The No Waste Vegan Place has a new location!

OREGON!

We just moved to Oregon, and it has been amazing so far.  I am so excited to check out the farmer's markets (though most are only open on Saturdays... pooh!) and I live walking distance from an all-natural, mostly vegan, locally owned, mostly-locally supplied grocery store!  Today I bought local strawberries from Oregon and rhubarb from Washington (which isn't that far, right?) and I'm going to make a (you guessed it!) strawberry-rhubarb pie this afternoon.  The homemade pie crust is chilling in the fridge already!

From just our first week in Oregon, I already have a couple No Waste success stories to share (yay!), along with a No Waste fail. :( 

Let's start with the No Waste fail:  I baked a dozen vegan oatmeal chocolate chip muffins the other day, and the two of us couldn't eat all of them, so I put a couple muffins in a container and labeled it with our mailman's name and a note saying what they were and thanking him for delivering our mail.  But he didn't take them!  Maybe it's against policy, or he has a food allergy or something, but what a big, fat WOMP.  I felt like I was doing something nice by offering baked goods to someone instead of wasting them (and he could've left a note saying why he couldn't take them!), but c'est la vie.  We ended up eating the muffins ourselves, guilt-free, and they were DELICIOUS.  The mailman missed out!

Now, for two great No Waste successes:

Our neighbor is wonderful.  She's so nice - she's lent us gardening books, lets us use her gardening tools, and provides friendly conversation for us when we're lonely because we don't know anyone.  So I've taken to bringing her a few of our baked goods whenever I make them, and she is super grateful, and I love that even though I only know a couple people in this whole city, I can still share the food I can't finish myself!

An even cooler success story: my girlfriend was at work the other day and met a man who farms in his backyard.  He said he had a ton of lettuce in his garden, too much for him to eat himself, so out of the blue he gave some to her!  Isn't that great?  The only problem is - now we have way too much lettuce ourselves! 

Lettuce is seriously a repeat offender, as far as wasted vegetables go.
  
So I cut the bottom of the head of lettuce and stuck it upright in a container of water (really, this is the only way to keep your lettuce fresh- treat it like flowers!).  When it freshens up a little, I've got to figure out a way to use it all up.  I've heard you can throw it into stir-fries with all the rest of your veggies, but I can't think of "lettuce stir-fry" without imagining slimy cafeteria slop.

I'll keep y'all posted on how I figure out how to use up all our lettuce.  I'm thinking lettuce wraps?  Maybe we should just replace all bread/tortillas with lettuce wraps till we finish up the entire head - healthy AND eliminates waste!  I'll also give y'all a peek at the yummy strawberry-rhubarb pie once it's done!  I'm using a recipe from Vegan Pie in the Sky, as usual.

See you soon!

The Clean Plate Club, and why this blog is not a member

Since I began this blog, I've wanted to clarify a few things about the No Waste principle I'm trying to live by.  Some readers may have misinterpreted the No Waste Vegan Place as a "clean plate club," which it definitely is not.

So I decided to research the Clean Plate Club.  I always thought the Clean Plate Club was just a cute name for parents who force their kids to finish all the food on their plates at every meal.  But apparently it has an institutional origin from the United States Government!  I had no idea.

 Source

From Wikipedia:

"[During WWI, President] Hoover knew that many Americans were willing to volunteer and had a strong sense of patriotism during the war, so he used that to his advantage when he advertised the idea of the “Clean Plate” campaign. Hoover promoted this idea to children who attended school with a pledge that read, “At table I’ll not leave a scrap of food upon my plate. And I’ll not eat between meals, but for supper time I’ll wait.” This targeted children too young to understand the value of food in the difficult economic time. Many necessities such as flour and sugar were in short supply, so Hoover used a sense of American nationalism to encourage families to take appropriate rations and save food."

"The ideal of completely finishing a serving has now become a bad habit, as food (in America) is no longer in short supply, and finishing the remainder of your meal is not a crucial belief any more. Today, portion sizes have increased considerably, shown by the fact that a serving of french fries today is twice the size of a 1950s serving, making “cleaning your plate” an unhealthy dietary action. It has been shown that parents who push their children to eat their entire meal may interfere with the self-control of their child, thus leading them to overeat, as well as creating a misunderstanding of an appropriate serving size."

