We had a pot luck luncheon for a co-worker friend who was leaving the company. I brought vegan lasagna! And homemade garlic bread.
Here's my version.
Lasagna noodles
Sauce
Tofu ricotta
Soy cheese
Lasagna noodles-store bought, dry lasagna noodles
Boil noodles until al dente and drain or...don't
Note: The Barilla "no cook" variety is made with eggs, so you may want to just go with the old school version and boil them. Conversely, the normal old noodles don't have to be boiled if you add an extra cup of water to the sauce and make sure the sauce comes all the way to the top of the lasagna in the pan. If you do this, make sure you cook covered 1 hour, the uncovered another 1/2 hour. First hour cooks the pasta, next 1/2 dries out the sauce.
Sauce: I made a big pot-this makes more than you need for the lasagna-I have about 4 cups leftover
1/4 cup olive oil
1 onion
20 (yes I said 20, but you can use less) cloves of garlic
1 eggplant (mine was not small)
1 green bell pepper
1 can crushed tomatoes
1 can whole peeled tomatoes (broken into small pieces)
3 TBS Italian seasoning (or combination italian friendly herbs, oregano, basil, marjoram, etc)
2 tsp salt
1/4 cup sugar (test first, you may need less if tomatoes are already sweet)
1/2 cup dry red wine
Chop onion, garlic, eggplant, and bell pepper very fine or in food processor. Add olive oil to a large pot and saute vegetable mixture. When vegetables are softened, add remaining ingredients including juice from tomatoes and let simmer until veggies are cooked and sauce has thickened stirring occasionally.
Optional uncooked noodles version: make a runny sauce; puree 2 cups of sauce and 1 cup of additional water/broth so you have a not thick sauce. Use this on the first and last layers.
Tofu Ricotta (adapted from
vcon)
1 package soft/silken tofu
1 bunch fresh basil
1 big handful spinach
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tsp salt
2 Tbs olive oil
Drain tofu and place in large bowl. Mix tofu with a fork so it's broken up, but not smooth. Chop basil and spinach and add to tofu. Add lemon juice, salt and olive oil and mix together. The mixture will be fairly wet.
Soy Cheese:
Preheat oven to 375
Assembly: (unboiled regular noodles version)
Place 1 cup runny sauce in bottom of 13X9 pan. Add layer of noodles, top with 1/3 ricotta, 1 cup sauce (make sure to get a good amount of the veggies in it) and 1/4 soy cheese. Repeat until you fill the pan. The last layer should be just noodle, runny sauce and cheese. Make sure the sauce comes up to the top of the noodles. Cover with foil and bake 1 hour. Test a piece of the noodle to make sure it's cooked. Tuck in any pieces that may be poking out and crispy. Remove foil and cook additional 1/2 hour.
If you did boil the noodles, you don't need the runny sauce or the extra 1/2 hour cook time, just remove foil and turn up to 450 for 5 min so the soy cheese melts.
Garlic Bread:
5 cloves garlic chopped
1/4 cup olive oil
Make bread: let cool
Saute garlic in oil
Slice bread almost all the way through, but leave the bottom so the loaf still holds together.
Put spoonfull of garlic oil mixture into each slice and then wrap in foil. Heat in oven 375 about 15 min.
I got three pairs of vegan work/walk to work shoes for a total of $42.98 at payless. That sum usually buys barely one shoe. I don't know about all payless shoes, but everything I looked at was all man made materials. All three are surprisingly comfortable and now I can release some leather work shoes to a thrift shop.
Next time someone has a wine and cheese party, I'm totally bringing this.
Spaghetti with simple sage butter (earth balance) sauce. Earth Balance vegan butter appears to be made in NJ. For today's purpose, that's local enough. At least I'm paying attention to where my food comes from. Honestly, I would normally use the fancy Italian olive oil. Sometimes you gotta support the global economy, too. The flours are from King Arthur, and the dried sage was fresh when I got it at the last farmer's market.
Fresh thin noodles cook in roughly 1 minute, so as soon as I dropped in the noodles, I made the sauce. Melted 1 TBS vegan butter, 1 garlic clove, 1 tsp dried sage (from farmer's market) and a little seasoned salt. When pasta is al dente, drain and give a brief saute in the butter sage sauce. Take quick photo, ignore bad lighting and photography skills, then eat.
