Okara Patties with Cilantro and Chaat Masala

Having experienced some success with my previous Okara Burger, I thought I would try again to make an Okara Patty, hoping for a stronger flavor. My older son’s friend yelled up the stairs to me that it was the best burger he had ever tasted. The twins even came around and tried them out — and ate every morsel. Success! I won’t have to compost the okara anymore!

The amounts and types of flours that you use can be entirely changed to suit your taste buds: This is just what I did this time around. I can picture corn, peppers, tomatoes, mushrooms … even zucchini being great additions. I used Chaat Masala (also called Spiced Salt, though it doesn't always contain salt) because I happened to have ground some up another day. Mine is not as complex as others — although I can’t remember exactly what I included in it — and I adapted it from a spice mix recipe in The Spice Box cookbook. Curry powder would also work.

Tofu Salad

One thing led to another while making dinner last night, and one of the things was TOFU SALAD. One of my sons was making guacamole, and I had gotten a green salad ready — adding radishes, arugula, chives, sorrel, mizuna, baby kale, and cilantro from the garden to a big head of red lettuce. 

I had cooked some potatoes for a potato salad, and the pan of hot water was still sitting there, so I threw some lamb’s quarters on top of the potatoes to steam. They volunteer in the garden and are a good substitute for spinach. They, like spinach and chard, do contain oxalic acid, which binds with calcium, so they are not my favorite green for that reason since I eat greens for their calcium content, but they are fine occasionally and are very mild tasting and not as slimy as spinach. I dressed the greens with lemon, olive oil, and salt.

I made a marinade for the potato salad, including olive oil, apple cider vinegar, balsamic vinegar, tamari, vegan Worcestershire sauce, yellow mustard, Smokey Serrano hot sauce, chopped onion, and celery. I mention this because I used some in the tofu salad, which I turned to making, next. 

Vegan Okara Burgers

This might not be too interesting to anybody who doesn’t make soy milk. If you do, you are always on the lookout for something to make with the okara — or leftover soy pulp resulting from straining the soy milk. Okara is still full of nutrition and fiber, so it seems a shame to compost it.

OKARA BURGERS  are not hard to stir up, they use up the okara from making three batches of soy milk — which I do at least twice a week — and they are an easy dinner for a hot summer day, along with some salad and noodle or potato salad. You don’t need to serve okara burgers on a bun, but I had some around, so I did.

These can be made with various vegetables, but I used what I had on hand. This recipe makes sixteen burgers, and you can then easily freeze them for a later time — a gift to your future self, who is most likely too hot to cook. 

Vegan Romesco with Cauliflower

My son remembered a delicious spread we bought once called Romesco, looked up a recipe, and sent it to me. Hint, hint.

The photo shows an open-face sandwich I made with my VEGAN ROMESCO SPREAD WITH CAULIFLOWER, some roasted tempeh strips, cucumber, radish, tomato, and green onion and arugula, with roasted onion to the side. This spread is very flavorful and filling. Although maybe that was because I ate several scoops of it before I constructed my sandwich … it was that good.

Peanut Noodle Salad

I needed a lot of NOODLE SALAD for a picnic party and had already made potato salad. I wanted something that tasted different. I had cooked up a lot of spiral noodles the day before and refrigerated them. There was a gallon and a half of them, waiting to be doctored. Somehow I got it in my mind to make a sort of PEANUT NOODLE SALAD with a Thai theme. 

In a big bowl mix the following:

 

Ingredients

3 Tblsp.— crunchy peanut butter

¼ cup — toasted sesame oil

¼ cup — rice vinegar

¼ cup — olive oil

1 Tblsp. — tamari

1 tsp. — agave syrup

1 tsp. — Harry’s Habenero hot sauce

2 inch piece — peeled and grated fresh ginger (remove the hairy bits)

1 clove — fresh garlic

Small handful — fresh cilantro, chopped

½ cup — raisins

1 carrot — grated

Method

Stir in approximately twenty-four cups of the cooked rotini or spiral noodles, or try some other pasta if that’s all you have. This tasted good enough that I was asked a couple of times what was in it. Luckily, I had written down what I was throwing in the bowl. You can save any leftover marinade in a jar for a week or so to use for another batch if you don’t have a huge pan to cook up as many noodles all at once like I did. Noodle salad, hot weather, and easy dinners go very nicely in the summer.

Birthday Vegan Brunch, Dinner, Cake

I can't give the recipes for any of these meals because I had no part in them. The four children at home took over the preparation and cleanup while I lolled around and waited to be served.

The brunch consisted of a potato pancake/hash browns patty, home fries, sweet potato and onion, some kind of vegan sausage, scrambled tofu, toast with Smart Balance, hot Roma, and cold mimosa. All very tasty.

Dinner was very yummy. They looked up the recipes for Spanish rice, Sweet and Sour Sesame Tofu, and Oven Baked Kale, which turned out to be crisp and chewy all at once. Again, yum!

 

Dessert was a cake called Boston Cream Pie. A one-layer vanilla cake (flavored with almond extract in this case) was sliced horizontally in half and filled with vanilla pudding. It was topped with melted dark chocolate and ringed with blueberries. My favorite! I had some for breakfast the next day.

 

Thank you, children, for making my birthday so special. (I enjoyed the calls from the farther-flung too!)

Vegan Deviled Eggs Will Fool the Eye

 

My daughter sent me a link about making VEGAN DEVILED EGGS, so I had to see for myself. I never really liked eggs much, so these are a little too close for comfort for me to enjoy, but luckily I was able to foist most of them off at a party last night. They weren’t hard to make at all, once I got the two special ingredients. I had everything else on hand. I made up a batch of unsweetened soy milk to start off with, and I had Morinu tofu on hand for the centers.

The original recipe used grams, but my partner converted the measurements for me. I am also doubling the whites and halving the yellows, as I needed more of the first and less of the second. But, other than that, I have to give a tip of my hat to the creators of these uncannily egg-like reproductions.

 

Black salt is an Indian mineral salt containing sulfur compounds that lend it the characteristic smell of hard-boiled eggs. It is also called Kala Namak and is used in the Indian spice mixture Chaat Masala. Agar powder is derived from seaweed. You can use your favorite mayonnaise substitute. I used Nasoya’s Nayonnaise.