Homemade BBQ Sauce

November 11, 2014
by Stephanie Pellett
2 min read
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Vegan BBQ Sauce >> Life In Limbo

I’m over at Guinea Pigging Green today sharing photos and thoughts on a new recipe for homemade vegan BBQ sauce I made this week. It’s seriously yum.

As with most of my recipes these days, the original recipe is from Oh She Glows. At this point I’m not totally sure what I’ll use it on, but it’s fun to have an extra sauce in the house. I’m sure it’ll come in handy for all kinds of different recipes – right now I have it in mind for these tacos, trying to recreate this flatbread in a skillet, something like these sliders, and maybe the old classic of easy BBQ tofu. I’m not too worried about using it all up! That said, it made a ton of sauce, so I might consider freezing part of it, as the original recipe recommended.

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I love making condiments – it’s so much fun and they always come out a hundred times tastier than their bottled counterparts. Plus, my apartment always ends up smelling absolutely amazing. It’s a win-win!

You can find the recipe and more photos over on Guinea Pigging Green right here.

PS. This is one of the 24 new recipes I’m trying to make before I turn 24 next April. It’s #15! See all the others here.

Fresh Summer Rolls with Peanut Sauce

June 30, 2014
by Stephanie Pellett
2 min read
1 Comment

Summer Rolls

I posted a “recipe” for summer rolls – aka non-deep-fried spring rolls – a few years ago, but I recently developed a new favourite ingredient combo (this time fully vegan) so I thought they’d be worth posting about again. I’ve been taking these into work with me lately and even though they often fall apart by dinnertime, they’re so tasty that I usually don’t even mind. It’s like mini packages of salad! So fresh and so clean.

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My current favourite mix of ingredients is tofu, leeks (or green onions), peanuts, red pepper, tofu and sweet chili sauce. I don’t need to handhold you here – just chop them all up! It’s all raw, so this is a very easy meal to prepare. Soak your rice paper wraps in warm water for around ten seconds, then spread them out on a flat surface and pile everything on! Like so:

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Then you want to tuck up the bottom, fold in the sides, and roll it all up like a burrito. It gets easier and tidier with practice, but sometimes I still end up with a floppy mess. One time, I just wrapped the whole mess in another rice paper, which was surprisingly an excellent fix!

DSC_3431I’ve been eating these with a homemade peanut sauce, which really makes them that much better. I usually half this recipe and season it to taste (since I don’t have sesame oil at the moment). It has good proportions though, and the resulting sauce has a great texture.

DSC_3532Yummy, right? This is exactly the kind of food I want to eat when it’s really hot outside. No standing over a hot stove please! My apartment doesn’t need to be stuffier than it already is.

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You could definitely customize this “recipe” in any way you want to! Different vegetables, maybe even some fruit like pineapple or mango, and fresh herbs would of course be wonderful. I’m sure I’ll be mixing it up quite a bit as the summer progresses. Happy eating!

Vegan Cashew Cheese

June 17, 2014
by Stephanie Pellett
3 min read
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Vegan Cashew CheeseHoly yummy, batman! Even though it’s true that I can eat the same thing over and over, lately I’ve been getting bored with what I’ve been eating. That’s part of why I love that I made this resolution to try new recipes: it breaks me out of food ruts and keeps my mind open to different meal ideas. The other part of why I love it, of course, is because the results so far have been very tasty. There’s also a third reason, and that is that I really love cooking and puttering around in the kitchen. It makes me feel industrious and healthier. I love that sentiment from Michael Pollan: “Eat anything you want, just cook it yourself.” I’ve been trying to embrace that more lately.

Oh Dear Drea is a blog that makes vegan living look easy. I was opening browser tabs like crazy yesterday, getting so much inspiration for delicious, easy vegan food. I had a huge bag of cashews in my kitchen, so I decided that this cashew cheese recipe would be the first one I’d try. Despite making a few changes to her original recipe, it still turned out great.

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Adapted from Oh Dear Drea

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup of raw cashews, soaked in a bowl of water for 1+ hours
  • 1-2 cloves garlic
  • 1-2 tbsp apple cider vinegar (or lemon juice)
  • 1 tbsp vegetable oil
  • 1 tsp salt (to taste)
  • Herbs

Soak the cashews for an hour or more. Drain them but save the water. Blend together all your ingredients, adding spoonfuls of cashew water until you reach your desired consistency (like a queso sauce). I forgot to pick up lemons so I substituted apple cider vinegar for the lemon juice the original recipe called for. Next time I’ll try with lemons and nutritional yeast because I know that would make it that much more delicious.

20140617-152044.jpgI’d treated myself to a garlic baguette (my first baguette since arriving in Korea!) after my run this morning, and loved eating some pieces of it with this yummy sauce. I think this would be great on a vegan pizza, like it was suggested in the original post. I’m excited to use it in veggie wraps and tacos too! Really it seems like you could just throw it on just about anything. The recipe makes a lot, almost a cup full, so I’m looking forward to discovering all the possibilities.

Yum! Dig in, friends.

Chocolate Chia Pudding

June 12, 2014
by Stephanie Pellett
3 min read
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DSC_3350“I love that after a day when nothing is sure, and when I say “nothing”, I mean nothing, you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate and sugar and milk, it will get thick. It’s such a comfort.” – Julie & Julia

Just replace “day” with “week”, “egg yolks” with “chia seeds”, “sugar” with “maple syrup” and add a “soy” to “milk” and voila: you have a quote that represents exactly how I feel right now. Walking home on Monday after getting the news about my school, I actually heard this quote in my head and was struck with the urge to watch the movie for the hundredth time.

And this morning, after I woke up feeling kind of small and defeated and not at all abundant, I made this pudding. I let it set up in the fridge while I went to the park – intending to do yoga but, after realizing that the platforms I usually use for my practice had been taken over by dozens of small Korean children playing, I just sat on a bench thinking instead – and tried it when I got home.

The taste is amazing, just like chocolate pudding but actually healthy, so no guilt required. The texture however needs a little work, my first few bites were too slimy for my liking. Blending in some steel cut oats really helped to give it a more palatable texture, but it could have still been smoother. It probably doesn’t help that my blender isn’t very high-powered so the seeds weren’t broken down much.

Of course, none of that is stopping me from spooning it into my mouth non-stop as I write this. It really is tasty.

DSC_3347Chocolate Chia Pudding

Adapted from Oh She Glows

Ingredients:

  • 1/4 cup chia seeds
  • 1/4 cup maple syrup
  • 1 cup soy or nut milk
  • 2 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
  • 4 tbsp steel cut oats
  • pinch of salt

Blend all your ingredients together until smooth. Let the pudding set in the fridge for about an hour or until it’s the consistency you like. Having a high-powered blender will help make this pudding smoother so that you don’t taste the chia seeds.

And with that, I’m off to (probably) watch Julie and Julia clips until it’s time for me to go to work. If I’m not doing that, you’ll find me at the Korean diner, eating kimchi fried rice and trying my hardest not to worry/cry.

Happy Thursday, friends!