Okay, so I know that most people probably know how to make pasta, but it’s seriously one of my favourite things ever, and it’s so versatile, so I wanted to share a really simple, delicious, homemade take on it.

Ingredients:

• 1 tablespoon oil (I use safflower)
• 1/2 onion, finely chopped
• 1-2 garlic cloves, finely diced, or 1 tablespoon smashed roasted garlic spread*
• 2 Field Roast Italian Sausages (or more if you want!), sliced to your desire
• 1 large can crushed tomatoes (I love the Muir Glen Organic Fire-Roasted)
• Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, & Thyme… or whichever ones you like
• crushed red pepper
• other spices to taste
• S&P to taste

• 1 box pasta (I used quinoa veggie curls, they’re cute, yummy, and gluten-free!)
• pinch of salt
• 1-2 tablespoons Earth Balance
• S&P to taste

Method:

1. Heat the oil in a saucepan, add the onion, and saute until almost clear.
2. Add in the garlic, saute a bit longer until just cooked.
3. Add in the sliced Field Roast Italian Sausage, and cook until browned.
4. Add in the crushed tomato sauce (pour carefully, and don’t wear white).
5. Mix in spices.
6. Bring to a simmer, turn to low, and let cook for 5-10 minutes (or longer is better).
7. Bring a separate pot of water to boil for the noodles.  Add a pinch of salt.  Cook to package directions.
8. After draining the pasta, throw it back into the pot with the Earth Balance and S&P. Stir until coated.
9. Put your sauce on your noodles in your bowl, and put it in your mouth!  Enjoy!

*to make a roasted garlic spread, simply heat your oven to 450 degrees.  On your full head of garlic, chop off the top so that all the cloves are exposed.  Pour 1-2 tablespoons of oil into the exposed cloves, and wrap in foil.  Roast in the oven for 30-40 minutes, until soft.  Pull out the garlic from the peel, and mash with a bit of olive oil.  Use immediately or store in a tightly sealed container in the refrigerator.

It’s Meatless Monday again!  Have you ever talked to someone about being vegan or vegetarian, and they say something like, “I just really need to eat meat/dairy every once in a while”?  As ridiculous as most of us know that sentence is, we all should know that it is a difficult concept to decide to forgo all animal products.  Personally, I remember telling my best friend that I could never be vegan… not more than a week before I did it.  So, we should be understanding when people can’t exactly get their heads around going 100% vegan.  So then, instead of lashing out about all the reasons they should go vegan (which they probably know some of already), simply implore them to try it once a week, on Meatless Mondays!  They’re becoming fairly mainstream, and it’s super easy to go vegan just one day a week.  Plus, before you know it, you’ll probably be doing it even more often, and eventually maybe even take the full plunge.  In any case, one person going vegan for one day DOES make a difference! Read the rest of this entry →

Marquis Pizza has been serving up vegan slices with Daiya for a minute, but they recently decided to start carrying some tasty faux meats including stuff from our friends at Denver Seitan Company. Stop by on Mondays from 5pm to close to get the vegan upgrade for no extra charge. Or grab some this Saturday at the Saul Williams show. We’ll be there.

Marquis Pizza is the slice and pie-slinging annex of the Marquis Theater, located at 2009 Larimer Street in Denver.

Haven’t settled on a New Year’s Resolution yet?  You could follow in the footsteps of four of my best friends, who decided to take a month-long vegan plunge starting this month.  Still a little too much commitment?  Take an idea from my mom, who’s decided to start keeping her Mondays meatless every week in 2012.

Eating meatless can be tricky, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing, andespecially if you don’t have good support.  That’s what we’re here for!  And to help you with that support, here’s your first Meatless Monday recipe of the New Year!  This is for Citrus Tofu by our lovely chef Melanie.  If you don’t like tofu, you could use tempeh or seitan, or even just veggies. This recipe is from our Chomp! Cookbook that just came out.  Pick up a copy of the cookbook at our upcoming Chomp! dinner this Wednesday for just $5!

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It’s starting to get a little colder outside, so let’s spice it up a bit!  Here’s one of my favourite recipes: Tempeh Corn Chorizo, also featured in our recently published cookbook.  Like it?  Pick up our cookbook for just $5 at our Volunteer Meeting this Wednesday or at the next Chomp!  Or email us at info@plantsanimals.org and arrange to get it another way!  (It will also be available online soon!)

Enjoy your Meatless Monday and spread the love!

