I have to say, this blog series is so much fun to put together each week. Even though I reply to your comments and questions a couple of times each day on the blog, making this round-up inspires me to dig a bit deeper and try new things to help troubleshoot. I also learn so many interesting things from you all, and absolutely love sharing your tips for others to read! Let’s dive in, shall we?!
Q1. Hey Angela! With how popular superfood powders are, I’m curious if you consume any on a regular basis?
Hi Monika, I can’t say that I use many superfood powders! They tend to be expensive and I’d personally rather spend that money on quality produce. I also want my recipes to be accessible. That said, there are a couple I like to use: DoMatcha Organic Green Tea Powder (I make green tea lattes with it and add it to smoothies) and Sprout Living Broccoli & Kale Sprout Mix. The latter is a powder made from broccoli and kale sprouts that have been gently dried and milled—I also add this to smoothies for a plant-powered boost!
Q2. Your coffee always looks so delicious on Insta Stories! Do you mind sharing exactly how you make it (including the proportions used)? My track record isn’t that good when I “wing” a recipe!
That’s too funny, Susan—I’ve definitely had my own fair share of “winging it” disasters! I love to start my day with French press coffee, and have a couple different ways of making it. I’m not a coffee expert by any means, but I’m happy to share both ways that I prepare it!
Basic French press coffee:
I start by grinding coffee beans—I like the “Mug Shot” organic coffee from Toronto-based brand 23 Degrees Roastery, and find grinding the beans morning-of makes them extra fresh and flavourful. I scoop two heaping tablespoons of ground coffee into my small (2-cup/500 mL) French press (from Ikea). Next, I bring a small pot of water to a boil before turning off the heat to let the water sit for 15 seconds or so. Then I pour just enough water into the French press to saturate my coffee grounds before giving the mixture a stir. After this pre-soak, I add the rest of the hot water to the French press, filling to about a 1/2-inch below the top of the vessel. I secure the lid of the French press and set my timer for 3 minutes. After 3 minutes, I press the coffee with the plunger and pour it into my mug before stirring in a mix of Nutpods French Vanilla Creamer and Califia Unsweetened Vanilla Almond Milk.
Blender coffee:
I follow all of the basic French press coffee-making steps above except for adding the creamer, and instead I pour the steeped coffee into my blender. Then I add 1/2 tablespoon of Nutiva’s MCT (Medium-chain triglyceride) oil along with a tablespoon of Nutpods French vanilla creamer. Finally, I secure the lid and blend the coffee for about 20 to 30 seconds (tip: make sure your blender lid is vented as it can explode if it’s not!). After blending, I pour into a mug and enjoy!
Full disclosure: When I need coffee yesterday (which is pretty much 98% of the time), I skip both the 15-second water resting and pre-soak periods, simply filling the French press with boiled water (this is technically a “no-no” as you can burn the coffee, but trust me when I say I’ve compared both methods and my sleepy taste buds tell me they’re virtually the same, lol). Then I follow the rest of the procedure as listed. On the average day, I like to have one of these in the morning, one in the afternoon (my caffeine cut-off is 3pm!), and a mild Matcha green tea thrown in between. #dontjudge ;)
Q3. Hi Angela, I want to make your new Easy Vegan Sugar Cookies as a surprise for my vegan husband. :) Instead of electric beaters, do you think I can blend the pink frosting in a food processor? Thanks!
Hi Nathalie, what a cute surprise for your husband! I wouldn’t have thought to make frosting in the food processor…such a fun idea! Your question made me super curious, so I just had to test it out in my food processor to see. I’m happy to report that the frosting came together quite well with this method. I tried adding the vegan butter first to “whip” it, but I found the butter just stuck to the sides of the processor bowl, so I’d recommend adding all of the ingredients into the processor at the same time. I also found that I needed to add a bit more almond milk than usual and had to stop to scrape the bowl down a few times throughout. I hope this helps you have pink frosting success!
Q4. Hi, is tomato paste the same as tomato purée?
Hey cb, Great question! Tomato purée and tomato paste are made using different methods, which accounts for their distinct flavours and textures. Tomato paste is made by cooking tomatoes slowly until they become thick and pasty, resulting in tomato paste’s sweet, rich, and intense flavour (similar to sundried tomatoes). Tomato paste tends to be sold in small cans or jars, whereas I find tomato purée is mostly sold in larger quantities. Tomato purée is made more quickly, cooking tomatoes briefly to soften before processing into purée, resulting in a thinner consistency and flavour more like that of fresh tomatoes. In the photo above, tomato paste is on the left and tomato purée is on the right. (A special thanks to Livestrong for the distinction.) With all this talk of tomato sauce, I’m now craving spaghetti squash with marinara! lol.