So what began during World War I as a nationalist propaganda movement to encourage Americans to eliminate food waste (and hey, we can all get down with that, right?) has morphed into one of the causes of our current obesity epidemic. Seriously, is there another term for that?  I hate the term "obesity epidemic."  It's like all those commercials that start with "In this economy..."  Cleaning our plates used to be a better idea, because our food was more natural and we didn't have so much of it on our plates to begin with.  Now, though, it's not a good idea to clean our plates anymore, because our food is unhealthy and our portion sizes are huge.  WOOPS!

However!  We can't WASTE food - that would be equally bad, not for our bodies, but for our consciences.  Which brings me to the core principle of the No Waste Vegan Place.  This principle was also used as a propaganda campaign, this time in the US during World War II:

Take all you want, but eat all you take.

One of my favorite WWII posters with a similar slogan. Source.

So, we're no longer in a situation where we have to conserve rations in order to send them overseas to our troops.  We actually have an enormous global food SURPLUS, if you can believe that!  The problem - the terrible, horrible, unfair issue at hand - is the unequal distribution of that food.  We have much far too much food here in the United States, and not nearly enough in the developing world.  Even when developing countries do have a lot of healthy foods, they are often exported to wealthy countries where we sometimes waste over half of our food supply while the developing world starves.

If we, as fortunate Americans, were to finish all the food available to us at mealtimes, we would become very unhealthy.  We just have too much food here, and not the right kind.  Out of the surplus of food we have - the wealth, the abundance, the mountains and mountains of food we have - we should take, buy, and eat all we want (responsibly, of course - I'm looking at you, Bacon-Imported-from-Haiti).  But we should always take only what we can eat, and we should never waste anything we take.

Which brings us full circle back to the Clean Plate Club.  Sometimes we all take more than we can eat.  As the old saying goes, our eyes are bigger than our stomachs.  The good news is that "not wasting food" doesn't have to mean "eating all of it ourselves."  Here are some ideas to prevent food waste without reverting to the old "Clean Plate Club" ways:

1) Share it.  Shareshareshareshareshare.  Sharing is caring.  Share with your friends.  You've got a carton of soymilk in your refrigerator door, and its expiration date is fast approaching?  Invite your friends over for a milk 'n' cookies party.  Bonus points if you read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie in a circle on the floor sitting criss-cross-applesauce.

2) Take it to work.  I cannot emphasize this enough.  Your coworkers will LOVE YOU if you are the person who constantly brings free food to work.  Try to make it look nice though, okay?  No one wants to stick a spoon into your crusty half-eaten scalloped potatoes.  Put them in a new dish and add some extra (vegan!) bacon bits or something.

3) Freeze it.  You'll be surprised how many foods can be successfully frozen, thawed, and enjoyed for a second time.  Label your foods with the date you froze them so you remember not only what they are, but how long they've been all cryogenic in your kitchen.

4) Give it to a homeless person.  People always giggle when I say this.  I'm serious!!

If you just cannot get anyone to eat your leftover food, you can compost it, or you can throw it away and just try to do better next time.  Living a healthy life and eliminating food waste is a continuous process, not an endless series of days where you pass or fail at being a good person.  Every day is a new day, and if you threw away a half-eaten yogurt today, maybe tomorrow you'll remember you just don't like yogurt that much.  Stay positive, and remember you are improving yourself, your body, and the world every day that you make happy, healthy decisions about your food.

My pantry is overflowing with leftover tortilla chips

I'll admit it, I'm not a huge fan of chips in any form.  Me and one of my friends have a long-running joke that I only like "soft vessels" for my dips.  I'll even eat guacamole with bread instead of chips!  So it ends up frequently at our house that we have a ton of leftover tortilla chips when people bring them over (I never buy them).

Then there's the fact that the local Mexican restaurants always bring enough chips to feed 8 people, when there are only 2 at the table.  I do usually eat some chips at the restaurant, because they're sitting right in front of me and I'm hungry. (I'm weak!)  But I can't leave the leftover chips at the restaurant (because horror of horrors, the restaurant is just going to throw them away!!), so I take them home, where they sit with my ever-growing mountain of store-bought, friend-brought tortilla chips.  Because - and I don't know if I already mentioned this - I don't really like them.

