To go along with the omnivore’s 100 and the vegan 100, I’ve decided to write out the top 100 foods that I want to cook and as I fix them, I will scratch them off and perhaps replace them with something new.  Some of these ideas are pretty mundane, some not so.  Some are vegan, some involve real meat.

If you like the idea, please create your own and leave me a comment so I can steal ideas see what you’re cooking.

1. Mango/chili powder sorbet
2. Cayenne Hot Sauce
3. Faux Short Ribs with Hard Bamboo Bones and Seitan
4. Fajita Skirt Steak (the real stuff, it’s a long story)
5. Mexican Flank Steak (Again, don’t ask)
6. Seitan in an Asian Plum Sauce
7. Silken Tofu Chocolate Cafe
8. Noodles like I get at Shogun
9. Miso Eggplant “eel” sushi
10. Vegan spicy tuna roll
11. Crab cakes with Match
12. Chiapas-style Seitan
13. Homemade rice pancakes (moo shu style)
14. Vegan gnocchi
15. Vegan nan (need a tandoori oven)
16. Aloo Gobi
17. Rucci Fry (my favorite vegetarian Indian dish, have no idea what’s in it except that it’s veggies, it’s red, and it’s FLAMING hot.)  Mmm…
18. Berry banana silken tofu shake
19. Vanilla/sugar sauted lobster
20. Dozen oysters with horseradish finished with citrus and a hint of watermelon
21. Seitan pepperoni
22. Seitan salami
23. Smoked tempeh
24. Tiger cry seitan
25. Vegan haggis (yes, I, too am puzzled by this…)
26. Vegan shrimp substitute
27. Vegan parmesan
28. Sweet mash (sweet potatoes and bananas)
29. Vegan hot dogs
30. Turducken
31. Cassoulet
32. A vegan version of Cassoulet
33. Vegan french toast
34. Cashew cheese
35. Cashew milk
36. Homemade soy milk
37. Lemon poppy seed cake
38. Mini carrot cakes
39. Kalamata olive bread
40. Vegan sun-dried tomato spread
41. Olive tapenade
42. Vegan ham
43. Barley risotto
44. Sweet potato risotto
45. Sweet potato ice cream
46. Vegan cookies and cream ice cream
47. Champagne risotto
48. Salad with nicoise olives
49. Pear puree soup
50. Strawberry/tomato bruschetta (thanks forfeng)
51. Jack Daniels glaze
52. Bourbon sauce
53. Margarita seitan
54. Chiliaquelles
55. Vegan alfredo sauce
56. Sugar grilled asparagus
57. Yu shiang asparagus
58. Sa cha eggplant
59. Dan dan noodles that don’t completely suck
60. Blazing noodles from Pei Wei (I’m close)
61. Seitan in a slow cooker
62. Tea marinated seitan
63. Tea smoked something
64. Green tea ice cream
65. Chipotle paste
66. Serrano ginger paste
67. Hard candy
68. Carmel scallops
69. Chinese pork bun
70. Chili paste
71. Mole
72. Good Brazillian polenta
73. Brazillian cheese bread
74. Seitan scampi
75. Collard greens
76. Profiteroles
77. Profiteroles stuffed with seitan
78. Vegan cheesy mashed potatoes
79. Vegan creamed spinach
80. Garlicky sauted spinach
81. Sweet Potatoe Souffle
82. Vegan coconut drop cookies
83. Vegan egg replacer
84. Frittata with tofu eggs
85. French-style omelet
86. Vegan feta
87. Flour tortillas from scratch
88. Chimichanga
89. Asian 5 Spice Seitan
90. Peking Duck
91. Stuffed portobellos
92. Mango relish that doesn’t taste like crap
93. Grilled stuffed peaches
94. Deep fried peanut butter and jelly sandwich
95. Fried cookie dough
96. Mochahete
97. Vegan sausage
98. Peach cobbler
99. Macadamia-nut encrusted cheese cake
100. Jamaican jerk sauce

So…what’s on your 100? 

