Great Lunch Meals and Delicious No Bakes!

Hi everyone!

It's been awhile ---- we are super busy this time of year at work! Finalizing new Betty Lou's organic vegan bars that taste great and are packed full of nutrition and antioxidants! Get excited for new snack bars that are better than Larabars, Pure Bars, and Cliff Bars! Check out Betty Lou's blog and website for any updates.


January has been milder in weather, but still rainy and damp, so we always enjoy some warm comforting food, especially one-pot meals. One of our New Years Resolutions is to make a dish from one of our vegan cookbooks. So, the past few weeks we've tried Vive le Vegan's Greek Basmati Rice, Veganomicon's Samosa Potatoes, among other great meals and breads.

The Greek Basmati Rice is probably one of the best rice dishes we've tried! Great flavor, not too strong in any particular spice, just an addicting bowl of deliciousness. Full of onion, garlic, olive oil, olives, zuchinni, chickpeas, rice, parsley, and spices we could eat this every day!

Samosa Potatoes was a yummy spiced meal perfect for lunches. Spices like mustard, coriander, onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, and cumin, this dish was great complimented with olive oil and Food Should Taste Good Olive chips! We didn't stuff the potato with the mixture, we just cooked diced potatoes in the pressure cooker, and added peas, parsley, and carrots.


In one of our bread cookbooks, we've been baking whole grain breads. We discovered a great technique for making great sandwich bread. We mix the dough and knead it, then let sit for 1 hour or so, knead again, then let sit another hour or two. We bake it at 400 degrees F as a round loaf, and we put a pan of water in the oven, so the crust is nice and the bread is airy and soft! Try putting some Bob's Red Mill cereals in your bread (like 10 grain cereal, kamut cereal, or just cornmeal), as it gives a great nutty flavor and great texture.
We love Greek food, and we found on vegweb.com "Real Deal Falafel" recipe. We made modifications, but it was tasty and great with condiments such as olive oil, mustard, tomato sauce, and avocado. When you get home from work it's easy to whip up a delicious dinner.


Of course to polish off a delicious meal you need some sweet treats! Delicious No Bake Oat Bites from Vegetarian Times Oct 2005 issue. We used sunbutter instead of almond butter, reduced the syrup a tad, added chocolate covered cacao nibs, and drizzled heavily with 73% Dagoba chocolate. Messy to roll, fun to make, and awesome to eat! Would be good to try an oatmeal cookie dough version with cinnamon and more raisins.



For some fun time outside of work, we've been busy with scrapbooking. Here's two pages we did, one of the Oregon Coast (we used an old calendar photo for the background), and one of our u-pick excursions this past summer!

Have a great last week of January!

We're Melting, We're Melting!

Texas is sweltering HOT. We had the pleasure of going home to see family and celebrate our grandparents 50th wedding anniversary, and it happened to be when San Antonio/Austin were getting record highs of 100-105! It was really nice when we flew back into Portland and basked in the breezy, sunny, 70-degree weather....












Don't you love photos and making memories with family? Our uncle, who is savvy with computers, made a DVD slideshow of 50 years of pictures of our grandparents and all of the children & grandchildren. It was so touching and memorable!

It's really hard to stay cool in such unbearable weather. Ice cream, fruit smoothies, lots of water, and fresh salads really help to stay hydrated. (Oh and dark chocolate is nice, too, lol..)

Speaking of heat, our mouths were on fire when we ordered take-out from our favorite local Thai restaurant. We enjoyed spicy red curry (with eggplant, tofu, bell pepper, bamboo shoots, onion, basil, and cabbage), spicy Pad Ga Prow stir-fry (with tofu, garlic, chili, bell pepper, onion, carrot, basil leaves, broccoli, and mushrooms), and spicy Tom Ka soup (coconut milk, lemongrass, galanga, kaffir leaves, lime juice, tofu, broccoli, cabbage, onion, tomatoes, and mushrooms). So flavorful! As summer continues, we hope everyone enjoys the outdoors and stays cool! And don't let little things in life (like hot weather) get to your mood - stay positive and cherish memories, no matter how unbearable things can get. :)

Our Good Friend Bob

Back in Texas we were only briefly acquainted with Bob, but now that we live here in Oregon, we are only an hour a way to visit our good friend Bob!

Bob's Red Mill that is!

We had a fabulous time- in awe really- while shopping at Bob's Red Mill Store in Milwaukee, Oregon.










When we first got there, we got some lunch at their quite popular cafe. Wonderful split pea soup with carrots and celery in a huge tasty bread bowl, and a side of steamed veggies! It was so filling, and the bread was so soft and fluffy.


