Getting Saucy

I have a very interesting, unique personality. Sometimes, I'm in a great mood and nice to everyone around me. I can light up the world with my smile, and I really am a nice girl. Sometimes, I'm down right sardonic. The point here is that sometimes I'm a little sweet and sometimes I'm a little sour. It makes sense that one of my favorite dishes before "the change" was sweet and sour shrimp. There's this great Chinese food restaurant on Santa Monica Blvd called Jin Jiang. It looks like something straight out of Temple of Doom. At least I think it was Temple of Doom that started out in some 80's-tastic chinese night club. Am I right here?
Oh yea, so this is a food blog. Point is, sweet and sour sauce is easily made vegan. However, you need to decide what to pour it over. I've been meaning to try it with vegetables, but I really love it over tofu. I've been eating a bit of tofu lately (and balancing it out by using rice-milk instead of soy). This dish is best served over steamed rice with a side of lightly steamed vegetables. I like to go with snap peas, mushrooms, and broccoli, but really you should do what you feel.

Florentine Tofu Scramble

This past weekend, I made a spinach and basil pasta salad for a veggie hikers potluck. It was a pretty good pasta salad, although nowhere near as delicious as some of the other food that people brought. It left me with a good deal of leftover basil. One day I'm going to get myself a window box and plant some herbs in it, so that I can avoid the mess of having to buy such a huge package of basil. I've literally used basil every day this week: pesto pasta salad on Sunday, pesto sauce on my pizza on Monday, basil on top of my stir fry on Tuesday, and today I used it in my tofu scramble. 
Catherine de Medici is credited with introducing the term "florentine" into french cooking. In 1550, she declared that anything with spinach would be refered to as florentine. Unfortunately, it has come to traditionally refer to a dish with spinach AND a creamy sauce. My tofu scramble has no such creamy sauce, but I'm going to stick with Catherine on this one and call it Tofu Florentine. The important thing is that it is absolutely delicious. I've tried making tofu scramble before and was not 100% impressed with the flavor profile that I put together. This scramble, however, is exactly what one would expect. It's made light by the spinach and grape tomatoes, but is still delicious and filling. I served it on top of an english muffin, and it is probably the best breakfast I've had so far this week.

Tofu Taco Tuesday

This post goes out to Carolyn, Carolyn Dempsey, who has been holding very successful taco nights in her Brooklyn apartment. She was telling me how much fun it was, and I got pretty jealous. However, I decided to use my jealousy as a motivator (which I read about doing in a Cosmo article) and make my own tacos. Beans were obviously an option, but I feel like that one has been played out. I've had tofu burritos before and always thought that they were delicous, so I decided to give tofu tacos a spin.
A note on tortillas: This is a situation where you need to check your labeling. The tortillas that I buy from Trader Joes have 2 ingredients corn flour, water, and lime. These are good tortillas. Some tortillas are made with lard. Lard comes from baby animals. Eating baby animals = not vegan. Also, who really wants to be eating lard anyway?
Which brings me to my semi-sequitor of the day. Did you know that Guiness beer is not vegan? It's finished with something called isinglass, which is a nice way of saying that they add fish scales to the beer during post-processing as a clarifying agent. I've had a lot of fun over the past couple of days pointing this out to people and watching them make faces. Now, I'm not usually one of "those" vegans who tells you about how bad your food is, but this one really grossed me out. Also, I love random trivia and anything involving beer clarification gets filed under random trivia.

Hey Garfield, it's Lasagna!

Who didn't love the comic strip and television cartoon about that fat orange cat who seemingly lived for the sole purpose of shipping dogs off to Abu-Dabi? More importantly, who doesn't love a good lasagna?
I used to take great pride in finding the perfect ratio of mozzarella to ricotta to tomato sauce to pasta. Then, I realized that putting 4 tablespoons of spinach into a 12-serving tray did not a healthy dinner make. Lasagna is comfort food, and with my discovery of vegan ricotta cheese, seemed like a good idea to me. This recipe has two components, first is a tofu-ricotta made with a food processor. This ricotta would be suitable for a baked ziti, or even on top of a vegan pizza with lots of garlic.