Enchis and Ritas

Today I took the kids to the All Abilities playground. It's a one-of-a-kind park designed to be both fun and therapeutic for all kids including those with disabilities or sensory issues. It's also huge! We spent all morning there.

There's a boat that gently sways back and forth, perfect for my pirates.

There's an entire pretend town...including a gas station with slushy machines! Olivia found them most interesting.

For dinner, I made enchiladas filled with tofu scramble and spinach, topped with chile verde sauce and black olives.

I made mango margaritas for Tony and me. I love frozen margaritas, but I don't love all the sugar, so I made my own and sweetened them with stevia. 

Once I was out on the deck, kicked back with my feet up, with a mango rita in my hand, I felt as happy and relaxed as Jackson on the giant swing.

Hope you have a great weekend, and remember to enter my AfroVegan cookbook giveaway which ends Sunday!

Mango Cupcakes with Matcha Buttercream Frosting

We could all use a cupcake this week, right?

So I finally picked up some matcha, a finely ground green tea powder. It's a little on the pricey side, but it will last a long time and it's not only used for making tea. Years ago while vacationing in San Francisco, I tasted matcha gelato in Japantown. I still remember its pale green appearance and mild tea flavor.  

There's a recipe in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World for matcha cupcakes, but since mangoes are so cheap right now and I love them, I decided to make mango cupcakes and use matcha in the frosting. I used cupcake and frosting recipes in VCTOtW for my template here.

Mango Cupcakes with Matcha Buttercream Frosting

Makes 1 dozen cupcakes

For the cupcakes:

Flesh of 1 ripe mango, roughly chopped

3/4 c sugar

3/4 c nondairy milk

1/4 c canola oil

2 t vanilla

1 1/4 c all-purpose flour

2 T cornstarch

3/4 t baking powder

1/2 t baking soda

1/4 t salt

Preheat oven to 350F and get your cupcake tin ready with liners. In a blender, puree the mango, sugar, milk, oil, and vanilla. In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, cornstarch, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Pour the mango mixture into the dry ingredients and stir until just combined. Spoon batter into cupcake tin, filling the liners 3/4 full. Bake for 22 minutes and remove from cupcake tin, cooling on a wire rack.

For the frosting:

1/2 c vegetable shortening

1/2 c vegan margarine

3 1/2 c confectioner's sugar

1 T matcha green tea powder

1 1/2 t vanilla 

1/4 nondairy milk

Make sure all your ingredients are at room temperature. Beat the shortening and margarine together until combined. Add confectioner's sugar and matcha powder and beat for 3 minutes. Add vanilla and milk, beat for 5-7 minutes until fluffy. When the cupcakes are completely cool, frost them. Please note, this frosting recipe assumes you are going to pipe fluffy heaps of frosting onto your cupcakes. If you are just going to frost them normally, halve the amounts.

The frosting looks a bit weird...I have a very small selection of cake decorating tips. I need some different ones. No complaints about the flavor though! I've always had a hard time making frostings. They've been the wrong consistency, too runny or not smooth enough. At last, success! 

Two keys to good frosting: have all your ingredients at room temperature, and make sure the cupcakes are completely cooled before frosting them. If you can't wait very long, stick 'em in the freezer for a few minutes!

Girly Girls

For lunch today I picked up a hummus tabouli wrap from Tom's Tabooley. Tom has a little sit-down restaurant by the UT campus and he also sells these wraps in health food stores all over town.

Delicious! Tom makes the best tabouli (OK, tabooley.)

Later, I attempted to make the Live Mango Gazpacho from The 30 Minute Vegan. It got off to a gorgeous start. All those bright colors, how could it be bad?

It wasn't bad! But it also wasn't soup. It was more like a salsa. A chunky, delicious salsa that walked the line between sweet and hot. We ate it with tortilla chips and called it dinner.

