Sweet Potato Rounds

Good News Everyone!

The last of my pregnancy aversions has gone away and I can now enjoy the delicious and nutritious sweet potato! I was a little nervous when Mr. Zoey brought home a 10 pound box of sweet potatoes from Costco last weekend because it was about a year ago that we bought an identical box, only to find out that I was pregnant and totally unable to tolerate all things sweet potato.

Anyway, our 10 pound box sat on the table for about 2 days with Mr. Zoey asking me to "research" sweet potato recipes and me stalling because I was afraid of what cruel fate the sweet potatoes might still have in store for me. So, as with most of the cooking these days, he finally took matters into his own hands and created these delicious sweet potato rounds.

These are super easy and super yummy and worth trying since sweet potatoes are in season right now. I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that our box is already almost half empty.

Sweet Potato Rounds

Ingredients:

1 sweet potato/ yam

Directions:

1. Slice sweet potato into rounds and place on a baking sheet (no oil needed)
2. Bake at 425 degrees for 12 minutes
3. Flip the rounds over and bake an additional 7 minutes
4. Enjoy with ketchup or your favorite dipping sauce.

More Kale Green Smoothies Please!

My mom asked me for my kale green smoothie recipe the other day and I told her that I thought it was on Zoey's Kitchen. We figured out pretty quickly that I am not using that recipe any more, so I thought it was time for an update- especially since I am in love with kale again.

Yes, kale and I had a brief period of separation during my pregnancy but things are looking up (which is perfect timing since kale is getting GREAT this time of year)

So here is what I do:

Kale Green Smoothie

Ingredients

Kale (as much as you can fit in your blender- see picture above)
1 cup frozen blueberries
1 banana
1 1/2 cups of water
1 Tablespoon ground flax seed (optional)
Splash of oatmilk or soymilk (optional)

Directions

1. Add everything to the blender and blend!

You will get 2 glasses this size:



Tonight Mr. Zoey and I each got a glass but when I make these during the day I drink both glasses (yum!) I usually drink one glass in the morning and another in the afternoon.

Of course, this habit has me going through 1-2 bunches of kale from Whole Foods a day but if we get our kale at the farmers market the bunches are big enough to last for 3 days. I am considering growing our own kale out on the deck- but tonight Mr. Zoey told me "there is no way we will be able to grow enough kale for our smoothies". I know he is right, but I still might give it a try!

** If you are new to green smoothies here is a trick that we used to get started: Don't start out filling your blender with kale- just add 1-2 kale leaves to a fruit smoothie blend that you already enjoy. Each time you make a smoothie add and extra piece of kale. I read once that a great way to start is to have 20% greens and 80% fruit. You slowly adjust your ratio until you are blending 80% greens and 20% fruit. Your tastes do adjust over time and you will probably find yourself thinking that these smoothies are delicious! **

Delicata Squash

What's this Zoey? Did your dad bring home a new kind of squash?

Mr. Zoey has stepped it up and in addition to cooking, he is also doing the bulk of random grocery shopping for now. Tonight he brought home this squash to try out. Neither of us knew what to do with it, so we decided to microwave it as if it was an acorn squash.

As an aside I should mention that we are in an acorn squash frenzy at our house. We are splitting one every night. Mr. Zoey requires that we keep 10 acorn squashes on our kitchen counter at all times and has been constantly replacing our stash at farmers markets.

Why 10 squashes? Apparently that way when the squash season ends and we can't get good squashes at the farmers market, we can still enjoy squash for 10 more days. Well, there is no argument against that, I do love a good acorn squash.

But back to the task at hand. We cut the squash in half and microwaved it for 10 minutes to create this:


Well, 2 of these to be precise. It was pretty tasty because it tasted exactly like acorn squash! It is fun to try new things but for now I think we will stick with acorn squash since we can get them for 50 cents near our house.

I might get adventurous and pick up some new types of squash since this experiment went well. Are there any types of squashes we should specifically try while they are in season?

Twice Baked Potatoes

I haven't had many twice baked potatoes in my life but I have always been fond of them. Unfortunately for me now, I think they are traditionally full of cheese and not so healthy. I have been wanting to make a healthy version for awhile now and so I finally decided to just give it a try.

My recipe was based loosely on the recipe in Vegan Vittles. I picked up a copy of that cookbook from the library but I don't think I will make anything else from it. Many of the recipes were fake-meat heavy and that isn't how we roll here in Zoey's Kitchen.

