So I know it’s supposed to be MUFFIN THURSDAY but I’ve been slacking on the muffin front, so instead its emotionally-charged chocolate eating Thursday…which doesn’t really have the same ring to it. But alas. I’m taking this really awful Research Methods course, and one example that the professor used in class recently was a study about chocolate affecting mood. I checked the citation, and it turns out that yes, it is a real study, and yes, chocolate makes you happier. SHOCK AND AWE. Anyway, over the last few weeks I’ve had a couple instances where chocolate was the only answer.

Vegan Rag Pie

I don’t think I need to go into the origins of the name, but just know that it is lovely alongside 40’s of malt liquor in your living room with your friends. It combines the two best friends of most premenstrual women: chocolate and peanut butter. It is also super easy and quick to make when you decide to have your friends over for malt liquor at the last minute.

You will need:
4 one-ounce baking chocolate squares, melted (if you are lucky enough to have vegan chocolate chips around, use about ½ cup and melt them)
½ cup creamy peanut butter
1 container silken tofu
2 TBS soy milk
1 premade crust (I used a shortbread-style, you can use whatever your lazy heart desires)

Blend the first 4 ingredients in a food processor. Keep the soy milk on hand, as I had to add slightly more to get the filling to a good “filling” consistency, but you may not. Pour into the premade pie crust and chuck that baby in the fridge for at least an hour.

Cut…

EAT EAT EAT

Sorry these pictures are on the terrible side, somebody (Rob) was too busy (malt liquor/Mario Kart) to take them for me.

And that’s not all…

For those of you who don’t know Rob or me in real life, we had a minor medical scare last week that involved Rob having to go to the emergency room. The diagnosis was good, but as anyone who has spent an evening in the ER knows, it’s stressful and depressing and all-around sucks. We came home and moped around for awhile, unable to sleep, when I decided that clearly what we needed was brownies. These were awesome. I found the recipe online and veganized it, and I have to say, I’d been thoroughly underwhelmed with vegan brownies before this version. They are thick and gooey and get stuck in your throat (a quality of a good brownie.) They also maintained their quality pretty well throughout the week. The recipe makes so many that I was forced to pawn some off on my cousin Celeste, who promptly asked, “Are these gonna be on The Food Sex??” Hope you liked em, C.

Post-Emergency Room Brownies

You will need:
2 cups flour
2 cups white sugar (I used slightly less than 2 cups because geez, that’s a lot of sugar)
¾ cup cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1 cup soy milk
½ cup vegetable oil
½ cup unsweetened applesauce
2-3 squares baking chocolate, chopped into little bits

Mix all the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt) in a big bowl and mix the wet (soy milk, vegetable oil and applesauce) in another. Add the wet to the dry and mix.

Pour roughly half the batter into a prepared 13×9 pan. Sprinkle half the chopped chocolate over. Is this necessary? No. Is it gluttonous? Yes. Does it make the brownies better? Definitely. Pour the rest of the batter over and top with the rest of the chocolate.

Bake at 350 for really only about 15 minutes for a gooey brownie. Remove from the oven and let sit for 10 minutes before cutting.

Here’s the pan:

and here are the brownies:

Unnngggh….

Well, that being said, Robbo and I are on vacation all next week on a road trip, where I will likely NOT be posting from the backwoods of Virginia. Have a good week!!

One of the crappiest things about having class Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights, Ukiah practice on Wednesdays and usually some social event on Fridays is that I have no time to cook, which is why I’m putting up some backlogged recipes. I made this back in February with black bean soup, but I figured I’d spare you another hot soup recipe now that it’s July, and just post the tortilla bowls.

Tofu and White Bean Tortilla Bowls

You will need:
1 lb firm or extra firm tofu, diced into bite-size pieces
1 can white beans (I think I used navy beans in this because they are my favorite, but cannellini or great northern would be fine also), drained and rinsed
1 clove of garlic, minced
Spinach
Salsa of yer likin’
Tortillas (fajita-size, I believe)
Cumin
Chili powder
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
Cilantro

My goal for this recipe was to make an edible tortilla bowl, like the ones they sell at Mexican chains like Qdoba (as my friend Nikki says, “It’s a bowl. That you can EAT!”) for salads and the like, but without frying it.

