A weekend of vegetables
It was a long weekend here, and I spent much of it trying to use up the countless veggies in the fridge. There was a lot of spinach and a lot of basil, so poof! then there was pesto. This made for a lovely pasta dish topped with steamed chard. And since I still had pesto left over after that, and also a whole bunch of root veggies, I made a warm salad of roasted potatoes, turnips, and radishes, all tossed with green onions and pesto and vegan parmesan. Yum! Now I can at least fit things into the crispers, but I still have cauliflower and beets and corn and zucchini and carrots and beans and yet more potatoes to work my way through.
Zucchini cherry bread
To make a dent in the zucchini I tried making a zucchini cherry bread today. It’s really just a veganized version of this recipe, but with dried cherries in place of walnuts (I was all out). The bread turned out quite well, if a bit sweet. Next time I’ll add walnuts (but keep the cherries!), reduce the oil a titch, and reduce the sugar by a quarter or third. Cranberries might work nicely in this too — their tartness would help balance the sweetness of the bread.
Zucchini cherry bread
- 1 cup sugar
- 1/2 cup vegetable oil
- 1 cup grated zucchini
- 3 T soy milk or other liquid
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 1/2 tsp egg replacer powder
- 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/2 tsp baking soda
- 1/4 tsp baking powder
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/4 cup dried cherries
To make:
- Preheat oven to 325F. Lightly oil a bread pan.
- ‘Cream’ the oil and sugar together until a little fluffy.
- Stir in the zucchini, vanilla, and soy milk.
- In another bowl, mix together the flour, cinnamon, soda, baking powder, salt, and egg replacer powder. Stir into the wet mixture.
- Quickly fold in the cherries.
- Pour batter into the loaf pan, and bake 60 to 70 minutes.
* If using a flax egg or other egg substitute, just replace the egg replacer powder and soy milk in the above recipe.
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. 
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. )
Pie!
A rare alignment of the culinary planets brought me fruit, lots and lots of fruit. I had a huge bunch of rhubarb, two plump mangoes, and maybe 24 hours in which to use them up. Hmmmm, I thought, wonder what they’d taste like together?
The answer? Tasty. The sweetness of the mangoes nicely balances the tartness of the rhubarb. (Well, the mangoes plus a cup of sugar, but I digress.) I think the combination might actually work even better in a crisp, but won’t know until a similar culinary alignment brings me those ingredients again. And next time I’d make it tarter, because I like my rhubarb treats mouth-puckeringly tart…but my housemate declared this version perfect for the rest of the world. 
Rhubarb mango pie
- Pie dough for two crusts (I made a full batch of this, used half, and froze the rest for some future pie-making. There were enough trimmings to make an extra tart after making the pie.)
- 1/4 cup ground almonds
- 1 tablespoon unbleached flour
- 2 cups mango, peeled and chopped small
- 2 cups rhubarb, chopped small
- 1 cup sugar*
- 1/3 cup flour
- 1/2 T cinnamon**
To assemble:
- Preheat oven to 350F.
- Prepare your pie dough. When ready, roll out half and fill a pie pan, trimming the edges.
- Line the shell with a sheet of parchment paper, and pour in enough dry beans to cover the bottom. (These will keep your crust from shrinking as it bakes.)
- Put the pie pan on a cookie sheet in case of drips, and bake until golden brown (app. 15 minutes). Remove the parchment paper and beans. Sprinkle it with the mixture of ground almonds and flour. Bake another 5 minutes.
- Let cool.
- Mix the rhubarb and mango with the remaining flour, sugar, and cinnamon.
- Pour into the cooled pie crust.
- Roll out the other half of the pie dough until big enough to cover the pie. Press the edges and cut steam vents on top.
- Bake (again on a baking sheet for drips) for 45 minutes to 1 hour…basically until golden brown on top and bubbly in the middle. I started with 30 minutes and then checked every 5 to 10, but lost count. )
* Next time I would cut the sugar to 2/3 cup, because I like my pie tart rather than sweet, but my housemate thought it was fine as is (and proved it by snagging two pieces).
