Tag Archives: Breakfast

2 Green Smoothies

Posted on September 20, 2012 | 2 comments

I went on a juice fast about a month ago for five very, very long days.  Now, I wasn’t a huge fan of not chewing any of my foods, but I do love smoothies regularly.  Here are a few recipes I came away from Sip with for Green Smoothies.

 Good Morning Green Smoothies

  • 10-16 oz cold filtered water
  • 2 cups spinach (If you are new to green smoothies start with spinach.  In time, switch to 1/2 spinach 1/2 kale, and then try all kale.)
  • 1-2 unpeeled apples
  • 1 banana
  • 2 stalks celery
  • small handful of parsley  (parsley can over power the smoothie, add more or less depending on your taste for the plant!)
  • 1 T lemon juice
  • 1/2 grapefruit
(use a whole orange if grapefruit is not an option due to certain medication interactions)
blend in high speed blender with a few ice cubes
*start with 10 oz of water and add more as needed*
  • 10-16 oz cold filtered water
  • 2 cups spinach and kale mixed (one or the other is fine too)
  • small handful parsley
  • 1/2 – 3/4 cucumber
  • 1 1/2 cups pineapple
  • 1 banana
  • 1 inch fresh ginger
  • 1 T lemon juice
blend with ice
Enjoy!
serves 2
photo:  Sip
A girl and her blender

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Posted in Breakfast, Brunch, Dinner, Fridge Finds, Vegan, Vegetarian

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Vegan SIN-amon Rolls

Posted on March 29, 2012 | 1 comment

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I wasn’t sure if I should share this recipe or just keep it to myself so I alone look amazing when I waltz into a potluck brunch with these babies in tow.  Alas, I want to eat them more often, so I thought if I can get this out there to my vegan friends, they also would develop a mild addiction and want to make them frequently as well thereby getting them into my face more often.

I’ve had this cookbook Vegan Brunch on my bookshelf FOREVER, and never even cracked the binding.  Honestly, when is the last time you attended a brunch?  Yeah, me either.  A few months ago however, my friends Kolene and Jon hosted, you guessed it, a VEGAN BRUNCH!  I made curried tofu scramble, but Jon….he made these rolls and probably other delicious things-but THESE I was frankly obsessed with and had to get more of.  When I asked for the recipe he directed me to Vegan Brunch, you know the book collecting dust on my shelf.  I went home and made them that night, pigged out on them at midnight with Mr. Wonderful, then brought a batch to work the next day (the recipe made a TON of rolls) to test on my coworkers.  In case you were wondering how to score serious favors at work for a while, bake cinnamon rolls in your office kitchen, then serve them to your friends.  They become even more helpful in their sugary comas.

Caution, these take a while to make.  You are MAKING cinnamon rolls-like “from scratch”, not just baking them off from the frozen food section at Meijer, so there are steps involved.  Do not skip them, do not rush them.  And by all means….MEASURE, this is baking, you know…like chemistry and crap, so you need to be precise.  If you haven’t worked with yeast before, check out this link to keep you from throwing in the towel prematurely.

Dough

  • 2-1/4 tsp active dry yeast
  • 1/3 c sugar + 1 tsp sugar
  • 1/2 c lukewarm water
  • 3/4 c non-dairy milk, room temperature (I used coconut milk)
  • 1/3 c canola oil
  • 3/4 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1 tsp ground nutmeg
  • 3 1/4 – 4 c flour

Filling

  • 1/4 c brown sugar
  • 1/4 c white sugar
  • 1 T ground cinnamon
  • 2 T flour

To roll

  • 1/4 c Earth Balance (soy margarine, non-hydrogenated)
  • also, a great deal of patience and an uncluttered work space

Icing

  • 1 C powdered sugar (10x)
  • 1-1/2 – 2 T non-dairy milk (I used coconut milk here too)
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract

Proof yeast by putting yeast into half the lukewarm water with the 1 tsp of sugar. Let sit, make sure it bubbles so you know your little organisms are hungry, alive and well.  Mix the rest of the dough ingredients together, add proofed yeast mix. Knead for 5 minutes. Place in an oiled bowl and let rise 1 hour. Punch the dough down and let rest 10 more minutes.

Make the filling (mix together ingredients above for filling).

Roll out dough to 12″ x18″ (or whatever you get frankly-mine was a little larger) on a floured clean, flat surface. Sprinkle filling over the dough evenly, dot with small chunks of the Earth Balance.

Roll from the long side. Go slowly and get it as tight as possible.  This for me is the most difficult part. I can’t even roll up my yoga mat without having it all cock-eyed, so this dough rolling part is torture for me.  Do the best you can.  When they bake, no one will know you had edges that were not perfect as they will be too busy cramming the final product into their pie-holes.