What I did was spray the inside of two deep cereal bowls with cooking spray, and jammed the tortilla down in there to fit the shape of the bowl. After drizzling the tortilla with olive oil and seasoning it with salt and pepper, I stuck something heavy (that, for the life of me, I can’t remember now—a rock? My cat? I’m not sure. Oh, stop writing the nasty email right this second, I was joking.) wrapped in aluminum foil in the bottom to hold it down, and baked it in a 350 degree oven for 10-15 minutes. The result? Ehh. It looked nice, but wasn’t much to write home about. I guess sometimes frying things is really the only way to do them.
So anyway, in a bowl, toss the tofu with the beans, a glug of olive oil, and a healthy sprinkling of cumin, chili powder, salt and pepper.

In a hot skillet, add another glug of olive oil and cook your garlic for just a minute. Dump in the tofu and bean mixture and heat, stirring occasionally, until the tofu is cooked to your liking. Throw in a handful of spinach (a prize to the first person to comment with the number of times I have used the phrase “handful of spinach” on this blog—seriously) and stir until it wilts. Take it off the heat and divide between your tortilla bowls.
Top each with a spoonful of salsa. Rob and I went through a phase over the winter where we were obsessed with Frontera brand tomatillo salsa:

So I used that and then sprinkled the top with a little more chili powder for color and topped it with cilantro. It was pretty good, but I guess the point is that you could use any kind of spices or salsa that you wanted. Next up= learning to fry a damn tortilla bowl. We’ll work on it.

Aaaaand the close-up:

1) Updating this blog.
Here’s the thing. I have been cooking up a storm lately. I have been photographing these foods. I have NOT been doing a very good job of updating this. Right now I have three nights of class a week for a total of 13 hours–after my 40 hour work week. Plus, you know, homework. Plus, since my old band broke up (miss you, Kacyn!), I have been pretty busy getting my new band off the ground for shows. This busy busy schedule not only makes me crabby with my loved ones, but also keeps me from doing things I enjoy, such as writing here. Luckily, I am only two weeks from finishing this crappy semester, and then I have big plans, including MUFFIN THURSDAYS, which must always be typed in caps because “muffin thursdays” is not nearly as thunderous as MUFFIN THURSDAYS. Plus, I love making muffins but can’t (and shouldn’t) eat them all the time, so I like to bring them to my office’s staff meetings on Thursday mornings. I’ve been canvassing for more good muffin recipes, so if you’ve got one, please please send it to me at food at thefoodsex dot com.

2) Making tofu scramble. What the hell? I’m usually pretty adept with tofu, but I am a failure at breakfast-tofu.

This is one I made by heating some olive oil in a pan, then crumbling tofu in and cooking it for a few minutes, adding some garlic powder and granulated onion (because I’m stinky, okay??) and then tossing in some vegetables (broccoli, mushrooms, sundried tomatoes) and cooking a bit longer, finally topping with sliced green onions. It really looks pretty, but it just wasn’t all I dreamed it would be. Help me, internet–what am I doing wrong?

Grab yer kebabs, it’s finally warm enough to fire up the grill. I’m always way psyched about grilling season because it means LESS WORK FOR ME:

The self-proclaimed King of the Grill. Also, Pittsburgh isn’t cloudy, it’s just a little sooty.

So, this meal happened on a Saturday afternoon, after we’d visited the previously mentioned Strip District and I bought all kinds of produce and fresh tofu. In retrospect, it was incredibly silly of me to use freshly made tofu for kebabs, as it was entirely too soft. Live and learn, and use the firmest tofu you’ve got.

You will need:
About 1/2 block tofu
One red pepper
One orange or yellow pepper
A good amount (how’s that for precision?) of pineapple

Marinade:
2 TBS Soy sauce
1 TBS Olive oil
1.5 tsp brown sugar
1 clove garlic, minced
Pinch dried ginger
Chopped Thai basil (optional–I’m addicted, okay??)

Normally I don’t have much of a sweet tooth. However, a strange thing has happened–after Easter, when our good friend Liz gave us 34 pounds of candy, so much so that I had to ask Rob to hide it from me and dole it out in reasonable portions, I’ve begun to develop sugar cravings. So when I wanted to make these kebabs, I decided to use sweet fruits and vegetables (the pineapple and peppers) and make a sweet marinade as well.

Okay, so begin by mixing the marinade in a bowl. Then chop everything into nice bite-size pieces. Dump them all in a Ziploc bag with the marinade, toss well to coat and refrigerate for at least an hour, turning the bag over if you think about it.

