Comfort Queen: Vegan Match Meats Chicken with Wild Rice And Mushrooms Casserole (And Other Pithy Comments)

It's always "casserole" weather in this house. Could be a hundred outside. If I have a hankering for a one-pot baked pile of yum, then that's what I'm making. I don't shy away from the foods of the "soul". This dish is a basic that is so down home, you'll be looking for a funeral to take it to. When I was putting this together and realized that the amount I had just poured into my neat little 9 x 13 casserole dish was enough to feed a family of eight comfortably (plus allow for an upper arm workout from the lifting of the dish from the oven)--well, I could only think of one thing--how many nights would we be eating this and how many different ways might I be able to sneak this into a salad or wrap. I was so wrong on the family of eight thing. Mr.Thyme and I chowed at least half of this in our first night. We gladly ate it again for dinner the next night, then another day for lunch using it in, what else: wraps. Yum.

Last night, after we all went to bed, we got a downpour so heavy that it rained like an inch in twenty minutes. Not really a Nashville situation here yet, but let me say, it is really lush and deep green outside now. I was kept awake from three a.m. until five a.m. by some very worried canines who were crawling over my head and arms attempting to hide from all the lightening and thunder. Real fun. Then the power went out. We're in for more rain, and more storms today and tonight. Such is life in the Midwest in Spring.

As vegan foods go, my goal has always been to pretty much feed myself the way I've always liked to eat: heartily and robustly. I've always had an appetite and it runs on the not-so-much bean and sprout variety. I tracked a lot of vegan food blogs prior to beginning my own. Spent many a dollar on vegan cookbooks--and must say, many of those cookbooks barely get touched--sometimes, but not a lot. I also really and truly tried to love tofu. I do not love tofu. Nor do I love beans and sprouts. Eating cruelty free for me made sense--that's not up for debate, but my vegan food also had to be good food defined by "my good". 

Vegan Carrot Cake #325 (GO St. Louis Half Marathon Weekend Is Here!)

Okay, so maybe I don't have three hundred recipes for carrot cake, but it sure seems like I do. If you combine this with the recipes I have for carrot and pumpkin cake, well that could take us up into the four hundreds. Carrot cake, like brownies, are personal. There are the carrot cakes with enough vegetable oil to lube a small car, then there are the carrot cakes with just that: carrot. I find that no matter what recipe I pull out of my box of tricks, I require it to be covered in a thick layer of gooey buttercream frosting. No ifs, ands or buts.

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a long gone St. Louis restaurant's carrot cake recipe. (I am forever cutting out recipes or printing them out. I am close to needing a new three-ring binder to hold my cut/print outs.) Why this recipe? This was a local place Mr. Thyme and I loved--before marriage. The Sunshine Inn. If I could describe it in one word, it would be: granola. I don't mean this in a bad way--but the feel and the food all lended nicely to folks kindly referred to as "granola" types. I was on the cusp of being granola at the time. Mr. Thyme is a child of the sixties--being granola is in his DNA. For me--a child of the seventies and "Madonna" eighties, I was not quite there--still never left home without a full can of hairspray tucked in my oversized handbag. Nonetheless, we loved this place. It had the best dinner rolls EVER. We'd even order the rolls with a sandwich (clearly before the ills of carbs had reached a fevered pitch).

BBQ Pulled Pork And Down N' Dirty Coleslaw (Idol Vegans And Take That You Square Foot Garden!)

The Southern in me just leapt out yesterday! Bring on the BBQ--but make it Kansas City style!

If there is a vegan heaven, there best be some BBQ stands around. I'll bring my own vegan meat stuffs, not to worry.

This is my "chia pet" chive plant. This is one amazing herb, let me tell you--doing what it's doing all by its lonesome. I'm impressed and am considering turning my entire lawn into "chia-pet" chives.

Cripes, I must have planted a hundred of these slips on Monday. It was really grueling work--stick a finger in the compost, drop the onion slip in, stick a finger in the compost, drop the onion slip in. . . a hundred times. I best be seeing some onions in a few months.

Little seeds of wonder. . .please bring me tons of greens!

Improvisational lazy-woman's way of square foot planting. I am at the point of just--get it in the ground already--using these kindling sticks from our firewood dude seemed both practical and, well. . . right. I have little patience for things after a certain point--and seems like the Square Foot Garden guy and his book was all anal-retentive in some of his requirements. I got the gist of his philosophy, now it's time to apply the "Kelly Method"! Plus, I was like, Look, I am not making one more gosh darn trip to Home Depot this week

. . . I'll go to Lowe's instead.

I totally had flip-flop fever and deemed these a necessary purchase for my summer wardrobe--don't you love them. (No I don't need a shave and that is not my foot!)

