Super Smoothies over on Suite101.com serves as a good intro to smoothie making. Fortunately, smoothies are something that are relatively easy to make, but it still helps to have a set of basic instructions to help ensure you get a good taste and good consistency no matter the ingredients.

As of late, I’ve taken a liking to smoothies for breakfast as I drive into work.

I’m proud to announce that the Veg Blog’s first original recipe is now online, complete with pictures! It’s a simple stir-fry dish put together by my wife and me. Considering it’s our first attempt at putting something together from scratch with an end result in mind, we were pleased with how it came out.

So, take a look at Light and Bright Pepper Delight and let me know what you think!

Scientist says he can create meat without killing animals

Here’s an interesting development in the world of science: a Dutch scientist says that he can create artificial meat without killing animals. This new meat wouldn’t be vegan since it’s derived from an animal, but would it be considered vegetarian?

It was rainy and beginning to get chilly last night, showing sure signs of Autumn. So, I decided it would be the perfect evening to try a recipe from Nava Atlas’ excellent Vegetarian Soups for All Seasons. From the “Autumn” section, I cooked up a very unique broccoli, apple, and peanut soup. I was only expecting it to take 35-40 minutes to prepare, but it ended up being a 1 1/2 hour experience (not including the trip to the grocery store). Fortunately, it was one of those nights that I was ready for a more time-intensive dish (and even the clean-up afterwards). The week started off kind of stressfully and cooking was the perfect activity to help me center and refocus.

Anyway, the dish… garlic and two large onions are sauteed until golden and then added to a vegetable broth with some chopped carrots and broccoli florets. Some curry is also thrown into the mix. After simmering for a short while, everything but the broth is pureed with low-fat peanut butter until smooth. This mixture is then added back to the broth and allowed to simmer a bit more. Some more carrots and broccoli are steamed separately and then added into the soup. It’s then ready to serve with optional chopped peanut garnish.

The end result was a nice, hot, hearty soup that would be perfect for a late-Autumn Sunday night dinner. Though I would have preferred it to be a little thicker, I made a few mistakes along the way that made the soup a bit thinner than I would have liked. All-in-all, a great dish well worth revisiting.

Last night I tried out a vegan Jamaican Jerk recipe that Scott had mentioned a few days ago. It took a little while to prepare (due to the long list of ingredients, mainly spices), but came out quite nicely: spicy (though not too spicy, since I used a regular chili pepper instead of a habanero) and flavorful, blending well with rice.

Here’s a reprint of the recipe with some very minor modifications made by me.

And here’s the original recipe, should you want to compare.

Initially, I would have disagreed with Dr. Bernards assertion that “the average person loses about 10 pounds after switching to a vegetarian diet, even without watching calories and fat grams.” When I became vegetarian, I stayed at pretty much the same weight for a number of months. Of course, this was as I was still eating a lot of processed foods and easing into cooking more.

After about six months, I dropped a couple pounds, mainly because being vegetarian for me no longer meant eating Boca Burgers three times a week. I was cooking a lot more and started buying cookbooks with the same fervor I buy CDs.

About a month before I got married, I really started to notice a change in my weight. Now, after a month-and-a-half, I’m down from 140 to 132. I didn’t think I changed my eating habits much—most of the change, I think, came from the stress of the final days in the wedding countdown. I dropped six of those eight pounds in August and two since. My weight seems to be holding steady where I am.

As the article mentions, if you’re a junk-food vegetarian, you’re not going to magically lose pounds because you stop eating meat. And, really, that shouldn’t necessarily be the goal. I’ve never had any real weight issues, and having a few “extra pounds” is no big deal to me as long as I feel good.

I guess the point of all this is: if you eat whole foods more often and cook for yourself a lot and eat a varied diet rather than meat substitutes every day, you’ll shed a few pounds without having to count calories. That or you could follow Laze’s Diet Plan. ;)

Tonight Huyen cooked up some tempeh burgers from Nava Atlas’ Vegetariana. We hadn’t tried any variations on the recipe before, but this one turned out really well and made enough for lunch for the next few days. They were a nice consistency and had just enough spice to compliment the naturally smoky flavor of tempeh (tempeh is fermented soybeans, for those of you that haven’t tried it).

The book itself is a great read. It has a nice little history of vegetarian cooking and is smattered with quotes from famous people as well as illustrations by the author herself. Nava considers Vegetariana, her first cookbook, originally published in the mid-1980s, to be her baby, since her touch is prevalent in every part of the book.

With some of our wedding money, Huyen and I made a trip to Bed, Bath, & Beyond and picked up the blender that was on our registry. I’ve been psyched to get a blender because I’ve been itching to make smoothies all summer.

We got the blender last night, and in the last 24 hours, we’ve made three smoothies. :) We were prepared for the first one or two smoothies to come out kind of nasty tasting until we got a feel for what worked well and what didn’t. Surprisingly, though, all our experiments (no recipes) have turned out well. We’ve prepared one for our breakfast tomorrow, though, that will be the real test, as I got a little risky, throwing in some pomegranate juice and peanut butter in with yogurt, blueberries, and strawberries.

Baby death parents spared jail

In the UK, a fruitarian couple was feeding their baby a strictly fruitarian diet. There’s a lot of controversy surrounding fruitarianism, as it’s an extremely limited diet that almost certainly does not provide the necessary nutrients when followed strictly, especially for infants. Unfortunately, this couple learned the hard way, at the expense of their child’s life.

In my opinion, the judge was too easy on them, claiming that the death of their child was punishment enough. They consistently went against doctor’s orders. They knew the risk they were putting their child at and must have noticed how malnourished their daughter was. A sad case…

While visiting my parents this past weekend, I was looking through my mom’s cookbooks. I was surprised to find among them a copy of Quick Vegetarian Pleasures, which she presumably bought when my sister became vegetarian in her early teens. I borrowed the book from my mom and made one of the simpler recipes from it the other night, Tortellini in sour cream sauce with tomatoes and leeks.

The end result was really good. I even substituted non-dairy sour cream with great results (there was cheese in the dish, so it wasn’t a vegan dish). It was nice and hearty and the sour cream sauce coated the tortellini nicely. What really made the dish, though, was the sauteed tomato and leek mixture that topped each serving. For such a simple dish, the variety of flavors and textures was surprisingly complex.