A handful of yum
We’ve picked the first few strawberries from the balcony plants, and they are the Best Strawberries Ever. The first one I ate dribbled sweet red juice all down my arm. *bliss* There are only a few, but quality counts. And then tonight we discovered the nearby cherry trees are starting their run of almost as yummy fruit. Cherry trees remain a novelty to me — they didn’t grow where I grew up (too cold), so I can’t get enough of them.
In other news, today I picked up a paper bag full of red wiggler worms from a friend, and this evening my housemate and I spent a good hour setting up our first vermicomposter. Now our veggie scraps will get composted and turned into fresh soil for the balcony garden. One small step towards a closed system. 
Brownie doom
It needs to be said: Not everything I cook works out. In fact, sometimes things fail rather spectacularly.
Last night, for instance, I suddenly found myself craving brownies. Brownies seem particularly fraught for me. I used to have a no-fail recipe that I loved, but then suddenly it started failing for no obvious reason. Failure in that case just meant “super crumbly”, but still tasty and edible. Nevertheless, I decided not to use it last night, because I wanted not-crumbly. A bit of googling offered up a new recipe to try, and off I went. It was a simple recipe, and over two thousand commenters raved about it. How could I go wrong?
I’m not sure, but I found a way. I made the substitutions for the non-vegan ingredients, found the batter yummy and tasty, put it in a pan, and started counting down to yummy brownies.
Fifteen minutes later I noticed a distinct snapping, bubbling sound from the oven. A peek showed that the top of my ‘brownies’ was now in fact a layer of bubbling oil. The Earth Balance somehow separated, and was in the process of deep-frying my brownies. Eek!
This is roughly when I remembered that I try to avoid subbing equal parts Earth Balance for butter. For some reason recipes seem to require less EB. Fie. I tried pouring off the layer of bubbly oil (a full 1/4 cup of it, ew!) and baking a little longer to see if the brownies would set. But when I eventually pulled them out…neutronium brownies. Seriously, they’re so dense and stuck to the pan that I’m not sure the pan is salvageable. 
Even so, failures are tasty. I scraped a bit of doomed neutronium brownie from the pan, put it on the last of my frozen [soy] yogurt, and topped it with the last of my market strawberries. Voila, one Doomed Sunday. Mmmmm, tasty doom.
Sweet & sour cupcakes
It’s been a week for experimentation. The tempeh chowder didn’t work out too well, but the peppercorn stroganoff surprised me and did. Then I realized just how much rhubarb I had kicking around, and decided it was time to make a stab at…rhubarb cupcakes.
A quick google search (why reinvent the wheel?) turned up this recipe, and for a while I thought I was good to go — I could just veganize it. But after writing out a vegan version using the ingredients I had available, I had second thoughts — it just didn’t look like it would produce the nice, light cupcake I was hoping for. (Not enough liquid, and egads, there were almost 3 tsp of baking powder once I substituted for the self-raising flour!) So I went back to our trusty old VCTOTW, adjusting the seasonings for a plain jane vanilla cupcake. I added some lemon extract, 1 1/2 tsp of powdered ginger, 1 tsp cinnamon, and maybe 1/4 tsp ground cloves. Voila, fluffy, slightly gingery cupcakes. For the filling I followed that original recipe’s instructions, chopping up around 2 cups of rhubarb and adding just a touch of pomegranate juice (yum), an inch of minced fresh ginger, probably 1/3 cup sugar, and reducing the lot to a thick rhubarb-y goo. (The only catch was I made too little — enough to fill 9 cupcakes instead of all 12.)
To assemble I just scooped out the centres, iced the edges (plain buttercream), filled the middles with rhubarb, iced the ‘caps’ and popped them on top. So. Very. Yummy. The sweet of the cupcake and icing complement the sour of the rhubarb perfectly. I took most to class and left some for the housemate’s date, and today there are none left.
Growing green
A quick update on my little balcony garden. So far everything’s alive, and some plants are starting to bear fruit…literally!
The first beans are dangling beneath a canopy of green in one of my apple baskets. Today I discovered a wee pepper on my cayenne plant…and the number of flowers promise many more. My lettuce is downright forest-like — high time to thin the planter and make myself a salad of baby greens. And yep, those are strawberries almost ripe and ready to pick.
The other plants are doing well too. Almost too well, since I’d assumed there’d be some attrition and overplanted! But I’m not complaining. The only ones that aren’t thriving are the plants I started indoors in the coco coir. Those are all still alive, but not really taking off. (Well, except for the beans.) I may try direct-seeding another cherry tomato plant just to see if that makes a difference, but overall I’m not worried as I have two tomato plants that are definitely thriving. (Those are the ones I bought from Little City Farm a few weeks ago.)
