I made some Faux Pho for dinner last night and made way too many noodles. So today when I was rummaging in the refrigerator for something to make for lunch, it was obvious I should base it around the leftover rice noodles, and maybe it was the peanut butter sriracha cookie I was nibbling while I thought, but the first thing that came to mind was pad thai. Now, pad thai is really not a very time consuming dish to make to begin with, so there is little need to try to speed it up. And traditionally there is no peanut butter in pad thai. But for a nearly-instant lunch, this was really very tasty. If, like me, most of your at-work lunches are leftovers, this is something you can whip together in three minutes before you leave the house and warm gently in the microwave at the office. I’m afraid my measurements – loose at the best of times – are non-existent here. It’s really up to you to balance out the sweet, salty, and sour flavors the way you like it.

Fastest Pad Thai Ever

cooked rice noodles (this is a great way to use up leftovers, which I tossed very lightly with sesame oil before storing)
peanut butter (smooth or crunchy is okay)
tamarind pulp or concentrate
soy sauce
jaggery (my favorite sugar, available in Indian groceries, and Wegmans is now carrying this product) or brown sugar
sriracha
protein, such as cubed tofu or shredded seitan (optional)
shredded or thinly sliced veggies (optional) – my Quick Pickled Carrots are perfect

Put the peanut butter, tamarind, soy sauce, jaggery or sugar, and sriracha in a blender in proportions that are pleasing to your palate and blend until smooth. Taste and adjust flavors. Thin with water and blend again. Heat for a minute or two in the microwave (or on the stovetop in a small saucepan), and then whisk. If your noodles are cold, warm them in the microwave for a minute or two. Toss everything together.

The pickled carrots are particularly brilliant here because the provide the extra tang that you usually get by squeezing a lime over your noodles, so if you don’t happen to have a lime on hand, you’re covered. For my protein, I used a handful of the shredded seitan chicken from Nature’s Soy, which I get at Super H. Top this with crushed peanuts, cilantro, and/or bean sprouts if you have them on hand, but if you don’t and you’re just going for super fast, this was quite tasty as is.

And today is a Torticia day. Torticia is a silly little animal. I think she’s getting a little pudgy, and although she and Gomez spend hours racing around the house all day, she’s been a bit lazy when I’m playing with her. Whereas Gomez leaps around like an Olympic gymnast trying to catch dangling toys, Torticia often rolls on her back and waits for the toy to come to her. She’s roly poly.

She’s lazy.

She takes naps to recover from naps.

She’s also an extremely cuddly, affectionate, friendly, tolerant, fuzzy, little ball of wonderfulness. This morning when I woke to her sleeping between my legs, as soon as she realized I awake, she snuggled up on my chest and purred and purred and purred and begged to be petted, and snuggled some more, and was basically so incredibly cute it brought tears to my eyes. She’s so loving and warm, and extremely soft and silky. It’s just a joy to touch her.

And then she goes and does something classy like this:

Although really she’s probably the most beautiful cat in the universe.

You may have noticed that I don’t feature dessert recipes very often. The reason is I simply don’t make them very often because I’m not much of a dessert person. I’d usually prefer a second helping of the main course instead of dessert. In fact, I make desserts so infrequently that when I do bake something like cookies, Mark is very surprised and confused. Because I don’t make that many desserts, I’m not particularly good at it. Although I rarely follow recipes when I’m doing regular cooking, I almost always follow recipes exactly, or close to it, when I’m baking (bread, too, although I am good at that and do it often), which is another reason I don’t have many dessert recipes here. Nonetheless, I came across a dessert recipe recently that I wanted to try and since it’s one I found on the internet, I can share it with you. I can take absolutely no credit for this one; it’s all The Sugar Pixie‘s. The only changes I made to her recipe were to veganize it.

And with that buildup, I introduce:

Peanut Butter Sriracha Cookies

Okay, now you know why I had to make them! You know we go through a bottle of sriracha a week, right? And peanut butter is one of the world’s most perfect foods. Why shouldn’t they go together in cookie form? The original recipe is here: http://www.thesugarpixie.net/2010/11/28/peanut-butter-sriracha-cookies/; all I did was make substitutions for the butter and eggs. I also halved the recipe since Mark and I don’t need to eat five dozen cookies between us.