If you are using wooden BBQ skewers, soak them in water for about 30 minutes before you grill them so they don’t go up in flames.

When the tofu mixture is done marinading, skewer them up and dump the remaining marinade on them while the grill heats up:

See how the tofu is getting kinda crumbly? That’s what happens when you don’t use extra firm. Foolio!

Now throw ‘em on the grill. Yeah!

Close the lid and let them hang out for a bit. If you don’t have a grill, you could easily do this on a pan inside. Let them cook about 4-5 minutes and carefully flip them over using tongs. Cook another 4-5 minutes and take them off. You’ll be able to tell when they’re cooked to your liking.

While they were grilling, I wanted to make some kind of side dish. To go along with the Asian influence, I decided on these udon noodles.

See, they’re from Japan; they’re authentic–

Eh, nevermind.

Anyway, I cooked the noodles according to the package directions, tossed them with a little soy sauce and sprinkled them with sesame seeds. Then I put some on a plate with the kebabs and threw some more Thai basil over the whole thing.

I’m so glad it’s spring!

So, now you have some Thai basil leftover from the previous recipe, right? And maybe you also picked up a package of smoked tofu at the Asian grocery store, and you’re like, “What am I gonna do with this anyway?” right?

Smoked tofu, by the way, totally rules. The package was on the floor next to the fridge as I put groceries away, when I was suddenly distracted by my ringing phone (or maybe it was a shiny object, I can’t seem to remember). When I came back I found Marley licking the package. I swatted him away, rinsed the kitty saliva from the plastic and stuck it in the fridge. I came downstairs about an hour later to find him licking the spot on the tile where the tofu had been. Of course, as you can tell, there is not very much that Marley won’t eat:

He’s not a kitty who misses many meals.

So anyway, it was Sunday afternoon, I had this basil, tofu, and a hungry manfriend—and thus, it was sandwich time.

You will need:
olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced (there are very few recipes on here that don’t include garlic. If you don’t like garlic, you can just go away.)
Half a package of smoked tofu, cut into strips the size of your index finger
1 large whole wheat pita, halved
Spinach, chopped
Red cabbage, chopped
Thai basil leaves, whole
Sesame seeds (optional)
Peanut Sauce (recipe below)

To make the Peanut Sauce, you will need:
2 TBS peanut butter
1 TBS soy sauce
1 tsp brown sugar
Squeeze of lime juice to taste
water to thin to desired consistency

Start by heating the oil in a skillet. Add the garlic and cook 1 minute, taking care not to burn. We really just want to warm the tofu and add a little garlic flava, so this part will be quick. Drop the tofu in the pan and cook a minute or two on each side, just to heat through. Remove from heat.

To assemble, carefully open the pocket of your pita and stuff half the tofu inside. Please also ignore my grody bass playin’ fingers with short nails and no use for polish:

Smear with half the peanut sauce:

Sprinkle with sesame seeds if you’re into that:

Add some spinach and cabbage for crunchiness:

Poke some basil leaves in there:

NOM NOM NOM!

P.S.
While I’ve already apologized for abandoning this blog during the semester, it was apparently worth it. I got a 4.0!

A few months ago, I posted a recipe that I tried to emulate from one of my favorite food places in Pittsburgh, Pho Minh. This is another that I have semi-successfully tried to adapt from a place in my neighborhood called Thai Me Up. This is one of my new favorite places in the city, because you can bring a 40 of malt liquor in there, and no one cares. In fact, if you linger over your 40 for long enough, the chef will bring you the most delicious almond-crusted cake you have ever eaten. Seriously.
Anyway, my favorite thing on Thai Me Up’s menu is Spicy Tofu with Basil and Rice Noodles. It is so good. So, I began searching the internets for a decent recipe, and ended up combining a few to recreate this deliciousness. It is certainly not as good as the original, but it’ll suffice.
The key to this recipe is absolutely Thai basil. I would suggest, if you can’t find Thai basil, that you substitute mint and go for an entirely different flavor—to use regular sweet basil wouldn’t do it justice. You can find Thai basil in most Asian groceries (for you Pittsburghers, I get it at Lotus in the Strip.) You can recognize it in a store or farmer’s market by its small, pointy leaves and purple stem. It tastes much stronger than sweet basil, with a slightly licorice-y flavor.

