Chipotle Mashed Potatoes

When it comes to holiday dinners, one of my absolute favorite side dishes is mashed potatoes. Probably one of the reasons why I love it so much is because they are nearly always homemade – not made from a box (please don’t make your holiday mashed potatoes from a box!) – and they usually have those little lumps of potatoes that escaped the masher. I always enjoy trying other people’s mashed potatoes, too, to see how they like to make them. There are so many variations to mashed potatoes, from the creamy to the rustic to the unexpected.

This recipe, I hope, falls into the unexpected category. It’s rare to find chipotle peppers in mashed potatoes, but they, along with the fresh garlic, add a little bit of a kick and flavor that is entirely satisfying. Because of the wonderful mixture of flavors, I’d recommend forgoing the gravy and stick to serving this with vegan butter or vegan sour cream instead.

Chipotle Mashed Potatoes
This recipe was inspired by Chipotle Smashed Potatoes on Allrecipes.com

• 2 pounds red potatoes (about 8-10 potatoes), peeled and cubed
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 2 tablespoons vegan butter
• 2-3 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, minced
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/4 cup vegan mayonnaise
• 1/4 cup vegan sour cream or plain vegan yogurt

Prepare your red potatoes by peeling and cubing them. Place them in a saucepan, cover with water, and boil until tender, about 20 minutes.

Preparing potatoes to boil

While the potatoes are boiling, mince your chipotle peppers and garlic, and gather together your other ingredients.

Getting other ingredients ready

Once your potatoes have finished cooking, drain them. Add the salt, vegan butter, minced chipotle peppers, minced garlic, and vegan mayonnaise. You can also add the vegan yogurt now, however I chose to add it in the next step. Mash everything together with a potato masher, or to make your potatoes smoother use a hand mixer. Add in the soy yogurt now if you have not already.

Tip: To reduce calories, use plain vegan yogurt in place of the vegan mayonnaise. This would increase your vegan yogurt to 1/2 cup.

Mashing the potatoes and the other ingredients together

Taste test to see if you are satisfied with both the flavors and consistency. To make it creamier you can add a little bit more vegan yogurt.

Suggested variations

• Don’t have or like chipotle, but still want to make it spicy? Try using jalapeños, either fresh or from a jar.
• For some, the garlic might be too intense still raw, so try roasting it. This will make the garlic not be quite as spicy, but will still give the dish a nice garlic flavor.
• Make the potatoes taste a little cheesy by adding in nutritional yeast and/or a handful of your favorite shredded vegan cheese.

A spicy twist on mashed potatoes

What is your favorite way to make mashed potatoes?

Learn more about Vegan MoFo.

Pan con tomate

I don’t really remember if I have mentioned this before, but I spent my second year of college studying abroad in Spain. It was a life-changing and calorie-absorbing experience full of moments of feeling like an idiot for not saying Spanish words or phrases correctly, and learning to appreciate the Spaniards’ love of chocolate (they treat it like Americans treat their peanut butter). There were a lot of foods I didn’t like – not a huge fan of turrón (unless it’s made out of chocolate) – but there were many that I did enjoy.

Fresh summer ingredients

One such food that I fell in love with the moment I tried it was pan con tomate, meaning literally bread with tomato. It’s essentially a Spanish bruschetta, and is just as easy to make with only a handful of ingredients. Despite its simplicity, it is filled with flavor and perfect for those summer tomatoes, and in minutes you’ll be enjoying your own slice of Spanish deliciousness.

Pan con Tomate

• 2 pounds fresh tomatoes
• 3-4 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 teaspoon salt or to taste
• Olive oil
• European-style bread (try making ciabatta bread)

First, you’ll need to grate your tomatoes. If you have a cheese grater, you can slice your tomatoes down the middle and grate them until you get to the skin (you do not want to include the skins in this dish).

If you're grating your tomatoes by hand, slice them in half.

Otherwise, what you will need to do is peel the tomatoes and roughly chop them up in a food processor. The way I am able to quickly peel tomatoes is to drop a tomato in boiling water for about 20-30 seconds (try not to cook the tomatoes!), take it out and run it under cold tap water, then pull the peel away. It’s really easy and you’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly.

Using boiling water to remove tomato skins

In my food processor, I used the grater attachment, and I quickly pulsed the tomatoes through.

Pulsing tomatoes

Once this is done, chop up or mince your garlic and add that and your salt to your tomatoes in a large bowl.

Mixing the garlic and salt with the tomatoes

Toast a slice of bread, then pour a little olive oil on top. Spread one or two spoonfuls of tomato mixture on top, and then sprinkle with additional salt (if it needs it). That’s it!

Pan con Tomate

You can also let your tomato mixture marinate and cool for a couple of hours in the refrigerator before serving to allow the flavors to mix together more. But if you can’t resist, then dig right in – you won’t regret it.

What is your favorite way to use summer tomatoes?

Roasted Artichoke with Meyer Lemon, Garlic and Vegenaise

I love artichokes. If my husband were to come home with flowers for me, he could probably do no better than if he were carrying a bouquet of bright green artichokes. I still don’t know why I love them so much. Maybe it’s like unwrapping a present, slowly savoring each leaf, and as you get closer to the middle the leaves are more like delicate petals and there’s less of a strain to eat it, finally coming to the best part with the savory and meaty heart in the end. It’s a food that gives a wide range of flavors and experiences, that it is its own little meal of appetizer, main course and dessert.

Typically my favorite way of preparing artichokes has been to steam them then serve with lemon butter, but after grabbing some artichokes the other day I decided that I needed to expand a little bit and experiment with roasting them. Although there are more steps involved in roasting artichokes, it does offer an interesting, almost smoky flavor that steaming does not.

