Recipe: Cheesy Vegan Green Bean Mushroom Couscous Casserole

I wanted the "classic" mushroom Thanksgiving-type green bean casserole with the crunchy onions on top, but I have no soymilk.

Ingredients:
- 1 lb bag frozen French-cut green beans (for faster cooking)
- 1 1/2 c nutritional yeast
- 1/2 tbsp ground mustard
- 1/2 tbsp paprika (optional)
- 1/2 tbsp chili powder (optional)
- olive oil
- 2 small white boiling onions or 1/2 small regular onion, sliced thinly
- 1-2 lg cloves garlic
- 1 c "pearl" or Israeli couscous (the kind with the larger grains)
- about 1 c dried oyster mushrooms
- 2-3 slices stale bread, cubed into croûton size (I used some stale whole wheat raisin bread for a sweet flavor)
- salt
- white pepper
- black pepper
- about 3 c vegetable broth (I used low-sodium and it worked out fine)

Equipment: covered casserole dish, medium-sized regular pot with lid, spatula or spoon

Preheat oven to 400 deg. F.

Cover bottom of pot with thin layer of olive oil, salt, white pepper. Turn on heat. When oil is heated up, add garlic. Stir until garlic is fragrant/browning lightly. Add onion. Stir. When onion is transparent and soft, add couscous. Stir to coat in oil. The couscous should become slightly transparent and then slightly tan and smell a little nutty.

Add about half the broth. Stir. Wait a few minutes for the couscous to start to become plump. Then add the spices, black pepper, and more salt and white pepper if you want. Add the mushrooms. Wait for the mushrooms to start absorbing the liquid; you may want to put the lid on the pot for a minute or two at this point.

Add the nutritional yeast, slowly so it doesn't clump up. Stir constantly. The liquid should thicken; if it gets too thick add half the remaining broth. You don't want it too sauce-like just yet, but it shouldn't be thin and watery either. This is a good time to test and add any other spices you might want.

Let the mushrooms and couscous absorb the rest of the liquid already in the pot, and simmer about 2-3 minutes. At this point your sauce should start looking more cheesy, but before it congeals completely turn the heat down.

Coat the inside of the casserole dish lightly with cooking spray. Dump the entire bag of frozen green beans into it.

Pour the warm cheese/mushroom/couscous sauce over the frozen green beans. With a spoon or spatula, make little dents or holes in the green beans for the sauce to flow into. The goal is not to mix it thoroughly, but have pockets of sauce in the beans while still leaving most of the sauce on top to form a kind of crust.

Put the bread cubes on top of the whole thing. Drizzle the remaining broth over the bread cubes. Ideally the bottom of the bread cubes should start absorbing the sauce, and the top of the bread cubes should be drier and form a little crust, kind of like a bread pudding.

Put the lid on the casserole, and pop the whole thing into the oven for 25 m or until browned on top. You can leave the lid off for the last few minutes to get the crust crispier if you want, since leaving the lid on will steam the bread slightly.

This will need salt and pepper to taste when it is out of the oven and heading toward your gaping vegan maw. I didn't want to put too much salt in the recipe as I was making it because you can always add salt later, but can't take it out if you oversalt during cooking.

Vegan Food Review: Trader Joe's Organic Low-Sodium Vegetable Broth

Trader Joe's Organic Low-Sodium Vegetable Broth was not the broth I wanted. I generally prefer the "better than broth bullion" vegan beef or chicken flavor broth concentrate, but the last time that I went shopping I couldn't find it anywhere (Shaw's was out, it seemed), so I just got this broth-in-a box. I prefer paying for the concentrate because otherwise you are really paying for a lot of water with flavoring, but I figured I should review this anyway.

You get 1 qt of broth. It's fat-free, low-cal, and gluten free. It also has *way* less sodium than their normal vegetable broth, at only 6% sodium. Some nutrients, but not enough to rave about. I think I picked up the organic kind without really noticing; I don't even know if TJ's carries non-organic vegetable broth or what it tastes like.

Mostly, it's water with a lot of vegetable juices. It tastes vaguely sweet because of the carrot juices they put in. If you're like me and love the taste of celery but hate the texture, you will like this broth, because you can really taste the fact that celery is the third broth on the list. Unfortunately, it does have tomatoes and onions in it, so this is no good for people who are sensitive to those vegetables. It is also slightly seasoned, but not overwhelmingly so.

It has recipe suggestions, like "omit oil and use broth instead," in the back. This does in fact contain a slight bit of olive oil, so it is a little bit oily--you don't need to add a lot of extra oil.

How else does it taste? Mostly of celery, with a slight hint of tomato and onion, sweetness from the carrots, and a little bit of parsley flavor. There is a slight olive oil aftertaste, and it has a nice feel in your mouth. I will probably use the rest of it to make miso soup; it's light and tasty without being overwhelmingly like "I'M BROTH!!" which is an effect you can sometimes get with broth concentrate pastes, or non-low-sodium broths, which I sometimes find too salty.

The only drawbacks are that you are essentially, again, paying for flavored water, and you have to use it up within 10 days after you open the box. Thankfully (or maybe not), if you are making a good deal of food, 1 box of broth will not last you too long (I used about 6/8ths of the box in the cheesy green bean couscous casserole, but that is an entire medium-sized casserole dish full of food and should last for several days).

Making Dandelion Wine Step-by-Step #1 - Supplies

ab3nd and I are making Dandelion wine this spring, because for once I finally thought of it before the dandelions were all gone, and ab3nd has the right equipment already so there wasn't a huge outlay for, say, specialty labglass, so if it all goes wrong then I won't have started an expensive new hobby only to find out I don't actually like it.

We are using the first recipe on this winemaking website. Most of the recipes we found on the internet when doing research involved Welch's Grape Juice Concentrate; this was unacceptable to me. I wanted my wine to taste like dandelions and maybe grass, not be reminiscent of Communion and full of reconstituted grapes and corn syrup...even if I wanted my wine to taste like it was made with grapes, I would make wine from grapes.

Stuff we had to get at the beer store:
- 1 three-gallon bucket with spigot on top
- 1 packet wine yeast. I chose "Vintner's Harvest" brand SN9, Saccharomyes bayanus, because it claimed it was good for flower based wines and also was much less delicate than the other type of yeast recommended for flower wines, which had a special note about how it was kind of finicky and needed TLC.

The local beermaking store also had a load of weird spices and cooking ingredients mostly last seen in things like the medieval cookbook I have--like juniper berries, dried rosehips, candy sugar in both brown and white varieties, oak pieces, and cacao seeds. If I need really weird spices, now I know where to go. Unfortunately, the helpful guy at the store told me that they don't have fresh yeast suitable for bread making, so my search continues for fresh bread yeast in the Boston area. They also had a half-gallon of agave syrup for 13.00, so I know where I am getting my agave syrup from now on. :)

Yeah. More pictures soon.