Q5. Hi! Your Roasted Carrot and Dill Hummus recipe sounds amazing!! Just wondering if it’s best made the day you want to eat it or just as good made the night before?
Hey Larissa, My recipe tester and I found the flavours were a bit better the day of, but it’ll still keep well in the fridge for 3 to 5 days. Homemade hummus thickens when chilling, so it’s probably best to let it come to room temperature before serving so your dip can soften (if you can wait that long!). :)
Q6. Hi Angela! I love the rebranding of the Friday FAQs series to “Ask Angela”—I think that’s a great idea! I’ve wanted to ask you for ages whether you have an Instant Pot and whether any of your recipes would be suited for it? What with this Instant Pot craze going on now, I’d love to be able to make your delicious recipes quickly in this new gadget!
Hey Sandra, ohh you know what? I’ve been asked this question a lot lately and it’s making me super curious about Instant Pots! I don’t have one as I’ve been trying to avoid purchasing another small appliance, but I have considered it. I’d love to hear about your own experience, though!
I’m also curious how many OSG readers use an Instant Pot these days, and would love to hear from you all in the comments!
Do you have one and would you recommend it (if so, which version/model do you have)? Have you tried any of my recipes in the Instant Pot successfully, and if so, which ones worked best? Would you like to see new Oh She Glows recipes developed specifically for use in an Instant Pot? Thank you so much for chiming in! I’ve been wanting to ask about this for a while. I may also do a poll on Insta Stories soon too. :)
“I love your 10-Spice Vegetable Soup! I found this recipe a year ago and make it about twice a month. It is so versatile. I can make it very spicy for our family or less spicy for those who do not love spicy food. I shared it with some co-workers and they love it too! Thanks so much for the amazing work you put into your site and recipes. We are paying attention and the world is getting healthier one recipe at a time thanks to you Angela! Keep up the great work!”
Hey Lyne, It really means the world to me to read this! I agree about how easy it is to customize the spice level in the 10-Spice Soup. I always add a lot more to my own portion (I’ve been known to dump it on!) because I can’t get enough of that intense flavour. Getting healthier one recipe at a time…I LOVE that!! Thank you.
I have an instant pot – and what I’ve made so far I love. I think my family’s favorite is apple sauce – so quick and delicious (https://www.pressurecookrecipes.com/instant-pot-applesauce/). I’ve made other things too – including lasagne and other meat based dishes. I’d love to see recipes for the instant pot from you :)
Get an Instant Pot. You will love it. I do lots in it but I especially love how easy it is to do beans. I throw them in the freezer for convenience. No more cans…well almost. My husband can’t believe how good chick peas are. He hated the canned versions. I’ve had mine for 3 years now and it gets lots of use. I have the IP Lux 6 qt.
I am glad to have purchased an Instant Pot. We were going to purchase a larger Slow Cooker and learned of the risk of lead in he ceramic SC inserts; the IP insert is not ceramic. With a seven month old baby, I can’t cook on the gas stove while taking care of her. Love that the IP allows quick cooking and no lead. I agree about avoiding too many appliances and the IP can slow cook too, so you can trade out your SC for the IP one for one. I would LOVE to see Oh She Glows recipes for the IP. The ones I have found are good but one SC recipe I adapted for IP is not quite as good so it would be great to have your wonderful recipes work in a fraction of the time! Thanks! PS first blog post ever just wanted to share and would love to see recipes!
I got an instant pot for christmas and love it. I am an avid canner, and was always frustrated when I wanted to can something and struggled to pressure cook it (in the pressure canner as it is faster) and then magically clean the canner and keep the ingredients hot and the canner hot… (not possible). Since getting it, making applesauce and stock to can is a breeze, and it making batches of beans from dry to cooked in under an hour is pretty spectacular too. It isn’t magic as some say, it is simply an electric pressure cooker, but if you don’t want to babysit the dial gauge and want to save a ton of time in the kitchen, it is a great investment.
I bought an Instant Pot last year and it does take some practice to get used to the settings/timings. But, now that I have used mine many times…I LOVE it! I make soups, rice and grains, beans, curries. The sauté feature is VERY important to me so that I can brown veggies/tofu/etc. before settings the cooker.
I have an instapot and use it a LOT. I’ve had it for several years. I premake beans to be frozen in individual servings. Every soup I make is made in the instapot now, including soups from your blog. I have found that sometimes I need to add a bit more spices to get the same flavor factor. The hands-off feature to the soup making is what I LOVE. Saute the onions, add everything else, set the timer for whatever (usually 5-9 minutes if it is vegetables) and come back at dinner time. SO EASY!!! Maybe throw in some greens just before eating. I LOVE it!
