This is the easiest soup ever. Seriously, five ingredients counting water and salt. And it produces a soup that tastes so much better than these five simple ingredients have any right to be. It's magic soup.

Potato-Leek Soup
Recipe originally from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison

2 tbsp earth balance margarine
1.5 lbs leeks, white and light green parts only, washed and chopped
1.5 lbs potatoes (yukon golds are nice), sliced into thin, bite-size pieces
7 c water
1.5 tsp salt

Melt the margarine in a large pot over medium heat; add the potatoes and leeks and let sit, covered, for 10 minutes. Stir occasionally. Add water and salt and bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer, partially covered, for about 30 minutes. Add more salt and pepper to taste.

Makes 6 large servings.

Nutritional Info: 179 calories, 4 g fat (1.2 g sat fat), 664 mg sodium, 36 g carbs, 4.3 g fiber, 6.6 g sugar, 4.8 g protein, and 3 WW points per serving.

Labels: recipes, soup

Posted by Amanda at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments

Something you may or may not know about me: I love sweets. Candy, chocolate, cake, cookies, whatever. It's my big food weakness. I love eating it, I love reading about it, and I love reading about people eating it - so I love Candy Blog. But most of what she reviews isn't vegan. And it's with that in mind that I've decided to start doing a Candy Review Monday. Every week I'll try some kind of vegan candy or sweet and post a photo and review. For this review I just pulled the shots from Terra Nostra's website, but from now on I'll have shots I take myself.

Ricemilk Choco with Almonds

I've tried the plain Ricemilk Choco bar once before and liked it, but I had to order it from Veganessentials because my health food store doesn't carry them. They still don't, but the last time I was there they did have two other varieties - almond and truffle.

The ricemilk choco is smooth and sweet. It's very reminiscent of milk chocolate, at least from what I remember. It could be almost too sweet for some people, but I've never met a candy that was too sweet for me so I like it. There's a good amount of almond bits in this bar, and it adds a nice crunch and offsets the sweetness of the bar a bit. I like this one better than the plain.



Ricemilk Choco with Dark Truffle Center

This bar is the same ricemilk chocolate with a darker chocolate center. The dark center really mitigates the sweetness, moreso than the almonds in the first bar. It's still sweet, but there's more of that dark chocolate smokey flavor that most of us are used to. It's a good bar, and very rich. Overall I still prefer the almond variety over the plain and this truffle bar, but all three are delicious and will definitely satisfy any lingering milk chocolate cravings.

Labels: product review

Posted by Amanda at 1:08 PM | Permalink | Comments

I think I've posted a picture of this before, but I don't care. I made it again recently and it is SO good. Plus the picture came out well. This is Susan V's recipe from the Fatfree Vegan Blog; the recipe is here.

The only thing I did differently was to use a flax "egg" in place of ener-g. It didn't cause any problems.

Posted by Amanda at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments

Oatmeal-banana-raisin waffles from VwaV. I made the usual "healthification" adjustments - whole wheat pastry flour instead of all-purpose and applesauce for most of the oil. Very tasty. Waffles are probably my favorite of the Breakfast Trifecta (pancakes, french toast, waffles).


Double chocolate chip cookies (recipe is here). These were just alright for me. Not bad, but I won't make them again.


Joanna's tester spinach dip. SO good. I love it.


The holy grail of oatmeal cookies. Crispy on the outside, chewy in the middle. Amazing. I could pretty much die happy now. The recipe is here. Make them and thank me later.


Joanna's tester alfredo sauce over whole wheat spaghetti. This stuff is pretty fantastic. Her cookbook (!!!) is going to be awesome.

Posted by Amanda at 4:42 PM | Permalink | Comments

I got out of class super early today, so I thought I'd take advantage of this bit of free time and catch up on posting photos here.


Here we have Joanna's chicken-style seitan, breaded and sauteed, with mashed potatoes and broccoli on the side. This seitan is the first simmered seitan that I've actually liked. Joanna and her recipes are fantastical. (It's a tester recipe, so I can't give it away. Sorry!) The breaded and sauteed bit reminded me of this pan-fried chicken my dad always makes. Very tasty. The seitan, I mean. Well, the chicken was tasty too, but that was a looooong time ago.


More Joanna porn. This time it's her sun-dried tomato cream sauce over whole wheat penne. Broccoli and bread on the side. This stuff is awesome. I love sun-dried tomatoes.


Lemon poppyseed muffins from the Candle Cafe Cookbook. Good but dry and not nearly lemony enough. Of course, I used whole wheat pastry flour and subbed applesauce for most of the margarine, but I do that to all the muffins I make and they're usually quite a lot better in texture than this.


