Making dinner healthier, one slow cooker at a time.
Happy weekend everyone! These little single-serving cakes are perfect for a dinner party or could be a special brunch treat. Full of sweet and tart cherries the almonds and coconut add great texture too. The cherry Amaretto sauce makes them an even more decadent treat. [Read more...]
The more I cook with oats the more I find they have an endless amount of uses. Savory oats are my latest obsession. These steel cut oats retain an al dente quality to them just like arborio rice does in a risotto.
Cheryl said she would have never guessed it was made of oats, but I have her prepped with a few barley risottos that I worked on for my new slow cooker book, Vegan Slow Cooking for Two or Just You!, that comes out this fall.
Of course you can pre-order it right now on Amazon. I promise you it will make my day! (Plus if you pre-order now you’ll get the lowest price it sells for between now and the release thanks to Amazon’s pre-order price guarantee.)
These dessert-like pancakes have a secret weapon in the batter – white beans! The beans add extra fiber, protein and all keeps them moist without very much (or even no) oil. Even better the beans do not effect the flavor at all!
I got the idea when I was writing The Great Vegan Bean Book last year. I started using beans in muffins, pancakes and waffles and all of the recipes worked really well. I like using any kind of white beans because the flavor is mild and no one will suspect that they are eating beans!
Snowmageddon disappointed me. It was a few hours of light snow mixed with some sleet, but it didn’t stick here in Durham like I hoped. That means that I’m at work today instead of conducting slow cooker bread experiments and sitting in front of the fire while it’s cooking. I even had my green owl fleece pajamas set out in hopes of a snowy day in.
Oh well, maybe I’ll get a snow day before winter is over. At least I have a hot mug of sugar cookie tea with homemade nut milk. A good cup of tea can be almost as wonderful as sitting in front of the fireplace.
Today I have a soup recipe for you that’s perfect for a snowy day. You can use less water and make it a full on stew or just serve it with a hunk of whole grain bread to make it a heartier meal. I served mine with a couple of sides – an arugula salad and a pile of steamed broccoli in a nooch sauce. (Water, nutritional yeast, salt and pepper mixed together and then tossed with the cooked broccoli.) Cheryl even liked the broccoli! [Read more...]
Today I have a few more things that can make your weekend even more special! This time I’ve remade some syrups that will make your Sunday morning coffee awesome! [Read more...]
There must be something about seeing 1/1 show up on the calendar that makes us all crave a little change. All week long I’ve been bombarded with blog posts, magazine articles, and new programs that promise to make me healthier and more motivated..
Healthy means something different to everyone. It’s really rooted in where you are at right now. If you are coming from a meaty standard American diet even the smallest changes will have a big impact on how you feel. But if you are farther down the path, or have been eating consciously for years, you may want to up it a notch.
No matter where you are starting from embrace where you are and be kind to yourself. It’s not always easy to make life changes, but many changes can still be tasty.
Speaking of tasty… Cookies get a bad rap because most recipes are packed full of fat, sugar, refined flour and a single cookie can be 2 to 3 servings. While my White Chocolate Cranberry Pistachio Cookies are not 100% healthy they are a few steps ahead of the typical chocolate chip cookies.
They are light and cake-like instead of a typical crunchy cookie. The banana keeps them very moist too. Leave out the white chocolate chips to make them almost fat-free or you can sub regular chocolate chips if you can’t find vegan white chocolate ones. [Read more...]
Happy New Year everyone! I have a feeling this is going to be a great year for positive changes! Today I have a spread recipe that can use up your leftover black-eyed peas and is healthy enough to fit right in with your resolutions! [Read more...]
Today I have a post about my new Gingerbread Sweet Potatoes on Key Ingredient’s blog, The Back Burner.
These sweet potatoes are full of cranberries, pear and spices all topped with gingerbread cookie crumbs. Not exactly traditional, but definitely worth a try this Thanksgiving!
You can even bake the sweet potatoes in the slow cooker instead of cooking them on the stove-top. Also the spices are fairly mild, so feel free to add more if you want them stronger.
You can get the recipe over at the Gingerbread Sweet Potatoes Key Ingredient page.
Vaquero Bean Tempeh Chili is one of the recipes in my upcoming book. This chili and the new book are both packed full of heirloom beans. In this recipe the heirloom star is vaquero beans. They are black and white and a relative to the anasazi bean and they are very tasty.
The lovely photo above was taken by my friend, and incredibly talented photographer, Renée Comet. Make sure to head over to her website and look at some of her other beautiful photos. I’m so lucky that she took all the photos for this book, and I had a blast doing the food styling for her!
[Read more...]
I couldn’t let Halloween night slip away without a big glass of Phantom wine and a silly dinner. The idea to make these pot pies came from a Babble.com article by Brooke McLay and you can find her article here. Thanks for the super awesome idea Brooke!!
Weirdly enough I had found some vegan friendly crescent rolls in a can a few weeks ago so I had stashed one in my fridge. When I’m without bread in a can I’d just make a biscuit dough, but you could use pizza dough or bread dough too. [Read more...]
The Virtual Vegan Potluck is over, but the virtual feast lives on!