Category Archives: Jewish Vegan Food

Holiday Recap and a Soy Curl Potpie Recipe

Posted by Banana Curl Vegan Girl in Appetizer, Bagels, Baked Goods, Breakfast, Cats, Christmas, Coconut, Cookies, Cooking, Desserts, Dinner, Dinners, Gluten Free, Hanukkah, Holiday Food, Ideal for potlucks, Jewish Vegan Food, Meatless Meats, Menus, Mini Foods, Nutritional Yeast, Pastry, Pie, Pot pies, Raw vegan food, Recipes, Sammy, Soy Curls, Update, Vegan Junk Food, veganism and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve been so busy lately. Between graduate school, taking an improv comedy class, the holidays, my grandmother dying, etc., I’ve barely had time for cooking. I was able to create two Youtube videos in the beginning of the semester, which you can see here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIGj10TPGenVBNH6vySDPpw! I hope to make more videos on Youtube in the coming year.

I’ve also been regularly updating my blog’s new(ish) Instagram account, which you can follow @bananacurlvegangirl

If you’re not on Instagram or following along here, I’m going to do a quick photo recap of some of the food I made for the holidays.

For some homemade gifts, I made my famous sour cream and onion kale chips, green tea, goji, and coconut superfood energy bars (adapted from this recipe), vegan and gluten-free marshmallow wreaths, and chocolate peppermint patties from a recipe that’s basically this (not pictured).

 

We had 4 relatives staying with us from Christmas Eve day until yesterday. My aunt and uncle and cousins have a tradition at their house of making appetizers on Christmas eve. So, I made lentil faux chopped liver dip, a spinach and artichoke dip, and we made mini potato latkes because it was also the first night of Hanukkah and my dad celebrates the holiday and loves having latkes. Instead of using eggs, we used the Neat egg for the first time and it worked out really well! There was also a salad made that I was able to eat.

 

For dessert, I had these gluten-free, vegan sugar cookies I made from a recipe on Minimalist Baker. Check the recipe out here.

gf sugar cookies xmas.JPG

For Christmas morning breakfast, everyone else was having bagels. My mom was nice enough to go to a local gluten-free bakery and pick up some vegan and gluten free bagels. I topped them with Kite Hill chive cream cheese, my papaya lox, and capers.

lox-bagels

For my dinner later that day, I made gluten-free, vegan stuffed shells with Kite Hill almond ricotta and pesto. I forgot to take a picture of them. We also had my favorite vegan caesar salad ever, which I also forgot to photograph, but believe there are previous posts on this blog about it.

It was a sweet Christmas! I hope you had a very merry one yourselves! As a thank you for reading, here is a picture of my three cats, that my brother photoshopped for a card.

christmas-cats

However, the best Christmas present is that I have a new recipe! For a soy curl chickun potpie that is soooo good!

WordPress has a new feature here, so I’m going to try to see what happens when I upload a word document of the recipe.

soy-curl-chickun-potpie (link to a downloadable recipe? or something)

Soy Curl Chickun Potpie

Vegan and Gluten-free

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups soy curls
  • ½ cup frozen peas
  • ½ cup frozen corn
  • 1 medium potato, chopped
  • 6-8 baby carrots chopped into rounds
  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 stalk celery, chopped
  • one small onion, chopped
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 2 tbsp nutritional yeast flakes
  • 1 tsp dried rubbed sage
  • ½ cup vegan no-chicken broth, divided
  • 1 tbsp vegan butter or coconut oil
  • 3 tbsp garbanzo flour
  • 1 cup unsweetened plain coconut milk
  • 1 no-chicken bouillon cube
  • Salt and pepper, to taste
  • 2 gluten-free, vegan pie crusts, homemade or store bought

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. Soak soy curls, corn, and peas in a bowl with enough warm water to cover. Let sit for at least 10 minutes and drain. Set aside.
  3. Steam potatoes and carrots in a steamer basket for 10 minutes.
  4. Place olive oil, celery, onions, and garlic in a skillet on medium heat and sauté until soft. Add in the soy curls, corn, peas, nutritional yeast, sage, and ¼ cup broth. Mix in the potatoes and carrots. Stir and heat until the soy curls are warm.
  5. To make a gravy for the pie, place the vegan butter and garbanzo flour in a saucepan over medium heat. Whisk until crumbly and beginning to brown. Slowly add in the coconut milk, continuing to whisk. You may need to lower the heat. Add the remaining ¼ cup broth and the bouillon cube. Keep whisking until the bouillon melts and the gravy is thick. You can add salt and pepper to taste once you turn off the heat.
  6. Add the gravy into the soy curl and vegetables.
  7. Spoon into a bottom of a pie crust. Place the top of the pie crust as you like it. Make slits in the top to allow steam to escape. You may have some leftover filling that you can eat separately or make into other dishes.
  8. Bake for 30 minutes or until the crust is golden in color.
  9. Allow to cool slightly before serving.
  10. Bon Appetit!

