“What do you want for Christmas?”
I am the toughest person I know to answer that question. The reality is that if there’s something I want, I probably already have it. Well, just about anything. Masae isn’t that much different. Suprising her is a real challenge. I don’t dare buy her clothes or jewelry as my opinion is not likely to match her taste and if she goes along it’s not a suprise. What a dilemna this is a couple of times a year.
This year she suggested something real unique.Since we have both upgraded from vegetarian to vegan recently, she said, “How about we go to the Whole Foods Store and buy the ingredients needed for a dinner, and then our gift to each other will be the time spent together preparing the meal as a team?”
I’m no cook, and Masae doesn’t really like to cook, but the “time together” part sounded cool as that’s the one thing I don’t seem to give very much of to anyone, making it valuable. So I went to Google and searched for vegan recipes. We agreed on “Totally Awesome Tacos” and then we went to Whole Foods and had fun buying the ingredients pictured above. The recipe is below, and when done I will post a photo of the finished product at the end of this post. If this works out, gift buying in the future will be easy and delicious.
Totally Awesome Tacos

Ingredients (vegan version):

    1/2 cup chopped onion
    1/2 cup chopped green bell pepper
    1/4 teaspoon salt
    2 cloves garlic
    1 15 oz can kidney beans, light red
    3/4 cup water
    1/4 cup nutritional yeast
    1 packet vegan taco seasoning

Directions:

1) Saute onion in olive oil til brown.
2) Add green bell and garlic.  Salt if you like. Saute 3-5 min more.
3) Add in beans, water and 1 packet of taco seasoning.
4) Let simmer until reduced, stirring occasionally.   While stirring, smash up the beans as much as you like (use a potato masher to get them fairly smooth).
5) Stir in nutritional yeast.
6) Place into taco shells and top with your fave toppings: avocado, tomato, lettuce, veg sour cream, etc…
Also, makes an awesome chip dip or layered bean dip.  Enjoy!
Serves: 2-4
Preparation time: 15 minutes

Tearful Task
Chopping onions will indeed bring tears to your eyes.

Done Deal - Let’s Eat
We all like to look back at a job well done. I go to the table with a newfound appreciation for the cook in the house.

Yummy!
I can now attest to the quality of the recipe above. We WILL do this again. No photos of the “dessert” that followed (the dishes). Merry Christmas.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 25th, 2008 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Health & Wellness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.