In this post on Nutritional Yeast, I gave a recipe for cheese sauce from How It All Vegan!: Irresistible Recipes for an Animal-Free Diet.  Well I got to chatting with Wordvixen, a Twitter buddy of mine, about the recipe.

Apparently Ms. Vixen grew up on nutritional yeast (good for her) and said she would try the recipe.  To make a long story short, we go to talking about how to make it more cheesy.  Personally, I think the sauce is great, but I don’t eat a lot of dairy.  (You know, the whole vegan thing .)  So I have no problem with it’s mild cheese flavor.

My wife, the cheese-a-holic…she did not care for it.  I want her to have the tools to be vegan if she decides to give it a try, so I mentioned to Wordvixen my thoughts about kicking the cheesy up a step.   (Not a notch, a full step.)  

My thought was to increase the amount of nutritional yeast, which I still plan to do at some point, but Wordvixen went and made it herself.  In her recipe, she added 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne and 1/2 can of diced green chilis.

As far as I am concerned, this is the new official recipe.

Oh, and if you want to follow me on Twitter, my name is the name of the blog (you know blog well done) without spaces.

 In my recipe for seitan, I listed Bragg Liquid Aminos as one of the ingredients.  Everyone’s favorite Domestik Goddess then asked what exactly they are.

I thought it would be a good thing to talk about since until only the last few weeks did I actually become aware of how to cook with them.  Even then I went ahead and did a little research into what they are since all I knew is that they are a replacement for soy sauce in a number of recipes.

What I found is that Bragg Liquid Aminos is a raw, fermented soy-based sauce.  While the sources I looked at would not break down exactly how they are made, it is basically thought to be a chemical process in which the proteins in the soy are broken down with an acid and then nutralized (likely with baking soda.)

In practical use, Bragg Liquid Aminos is a very deep, salty sauce.  First and foremost, Bragg Liquid Amino acids taste like heavily concentrated soy sauce.  It is also slightly bitter and I think has an almost alkaline aftertaste.  Still, the sauce brings a lot of flavor to the party and is useful in a number of dishes.  It still hasn’t unseated tamari (low sodium, right Sue?) as my weapon of choice when it comes to making most Asian foods, but there are times when I will use it, especially when that is what the recipe calls for.

Somehow given the gravity of this day, talking about food seems somehow inappropriate.  Talk to everyone tomorrow.

In response to The Omnivore’s Hundred, Bittersweet has produced The Vegan’s Hundred.

The rules are the same for this list as the Omivore’s.  I will bold all the foods I have eaten as I eat them, however I am only bolding them if I have eaten the vegan version.  (All links are Bittersweet’s because she deserves the credit)

Last edited 9-10-08.

1. Natto
2. Green Smoothie
3. Tofu Scramble
4. Haggis
5. Mangosteen
6. Creme brulee
7. Fondue
8. Marmite/Vegemite
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Nachos
12. Authentic soba noodles
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Taco from a street cart
16. Boba Tea
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Gyoza
20. Vanilla ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Ceviche
24. Rice and beans
25. Knish
26. Raw scotch bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Caviar
29. Baklava
30. Pate
31. Wasabi peas
32. Chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Mango lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Mulled cider
37. Scones with buttery spread and jam
38. Vodka jelly
39. Gumbo
40. Fast food french fries
41. Raw Brownies
42. Fresh Garbanzo Beans
43. Dahl
44. Homemade Soymilk
45. Wine from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Stroopwafle
47. Samosas
48. Vegetable Sushi
49. Glazed doughnut
50. Seaweed
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Tofurkey
54. Sheese
55. Cotton candy
56. Gnocchi
57. Piña colada
58. Birch beer
59. Scrapple
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Soy curls
63. Chickpea cutlets
64. Curry
65. Durian
66. Homemade Sausages
67. Churros, elephant ears, or funnel cake
68. Smoked tofu
69. Fried plantain
70. Mochi
71. Gazpacho
72. Warm chocolate chip cookies
73. Absinthe
74. Corn on the cob
75. Whipped cream, straight from the can
76. Pomegranate
77. Fauxstess Cupcake
78. Mashed potatoes with gravy
79. Jerky
80. Croissants
81. French onion soup
82. Savory crepes
83. Tings
84. A meal at Candle 79
85. Moussaka
86. Sprouted grains or seeds
87. Macaroni and “cheese”
88. Flowers
89. Matzoh ball soup
90. White chocolate
91. Seitan
92. Kimchi
93. Butterscotch chips
94. Yellow watermelon
95. Chili with chocolate
96. Bagel and Tofutti
97. Potato milk
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Raw cookie dough

