Watching Chef Tal cook a vegan celery root soup on a recent episode of Oprah reminded me that you don't need heavy cream or milk to give soup a luxurious creamy texture. Cooking vegetables or beans in a broth or water and then blending at a high speed will actually do the trick.

With a hefty bunch of asparagus sitting in my refrigerator over the weekend, I decided to make a cream of asparagus soup.

Cream of Asparagus Soup

You start by sautéing onions and asparagus in vegan margarine, and then you add broth and bring it to a simmer. The next step—blending all the ingredients—is what creates the smooth texture, but I also like to add just a little unsweetened soy milk to make it extra creamy.

A touch of lemon and cayenne in the soup add tartness and spice that help balance out the strong asparagus flavor. And because of that full flavor, I must warn you that this recipe is strictly for asparagus lovers. Enjoy!

Vegan meats have been popping up on menus around the country, even at restaurants that are known for serving dishes with animal ingredients. With so many options out there, we decided to find out which are the best. Today we're bringing you the best vegan meatballs—made from ingredients like tofu or veggies, not the flesh of dead animals—served at restaurants across the U.S. So who has the best? The winner is …

Ike's Place, San Francisco, California: The runners-up come from all corners of the country, but Ike's has the best vegan meatballs in America. For a sandwich shop that isn't even all vegetarian, Ike's has a huge vegan menu, including two vegan meatball favorites: the Vegan Meatless Mike and the Not So Sloppy Ike.

And the runners-up and their winning dishes are:

•The Greenery Raw Food Café, Encinitas, California: Veggie-walnut meatballs served on zucchini noodles with marinara sauce

•Gianna's Grille, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: "Haastile" Meatball Sub, with sautéed onions, green peppers, and mushrooms

•Caravan of Dreams, New York City: "Live Love Boat," featuring savory almond-Brazil nut meatballs served with sliced tomatoes on a Napa cabbage leaf boat with mango chutney and marinara

•Twisted Tree Café, Asbury Park, New Jersey: Baked tofu meatball wrap served with tomato sauce and vegan cheese

•Buddha Hut, Worcester, Massachusetts: Italian meatball soup

•Portobello Vegan Trattoria, Portland, Oregon: Spaghetti and meatballs

•The Breakroom Café, Oakland, California: Homemade vegan meatballs served on a French panini and topped with vegan mozzarella, upon request

•Spiral Diner & Bakery, Dallas, Texas: "Sketti n' Meatballs" made with tasty soy meatballs, served on spaghetti with homemade marinara sauce and topped with pine nuts and pesto

•One World Café, Baltimore, Maryland: Vegan meatball sub sandwich

Did we leave your favorite vegan meatball spot off the list? Tell us about it by leaving a comment below!

To thank PETA's hardworking interns, we often fill them up with free vegan food—lots of free food. With Halloween right around the corner, we decided to thank our current team with a haunting Halloween cupcake party, hosted by Mylie.

Everyone had a chance to decorate their own masterpieces, as you can see here:

Haunting Halloween Cupcakes

To help you host your own cupcake party, I've compiled a few of my favorite recipes for the cake and icing. You can mix and match the cupcakes with different types of icing using these recipes or go the easy route and use store-bought icing.

Cupcakes

•Chocolate Stout

•Basic Vanilla

•Horchata

Icing

•Easy Chocolate

•Creepy 'Cream Cheese'

•Fluffy 'Buttercream'

And if you're in need of decoration inspiration, check out these ghosts, spiders, mummies, and skeletons. Happy Halloween!

Many people, myself included, are guilty of using food as merely a vehicle for condiments. If you're known to use a tablespoonful of ketchup per fry, then, yes, I'm talking about you. One of the most addicting condiments (OK, some say it's more of a sauce) is gravy.

Pan-Seared Seitan With Mushroom Gravy

Mushroom gravy can easily be made using the margarine, vegetables, and herbs that are left over after pan-searing seitan—and this method will result in more flavorful gravy.

