Taquitos and Tacos!

I went shopping!  the goal was to make four different types of taquitos to explore different tastes and textures.  Knowing I would not make enough taquitos to feed the house I also made extra filling of each to serve as the base for tacos that would be topped with salsa fresca, shredded lettuce, carrot and radish. 

The potato taquitos were made with this turkish spice that I really like which is predominantly paprika but I have yet to ask Justin what it is. I supplemented with salt pepper tumeric curry spice and cumin to round out the flavor.  Season to taste! always season ti to the way you want ti to taste so you can enjoy it, this includes compensating for how the flavor changes as it cooks, in particular spicyness will decrease a bit  and herbyness will increase.  If you are cooking for other people (say someone who hates spice) you can either laugh at them as they bite into your taquito or you can take the time to set aside some potatoes and spice it with hem in mind.  Toss them in olive oil and bake at 400 for about an hour. 

Chiplotle tofu seemed like a must.  . .well chipotle something at least.  I crumbled the tofu and tossed it with chipotle, paprika garlic powder, spike(my favorite powdered vegetable bullion) , pepper and olive oil.  Before baking I let it sit for about 30 minutes so the flavor could soak in.  I just threw it in the oven with the potatoes and took it out 25 minutes later. it was brown and crispy and spicy!  I could have done a bit more to make it saucy but it worked.  I think next time I will make a chipotle sauce to mix it with after baking.  This would also help in the taquito rolling phase since the sauce (I am imagining a pretty thick sauce) would hold things in place better.  

Sweet potatoes get cubed and steamed.  Just 15 minutes in steam is enough to make these sweet tubers mashable.  I mixed in a bit of salt and olive oil but wanted to let the sweetness really shine so I stayed away from my typical arsenal of savory spices. 

not pictures here is the garlic black beans which I made. . . not sure where those pictures ended up but I did have some problem with my camera earlier in the week.  We will just have to do black beans another time and shift our focus to the tortillas which are made form scratch. 

Buy a masa mix.  It is a medium ground corn meal with lime.  the acidity helps bring out the starchyness of corn so it makes for good tortillas (at least that is what I was told once and it sound good enough to propagate whether it is totally factual or not).  Knead together 2 cups of masa with 1 cup water and a pinch of salt and you are already half way to making tortillas.

I am lucky enough to have a tortilla press in my house so I dont need to roll out the dough and then get something round to cut out the shape I want.  I take a small lime sized piece of dough (golf ball sized for sporty people) and press it, using an old plastic bag as my make-shift wax paper to assist removal from the tortilla press.   

 Cook those lovely tortillas for about 2 minutes on each side on a hot griddle/ in a cast iron pan and you are ready to start into taquito land proper!

We have our 4 fillings to work with (with a close up of the beans since there are not enough gratuitous black bean pictures yet) and each tortilla gets about 1.5 Tbs of filling and rolled into the approximate shape of a taquito. (yes the tortillas below are store bought, the home made were saved for the tacos) 

The biggest problem I had was that the beans and tofu were not held together enough.  Both potatoes did quite well and I think if I mashed the black beans a bit more it would have made the rolling a bit easier, still came out delicious! I brushed the tortillas with canola oil and then put them in the oven at 400 for around 45 minutes (the last 10 minutes were actually at 450 because I wanted my taquitos extra crispy)

To go with the taquitos, Guacamole of course. Avocado cut in half, pit removed and SMASHED into bowl.

mix in salt pepper some lime juice 5-60 cloves of garlic ( i used 5 cloves finely grated for 4 avocados worth) and you are done!  I put in a spoon full of salsa fresca for color and flavor but you are getting dangerous with the purity of what is guacamole if you push that too far! 

salsa fresca?  diced tomatoes green onions and garlic. Toss ti with a healthy squeeze of lime juice an a hearty pinch of salt and pepper . . .done and done! 

out of the oven I was so excited that I burned my mouth as I tried to eat one of the sweet potato taquitos right away ( did I mention this was the first time I made taquitos?).  So let them cool but dont let them get cold, these baddies are best eaten hot and often!  I am happy to say that none of the 30 taquitos I made were left at the end of dinner.  

Taco Bar!

Taquito Bliss! served with a cabbage salad that Ashley made that has an amazing creamy tahini grapefruit vinaigrette to go with it.  

