Our Corn Obsession

With a fast-paced summer school class, we've had little time to cook elegant meals. We've been doing meals that you eat all mixed together (if that makes sense), such as a corn oat-pilaf bowl and wraps. We've noticed that we tend to eat corn sometimes twice in a day in different forms, such as fresh corn, cornmeal, corn cereal (Puffins), cornbread, corn tortilla chips....

We tried Veganomicon's Edamame Corn Salad with fresh corn kernels. It was nice and sweet without any sugar! We've been using fresh corn like mad - summer has such great produce!
Another great corn dish we ate was a corn & oat pilaf meal. We cut off corn kernels off of 3 cobs and microwaved the corn for a few minutes. Then, we processed some corn kernels with unsweetened almond milk to make a "cream corn". After it was creamy, we added black pepper, a little agave, and whole corn kernels (the cream corn recipe was based off of the World's Healthiest Food's recipe).

To go with the corn dish, we cooked some local sunburst squash with diced onion and banana peppers. We also cooked a mix of oat groats and steel cut oats on the stove. Once the corn, squash, and the oat-pilaf were done, we mixed them together to make a creamy and hearty meal! Yummy, creamy, fresh, and easy to eat! The next day we ate it with fresh tomatoes, slightly heated to soften. The combination of oat groats and steel-cut oats gave a nice texture and flavor.

More Veganomicon Delicacies: We made the Cauliflower Hummus recipe to have for lunches throughout the week, and made the Chile Cornmeal-Crusted Tofu recipe for dinner.

The Cauliflower Hummus is sooo good. We modified it slightly, and didn't use lemon, tahini, or parsley, and replaced the chickpeas with butter beans. We cut the cumin in half, because we didn't want it to overpower the cauliflower flavor. It was lighter than regular 100% bean hummus because the cauliflower substituted for some of the beans. We love beans/hummus, but too much fiber can make you full, and the cauliflower helped to lighten it up for a healthy lunch. It was very good with Mary's Gone Crackers and avocado, and the chives and garlic really enhanced the cauliflower nicely. We will be making this repeatedly with different flavors/spices!

The Chili Cornmeal-Crusted Tofu was good, but too time consuming and not enough wow. The recipe says to use 1 cup cornmeal and 1 cup soy/non-dairy milk, but this was too much for just a pound of tofu! We used 2/3 cup each, and we still had a lot leftover. The tofu inside wasn't very flavorful - I think we should have marinated the tofu for a few hours in lime and spices. Next time, we will just follow the curried tofu recipe, marinate the tofu with Mexican spices and lime instead, and then just bake it until chewy, without any cornmeal coating.

What was really good about this dish was that we served it with agave-mustard-lime dressing. It was more like "Would you like a little tofu with your mustard dressing?". We steamed some broccoli, too, which paired nicely with the tofu and dressing. Another side dish we ate with the tofu was cornmeal-crusted tomatoes. We used some of the leftover cornmeal mix and coated sliced tomatoes, then baked it in the oven. It was actually more flavorful than the coated tofu!


For more easy meals, we made mashed sweet potatoes with the skins and used unsweetened almond milk. This was easy to make and so creamy. We served this in a wrap with black beans, nutritional yeast, and sunflower seeds.

Another tasty dish we had was coconut rice. We've never used coconut milk before and decided to try it with long grain Basmati brown rice. We sprinkled some chives and black pepper on top, and served with steamed green beans and curried tofu! Yummy! Of course, we used light coconut milk. Light coconut milk is supposed to taste just as good as full coconut milk but with less fat and saturated fat. Although many sources say that the saturated fat found in coconut is different than saturated fat from animal sources, we feel it is still good to reduce saturated fat consumption when possible.


Cheers to fresh food and healthy delights! Just for fun here are some funny food quotes:

"Do vegetarians eat animal crackers?"
"I eat merely to put food out of my mind. ~N.F. Simpson"
"We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons. ~Alfred E. Newman

- LK Sisters