Despite being a small-sized store (only setback was that the aisles were too small and it was really crowded), we enjoyed parading down each aisle and finding cool products. We felt like excited little kids! The best part of the store was the bulk section. Instead of buying a whole package of one product (which would cost about $3-4), we loved being able to get $0.40-$2.00 worth of products to try. So, we ended up buying a lot of different products, but our bill was quite reasonable.

Triticale meal, Triticale Flour, Green Pea Flour, White Popcorn, Pumpernickel meal, Rolled Spelt Flakes, Creamy Rye Flakes, 10 Grain Flour, Millet Flour, and Chana Dal Beans!

The popcorn was fabulous - we literally hadn't had popcorn in years, and we made a huge batch of delicious popcorn on the stove. It cooked up just right! Had leftovers the next day and added some nutritional yeast.

The pumpkernickel meal is now a favorite! We think it's better than quinoa, millet, couscous, and steel cut oats. We had some for dinner with just olive oil and it was simple but delicious. There is a recipe for rye crackers on the label, and we are thinking of making some this weekend.

The green pea flour can be used in guacamole, bread, soup, and other creative concoctions. We're not sure how we'll use it yet.

Fig Nuggets, Whole Wheat Flour, Whole Wheat Potato Flaxseed Bread Loaf, Flaxseed meal, Date Pieces, Pumpkin Pie Spice, Kelp Granules, and Apple Pie Spice.

The Figs and Dates are the best! We use them in everything - cereal for breakfast, snacks, ice cream... Note to self - buy these by the case next time!

The wheat potato bread was a light airy bread with a good brany texture but not as soft as we would like. Can't wait to make our own bread with the wonderful flours from Bob's Red Mill.


We also bought some Grande Whole Grains and had that in a Thai Rice Bowl with broccoli, bean sprouts, Just Tomatoes Freeze Dried Peas, and a Thai nut sauce (hemp seed butter, crushed red pepper, garlic, lime juice). Chewy nutty grains!


As for the spices, we've used the Pumpkin and Apple Pie spices like crazy - oatmeal, smoothies, ice cream, and apple salads. Here's a pic of a fresh apple salad with apples, dried fig pieces, apple pie spice, and vanilla soy yogurt. A healthy filling dessert!


Hoping to visit our good friend Bob once a month! Can't wait to bake and cook with all of the flours and grains! What are your baking suggestions for cereal meals and grains and flours? - LK

The B's - Bowls, Blueberries, Bread, and BUSYINESS

Long work days (9-10 on average, but this week will be ~13 hours) limit our cooking creativity and cooking time... Our cookbooks, like Veganomicon and Soy of Cooking books are starting to collect dust! Hopefully work will get better and we'll have more time to try some of those good looking recipes! While we are cherishing each minute of relaxation and free time we do have, we've been only cooking quick meals or planning ahead. What kinds of nutritious meals do you all prepare during BUSY times?

Our recent favorite meal has been rice BOWLS - they're versatile and chock full of good veggies. Simple, yet elegant. We've been loving red rice with it! The first rice bowl this week was with edamames, carrots, scallions, mushrooms, bell pepper, garlic, and Bragg's. The next day we enjoyed the rice bowl with an addition of orange sesame dressing, crunchy water chestnuts, and a gold nugget squash (creamy, like a cross between a summer squash and an acorn squash). Just mix all the veggies and goodies you want with rice in a bowl and dig in with a big spoon! :)


More "bowls" ahead, only this is a sweet treat - Coconut Bliss Vanilla Bean ice cream with fresh local peaches and cranberry orange granola!


For breakfast, we soaked extra thick oats overnight with hazelnut nut butter and some milk. Then we added frozen banana slices and fresh local blueberries and heated it for a heart-warming healthy breakfast! The BLUEBERRIES here are to die for; we've been buying 1/2 flats for really cheap and freezing them to stock up for the winter.


It's really convenient and cheaper to bake homemade BREAD/rolls and freeze them for the week. We made wheat rye garlic rolls (some wheat flour, rye flour, garlic, and herbs), which olive oil always goes well with. (By the way, we've been chugging our current olive oil - from Italy! It is to die for.)
Other baked goods we made this weekend were guava jam biscuits and ginger spice biscuits. Our grocery store had all natural, no sugar-added guava jam -it tastes so tropical and delicious on bread, we might as well put some jam in the bread!

We recently enjoyed Fat Free Vegan Kitchen's paprika potatoes with local red potatoes. We added more tomato paste, omitted the saffron, and cut down the oregano. We, of course, drizzled olive oil and nutritional yeast on it. It was good served warm with steamed broccoli, as well as eaten chilled like a potato salad. Thanks Susan!

