Tofu and Kale Spanakopita

This recipe is from the cookbook Vegan Planet by Robin Robertson.

Recipe: see page 386 of Vegan Planet.

Traditional spanakopita is a Greek dish consisting of spinach, feta cheese, and phyllo pastry dough. In this veganized recipe, the feta is replaced with tofu and lemon juice, and the spinach is replaced with kale.

The taste was kind of bland. Normally that wouldn't bother me as long as the dish is healthy or low calorie or low sodium, but the calorie count was high from the phyllo and olive oil. But still, it was kind of fun making this. I've never used phyllo pastry dough before, or made spanakopita.

Ingredients: kale, firm tofu, phyllo pastry, yellow onion, garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, salt, pepper, nutmeg.

Irish Stew with Potatoes and Seitan

This recipe is from the vegan cookbook Appetite for Reduction by Isa Chandra Moskowitz.

Recipe: see page 258 of Appetite for Reduction.

Saint Patrick's Day is coming up and I decided to go through my vegan cookbooks to see if I could find something appropriate, as well as something that didn't involve the use of artificial green food coloring. Now, granted, I don't have that many cookbooks, but this was the only Irish-style recipe I could find. But that's okay, because this was in Appetite for Reduction, a vegan cookbook with healthier recipes, so it was exactly what I was looking for.

While this stew was cooking it had an amazing aroma from the garlic, onions, thyme and beer. It gets cooked in beer for a little bit before the potatoes, carrots, green beans and seitan are added. As you can imagine, it a very savory smell. By the time it is finished, everything is swimming in a thick (very low-fat) beer-scented gravy.


The only thing I didn't care for was the lemon juice that was added at the end. It gave the dish a citrus flavor that seemed overpowering. I will leave that out next time I make this.

Ingredients: seitan (I used Trader Joe's Beef-less Strips), onion, Yukon Gold potatoes, carrots, green beans, garlic, olive oil, dried thyme, bay leaves, beer (Dos Equis), broth (Trader Joe's Low-Sodium Vegetable Broth), tomato paste, all-purpose flour, lemon juice, salt, pepper.

Cheater Chili

This recipe is from The Vegan Slow Cooker by Kathy Hester.

Recipe: see page 69 of The Vegan Slow Cooker.

Taste on this vegan chili is fair. It's not any masterpiece of a recipe, but it's not trying to be. The real attraction is the extremely short prep time, which is 5 minutes or less.... the amount of time it takes to open 5 cans and combine them all in the slow cooker. This would be a good recipe for when you are pressed for time in the morning, and you want to have dinner ready and waiting when you come home. You can set the slow cooker before you leave, and bingo, vegan chili ready when you come back.

BTW, those are cornbread muffins in the background. I'm looking at the photo now and realizing they kind of look like cupcakes. I made the cornbread recipe from the cookbook Appetite for Reduction, but didn't want take make a whole batch, so I did half and poured the batter into muffin liners.

Ingredients: black beans, pinto beans, kidney beans, corn, canned diced tomatoes, garlic, chili powder, liquid smoke, Tabasco sauce, salt, pepper.