The key to getting the gravy right is to make a roux out of margarine and flour, cooking until it begins to brown. Then slowly add vegetable broth and additional seasonings to taste.

The pan-seared seitan is delicious, but the gravy is definitely the star of the show. Enjoy!

I'm not sure where the tradition comes from, but in Louisiana, Mondays are reserved for red beans and rice. The dish is a Creole staple in my home state—and for good reason. The beans are simmered for hours until they reach an almost creamy consistency, and the combination of vegan Worcestershire sauce, liquid smoke, and a touch of spice gives this simple dish a complex flavor.

Louisiana Red Beans and Rice

The longer you cook your pot of beans, the creamier the outcome, but no matter what consistency you achieve, the beans are perfect served over a heaping scoop of white rice and a big piece of crusty French bread. Enjoy!

Flipping through the pages of a classic by M.F.K. Fisher or James Beard—or even a recent issue of Gourmet—might be an upsetting experience for some vegans. It can be easy to feel left out if you focus more on what you won't eat than what you will—but I don't have that problem.

Immersing myself in the gourmet food world, regardless of whether I'd eat the items mentioned, is always enjoyable, and that's partly because I'm holding out hope that plant-based cuisine will one day be a bigger part of that world. I think that day is finally here.

For the first time ever, a vegan chef will cook an animal-free meal at the James Beard House in New York City.

The James Beard Award
Picasa/Creative Commons

Chef Rich Landau, co-owner and chef of Horizons, a vegan restaurant in Philadelphia, has the honor of creating the first cruelty-free meal at the James Beard House on November 3. Tickets are available to the public and can be ordered online.

James Beard was known for turning American food into a cohesive and gourmet cuisine. Finally, vegan recipes will be recognized as a significant part of it when Chef Landau takes advantage of this prestigious opportunity.

Landau says, "It has always been my mission to create interesting and delicious food that just so happens to be vegan," and I can't wait to see what he cooks up at the culinary mecca. If you are lucky enough to attend the event, please let me know what you think!

Anyone who has a soft spot for sauerkraut, relish, or even kimchi will certainly be a fan of chow chow. It's a Southern condiment (not just a dog) that's often used on greens and beans.

Black eyed peas topped with chow chow

Chow chow can be made from a variety of bases, such as tomatoes or a combination of peppers, but the most common main ingredient is shredded cabbage. Most recipes call for canning the condiment, which comes in sweet and spicy varieties, but that seems just a bit too complicated for me.

The chow chow recipe I use is one of the few "canning-free" options I've found, and it comes from a barbecue cookbook at SeriousEats.com.

Enjoy!

Remember when Oprah went vegan for three weeks? To make her transition to a vegan diet as delicious as it was healthy, she had vegan chef Tal Ronnen whip up all her meat-free meals—and now you can have Chef Tal in your kitchen. How? By entering to win his new cookbook!

In The Conscious Cook, Chef Tal, who also catered Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi's vegan wedding and prepared the first vegan dinner at the U.S. Senate, offers a diverse menu that goes far beyond veggie burgers and pasta. Recipes include Pine Nut and Basil-Seared Gardein Chicken With "Lobster" Mushroom Beurre Blanc and Artichoke and Oyster Mushroom Rockefeller, just to name a couple.

Head on over to PETA.org now through October 30 to enter the contest!

New York City is known for great restaurants, and vegetarian restaurants are no exception. You could borough-hop for a week and never eat at the same place twice if you didn't want to. And one of the restaurants that you might find yourself revisiting is Chef Amanda Cohen's Dirt Candy, where the focus is on vegetables—and where everything on the menu is available as vegan or vegetarian.

I'm happy to announce that Amanda has been named "Chef of the Month" for October and has given us a little insight to her food background and philosophy. Check out our Q&A with Amanda below, and be sure not to miss her recipes at the end of the post.

