Tag Archives: Mexican

Black Bean Sweet Potato Burritos – quick, vegan, gluten-free, and satisfying

Posted on by March 18, 2017
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back bean sweet potato burritos

These burritos are filled with a creamy black bean and sweet potato mixture. They are soothing and nourishing. My whole family likes this recipe, especially my daughter Kendra.Watch movie online The Transporter Refueled (2015)

Back when my youngest child, Corbin, was starting to eat solid foods, the filling from these burritos was the first food that really interested him. He liked it so much that it was his gateway to eating solid foods — so surely this is a very delicious food.

This is my version of a recipe in Moosewood Restaurant Lowfat Favorites — one of my favorite cookbooks ever! Their version is baked, which makes the tortillas crunchy on top; my version is served without baking.

Black Bean Sweet Potato Burritos - quick, vegan, and satisfying
 
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Prep time
25 mins
Total time
25 mins
 
These vegan black bean sweet potato burritos are creamy and satisfying.
Author: Valerie Mates
Recipe type: Dinner
Cuisine: Mexican-ish
Serves: Serves 5
Ingredients
  • 5 cups of sweet potatoes (more is okay), cut into roughly 1 inch cubes, skin still on
  • 2 tablespoons canola oil
  • 4 teaspoons ground cumin
  • 4 teaspoons ground coriander
  • 3 cans black beans (4 1/2 cups cooked), rinsed and drained
  • optional: 2/3 cup lightly packed cilantro leaves
  • 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 11 tortillas (either storebought -- or my tortilla recipe, with a little salt added to the batter, is fabulous here)
  • salsa (such as Amy's mild salsa)
  • optional: lettuce, chopped
  • optional: chopped bell pepper
Instructions
  1. Put the sweet potatoes into a pot. Add enough water to just cover them. Heat to boiling. Turn heat to medium and cook for 12 minutes, or until the sweet potato pieces are very soft. (You can test for doneness by poking them with a fork.)
  2. Drain the sweet potatoes and let them cool for a bit.
  3. In a food processor, blend the sweet potatoes, oil, cumin, coriander, beans, lemon juice, salt, and optionally the cilantro, until smooth.
  4. Place about 3-4 tablespoons of filling in a line off-center in a tortilla. Add some lettuce and bell pepper, if you are using them. Roll up the tortilla.
  5. Serve with salsa on top.
  6. A time saving tip: If you are making your own tortillas, you can fill them one by one as they get cooked, rather than waiting for them all to be ready.
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Black Bean Tostadas

Posted on by October 27, 2014
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Black Bean Tostadas

This quick and delicious meal has a story behind it.

Many years ago, when I was a young single person, my friend Rob and I were discussing what to do for dinner. It went something like this:

What do you want to do for dinner?
I don’t know. What do you want to do for dinner?
I don’t know.
Too bad Ann Arbor doesn’t have vegetarian restaurants like Ithaca.
Yeah. Ithaca has great vegetarian restaurants.
Too bad we can’t eat dinner there.
Yeah. It would be neat to eat dinner in Ithaca.
We couldn’t go there, could we?
Well, maybe we could! Want to go to Ithaca for dinner?
Okay, let’s go have dinner at the Moosewood!
Are you serious?
Yeah! Let’s go!

washing black beansThat was on a Saturday in the late afternoon. We hopped in the car and drove eight hours to Ithaca, New York, stopping for a few hours of sleep in a tiny motel somewhere in Canada. We reached Ithaca in time for Sunday dinner — which I thought was really the perfect day to be there because I loved the cookbook Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant. I had never been to Ithaca before, but I loved reading cookbooks from the three vegetarian restaurants there, especially the Moosewood.

The meal we ate at Moosewood was Black Bean Tostadas.

It was worth the trip.

Afterward, I discovered that the recipe for Black Bean Tostadas was in the Sundays at Moosewood cookbook. So I tried cooking it. It came out well.

beans for tostadasOver the years I have adapted it in many ways, and made it my own. I am not sure that anybody at Moosewood would recognize this recipe the way I make it.

That trip to Ithaca was twenty five years ago. I am sorry to say that I have lost touch with Rob.

Ann Arbor now has several excellent vegetarian restaurants — but I still think fondly of that crazy weekend road trip to the Moosewood.

The original version of this recipe was served on a crispy round corn tortilla. I’ve always found tostadas very hard to eat without having food go flying in all directions. So I changed this recipe to use crushed corn chips instead of a tortilla. I’ve played around squashed corn chips for tostadaswith the ingredients to meet my family’s food needs. And I have speeded it up, so that the whole meal can be cooked in 30 minutes.

My kids like this meal served with the corn chips on the side and all the parts of the meal in separate piles. I like it all heaped together, with avocado and salsa strewn throughout.

This recipe is dedicated in memory of Sue Talbert, who liked this recipe. Sue passed away last year, far too young.

Here is Sue’s version of this recipe.

Jan Wolter says that when he eats this recipe, he tries to put lots of liquid on the corn chips. Normally soggy corn chips don’t taste so good, but in this recipe they are transformed into something altogether different and very yummy. I know soggy corn chips sound really awful — and some brands are — but I hope you will trust me that the right corn chips are transformed in this recipe.

Black Bean TostadasSome brands of corn chips work better than others in this recipe — they have to mesh with the sauce in just the right way, and some brands do that better than others. I like Guiltless Gourmet blue or white corn chips, but the last time I checked, Guiltless Gourmet could not guarantee that their chips were gluten-free, so I don’t buy that brand anymore. Whole Foods white corn chips are good in this recipe too.