So…this is kind of depressing.  As of 9/10/08 I have eaten 40 vegan foods and 63 on the Omnivore’s 100.  Looks like I have some eating to do.

I’ve been trying to branch out and try new ingredients, especially those typically associated with vegan cooking.  During my experimentation, I ran across Nutritional Yeast in several recipes (including my spicy “buffalo wings”.)  I had no idea what it was, so I consulted my friendly local Internet and found out all sorts of interesting tibits.

• Nutritional yeast is made from letting certain strains of yeast feed on mineral-enhanced molasses.   After the yeast has grown to a certain size, it is pastuerized to kill it.
• Nutritional yeast is high in B vitamins and has enough amino acids to form a complete amino acid chain, making it a good nutritional supplement for vegans.
• According to the link above, nutritional yeast also contains elements which regulate blood sugar and can aid in stress reduction.

The first recipe in which I ran across nutritional yeast came from the book How It All Vegan!: Irresistible Recipes for an Animal-Free Diet (lest you think that’s a typo, it’s a play on words.  Replace vegan with began.)  Give it a try, I really liked it.

Eazy Breezy Cheezy Sauce

You will need:

• 1/2 cup nutritional yeast
• 3 tablespoons flour
• 4 teaspoons arrowpowder or corn starch
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup water
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1. In a small saucepan, whisk together the yeast, flour, arrowroot powder, and salt. 
2. Add the water and oil and continue to whisk thoroughly.
3. Stir over medium heat until the sauce becomes thick.
4. Stir in the mustard and stir 30 seconds.

Yield: 2-4 servings

Blogger’s Notes:

1.  Be careful with step 3.  I thought the sauce was never going to get thick and the BOOM! glop.
2.  Next time I make it, I will increase both the Dijon and the salt.
3.  If you using corn starch, my advice would be to add another teaspoon at least.  Arrowroot is a much better thickener than corn starch.

Try it and tell me what you think!

Heidi from 101 Cookbooks has again inspired me, though this time without a recipe.  After reading this post about setting up 101 Cookbooks as a Kiva.com lending team, I was inspired to log back into my Kiva account and make sure that all of my donations were allocated.

For those of you unfamilar with Kiva, they make microloans (loans of a few hundred dollars) to entrepreneurs in foreign countries.  To these brave folk, $500 is enough for them to start or expand their business and given them badly needed operating capital.  In return, they repay the loans with interest. 

Where we come in is we fund an account with Kiva and then select which businesspeople we are going to support.   Typically, what happens is that multiple lenders pool small donations of $25-50 and once enough people have contributed, the full sum goes to the entrepeneur.

It’s a great system and a fantastic way to feel like you are doing something for your fellow residents of this planet.  Here is my lender page (you’ll notice I support food related businesses. )

I urge everyone to give Kiva a try and to tell Heidi that she’s setting a good example.

So last post, I talked about making my own seitan so that I could fry it up and make “buffalo wings.”

Here are the seitan wings I made:

It’s kind of hard to see, but they turned out really well.  There was something about the light, moistness of the homemade seitan that turned into juicy wings (well cubes…I guess.)

It was very simple to do.  You can pretty much use any chicken wing recipe you want, but substitute my seitan recipe instead.

