Semicircular Vegan

Hi everyone. Paula’s sister here!

After much poking and prodding (virtually, through teh intarwebs), I’m finally posting my first GT Xpress endeavor. Unfortunately, it’s not very creative, but I figured it would be ok since I used Trader Joe’s pizza dough instead of Pillsbury, so they actually tasted amazingly delicious!

First, the b-fri and I made a vegan pesto using basil, olive oil, pine nuts, garlic, and…instead of parmesan…our special ingredient… Stacy’s Sundried Tomato and Pesto pita chips!

Then we cooked up some veggies (broccoli, bell peppers, mushrooms, olives, artichoke hearts) and mixed in some mashed up vegan meatballs. This was our result:

Then, after much stretching and rolling, we fashioned the pizza dough and filling into GT Xpress shapes and cooked them up! The dough puffed up considerably in the pockets, so the machine didn’t really stay closed…meaning next time we won’t use quite so much dough. Here’s the final product, which we dipped in tomato sauce and ate with glee!

BIG NEWS on the Cathy Mitchell front!

In other news, my sister, Shmeepers, who also has a GT Xpress is supposed to start blogging with me. She made calzones that she said came out great, but she has yet to post pics of them. Hurry up and blog, sis!

I’ve made a few things over the last month in my absence from this blog, but they all seemed to sort of fail.

Nothing was coming out how I wanted it to, but I took pictures anyway.  After my third failure tonight, I decided I should probably just post about it, so here goes!

Pineapple Right-Side-Up cakes

The first thing that didn’t work out was entirely my fault. This idea is from the GT Xpress cookbook.  I made some coconut pineapple cakes, sort of like a pineapple upside down cake.  I halved the vanilla cupcake recipe from from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, but I didn’t halve the oil, so I had some mega greasy cakes that were tasty, but very oily.  Too oily to eat.

Another Frittata

Looking back at the pics of this, it didn’t fail as badly as I thought it had when I initially made it.   It tasted really good, but just didn’t stay together all that well.  It still looks passably semi-circular so I guess it came out ok.   This tofu swiss chard frittata is a tester recipe for Isa’s Crack of Noon brunch book.  I’ve made it normally and it comes out looking a lot prettier than this, but it tastes great either way!

Polenta pie!

Tonight I took some polenta I made yesterday and pressed it into a well of the GTX to make a sort of crust.  I cooked it for about 15 minutes and then put some broccoli rabe and tofurkey sausage in the middle.  I was hoping the polenta would turn into a solid crust, but it didn’t.  I think there’s too much steam in the GT Xpress for that.   I ended up just dumping it out onto the plate and topping it with some tomato sauce and eating the rest of my sauteed broccoli rabe with it.

It tasted good, but definitely wasn’t a pie of any sort, just a mush of all those things.  I was basically just reheating some polenta and things in the Xpress.

Woo! It feels great to get all that blogged!  I hope the next thing I make turns out.

I’m thinking of some sort of nut/grain loaf type thing maybe.

<3

These don’t even need a semicircular name because they are always semicircular. I felt very infomercial with this one because I used Pillsbury pizza dough. I knew I wanted a lazy dinner tonight, but this might be a little too lazy. Pillsbury pizza dough is….not good. It didn’t really taste like anything and it was just, not pizza dough. I wasn’t expecting much, but it really wasn’t worth it for the quick dinner. Next time I will use real premade pizza dough from the grocery store or local pizza place. I’m not exactly sure why I didn’t just do that tonight.

Other than that these were good! I filled them with some leftover homemade pumpkin sausage, yet another adaptation of Julie’s steamed sausages. These are so easy and amazing. I also used some tofu ricotta and a little bit of tomato sauce on the inside. The filling tasted great and these baked up really quickly. The pizza dough was not very doughy and pretty thin, so I ate two.

Overall these were good, but would have been a lot better with real pizza crust.

On a separate note, Rami really should have won Project Runway. His dresses were amazing and his clothes were really timeless and classy. I didn’t hate his colors.

Smuffins? Semi-muffins? Sure, I guess that works.

