Cooking with Dried Beans

About a year ago, I made the switch to using dried beans instead of canned.  I made this change because dried beans are a bit cheaper and because BPA is used to line cans.  I always thought that using dried beans would mean more work and longer cooking times.  However, I found out (thanks to the wonders of the Internet) that you can use your crockpot to make beans and then freeze them!  Talk about easy!  So here's what I do:

1.  Grab a bag of dried beans
2.  Pour the beans into the crockpot.
3.  Pour water into the crockpot until there is about 2 to 3 inches of water over the beans.
4.  Cook on high for 6 hours.
5.  Drain and rinse beans.
6.  Put beans in freezer container and freeze.

Now whenever you need beans for a recipe, just take the beans out of the freezer and thaw in the microwave.  You an take out however much you need that day and then re-freeze the rest.

More Than Salads!

Scott and I went to visit my parents this past weekend, and I experienced a "GRRR!" moment. Thankfully, my parents did not make the faux pas; it was something a friend of theirs said. I simply stated how we are vegetarians, and a comment was made that I'm sure I will learn to overlook in time. However, for now this comment just frustrates the snot out of me! The comment: "WHAT?! Vegetarians? So what do you eat? Salads?" Unfortunately, I was too busy seething to make either a smart-alleck response or an intelligent one. I sputtered something about a meal I'm making this upcoming week...lame and unintelligible. So, consider this my rational and brilliant re-response. Sample menus from the Ramsey House of Vegetarianism:

Day 1

Breakfast--cereal with fruit and light vanilla soy milk

Lunch--hummus on whole wheat tortilla with tomato and cucumber

Dinner--pepper and onion fajitas with homemade guacamole and salsa (my own secret recipe. Actually just my own creation that is never the same twice, and I could never make into a recipe that someone else could easily follow!)

Snack--apples, pretzels

Day 2

Breakfast--whole wheat pancakes with real maple syrup

Lunch--peanut butter and banana sandwich

Dinner--vegetable and chickpea ragout (http://www.self.com/fooddiet/recipes/2009/10/vegetable-chickpea-ragout)

Snack--Oreos and rice milk

Day 3

Breakfast--baked oatmeal

Lunch--Boca burgers

Dinner--veggie kabobs (here's a sample marinade I've used: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Kabobs/Detail.aspx)

Snack--gorp (it's like trail mix; I make mine with multi-grain Cheerios, nuts and dried cranberries)

See, WAY more than salads! Take that narrow-minded people!

Delicious Discoveries

We've been veg for almost 2 months now, and with another month, has come more insight and wisdom. Here are my 5 latest delicious discoveries:

1. Seitan (pronounced say-TAWN) is delicious! We went to Hellbender's Burritos last week just to try seitan for the first time. It's another meat substitute, sort of like tofu, but even better! It's actually wheat gluten, and I have discovered that I can make it at home. It has the texture of the inside of a good piece of chicken fried steak. It's taste...well, just like tofu it takes on the flavor of whatever you put with it, but I would describe it as carb with a hint of meat. I'm hoping to try and make it at home sometime in the future. I'll post an entry on how that goes.

2. Rice milk is yummy! Scott is an Oreo-aholic. Luckily, they are vegan since there are no dairy ingredients involved. But to keep it inline with how we try to eat at home (no eggs; little or no dairy), we needed a replacement to his beloved milk. He tried vanilla soy milk, but it didn't have the right taste. We bought vanilla almond milk. Again, yummy, but not the right taste. The last attempt was vanilla rice milk. And with this, we are close to dairy milk. It has that vanilla taste, but more importantly it has the creaminess you would associate with dairy milk. Next time he gets Oreos, we're going to try plain rice milk because I'm pretty sure that's going to be pretty darn close to the real deal! I'll let my beloved readers know how that works out.

3. 2 tablespoons of corn starch dissolved in 2 tablespoons of water makes a great egg substitute! I went hunting for something called ENER-G, which is a powdered egg replacer. I've seen it mentioned on lots of the vegan websites I patrol. I finally found one lonely, leaking box of it at Good Energy in Elkins. It was almost $7.00 for the box, and it looked as though it had been there for awhile. I looked at the ingredients and reasoned that surely there is something in my kitchen cabinet that will work the same as this expensively priced leaking box! So, I kindly placed it back on the shelf and resolved myself to more hunting online for more ideas on how to replace eggs in recipes. The other day, I found what I was looking for: corn starch. Tonight, I made corn bread from a mix that called for milk and egg. I used water (could have used soy milk, but I was low) and the cornstarch mix. Worked great! The only difference I could see was that the cornbread was maybe slightly more crumbly (but it's cornbread), and it didn't have that usual golden yellow color.