I found myself craving barbeque and flip-flops yesterday. Like any sane woman, I drove right over to Target where I was met with flip-flop nirvana! Hello flip-flops! Hello Spring! Then, there was this pull directing me to my pantry seeking out one of the South's most precious commodities: Kansas City Barbeque Sauce. Okay, so maybe we aren't in the heart of Dixie, but that doesn't mean the heart doesn't crave some southern derived food! I really feel for vegans who think they must swear off the best foods of summer. I have an answer for you: Match Meats!

Vegan Gooey Butter Cake (A St. Louis Tradition Adaptation!)

Let me introduce you to the most amazing thing to come out of St. Louis since The Arch: the Gooey Butter Cake. But this one here is vegan and not "as gooey" as they tend to be, but qualifies for me as one of the best cake recipe homages to the GBC I've tasted in a really long time!

You can almost taste the crispy cooked, golden chewy edges and then, the crumb sort of collapses in your mouth like you're eating a super-sized piece of butter cake heaven--soft and moist in the middle with a large crumb!

My favorite day of the week is Wednesday. This is when the Let's Eat section of our St. Louis Post-Dispatch (the second most left-leaning piece of journalism diatribe out there--next to the New York Times--a little balanced reporting once in awhile would be nice)--but nonetheless, the food section, on most weeks, prints something I feel worthy of "trying". My three-ring binder is filled with little scraps of black and white newsprint cut-out recipes dangling from my folder pockets. I am like one of those old women who will someday be able to submit "the long lost recipe" for Aunt Mable's pecan shortbread printed in the nineties by someone in the "food section" of the Post. I'll have that recipe cut out somewhere and will oblige by sending it in. My dream job is being the Food Editor of this paper someday (not likely to happen given my intro to this blog post, but oh well)--I'd love to give them a shot of "veggie" sense and other worthy food review commentary that I feel is often lacking.

So yesterday's food section carried a whole front page article on Asian Grocery Store Shopping. . . Okay. But then there was this quaint little cake photo in black and white tucked in the folds with a reader question requesting a "bakery" butter cake recipe "from years gone by". The bakery still exists up in the North part of the city--I'd never heard of them. (If you weren't aware--St. Louis is known for two very famous things in the dessert/confection world: Gooey Butter Cake and World's Fair Donuts.)

Hello Hives! Vegan Honey Mustard Chicken (Sans The Bees) with Horseradish Mashers & Red Onion Gravy

I craved honey-mustard last night. So, out came the agave. This was yet another vegan comfort food classic re-made! It came together in a jif and I used, what else: Match Meats Chicken. You could use tempeh or seitan for your protein. What made this even better was my little mixture of agave-mustard I drizzled over the chicken patty after frying them--giving it an extra dose of that yummy flavor combo! Plus the mashers with the red onion gravy: yum!

Your main ingredients for this entree. Pretty simple.

I am covered in hives! Covered! Initially, I thought I'd maybe brushed against a poison ivy vine taking the dogs for a walk yesterday--just a spot on my arm was all that bothered me. Then, I started to itch on my chest, neck, back and stomach. Then I looked in the mirror, showed Mr. Thyme and began to sink into a bit of a "state" because this was not what I needed right now. So, I took some benedryl--hoping to relieve whatever it was causing me to look like a measles case. Not much help. Really, not much help at all--last night I woke up some four times to "scratch" and try to relax back into sleep. Then after five this morning, I just stayed up and waited to place a call to my doctor, I knew it had to be the new oral antibiotics. I really wished it weren't, but the rash wasn't getting better. I waited to call the exchange to not appear like I was in dire straights, though, I really was. The measles had spread. He phoned me back promptly and I explained it all to him. He said what Mr. Thyme and I had already sort of figured out: I am now allergic to penicillin. I was like, How? I've had an IV of penicillin in me for two weeks now--how could this happen? He said, Your body has just decided it's had enough. (Oh, has it now?) So, I am off the orals until Friday, when he hopes this rash will have calmed down--then we'll probably begin a new antibiotic course of treatment--penicillin-free. Meantime, there is another prescription waiting for me to deal with another problem as a result of my new "allergy" which I will pick up today.

This is becoming a comedy. I have to laugh--if I don't, I think I'll cry, well I do cry. I know I will look back at all of this and tell this story without as much emotion and hysteria as I feel today. But if you could see my skin right now--along with my new dimple in my face--well, you'd hopefully find this amusing, I'd encourage you to laugh, in fact, I'd laugh with you!

So, as for another aside: I was a beekeeper. I loved honey. I once had three hives. I still love honey--I've turned to agave, take it easy there. But my last hive of bees flew the coop this past summer and you know what, I think they secretly knew I had become vegan. What else could have caused them to leave? (I don't really need any PETA commentary on the matter either. In fact, more of my bees died in thunderstorms than ever died during my honey harvesting, pre-vegan.) Anyhow, I am almost fifty and make my own decisions on the matter. Thanks to the hobbyist beekeepers, we have not lost the bees. As many of you know, if the bees go, our fruits and veggies and flowers go, too. For now, my bees are probably hanging out in my neighbor's hives. They may come back as I did not extract any honey at all last year. I'll keep the light on for them.