Source

Alright, so what to do with all those little broken triangles of corn and oil?  (appetizing, right?)  They go stale pretty quickly, but they really never spoil, which is one thing I'll give them credit for.  It's pretty easy to spread them evenly on a baking sheet and pop them in at 400F for a few minutes to crisp back up.  But then I just have crispier chips that I still don't really like.

So I perused the interwebs for ideas (okay, I actually just googled "ways to use up tortilla chips") and here are some great ideas I found:

From Mother Nature Network
1) Top a casserole with them.  This sounds like a pretty good idea for Mexican-type casseroles (my recipe for a super-duper easy tortilla tower casserole coming soon!), but it's not really all that inspiring.  Still, it's definitely an easy and quick way to get rid of stale-ish chips.
2) Chop them up in a food processor and use in place of breadcrumbs.  Now THIS is a really motivating idea - you can bread tofu, vegan stuffed jalapeños, or vegetables and bake or fry them.  You can even use them as a filler for vegan meatballs!  I would have never thought of this on my own.

From The Kitchn
3) I love commenter ohwoah's idea: "If you are me, then this week you dropped them into the almost empty jar of queso and stirred them around and ate them with a spoon, so as not to waste any. Not every day is for grownups."  Obviously I'd love it if the commenter had used vegan queso for this, but in the spirit of not wasting food AND eating dip straight out of a jar with a spoon just for fun, this may be my favorite idea of all.

From VegWeb
4) Tortilla Soup!  I scoured VegWeb, my favorite vegan recipe website, to find the most popular tortilla soup recipe of them all.  Just look at those photos!  YUM!  I've never made tortilla soup (actually, my girlfriend is more of a soup connoisseur than I am), but I think I'm going to have to do it now!  I would add more chips to the recipe - some ground up to thicken it, and some in slightly bigger pieces to go throughout and on top.

 VegWeb user Niecey's tortilla soup... MUST. EAT. NOW.

From me
5) Take them to work with dip.  I did this once to get rid of some leftover restaurant chips.  I set them out with some hummus and people went to town.  Plus, you'll be everyone's new favorite coworker (but let's be real, you already are, aren't you?)
6) Give them to a homeless person.  I'm not kidding, leave the restaurant with chips in hand and on your drive home, if you see someone who looks like they need a meal, give them the chips.  You'll feel good about it.

If none of these ideas tickles your fancy, there are plenty more out there on the internet.  I just pulled the ones I thought were most interesting and vegan-friendly.  If all else fails, you can just eat the damn chips or feed them to the birds on your patio, but I really prefer to use human food for humans!  I believe we have a moral responsibility to eat the food that has been provided to us, because we are fortunate enough to have a secure, steady supply of nourishment.  Some people aren't so lucky, so we owe it to them to not take our food for granted.

No more veggie waste: Post Script

Last night, our friend went out of town and gave us the groceries that were left in her fridge.  Score 1 for not wasting food!  We got some great, crunchy carrots and some fresh soy milk, but the kale was limp and floppy, and the color had gone a little dark.  Not a pretty sight. 

Step one in not wasting vegetables is to keep them fresh as long as possible, so you're not scrambling to cook them into something that you may not even want to eat.  I learned from Tristram Stuart's Waste to always store my lettuces and green plants in a column of water.  They'll last a lot longer!  Actually, I keep most of my cut vegetables (say, I have half an onion left) in a shallow pool of water in a dish in the fridge, and they stay fresh for ages.

So I cut off the ends of the stems of the sad, wimpy kale and set it up in a column of water (actually just an old Duncan Hines frosting container filled with water) overnight, and BOOM - this morning, I looked in the fridge and saw the most beautiful, crisp, vibrant green plant.

I should have taken a "Before" picture, but I guess it never crossed my mind to take a picture of a wilted, saggy kale plant.  But here is the "After":

I don't even like kale very much (bad vegan!), but a plant that gorgeous will probably find its way into my tummy somehow.

No more veggie waste: not now, not ever!

I buy too  many vegetables.  You probably do too.  We have good intentions at the grocery store, so we pick up the celery, broccoli, bell peppers, and spinach that we would all eat tons of, in an ideal world.

