Whiteley Creek Homestead Bed and Breakfast Brainerd Minnesota

vegetarian taco salad

I made a meatless taco salad when my daughter Lisa invited her friend Niki, who is vegetarian, over for dinner. The recipe came from a vegetarian cookbook that I purchased when Dick and I attended a Hallelujah Acres nutritional seminar in Tampa, Florida. Serve it with a cluster of grapes and chunks of zucchini oatmeal bread and you have a nutritious tasty meal.

 

Vegetarian Taco Salad

Taco Sauce:

Heat 1 cup water or chicken broth. Turn off heat then add 1 cup TVP. Stir, cover with a lid, and let stand for 10 minutes.

Prepare veggies:

1 cup carrots, chopped into very small pieces so that they cook through at the same rate as the other veggies

1 cup green peppers, or green/red peppers combo, or zucchini/peppers combo

1 cup chopped onions

Saute veggies in small amount of water or chicken broth/stock until they are tender but still have some firmness. Season with generous measurements of 1 tsp powder oregano, ¾ tsp cumin, and ¾ tsp garlic powder. Add rehydrated TVP and 1 can black beans. Add Bragg Liquid Aminos to taste. Heat.

Prepare toppings:

sliced black olives, Romaine lettuce (shredded or cut into small pieces), and shredded cheddar cheese

Assemble salad:

On a dinner plate, crumble blue corn chips and top with shredded lettuce. Add a ladle of taco mix and top with shredded cheese and a few black olives. Serve with mild salsa. I like Muir Glen and Wild Harvest Organic (Cub Foods store brand).

 

Bragg liquid Aminos is essential. It gives the taco salad a wonderful salty flavor. TVP (textured vegetable protein), which is also labeled TSP (textured soy protein), is used as a  replacement for meat in the dish. It comes dehydrated and when rehydrated with water, vegetable broth, chicken broth, beef broth, or tomato juice it has the texture of ground beef.

 

zucchini oatmeal bread

Frost is predicted for tonight so I am frantically using my zucchini. I made zucchini crisp for dessert last night. I also made two loaves of zucchini bread, of which not a crumb remains.  The bread recipe called for 1 cup of oil. Instead, I substituted 1/2 cup oil and 1/2 cup applesauce. I also reduced the 2 cups sugar to 1 cup. The changes produced a very tasty product without compromising the flavor or moistness. Today I will make two more loaves to serve my bed and breakfast guests in the morning, as well as to send with Lisa and Jessie tomorrow for a snack on their flight back home to New Jersey and Florida.

   

Zucchini Bread

3 eggs

1/2 c. oil

½ c applesauce

1 c sugar

2 tsp vanilla

2 c. grated zucchini

2 ½ c flour (I used 1 ½ c unbleached all-purpose flour + 1 c. w.w. pastry flour.)

½ c oatmeal

1 tsp baking soda

½ tsp baking powder

1 tsp salt

3-4 tsp cinnamon (I used 4 tsp.)

½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Preheat oven to 325. Grease and flour 2 small loaf pans (4 ½ x 8 ½).

Beat eggs. Add oil, applesauce, sugar, vanilla, and zucchini. Mix together. Add dry ingredients. Pour Pour into loaf pans. Bake for 1 hour.   

Mpls Farmers Market and Childrens Museum

 

Over the weekend, Dick and I shopped the Minneapolis Farmers Market on Lyndale Avenue along with two of my daughters who were visiting... Lisa, with her husband and two kids from New Jersey, and Jessica from Florida. Jess and I broke away from the pack for a while to sit and listen to a jazz musician while we ate from a box of raspberries and shared an oatmeal flax muffin... both purchased from the market.  Besides in-season freshly-harvested veggies, vendors were selling homemade cleaning products, flowers (I bought a huge orange-red colored potted mum.), cheese (I chose two bags of yummy slightly salty cheese curds.), as well as a variety of clothing and food. It would be fun to live closer to be able to shop the market every weekend but, even though our Brainerd Farmers market is much smaller, I find the variety and quality to be very good and I am grateful for the growers in our area.

   

We were in Minneapolis to attend the wedding of my sister Rita's daughter. We had some time to spare so we took our grandkids to the Childrens Science Museum. My favorite part was an entire town set up for the kids to interact with.