1/2 cup soy margarine, softened (ordinarily I’d have used Earth Balance’s Buttery Sticks, but I was out and there was snow, so I just used the kind in the plastic tub)
3/4 cup crunchy peanut butter
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
2 Tbsp sriracha
egg replacer for 1 egg (I used 1 scant Tbsp flax seeds, ground, blended with 3 Tbsp water)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/4 cups + 2 Tbsp all-purpose flour (a little more if necessary)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 tsp baking soda
extra white sugar

First I made my “egg”; I put a scant tablespoon of flax seeds in my spice grinder, …

… ground them to a powder, then added 3 tablespoons water and blended until smooth.

Put the white and brown sugars, peanut butter, and margarine into a mixing bowl …

… and cream.

Add the vanilla, sriracha, and egg replacer …

and mix until well blended.

In a separate large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

Add the peanut butter mixture …

… and mix. After a few stirs, it’s easiest to just use your hands. I used a little too much flour; your dough should be slightly less dry than mine. I’ve adjusted the amount called for above (the original recipe was correct; I just added 1 1/2 cups right away and shouldn’t have).

Refrigerate for an hour. Mine was actually refrigerated for two or more hours while I was out shoveling snow and because it was a little overly dry, I let it sit out and warm back up to room temperature before dealing with it. I probably could have just baked them without refrigerating the dough and it may have been easier.

Roll the dough into 1-inch balls. If you weren’t as aggressive with the flour as I was, you could use a small, 1-inch scoop but my dough was too stiff for that.

Dip each ball into a small bowl of sugar.

Place each ball on a cookie sheet. You’ll notice here my balls are flattened. Because my dough was so crumbly, I made disks instead of balls so they didn’t fall apart when I smooshed them later.

Flatten each cookie with the back of a fork in a criss-cross fashion. Again, because my dough was crumbly, I just did this lightly to get the traditional peanut butter cookie pattern.

Bake for 10 minutes in a pre-heated 375-degree (Fahrenheit) oven and remove to wire racks for cooling.

Mine didn’t turn out as pretty as Sugar Pixie’s because of the extra flour, but they tasted just great. I don’t know that I would have guessed they had sriracha in them. You don’t really taste it at first, then your tongue feels a bit warm, then you just feel like you would if you had just eaten a peanut butter cookie, which is happy! Actually, I baked one sheet of the cookies for a minute longer than the other, so they are crunchier, and that batch is noticeably hotter than the other, which is interesting considering it was the same dough. I’ll be making these again, and be more careful about the flour.

Also,

Who else is snowed in? We got a mess yesterday, beginning with rain and sleet all afternoon, a slushy mess that washed away all the salt that had been put down to pre-treat the roads, which then turned to a heavy snow, pretty much at the minute they predicted it would – 4 p.m., just in time for the afternoon rush hour – dumping about 5 inches. We’ve still been fortunate so far this year compared to the rest of the East Coast (even to the south!), so I shouldn’t complain, though I probably will because I hate this stuff! I have even less right to complain because from what I’m hearing, I think much of our county is without power right now, and though our lights flickered several times last night, they stayed on.

PLUS, working from home enabled me to bake bread, a treat I don’t usually get mid-week! My lunch today was the Barbecued Tempeh Sandwich Filling from Peter Berley’s The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen on fresh-from-the-oven multi-grain bread, smeared with Berley’s Spicy Sun-Dried Tomato Spread, topped with pickled carrots and a squirt of sriracha. Served with broccoli slaw.

When I sat down to begin this post, I was going to apologize for not having a recipe for you in this post. I have one coming later today, but because it might be photo-heavy, I thought I’d get some other pictures out of the way first. But then I realized I could tell you how I made the carrots and call that a recipe, so I’d feel better about making you look at a bunch of pictures. Berley suggested shredded carrots as a topping for the sandwich, but I’d read Jes‘s Spicy Noodles with Tofu recipe earlier in the day and had been intrigued by the quick pickled carrots it included. I’m looking forward to making that entire dish very soon, but for my sandwich, I decided to make slightly more involved pickled carrots, though they were nearly as quick. So here you go:

Quick Pickled Carrots

2 large carrots, shaved, shredded, julienned, spiralized, or very thinly sliced
1/4 cup cider vinegar
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 tsp salt
2-3 cloves garlic, pressed

Whisk together all ingredients except the carrots, then mix in the carrots, cover, and refrigerate for at least half an hour. I put mine in a pickle press just because I have one, but that’s completely unnecessary. I shaved my carrots into long, thin peels using a vegetable peeler, but since I was using them as a sandwich topping, I wish I had used the spiralizer, which would have made them easier to eat on the sandwich. The shavings are good for using as a little side pickle, though. These were even better the next day.

