Garlicky Green Beans and Potatoes

 I love green beans.


I also love potatoes.


Put them both together and you have a love fest on a plate.

So I stir-fried some green beans with these small potatoes for lunch and it really made my day.

I present garlicky green beans and potatoes:

Ingredients:

Green beans snapped and washed
Fingerling potatoes or any small white potato
5 cloves of garlic minced
Olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Green beans and potatoes after their shock treatment.

Boil the potatoes for 15 minutes or until they are soft.  Set aside.

Steam the green beans for 5 minutes.

Shock the green beans in ice cold water. Drain and set aside


Heat a skillet with olive oil on medium high. Saute your minced garlic.

After garlic is browned, throw in your potatoes and green beans and heat through. Add salt and pepper and turn off the heat and serve.

Beet and Carrot "Latkes"

 I like rich foods. There's rarely a meal I eat that I don't have tofu or seitan in it. But sometimes it's good to indulge in the lighter vegetarian fare. Tonight was one of those sometimes.

I paired the cakes with a salad and crumbled some queso fresco on top (On one of my grocery whims I bought this cheese with big plans of cooking some deluxe Mexican fare. Now I'm just trying to use it before it goes bad).


Here is the recipe for beet and carrot latkes:

a piece of a beet (the piece goes a long way believe me)
2 small carrots
one half a small onion
one small clove of garlic
a small amount of flour
paprika
nutritional yeast
salt and pepper to taste

Grate the veggies and mix all the ingredients together. Make small patties with your hand and place on a well-oiled sheet pan.

Bake at 350° until slightly blackened** on each side. That should be about 15 minutes tops but check frequently. 


**NOTE: It doesn't take long for this to happen because of the high sugar content in both the beets and the carrots. You know how after sugar turns to caramel it then turns into black crunchy crap? Same principles.

Taco Time

After work, I had a hankering for some tacos and for the life of me I didn't know why. Maybe one too many listens to the merengue mixes on YouTube? Or was it the Latin food trucks within a block from my job sending me subliminal messages? I don't know what it was but whatever it was worked. So I decided to go to the store and pick up some ingredients.


Then I got to the store and realized I never made soft tacos in my life. At least I don't remember. Go figure.

So I went searching for some taco recipes and found a few that got my juices flowing (this is one of the many I looked at. Really it's one of two I looked at before my attention went elsewhere) and decided to try a fish taco recipe.

Naturally I don't eat fish so I substituted the fish for some tofu and baked it instead of fried it (look at me being healthy). Tofu, like fish, is one of those ingredients that soaks up whatever flavor you want it to have so it's very versatile.

Then I threw a lot of veggies that seemed to go together in a slaw, added some chili sauce and voila. My rendition of a veg-friendly "fish" taco.

"Fish" Tacos

For the Tofu:
Tofu
Soy Sauce
Equal parts flour and white cornmeal
Chili powder
salt and pepper
Oil for baking


For Slaw:
Cabbage
Onions
1 clove of Garlic
Radishes
Corn
Cilantro (I used dried because that's all I had but I' sure fresh would've been so much better)
salt and pepper
The juice of 1/2 lime

For Sauce
Mayo (or Vegenaise)
Chili powder
A small amount of red pepper flakes
Juice of 1/2 lime
salt and pepper

Slice the tofu in strips (about 1/4" thick) and soak it in equal parts soy sauce and water while you make the slaw.

Grate all vegetables (including the onion and garlic) with the small grate size. Mix the other ingredients and set aside

Preheat the oven to 400°.

Drain the tofu and dredge each slice in the cornmeal/flour batter. In a shallow baking dish add a shallow layer of oil and place the tofu in the pan. The strips should not touch each other.

After about ten minutes, flip the tofu strips and allow to cook on the other side. Allow to cook another 5 minutes and remove and drain the excess oil.

Combine all the ingredients for the sauce. Taste it. I felt like I should say that.


Warm your tortillas and get to building your tacos. I warm my tortillas like so:

It gives it that nice charred look on the edges. I'll probably have hell to pay when I'm cleaning the eyes of my stove but whatever.

Steam!

