Having a jar of kimchi in the refrigerator and ordering an amazing bibimbap the other night at the Noodle Bowl (http://www.noodlebowleugene.com) led me to try to make this at home.  According to the website, bibimbap simply means “mixed rice with meat and assorted vegetables.”  It ended up being much more labor intensive than I envisioned, yet sometimes that’s how recipes are the first time you make them. Or maybe it was because I also decided this was somehow the perfect time to try to make ghee in my oven (that may be another blog post!) So, I will definitely make this again, especially since my family really enjoyed it.

Bibimbap – www.mykoreankitchen.com

I kept mine vegetarian and cooked venison to put in my family’s.  Which makes this a great example of basically cooking one meal, while still meeting all of our needs. Gotta keep those meat eaters happy.  🙂

I used carrots, shiitake mushrooms, sugar snap peas and spinach.  All so good and I’m just loving the different colored carrots!

 

The kimchi had such a great fizz when I opened it, gotta be good for the gut!
With the mandatory fried egg on top and drizzled with bibimbap sauce.

For the third installment of my walnut love, I made vegan walnut sausage.  Following this recipe:

Vegan Walnut Sausage – www.beyonddiet.com

It came together super easy, just threw everything into the food processor! The hardest part was finding the nutritional yeast.  I found it hanging out on the spice aisle at Whole Foods.

Freshly made walnut sausage.  The crazy thing is that it actually tastes like sausage, thanks to the rosemary, thyme, fennel seeds and nutritional yeast.

I decided to incorporate this into stuffed peppers for dinner. I didn’t follow a recipe, which is shocking for me and unchartered territory, but I was feeling brave!

Walnut sausage (I doubled the recipe)

1 small onion

1 package of Quinoa/Rice by Seeds of Change

Leftover brown rice (about 1/2 cup)

2 cups tomato sauce (I didn’t have tomato sauce, so I used tomato paste and ketchup mixed with water) #cookingimprov

I mixed all of the above ingredients together, which fully stuffed 6 peppers. I put a little bit of water in the baking dish and covered it with foil.

Cooking them for 30 minutes in a 350 degree oven was just right.

I topped it off with a little sprinkling of nutritional yeast!

I was pretty pleased with how they turned out.  The only thing I would change next time is actually using  tomato sauce (and probably a little less too) because I think the ketchup made them too sweet.

I never knew walnuts could be so versatile and am loving all the fun foods I can turn them into.  It is really quite unbelievable how good this mock tuna turned out, following this recipe.

www.rickiheller.com – Mock Tuna Salad

I assembled the tuna salad on collard greens and topped it with pickles and cherry tomatoes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After eating a mock tuna wrap made from walnuts that was to die for, I began searching for recipes to recreate it and stumbled across this walnut based taco meat.

Vegan Taco Meat – www.myhdiet.com

The walnut bath.

After soaking for a few hours they went into the food processor with some cumin, coriander and tamari sauce.  It really looks like taco meat!

While the toaster oven was heating up I assembled the quesadilla- I used 1/3 cup of taco meat and Daiya shredded cheese on flour tortillas sprayed with Pam, to help them crisp up.  I baked them for about 3 minutes on each side at 400 degrees.  I served it with one of my favorite salsas.

And the finished product!  I seriously couldn’t believe how good they were!  YUMM 🙂