Or you can use the following recipe:

You will need:

To fry the seitan

• 1 cup of All Purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons of garlic powder
• 1 tablespoon of onion power
• 1 tablespoon of black pepper
• 1 tablespoon of smoked paprika
• 1 batch of seitan cut into boneless buffalo wing sized pieces
• oil for frying

To make the barbecue sauce:

• 1/2 cup of barbecue sauce (I perfer Oklahoma Joe’s Night of the Living B-B-Q sauce)
• 3 tablespoons of sriracha

1. Make the barbecue sauce by mixing both ingredients in a bowl with a spoon. 
2. Add all ingredients for frying except the seitan and the oil in a plastic bag and shake thoroughly to mix.
3. Put the seitan pieces in the plastic bag a few at a time and shake to cover in the flour/spice mixture.  Shake off excess flour.  Remove from the bag and put aside to set.
4. Bring the oil to temperature over high heat or in a fryer.  Test the oil by putting in a small piece of seitan.  Bubbles should form around the seitan.  If bubbles do not form, the oil is not hot enough.  Wait a few minutes and try again.
5. When the oil is ready, add the seitan in small batches and fry until golden brown (about 2-3 minutes).
6. Put the seitan on a cookie cooling rack and let the oil drip away.
7. Once the seitan has cooled, put it into a plastic bowl with a lid or a plastic bag with the barbecue sauce.  Shake to cover.

Give it a try.  It’s a pretty unhealthy way to eat a pretty healthy food (seitan), but with football season here, you have to live a little bit!

For over year now, I have been a fan and evangelist of seitan, sometimes called Wheat meat or Buddha Food, which is a dough made from the vital gluten of wheat.  But up until recently, I was using store bought packages rather than making my own.

 However, I decided that needed to change.  Here I am, a very outspoken fan of it, so much so that I am writing a cookbook on it, but I had never made it myself.

So I bit the bullet.  I headed to my local Whole Foods for a great big bag of wheat gluten, headed home, and gave it a whirl.  I would like to say I invented the recipe all on my own, but I had some help from the Vegan Lunchcast whose step-by-step tutorial is far better than anything I could do.

For the technique on how to make seitan, I advise checking out his site.  However, I did change up his recipe in a few significant ways.  First, he was trying to make seitan that resembled beef, which is a dense meat.  I was angling to make “buffalo wings” and wanted meat that was moist and a bit more delicate.

Here is what I did.  You will need:

• 2 cups of vital wheat gluten
• 4 tablespoons of All Purpose Flour
• 1/4 cup of nutritional yeast
• 1/2 cup of Braggs
• 2 tablespoons of canola oil
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced and 4 cloves cut in half
• 1/8 teaspoon of thyme

1. Placed the gluten, All Purpose flour, and yeast in a mixing bowl and mix well.
2. Put 1 1/2 cups of cold water, the Braggs, oil, and minced garlic in a separate bowl and whisk well.
3. Add the wet ingredients to the dry and begin kneading.  I used a Kitchenaide and kneaded for 7 minutes.  Check the consistency of the dough.  If it is too wet, add more All Purpose flour.
4. Take the resulting dough and shape it into a log.  Allow the log to sit for ten minutes.  Cut the Seitan into one-inch-wide strips.
5. Put the strips into a soup pot with 12 cups of cold water, the halved garlic, and the thyme.
6. Bring the water to a boil and simmer for an hour until it floats to the top.  If it has been more than hour, check to make sure that the seitan is not stuck together.
7. Take the seitan out of the water and let it drain before any further cooking.

Enjoy!  I think this recipe has a chicken-like texture when fried and was perfect for mock buffalo wings.  Do you have any seitan recipes?

I’m kind of a big deal. 

… or something like that. 

I did want to say that I was recently given the opportunity to guest post on so you wannabee a Domestik Goddess? which was a great opportunity.  I really enjoyed reading through her site.  I got a lot of recipes and gardening ideas while my wife has found a bunch of design tips.

So go give the site a read.  The article I do on tasty veg*n seitan gyros (my wife’s new favorite dish) will not appear on Blog Well Done.  So, what are you waiting for?