Follow the jump for the recipe. Read the rest of this entry →

Oh man, I’ve been way into soup lately.  It’s the perfect time of year for it too.  One of my favourite things about making soup is that you can easily make a huge batch in the crockpot, share it with friends, and still have leftovers to throw in your freezer to save for a cold winter night.  I’ve got about six different kinds in my freezer already… but my newest one is a delicious concoction made with maple-roasted sweet potatoes, pumpkin puree, and a hint of spice–perfect for the season we just started! I brought it into work for my coworkers and even one who said she hated pumpkin loved it!  You can really play with the flavors a lot here: make it sweet, make it spicy, or whatever you like.  Here’s a basic recipe of what I did, but feel free to change it up! 

Roasted Sweet Potato and Pumpkin Soup Read the rest of this entry →

Last night, we had a little vegan potluck at my house, and it was fabulous and delicious.  It’s amazing what people can pull out of nowhere (even some of my friends that aren’t even vegan!).  The centerpiece of our meal was something that we’ve been talking about for a while, and one of my favourite recipes, Baked Potato Soup.  This is a recipe that a friend and I made up simply to make good use of leftover tempeh bacon crumbles from breakfast!  While it did serve its purpose, it did much more than that, by being simply delicious.  We paired it with homemade bread bowls, a green salad, and some chips and homemade hummus (with awesome rum-infused cakes for dessert).  By the end, we were all laying down rubbing our full bellies in a fit of food coma.  Isn’t that the best? 

Anyway, if you don’t know me by now, I don’t like to measure.  So this recipe is more like guidelines.  Play around with it ’til you make it delicious.  That’s all there is to it!

Baked Potato Soup Read the rest of this entry →

**The Meatless Monday Unicorn from vegansaurus.com!!**
Hooray for Meatless Mondays!  And here’s a recipe for meaty meatless meatballs!  I’ve made these meat-less-balls a few times before, but they have never turned out so wonderful as when I made them last week.  It’s loosely based on this recipe, but I totally took it to a new level with my modifications. The consistency was great, they stayed together well, and the flavor was awesome! Unfortunately, you know me, and I rarely measure or follow recipes, so this recipe will be more like guidelines.  But delicious, nonetheless.  So here’s a meatless recipe for this week!

Meaty Meatless Meatballs *
or MMM, as I like to call them.  Read the rest of this entry →

Fresh, summery tempeh salad.

It’s Meatless Monday, the most wonderful time of the week!  Or, the only thing that doesn’t make Mondays totally suck!  Either way, have yourself some delicious Tempeh Salad today, and kiss goodbye to your case of the Mondays.

If you’re not a tempeh fanatic, you may not know that tempeh comes in may different flavors. You have your basic soy, of course, but there’s also multigrain varieties made of things like rice and barley, and even flavored tempeh like “garden veggie” varieties. They have distinctly different tastes, so try a bunch and find your fave! If you are put off by the slightly bitter taste of tempeh, boiling it for a bit first will take a lot of that away.

Tempeh is also awesome because it’s a fermented food, meaning its proteins are more digestible, it has reduced oligosaccharides (that component of beans that makes beans, you know, do their bean thing), and it’s pro-biotic. Plus, it’s a super source of those wonderful soy isoflavones that are protective against all sorts of diseases.

So go forth, vegan masses, and eat tempeh!  Here’s a recipe to get you started.

Read the rest of this entry →

A crappy cell phone picture of delicious orange-almond green beans.

It’s Meatless Monday, that wonderful time of the week when we’re allowed to demand that our omni friends forego the flesh and try some new vegetarian delights.

To inspire your day of cruelty-free chow, today’s meatless recipe is Orange-Almond Green Beans.  Okay, so green beans are generally meatless anyway.  But people are going nuts with the bacon these days – it’s like, oh look, I’ve made a delicious pasta primavera.  What does it need?  Bacon!  How about these roasted carrots?  Bacon!  Chocolate cake?  Bacon!

Ahem.  Sorry.  (Seriously though, fuck bacon.)

This is a 100% BACON-FREE (is that going to be a new food label now?) dish that is still unbelievably delicious.  If it’s too early for fresh green beans, you can certainly use asparagus instead – just skip the initial boiling step.

This recipe has 2 speeds: normal, and extra-super-fancy.  See the note for how to fancy it up, like if you’re making it for a throwdown against Bobby Flay.

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