Vegan MoFo Day 1 – Re-Inventing the Veggie Option

Hello, and welcome to the vegan month of food (MoFo) for 2017! For the next month, we will be entertaining you with stories of our vegan food adventures. Sarra and I love coming up with great food ideas – we play off of each other so well and always come up with great ideas to share with you! This year, we are going to try something new for us – in addition to following the daily prompts, we will have a theme of our own to follow each week. For the first week, we’re doing tacos! They’re the perfect food – portable and delicious.

The prompt for day 1 is “Re-inventing the veggie option”. For this prompt, the goal is to give a makeover to a boring, standard veggie option…and what’s more boring and standard than the veggie and hummus tray? Almost every restaurant has one, and many times, it’s the only vegan option. So, how do we turn this boring staple into an exciting meal worthy of your attention? Well, turn it into a taco, of course! Here’s how it went down.

First, I made some hummus. I took a recipe for hummus from The Taco Cleanse, an absolutely masterful cookbook written by our friends in Austin. We’re trying to be mindful of the calories, fat, and salt in our meals, so I cut back a little on the olive oil and salt, and made up for it by tripling the amount of garlic in it. I mean, we probably would have tripled the garlic anyway because we’re us, but now we’ve got an excuse!

Prepping the hummus with the Dude.

Next, I spread half of the hummus in the bottom of a pyrex baking pan, added slices of tofu on top, and then spread the rest of the hummus on top, turning the whole thing into a tofu and hummus layer cake of sorts. I sprinkled some breadcrumbs on top and popped the whole thing into a 350 degree oven for about 45 minutes, and turned it into a hummus-crusted tofu mass.

Hummus plates always come with the same boring old vegetables: broccoli, cherry tomatoes, carrots, and peppers. In and of themselves, they’re not boring at all, but we’ve eaten them raw with hummus so many times! I decided to add those to the tacos, but gave them a little more pizzazz. To be completely honest, I forgot the carrots – they stayed in the refrigerator while we ate dinner – oops! However, the rest of the vegetables were great! We got them all at the Farmer’s Market – beautiful broccoli, perfectly ripe yellow cherry tomatoes, and something we’ve never tried before: blueberry sweet peppers. I blanched the broccoli to get it a little tender, and loaded them all into tacos with the hummus-crusted tofu. We used hatch chile tortillas to make them even more special. They came together beautifully, and we were quite pleased with the delicious results!

This is what a blueberry sweet pepper looks like!

Warming a tortilla. Boy do we love our cast iron pans.

We’re never satisfied with one great dish, so we also made a great side – a casserole! Every potluck is riddled with casseroles, but how do you make one special? Well, it may not be as hard as you think! We got some squash blossoms from the Farmer’s Market, so we wanted to see what we could do with them. I layered some of the squash blossoms in the bottom of a casserole dish and topped it with half a container of Kite Hill’s amazing almond milk ricotta mixed with Penzey’s roasted garlic powder and some oregano. I put the rest of the blossoms on top of it, and poured on some of our home canned enchilada sauce (hopefully, we’ll get a chance to tell you about our home canning experiences in another post) and added some bread crumbs on top before baking the whole mess together. It was so delicious, too! This was a great meal that I hope we can repeat sometime soon.

Look at all of this casserole-y goodness!

And this is how it all came together. Looking good!