Aren't you glad it wasn't another pesto or squash recipe?
Why oh why don't I make new recipes more often. I read them, think, hey, that looks good, then like a year later-by the power of greyskull-I finally whip it up.
The ninja will be happy when he gets home to have biscuits. Too bad the mustard sauce is gone, or I would have had to go all Slingblade and have biscuits with mustard sauce. Mmm,hmm....maybe next time.
I also made more of the artisan bread dough. This time I used King Arthur white wheat flour. We made pizzas out of it and there's still dough for mom to make more fresh bread herself.
The pizza is topped simply with some jarred tomato sauce and Follow your Heart cheddar which melted beautifully.
When I visited mom earlier this year I made seitan and didn't eat it all while I was here. It's the vcon recipe and I froze it with the broth and all.
I wanted to make the vcon chickpea cutlets, but despite mom's wealth of pantry goodies, there were no chickpeas to be had. So I subbed some kidney beans. The wheat gluten might have been a billion years old and the breadcrumbs a little stale, but in the end I got something resembling a cutlet. I thought I'd give the vcon mustard sauce a try and I'm so glad I did. Mom didn't have any sherry, so we found some dry vermouth (probably older than me) which worked just fine.
Mom stocked up on vegan goodies for me. There's some vegenaise, follow your heart cheddar cheese, earth balance and soy milk! Surprisingly, all came from the local supermarket not known for exotic ingredients. I'm impressed. 
Yeah, this little disaster was brought on by Vogue. I was opening the magazine out of it's plastic packaging when it burst out onto my keyboard cracking off the letter I. Veg News would never do this to me.
Fastest meal ever.
Celebration field roast with mushroom risotto, mushroom gravy, and squash.
Then we went to see Spring Awakening. It was really good, but let me just say, don't see this with your parents or on a first date. I've seen Avenue Q, and the uncomfortableness of puppet sex is nothing compared to the teen lust of the first few songs of Spring Awakening. The performance was great. The main guy was Hunter Parrish from Weeds. Duncan Sheik won a Tony for the music. Every time I go see a show, I can't believe how I don't do this more often. There are tons of ways to get cheap tickets in New York and with so many shows closing, I'm going to have to make more efforts to support the arts. Next, I'll have to go see Harry Potter naked in Equus.
Here's a little info about this award:
Last week when I was defrosting my ancient freezer, I forgot to put back the bag of artichokes, so they've been thawed in the fridge all week. They're still good, but I needed to use them now.
Sometimes I do plan ahead. I had chopped up some summer basil with olive oil and stashed it in the freezer for just such an occasion. This is my first attempt at spaghetti squash, and although clearly it's meant to come out in strands like spaghetti, it was kind of hard to get a good pile that actually looked like spaghetti in a photo. The pesto squash is paired with some fresh local off the stalk Brussel sprouts and a local Cabernet Franc from Millbrook winery.
My squash was already warmed from baking, so I just mixed it with the pesto and voila; lunch.
Maybe I'm just hungry, but this is the best vegan burger I have ever had. It's not the individual parts, but rather the whole that has just made my night. In the immortal words of U2 it is even better than the real thing. I don't usually power down an pile of relatively processed faux products, but this bad boy really hit the spot. There's a veggie stuffed potato in the background to redeem myself. I don't think it's doing much. I wish I'd made fries. 
We had a pot luck luncheon for a co-worker friend who was leaving the company. I brought vegan lasagna! And homemade garlic bread.
OK, "vegetarian" vampires who hunt wild game instead of humans is kind of a misnomer, but there were some real veggie friendly surprises in the film.
Yeah, the ninja (my husband) loves these. The filling is different every time, but I get to feed him vegan and he cleans the plate. I like spicy, but he is sweats at anything hotter than black pepper, so I try to give it more flavor than spice.
I like to use the cast iron skillet to fry the ninjadilla. Put in a little annatto oil to cover, place the tortilla on flat and cover with soy cheese if using (today I had follow your heart cheddar) then place filling on just one half. Once the tortilla is softened, fold in half and heat until crispy, then flip and let the other side crisp up.
