Meatless Monday

This seems to happen about every couple of weeks.  I start to get the feeling that Jon and I have been eating nothing but meat, meat and more meat and I get the itch to dive into my vegan cookbooks and get us out of a meat-eatin rut.  Eating vegan about once or twice a week for a whole day is a goal or compromise between Jon and I and I vouch for it for a few reasons:  1. I feel that most vegan recipes get us more veggies in our meals than normally as a side dish to meat and the recipes as a whole are usually packed with lots of protein, fiber and un-refined carbohydrates.  2. vegan recipes are just interesting, unique ways to cook and eat different foods and 3. this is just the environmentally-conscious person in me, but eating meatless even one day a week can have a positive effect on our environment and lessen the enormous drain on our resources that it takes to manufacture meat production.  If you are interested here is a good article: http://www.vegansa.com/veganism-and-the-environment.php

So, for these reason this is why I'm sharing two recipes today from one of my favorite vegan cookbooks, The Vegan Table,by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau.  The first is a delicious and messy version of the typical Middle Eastern shawarma or kabob.  In discussing this recipe with my other "occasional vegan" friend, Amy, we both agreed that we are loving tempeh the more we cook with it.  If you've never cooked with tempeh, then it's definitely an adventure, but worth it!  I find mine at Whole Foods and I like the flax kind.  Tempeh is basically a protein in the form of consolidated grains and soy.  It's low-fat, tons of protein and when marinaded and pan-fried, gets nice and crispy.  For the "Carmelized Tempeh Shawarmas" recipe the tempeh does a great job replacing meat and the soy sauce and maple syrup sauce give it a nice sweet and salty taste.  I ended up pan frying the tempeh with sliced onions for this recipe so that both ingredients got caramelized.  And just as a side note, I sliced my tempeh pretty thin.  The other recipe is a veggie-packed white bean dish with great flavor such as sun-dried tomato and sage.  We had this as a main course with some garlic bread and it was really filling!

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/CarmelizedTempehShawarmas.jpg

http://i1263.photobucket.com/albums/ii623/hope_friedman/TuscanWhiteBeanswithSun-DriedTomatoes.jpg