I have the 6-quart Duo Instant Pot – love it! I would very much like to have your recipes converted to the IP – or at least a conversion “chart” to help us do it individually. It is wonderful for beans and grains and vegetable stock and soups and chili and yogurt and some veggies. For example, do broccoli using 0 (zero) minutes and it is great – cooks enough in the pressure build up stage. Great for baked sweet and white potatoes – faster than oven but better than microwave. It is a great kitchen tool.
We have an Instant Pot. We love it. It makes cooking grains so much easier. We use it a lot for rice, beans, quinoa, etc. All those things that I usually get wrong by cooking manually. This makes them so much easier and they generally turn out perfect.
This was a great reminder to make your 10 spice soup again. I made it in the Fall (for non-vegan friends and family) and everyone loved it. I froze some for work lunches and it thawed beautifully. My husband made fun of me for the GIANT batch of 10 spice mix I made, but now we put it on everything and he thinks I’m a genius (OK that’s a stretch).
haha we do that too Michelle! (Make a huuuuuge batch and put it on everything!). I haven’t found something that it doesn’t taste good on. Roasted veggies, soups, chili, sauteed veggies, avocado toast, hummus, etc. Last night I used it to “doctor up” a store-bought soup and it went from bland to amazing. So glad you guys love it too.
Hi Angela! I’ve used a stove top pressure cooker for a few years now and just received an Instant Pot last xmas from my mom (the 8qt Fagor Lux Multi-Cooker). With our first baby due early March (or really, any moment at this point!), I’ve been trying to become an Instant Pot pro because it’s a lot more hands-off than the stove top pressure cooker – so I think it will be better fit in our “new normal” with babe! Supposedly you can get more precision with the stove top pressure cooker, but honestly I haven’t noticed a notable difference, so I’ve become a big Instant Pot fan.
I’ve made over 125+ of your recipes at this point (thank you for being amazing!!). Since your recipes are on regular rotation in our home, I would absolutely LOVE pressure cooker instructions to save me in prep time. To adjust your recipe I’ll usually google similar recipes for guidance. For example, if I were to make your Favourite Vegan Chili, I would google “pressure cooker vegan chili recipe” or “instant pot vegan chili recipe” and then cross reference to adjust your recipe for the pressure cooker. Now that I’ve become better acquainted with the pressure cooker, I can wing it more often but still sometimes need to cross reference other recipes.
I’ve made a whole bunch of your recipes in the pressure cooker, but to name a few… African Peanut Stew, Favourite Vegan Chili, Metabolism-Revving Spicy Cabbage Soup, Creamy Thai Carrot Sweet Potato Soup, Black Bean Sweet Potato and Red Quinoa Soup, and Detox Eat Your Greens Soup. Typically, I use the Saute Function to saute the aromatics for a few minutes, then add veggies and saute a little more, then add broth, beans and cover to pressure cook. After pressure cooking is complete, I’ll open the lid, throw in the greens and cover again for a moment to wilt.
I often double your recipes which on the stove (sans pressure cooker) I find takes quite a bit longer than the regular recipe. As such, the pressure cooker is great because the times are independent of quantity, so I can double up your recipes without underestimating the amount of time it will take to cook.
Also of note, I’ve wanted to share some of my postpartum food prep with you and a little experiment. I’ve been making your soups and freezing in ball jars. However, I do prefer freshly cooked food so with pending postpartum chaos and lazy brain in mind, I decided to conduct a little Instant Pot experiment on your African Peanut Stew recipe. I was curious if I could prep and freeze all raw ingredients in ball jars now (not the same as fresh but hey!) and then skip multiple recipe steps and instead simply throw everything into the Instant Pot (so, no sauteing etc) at once, and still end up with a delicious meal. I tried it (without the pre-freezing), and by golly it worked! I even went so far as to use soaked chickpeas (which I soaked for 10+ hours to be sure they were nice and hydrated). There was a little less depth of flavor than if I had sauteed ingredients, however, unnoticeable to the unfamiliar palate. I threw in fresh kale after cooking (per my prior methodoloogy description), garnished with cilantro and roasted peanuts, and voila, dinner! Not sure I could do this for all recipes, but a few very flavorful ones could work with this method (I was thinking My Favourite Vegan Chili, Creamy Thai Carrot Sweet Potato Soup and Metabolism-Revving Spicy Cabbage Soup).