I also got some of these red Thai chilies for this recipe, the nice thin ones, but you could use regular red or green chili peppers from the grocery store for this as well.

You will need:
Oil (peanut would be great, I only had olive oil on hand)
1 shallot, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
Chili peppers, de-seeded and de-ribbed, as many as you’d like
Half a block of extra firm tofu, cut into 1-inch(ish) cubes
About 2 TBS soy sauce
¼ cup of water or vegetable stock (or slightly less)
Large bunch of Thai basil
Rice noodles, cooked according to package directions

Heat a bit of oil in a wok or large skillet. Add the shallot and cook 2-3 minutes. Add the garlic and chilies, cook another minute.

HEY! HERE’S AN IDEA! DON’T RUB YOUR EYES AFTER CHOPPING THE CHILIES. Because I did, and it hurt like hell. I threw myself on the kitchen floor, screaming like a wounded animal and frantically trying to…I don’t know…rub the chili pepper residue from my eyes? With my tainted hands? I screamed to Rob, “GET IN HERE AND TAKE A PICTURE OF THIS SHIT, I’M GONNA BLOG IT!”
He respectfully declined.

Anyway, once you’ve dried the tears, add the tofu to the pan and stir fry until browned on all sides, to your liking. Add the soy sauce and water, stir fry another minute or 2, until the sauce is thickened. Add a big handful of Thai basil leaves, either left whole or chopped once or twice (you want big pieces.) Stir to wilt the basil and remove from heat. Serve the mixture over rice noodles with a Thai basil garnish—it’s too pretty not to!

Now close up!

Now far away again!

This recipe was adapted from one I read in last month’s Bon Appetit for Chicken-Lime Fajitas. It translated nicely to being vegan and was totally delicious, though it left me with a lot of cabbage to use up (that’ll be posted later.)

Tofu-and-Lime Tacos

You will need (to serve 2):

Taco shells or tortillas (I’m a soft girl, Rob’s a crunchy guy.)
2 cloves garlic, minced
Olive oil
Green onions
1 lime (for juice and zest, get extras if you want to garnish the plate)
3/4ths block extra firm tofu
Red cabbage
1 avocado
Cilantro
Salt and pepper

In a bowl, mix about 2 TBS olive oil with your garlic, the juice and zest of one lime and some salt and pepper.
Now, slice your tofu into finger-sized lengths. Whose fingers? I dunno, your fingers? You figure it out. Place the tofu pieces in a large Ziploc bag and pour the lime mixture over. Leave a little bit of the liquid in the bowl, you’re gonna use it later. Toss and shake the bag until the tofu is nice and coated. Throw (you can gently place, if that suits you better) the bag into the fridge to marinate for an hour or so. Turn the bag over once if you think about it to make sure it marinates evenly.

Once it’s been in there awhile, grab your trusty big skillet (you can carefully pull it from your closet, if you want. Why are cooking terms so violent??) and start it heating over medium-high heat on your stove. Once it’s nice and hot, dump the contents of the tofu bag in, getting as much liquid in the pan as possible. I think I actually added a bit of water to the mostly-empty bag and dumped that in the pan in order to get all the oil and lime juice out. To the skillet, add some chopped green onions if you so desire. This is what it looked like in my pan:

Cook until, well, it’s the doneness that you like in your tofu. What are you really looking for in tofu? When you find the right doneness, you’ll know.
While the tofu is cooking, slice two leaves of red cabbage into strips. You could grate it, I guess, but I liked the slightly thicker strips that slicing provided. Place the strips in the bowl with the leftover lime marinade and toss them around with about a TBS of chopped cilantro, to just very lightly coat.

Then check on your tofu. Is it done yet? Is it all you dreamed it would be?

It probably isn’t. So, take your biggest knife and slice around the pit of the avocado so you can essentially break it in half. To get the pit out, WHACK it with the knife so the blade is stuck in the pit (this needs to be violent) like so:

This illustration confuses me, as I’ve never seen an avocado so tiny as compared to those giant fingers. But you get the point!

Now your tofu is probably done. Remove it from the heat and arrange tacos as follows: taco/tortilla, tofu, cabbage, avocado. Finish the whole thing with some chopped cilantro.

