. Bring it to a boil, and then slowly add the flour paste while stirring. After all the flour is stirred in, lower the heat, cover and simmer for about 10 minutes. Yum!

Thai Tofu Curry

I just made this curry for lunch and it was amaaaazing. And pretty simple, despite the pretty long list of ingredients. I sort of mashed up this recipe and this one and altered it according to what I had on hand.

Sauce:
1 can coconut milk
4 cloves of garlic
2 Tbsp Thai chili sauce
Juice of an orange
Juice of 1/2 a lime
2 Tbsp soy sauce
1 Tbsp brown sugar
1 Tbsp cumin powder
1 Tbsp cumin seeds
2 tsp curry powder

Then I blended it all in the blender and set it aside.

Tastes better than it looks

OK then I cut up:

1 onion (I think next time I make this I would do 2 onions. But the one I had was pretty small so maybe just 1 big onion. Whatev.)

1 yellow pepper

1 tomato

1 portabello mushroom (because it was about to go bad, otherwise I would definitely just use brown mushrooms or something cheaper)

1 pack of cubed tofu

(The recipes I cribbed from suggested: cauliflower, snow peas, chick peas, yams... I think you could put pretty much whatever vegetables you have lying around into this sauce.)

I started cooking the onions and peppers in a little bit of oil and then poured on the sauce and brought it to a boil.

 

Then I let it simmer for a few minutes and then dumped in everything else and simmered it for like ten minutes.

And then I ate it and it was AWESOME.

I ate it with some Minute Rice because I acquired a box of it when we closed down the camp kitchen for the summer. It was fine even though you are supposed to eat Thai food with jasmine rice. Whatevs.