Twice Baked Potatoes

Ingredients:

1 baking potato
1 Tablespoon nutritional yeast
1 sprinkle of garlic powder
1 sprinkle of black pepper
1/4 cup plain non-dairy milk
1 sprinkle of paprika (optional)

Directions:

1. Prick the potato with a fork and bake in the oven for about 1 hour at 350 degrees. (I made big slices with a knife and this backfired- learn from my mistakes and use a fork)

2. Remove the potato from the oven and slice in half.

3. Carefully scoop out the inside of the potato into a bowl.

4. Add all ingredients except the paprika to the potato insides and start mashing/ mixing.

5. Scoop the mixture back into the potato shells and sprinkle with paprika (if using)

6. Bake the potatoes at 375 degrees for 30 minutes.

7. At the end, you can turn the broiler on for a few minutes for a crispier potato top.

8. Enjoy! It tasted a lot like garlic mashed potatoes inside a potato shell which was pretty great in my book.

I made these in part to share with Mr. Zoey when he got home from work yesterday. I asked him which half he wanted and he told me that he doesn't like twice baked potatoes. Has he ever had them? No.

Whatever, that means more for me. As I was eating, he asked for a taste and told me that he thought it was okay. But then, tonight at Whole Foods he added two baked potatoes to our basket and asked if it was possible to double the recipe I made so that he could have a whole potato next time. I think that means he liked it!

Pumpkin!

As promised, Zoey and I roasted a pumpkin! I didn't get many pictures because I decided to roast the pumpkin at 10pm and I was already a little tired.

Here's what we did:

1. Cut the pumpkin in half and scoop out the seeds for later roasting (yum).
2. Place the pumpkin face down on a baking sheet with some water.
3. Bake at 350 degrees for 90 minutes.
4. Open the oven and see this:


5. Scoop the pumpkin out and blend in a food processor.
6. Bake pumpkin oatmeal cookies!

I am pretty sure that I can freeze the leftover pumpkin but I am not quite sure how to do that yet so it is in my fridge. I am guessing that one pumpkin made about as much pumpkin mush as 2 cans of pumpkin. So at $4.00 a pumpkin I am about breaking even. Except, the money went to a local farm near my house and I don't have to dispose of 2 cans.

Overall, a success! I am not sure if the fresh pumpkin made the cookies any better because they are already the best treat ever in my mind. This new batch was equally as amazing.

So there you have it- we roasted our own pumpkin this year and I will probably pick up some more at the farm this weekend. I have heard that I can also use butternut squash to make "pumpkin puree" and I may try that since the butternut squashes are only $1.00 right now.

If you have any tips on how to freeze this puree, leave me a comment!

Pumpkin Oatmeal Cookies

Back to Whole Foods for more organic pumpkin in a can! We forgot our fancy reusable bags so we ended up with a brown bag. Turns out a brown bag makes an awesome cat fort. Zoey had more fun with this paper bag than with any of her other toys. Funny how that works.

As I mentioned in my last post, we were preparing for our childbirth education class reunion on Saturday and I wanted to make a great treat. I normally try to make my treats as healthy as possible- but this time I wanted something really rich and good. I found a recipe for pumpkin oatmeal cookies here and decided to give them a try. Zoey and I added chocolate chips for extra goodness (instead of walnuts and raisins) and the results were delicious. They were great right out of the oven but they were even better the next day! (I never believe claims like that but it is really true this time)

The picture isn't the greatest but I seriously cannot say enough good things about these cookies. I even told Mr. Zoey that instead of baking a cake this year for my birthday I may just want to make these cookies again.



As for reviews? The consensus seemed to be that people were hoping I would make chocolate pumpkin muffins again but these cookies were a close second.

Zoey and I disagree, we think these cookies are the best! I think this ends my quest for the perfect pumpkin muffin because I have found the perfect pumpkin baked good. I want to make these again for everyone I know to share the vegan cookie love!

The Best Pumpkin Muffins?

As promised, Zoey and I made "the best pumpkin muffins" that I keep reading about during Vegan Mofo. All links lead back to here and that is the recipe that we used.