Irish Pride!

at only 1/8th Irish and growing up in California I dont really know much about Irish cuisine . . .but it turns out most of my american friends dont know much beyond meat and potatoes either so I felt pretty comfortable making up a meal based on the family tradition (sans corn beef).  

I am still being lazy in terms of making posts but this is a pretty easy meal.  

boiled potatoes with carrots and cabbage

garlic barley

Irish soda bread

steamed cauliflower

spinach salad 

garlic Earth Balance

Potatoes and Carrots and Cabbage:

This is the old staple and in my family it was always made with a mix of spices which are pretty close to pickling spice.  I used vegetable stock picking spice, a bit of oil, a few bay leaves, half an onion and 4-20 cloves of garlic (I used somewhere around 8 but lost count).  The potatoes carrots go in as soon as the broth is made and the cabbage goes on top 20 minutes after with a lid to make it so everything steams together.  Put the heat on low and just let it simmer for about 35 minutes.  It can go longer but be careful or the potatoes will just fall apart.

There were about 5 lbs of potatoes and 2 lbs of carrots and a full head of cabbage with the core cut out.  Not much of a recipe but it is really that easy and comes out very tasty, just make sure your broth has a good flavor and all of the vegetables will have a good flavor!  ( keep the broth after cooking so you can make soup later)

Garlic Barley:

Barley cooks at 2:1 and I made 3 cups of barley with 6 cups of water (a bit of stock to make it extra savory).  Barley is a funny grain, something in the process of preparing it makes it so it come out dusty so make sure you rinse the barley before cooking it.  I tossed in some thyme, black pepper and salt; it cooks for 40 to 60 minutes and gets 4-500 cloves of raw garlic grated into it  (I used 5 cloves) and tossed the barley with about 1/8 cup olive oil and served it hot! 

Steamed Cauliflower:

Dice it into chunks toss in a steam basket in a pot with a few inches of water and steam for 15 min.  Season it as you like but I do Tarragon, black pepper and salt.  It doesn't have much going on but it goes great with a bit of garlic 'butter' is easy to make and in season ( so it is cheap right now)

Irish Soda Bread:

made it out of 'joy of cooking' using soy milk whisked with vinegar to make 'buttermilk' and Energy brand egg re-placer to bind it.  I was surprised that this simple recipe was so delicious!  I made a double recipe making sure to follow the directions of preparing the west separate from the dry.  The double batch made to very thin loaves (only an inch or two thick) but I think that is part of how it is suppose to be.  

Garlic Earth Balance:

this stuff really brings the meal together.  every dish made (yes even the salad!  ok not the salad) can have a dollop of garlic earth balance on top to add that oily/salty/garlicy awesomeness that made it so we didnt have as many left overs as I was hoping!  

I used a pot with boiling water poured into it to heat up a jar of earth balance until it was liquid.  Grated 3 cloves of garlic (into a half cup of EB) and then took it out of the hot water.  Giving the EB time to cool also gives it time to take on the flavor and for serving 8 people 1/2 cup was just enough . ..but dont worry about making too much it keeps well and can be used in almost any savory recipe that calls for oil or a spread! 

I served it with yellow mustard and garlic 'butter' often wrapping the potatoes and carrots up in a cabbage leaf.  The above plate is missing the barley but it was also delicious and even at 5-7 cups yield it was all gone by the end of the night! Using 3 medium heads of cauliflower made it so there was only a little left over by the end (which was eaten with breakfast in the morning). The Irish soda bread had two pieces left at the end of the meal which were happily eaten rather than put away (not to self  . .. triple recipe for Irish soda bread).

Someone else's Pie

In honor of 3.14 day I made a pie.  I used a recipe from one of my favorite blogs that you can find here:

http://www.addictedtoveggies.com/2012/02/meyer-lemon-cream-pie-or-ice-cream-pie.html

Since that part is done let em just tell you some of the problems I had with the recipe, while keeping in mind it still came out delicious!

First:  I like thicker crusts, I would suggest increasing the pie crust to 1.5 C of almonds with the other ingredients similarly increased.  This crust is really good! you wont regret having a bit extra, and if you have some left over I bet you will find something to eat it with .. . like a spoon!

Second:  My cream filling came out just great!  My food processor is not very high end ( got it at a thrift store for 5 bucks) so blending the ingredients to be nice and smooth took a while and was still not as silky as I wish it were.  Some day I will have the money for a better blender (and will be confronted with the vitamix vs blendtech debate once again!) but until then my friends and I will have to tolerate pies with a more. . .rustic texture.