** Cinnamon was okay, but mango demands something a little more exotic. Next time I’m thinking allspice.
Learnin’
Know what I never look at in bookstores? Cooking magazines. At best there are maybe two veg-focused magazines on display, and they rarely excite me. The others…the others are full of things I don’t eat, so why bother?
Or so I thought. Um. I’m an idiot. Yes they’re full of things I don’t eat, but I kinda get a kick out of ‘veganizing’ recipes, so why should that prove an obstacle? And besides, they’re not just full of things I don’t eat…they’re also full of information. *swoon*
I like learning. Nah, I love learning, and cooking is one area where I certainly have a lot to learn. Imagine my delight, then, when yesterday for the first time in many ages I wandered into my local bookstore and checked out the cooking mags. I left with two. The one that got me all excited? Cook’s Illustrated. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s kind of a cross between a normal cooking magazine and Consumer Reports. The people who create it run a test kitchen, and they take a methodical, scientific approach to cooking. They tackle culinary questions like “what’s the best way to cook baby spinach” or “what’s the best chocolate cake recipe,” and try every variation imaginable until they find the answers. (It’s almost exhausting to read the descriptions of their labours.) Then they publish the results, complete with recipes. And yes, a lot of those results apply to vegan cookery just as much as to non-vegan cookery.
A five minute read-through of my copy felt like a three-hour cooking lesson, minus dinner at the end. But lunch…lunch I could do. The best way to learn is to apply lessons while they’re still fresh, right? And I can see myself trying and adapting a lot of the things in this issue.
But back to lunch. There was an article on making the best oven fries, and there were a couple of articles involving baked chicken. I went with those, because yum, fries! And also because I’ve tried making crispy faux chicken a few times in the past few months and haven’t been happy with any of the results — the coating always turns out a bit soggy, and I don’t care how tasty it is — soggy just isn’t acceptable.
Here’s the gist of the oven fries article: For the absolute best results, [1] Cut russet potatoes into wedges, [2] soak the wedges in hot water for 10 minutes and then drain and dry them, [3] in a baking pan season 4T of oil with salt and pepper, [4] spread potatoes evenly, [5] bake covered tightly with foil at 475F for 5 minutes, [6] remove the foil and continue baking 20 to 30 minutes, turning once.
Honestly? I burned mine. My bad — I cut my potato into too many wedges, so that they were too thin and cooked super-fast. Also my baking sheet is thin and crappy and doesn’t heat evenly, so that some fries did okay while others burned. C’est la vie. (Besides, I have thirteen more potatoes to play with!) The soaking and steaming did create a noticably better texture than I’ve managed with my usual oven fries recipe though; there were no ‘hollow’ fries. And seasoning the oil rather than the cut potatoes? Sheer genius. I was skeptical, but it worked perfectly.
Now for the chik’n. I used a PC meatless chik’n breast. It occurred to me that maybe past attempts hadn’t done as well because I hadn’t thawed the faux meat fully before prepping the meal, so this time I let the cut thaw overnight and made sure it was dry to the touch before starting. I think fake meats tend to hold more moisture than real meat, which may add to the challenge of creating a crispy coat. Anyway, I sliced mine in half to create two thinner cutlets, and then I breaded them. To do this I prepared one flax egg (1 T ground flax whisked into 1/4 cup hot water), and dipped both sides of each cutlet. Then I pressed these into panko (japanese breadcrumbs) seasoned with 1 T of nutritional yeast, salt, and pepper. The two tricks I picked up from Cook’s Illustrated were these: [1] Cook the chik’n on a rack set over a baking pan, and [2] spray the breaded cutlets lightly with oil before baking.