Lastly, here is a pic of our grocery finds, including the guava jam, red rice, and gold nugget squash. There are two new chocolates we've discovered - mango chili and cacao nibs with nutmeg. They're both sweeter than we like (we like extra dark chocolate), but the nutmeg one reminds us of eggnog spice, and the mango chili has subtle notes of tropical coconut sweetness with some heat.
Hope that your lives aren't as busy as ours....we need your encouragement and energy to get through this upcoming week! We're thankful for Farmer's Markets and a vegan's favorite B's - Blueberries, easy meal Bowls, and Bread.

Best wishes, LK

Mid September Eats

It's already September, and even though we've been cooking up some great eats, we've been very bad bloggers. It's in part because we are still trying to settle in as well as keep up with 8-10 hour work days! We've just been too exhausted. But this weekend we've managed to squeeze in time to blog about our exciting September eats!

Rice Bowls - with baked tofu, yellow bell pepper, broccoli, red onion, sunflower seeds, red rice, and an orange sesame dressing. It was delicious and we love having rice bowls quite frequently.



We made spinach hummus and added red onion and cucumber in a flatbread to make a "panini-style" sandwich. Would be good with agave-mustard dressing!





Using Bob's Red Mill Millet Grits, we made Homemade Millet Cornbread. It was a spontaneous creation, so it may need some work (like reduce the sweetness), but it turned out delicious.

Homemade Millet Cornbread
1/4 cup flax
3/4 cup hemp milk
3/4 cup oat flour (or other flour)
1 cup cooked millet grits
1 cup cornmeal
1 Tb baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup agave
1/4-1/3 cup chopped red bell pepper

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Mix flax and some milk and let sit. Combine the remaining ingredients in a large bowl, except for the bell pepper, then add the flax mixture. Stir until combined, add bell peppers and stir until just blended, then bake in a round pie pan or make muffins in a muffin pan. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until golden.


Purple cauliflower - roasted with olive oil, garlic, and nutrional yeast!



Had a Bell Pepper with Tofu and Walnuts recipe in our recipe book, and we are so glad we finally made it. The filling you could make into a casserole with broccoli and more tofu and mushrooms. We changed the recipe slightly - for the filling we used Bob's Red Mill Grains and Nuts Hot Cereal (instead of rice), added crumbled tofu, chopped mushrooms, onion, Braggs, curry powder, black pepper, garlic, oregano, and celery seed. Served with nutritional yeast.



One of our favorite cuisines is Thai - and this Thai Coconut Stir Fry was so elegant and full of flavor. Another recipe in our recipe stash, and we don't know where we got it from, but we will definetely make this again.

The dish had coconut milk, garlic, snap peas, mushrooms, bell pepper, bok choy, crushed red pepper, lime and lemon zest and juice, onion, some spinach, and soy sauce. We served with long grain brown rice. Love that it was saucy to serve over the rice. Next time we'll try it with broccoli and chinese cabbage!


Finally after many months, we made pizza again! Homemade pizza crust, with local fresh tomatoes, eggplant, bell pepper, onion, and basil, and with lots of garlic and olive oil. This pizza crust is a keeper - soft but chewy, just great flavor and texture.
LK's Homemade Pizza Crust

1 1/2 cup warm water
1 tsp sugar
1 pack dry active yeast
1 Tb olive oil
3/4 tsp salt
2 cup whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cup hard white wheat flour
1 tsp basil
1/2 tsp oregano
fresh rosemary leaves, chopped

Add all ingredients according to your bread machine's directions. Set on dough cycle. When done with dough cycle, flattened into a pizza crust. Place stone in oven to preheat, then add crust to stone and bake at 500 degrees F for only 5 min. Can freeze crusts for easy pizza dinners for the week. To finish the pizza, add toppings, then bake at 425 degrees F for 8-15 min.


Finally, this morning we enjoyed warm tasty Carrot Trail Mix Muffins. We adapted this recipe quite a lot, so here is our version.
LK's Carrot Trail Mix Muffins

1 1/2 Tb ground flaxseed
1/3 cup pineapple juice
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1/4 cup wheat germ
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
pinch of salt
1/4 cup date pieces
2 Tb sunflower seeds
1/2 cup + 1 Tb pineapple, crushed
1 Tb safflower oil
3 Tb agave
1/2 tsp coconut extract (or just vanilla)
1/8 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 cup carrots, finely grated

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Combine pineapple juice and flax in a small bowl and set aside. Combine all dry ingredients in a large bowl and wet ingredients in another bowl. Stir in flax mixture to wet ingredients, then add wet ingredients to dry ingredients. Bake in a mini muffin pan for 15-20 minutes (check for doneness and golden color). Sprinkle cinnamon on top. Makes 12 mini muffins.