Here are mine in tortillas:

And here are Rob’s in hard tacos:

It’s been awhile since we made these, but if I remember correctly, Rob’s only beef with them was that the cabbage consistency was a little TOO crunchy when raw, especially in big chunks. I personally liked it, but if that sounds like it would be a problem for you, by all means throw the strips in the pan and cook them around with the tofu until they are done to your liking.
Then again, what are you really looking for in cabbage?

Tofu Spring Rolls

My favorite restaurant in Pittsburgh, somewhat regrettably, is Pho Minh on Penn Avenue in Garfield. It is a family-run Vietnamese joint with excellent food, and it’s BYOB. While I’ve always dined there without incident, I have heard stories of many insane things happening there. Here is the building. I did not take this picture.

My friend Matt tells a story about walking by Pho Minh with a friend of his, who was saying that she thought the place was shady. Matt responded, “Come on, it isn’t that bad,” just as someone was thrown up against the window inside. I really like Pho Minh.

But none of this is the point. The point is that they have some of the best tofu spring rolls I have ever had, and I decided to try to replicate them.

For this, you will need:

About a ½ pound of extra firm tofu
Hoisin sauce
Soy sauce
Spring roll wrappers
Mai fun rice noodles, cooked according to package directions and then chopped
Cucumbers, cut into very thin planks
Carrots, grated
Cilantro, chopped
Spinach
Sesame seeds (optional)

Start by pressing the tofu and cutting it into slabs about a half inch thick, a half inch wide and two inches long. You can always cut them smaller after cooking them; you just don’t want them to fall apart in the pan. Brush them with hoisin sauce and start heating a skillet—we’re going to sear them.

Once the skillet is nice and hot (it’s important that it be dry, so make sure to use a nonstick pan), throw your tofu pieces in and let them cook. This caused a ridiculous amount of smoke in my kitchen, so I turned on the stove fan. It didn’t help much, eventually Rob came down and threw the back door open and glared at me, shivering. Whatever, the tofu was good.

Don’t move it around too much, but flip after a few minutes. There’s really no science to this, just keep your eye on it. Once it’s all cooked, put the pieces on a plate and pop them in the fridge to cool.

Now, get a large bowl of hot water—not so hot you can’t stick your hands in it, but hot nonetheless. Take one spring roll wrapper and submerge it in the water until it gets pliable and sticky. Spread it on your work surface and top with a few tofu slabs, some noodles, cucumber, carrots, lots of cilantro and a few leaves of spinach, just for crunch. Roll the bottom part over the pile of goodness and then fold the sides in and roll all the way up. You’ll have to work quickly, as the spring roll wrappers might get a little gunky. This takes a bit of practice, but you’ll get the hang of it.

MMMHMMM.

Here is the inside:

For the dipping sauce, I just mixed hoisin sauce with soy sauce to my taste, and then added some sesame seeds for garnish. This was not nearly as good as Pho Minh’s, but I have no idea what is in theirs. I know, if I were smart, I’d have put it in a light colored bowl so you could see it. I really need some new dishes.

All in all, it was a good meal, although I couldn’t eat nearly as many of them as I thought I could. Rob (who also loves Pho Minh, but he digs the beef soup thing) gave it eight hot dogs.

There’s a little Asian market in the Strip District here in Pittsburgh that sells tofu for 25 cents a brick. 25 cents! That is insanely cheap. So whenever we go to stock up on veggies from Stan’s, we always stop in at the Asian market and grab some tofu.

From that, I made this apple-soy tofu. The recipe was originally from a VegWeb user, but I ended up having to do a little tweaking.

about 1 lb. firm tofu, drained and pressed
1/4 cup unsweetened apple juice
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 medium-sized garlic clove, minced or pressed
1/2 teaspoon grated fresh ginger

Slice tofu into triangles. Mix the above ingredients in a Ziploc bag and marinate the tofu in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours, but up to overnight.

Place the tofu into a glass baking dish. Here’s where your preference comes in–if you want your tofu to be crispy, set the leftover marinade aside. If you want it to be chewier and less crispy, pour the remaining marinade over the top. When I made this, I actually discarded the leftover marinade (stupid!)

Bake uncovered at 375 for about 30 minutes.

This is what they looked like:

If I were to make this again, I would have saved the leftover marinade (or made more, depending on how long you let it marinate for and how much was left) and served it as a sauce on top of the tofu, with some rice for soaking it up. All in all it was good, but it definitely needed more kick.

Rob’s review:

Seven hot dogs. Not a resounding victory, but not terrible either!!