Throwing another request into the mix… the incredible advantage of the pressure cooker, and why I bought one in the first place, is to rehydrate dried beans. It is SO simple and as such the pressure cooker should be a fixture in any vegan or vegetarian kitchen. You don’t have to waste hours attending a boiling pot (or rather accidentally forgetting about that pot!). I’d love to see your recipes integrated with instructions for use of dried or overnight-soaked beans, as I find this integration more complex with a lot more google studying and cross referencing.
Hope this book of a comment helps and provides some insight. And thank you for all your content production of late – loving it. Those Triple Threat Almond Bites are next on my list for a freeze-now breastfeeding snack. Cheers!!
Hey Trinity, Oh my goodness, thank you for your insight! This is fantastic. :) I absolutely love the Peanut stew experiment you tried out…that was going to be one of my first experiments if I did get an IP! Love that you could throw it all in there. Do you remember how long it took to cook?
All the best with your little one’s impending arrival! Sounds like you will have so many nourishing meals ready to fuel you!
Hi Angela,
I have an Instant Pot (that’s the brand). I read about pressure cookers about 2 years ago and after doing my research, purchased my instant pot. I LOVE it, use it a few times a week and have told all of my friends about it. My mom bought one and then, she told her friends. Many purchased the instant pot. I can get home at 5pm and have a delicious dinner on the table for my family at 5:30pm that is nutritious, delicious with very little clean up. I highly recommend getting one! I would LOVE to make one of your recipes in my instant pot. I think I could figure it out – I could definitely do so with your soups. Stay tuned on that! Please let me know if you have any questions. ps. I would love to share my business with you! It’s all about empowering women with whole foods! Best always, Teri
Yes I have an InstantPot and love it for beans, soups, stews, rice, and sauteing! I would like more recipes for it.
I have an Instant Pot and would love it if you developed recipes for it!! I use it all the time and definitely recommend. I have the 6qt IP-DUO.
I don’t have an Instant Pot. Being a minimalist with very little cupboard or counter space in my studio apartment and not liking to cook much, it’s something that I don’t really think that I need right now. But like another person said, if you made your Instant Pot recipes adaptable to Dutch ovens or slow-cookers, that would be fine with me. Your recipes are so good. I have however, found space for your cookbooks. :-)
Hi! I love your Endurance Crackers, but wondering how to make them crunchier. They were nice and crispy when they first came out of the oven but as soon as I stored them they went soft. I also tried flattening out the “loaves” of dough to make them thinner, thinking that would make them crispier but didn’t work. Any ideas? Thanks!
Hey Claire, So glad you enjoy the Endurance crackers! Yes sometimes storing them can soften them a bit. I tend to freeze them and find they remain crispy. Another thing you can try is storing them in a paper bag that isn’t full “sealed” to allow air to escape. It’s also important to allow them to cool fully before storing or the heat/moisture will get trapped in the container and soften the crackers. I hope this helps! :)
Thanks, Angela. I’ll try your suggestions. I can’t tell you how much I LOVE your cookbooks. I have so enjoyed trying out the recipes and together with my 2 young children, love to go through them and pick out dinner plans for the week. Thank you.
Aww that’s so sweet to hear that you go through my books with your kids, Claire! Adriana has gotten into that with me lately and it’s so cute. Thanks for all your support! :)
We truly enjoy every recpe we’ve tied from your cookbook and have many favorites. We do have an Instapot and would continue to be inspired if you published an electronic pressure cooker book.
Yes I have an instant pot and would love if some of your recipes were modified for it, or even better new recipes for it!
Hi Angela,
I love your blog and cookbooks!
I do have an instant pot and it is AMAZING! You can do recipes that normally take hours to make in less than 30 mins – the thing that takes the longest is cutting the veggies. I would love if you adapted your recipes to it as its hard to pull myself away from your recipes to use others!
I have the Instant Pot brand 6qt size. We just got it 2 weeks ago and have used it 4 times. I made rice in 12 minutes! It was pretty exciting! Anyway I too wanted to ask you about recipes for one because while we do eat animal products I try to minimize them and it seems that most of the recipes I have seen are all meat based. I was thinking about trying to do a bean based soup today so we will see how that goes;). I’m not a gadget/small appliance person so I really thought about getting one before I got it but I think this one will be worth it. I’m already planning on getting rid of my rice cooker and the slow cooker might be on its way out too. Thanks for all your hard work! Your blog kind of changed my life when I found it. It’s been at least 6 yrs maybe longer, but back then I was in the haze of little kids.
Yes! Please add some instant pot recipes! I have one, too (I actually have the Fagor Multipot) and I would love to be able to use it more!