Monday: Recipe Day with Puttanesca Sauce

Vegan Goodness:

Today we ate:

Breakfast: Blueberry smoothies and and the last of the NY bagels for Mom and LP. LP had his bagel with butter, even though he insisted that we stop at the store last night for tofutti cream cheese. Toddlers – sheesh!
Lunch: Leftover extravaganza! Leftover pasta for LP, leftover quinoa and setian roast for Mom and Dad.
Dinner: Creole Okra from Color Me Vegan, the cookbook I’m trying to cook from the most this month. Think of it as a one-month extension of my “try one new thing” tip.

Money Matters:

Today we spent the following:

$30.00 at the salon for Mom
$6.00 at a local stationary store for some holiday stationary

Monday Munchies: Recipe of the Week

I was recently looking through a Rachel Ray cookbook from the library to see what all the fuss was about. I’m really interested in trying to make some 30 minute meals of my own, so I decided to look outside the vegan world for inspiration. While most of her recipes are pretty useless for me (so much meat! so much! ugh.) I did appreciate her pasta section. She has a puttanesca sauce recipe that was quick and easy, and it reminded me of the tofu scramble puttanesca from Vegan Brunch. I wanted to try it out and see how quick and easy I could make this sauce. Well, we had a winner on the first try! This sauce was super delicious, amazingly quick (like, 15 minutes, max) to make, and versatile. We had it on top of polenta that I had made a day earlier, so it was easy to just throw on the skillet. You could also toss this about 1/2 lb of pasta – it is so good!

Puttanesca Sauce

Servings: 2-4
Time: 30 mins
Difficulty: easy
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Ingredients

1 TB olive oil

4 cloves garlic, minced

1/8-1/4 tsp red pepper flakes

1 cup of chopped olives (we used kalamata)

2 TB capers

1 1/2 cup diced or chopped tomatoes (you could use on 14oz can)

Directions:

Heat the olive oil in a skillet on medium heat. Add the garlic and cook for about 1 minute, until the garlic is fragrant. Add in the red pepper flakes
Add the tomatoes to the pan and stir to mix in the garlic and red pepper flakes. Cook for 2-5 minutes. You can use this time to rough-chop the olives if you want
Add in the olives and capers and stir to combine. Serve now or turn heat to low and cover until your pasta/polenta/tofu is done. Enjoy!