Chef of the Month: Amanda Cohen

Where did you train to become a chef?
The Natural Gourmet.

What type of cuisine do you focus on?
Well, I've cooked vegetarian, vegan, raw, and meat, but Dirt Candy is where I get to do what I love: vegetarian cooking.

Do you have a favorite cooking method?
My philosophy is: whatever works. Everything at Dirt Candy comes in a vegan and a non-vegan version, and I really like skipping back and forth between vegan and vegetarian cooking. Vegan cooking is challenging in a way that's a lot of fun. It wakes your brain up. And I actually think that the Orange Tofu we serve is better vegan (we use coconut milk in the sauce instead of butter).

What are your favorite ingredients to work with?
Right now, what I'm really into are potatoes. And even though beet season is wrapping up, I'll probably stay obsessed with them until the year's last beet is pulled up out of the dirt.

What are the most important elements in cooking great vegetarian cuisine?
Vegetarian food should be about what you can eat, not what you can't. Aping the "protein, sauce, side of veg" format of the standard meat dish just reminds omnivorous diners of what they're not eating, and it doesn't do justice to vegetables, fruits, grains, and all the other fun stuff we get to play with. To me, breaking the "meat replacement" mold is the most important element in cooking great vegetarian food.

What is the key to getting meat-eaters to enjoy vegetarian food?
One of the things I'm most proud of is how many committed carnivores have been dragged into Dirt Candy against their will by friends or significant others and have come up to me afterwards and said how much they loved it. I think the key is that you have to have fun, but you also have to take it seriously. You have to have fun because that's what eating out is about. The more fun you have in the kitchen, the more fun your customers are going to have. On the other hand, you have to take what you do seriously. You have to be able to cook as well as any classically trained French chef, and you have to be willing to have your food compared to restaurants that "cheat" by putting bacon on everything.

What, in your opinion, does the future of plant-based cuisine hold?
I think the challenge to all of us is that we have to be better. Vegetarian chefs are like the Ginger Rogers to the omnivore chef's Fred Astaire: Our job is harder because we have to do everything they do, only backwards and in high heels. We have to work twice as hard for half the respect. Despite this, we desperately need to engage with the mainstream food world, because it's not enough to preach to the choir anymore. Chefs and owners, myself included, need to step up our game. We need to become the 4.0 GPA overachievers of food.

And there is a huge opportunity here. Most omnivore chefs would rather spend their time playing with pork belly and offal because that's the kind of "rock and roll" cooking the food press currently celebrates. Vegetables are considered unworthy of their attention. Which means that young, hungry chefs who want to make a mark and who are really passionate about vegetables have a wide-open field in which to play. Vegetables are like the Wild West of cooking right now—there are no rules. Every day in my kitchen I feel like I'm on the best downhill plunge of the coolest roller coaster ever built.

In your opinion, what vegetarian dish or type of food is most frequently prepared poorly and why?
I think dishes with some kind of meat replacement like seitan or tempeh or mock meat usually wind up tasting pretty boring because they often use a mishmash of techniques and unpleasant-to-work-with products. And that's really too bad. Mock meats come out of the Chinese temple cooking tradition, and when you have Chinese vegetarian food done right it's mind-blowingly good.

If you were stranded on a deserted island and could only eat one kind of ethnic food, what would it be?
Indian. It has the world's oldest and best vegetarian food tradition, and it's one of the world's greatest cuisines to boot—and to my shame I know too little about it.

Can you give us one great cooking tip for aspiring vegetarian chefs?
If you're aspiring to work in a professional kitchen, work on your technique. Find the toughest, busiest restaurant you can and get a job on their line. Show up for work every day. Stay for at least a year. By the time your year is up, you'll either realize that working in a professional kitchen isn't for you and you'll move on to something that makes you happier, or you'll be on your way to having an indestructible technique that'll make you a ninja master in the kitchen.