Enjoy the new year festivities if I don’t post before then (but I do have several posts lined up!) Happy Holidays from Banana Curl, Vegan Girl!

 

Happy Hanukkah! My recipe for vegan latkes

Posted by Banana Curl Vegan Girl in Fried food, Hanukkah, Holiday Food, Jewish Vegan Food, Original Recipes, Recipes and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Happy Hanukkah to all who celebrate!

I am working on my cookbook zine quite a bit and wanted to share a recipe I created for it because it is relevant! I also recently veganized kugel, which I was quite surprised by, but you’ll have to wait for the zine to come out for that one 😉

My family has a tradition for the first night of Hanukkah to make latkes. Unfortunately, the recipe we’ve always used calls for eggs. This is the first time I experimented with egg replacer, and it actually turned out better than my mom’s she made that were not vegan.

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Vegan Potato Latkes

Ingredients:

  • 2 cups grated raw potatoes
  • 1/2 chopped onion
  • 1 tbsp egg replacer powder
  • 4 tbsp warm water
  • 2 tbsp flour or matzo meal
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1/4 tsp black pepper
  • oil for frying
  • vegan sour cream or applesauce for dipping

Directions:

  1. In a large bowl, fill with freezing cold water and ice.
  2. Grate potatoes and put the potatoes into the ice bath while you prepare the rest of the ingredients. This prevents discoloration of the potatoes and reduces the sogginess.
  3. Chop onion and whisk together the egg replacer and warm water in a small bowl.
  4. Drain the potatoes in a strainer. Be sure to get all the ice out.
  5. In a kitchen/ tea towel, place the drained potatoes in the middle, and squeeze out any excess moisture.
  6. Place into a large mixing bowl, mix in all ingredients except oil.
  7. Cover a frying pan with about an inch of oil. Heat on high until a piece of potato bubbles and sizzles immediately upon placing in the oil.
  8. Place a wooden spoonful of the potato mixture in the oil. With the back of the spoon, press down to flatten in the oil.
  9. Use a slotted spoon to flip them after they have browned on the bottom side. Keep in the oil until both sides are browned.
  10. Place onto a plate with paper towels to drain.
  11. Continue to fry until you have used up the batter. You will probably need to turn down the heat a bit to allow them to cook a bit more slowly at some point.
  12. Enjoy! Have a happy holiday!

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Vegan Papaya Lox for Bagels

Posted by Banana Curl Vegan Girl in Bagels, Breakfast, Jewish Vegan Food, Original Recipes, Recipes, Sunday Brunch, Vegan Seafood and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Last night I bought some pre-sliced papaya because I wanted to see if I liked it without buying a whole papaya. I don’t think I have ever had it before or if I have I don’t remember. When I got home from the store, I tried a slice, but I didn’t really like it. However, the color, texture, and lack of distinct flavor led me to believe I should try making a vegan lox substitute. So, I began to make a marinade for it and began experimenting. The results were pretty great!

First you marinate the slices for about an hour in a mixture of stuff (see my recipe below) in the fridge, then you bake it at a low temp of 200 degrees F for about 5 minutes, turn up the heat in the oven to 250, bake 10 minutes, flip, and bake for 10 more. Then you will have the perfect faux lox to put on top of bagels and vegan cream cheese. I’m also going to try making it in the dehydrator I think. I’ll post more about that if (when) I do it.

IMG_2866Vegan Papaya Lox

Ingredients:

  • 4-6 large, thick slices of papaya
  • 2 tbsp soy sauce
  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tsp kelp granules
  • 2 tsp liquid smoke
  • 1 tsp rice vinegar
  • 6-10 tbsp water (depending on how many slices you are attempting to make and what container you are marinating it in)
  • Salt, to taste

Directions:

  1. In a shallow container with a lid that fits securely and is big enough to fit the papaya and marinade, pour all the ingredients in (except the salt and papaya) and stir or whisk well.
  2. Place the papaya slices into the marinade. Flip to the other side.
  3. Close the container, and place in the refrigerator for an hour or longer, flipping halfway.
  4. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees F.
  5. Place papaya on a well-oiled baking sheet and sprinkle the tops with salt.
  6. Bake in the oven for 5 minutes.
  7. Turn the heat up to 250 and continue to bake for 10 minutes.
  8. Flip over, sprinkle this side with salt as well, and heat for another 8-10 minutes.
  9. Allow to cool or eat while warm on top of a bagel with a schmear of cream cheese!