But then we get home, stow those veggies safely in the drawers of our fridge, and the real world happens.  Our friends invite us to dinner, so we end up with restaurant leftovers stacked precariously around the veggies.  We get home late a few nights after work, and suddenly a pre-made vegan chik'n patty sounds much easier and more delicious than a home-cooked veggie stir-fry.  I get it.  We all do it.

So, how do we responsibly use those leftover vegetables in the No Waste Vegan Place?  I've organized some ideas in order of how difficult I think they are:

1) EASY:

Pasta with Jarred Pasta Sauce and Veggies
Lots of leftover veggies, chopped
1 cup vegetable broth (preferably homemade, but I'll get to that later)
Spices of your choice (think Italian - basil, garlic, oregano, etc) plus salt and pepper to taste
2 servings of pasta
Jar of pasta sauce, preferably with veggies already in it

Throw your veggies in a pan or skillet over medium-high heat with some vegetable broth (preferably homemade - but I'll get to that later) and spices until they're tender.  

In the meantime, cook your favorite pasta in another pot according to the package directions, and strain.  

Dump pasta back into its pot, add your tender veggies, and stir in some pasta sauce from a jar.  Voila! Who ever said pasta isn't good for you?  Add some Daiya cheese and vegan Italian sausage if you're wanting a more comfort-food feel for this pasta dish.  

If you're up for a little higher level of difficulty, make a vegetable lasagna.  It's similar to what I've just described above, just more structured and with more "cheese" (yummmmm....)

(For this pasta, I used 1 cup homemade vegetable broth, 1/4 large sweet potato, 1/2 jalapeño pepper, 1/4 large tomato, two Field Roast Apple Sage Vegan Sausages, Muir Glen Garden Vegetable Pasta Sauce, and Barilla Whole Wheat Spaghetti)

2) EASY: Vegetable stir-fry.  In a pan of heated oil or cooking spray, saute your chopped leftover vegetables in the order of their required cooking times; i.e., put in the denser vegetables (like carrots) first, and the most delicate ones (like spinach) last.  Since we're going for "easy" here, forget the rice.  It takes too long, unless you have minute rice, in which case, more power to you.  Serve your stir fry over pasta or drained, heated canned beans instead.

3) MODERATE: Vegetable broth.  In my kitchen, homemade veggie broth is the holy grail of the No Waste principle.  While the rest of the ideas in this list call for the edible portions of vegetables, my homemade vegetable broth is made from the inedible (or unappetizing) scraps - think onion peels, spinach stems, garlic skins.  I save all of the vegetable scraps from my cooking in a large tupperware container in the freezer.  Over a week or two, the container gets full and I make vegetable broth with it.  Easy peasy:

Homemade Vegetable Broth
Trust me, you'll feel like a total badass

Large pot of water, 2/3 full
Lots of leftover vegetable scraps (let's say roughly 6 cups)
Spices (I usually use some combination of Tony Chachere's salt-free seasoning, black pepper, bay leaves, thyme, oregano, and rosemary.  It's hard to go wrong)
Large bowl
Strainer
Towel


Boil the pot of water, add the scraps and spices.  Return to a boil, and let cook for 20-30 minutes, until the water has turned a nice brown color and smells amazing.

Set up a large bowl underneath a strainer, and put a towel inside the strainer.  Pour the pot of scraps and broth over the towel, so the broth fills the bowl underneath but the scraps are caught in the towel.  

Now you have delicious homemade vegetable broth, and you'll never want to buy the canned kind again.  Some notes on making this broth:

-Boiling longer will not extract more flavor. 
-Some scraps to avoid: brussels sprouts, celery, corn, cauliflower, broccoli, turnips, rutabaga.
-Only use vegetable scraps that have not spoiled.

Full disclosure: I originally got the idea to make my own broth from this blog.

4) MODERATE-DIFFICULT: Bake your veggies into a loaf of bread.  I really like Robin Asbell's recipe for veggie loaves in Big Vegan, but the recipe only calls for a couple vegetables.  I like to get creative with it, and add a ton of whatever vegetables I have in the fridge, chopped up in the food processor.

