Stuff we’ve eaten lately.

While Red and I continue to nibble away on the vat of buffalo tofu we made over the weekend, here are some other things we’ve eaten over the last week or so:


This here’s a nice minestrone. I have a recipe I printed from some website a few years ago and veganized, but you don’t really need one. I like to think of minestrone as “Italian leftover soup,” because that’s basically what it is. Got some sad veggies languishing in that Crisper drawer? Chop ‘em up and throw ‘em in a pot with a can of beans, a can of tomatoes, a few cups of broth, a handful of small pasta, and a few shakes of Italian seasoning. When the pasta’s ready, chow down. Because my inner child demanded to be indulged, we used ABC pasta this time. I did not torment Red by insisting that we play Scrabble with our soup noodles.


I made a double batch of seitan last week. Some went into Appetite for Reduction’s Portobello Peppersteak Stew, which is delicious but not at all photogenic, so I didn’t bother with a picture. (It is incredible though, so you should make it.) Red sliced up the rest and we made barbecue seitan! This is one of his favorites. I sautéed the seitan for a few minutes in our biggest cast-iron skillet, then poured a bottle of Organicville Tangy BBQ Sauce over it and let it simmer until we got too hungry and had to eat it. Because nothing accompanies barbecue like cornbread, I made Cornbread Biscuits from Vegan Brunch. They were possibly even easier than regular cornbread, and very tasty. Them’s frozen green beans up there, if you’re keeping track.


This is Quinoa, White Bean, and Kale Stew from Appetite for Reduction. Isn’t it pretty? I love all the colors. It is a total color-texture extravaganza. This stew has damn near everything in it—kale, potatoes, carrots, quinoa, beans, parsnips, leeks, a bunch of spices, and on and on—but it comes together very quickly. I know I mentioned parsnips and they are kind of creepy to some people, looking like albino carrots like they do, but believe me, you won’t even notice them. They blend right in with the potatoes and you can’t tell the difference. I have examined spoonfuls of this stew, looking for something identifiably parsnip, and I haven’t found it yet. You should also know that the quinoa soaks up the broth like crazy, so after a night in the fridge, your stew becomes less stewish and more like a delicious amalgamation of veggies and grains that you need to eat with a spoon. It’s doesn’t bother me at all, but if you want to preserve your solid-to-liquid ratio, you might be SOL unless you eat the entire vat at once.


Last night, we made Pasta con Broccoli, also courtesy of AFR. It’s pretty obvious what this is, right? We cheaped out and used frozen broccoli, so it was extra-quick. Red was a little skeptical of a pasta dish that didn’t have an accompanying sauce, but he was pleasantly surprised. I was surprised by how filling it was—I didn’t expect that plain old noodles and broccoli would leave me satisfied for more than an hour or two. It is a garlicky delight that you could easily change up with whatever veggies in your fridge or freezer crave the loving embrace of pasta.

So there you have it. We’ve noticed that although we’ve loved everything from AFR so far, we seem to always end up with one less serving than Isa suggests. This isn’t really a problem for us—that pasta dish was supposed to make four servings at 300 calories each, so even if Red and I each snarfed down half the pan, that still would have been only 600 calories apiece for dinner—but maybe you care more about calories than we do. Anyway, all the AFR recipes have been so easy and tasty, three servings instead of four (or seven instead of eight) is totally justifiable.