For the home cook: fearless experimentation. Find the ethnic grocery stores in your neighborhood and buy copies of Linda Bladholm's The Asian Grocery Store Demystified. She's got one for Asian grocery stores, one for Indian grocery stores, and one for Mexican grocery stores. Take the books with you when you shop. Buy things you've never tried. There are so many awesome vegetarian traditions around the world that you can steal from, you'll never get bored. Then get one good knife (and learn how to sharpen it), one good pan, and the world will be your oyster (mushroom).

What are some ingredients that you recommend vegetarians and vegans have in their kitchens to cook with?
Splurge on good oils. Truffle oil, almond oil, hazelnut oil, or pistachio oil are all really nice ways to finish off a dish. You can drizzle them over just about anything, cooked or raw, and they add an extra, savory dimension.

Recipes

•Sweet Carrot Risotto

•Carrot Dumplings

•Carrot Ribbons

Many northerners have been shocked, and somewhat horrified, to find that many southerners actually love the taste and texture of boiled peanuts. My fiancé is one of them. He says that the texture was the hardest—or rather, softest—thing for him to warm up to. But he, like many, eventually came around. I, on the other hand, was raised on the salty snack by my dad. Boiled peanuts have always been one of his favorite foods and he is one of the few people I know who actually make his own at home, so it was inevitable that I, too, would love them.

During the summer in the South, you can find many stands along the side of the road that offer boiled peanuts by the bag, and they most commonly come in two varieties—plain and Cajun. Plain boiled peanuts are great on their own when cooked very well done and with gobs of salt, but Cajun peanuts are really where it's at.

Boiling the peanuts with Cajun seasoning (I recommend Zatarain's Crab & Shrimp Boil, but you can experiment with others) for hours really infuses the flavor, and the extra red pepper flakes kick up the heat. You can always omit the red pepper if you'd like. The result of the long cook time is a soft peanut with a texture similar to a cooked bean and loaded with spicy Cajun flavor. And with each peanut you crack open, you may find a small amount of the briny, spicy juice inside as special treat.

Amy is out this week, but that doesn't mean that the mouthwatering recipes on the blog will stop. We'll be featuring a "best of" series for the next week, highlighting some of the VegCooking blog's most popular posts from the last two years. Enjoy!

Tofu might seem unfamiliar to many new vegetarians and nonvegetarians, but the good news is that when properly prepared, tofu can be delicious. And by "properly," I mean cooking the tofu my favorite way—pan-frying it until it's golden and chewy.

Perfect Tofu

To achieve this, you can freeze your tofu overnight, and let it thaw before cooking it for a short amount of time. But if you're not one for planning ahead, then your tofu must be cooked for a long time to reach the chewy stage. There's simply no way around it. I often see recipes that call for tofu to be cooked for just a few minutes, but if you do that, you'll probably be left with a very soft texture.

The only other requirement for perfect tofu is to finish off the pan-fried soy protein with a splash of soy sauce. It's a great first layer of flavor that can easily be built upon.

Enjoy!

Amy is out this week, but that doesn't mean that the mouthwatering recipes on the blog will stop. We'll be featuring a "best of" series for the next week, highlighting some of the VegCooking blog's most popular posts from the last two years. Enjoy!

After a long honeymoon filled with eating food that was far from healthy, I find myself still on a junk-food kick. I decided that I needed to start eating some vegetables again—but that they should be prepared in a way that is still almost sinful. That's how I stumbled upon this recipe for spinach and artichoke dip.

Sure, the name sounds healthy, but when you add a cup of vegan mayo and cheese to any veggies, you certainly cancel out almost all health benefits from the main ingredients. But, that shouldn't scare you away from making this delicious dip every once in a while. It's wonderful—and easy—as an occasional appetizer that can be eaten in small portions.

I visited Savannah on my honeymoon and saw the line formed outside Paula Deen's restaurant—no matter what time it was, night or day—and I'm certain this recipe would make the queen of Southern cuisine proud! Enjoy.