More breaded seitan. This time I used a cornmeal coating and baked it; it wasn't as good as the sauteed stuff.


Fire-Roasted Quinoa and Black Beans, except with a small can of fire-roasted tomatoes and two cans of beans, one black and one garbanzo. This was my first time cooking with or eating quinoa. It's good stuff.

More tomorrow! Also coming soon: the rest of the Lightlife reviews.

Posted by Amanda at 1:56 PM | Permalink | Comments

As you can see, the old layout is back. I have a new one in mind, but that will have to wait for another time. A time when my blog is not in shambles, perhaps. The photobucket images are still broken; they should be back in a few days. In the meantime I've gotten myself a Flickr account; I've been uploading food pictures to it for about a week now. I'll post them all here in due time, but right now I wanted to mention another thing I've started doing: keeping a daily food photo journal. Inspired by Joanna's daily eats project, I am taking pictures of everything I eat and compiling them into neat little mosaic of my daily consumption. It's really interesting to see it all together like that, big as life. And on the diet front, it really leaves no opportunity for plausible deniability. So if you want to check that out, it's here.

And if you want to check out the food porn that's on deck for blog-posting, those pictures are here.

Posted by Amanda at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments

I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm working on a new design for the blog, and I should have it up within the next few days, but until then I switched back to a tweaked blogger template. The old design was a big mess with all the images broken and it was really annoying to look at.

As soon as I get the new design up, I have a bunch of pictures to post. I've been cooking more lately.

Posted by Amanda at 11:27 PM | Permalink | Comments

Apparently I've exceeded my bandwidth limit on my photobucket account, so all of the images on the blog are broken for a while. So that's awesome.

Posted by Amanda at 11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments

Whole wheat penne and broccoli with Joanna's Sun-Dried Tomato Cream Sauce. She's putting together a vegan cookzine and I'm lucky enough to be one of the recipe testers. This one is fantastic.


Rainbow Rice & Beans from VeganYumYum. Excellent recipe. I've made it twice now. It freezes beautifully, too. This batch has both black and kidney beans in it. Also pictured is a metric ton of broccoli (I really love broccoli) and Joanna's nacho sauce (sans jalapenos), which is another tester recipe - and also my new favorite nutritional yeasty sauce.

Last but definitely not least, we have the Chickpea and Broccoli Casserole from VwaV. I was skeptical about this one. It has so few ingredients and no spices - it's just chickpeas, broccoli, carrots, onions, salt, olive oil, breadcrumbs, and vegetable stock. But of course Isa came through with another winner. I reduced the oil from 3 tbsp to 1 and added a little extra broth to compensate, and I left out the chives because I didn't have any, but otherwise I made the recipe as written. I'll be adding this one to the rotation for sure. It's creamy comfort food that you don't have to feel bad about eating (with 1tbsp of oil, it's 4 points per serving for 6 servings).

Posted by Amanda at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments

Sensational Sun-Dried Tomato and Chickpea Soup from The Garden of Vegan. I never use that cookbook, but I saw this recipe posted at Yeah, That "Vegan" Shit and decided to give it a try. It's really tasty. I'll make it again.


The cake I made for Adam's birthday. It's simple vanilla cake with orange "buttercream" frosting. The frosting was a variation on the fluffy buttercream from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. This cake was fantastic, if I do say so myself. Yum. Plus it was perfectly shaped. No sunken tops or anything.


An inside shot.

Posted by Amanda at 5:05 PM | Permalink | Comments

I never seem to have the time/motivation during the week to update, but I have been taking pictures of the more interesting things I eat. So here's a whole bunch that have been collecting dust on the harddrive.


Chickpea and Spinach Curry from VwaV. Seriously delicious and very low in points if you reduce the oil. I was low on spinach so I only used half the amount that was called for; I'm looking forward to using all 10 cups next time. I love me some spinach.


My second attempt at seitan. Based on this recipe, but with onion and garlic powder thrown in. And some nutritional yeast. And twice as much gluten flour, because the texture was weird. I wrapped the seitan log in foil and baked it that way instead of in a pan with broth. It turned out much better than my first attempt at seitan, but I'm still going to keep trying new recipes.


The seitan, sliced and sauteed with bbq sauce. Pretty tasty.


Flax-Berry Pancakes from Vegan Planet, with crushed pineapple in place of the berries. I always use whole wheat pastry flour for these.


Peanut Butter Oatmeal from Peanut Butter Planet. This was interesting. I'd try to make something similar, but I wouldn't make this exact thing again. I like the idea but I didn't love the recipe, basically.

Posted by Amanda at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments