Chopped Vegan: Refried Black Eyed Pea Chimichanga with Maple Mole Sauce and a Blackberry Mint Margarita Salsa

Yesterday, The Post Punk Kitchen posted a Chopped Vegan challenge where you had to make an entree using black eyed peas, mint, blackberries and bittersweet chocolate. This is one of the best dishes that Krista and I have ever made. And what makes it even more awesome is that we completely invented this recipe. Here's what we did...

Margarita Blackberry Mint Salsa

Ingredients

approx. 2 cups blackberries, chopped

1 tsp mint

1/2 red onion, diced

juice of 1 lime

1 tsp grated ginger

1 clove garlic, minced

1/2 cubanelle pepper, diced

1 shot of tequila!!!

salt and pepper to taste

Mix all of the ingredients together and let them marinate in the fridge until the chimichangas are ready.

Refried Black Eyed Pea Chimichanga with Maple Mole Sauce

Ingredients

2 cans black eyed peas

1/2 cubanelle pepper, diced

1/2 bar semi-sweet chocolate

1 tbsp peanut butter

2 tbsp maple syrup

1 onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp nutmeg

1/4 tsp cloves,

1/4 tsp cayenne

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp oregano

salt and pepper to taste

1 can roasted tomatoes

1 cup red wine (we chose a shiraz for it's blackberry notes and peppery finish)

Heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a large pan over medium high heat. Add onion and cook until starting to brown. Add garlic and cubanel pepper and cook 1 minute. Reduce heat to medium. Add the black eyed peas and smash up 1/3 of them. Add the wine, tomato and spices. Once wine is starting to reduce, turn heat down to low and reduce until consistency of refried beans.

Put mixture in tortilla and wrap up like a burrito. 

Heat pan to medium high and coat bottom of pan in 1/4 inch of good frying oil. Place burritos in and fry until golden brown on both sides. Serves 8 to 10. 

Voila chimichangas!

Hot Dog Variation #465: The Banana Dog!

For some reason, whenever I tell people about my banana dog creation, I'm greeted with disgust... Maybe it's because folks are imagining a hot dog and banana living together in the same bun, but as you'll see, that's definitely not the case. So without further adieu, here's my creation:

Ingredients:
Banana
Hot Dog Bun
Peanut Butter

Step 1: Spread the peanut butter on the Hot Dog Bun

Step 2: Place banana inside hot dog bun

Step 3: Enjoy!

Puffed Crust Pizza

Last night, I decided to attempt to make a stuffed crust pizza. I figured it'd be relatively easy to outdo Pizza Hut's version and for much cheaper (the last time I ordered one it was $40 and arrived late and cold!). I posted it on my twitter feed and to my delight, Daiya ended up featuring it on their Facebook Page. It turned out so nice, that I figured I'd give it another shot and try to make it less "puffed" and more "stuffed". It still ended up more on the puffy side, but with a bit more tweaking I think I can perfect the technique... All in all, it turned out better than Pizza Hut's version. Onto the ingredients!

For my dough, I used the recipe from this book. Here's the recipe, but seriously if you have a bread machine at home, you should buy it and if you don't have a bread machine, you should get one of those too...

1 1/3 cups water
1/4 Cup extra virgin olive oil
3 1/2 Cups all purpose flour
1 Tbsp sugar
1 1/2 Tsp salt
2 Tsp active dry yeast

Add the ingredients in this orders and set your bread machine to the dough setting. 

 

After it was done (it took about an hour and a half), I rolled it out over a lightly floured counter and preheated my oven to 450F. In the meantime I added all my toppings. On tonight's version, I used olives, pineapples, fresh basil, Yves breakfast sausage, sun dried tomatoes, President's Choice brand fire roasted tomato sauce and about a third of a bag of Daiya Cheddar Style Shreds (I would have used more, but that's all I had left after last night's pie...). I also brushed the folded over puffed crust with some of the oil from the sun dried tomatoes before I stuck it in the oven for 15 minutes. 

 

Here are some pictures of my pizza:

Dough ingredients in the bread machine!

The toppings

Raw pizza dough

Tomato sauce, sun dried tomatoes and fresh basil go on first.

Daiya cheese and olives for the stuffing in the crust

Crust is folded over the olives and the rest of the toppings are added

Cooked Pie!

Puffed Crust Pizza

Sliced pie!

 

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!

Nothing Rhymes With Vegan Scallop Linguine

It's come to my attention that I completely missed the opportunity to riff off a few puns about beets in the last post, but what are you gonna do? No need to beet myself up over it... And of course, I'm a huge fan of puns, you could go so far as calling me a pun-dit and I could pun-tificate all day long on the glory of wordplay and humour. But today's post is about vegan scallops and linguine. Punning about scallops is the equivalent of finding a word that rhymes with orange and the closest I could find so far on that one is "storage"...

Anyways, onto the food! Last week, I was searching online to find a good cauliflower recipe and stumbled upon this wonderful dish courtesy of the Vegan Homemade Blog and I absolutely had to try it out. And I immediately had the brilliant idea to pair it with linguine and a vegan Alfredo sauce. A lot of the recipes I found were either too complicated or had ingredients that were too difficult to find. I eventually found this one on Vegan Dad's blog. I pretty much had everything in my pantry and the only things that I needed to re-stock were the tofu, sea salt and white wine (I went with a Pinot Grigio from Pelee Island by the way). The best thing about this meal was that both recipes were super easy! 

Here are some pics:

Chopped King Trumpet Mushrooms

Marinating the Mushrooms. I couldn't find vegan fish sauce, so I substituted that with soya sauce and a splash of sesame oil and it turned out awesomely!

Finished Dish - Scallop Linguine!

Krista's empty plate! See how nice I am, I share my food with my wife, I'm not shellfish...