IMG_2859

Raw papaya before being used

IMG_2862

the papaya in the marinade

IMG_2864

The papaya after it’s been cooked

First Blog Post–Happy Vegan Rosh Hashana!

Posted by Banana Curl Vegan Girl in Baked Goods, Holiday Food, Jewish Vegan Food, Recipe Reviews, Recipes, Rosh Hashana Food, Vegan Sandwiches Save the Day!, Veganomicon and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I rarely celebrate any Jewish holidays, as I am not religious at all. However, I grew up loving Russian Jewish food because that’s the ancestry of half of my family, My family  decided to get together this past weekend, and we decided to make food inspired by Rosh Hashana for it, since it starts tomorrow night (The evening of September 4th, 2013) and is close enough to when we got together since we don’t see each other very often.

So when I heard we were doing this, I started looking around for what in my mind was classic Jewish food, with the intention of veganizing it. I looked in a lot of the cookbooks I own by Isa Chandra Moscowitz as she has a lot of good stuff like that hidden throughout her cookbooks (mainly Veganomicon and Vegan with a Vengeance) and finally decided on a menu.

I ended up making:

My Reviews of it all:

The “Brisket”

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A rating of 5 good Bananas is the highest rating! Woohoo! Seitan Brisket recipe! This means it was amazingly delicious and I wanted more. This means even my aunt, who eats meat and isn’t used to fake meats at all, ate it and said it was really delicious (especially the sauce)! I would gladly make it again, even though it took me two days  to do so!

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so good, 5 good banana rating!

A few tips if you decide to make it yourself? If using the recipe in the Vegan Sandwiches book for the home-made Moo Free seitan, I cooked it in the slow cooker, that way you can forget about it all day basically and go about  your business as normal. However, place it in the fridge when you go to bed so it’s ready and cool the next day. Then slice and prepare the rest of the stuff on the Earth Balance recipe. I used grape juice instead of red wine (I’m sort of straight edge but I cook with wine occasionally. I wanted to try the grape juice though to see if it worked and it worked amazingly,) I also used white miso for the glaze.

If you don’t want to go through the hassle of making your own seitan (I contemplated it) you can try storebought. You could also substitute any beef like basic seitan recipe instead. With either of those changes though, I can’t guarantee you’ll get the same 5 good bananas rating results that I had 😛

The kugel:

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I hate to give my worst rating to a recipe right away, but I’m giving this the rating of one good banana, 4 bad bananas! 😦 Partly this may have been my fault, because I was really spacey the day I made it, and used 3 matzos instead of 4, and forgot the onions, and left out the lemon juice. However, the way the recipe was written it was easy to forget the onions, but the lemon juice was totally my fault. Despite my botched attempt at making this recipe, I think it would not change much had I done it right. It’s a hunch…but the matzo makes it have this weird taste and it just was too spinachy or something. I wish it was better. Like it has the potential to be a bit creamier like a spinach souffle or the like, but it’s really off-putting. I don’t even want to eat the rest of it that is left over… 😦

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the kugel along with everything else on the plate

Oh, and I used a Stop and Shop brand of egg-free noodles. They’re the same shape as the egg kugel noodles, but I verified to make sure they were vegan.

FInally,

The Rugelach!

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Well I’m rating these delicious vegan Jewish Holiday pastries that I grew up with (except not vegan at the time) four good bananas and one bad! It loses one good banana simply because I think they could be slightly better. The recipe doesn’t instruct how to get the classic rugelach shape correctly, which I’m more than okay with because they still taste excellently good, but I think the dough may also need a tiny bit of work, as it’s softer than the real rugelach I remember. Otherwise, it’s basically the real deal. The chocolate filling option is amazingly authentic and so tasty!

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one out of two baking sheets it made of these babies!

It was slightly challenging to clean the food processor after making these, as well as really hard to roll out, I didn’t slightly flour the surface, I heavily floured it. Except for some of the jelly rolls I made unrolling a bit in the middle, though, I am very happy with it. It makes a ton! I made exactly 48 cookies. Don’t eat a ton of them all at once, as they’re about 100 calories a pop (more on how I calculate this later on in future blog posts).

That’s it for this post today! Hope you enjoyed it! And if you’re Jewish (or not), Happy New Year !

P.S.: Since this is my first ever blog post, don’t forget to check out the about me page on my blog here