Recipes: Plant-Based Favs

The more I research our impact on the environment the more I think we should eat as many plant-based meals as possible. Here are some of my favorite recipes (most with great leftovers for lunch!) – a little more than a week’s worth of dinners to get you going:

• Lentil Salad
• Hummus!
• Celery soup (surprisingly filling and good)
• Buttery Potato Leek Soup without any butter.
• Shaved Veggie and Tuna Salad from Feast of Joy.
• Quinoa Stuffed Yams (easy)
• I finally found great gluten-free vegan pancakes! Buckwheat pancakes from Colorful Kitchen. A little dessert-y with chocolate chips but you could leave those out and they would still be great (not mushy).
• Black Bean and Quinoa Burritos
  – great for lunch.
• Chard and White Bean Stew (even without the egg and toast it’s really good).
• Korean Vegetable Stir Fry Noodle (hardest part is finding Korean noodles – but worth it!).
• Soba Noodles and Veggies (I used oyster mushrooms and did not cook the kale) the dressing rocks this dish.
• Vegetarian Chili
• Vegetable Quinoa Soup
• Magic Kale Salad with Pistachios and Apples
• Pumpkin Stew Moroccan-Style with Lentils
• Curried French Lentils
• Quinoa Salad with Pears, Spinach
• Roasted Butternut Squash Soup – Amazing!
• Holiday Detox Salad (good anytime)
• Amaranth Crackers and Roasted Cauliflower Dip
• Vegetable and Millet Salad
• One-pot Mujadara with Leeks – I used French lentils and would recommend letting them soak for at least an hour. Lentils, leeks, rice are the main ingredients.
• Cannellini Bean and Spinach Soup – Amazing. Only changes: added garlic and sauteed the onion and leeks until they were transparent, and added the entire 32 oz of veggie broth instead of just a cup for a light, delicious soup.

Desserts, Etc.

• Chocolate popcorn with almonds and rosemary salt (easy, and a great hostess gift).
• Inside Out Buckeye Cookies (my husband and his friends ask for these all the time – freakishly good if you like peanut butter and chocolate)
• Vegan Banana Muffins (These are fantastic. I used Multiblend gluten-free flour from Authentic Foods — very easy to bake with.)
• Protein Peanut Butter Cookies (super good even using half the sugar and replacing it with GF flour: 1/3 c sugar 1/3 c GF flour).
• Black Bean Brownies – really good. No joke. I didn’t have black beans so I used kidney beans, plus a huge glob of peanut butter (’cause just about everything is better with a big glob of peanut butter) and a teaspoon of vanilla. I didn’t add essential oil to either, but other than that I followed the recipe. Really good the next day. 🙂
• Pumpkin Bread – original recipe from Once Upon a Chef with the following modifications: use one 8×8 glass pyrex dish, 2 tsp of cinnamon, 1 tsp of ginger, 1 tsp of vanilla, 1.5 tsp of ground cloves, multi-blend gluten free flour, coconut butter instead of regular butter, and just one cup of sugar instead of two. To go vegan, use flax eggs instead of regular eggs. Plus, I add a handful each of white raisins and walnut chunks.

Oh, and did I mention, I try to stay gluten-free (hard in our world today, eh?) so these recipes are gluten-free too!