 (Sorry I don't have a better picture - this is while the loaves were rising the second time)

Veggie Loaves
Adapted from Big Vegan by Robin Asbell

2 packets active dry yeast
1/4c warm water 
1/2 tbsp agave
6 cups flour (I like using whole wheat, since this bread is so healthy already)
1/4 cup soy flour or vegan protein powder
2 tbsp gluten flour
2 tsp salt
1.75 cups unsweetened, nondairy milk of your choice
1/2 cup olive oil
About 2 cups chopped vegetables (the original recipe calls for carrots, scallions, and spinach, but I use whatever I have on hand).  Try to get the vegetables as "dry" as possible.


In a small bowl, gently combine active dry yeast, warm water, and agave.  Let sit until yeast is "activated" (bubbly, foamy), for about 10 minutes.


In a large bowl, combine 4 cups of the flour with the soy flour, gluten flour, and salt.


In a small saucepan over low heat, warm milk and oil (do not allow to become very hot).


Pour the warm milk mixture and the yeast mixture into the flour mixture and stir.  Knead the dough until it is supple and not sticky, adding the remaining two cups flour little by little as needed.  When the dough is well mixed, knead for 5 minutes more, or until it's springy.  Add the vegetables and knead them in until they are well distributed (I like to do this on a large cutting board).


Transfer the dough to an oiled bowl and let rise in a warm, draft-free place for 1 hour OR until doubled in bulk.  IMPORTANT:  doubled in bulk is doubled in bulk - if it's been an hour and the dough hasn't fully doubled, wait until it has.


Preheat the oven to 350F.  Oil two loaf pans, or two baking sheets, depending on what shape of bread you want.  


Punch down the doubled-in-bulk dough and transfer to the loaf pans or baking sheets.  Let rise on top of preheating oven for 45 minutes to an hour.  Bake for about 30 minutes, until well browned on top.  When tapped, the bread should sound hollow.


Let the bread cool for 10 minutes (if you can wait that long before digging in!!! I sure can't), slice, and serve.

5)MODERATE-DIFFICULT: Make a vegetable tart or pot pie.  Difficulty level depends on whether you make your own pie crust or use vegan store-bought crust.  I highly recommend making your own, but if easy is what you're going for, you really can't beat a premade pie crust.

I like making mini pies, because they're so adorable and easy to eat, serve, and take to work.

Miniature Vegan Pot Pies

Muffin pan

Cooking spray

Double pie crust (either homemade or store-bought)

About 3 cups vegan creamy sauce (I like the sauce used in this recipe)

Vegetable broth or olive oil 

Loads of chopped veggies of your choice, plus 2 cloves minced garlic

Spices of your choice (I usually use a combination of tarragon, rosemary, thyme, oregano, salt-free seasoning and pepper)

About 1/2 cup Daiya mozzarella "cheese" - highly recommended but not absolutely necessary

Note:  If making your own crust, I highly recommend the olive oil double crust from Vegan Pie in the Sky by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.  I like to make it with whole-wheat flour.  If you're buying your crust, pick whichever frozen or refrigerated crust is vegan.

Preheat oven to 425F.

Roll out each pie crust into a flat circle, and use a cup or bowl with a 4-inch diameter to cut 12 circles out of each larger dough circle.  You'll probably have to recombine and re-roll the dough a few times to get 24 circles.  It's okay if some circles are smaller than others - those can be the "tops" of the mini pot pies.  Prepare the muffin pan by spraying first with cooking spray, and then filling each muffin space in the pan with a 4-inch dough circle.  Set aside.

Prepare the vegan creamy sauce and remove from heat.

Cook your vegetables and garlic in heated broth or oil until mostly tender.  It's okay if they're not fully cooked, because they will soften up in the oven.  Don't let the garlic burn!  Add it toward the end.  Season with spices of your choice. 

Combine creamy sauce with vegetables and Daiya cheese, if using.

Fill dough cups with creamy vegetable filling, and top with remaining dough circles.  Cut or poke holes into the top dough circles so the steam can escape.

Bake at 425F for 15 minutes, followed by about 20 minutes more at 350F.  The pies will have golden brown tops and bubbling filling when they're done.

It's important to keep your eye on these little pies while they're cooking, because cooking times can vary wildly between different ovens.

Remove from oven, cool slightly, and eat!

 

6) MOST DIFFICULT-NEAR IMPOSSIBLE: Stop buying so many veggies.  Keep track of how many vegetables you ACTUALLY eat for several weeks, and then adjust your shopping habits accordingly. 

