I haven’t written all week and with the holidays I probably won’t write much if at all next week either.  I’m substituting holiday and family type things for writing and also for pretty much everything else.  And I am very OK with that!

I had to come tell about Meatless Monday though because it’s kind of become a goal of mine to be a once a week vegan. I’m thinking it may be one of my 2014 goals – to keep it up all year.  That may sound like an easy goal but only if you don’t know what a dairy addict being vegetarian has made me and only if you don’t know how slightly horrible I am with trying new recipes.

About that…

Breakfast:

Last week I tried to make this cranberry bread in the bread maker and my result was bad enough that it went straight to the trash.  I mentioned it wasn’t the recipe, it was most likely my choice of bread machine settings.

This week I just made it in the oven like the recipe called for – and I love it!  This is the first time I’ve actually bought an orange for the purpose of using the ‘zest of one orange’ but I doubt it’s the last.  I really like the way it tastes and highly recommend you try this recipe. I actually plan on making this to bring to Christmas dinner.  If you figure out how to do it in a bread machine do tell!

Lunch:

Thanks to having Christmas Eve and Christmas off it seemed kind of wasteful to make a full week’s lunches like I usually do.  I mentioned it to my boyfriend and he said he was just doing sandwiches.  Hmm, good idea. But are the breads sold at my local grocer vegan?  I didn’t even look because I kind of doubt it and even if they are you know they’re full of unnecessary ingredients.  And so I had my next bread machine (almost) disaster.

• 1 cup unsweetened vanilla almond milk
• 2/3 water
• 2 tbsp coconut oil
• 2 tbsp agave
• 2 tsp salt
• 3 and 3/4 c whole wheat flour
• 1/2 c oats
• 1/4 cup flax
• 2 and 1/4 tsp yeast

I used the whole wheat setting for a 2# loaf.  I modified the recipe from this one on Paleo-ish Guilty Kitchen.  I was a little confused about the setting for this bread too because she says she uses the ‘rapid bake’ setting and that it takes over 4 hours but on my machine rapid bake is less than an hour.  Hmm.  I just used the regular whole wheat setting.

I looked in at the bread a wee bit through and it was all crumbly  like it had sand in it.  What?  I make bread often enough to know it doesn’t do that.  So I ran back to the site and scrolled through the comments and saw one that said they thought they may have added too much water.  Um, I don’t remember water being in this recipe.  Talk about an A-Ha moment.  So I went back to the machine and added my 2/3 warm tap water and squished it in with my hands.  I kind of wrote off the bread at that point but figured there was no harm done by letting the bread machine do it’s thing.  And what came out?  An ugly, uneven, slightly heavy but very tasty bread!  Talk about a fool- proof recipe! So sandwiches it is.

Dinner:

I do like to stick with easy on Monday nights so this week I’m making a minestrone type soup.  I can’t give an exact recipe because my method of making soup is throw a little of this and a little of that in a pot, then switch to a bigger pot once or twice, and so on and I didn’t make this one in advance.  But here is the general idea:

•  a can of cannellini beans
• maybe a can of kidney beans if it looks like it needs more
• 1 sliced zucchini
• 1 sliced yellow squash
• a chopped onion
• about 2 regular sized chopped carrots
• a stalk or two of thin sliced celery
• lots of fresh minced garlic – at least 3 or 4 cloves and likely more
• fresh green beans
• bite sized kale pieces
• a can or two of diced Italian tomatoes
• shell or macaroni pasta (depending on what I have)
• Italian seasoning
• spices but I’ll just have to use the add and taste method for that part (it’s my favorite cooking method!)

This is totally unrelated to any kind of meatless Monday but totally related to spending my time not blogging.  My son just showed me this:

He squeezed the innards of a highlighter into a glass of water and put it in front of his black light.  Believe it or not I did nothing to the above picture at all, I just took the pic and uploaded it.

Groovy!!

If you have a vegan bread machine recipe I’d love a link to it!

Also let me know what you thing of my son’s experiment. I told him I was posting the pic on my blog and he of course instantly asked me what people thought.

Related articles

• Vegan Meatless Mondays (kindazennish.com)