The results? Best breaded chik’n so far — crispy and lightly browned. The rack made a big difference in ensuring that both sides crisped up. My only excuse for not thinking this up myself is that my normal baking pans don’t have racks. Fortunately my housemate pointed out that my wee toaster oven pan does have such an insert, so I used that and it worked perfectly. I did forget two things while making these — I didn’t dredge the cutlets with flour before breading them, and I didn’t spray the baking rack. Neither proved major issues, and the finished product tasted wonderful topped with a raw tomato sauce (half a tomato, diced; a few basil leaves, minced; one garlic clove and one teaspoon capers, squeezed through a garlic press; salt and pepper to taste).
As lunches go, yum. As learning experiences go, likewise yum. And I still have a bunch more recipes and techniques eyemarked for trying. Is it dinner time yet?
Substitutions
I keep meaning to start a table listing easy substitutions for when you’re trying to ‘veganize’ a recipe. I’ve made notes in a half dozen places, but can I ever find them when I want them? Nooooo. Anyway, here’s a first take, and I’ll keep revisiting this as I think of new things to add.
| Ingredient: | Substitute: |
| Milk | Easy — try an equal amount of soy milk, almond milk, rice milk, oat milk, potato milk, coconut milk, raw mylk, etc.Bear in mind that different milks have different qualities. For example, rice and almond milk tend to be quite sweet, so might not do the trick in a savoury dish. Soy milk is roughly the same ‘thickness’ as regular milk, but rice milk is very thin — more like a skim milk. Most soy milks are sweetened — you may want to hunt for an unsweetened version (particularly if you have something like mashed potatoes on the menu). All versions have their own benefits, and you can even make some of them yourself, from scratch. |
| Cream | There are commercial soy-based ‘creams,’ but I haven’t tried any yet. When I need to replace cream, I tend to use:
|
| Buttermilk | Add 1T lemon juice or white/cider vinegar to a cup of soy milk. I find this does wonders in many baked treats. |
| Eggs | Pureed or mashed fruit. Apples, prunes, and banana all work. To replace one egg, try half a banana, or a quarter cup of apple or prune sauce. Best for baked goods, or anywhere the added sweetness and fruit flavour will prove tasty. I use pureed prunes in baked chocolate goods, though generally to replace oil rather than eggs. The flavour compliments the chocolate taste very nicely.
Tofu. (1/4 cup silken tofu = 1 egg.) This is fairly neutral, taste-wise. Puree it with other wet ingredients before adding to the rest of the dish. Egg replacer. This is a commercial product — a cornstarch-like powder. There are a few varieties; the one I use is Kingsway, and calls for 1 tsp mixed with 2 T liquid to replace one egg. Others may vary. I’ve had excellent luck with the stuff in baking — it’s very convenient. I do tend to add a bit extra. This is also a neutral taste addition. Cornstarch. Another neutral taste. To replace one egg, mix 2 T of cornstarch with an equal amount of water. Flax. “Flax eggs” seem to be one of the most common egg replacers out there. To replace one egg, grind some flax seed (coffee grinders are great for this, but clean them well before and after!). Beat 1 T into 1/4 cup of water, until the mixture thickens a bit. Flax eggs add a slight nutty flavour to dishes. |
| Butter | I find I can use oil in place of butter in many cases; my oil of choice is grapeseed, because it’s fairly neutral taste-wise and handles high heat very well.If you really want a buttery flavour, try Earth Balance — a very tasty vegan margarine. (And no, most margarines aren’t vegan — the majority contain whey powder or casein, which are milk products.) I’ve found that in baked recipes I can cut back a bit on the amount of fat required when using Earth Balance; substituting 1:1 makes things a bit oily. |
| Lard | Use vegetable shortening. |
| Yogurt | Try soy yogurt — there are at least two varieties available out there. If you don’t have soy yogurt, you still have a couple options:
|
| Cream cheese | Definitely try Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese, which I’ve found in most health food stores and seen in some grocery stores. I always loved bagels and cream cheese, and no longer miss them. The stuff really is as good as they claim…and it makes heavenly cheesecake. |
| Sour cream | There are a couple commercial faux sour creams. I’ve tried the Tofutti one, but remain fairly unenthusiastic about it.
