Vegan Soul Kitchen

Here’s my first efforts of the Vegan Soul Kitchen cookbook! The recipes I used from the book were the Citrus Collards and the Rosemary Roasted Tofu. Both are fantastic recipes! The rosemary roasted tofu calls for paprika, and I used smoked hot paprika to excellent effect. Rounding out the plate are a roasted yam, sauteed plantains sprinkled with lime juice, and–the ultimate calorie upper for the meal–a tostada-like base of fried corn tortillas. This was a feast!

Elliott’s First Birthday Cake!

When Elliott was born, I made a deal with his mom Cathy that I’d be making his first birthday cake. It seemed like it would be ages away at the time! The theme was Mad Hatter and strawberries. I actually forgot that these were the formal themes, but with fairly dumb luck (or the aid of my subconscious) decorated the cake properly. The cake was the vanilla cake from here (well, actually the version from Papa Tofu that uses 3 c. of flour and 2/3 c. oil and 2 t. vanilla.) I made a full batch of batter into two smaller layers, and then an extra half batch to make the larger bottom layer. Between the layers I spread organic strawberry jam, and the icing was my usual wing-it: Crisco, Earth Balance, icing sugar, vanilla, bit of water. Lately I’ve been adding a sprinkling of this Dr. Oetker “Whip It” powder that’s meant to stabilize whipped cream. I think it helps icing set up better, especially when you’re adding water (I wanted the cake to be fairly soy-free this time). The strawberry was made with part of the icing that I coloured and flavoured with raspberry latte syrup. Hooray for Elliott!

Vegan Brunch!

As my friend Mack says: “It’s Morning Time! Time for more meals!”
Yes, the new Isa Moskowitz cookbook is here, Vegan Brunch. Here we have the Banana Flapjacks, a lovely recipe, and the Tempeh Bacon Revamped. I like the taste of the revamped tempeh bacon, but I’ve always had trouble with making tempeh bacon in a frying pan. It always breaks apart, won’t get crispy, and is hard on my nonstick pan. I think I’ll go back to baking it on a sheet…

Eggplant “Cheese” Pizza

This is one of the best pizzas I’ve made in a long time, if I do say so myself! The base is “I Can’t Believe it’s Not Cheese” sauce from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook. I know I use this constantly; I’m just so impressed with its richness. Unlike “cheese” sauces whose main base ingredient is nutritional yeast, tahini and miso predominate here, creating more of an earthy, blue cheese kind of bite.
(You combine 1/3 c. tahini, 2 T. nutritional yeast, 2 T. lemon juice, 2 T. light miso, 1 and 1/2 t. onion powder, and 1/4-1/2 t. salt. Then mix in the desired amount of water. The book suggests 2/3 c. of water to make a sauce, but I add a lot less to make a sandwich spread, and a little less to make a pizza sauce.)
So, I spread some cheese sauce over the pizza dough, and topped it with eggplant slices I had roasted, toasted pine nuts, sliced tomatoes, red onion, red pepper, and a basil-garlic-lemon-juice puree (this puree’s sharpness balances the rich cheese quite nicely!) Up close below.

Housewarming Cake

Terra and Mike and Ella just moved into a new apartment, so I made a cake for the housewarming. I wanted to try out a decorating aesthetic that was spare, humble, and somewhat mid-twentieth-century.
The cake itself is a lemon genoise cake from Bryanna Clark Grogan’s website; the post is here (it doesn’t look like it: scroll down). For the filling I used the lemon curd from the same post (I’ve made this a couple of times and am very pleased with it!) combined with blueberries. For the frosting, I winged it, as usual, making a cream cheese-style icing. I added soy milk powder for stability because I find Tofutti cream cheese produces quite a runny icing, but I think I added a bit too much this time, because I found the finished product too tacky and clay-like in texture. But no one else seemed to mind. A small quibble, a tasty cake.

Broken Record Roasting and Tempeh

Here’s the Hot Sauce Glazed Tempeh from Veganomicon again, which tells you how much I like this method of cooking tempeh! This time I used red wine in the marinade, which happened to make it look pretty steak-like, which introduced a little ambivalence into the aesthetic situation. Keeping with the theme of predictability, we have roasted vegetables… but notice the outdoorsy setting! Summer will see more of this, which is welcome because my apartment doesn’t have the best lighting for photos.

Crispy Tofu Cubes

Here are the crispy tofu cubes from ReFresh. I’ve written about the breading before (1/4 c. nutritional yeast plus 2 T. wheat germ plus a little less than a t. garlic powder and a dash of salt and pepper). I did what the book suggested and marinated a pound of tofu, cut into cubes, in 1/4 c. apple cider vinegar, 6 T. tamari, 2 T. water, and 3/4 T. canola oil (they use sunflower) before tossing it in the breading and panfrying.
Also in this picture is some Miso Gravy from the same book, but unlike most of the recipes in this book, the gravy was nothing to write home about. I find a lot of the recipes in this book to be a little high in salt (mostly in the form of tamari) but otherwise, overall, pretty tasty stuff.

Panzanella

Here’s the panzanella I took to a birthday potluck, very loosely based on the recipe here. I think I made a three-quarter version of the dressing, as I figured I didn’t make enough salad to warrant 1/2 a cup of olive oil. But truthfully I can’t remember if that’s what I did or meant to do. I also added white beans and chopped red pepper. And, instead of the traditional stale bread (I got a kick out of telling people I was bringing Tuscan Stale Bread Salad) I used some of a fresh loaf of Calabrese bread, cut into cubes and dried out a bit in a 300F oven– not quite to crouton stage.

I made a crab panzanella for my mom a million years ago, and I remembered this time that it’s actually preferable to let the dressing soak the bread. Because there’s quite a bit of olive oil, the bread gets soaked in a pleasant, not-too-sopping way. I find we have a bit of an aversion to soaked bread these days in our cooking: even croutons in salad seem to be arranged so that they will remain hard as rocks. Let us get over this! Remember how good that soggy last crouton at the end of your salad always turns out to be.

Perogies

I get these vegan potato and onion perogies from Dennigers that are great with sauerkraut. The same company makes mushroom and sauerkraut ones– no extra sauerkraut required! The sauerkraut you see here is Bubbies brand. I like this better than Eden organic: because Bubbies sauerkraut is sliced paper thin, it’s not rubbery at all, and just the right amount of crisp.

Simple Sesame Kale Stirfry

Here’s a super-simple kale stirfry. Russian Red Kale, braised with some sauteed garlic, rice vinegar, tamari, and sesame oil, with toasted sesame seeds on top. Sometimes you don’t have much in the house, but what you have tastes good anyways. This was one of those times.