Oil or spray any kind of pan you like really. I used two pie plates so I could bake one now, and take one to work in an unbaked state later. Cut the roll into half to one inch pieces pieces and place close together in the prepared pan. I used dental floss to cut through the dough so that I didn’t smash the dough.

Cover with towel, let rise for 30-45 minutes in a warm location. I usually put it on the stove, above the pilot lights.  These can also be stored in the fridge overnight without losing any of the yumminess to be baked off the next morning, just cover in plastic wrap. The next morning when you are preheating the oven (below) leave on the counter until they hit just about room temp.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Bake 18-2o minutes-the smaller your rolls when they go in, the less time you need, check them regularly to make sure they aren’t burning, they should be lightly browned. Make icing while it bakes.

Drizzle with the icing as soon as you remove from the oven.

Adapted from Vegan Brunch by Isa Chandra Moskowitz.

Featured on The Mode Life.

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Posted in Baking, Bread, Breakfast, Brunch, Make Ahead, Vegan, Vegetarian

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BerryCakes

Posted on August 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

Tired of reading about raspberries?  Well, we’ve been eating them for a solid week, how do you think we feel?  The last of ’em went into pancakes a final breakfast.  Using the pancake base from the Milk Chocolate Banacakes post last year, just add raspberries in place of the chocolate and/or bananas and you have breakfast.  Goodbye raspberries!

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Posted in Breakfast, Brunch, Michigan, Recipes, Seasonal Ingredients, Vegetarian

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Milk Chocolate Banana Peanut Pancakes

Posted on April 15, 2011 | 5 comments

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Alright, this recipe doesn’t need a fancy narrative, it just needs you to take your sweet self into the kitchen and make it now-yes, you can eat breakfast for dinner.

Pancakes

  • 1 1/2 C all purpose flour
  • 3 1/2 tsp baking POWDER
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 T sugar
  • 1 1/4 C milk
  • 1 egg
  • 1 very ripe banana cut into bite sized pieces
  • 1 handful milk or semi-sweet chocolate chips
  • 1 handful peanuts or walnuts (unsalted)
  • 3 T melted butter (optional)
  • 1 T vanilla (optional)

whisk together dry ingredients.

make a well for wet ones, gradually add wet to dry ingredients

poor by 1/4 C onto hot (375 degree) griddle

drop sprinkles of banana, chips and nuts into batter

flip just once after tons of bubbles appear

slather with butter, dust with powdered sugar if you are a diva or syrup like Mr Wonderful does and inhale

with leftover batter, for Walter the Wonderdog, I put just bananas and peanuts in the pancake…Bagels like Walter love pancakes too.

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Posted in Breakfast, Vegetarian

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Second Chances

Posted on October 4, 2010 | 1 comment

Here’s to second chances.

Recently I had the opportunity to accompany my friend Missy to Chicago with a group of gal pals for her Bachelorette Party, second chance style.  I’ll get to the food part in a minute, because it was GRAND; but first, the bride.  As a group my core contingency of friends has endured many complexities in the past two – three years.  Everything from a parent death, to domestic violence, to a handful of divorces, from first born babies to depression and back again, we faced these challenges as a group and hoped for the day where we could FINALLY celebrate a second chance.   This trip to Chicago was the first of many second chances.  Cheers to Missy and her pursuit of her happy ever after.

Back to your regularly scheduled blog post.  Speaking of cheers.  What goes best with cocktails?  Fabu food of course.  On this second chance tour, we used a pink goblet (32 oz) to procure free beverages, and a bridal veil to elicit many unique looks from passers by.  We even had a flash back to 22 when some of us made our first BIG mistake, and decided that we are glad to be in the range of 30 years old finally.  The food however, the FOOD WOW!  We did a bang up job in the dine out category.  Our visit to Opera Chicago was a really, really good choice by Fancy Nancy.  At Opera, from the veg side of the menu, we enjoyed mushroom won-tons with a green salad and miso dressing,  veggie egg rolls with a teriyake reduction, Kung Pao tofu, Malaysian vegan flat bread, and Hainanese Kaipong (cooked in a Lotus leaf which Missy tried to eat for additional fiber!!).  All beautifully plated and wonderfully light and tasty.  Asian fusion Chicago style is not to be missed at this place.  Do NOT forget to sample the pickles and spicy nut mixture they put on your table.  That was the best pre-dinner bite I’ve had in a long time.  Beware the Thai chili pepper if you are not in to spicy with the sweet.  Please visit.

