Holy Mole! Chocolate Peanut Butter Tempeh Sweet Potato Chili!

We lost a good friend this morning, so I felt some comfort food was an appropriate meal choice. I pulled out the crock pot and made a batch of Sweet Potato Chili. The great thing about this recipe is that it's really easy and super cheap. I think you can make a double batch of this for less than $20 and the leftovers will last all week. Since we've moved into the new house with Karen, a lot of our ingredients are doubled up. One of those ingredient redundancies was peanut butter, so I emptied out some chunky peanut butter into the mix (it was at least a cup's worth). When we were camping in Maine a few weeks ago, we visited a Mexican restaurant in Portland that made an awesome Chili Relleno featuring an amazing Mole sauce. This inspired me to add some unsweetened chocolate into the mix (probably about 3-4 tablespoons). This was a pretty risky choice for comfort food, but I had a feeling that it would all turn out nicely combined with the sweet potatoes. Oh and one more thing, I normally add vegan ground beef to my chili, but we didn't have any, so I  substituted Tempeh instead. The earthiness of the Tempeh, Mushrooms (subbed for red peppers) Cumin and Peanut Butter combined with the Sweet Potatoes and Chocolate really went well together. Turned out to be the best Chili yet. Karen made a Taco Salad to go along with fresh veggies delivered to our door today from the folks at Ottawa Food Box. Here's a pic of the meal:

The Exciting Life I Lead...

Krista's working tonight, so today's post will give you an idea of the exciting life I live as a bachelor... After discovering this awesome youtube video, I started to get hungry:

So I decided to make some veggie dogs. I didn't feel like going the classic route with regular yellow mustard and ketchup, so I made Mexican Veggie Dogs! Pretty much it's just Daiya Cheese, Tofutti Sour Supreme and Salsa. I guess now, I'll clean up a bit and then later on watch the Jays game. Yet another exciting day...

And here's a pic of my meal:

Yeah, that's right, I ate four of these!

Supper for Breakfast

Last night Krista and I had Tofu Benedict with Homefries. Both recipes were found in the wonderfully awesome cookbook Vegan Brunch by Isa Chandra Moskowitz. Krista made this recipe once before, but it didn't turn out as nicely (possibly because I wasn't helping out that time around...). A while back, we located some black salt at an Indian grocery store on Somerset, so that helped improve the taste of the tofu marinade. Throughout the course of the evening, I discovered I'm not so great at following recipes. I forgot to add the turmeric to the Hollondaise until the last minute and there was some step where we were supposed to add liquid smoke and salt (substituting for smoked salt) that never happened. I guess it wasn't a crucial step though, because the meal turned out great! It also got me thinking that maybe I could try using tofu instead of mushrooms in the vegan scallop recipe, but I'm not sure what kind would work best. If anyone has any suggestions, it'd be much appreciated. Anyways, on to the food photos!

Future Tofu Benedict & Homefries!

Marinating Tofu

Krista's working on the homefries

Whisking the Hollondaise. As you can tell from the colour, I haven't remembered the turmeric yet..

Wine for the Hollondaise

I remembered the turmeric!

Finished homefries

Tofu's a-fryin!

Tofu Benedict and Homefries finished just in time for Shark Week!