Welcome back to the Vegan Cookbook Challenge with Angela Liddon’s fantastic Oh She Glows Everyday. Sorry for the delay in this post – it was meant to go up on Monday but I was coming off of a busy five days of traveling (Massachusetts → Connecticut → New York → Connecticut → Massachusetts) and all of the walking and amazing vegan food that New York City has to offer. Needless to say, I’ve been exhausted the last few days and recovering from all of that fun! Last week was the ultimate challenge – I had to make all four recipes in one day before I left town for my trip! But, as the title of her cookbook implies, Angela has really compiled a great collection of easy, tasty recipes so it wasn’t as daunting as it sounds. To the recipes!
Week 4:
I am officially a smoothie bowl convert, even though they are so trendy and everyone takes pictures of them just like I do! But whatever. This blueberry- and banana-based bowl was super creamy and the almond butter definitely added to the flavor. I love having these smoothie bowls for breakfast with something crunchy on top like granola, hemp, or chia seeds, and it keeps me full for the whole morning. This bowl reminds me of an acai bowl from the place I used to work at – the blueberries and the nut butter create a nice peanut butter and jelly flavor, similar to this bowl. Yum!
These granola bars are so insanely good and the easiest things to throw together. They use freshly ground coffee, chocolate chips, chopped almonds, oats, and brown rice crisp cereal and they taste like a cross between a rice krispie treat, a Chewy granola bar, and a CoffeeBar. The coffee flavor makes one of these bars a great addition to an on-the-go breakfast or an invigorating snack. I stashed almost all of them in my backpack for my travels and they were the perfect bus/train treat. I had my mother and my brother try them too and they were both big fans! I normally have most of the ingredients on hand so I will definitely make these again.
This is one of those salads that you know is going to be good, but then you’re surprised by how good it actually is! It’s mostly basic ingredients – quinoa, chickpeas, kale, carrot, green onion, parsley, sun-dried tomatoes, toasted pumpkin seeds – but it is so freaking good! The dressing is mostly red wine vinegar and olive oil but it also has some dijon mustard and maple syrup to give it some depth. I brought some with me to Connecticut and enjoyed it just as much two days later, as did my mother who still mentions how good this salad was. The recipe calls for Lacinato kale but I had some regular kale in the fridge that was on its way out so I used that instead. Serve this to anyone who questions how much protein you’re getting as a vegan – it has approximately 15 grams of plant protein with the quinoa, chickpeas, kale, pumpkin seeds, and hemp seeds. Yum!
I used the strawberry chia seed jam that I made last week to make these oat crumble bars and yummmmmmmm. They were so easy to pull together, had very few ingredients, and made the perfect sweet snack (but not too sweet). I didn’t have any sunflower seed butter for the crust so I used almond butter instead and it did not disappoint. At first I was worried that my sunflower seeds were salted – I definitely wanted these bars to taste sweet, not like a salt lick! But they ended up being perfect, and just slightly salty, which was a nice contrast to the sweet strawberry jam. So I did take out the salt in this recipe because the seeds were salted, just FYI. I put a couple of these bars in the freezer and had one for breakfast this morning, a week and a half later, and it was heavenly! So good.
Love, Brenna
openbookkitchen.com 