For breakfast the following morning, we got up at the crack of 8:30, and made our way down to perennial fave, The Bongo Room.  The wait on a typical weekend is well into the 2 hour arena, but if you get there early, when they open at 9am, your wait is nill as I guess Chicagoans don’t like to eat before then and consequently you get a table lickity split.  We agonized over the menu and finally ordered the sweet potato black bean burrito, special eggs benedict (veggie), the breakfast burrito, chorizo omelette, and of course two very special pancakes:  red velvet and walnut with vanilla creme’ anglaise, and white chocolate, caramel and PRETZEL.  I’d honestly like to see a cracker jack, popcorn pancake soon…oh, they have a dish that our new found friends at the table next to us ordered, banana, oreo, chocolate pancakes that looked like a must try for next time.  Eat here, but drink your coffee while you wait from Starbucks across Randolph.  Caution:  The Bongo Room has lackluster coffee.  I’d opt for the fennel bloody Mary instead.  Cheers.

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Cook with a book, but make it your own recipe

Posted on June 28, 2010 | Leave a comment

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I’m embarrassed every time someone asks: can I have the recipe?  I reply, sure you can, but it um, won’t taste exactly like this…  Which leads the consumer of said tasty goods to ask a perplexed “why not?”  They then proceed to give me that, “you stopped at D&W’s deli counter on the way over here didn’t you bitch!!?”  To which I must defend with a totally lame-o explanation:  No!  I didn’t buy it!  I um, don’t follow directions, really, well, exactly.  Which is true.  I don’t.  It’s ironic actually, because I am a fantastic rule-follower, order-taker and baker (which requires precise, level it off with the back of a knife measurements-my worst nightmare).  It makes my friend LEP really frustrated as every time she encounters a new recipe, she follows it to the letter so as to produce the EXACT item and then the next time she will re-make it according to what she likes, wants, etc.  I myself don’t mess around with that first step…I feel like the integrity of the dish is what I make of it, the original recipe is sorta like the skeleton, I provide the flesh for it.  This way, I can LOVE or sometimes, loathe what I have created, claim the recipe as my own and then fix it or nix it as inspired by another recipe.  The trick is…writing it down.  As a result of this behavior, ALL of my cookbooks and recipe print outs have “x’s” through some things and a ton of margin notes.  It’s an illness.

Here is a great example.  Most mornings, breakfast is two whole grain pieces of toast slathered with EVOO butter, OJ and #Freshpots.  Today, no bread to make toast…damn.  I did however have whole wheat tortillas, lots of eggs, red peppers (on sale!!!), onion, a jalapeno fresh from my garden, a handful of cilantro from a pot on my deck, a sweet potato, some really limp sad spinach in clam shell box ready to go to old food heaven, queso fresco, and a beautiful shiny poblano pepper in the crisper.  So I dug through a file folder for a recipe I know I fished off the Internet about 100 years ago, and whew…I still had it!  This is the recipe I used as the base, with the ingredients up above as subs, adds, etc.  Since I’m planning on using tofu in my dinner dish tonight, I opted to omit the soy protein.  It freaks me out to eat so much soy in a day-I try to follow these guidelines, but also my brain that says, too much of anything, while tasting wonderful, will probably turn out to be bad for me (this is true for more than just food it may seem).

The end result?  Here is my breakfast burrito recipe as adapted from the Cooking Light Tofu Breakfast Burrito recipe from the May ’09 issue-and yes, I did write it down.

Ingredients:

  • 1  teaspoon  EVOO
  • 1  teaspoon  chili powder
  • 1/2  teaspoon  ground cumin
  • 1/4 of each, diced finely, sweet onion, red pepper, poblano pepper, jalapeno pepper
  • 1/4  cup  (1 ounce) queso fresco crumbled
  • 2  tablespoons  minced fresh cilantro
  • 1/8  teaspoon  salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper
  • 4  (8-inch) flour tortillas
  • 1  cup  baby spinach leaves, close to compost (good save!)
  • 1/2 sweet potato, peeled and grated (yep like cheese–cooks faster)
  • 4 large eggs
  • Frank’s Red Hot

In a saute pan, heat EVOO gently over medium heat, add all veggies at same time, cook until just tender.  While veggies are cooking, scramble eggs and seasonings in a bowl.  Add eggs to veggies after they reach your desired level of “doneness”  scramble until you don’t gag anymore when you see wetness of the eggs.  Remove from heat, sprinkle with queso fresco, liberally cover in Frank’s Red Hot, then add some more because you can never have too much Frank’s Red Hot.  Fill each tortilla with about 1/4 of the mixture, roll and eat from your hand, preferably over the kitchen sink as you wouldn’t want to appear to be too dignified (you don’t need a plate!!) and certainly you do not want to pick up all those diced veggies that will fall out of the back of your burrito onto the floor.

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