Personally I prefer the raw sour cream I learned to make last month:Soak 1 ½ cups cashews for a few hours or overnight. In a blender, combine the cashews with ½ teaspoon salt, 2+ T lemon juice, and ¾ cup water. Blend until smooth, then taste. Adjust the seasonings as necessary (you will probably need more lemon juice), and then add water a bit at a time until you reach the right consistency. |
Feeling blue
Saturday morning saw me awake at around 5am, and up by 5:30. Ug. Have I mentioned that I’m so not a morning person? But there are advantages to seeing the sun come up — like realizing there’s time to make fresh muffins for everyone, to start a crazy-busy day. And lo, there were fresh, warm blueberry muffins for breakfast, and they disappeared so fast I didn’t get a single picture. But that’s okay, that just gave me an excuse to make more today.
Today’s version was, if anything, even better than Saturday’s. These muffins are surprisingly light and fluffy — so much so that my gf thought I’d adapted a cupcake recipe!
I love the fruitiness of these, particularly with today’s cranberry-blueberry mix. They’re not nearly as full of fat as everyone thinks either. For Saturday’s version I used Earth Balance, and they had a definite buttery taste. For today’s version I switched to oil, which gives a more neutral flavour that lets the fruit really come through. Mmmmm, fruit. Can’t wait for berry season!
“Graiiiiiiiiiinz!”
Sorry, vegan zombie joke.
Anyway, last night was Earth Hour, and so at 8pm we shut off all the lights and non-essential electronics. Most of our complex went dark — there was only a single light on outside one house. My housemate flaked on the couch and read an ebook on his palm pilot. I lit a half dozen candles (mmmmm, beeswax) and spent some time looking through cookbooks. Paper cookbooks. (gasp!) Ultimately I found a bread recipe close to what I’ve been wanting, and started bread by candlelight.
Many hours later, after Earth Hour ended and we’d (eventually) put some lights back on, a very tired me pulled these out of the oven. The original recipe was for Mollie Katzen’s sunflower-millet bread from Enchanted Broccoli Forest (a Moosewood cookbook), but I veganized the recipe and converted it to a 12-grain loaf by the very simple expedient of substituting a multigrain cereal mixture for the millet. It’s hands-down the healthiest bread I’ve ever made, and also the best ’sandwich bread’ — it slices perfectly, and has a good, non-crumbly texture. Probably won’t last long. Half a loaf is on its way to a sick friend, and the other half is almost gone too. Good thing I made two loaves.
Lentil lurv
For some strange reason there’s a conspiracy of lentils this week. I certainly didn’t set out to make an all-lentil dinner, but that’s what I ended up with. How can you go wrong with lentils, though?
First there was lentil soup. Lemony lentil soup. I had a small heap of lemons in the crisper, and a shiny new bag of beluga lentils (which at 24% apparently boast the highest amount of protein of all the lentils). I figured these had to go together. The results? Zingy! Fabulously zingy. I won’t be getting scurvy anytime soon. Served with sweet potato fries, it was very hearty. This might be my new favourite soup; the recipe’s below.
And after dinner? Lentil cookies. As soon as I knew such a thing existed, I had to make them. And omg, yum! Fresh from the oven they were light and crispy on the outside, and full of cranberry-cherry tastiness. Instant love. The original recipe is easily veganized (sub Earth Balance for butter, egg replacer for the egg). For extra flavour I simmered my lentils in light coconut milk with a goodly pinch of nutmeg and maybe a half teaspoon of mace. (Vanilla rice milk would probably be equally good.) I also toasted my oats in the toaster oven while doing other things. (325F, stirred twice, maybe 6 minutes?) For some reason my cookies took an extra couple minutes to bake, but that might just be an oven variation. Regardless, these are fabulous, particularly when toasted for a few minutes to crisp them up. I suspect they’ll make my top-3 list of cookies long before I finish eating them all. Besides, they have protein and fruit in them, so they’re healthy, right?