My lunchtime wrap got me thinking about hummus (it doesn't take much.) So I also made a bowl of chipotle lime hummus. Chipotle powder is one of my new favorite pantry staples.

Miss Olivia got her nails did for the first time today. My daughter is a tomboy who plays firetrucks with Jackson and tries her best to climb trees, but she also has her girly-girl moments. She is thrilled with her new manicure. I don't have a picture, but I painted mine to match. I guess I have my girly-girl moments, too. 

Cookbook Challenge - Mango-Ginger Tofu

This week, the PPK Cookbook Challenge checks in with Vegan with a Vengeance. I was so excited when I got this cookbook a few years ago. I was vegetarian, not yet vegan, but I already owned the Sarah Kramer books and VwaV seemed to be along the same lines...a cookbook that would be funny and interesting to read, while also full of quality recipes.

Tony and I soon came to refer to VwaV as "the cookbook that can do no wrong" because we ate one awesome meal after another from it. Amazingly, there are still a few recipes that I had not gotten around to...until now.

First off, Mango-Ginger Tofu.

I love the presentation of this dish. Once I plated it, I was like "ooh, this is gonna be good" and couldn't wait to eat it. The taste lives up to the appearance, too. I loved the contrast between the sweetness of mango and the heat of jalapeno. I am not sure why I never made this in the past, but I know we'll be eating it again soon.

Mango Smoothie and Broccoli Dal

Today I remembered to take pics of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Wooo!

For breakfast, I had a mango smoothie. To me, it's like a mango lassi served in Indian restaurants, but I don't want all that sugar when I just woke up, so I use stevia to sweeten it. Do you use stevia? It's my favorite way to sweeten smoothies, oatmeal, or tea.

Mango Smoothie
(makes 2 small servings or 1 large)
2 cups frozen mango cubes
1 1/4 cups soymilk
1/2 tsp. vanilla
1/4 tsp. ground cardamom
10 drops stevia or to taste
Mix in a blender until smooth and creamy.

For lunch I had a multigrain bagel with avocado, hummus, and tomato.

For dinner I made the creamy broccoli dal from Vegan Yum Yum. Very easy and fast to put together. I sliced my broccoli stalks thinly but left the florets on the bigger side, so the soup would have a lot of texture to it. I love broccoli.

And to make this post a tad more interesting, I offer a picture of my cookbook collection. I don't have room for a bookshelf in my kitchen, so I store them vertically in cabinets next to my stove. Works for me! Anyone else have an odd way of storing their cookbooks? Which is your favorite?

Seitan Tacos and Mango Smoothie

Last night I wanted to run some errands and work out after Tony got home from work, so I needed to make a quick dinner that wouldn't keep me in the kitchen too long. Luckily I had a pound of steamed white seitan from Viva Vegan in the freezer, so I set that out to thaw and declared it Taco Night.

I cut the seitan into thin pieces and browned it in a pan with 1/2 onion.

Then I added 1/2 cup water and 2 Tbsp. taco seasoning (I used the spice blend from Vegan Comfort Food, but the packaged kind is fine too) and let it cook down until the liquid evaporated.

I chopped up some tomato and avocado, filled up the taco shells and doused everything with some taco sauce, and dinner was served.

This morning I made the discovery that coconut milk makes a typical smoothie like 100x better, so I would like to share this newfound knowledge with you.

Coco-Mango Smoothie
1 cup frozen mango pieces
1/2 cup coconut milk
1/2 cup soymilk
1 scoop vanilla protein powder (optional)
1/4 tsp. vanilla
1/4 tsp. ground cardamom
a few drops stevia to taste
Blend it all up!

It was hard but I did manage to share some with Jackson before gulping down the rest myself. Here he is enjoying it with his new Yo Gabba Gabba cup and bowl. If you have little ones, are they as OBSESSED with this show as he is? He would watch it all day if I let him. And then I wonder why I go around humming "There's a party in my tummy, so yummy, so yummy!"