Third: After being in the fridge overnight the pie still did not set and was too runny to cut.  I blame myself for over soaking the dates which made my date paste a bit more runny than I think it was suppose to be.  Freezing it did the trick but after the second day the pie got that ice crystal feel to it (kinda like a popsicle).  Really I like most things at room temp so next time I make this I will experiment with  thickeners.  My current idea is to use some heated coconut oil, it will pour into the blender and just the heat from spinning will keep it melted . . .then as it cools to room temp it should firm up. . . how much coconut oil is yet to be determined.

Finally: I got lazy with the zest and juice. DONT DO IT.  My pie was tasty and had a lovely feel with that gentle cashew taste but when I have a lemon pie (or a lime pie which I think I will make next time) i like to have flavor that nearly slaps me in the face! so cutting that corner was definitely a mistake. I am tempted to say the amount of zest should be increased but seeing as I didnt do it right it seems like an unfair assessment.

Even with the learning curve of never really making raw deserts this thing came out delicious!  you can look at my four comments and think what ever you like, I would still be happy if the pie came out exactly the same way again.  

Snack Time! Toast

Yeah toast.   Totally taken for granted, made in a hurry when you are late for work, and usually satisfying.  When you have the extra time to make toast a bit more than just toast.  Cinnamon sugar, jam or peanut butter and agave are all fine but delicious savory toast:

rosemary focaccia
garlic powder
cayenne
vegetable stock powder (spike)
nutritional yeast

Some day I will learn to make my own focaccia and I will make sure to post it but for now I get this lovely locally made bread Slice off a piece 3x3 ish  (this time the bread was ripped up a bit so i ended up with a strip rather than a square).  A slice toaster is fine but I am lucky and my house has a toaster oven, I like to make my toast a bit on the light side so just after a few minutes it comes out and gets slathered with Earth balance, my favorite vegan buttery spread.

I probably use too much EB(earth balance) but the way it combines with the spices and the "nut'yeast" turns it into almost a cheesy gravy on toast.




I use just a pinch or two of spike and cayenne, literally using a thumb-pointer pinch (don't get me started on all the different types of pinches and their approximate measures).  The garlic powder I use a spoon and dust the toast, avoiding the use of my fingers because of the way garlic powder cakes onto finger tips.

Nutritional yeast is a confusing and fantastic product.  It is often used as a 'cheesy' flavor but if you go around actually expecting that you will be disappointed. Nutritional yeast (often called nut yeast or nooch)is a flakey yellow yeast culture grown in a vitamin rich environment thus making ti more nutritional than other yeasts.  The color and flavor varies from vendor to vendor but all work in approximately the same way and are of particular note for their B vitamin content.  I dont know how to describe the flavor very well but it is good, down right delicious if you give it half a chance.


I cover the thing in nutritional yeast and stick both pieces back in the toaster oven; even thought it has been off for a few minutes there is enough residual warmth to heat it all together.

This toast is pack full of flavor and nutrition, makes a perfect dish by its self or a great side with beans or soup.

catching up

In the last month and a half I have made some amazing meals!

I started working on the Macadamia nut cupcake post back in January and still have not posted that.

there is polenta with mushroom gravy, chilli, pancakes, a quick potato carrot snack with an almond sauce, and a wonderful roasted carrot dish.  That is not to mention the tofu scramble I made this weekend with roasted potatoes that I got no pictures of!

while it is totally feasible that I will catch up on all of it this week, as my work load has finally reached a normal level again, my emotional state still makes me question how much extracurricular productivity I will have in the coming days. The result. . . Just some photos with recipe to follow some day in the future.

for starters here are the cupcakes my brother and I made back in Jan. for our nephews birthday.  Josh did most of the work and the recipe is out of 'vegan cupcakes take over the world'  so go get it!

Macadamia Nut Cupcakes with Lemon Butter-cream Frosting

 Everything you need, including the book

whisking the sugar with the oil. . . very important

Lemon zesting!

roasting the nuts

and grinding

I ate way too many of these!  The macadamia nut added a great texture and flavor that kept me coming back for more . ..The lemon frosting is one of my favorite and i probably use it too often but the balance of sweet and sour tops any desert perfectly!