Have you ever been so sick that cooking was just not an option? Well, that was last week for me. By the end of it, I was craving veggies like you wouldn’t believe, but was still not up to a trip to the grocery store. Solution? This quick and easy pasta.
1/2 box pasta, diced mozzarella, some garlic, olive oil, and spices, with steam in the bag veggies. It took maybe 20 minutes, tops, to make, and there was enough for several days.
This recipe is not yet perfected, but that’s the fun of it. I wanted pasta. I did not want to shop. So, I made this.
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I used:
1/2 box of penne
1 bag of frozen steam in the microwave vegetables
nutritional yeast
rice milk
1/4 stick of cheese
ground pepper
pecorino romano
stovetop and pots, mixing bowl, and food processor
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I was trying to make a pseudo-alfredo with the nutritional yeast, cheese, and rice milk. I am lacto-ovo, but my stomach can’t take real alfredo (milk/cream issues), and I’m allergic to the most common vegetarian/vegan substitutes (soy/nut issues), so I was trying to make a version I can actually eat.
I steamed the veggies and then processed them, and added them to the sauce. No problem there. If the sauce had been cheesier, this would’ve been even better. So, it’s almost there, but not quite. Because of the veggies and high quantity of nutritional yeast, this felt like good fuel. Plus, I had enough for days, which is always nice.
This was a lot of fun for me- one of those puzzles that requires ingenuity.
I can’t wait to figure this one out! 
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Like I said, quick and easy this time of year.
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Rosemary and Cheese Bagel
Utensils:
A pair of scissors
An oven
A cake pan
Cooking spray
Aluminum foil
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Ingredients:
Dried rosemary leaves, to taste
4 slices American cheese
Nutritional Yeast to taste, not too much
Gouda to taste
Pecorino Romano to taste, not too much
(Did I add Italian Seasoning? Let’s just say I did.)
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Directions:
1. Preheat oven to Broil/HI if electric. If not, hopefully you can figure it out. Regular broilers are tricky. This would take far less time under one of those, and could easily burn, so be careful. You should also find another way to set these up instead of using a cake pan.
2. Line your cake pan with foil and spray it. Slice your bagel carefully, and place in pan. Then, place one slice of American cheese over each half.
3. Dice your Gouda. Set little piles on top of each bagel.
4. Sprinkle nutritional yeast, Pecorino Romano, and cut up rosemary leaves on Gouda.
5. Place one slice of American cheese over each bagel. Add Italian seasoning to top, sparingly.
6. Place in oven for about 5 minutes or less. Switch to LOW when needed. This only took about 5 minutes to cook when I did it.
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Enjoy!
It seems like everyone has been doing stuffed pepper posts lately. Does it help that I typed this up at the beginning of the month and just scheduled it for now? Is it possible to get sick of stuffed peppers? This is the last post in my unofficial series of Things I Wrote Ridiculously Ahead of Time Because It’s Summer and I Want to Go Outside.
I haven’t had stuffed peppers since I was a child. All I remember about them was the fact that I used to eat the stuffing, but not the pepper, in that peculiar logic children seem to have, and that the stuffing itself was ground beef & rice.
Since I have long since abandoned an omnivorous diet, and wasn’t in a veggie mince mood, I was faced with the challenge of coming up with something that was savory enough to do my memory justice. I was also intent on making this a make-now, eat-later meal. The recipe combines this broth recipe and the cooking temperature & averaged time from the stuffed tomatoes. I was very happy with how these turned out.
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Ingredients:
5 peppers
1 bag of boil-in-the-bag rice
The broth from the seitan recipe
1 box of babybellas
Spray olive oil
Cheddar cheese shreds (2 or 3 cups)
5 or more american cheese slices
Nutritional yeast
Romano cheese
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Tools:
Cake pan and aluminum foil. (You just need something tall enough to stand the peppers in, & the foil makes clean-up easy).
Oven
Cutting board & knife
Food processor
2 large pots
Strainer
Mixing bowl
Cling wrap
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Preparation:
1. Start the broth, then start the rice. Preheat oven to 400 F.
2. Process the mushrooms, then place in broth.
3. Is the rice ready? If so, strain & place in broth. Stir.
4. Strain the broth, mushroom, rice mixture. Place in mixing bowl & add cheese. Stir.
5. Remove the top portion of the pepper & insides.
6. Spray cake pan & peppers with olive oil.
7. Put mixture in peppers. Place peppers in cake pan. Place a slice of American cheese with a sprinkle of Romano & nutritional yeast on each cheese slice. Do not wrap peppers before placing in oven. Just let them stand up in the cake pan.
