Good evening friends! I hope all of you are having a great week and more importantly a wonderful day today. 🙂 Today one of my friends came up to Chicago to visit me for the day. Her and I went to the North Avenue Beach, the Lincoln Park zoo and the conservatory, and window shopped. I highly recommend stopping at the zoo and conservatory if any of you are ever in Chicago. It’s nice, fun, and best of all free! Today was a fun filled day and we must have walked over 4 or 5 miles total the whole day. I’m glad to have a friend who likes being active just as much as I do! I dropped her off at the train station a few hours ago and I am definitely going to miss her if she can’t come back to the city before leaving for graduate school in a little over a week though. 🙁

On a brighter note, I took tons of pictures at the zoo and conservatory so I’m going to share a few of favorites below. Then, I’ll share a new recipe my boyfriend and I tried out using a vegetarian/vegan soy food called tempeh.

I found this recipe on page 36 in The Teen’s Vegetarian Cookbook by Judy Krizmanic. This recipe is very easy and relatively fast. I hope you all enjoy it! We did not make any major modifications to the original recipe this time.

BBQ tempeh “burgers”

yield: 2-4 servings

8 ounces of packaged tempeh (we got ours from Trader Joe’s)

2 tablespoons of vegetable oil

1/2 cup of bottled BBQ sauce ( we used Trader Joe’s Bold and Smokey Kansas City Style BBQ sauce)

1/2 cup water

1. Slice the tempeh into four sandwich sized slices.

2.  Combine the BBQ, vegetable oil and water into a bowl. Put the tempeh slices in the mixture and let soak for ten minutes.

3. After ten minutes, heat a skillet over medium heat and place the tempeh slices in the skillet (no need to spray the skillet). Save the sauce. Cook the slices for 3-4 minutes or until they start to brown.

4. After the slices start to brown, reduce the heat to low and pour the BBQ sauce over the slices. Cook for another five minutes or until the tempeh slices darken and the BBQ sauce starts to disappear.

5. Turn off the heat and serve the “burgers” on buns  with your favorite toppings. We topped ours with sweet peppers and spooned some of the extra BBQ sauce on them.

Have you ever had tempeh before? If so what did you make with it?