We especially like the pineapple as a sweetener. Sunflower seeds added a nice crunch, but we may try walnuts next time. Other ideas: apple butter and currant muffins and pumpkin pineapple muffins.


We are praying for all you Texans who may be affected by Hurricane Ike. We hope you are all safe and well.

God bless, LK

English Muffins, Carrot Pancakes, and Comforting Meals

The past week or so we've been compiling all the great recipes we have bookmarked so that we can print them off and bind them in a binder...that way we can cook these recipes and stop accumulating more recipes. There are so many great looking recipes out there, that we can't make them all. So, we will just work with the ones we will print off for now. (And that adds up to over 100 pages! Yikes!).

Yes, we love food and cooking! We decided this week to go back to what we love - baking bread/breakfast/dessert and making comforting, hearty meals. Who doesn't love the great yeasty fresh smell of bread rising, bananas in the oven, nutty rice cooking on the stove, and cinnamon filling the air?

Like many bloggers recently, we made carrot cake pancakes. Soft, fluffy, and we get our healthy orange fix in the morning! For the first time, we enjoyed them with some cooked apples, a little agave, and heavily doused cinnamon on top. This morning we also enjoyed the pancakes for breakfast, but ate them with more freshly shredded carrots, slightly warmed, and cinnamon. I think we had 1 Tbsp each of cinnamon on our pancakes! Yummy.


We also enjoyed making homemade whole grain English muffins! They actually we pretty easy to make - it just took patience to let the yeast ferment overnight and then let it rise. Easier than bread baking, and used less energy because they don't require an oven to cook. You just cook them on a skillet similar to pancakes. We served them with homemade beet veggie burgers, then tofu sandwiches. Really soft (more like a soft bread texture than a airy English muffin) and very tasty when toasted!

Another great treat we enjoyed was homemade banana-date-walnut-oatmeal bars. We tried to imitate Odwalla bars, but we still need to tweak the recipe. It was very soft and flavorful, it just needs to be less fluffy/bready and more dense like Odwalla's.

Banana-Date-Walnut-Oat Bars

1/4 cup + 1 Tb Scottish oatmeal
1/4 cup Bob's Red Mill Peppy Kernels (or rolled oats + some uncooked millet)
1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 cup chopped walnuts

6 large medjool dates (1/4 cup), mashed/pureed
3/4 cup frozen bananas, warmed and mashed with the liquid (or 3/4 cup fresh bananas mashed plus some liquid)
2 Tbsp flaxseed meal, added to mashed bananas
2 Tbsp agave nectar

Mix together dry ingredients. Add dates into flour mixture, then add mashed bananas. Mix slightly, then add walnuts and mix until just combined. Spread in a 1 1/2 quart glass bar pan (9 x 7 baking pan) and bake 13 min. Let sit before cutting into bars.


With the extra dates, we just mashed them onto a graham cracker and topped with walnuts for a quick and tasty treat. I never knew how soft and versatile dates are in baked goods!


For meals, we chose the hearty dishes - Homemade Sloppy Joe's with Chickpeas, Chickpea & Vegetable Shepherd's Pie, and Edamame "Fried" Rice.
The Sloppy Joe's reminded us of our southern roots - messy, tomatoey goodness! For leftovers, we served them in cabbage leaves for a lighter flare, and then another day served them mixed with cooked red quinoa as a "Quinoa bowl".

The Shepherd's Pie we adjusted from multiple Shepherd's Pie recipes we saw, one from Veganomicon. Ours had lots of nutritional yeast and Bragg's, plus a little thyme, sage, Worcestershire sauce, garlic, onion, olive oil, coriander, and celery seed. For the filling, we used local squash (it was like a cross between zucchini and winter squash; semi-creamy), chickpeas, and diced carrots. The mashed potato topping we had made a few days before, which made the dish less time consuming. It actually was half red potatoes, half cauliflower mixed with soy milk. We really loved the mashed potato/cauliflower mix! Lighter, yet still creamy and comforting. This dish was very tasty when doused with nutritional yeast and drizzled with a little olive oil and more Bragg's.

Our last hearty meal for the week was a healthy Asian bowl- edamames, diced carrots, scallions, diced bell pepper, toasted sesame seeds, and long grain brown rice, with just some olive oil and Bragg's. Sometimes the most simplest ingredients come together with the best flavors.


We have more great concoctions coming soon!

While we've been doing moving/job research (we may be moving to Oregon), we found this great website - walkscore.com. You can search an address, find how "walkable" it is, and even zoom in and see the streets/houses close up! ("street-level" view option)

-LK Sisters

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