8. Place in oven at 400F for 15 minutes.
9. Remove from oven. Place on cooling rack, pan & all, and cover with cling wrap.
10. Go watch a movie for a couple of hours.
11. Remove cling wrap. Individually wrap each pepper in cling wrap & store in fridge in new container.
12. I microwaved these at 30 second intervals both wrapped and unwrapped, & ended up with an average microwave time of about a minute. I also think they heated up better unwrapped, which was a bit of a surprise. Decide for yourself which method you prefer, & check at intervals to determine your preferred cooking time.
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Enjoy!
Through the generosity of Mother Nature and her minions, I had way too many tomatoes this week, which admittedly, is not actually a problem. I love tomatoes with a firey passion unmatched by any other vegetable, and everyone in my life knows this, which is how I ended up with a bowl full of them.
I love tomatoes. I love cheese. I love bread crumbs. So, there you have it.
I’d forgotten where I first saw the recipe, so I used my google-fu and found this one. I’m not a regular reader there, and dislike the ads on the source site. But the layout was easy to navigate, the recipe more or less matched what I had available, and I really appreciated how easy these were to make.
The only problem was the guilt I felt gutting my beautiful tomatoes. It was Linus on Halloween all over again…
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Ingredient Modifications:
4 medium tomatoes to 3 medium tomatoes and one large tomato.
My bread crumbs are Italian style.
Butter to faux light butter.
Fresh basil to about an inch of dried basil I was trying to use up.
Monterey Jack to I had mozzarella already shredded, what would you do?
1/2 teaspoon of salt to I don’t like that much salt, so three grinds should be plenty.
Added about 1/2 cup of nutritional yeast, some Italian seasoning, some Romano, & 1 teaspoon minced garlic to the filling. I think 1/2 teaspoon of garlic next time will be enough. I like garlic & don’t mind garlic breath, but this was a bit much.
I did not use the pulp and didn’t miss it.
No pretty garnish because I didn’t have it and yes, this bothers me.
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Preparation Modifications:
I sprayed the inside and outside with olive oil because I really like olive oil and was also a little worried these might burn.
10 minutes to 20 minutes because mine were still cold after 10 minutes.
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Enjoy!
I can’t even tell you the last time I had mac & cheese. I tried making it in the fall, but the result tasted like some sort of Italianesque appetizer hybrid. There was cheese, there were noodles, there was also a combination of seasonings that combined together form “Italian”, kind of like Voltron or the Power Rangers form… you know what, nevermind.
…I got a slow cooker. Finally. I’ve never cooked with a slow cooker before, but have been looking forward to it for ages. I decided to make mac & cheese because I only had ingredients for mac & cheese. I chose the recipe that best matched what I had around, but I still ended up modifying it.
It’s really hard to make mac & cheese without milk or soy, so you can imagine how pleased I was to have finally figured something out! Here’s the base: Carla Hall’s Slow Cooker Mac & Cheese – the chew – ABC, and below are the modifications I made. I’ve never seen this show. My mac does not look or taste like Carla Hall’s. The most obvious visual difference is that mine is creamy (out of the crock) and hers, you can slice. Mine is also bland by design. (Though, she is a famous chef and I’m not, so maybe you’ll like hers better). It was super easy & responded well to my mods, so I was happy!
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Tool Modifications:
Measuring cup to 80s Garfield mug from fast food place.
(I literally did 2 cups & so forth. Why? Why not?)
No measuring spoons. Instead, a soup spoon, which I used to mash the cream cheese & for the mayo. Most things were just eyeballed.
Wisk to large knife because it was there. I have a wisk. I did not use the wisk.
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Ingredient Modifications:
Pepperjack to Muenster & Cheddar
Half & Half to Rice Dream Original
Paprika to Nutritional Yeast
Cayenne Pepper to a dash of red pepper flakes
Added one circle around the bowl of nutritional yeast (after the above mod)
Added a little less than one soup spoon of soy-free vegan mayo
Added more rice dream & shredded cheese by instinct, trying to get it to look like it would produce mac & cheese. (Sorry this isn’t more helpful, but hopefully we all know what mac & cheese ought to look like.)
I didn’t mix it up the way she suggests. Instead, I mixed it all in the bowl, then poured it into the crock pot. Her way sounds better.
Sprinkled with black pepper to serve
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Cooking Tips:
* Start the pasta prep first while you do everything else.
*I set the crock pot to LOW for 4 hours, but the center could have easily gone longer. The center was creamy, but the edges crusted over. After 4 hours, I ate some & stored the rest.
* My crock is 3 quarts. Hall doesn’t really address the size of the crock in her version.
* This became more solid after refrigeration. For this reason, I liked the leftovers better!
Enjoy!
