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.
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.
“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.