And because he amuses me, here’s a pic of my garden guardian — my little axe-wielding gnome.
Tempeh tuna
This weekend my gf introduced me to the most lethal store ever — Whole Foods. Apparently I’m the last person on earth to hear about the chain, but better late than never. I was won over by the bakery section alone. See, I have this thing for really, really good bread, but hardly ever find it. There are lots of average breads, and lots of ‘good’ breads, but very rarely exceptional breads. Imagine my glee, then, when I found myself drooling over three or four different kinds on Saturday. Should I take home the pumpernickel? The herb bread? Something else?
Eventually I settled on a lovely round loaf of roasted garlic sourdough, and only pure willpower kept me from nibbling on it on the subway. Back at her place we cut into it…and *swoon* Wow. So good. Amazing rich flavour, a nice moist and springy texture, an extra tasty crust.
Half the loaf made it home with me, and today I decided to do something more than slather it with Earth Balance. It had a perfect texture for sandwich-making, so I coerced the freezer to yield a package of Sea Veggie Tempeh and made a tempeh tuna sandwich. Mmmmmm. Tempeh tuna has always been my answer to tuna sandwich cravings. The filling consists of tempeh (poached to remove any bitterness), crumbled and mixed with a bit of vegenaise, dark sesame oil and a bit of spicy oil, diced onion, a bit of Braggs, and a teaspoon or so of kelp powder. Since I recently rediscovered the dulse powder I picked up on Grand Manan island last fall, I threw a bit of that in too. Happily the tempeh’s nuttiness and seaweed’s…ummmm….oceaniness(?) paired nicely with the roasted garlic flavour of the bread. Yum.
Rabbit food
I’ve kinda had this thing against salad for a long time now. I think it comes from everyone telling me “well you can always have salad” when a restaurant menu offered little in the way of veg-friendly food. Eventually salad became a loathed thing.
But y’know I really do like veggies, and I hear salad’s full of’em. So, with spring bringing in all sorts of yummy fresh things, I’ve been making an effort to learn to love salad. Last night’s took the prize — roasted fiddleheads and asparagus with marinated tofu on fresh spring greens. My inspiration was this recipe. The marinade became the salad dressing, and suited the roast veggies very nicely. Oh yum.
To roast fiddleheads, toss them with a little oil and salt and pepper, then spread on a baking parchment-covered pan in a 400F oven (I used my toaster oven) for ~25 minutes. For asparagus, do the same thing but for only 12 minutes. Mmmmm.
Experiments
There’s a lot to be said for seeing the sun come up in the morning. Sadly most of the words involved are swear words, because I am not a morning person. But since sleep eluded me last night for some reason, I found myself puttering around in the kitchen at 6am this morning, and decided to make muffins.
Only one problem — I was out of some key ingredients, and specifically vegan sour cream or yogurt. Hmph. But I did have soy milk, so I decided to try the yogurt substitution I listed as untried in my Substitutions post. To replace 1/2 cup of the stuff I didn’t have, I mixed 3/4 T of cornstarch with a scant 1/2 cup of soy milk. Then I microwaved the mixture for 30 seconds, stirred it, and microwaved for another 15 seconds or so. Stirred in a splash of apple cider vinegar and let it cool. The results? Thickened soy buttermilk. It was a neat little chemistry experiment. I added the results to my muffin batter with some minor trepidation, but without cause — they worked out just fine. Hurray for an easy to make yogurt substitute! (And muffins too. )
K.I.S.S.
Sometimes lunch is a simple affair. Simple is good. Today I was trying to find enough energy to make something more than toast when I happened to catch one of Celine’s last posts at Have Cake Will Travel.
Seitan bacon. Mmmmmmm. And it looked easy.
Thirty minutes later I sat down to enjoy a yummy, yummy sandwich — a real Montreal bagel, toasted, with seitan bacon, tomatoes, and a couple slices of Sheese. Very, very yummy. I’ll be making that bac’n again. (Tomorrow in fact, since there’s some left. )
News from the Colonel
Well hey, I’ve just heard some good news for those of us in Canada. KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) has agreed to make some changes to the way it does business in response to a PETA campaign. The benefits? They’ll be operating more ethically, and adding a vegan chik’n offering to their menu. Woot! [Details]
Sadly KFC restaurants in the States and worldwide aren’t taking the same approach yet, but you know what they say about baby steps.