Zoey had to check out a new can of pumpkin for the blog. We used to be able to get pretty cheap cans of pumpkin at Whole Foods but now we are stuck with this fancier stuff for $2.00 a can. I did buy a small pumpkin last weekend to try roasting for my own pumpkin puree but that's a different blog post.

We didn't have any almond milk so I used oat milk instead for these fabulous results:



Check out the insides:



Yum. I am not sure if these are the best pumpkin muffins I have EVER had or dreamed about, but they were pretty tasty. They were light and fluffy and they were even better the next day for breakfast. For a muffin with whole wheat flour and low in fat, I would say that these were a success!

Now tonight I am trying to plan out another treat to take with me to a potluck tomorrow. Our childbirth preparation class is having a reunion and I want to bring something pumpkiny! This means I will be testing recipes tonight and luckily my family is visiting so we have lots of tasters!

I'm losing my mofo

It's 7:45 pm and do you know what you are having for dinner? I don't, but here's a funny picture of our cats!

Mr. Zoey and I were secretly hoping that one of our favorite restaurants, Laughing Planet would have the East Indian Burrito on special and we could have that for dinner. But they don't have that burrito tonight so we are out of luck there. We have some taco soup in the fridge but we used a new seasoning packet in it and I don't like it quite as much. Plus, I am grieving the fact that Morning Star crumbles are no longer going to be vegan. I am mourning my Morning Star crumbles! Luckily Mr. Zoey is happy taking it to work for lunches so it won't go to waste.

I did make a batch of blueberry bran muffins earlier, can those count as dinner?

This is one of those moments when I realize that I need to get back in meal planning mode. I'll probably have rice and beans for dinner with a kale green smoothie.

So nothing new to report here tonight and it isn't looking good for the weekend either- my inlaws will be in town visiting which means a fair amount of eating out. Tomorrow I am planning to test out some pumpkin muffins that are rumored to be "the best" pumpkin muffins. So we'll see!

** Mr. Zoey took that picture! **

McDougall Right Foods Breakfast

I usually do a pretty good job of making a wholesome breakfast for myself, but some mornings with a 3 month old don't allow me that luxury. Some of you may know that Dr. McDougall is one of the reasons that I eat a vegan diet so I was actually pretty excited to see that there were easy meals like this out there that are "McDougall approved". Even so, I wouldn't have bought these under normal circumstances- they are leftover from food I brought to the hospital when I gave birth to baby Zoey. I was worried that the hospital wouldn't have good food so I came prepared. Mr. Zoey and I seriously showed up with 2 full bags of groceries and a cooler full of fruit. You can never be too prepared!

It turned out that the hospital actually had really good food and we had a lot of leftovers from our stockpile to bring home. This breakfast was one of those leftovers.

I heated up some water and added it to the cereal while I played with baby Zoey for about 5 minutes. I added 1 tablespoon of ground flaxseed too for the Omega 3s.


Here it is all mixed up and it was actually really good! This isn't a flavor that I would have picked out on my own (Mr. Zoey picked some of the flavors) but it might be my favorite one. Or, it might be that any food that is easy to prepare tastes amazing while you are entertaining a baby.

There are also some lunch/ dinner meals like this that we have and never ate so I may give some of those a try.

Curry Roasted Chickpeas

I know that this may come as a surprise, but I actually have been eating more than muffins during Vegan Mofo. Aside from my daily sugar indulgence I eat a lot of beans, grains, vegetables and fresh fruit. This dish came to be because I had some leftover garbanzo beans that were getting a little old in my refrigerator. I thought that if I roasted them up Mr. Zoey and I could eat them as a pre dinner snack.

I wanted to do a variation of my first attempt with roasting chick peas and since curry spice was the first thing I saw in my spice cabinet, that is what I went with. I bring you curry roasted chickpeas!

Curry Roasted Chickpeas

Ingredients:

Chickpeas (soaked and cooked or from a can)
Curry powder
Salt (optional)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Add a few shakes of curry spice to the chickpeas and mix well.
3. Bake for 40 minutes or so, being sure to stir every 15 minutes.
4. Open your windows so the neighbors think: "Wow, things coming from that kitchen always smell so good!"
5. Remove chickpeas from the oven and add salt to taste if desired.

These were a major success. Mr. Zoey and I ate them quickly and he asked me if we had more. When I said that we didn't, he walked into the kitchen poured some dry chickpeas into water so they could start soaking and asked me if we could have them again tomorrow.