Chocolate Rum Pudding Cake

Here’s the Chocolate Rum Pudding Cake from Vegan With a Vengeance, made for yet another potluck– perhaps the preferred party mode of grad students everywhere? If you are going to make this cake, make sure your springform pan is fairly watertight!! I made this a couple of years ago in a better pan and it was gooey, cakey, rummy, and delicious. This time, most of the liquid poured out of the pan almost immediately (luckily it had been placed on a baking sheet) and I had to pour it back on top of the cake layer, partway into cooking. Some of it still spilled after that, and the scooped remains are what you see glazing the top of the cake in the end. Not my smoothest baking moments.

Lemon Caper “Chicken”

I wanted to dress up a Gardein fake chicken breast, so in its pan juices post cooking I reduced some white wine, lemon juice, capers, rosemary, salt and pepper. Sauce! Plus kale. And brown rice.

Gussied-Up Gumbo

Everyone living alone who likes to cook should take up the habit of freezing leftovers in single-sized portions. There’s my prescriptive manifesto-like statement for the day! This is the gumbo I made ages ago out of Veganomicon. For something different, I cooked up a Gardein fake chicken breast and added it, and ate it with some fancy herb flatbread form the store.

Apple-Pecan Pie

From the Farm Journal’s Complete Pie Cookbook, 1965, my favourite cookbook of all time. According to the recipe, “You’ll like what the nuts do to apple pie–both in flavor and texture.” I brought this to a potluck and it was devoured in about two seconds.

Apple-Pecan Pie
Unbaked 9 or 10 inch pie shell
1/4 c. chopped pecans
6 c. sliced peeled apples (now, supposedly this is about two pounds of apples; this turned out to be a little too much for my 10″ pan. I used five big empires, I think, and had leftovers, but since they were already coated in sugar and cinnamon it wasn’t too difficult to eat them alone)
1 c. sugar (I used closer to 3/4 c.: I find this cookbook has a bit of a sweeter tooth for fruit pies than we do nowadays.)
2 t. flour
1/2 t. cinnamon
1/4 t. nutmeg
Spicy Pecan Topping (recipe below: this cookbook also calls “spicy” anything with more than 1/4 t. cinnamon!)

Sprinkle chopped pecans in pie shell (see photo below.) Combine apples, sugar, flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg in a large bowl. Turn into pie shell and spread (or “press”–mine was not exactly spreadable) Spicy Pecan Topping over apple mixture. Bake at 425F 40-45 minutes, or until apples are tender and pie top is browned. (If you use pastry cutouts on top like I did, watch for burning– you may have to use the old tinfoil-cover-deflection trick.)
Spicy Pecan Topping: Mix 1/4 cup softened Earth Balance (margarine), 1/2 c. brown sugar, 1/3 c. flour, and 1/2 t. cinnamon until completely blended, then mix in 1/4 c. chopped pecans.

A word on pastry: I use the recipe from the same book that says to cut 3/4 c. shortening into 2 c. flour mixed with 1 t. salt. To this mixture you sprinkle 4-5 T. cold water, a tablespoon at a time, mixing lightly with a fork, until you can press it into a rollable ball. NOW, this recipe works great with Crisco. But I got my hands on some non-hydrogenated Earth Balance shortening sticks, which really improve the texture of pastry. Non-hydrogenated shortening doesn’t have that filmy aftertaste that Crisco can have in pastry. HOWEVER, because this better shortening is so hard-textured, you have to bend the classic pastry rules. The shortening needs to be left out on the counter awhile to soften up–breaking pastry rule no. 1, that all ingredients should be stone cold. Second, I find that the amount of water needs to be played with: I think I used somewhere around 8 T. to get the pastry to stick together satisfactorily.

Ful and Quinoa Tabouleh

Oh dear! Everything about cooking and blogging got away from me this week. Too many other kinds of fun and work got in the way! Well, I’m back. I was also putting off updating because I thought I should take the time to explain how I made ful, even though I didn’t really do it properly and cooked it too long. But then I realised a picture update is better than no update at all, so here it is! I went loosely off the ful recipe in World Food Cafe, which is a great cookbook. For the quinoa tabouleh I just mixed quinoa with parsley, red pepper, cucumber, lemon, olive oil,a nd a bit of cumin and salt and pepper.

Tofu Club, and Cookie

Crazy weekend, no updates! We went to Guelph for the afternoon on Saturday and went to The Cornerstone, where I ate this lovely vegan tofu club sandwich, and crazy cowboy cookie. I love restaurants that know what “vegan” means!

Cookies and Dip

A two-item post, because the broccoli pesto used as a dip the next day for pita is really just a pretty repeat from the pasta entry, and the new item, peanut butter white chocolate cookies, only got blurry photos (I’m still getting used to this new-to-me camera!)
It’s really hard to find a good vegan peanut butter cookie recipe, I’ve found. But I tried this one and it’s really good! I also added about 3/4 c. vegan white chocolate chips. I figured, since vegan white chocolate chips taste mostly just like vanilla, that they’d taste particularly good in a peanut butter cookie. Maybe even better than in a cocoa-based cookie. They’d add a caramelly blondie-rather-than-brownie type effect. And I think my theory was right, in the end!

Broccoli Pesto Pasta

Here’s another recipe from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook using broccoli instead of herbs for pesto. Healthy and tasty! It calls for vegan parmesan, which is really best homemade. The recipe in the book for parmesan includes nutritional yeast, ground almonds, and miso. I find, though, that a mix of just nutritional yeast, ground almonds, and a bit of salt tastes better than the version with miso. Try it!

Cinnamon Fronch Toast

I went out for brunch with my friends and Sarah had cinnamon french toast, which put me in the mood for doing it up at home. The Fronch Toast recipe from Vegan With a Vengeance tastes remarkably like original french toast. The amount I used would be good to soak at least three pieces of bread. I used raisin bread and topped it with maple syrup and cinnamon.
How I did the recipe:
1/2 c. soymilk
1 T. cornstarch
2 T. chickpea flour
Mix up the ingredients, soak the (preferably a little dried out) bread slices in the mixture and transfer to hot oiled skillet, cooking each side for two minutes or a little more until brown on both sides.

C’est What Moroccan Stew

Restaurants rarely have good lighting for food pictures; nevertheless, this was a very tasty stew I had for dinner at C’est What in Toronto this weekend. They had so many vegetarian options, I was very impressed! I took a gamble and didn’t ask if this was vegan–not just vegetarian– beforehand, which risks an unexpected dollop of yogurt or something. But my risk paid off: it was as vegan as they come and very tasty. In terms of plating, a sprig of cilantro or something on top would have made it much prettier. But that’s my only complaint.