I hope I've given you some ideas for using up those leftover veggies!  Honestly, if all else fails, you can start a compost or freeze most vegetables indefinitely... there are no excuses for food waste in the No Waste Vegan Place!

Three Homemade Vegan Meals Today!

Today I'm home from work, "sick" with an eye infection.  The thing about having an eye infection is that you can't go anywhere because you have to go to the doctor and you're contagious, but you don't feel sick so you have all day to do fun things you normally don't have time to do... like split your pancake batter into six separate bowls to dye each pancake a different color.

So I made a stack of rainbow pancakes for breakfast, I refurbished some Mexican leftovers into a new and improved Mexican meal for lunch, I cooked some Thai red curry tofu and vegetables with brown rice and skillet corn on the cob, and somewhere in there I also found the time to bake a bread pudding (made from Seeduction bread, the best bread there is) and drench it in coconut caramel sauce!

For the pancakes, I followed this recipe to the tee, but I separated the batch into 6 different bowls and added food coloring to each one to make a rainbow!  The food coloring made a few of the bowls a little watery, so I ended up adding a pinch of flour to thicken them back up.  Normally I use cooking spray when I make pancakes, but I confess, today I pan‐fried them in Earth Balance butter, and they were sooooooooo good.  There's just something special and inimitable about crispy, butter‐fried pancake edges, and I won't apologize for them!


Last night my girlfriend had a presentation on the other end of town (and I really mean the OTHER END OF TOWN), so we had to find something to eat over in that neck of the woods.  We ended up at a Mexican restaurant and shared the Vegetarian Fajitas for One, which must have meant "vegetarian fajitas for one brontosaurus" or "vegetarian fajitas for one village of giants" because holy hell, a lot of food ended up on our table.  We brought the leftovers home of course, and for lunch I sauteed the vegetables (the only part that we actually had leftovers of) with a little water and the juice of some leftover limes to remoisten them, made some of my favorite go‐to refried beans, whipped up this delicious nutritional yeast queso sauce, and munched on tortilla chips we had in the pantry.  Look, I'm not saying it was healthy, but calories don't count when you're sick.  It's science.  

What's interesting about these beans is the buffalo sauce.  Years ago when I was making refried beans, on a whim I threw in a splash of buffalo sauce, and I've never looked back!  I didn't take a picture of my lunch; must have been so hungry I forgot!

Buffalo Refried Beans


1 14oz can organic pinto beans (do NOT drain)
2 tsp bottled buffalo wing sauce (not Tabasco or a similar hot sauce; it needs to be the buffalo flavor)
Salt and pepper to taste


Heat all ingredients over medium heat in a medium saucepan.  When the beans are nice and hot, mash them with a bean masher (or a potato masher).  Don't try to mash them in the beginning ‐ it's much easier when they're warm.  At this point you'll have a runny, soupy pot of mashed beans, but let the beans cook until they're at your desired thickness.  Personally, I like mine a little runny, but that's just me.  Remember, they'll thicken up a little after you take them off the stovetop.  Whenever they get to your ideal texture, remove the beans from the heat and eat them!


Between lunch and dinner I flipped through all my cookbooks to find a dessert to make.  Honestly, the major reason I chose to make the bread pudding was that I had almost all the ingredients, though at a young age my mom instilled in me a deep love for bread pudding.  I based my recipe off the Old Fashioned Apricot Bread Pudding with Caramel Sauce from Big Vegan by Robin Asbell, but I changed the recipe considerably to suit what I already had in my pantry.  The reason my bread pudding came out so spectacularly is the Seeduction bread I used; it's sold at Whole Foods and just cannot be beat in terms of taste, texture, and quality.  I LOVE SEEDUCTION BREAD, and if you've never had any, why the hell not?

Seeduction Bread Pudding 

with Sweet Coconut Reduction

Pudding:
Cooking spray
1 box (12.3oz) silken tofu
1 cup organic unsweetened soymilk
1/2 cup agave syrup, plus an extra squirt
2 tbsp cornstarch
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1.5 tsp vanilla extract
Pinch ground nutmeg
Pinch salt
5 cups cubed Seeduction bread


Coconut Reduction:
1/4 cup water
1 cup organic sugar
1/2 cup full‐fat canned coconut milk
Pinch salt


Preheat the oven to 350F.  Coat the inside of a 9x9inch pan with cooking spray.