4. Hellbender Burritos in Davis has the best vegetarian menu around! They have wonderful burritos and several of their specialty burritos are vegetarian. They also use tofu and seitan in some of the burritos. Oh, and the queso is phenomenal; the best we've ever had!

5. Vanilla soy milk and cereal in the morning will provide desperately needed protein. Scott had headaches the other week, and we've attributed them to not enough protein. In the past, even before our veg life, he has noticed that hunger, or more specifically low protein consumption can trigger a headache. The culprit this time? We were using rice milk with our cereal. Rice milk has only 2 grams of protein per serving, versus 9 grams in soy milk. Good thing we like soy milk!

New Lifestyle

As some of you may know Scott and I recently made the decision to become vegetarian. Although I have some negative thoughts on hormone-infested animals, we decided to go veg for our health. I've attempted several times/several ways to adjust our "normal" diet to help us loose weight/feel healthier, but to no avail. We finally realized that it would take a drastic change to get us out of our rut. We've been veg for about a month now, and we feel SO much better. At first I thought going veg would be this HUGE challenge, one I was glad I had my summer spare time to tackle. I kept thinking how I was going to have to learn how to cook all over again. I thought I was a pretty darn good cook. But would I know how to cook as a vegetarian? Well, I'm pleased to say that I have gained some invaluable experience and am now doing fabulous as a veg cook. So here's my advice to anyone wanting to attempt a veg life, anyone looking for healthy meals and/or anyone listening to this rant:

1) Soy milk is NOT horrible. We LOVE light vanilla soy milk. It's fabulous with cereal and fruit (our regular breakfast staple). It also makes a wonderful substitution in any recipe calling for milk.

2)If you know someone who is vegetarian/vegan, ask them for advice and recipes. Robin Fetter has been so helpful to me! Thanks a bunch, girl!

3)Applesauce makes a great egg replacer. If the recipe is for something sweet, this is such a healthy substitution. I've used applesauce in my whole wheat pancakes and baked oatmeal. YUMMY!

4)Tofu is NOT horrible. The key to tofu I think is marinading it. I made smothered "steak" the other night that Scott really liked. I marinaded the tofu for a few hours in steak seasoning sauce and balsamic vinegar, and there was never a dull bite!

5)Portion control. One of the main reasons Scott decided to join me in this quest is because he felt that we needed to learn better portion control. Many of the recipes I relied on before made enough food for 6 people! And unfortunately, that led us to eating like 6 people! Many of the veg recipes I've found are at max 4 servings OR can be easily cut down for just little old us.

6)Don't try the exotic recipes until you've been at it for awhile. Our first week of being veg was a bit shaky. I made something called Morocan Stew for dinner one evening, and Scott hated it. I think it was something too far outside our food comfort zone at the time. (I think he'd like it better now). Which leads me to the next point...

7)The best vegetarian recipes are modified versions of old favorites. We love pancakes around here. So I found whole wheat baking mix and modified my standard recipe to veganize it and VOILA...awesomeness! I've done this with lots of my recipes.

8)Vegetarians/vegans eat more than salads. We've had some great veg food this past month: ratouille, fajitas, kabobs, taco soup, grilled portobella mushrooms...makes me hungry just listing this stuff.

9)If you're going to eat grains, try to do whole-grain. I'm a label reader now just because of this. If it says "enriched" or "bleached," it goes back on the store shelf.

10)If possible, plan out your menu for the week and go grocery shopping for what you need for those meals. When it comes to being veg, you eat a lot of fresh produce, which can spoil if you're not careful. If you plan out your menu, you won't buy unnecessary produce that ends up being a waste of your money.

What can I say...I love to blog!

I was talking with some friends the other evening. Amongst the many varied topics we stumbled upon, my hiking blog and Scott and I going vegetarian both came up. Then, an epiphany occurred at the table. Actually it was more of Chrischele and Char's request and my epiphany that it wasn't such a bad idea! ha ha The request/epiphany regarded another blog about vegetarian cooking. Since I have fans, how could I deprive? Actually, truth told, I really like blogging. It's a great outlet for me. I really like to write autobiographically. Which also explains my love of humorous memoirs; I guess I'm just trying to be like them with this whole blogging thing.

So welcome to my blog on vegetarian living! What you can expect from this blog is advice and recipe reviews. I know many of you reading this are not vegetarians and that doesn't offend me in the slightest. However, it is easy to take many of the recipes I'm going to review on here and be vegetarian one meal a week. As I said on Facebook, it's all about eating healthy. So, come and get it y'all!