I really didn't like any of the pictures I took this morning but looking back I saw that I caught some steam and I got excited. I don't know why.

If you squint in just the right light, hold your head slightly to the left and get real close you'll see it.

Can you see it?

Pasta with Brussel Sprouts and Feta

Brussel Sprouts: The Jolly Green Giant's blessing on humanity

So not until my adult life did I experience the pleasure of eating my first brussel sprout. I know some people have these awful flashbacks of crying at the dinner table in front of a heaping pile of boiled, mushy, stinky brussel sprouts as your mom stared sternly at you over her glasses across the table as she repeated just one command every 15 minutes: "Eat." (Resurfacing of suppressed childhood experiences in 3, 2...)

But I did not have the privilege of eating them in childhood because they were just not in mother dearest's price range.


Once I discovered just how good these crisp green globes of bittery deliciousness could be I began cooking them every way possible. Eventually I made my to adding them to pasta which was such a success I wanted to share the recipe.

DISCLAIMER: I am not the measuring type unless I'm baking so I'm going to just list my ingredients. Really I think you should be the one to determine what your taste buds would like and how much you would like of it. I tend to use a lot of onion and garlic in my dishes. Some people don't like that. Anyway here's what I put in the dish:

The ingredients

Brussel Sprouts, sliced
Olive Oil
Onion (red, yellow or white. I used yellow onions in this recipe)
Garlic, coarsely chopped
Lemon zest
Any short pasta--I've used both fusilli and farfalle and they stood up perfectly with the veggies.
Field Roast Smoked Tomato deli slices finely chopped--not shown above (see NOTE below)
Feta cheese--not shown above
Salt and pepper to taste




Boil your pasta according to the package directions and set aside. Save a little of the pasta water too if you can.

In a frying pan, add olive oil and stir fry the onion and garlic until they are just about to caramelize. Then add the Field Roast deli slices and cook until brown (about 2 minutes).

Add the brussel sprouts and stir fry on medium for about 3 minutes. Your sprouts should be a really bright green. Because they're sliced they don't take to long to cook so resist the urge to cook them for a long time.

If you kept some pasta water, add a ladle full in the pan and let the veggies steam for a couple of minutes. If you didn't keep any it's cool. Use regular water or, if you want to get fancy use some vegetable stock or even dry white wine if you have some available.

Once some of the water evaporates turn off the fire and pour your pasta in with the veggies. Add salt, pepper, lemon zest and feta cheese.

NOTE: If you've never heard of the Field Roast products yous should look them up. I will not go into detail about how fantastic (and time-saving) these products are right now so I encourage some googling. You should be able to find the products at Whole Foods. They're good about stuff like that.

The recipe with fusilli instead of farfalle

If you don't like this dish something is seriously wrong. I think I'm going to say that about everything I post though.

Newbie Alert!

 I've always been in the kitchen cooking. I was raised in a communal living setting (meaning multiple families living under one roof) and my mother worked late nights so making food for myself and the others in my house became a natural duty. I've always loved to create new dishes and in recent times I've realized that I actually like to photograph my creations too. So I hope you enjoy some of the stuff you'll see around here just as much as I've enjoyed creating it.

  Oh did I mention I was vegetarian? That seems like some pertinent information right about now. Hence the title of my blog. Oh, and the "Snaps" would be short for snapshots. Just so we're clear.

Watermelon with mint and peach schnapps. Just something I whipped up.

  And if you're wondering, no I am not one of those PETA card-carrying "all life is special life" type veggies. I was raised vegan and after awhile realized that I liked pizza too much to deprive myself of it for the rest of my life so I became and lacto vegetarian (my mother hates that I eat dairy by the way. She says it's the gateway drug to meat. Bless her heart).  So I've never really had this desire for meat and probably won't. That isn't to say I haven't tried it. But not eating it does not feel like a deprivation.


That's enough of that. I'll be posting pictures of the stuff I make in my little kitchen as regularly as I can. To my fellow veggies, I hope you'll like and maybe cook some of the things you see. To my omnivores out there: don't knock it until you've tried it. My roommate's a carnivore (like seriously, this chick loves her meat) and when I cook she eats my food and loves it. You might learn something.

Thanks for reading!