So. Snow. We’re trapped:

Okay, the Canadians are probably politely trying to refrain from laughing. After seeing Zoa‘s pictures of the snow at her house, it does feel a little pathetic to post that one and whine about it. But there’s a thick layer of ice under that snow that’s making it impossible for this Miata driver to even attempt to leave, especially considering I slid into a ditch after hitting an unexpected patch of ice a couple of weeks ago. (Mark, who was drugged up from his root canals, the Miata, and I were all fine; it was mostly just surprising.) I’m fortunate to have the ability to work from home when necessary, so there’s no point in joining the traffic fracas, with downed power lines and trees, unplowed streets, and numerous non-working traffic lights.

I’m not such a curmudgeon I won’t even go outside, though, and the light was nice when I finished breakfast, so I grabbed my camera and looked for photo ops. My favorite was this tiny icicle dangling from a thin tree branch.

It’s shaped like a music note, which I found appropriate because all around me was a symphony of dripping, melting icicles, and weighty snow plopping to the ground from bowed trees. The music note icicle was only about an inch long. It can be difficult to photograph such small things when you are shooting into the air and it is blindingly bright all around you. I was using auto-focus, but a slight breeze was causing that tiny branch to sway, and at the huge aperture I using in order to blur the background, the tiniest movement by either the branch or the camera would cause the lens to focus at a drastically different distance. Would you believe that icicle is actually right smack in the middle of this photograph? It is that blurriness you can almost make out.

Moving on around the house, here is the patio, where you can also see the outside of my sunroom/library.

Here I am peeping into the sunroom from the backdoor. I’m meant to be in that chair, working!

Whilst I was peeping in, Torticia was peeping out:

Gomez has been looking out a lot, too. This is him watching the sleet yesterday:

And no, they aren’t always so placid. They’re actually quite bad. And they wrestle a lot.

In other news, I know I haven’t been posting much, even though I’ve been home quite a bit. The reason is I’ve been doing this really bizarre thing called sewing. If you’ve read the few craft posts I have sprinkled throughout this blog, you know that I hate and am terrible at sewing (although for some reason, I keep doing it). I think I mentioned a few posts ago that I finally broke down and bought a new sewing machine in December after almost having a meltdown while making gift bags this year. It turns out that I hate sewing much less when I have a machine that works. I’m still pretty terrible at it, but I am becoming more confident.

This is a common view from my seat at the sewing table:

He attacks and chews on the thread at the top. He’s very bad! (Both he and Torticia also try attacking the rotary blade when I’m cutting fabric and are thus banned from the sewing room whenever it’s out.) Anyway, my big project was making my mom a rag quilt for her birthday. She just received it in the mail yesterday, so I can post these pictures now. The kittens were very fond of the quilt.

Here’s what the quilt looked like; I couldn’t get any photos that didn’t involve a kitten.

Would you believe I actually free-motion quilted it? I barely can (believe it). I did tell Mom not to look at the quilting too closely, though, since I’m even worse at that than I am sewing in a straight line. It’s a very weird sensation at first, but it’s kind of fun. If there is any interest, I may be talked into writing up a tutorial on making rag quilts. You don’t have to free-motion quilt them, in fact, I haven’t seen any instructions that even recommend that you do (usually you just sew an X through each quilt sandwich). I’m just insane.

This is what happened when I tried to pack the quilt up to mail it. Sigh.

That’s it for now. Stayed tuned for a post with a real recipe later today. I promise no more snow pictures. I can’t promise no more kitten photos, though.

Feel sorry for Smark. The poor boy had two root canals yesterday. I made him some “Cream” of Asparagus Soup for dinner last night, and I thought maybe I’d have to change the name of this blog to I Eat Soup (which would be fine with me, I love soup), but today he said he was feeling up for something more substantial. I still didn’t think it would be a good idea to make, say, ddukbokki, so I peered into the cupboards and tried to think of things that are fairly soft to eat but don’t make you feel like an invalid. Pasta seemed like a good bet, but I’m inexplicably out of any shapes and didn’t feel like straight up spaghetti. I did, however, have lasagna noodles. I’m not sure what possessed me to make a Mexican lasagna, but that’s what I did.