Roasted Artichokes

• 2 artichokes, whole and raw
• 1 lemon
• 4 garlic cloves, skins removed
• olive oil
• salt
• Vegenaise, optional

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Clean your artichokes, then cut the end of the stalk off and trim the tips of each leaf.

Cleaning and trimming an artichoke

Put the artichoke on its side and cut away about the first 1/2 inch of top of the artichoke. It’s easiest if you use a serrated knife for this.

Place the artichoke in a position that will be easiest for you to cut it in half. I found that after I cut the top 1/2 inch off that it was easiest to put the flower straight down on the cutting board, then cut through the stem to the top of the artichoke.

Cutting the artichoke in half

Cut a lemon in half, and then spread the lemon on all the cut and exposed areas of the artichokes.

Spreading the lemon juice on the artichokes

In the bottom of a baking pan (with optional aluminum foil covering the inside of the dish) pour about 1 or 2 tablespoons of olive oil, and sprinkle some salt.

Preparing the pan for roasting artichokes

Take your artichokes cut side down and spread them around in the bottom of the pan so that they are fully covered with oil and some of the salt.

Press a fresh garlic clove near the heart of each artichoke half, and then add a large slice of lemon on top of the garlic.

Adding garlic and lemon to the artichokes

Put the artichokes face down in the pan with the garlic and lemon kept under each, then add about 1/4 water to the pan. Cover the pan well with aluminum foil and bake in the oven for about 45 minutes to an hour (depending upon the toughness of the artichokes you choose, as well as your own individual oven, you may find that about an hour and 15 minutes is a better length of time).

Roasting artichokes

Serve the artichoke with a vegan lemon butter or with Vegenaise.

Roasted artichoke served with Vegenaise

This turned out really nicely, but I think that there are a few things I may try or do differently next time.

One thing is that I felt that 45 minutes was not long enough. I like my artichoke leaves really quite tender so I could most definitely have kept them in the oven for at least an hour and 15 minutes, if not more.

Another thing is that I felt that the garlic did not add a lot of flavor, nor did the lemon. However, I think it would have been nice to perhaps blend the roasted garlic with the Vegenaise and then served that as the dipping sauce.

What I did enjoy was squeezing the roasted lemon over the artichokes, but this made eating the artichokes a little messy. It is probably better, at least for dinner parties, to serve a lemon dipping sauce on the side.

At any rate, this was a good experiment for me to try. Any suggestions on other good ways to prepare fresh artichokes?

Pasta with a kick

Remember almost a year ago how I wrote a post about the woes of moving? Remember how I wrote about how disappointing it was to have to pack away your kitchen and become severely limited in what you could bake or cook? Remember how I wrote later how nice it was to finally get more settled into our new apartment? Those were the days, weren’t they? I think I am remembering it all too fondly because …drumroll… we’re doing it again. Except this time we aren’t moving around the corner – we’re moving to the other side of the country.

Look! We saved boxes from our last move!

Yep – after eight years, we’re saying good bye to the Big Apple and saying hello to the Emerald City (translation: Seattle, WA) or at least one of its neighboring towns. This is something that we have wanted to do for a few years now, but circumstances were never really in our favor to do it. Then we realized a few months ago that the circumstances would never be in our favor. We’d always have an excuse to stay in New York – the work, the food, the restaurants, the familiarity, et cetera, et cetera. We’re grown ups, though, and we finally decided that we couldn’t let any of that get in the way of living a life we’ve been dying to try for a long time.

At this point we’re in the final stages of packing which means our kitchen is reduced to memories of baking cookies and rolling out hand made tortillas. I am in that quandary of “what can I make that’s already in my cupboard?”, also known as a science experiment that could go horribly awry.

Lucky for me, though, I still had the right ingredients to make a pasta dish based upon a recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks, The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen, called Enraged Penne – except I had rigatoni, so I am calling this one Enraged Rigatoni. It’s a simple dish, but has a nice kick to it which you can increase or decrease as you like. The original recipe calls for fresh tomatoes, but if you don’t have them the canned variety works well.

Enraged Rigatoni

• 1 package rigatoni or penne pasta (I used whole wheat pasta)
• 2-3 tablespoons olive oil
• 3-5 garlic cloves, peeled and chopped
• ½ to 1 teaspoon chili flakes
• 1 16-ounce can diced tomatoes (do not drain unless you want a drier pasta dish)
• 1 teaspoon salt

Boil the pasta according to package directions.

While the pasta is boiling, put your olive oil in a hot pan then add the chopped garlic. Continuously stir the garlic around until it starts looking slightly toasted.

Freshly prepared garlic

Stir in the chili flakes, and stir around for another minute or so.

Add as much or as little kick as you like

Pour in the diced tomatoes and salt, then stir. Let the liquid reduce somewhat because you do not want the pasta to be too soupy. You should have a nice balance between pasta and sauce.

Canned tomatoes are a fine stand in for fresh tomatoes in this dish

Once the sauce is done, stir in the drained pasta and then serve with chili peppers and/or basil as a garnish.

Stir the rigatoni and the tomato sauce together

I really love the simplicity of this dish, but if you like yours with a little extra flavor I’d suggest trying any or all of the following variations.

How about frying up onions with your garlic and pepper? You could also add mushrooms, but to avoid the sauce becoming too soupy I would saute the mushrooms in a separate pan first, then drain the water off, and then add the cooked mushrooms at any point in the cooking. I’d also recommend adding chopped basil to the dish just after the heat is turned off, so that it will wilt, but not be overcooked. A final suggestion would be to add a little bit of red cooking wine (about ¼ cup) for your garlic to soak up before adding in the tomatoes.

A nice, spicy pasta

When you move, what do you do for food? Do you try to use up what is in your cupboards or is it take out all the way?