This is so simple, so good, and more healthy than the alternative.

Prep time 45 minutes. Serves 4 – 6.

• 1/2 cup Earth Balance margarine
• 1 cup of organic sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 3 mashed bananas (to a paste)
• 2 Ener-G egg replacements
• 1/2 cup nuts

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cream the sugar and margarine. In a separate bowl, sift the flour, salt, and baking soda. Blend with the wet mixture. Add the bananas, Ener-G, and nuts. Stir until mixed. Spoon into a mini-muffin sheet (like Pampered Chef’s) and bake for 15 – 17 minutes. Allow to cool for 5 and them pop ‘em with some coffee or hot chocolate.

There is nothing better on a cold Fall night than a big bowl of soup that serves as a meal (there are probably some things that are better, but…). This soup is vegan, healthy, hearty, and takes 30 minutes to make. There are lots of shortcuts to soup that don’t require sitting in a crock pot, subject to every passerby lickin’ and lappin’ a “just a taste”. Especially with the SWINE running around. I could have named this “Simple Healthy Swine Fall Soup” if it took 8 hours to make and you have 8 kids.

Ingredients:

• 1 medium onion diced
• 2 carrots diced (like whole carrots, not those cheating “bites”)
• 2 celery stalks diced
• big handful of sliced mushrooms
• 1 large potato diced
• 1/4 cup instant brown rice
• 8 cups water
• 6 tsp of “Better than Bouillon” vegetable stock (this matters)
• 1 cup plain soy milk
• 2 tbsp cornstarch
• 4 tbsp cooking oil
• 1/2 tsp fresh chopped rosemary
• 2 tbsp fresh chopped parsley

Heat the cooking oil in a large soup pot (like really hot). Throw in all the veggies (they should sizzle), reduce heat to medium, and stir for 5 minutes. Add the water and vegetable base. Bring to a boil and then simmer for 10 minutes. Throw in the brown rice, soy milk, parsley, and rosemary. Cook another 5 minutes. Remove about two cups of the broth and transfer it to a small pot. Get it boiling hot. Mix the cornstarch with just enough water to make it look like milk. Stirring with a whisk, pour the gradually cornstarch into the small pot. The liquid will almost turn to putty. This is good. As soon as it gets to a putty state, remove from the heat. In the larger pot, stir the soup and add the putty. Stir and stir and stir until the putty has dissolved and the soup is thicker.

Taste the soup. You want the soup to taste 75% of the flavor you want to eat it at. If it is not salty enough, add more bouillon 1 tsp at a time and make sure it is stirred (to be at 75% the edible flavor). The soup will need to cool to room temperature before you store it in the fridge. There will be some evaporation and further mixing (or “getting aquatinted” as my late mother-in-law used to say). If you salt it to taste immediately, it will taste like the Dead Sea the following day. If you plan to eat a portion of the soup immediately for a meal, then salt each portion to taste.

If you did everything right, you should have a chunky and somewhat earthy soup that compliments the smell of the autumn leaves around you…minus the SWINE.

Even before the vegan diet, I always felt an artery harden when eating a chicken wing. I could always get beyond this because, well, buffalo wings taste so stinkin’ good. This is especially true with a huge bucket of potato wedges and two tubs of ranch and bleu cheese dressing. Add a good football game and a beer and I can’t think of a better night in front of the TV. In fact, I was so obsessed in college with that buffalo taste that I would eat chicken wings whenever I could afford them. If I couldn’t I put the Red Hot sauce on pasta and even popcorn (at 3 AM, anything tastes good). A 12 wing basket with fries and dipping sauces is about 140% of your fat, calories, and cholesterol intake.

Aleta and I both thought our wing days were over until I saw frozen vegan “boneless wings” at our local specialty store. The brand is called “Health is Wealth” and the box is called “Chicken Free Buffalo Wings”. These “wings” are 100% wheat gluten and vegan. I picked up a box of these with high hopes and rushed home.

For ranch sauce, I made an all vegan ranch dip with the following ingredients:

• 1 cup vegan mayo
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 3/4 teaspoon onion powder
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 2 teaspoons of fresh parsley
• 1/2 cup of plain soy milk
• 1/4 cup vegan sour cream

Blend all this in a food processor until creamy and put in the fridge for 15 minutes. For wing sauce, melt 1/2 cup of Frank’s Red Hot (don’t use anything else) with 1 tsp of margarine. Bake as many wings as you’d like according to the box. When they are done, dump the in a medium sized bowl and add some hot sauce. Toss the wings a bit until they are coated. Add more or less sauce depending on taste.

We were absolutely shocked at how good these wings were. They had the same taste and texture as the boneless buffalo wings we used to eat at Chili’s. The ranch dressing had the cool garlic flavor to balance out the hot and spicy. As a matter of fact, I whipped up a batch of these last night and watched the Colts vs. Rams game.

Peanuts, to be exact.

We started eating almond butter a couple years ago simply because it was not as “strong” as peanut butter, but it also packed all the nutrition with less saturated fat (make no mistake, it still has fat. Almond butter is expense in general ($6 as opposed to $2.50 peanut butter) , but ridiculous in the two stores in Tulsa that sell it ($11+). This has caused me to pick it up at Trader Joes in CA on my biz trips.

Since I have already started throwing nuts in a blender, I decided how hard would it be to just make my own nut butter of some kind. So, I threw a handful of almonds, pecans, flax seed (gotta have the flax), and walnuts into a blender. They chopped up to a sticky powder. This was hardly spreadable. Instead of pouring oil into it to make it more “creamy”, I opened a can of conconut milk and threw it in. That definitely worked. I finished it off with some cinnamon and sugar to add a little sweetness.

When it was all said and done, I took a wiff of the stuff. It smelled like a cross between maple pancakes and tropical something. When I tasted it, I was shocked at how well all the flavors came together. Since then, we have been making a batch a week and just kinda throwing it on bread, in cereal, or even in my smoothie. Compared to peanut butter, it has a wider spread of protein, nutrients (especially calcium and iron), and is very “basic” (as in chemistry) to neutralize stomach acid, a natural antacid.