In a blender, puree all the ingredients for the pudding EXCEPT the bread.  

Combine cubed bread and blender mixture in a large bowl and let soak for 5 minutes.  


Pour soaked bread mixture into the prepared 9x9inch pan and bake 40 minutes, or until the liquid is thickened, but not completely "set."


For the sauce: in a saucepan, boil water and sugar without stirring for about 5 minutes, or until the sugar melts and begins to darken into a brownish amber color.  Remove the pot from the heat and add the coconut milk and salt, stirring as you go along.  Turn the heat down to low and return the pot to the burner, stirring until all the sugar is melted and the sauce has reduced to a thicker version of its former self.


Serve the pudding slightly cooled with the coconut reduction drizzled over the top.  YUM!


For dinner I wanted to use up the rest of the coconut milk in the can left over from the bread pudding, plus I had some vegetables I needed to get rid of in the fridge, so I made a Thai‐inspired (I don't know how the Thai actually make their curries, so I'm gonna call this one Thai‐inspired) red curry with tofu and vegetables.  This curry was so good, and so easy, and definitely rivaled any restaurant curry I've ever had.  I used some celery in mine, which was fine (especially since I didn't want to waste it and needed to use it SOMEHOW), but if I were to make this again I wouldn't use the celery.  I cooked the brown rice according to the directions on the bag, so I won't post a recipe for that.  I served up the curry and rice with a side of skillet "parmesan" corn on the cob.  It was the first time I had ever cooked corn on the cob in any form or fashion, and turned out GREAT!

Since this is a blog about not wasting (vegan) food, and this next recipe has a lot of veggies in it, I feel like I should mention that I always save my vegetable scraps to make vegetable stock (more on that in a future post) and you should too!  Just put them in a tupperware container in the freezer and wait for my further instructions.  :P

Red Coconut Curry with Tofu and Vegetables

Served with Brown Rice


1.5 cups canned full‐fat coconut milk (you don't really need to measure; I just used the leftover coconut milk from the bread pudding)
1 tbsp red curry paste from a jar
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 sweet potato, cubed
1/2 jalapeño pepper, diced
1 cup frozen chopped spinach
1/2 large tomato, diced 
Salt and pepper to taste
1/2 block extra firm tofu, cubed
1 tbsp olive oil
Garlic salt to taste 


Cook two servings brown rice according to the directions on the bag.


Heat coconut milk and curry paste in a medium saucepan over medium heat.  Stir until blended.  Add all vegetables except tomato, cover, and cook until veggies are tender.  I'm not good at timing things ‐ I just check often until the texture of the vegetables is just right.  Salt and pepper to taste.


While the vegetables are cooking in the coconut milk, heat the olive oil in a pan over medium heat until it loses its thickness and moves easily across the pan when you tilt it.  Add the tofu cubes and sprinkle with garlic salt.  Shuffle the cubes around, letting them cook for a little while on each side (it's not really important to make sure EVERY side is cooked; just make sure they are golden brown overall by the time you're done).  When the tofu is golden and crispy on the outside, add it to the saucepan of coconut milk and veggies.  

When the vegetables (mainly the sweet potato) are tender, add the diced tomato and stir.  Check the seasonings and add salt and/or pepper if need be.  Serve with rice.


Skillet Corn on the Cob
Sprinkled with vegan Parmesan cheese


Earth Balance vegan margarine
Two ears corn on the cob, shucked
Garlic salt to taste
Pepper to taste
Paprika to taste
Vegan Parmesan cheese (the kind that comes in the sprinkle‐top plastic container; I use Parma)


Heat a dollop of Earth Balance vegan margarine over medium heat in a pan.  When it's melted, add the corn cobs and season with garlic salt, pepper, and paprika.  Turn corn cobs every now and then until they are cooked on all sides with some black marks here and there.  Remove from heat and sprinkle with vegan Parmesan cheese.


I have to say, for my first time ever making corn on the cob by myself, I'm pretty proud!


Today was a fun day for cooking.  I'm grateful for the time I got to spend by myself in the kitchen today, and grateful for the food I'm fortunate enough to have in my kitchen!  I'm proud of myself for using the leftovers from the other night, and for supplementing one meal with a leftover ingredient from what was cooked before it.  My kitchen was a no waste vegan place today!