This lasagna can be as easy or difficult to make as you’d like. You can either use pre-packaged foods for most of the layers or make everything from scratch. I was looking for a pretty easy meal tonight, but I did have to make what I didn’t have on hand from scratch, so mine was a hybrid. By the way, Trader Joe’s No-Boil lasagna noodles have transformed my life! Years ago, when I was first learning to cook, I hosted a dinner party. Even before I learned to cook, I had the terrible habit of trying new dishes for dinner parties, although I used far more actual recipes back then. For this particular party, I was making some sort of vegan lasagna thing and the recipe said I could use no-boil noodles, which I thought would be a real time-saver. Well, the dish was very tasty and was a big hit with my guests, but the noodle were a bit underdone and sort of ruined it. Since then I have hated no-boil noodles and stayed far, far away from them. Consequently, making lasagna always seemed a bit arduous. I’d do it – it’s one of Mark’s favorite foods and I’m quite fond of it myself – but cooking the noodles is sort of a pain; you never end up with a pan full of perfect noodles – half of them are always broken, and they stick together before you’re ready for them. Then a few months ago I saw no-boil noodles at Trader Joe’s and decided to take a chance on them. They worked perfectly! And they are a fun size: just right for an 8×8″ pan, which makes a great size lasagna for 2 to 4 people. In retrospect, I wonder if my failed dish so long ago simply didn’t have enough liquid in it to fully reconstitute the noodles, but I’ll never know because I’ve long since lost the recipe; all I remember is it involved pine nuts. So if you aren’t close to a Trader Joe’s, feel free to try different no-boil noodles, but just make sure your lasagna is brimming with liquid-y sauce. I can’t vouch for any other no-boil noodles, though.

The first thing you need to make for the Mexican lasagna is nacho sauce.

Nacho Sauce
This uses the Yeast Cheeze recipe from the New Farm Cookbook/Simply Heavenly!. This has been a staple at my parties for years, and is gobbled up even by non-vegans. An ex-boyfriend once told me to bottle and sell it.

1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup nutritional yeast
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp garlic powder
2 cups water
1 Tbsp soy margarine
1 tsp prepared mustard (I usually use Dijon)
2 cups salsa – use a thick, chunky, tomato-y kind

Whisk together the flour, nutritional yeast, salt, and garlic powder in a medium pot. Whisk in the water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, whisking often, until it thickens. Remove from heat and whisk in the margarine and mustard.

Then whisk in the salsa.

I didn’t have any pre-made salsa so I did this:

I put 3 cloves of pressed garlic, 3 Tbsp minced onion, 1 minced jalapeno, two frozen cubes of cilantro (from Trader Joe’s), some salt, and 3 Tbsp tomato paste into a bowl:

I mixed that all together, then added a 14.5 ounce can of diced tomatoes and mixed well.

And now the lasagna:

Mexican Lasagna

no-boil lasagna noodles (or cooked lasagna noodles)
1 batch Nacho Sauce, recipe above
1 can refried beans (or make your own from dried pintos)
1 1/2 cup veggie crumbles/mince, ground seitan, “beefy” TVP crumbles, or other “beef” substitute (I used 3 crumbled veggie burgers)
veggies of your choice, about 1 or 2 cups (I used corn, onions, and spinach)
taco or enchilada sauce
vegan cheddar “cheese”, optional

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Smear a thin layer of nacho sauce on the bottom of an 8×8″ pan.

Place a layer of noodles on top of it:

Smear the refried beans on the noodles:

Top with some nacho sauce:

Add a layer of noodles, then the “beef”.

Then some more sauce:

Another layer of noodles, then the veggies:

And the rest of the sauce:

Add the last layer of noodles and top with the taco or enchilada sauce, as well as the cheddar “cheese” if using. I used some taco sauce leftover from the other night, which I made simply by blending together a clove or two of garlic, a can of tomato sauce, some onion powder, and some pickled jalapenos and pickled jalapeno juice. I wish I’d had more of the taco sauce; it provided a nice tang but I only had maybe 1/4 cup left. I’d use more like 1/2-3/4 cup next time.

Unless you love cleaning your oven, put the lasagna pan on a cookie sheet. Cover and bake for 45 minutes, then uncover and bake 15 minutes more. Let sit for 5 to 10 minutes before eating. This was good, although I think Mark overestimated his chewing ability because when I asked him after his first bite how it tasted he replied, “painful”. Apparently he hadn’t eaten all day and had forgotten how to chew. He did manage to eat an entire piece, though, and I assure you, it’s not much a workout for your mouth. I think it worked well as a progression food.

This has been a photo-heavy post, so just one picture of my “helpers”:

I hope to be back soon; I haven’t been as busy as I have been the last few months, but I also haven’t been cooking much that’s new or interesting; I’ve been doing a lot of old favorites lately. But that will get boring soon!