Veggie Potstickers

Chris and I love Veggie Potstickers. I was looking online for some dim sum recipes and I found this recipe, by  The Vegan Mouse which sounds simple and as an added bonus I have all of the ingredients on hand except for the Dark Mushroom Soy Sauce, which if you are on my Facebook you will know broke because the stupid bar that holds condiments in the door of the refrigerator came loose and the dark soy sauce shattered and oops-a-daisy, soy sauce all over the floor XD......And celery which I hate anyway and I am going to leave out. I am going to make this sauce recipe to go with them. I will be steaming my potstickers for about 10-12 minutes in my bamboo steamer. Below are the dumpling wrappers and the mixture before it went into the dumplings. I am getting Chris to help me with making these. LOL, I ended up making them. Make sure to line your steamer with cabbage leaves or spray with no-stick cooking spray so these don't stick. Bring a soup pot of water to a boil and sit your steamer filled with dumplings on top. The smell of the bamboo will be amazing! Chris was washing dishes (in the background). The verdict: delicious! They went great with the sauce.

Thai Tea and BBQ Tofu Vermicelli

I love Vietnamese food. Heart healthy, cheap and so very easy to make. Hit up the local Asian Grocer for the very best deals on fresh fruits and vegetables, fresh herbs, tofu, soy milk, sauces, spices, noodles, bamboo steamers, kitchen items, rice, candy, snacks (ooh Wasabi Peas) meat (if you are a meat eater), mock meat, tea, etc. All kinds of goodies there. I even got some Boba Milk Tea powder (green tea, and they also had black tea) there (more about that in upcoming posts) and Green Tea flavored Boba Pearls. But I digress, back to the foods at hand.

The BBQ tofu vermicelli bowl is what I get when I go to Pho. It is exactly what it sounds like, noodles and BBQ'd tofu. It has shredded romaine lettuce, bean sprouts and thinly sliced cucumber matchsticks as a salad in the middle of the noodle bowl (I threw in some carrots for extra crunch and color, maybe that is why I forgot the cucumber, oops). To serve it comes with Peanut Sauce. To me this recipe tastes better than the sauce that I get from Pho. Please do not overcook your rice vermicelli. It only needs to cook 3 minutes once it hits the boiling water. That's all, and if you cook it longer it will get chewy and not taste good. For that beautiful tofu, all I did was brush it with hoisin sauce on both sides and grill on my George Foreman grill. Here is the recipe that I used to make the Thai Tea it is the cold Thai Tea,Cha Yen. It is subtle and delicious. I made mine with skim milk and fat free sweetened condensed milk. I may add additional spices such as cinnamon to the next batch. You won't believe the beautiful color of this tea. I actually got a huge packet of Thai Tea from the Asian grocer ( Tan-A-Supermarket for those of you that live here in Richmond, VA and yes that is an old Rite-Aid building) for about $3.00. I will have a picture of that for you soon. I would love to go to Thailand and drink it right out of the bag...yes they really serve it to you like that....

Took a picture for you before I drizzled it with Sriracha,  Hoisin Sauce and Peanut Sauce and I forgot my cucumbers and my Pho bowl is currently holding watercress. I am pleased, although I would have liked the tofu to be a bit crispier.

Little Wieners to love.....

Smokey Little Wieners and the people who love them on the next Geraldo....LOL, just kidding. Seriously though, these cocktail wienies rock. When I found this recipe for Little Wieners, I knew I had to try it. It is a recipe for "cocktail wieners" or "Lil' Smokies". I finally made it today, and it was fairly simple to make. I also made the BBQ sauce to go with the little wienies which was very hot and spicy, Chris loved these recipes and he kept saying how hot the sauce was but he kept coming back for more ;P I think that I will cut back on some of the heat of this BBQ sauce the next time that I make it. The most tedious part of the recipe is actually rolling the little wieners up, candy style, in aluminum foil. I love that the seitan is steamed in this recipe and the texture is better than most homemade seitans that I have made. I know that I will make this recipe again, and make the other seitan goodies listed on the website, including the brats. I don't think that I will be buying any pre-made wienies anymore. While I worked on these recipes, I helped Chris make some spring rolls and I made some Vietnamese Peanut Dipping Sauce which IMO is so much better tasting than the sauce you get at Pho. We used bean sprouts, napa cabbage, shredded carrots, green onion, rice vermicelli, mint and cilantro in our spring rolls however use what you like. More on those in posts later on this week including photos.

Saucy spicy goodness.