I’m so into spelt lately, and these muffins based on the Vegan with a Vengeance muffins came out great! They only had to bake for about 8 minutes and they were baked perfectly. I made a half batch and got 3 semi circular muffins, so each one is worth two, which is good because I never eat just one muffin.

This made a great breakfast for a few days.

I’m actually watching the infomercial right now and really feeling like I need to veganize Stuffed Soup. And the Tostada Bowl might be next on my list. Ugh, now they are putting left over El Pollo Loco in a tortilla with a kraft single.

I’m sort of running out of semi circular ideas. I need to start getting more creative with this thing.

Here are the pumpkin spelt muffins. They were super yummy, and I will definitely admit that this is much quicker than baking in the oven.

I just can’t bring myself to awkwardly fit “semi” into the title right now.

I know I already made a corndog thing, but it’s getting harder to come up with ideas, and also I really wanted chili and cornbread, so I made some spelt cornmeal biscuits and plopped a veggiedog and some Amy’s chili down in the middle. This was pretty perfect for the GT Xpress. It was definitely the type of meal they had in mind when making this thing: canned chili, packaged hotdogs and cornbread. Of course, I made the bread from scratch not from a mix or a pop ‘n fresh pack, but what else is a vegan supposed to do?

Here they are baking:

And here’s one all plated up. I sort of broke it when taking it out, but they actually stayed together really well .

My titles are getting worse and worse! I made these Banana Flapjacks for dinner tonight. They are a tester recipe from Isa’s forthcoming brunch book. I haven’t had a banana pancake in a while, and it was just the ticket after a long day. I’d had some bananas over ripening in the fridge for a few days so it was the perfect chance to use them up and eat something super yummy for dinner.

I used about 1/3 cup of batter per well and that seemed to be perfect. They puffed up right to the top. I should have sprayed the wells because they got a little stuck and I had to sort of maneuver them out of there. That’s why they look kind of messed up.  Also, there’s some thing kind of freaky about half circle pancakes.  Not natural.

The smokey tempeh on the side was a great salty side dish and tasted great with the maple syrup that oozed onto it.

I’m looking forward to trying more pancake and general breakfast recipes in here!

I was craving chocolate chip cookies, so I made up a small batch of whole wheat cookie dough and popped it in the GT Xpress. I probably should have used a recipe rather than just winging it because these turned out a little dry. I will try this again soon. They looked totally perfect though!

French bread french toast seemed like an obvious way to go in the GT Xpress. For one thing the bread is already semicircular (is that cheating?) I wanted to step up the french toast a little and make monte cristo sammies, as Rachael Ray would say. She is actually where I learned about monte cristos and I’ve been craving one ever since I saw her fry up those crispy sammiches in a pound of butter.

I was feeling something more sweet than savory so I made one peanut butter banana sandwich and another with peanut butter and apricot jam. I dipped them in the Vegan with a Vengeance amazing “Fronch Toast” batter of chickpea flour, cornstarch and soymilk and squished them into the wells of the Xpress.

Obviously this was totally amazing. How could it not be, right? I’ll have to make some savory monte cristos soon.

These cooked up quickly and browned perfectly on both sides.

Great job, GT!

I ate a lot of dessert and junk food this weekend, so I decided to make up for it by making some healthy and semicircular!

I knew I definitely wanted to make some sort of quinoa patty with beans, but I didn’t really know how I would hold it all together, so I went to the store and walked around and saw a bin of sweet potatoes. Quinoa, sweet potatoes and black beans sounded like an awesome combo, so I cooked up a sweet potato with onion, garlic and cumin, mashed it and mixed it up with some cooked quinoa and cumin spiced black beans and packed the mixture into the wells of the GT Xpress.

I thought this would be good, but sort of bland and mushy, but it ended up not being bland at all and had some great textures. The quinoa was still a tiny bit “al dente”, the potatoes were mushy and the beans had a tiny bit of bite to them.

I should have eaten this with a green vegetable, but I had a serious pile of laundry waiting for me, so I skipped the leafy greens today.

This ended up falling apart a bit when I took it out, but I think if I had waited 10 more minutes it would have cooled down enough to stay together.

I’m going to experiment next time with actually cooking quinoa right in the wells. I think it could work.