Tip: At our house, we don’t always have fresh orange juice on hand, but we keep some frozen concentrate in the freezer. For this recipe, I mix up a micro-batch of orange juice from concentrate, just enough to use in this recipe: six tablespoons of concentrate plus one cup and two tablespoons of water makes exactly the amount of orange juice needed for this recipe.

Black Bean Tostadas
 
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Black beans and orange juice taste surprisingly good together. In this recipe they are served on top of crushed corn chips, with avocado, lettuce, and other toppings.
Author:
Recipe type: dinner
Cuisine: vaguely Mexican
Serves: serves 6
Ingredients
  • 1 1/2 cups orange juice
  • 3 cans of black beans (4 1/2 cups, cooked), rinsed
  • 3 tablespoons canola oil
  • 2 teaspoons ground cumin seeds
  • 2 teaspoons ground coriander seeds
  • EITHER 2 tomatoes, chopped, or 2 red or yellow bell peppers, chopped
  • corn chips (blue ones are good here)
  • 2 ripe avocadoes
  • shredded lettuce
  • optional: grated cheddar or Monterrey Jack or mozzarella cheese
  • optional: unsweetened yogurt or sour cream
  • salsa
Instructions
  1. Put the beans and orange juice in a pot over medium heat.
  2. Add the oil, cumin, coriander, and tomatoes or bell peppers, and stir.
  3. While the beans warm up, wash the lettuce.
  4. Mash the avocadoes into a very simple one-ingredient guacamole.
To serve:
  1. Put two handfuls of corn chips on a plate. Crush the corn chips with your hands, into pieces about an inch wide or smaller.
  2. Put a big scoop or two of the bean mixture on top, taking care to get the corn chips wet.
  3. Add lettuce, salsa, guacamole and other toppings.
  4. Serve!
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International Enchiladas

Posted on by October 27, 2014
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International Enchiladas

international_enchiladasThis is a special occasion recipe. It takes time to prepare, but the results are very much worth it – it is a truly wonderful food, quite possibly the yummiest dinner recipe I’ve ever made.

I invented this recipe when I found a yummy-looking recipe for Sour Cream Chicken Enchiladas on the Internet, back in the 1980s when nobody had heard of the Internet.  I converted the recipe to be vegetarian by replacing the chicken with an addictively delicious recipe for Fried Spiced Tofu, from the cookbook “Diet for a Small Planet“.  And I replaced the chili powder with curry powder, which blends harmoniously with the creamy white sauce for a fabulous taste combination.  This recipe was originally called Tofuladas.

I’ve been making this recipe for so long that it has a lot of variations included.  I usually make it corn-free, dairy-free, tomato-free, and it can be vegan.  Every one of these variations is delicious!

Serve this with a salad, or cooked broccoli.

Cooking time: 70 minutes + a few minutes of broiling — but worth the time it takes!

International Enchiladas
 
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My favorite special-occasion dinner! Salty, curried tofu, rolled up in tortillas, with a cheesey sauce that can be vegan, and a creamy curried white sauce on top. Yum!!!
Author:
Recipe type: Dinner
Cuisine: International
Serves: serves 4-6
Ingredients
Tofu:
  • 2 pounds tofu
Red Sauce:
  • 1 can Campbell's tomato soup OR 1/2 of a little box of Imagine Organic Creamy Tomato Soup OR (1-2 tablespoons of pesto + 1 cup baby carrots, rinsed, 3 tablespoons oil, 1 tablespoon cider vinegar, 1/4 cup water -- blended until smooth)
  • 1-2 tablespoons curry powder
White Sauce:
  • 2 tablespoons oil
  • 2 tablespoons potato starch or flour
  • 1/2 cup nondairy milk, or cow's milk, or homemade cashew milk, or water
  • 1/2 cup water
  • 1 cup plain unsweetened yogurt, or more nondairy milk
  • salt
  • pepper
Cheese:
  • 6 ounces of Monterey Jack cheese (about 2 cups), shredded OR 1 cup of "lasagna cheese"
Tortillas:
  • 20 corn tortillas OR two batches of crepes
Instructions
Tortillas:
  1. If you are making tortillas, start on that first.
Tofu:
  1. Cook 1 1/3 blocks of tofu according to the Golden Curried Tofu recipe. Do not wash out the pot; you'll be using it for the white sauce.
Cheese:
  1. While the other parts cook, grate the cheese, if you are using cheese, or use the remaining 2/3 of a pound of tofu in my vegan lasagna cheese recipe.
Red Sauce:
  1. If you are using tomato soup, mix the soup, curry powder, and about 1/4 soup can of water. If you are using the blended mixture with the pesto and carrots, also blend in the curry powder.
White Sauce:
  1. Put the oil in the pot you used for the fried spiced tofu. Add the potato starch or flour and stir to mix thoroughly.
  2. If you are using flour, stir and heat it until it is bubbly. (Potato starch does not need heating.)
  3. Stir in the milk and water.
  4. Simmer slowly until thickened.
  5. Add salt and pepper to taste.
  6. Stir in either unsweetened yogurt or more milk.
  7. Simmer until heated through.
  8. Remove from heat.
To assemble:
  1. Set out a 9x13 inch baking pan and an 8x8 inch baking pan. Take a tortilla and spread a dinnertable tablespoon of red sauce on one side. Turn the tortilla over and repeat. Place 2-3 tablespoons of the tofu down the center of the tortilla. Sprinkle about a tablespoon of the cheese over the tofu. Roll up the tortilla and place seam side down in the pan. Repeat for each tortilla.
  2. Pour the white sauce over the enchiladas, and sprinkle with any remaining cheese.
  3. Place under the broiler until hot and bubbly and the cheese is starting to brown. Serve immediately. This dish reheats nicely.
  4. Serves 4 to 6.
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