The Lustful Vegan

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?

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So a while back I made a comment about some Sooper Sekret Projekts I had underway. These were for Valentine’s Day (no real ’sekret’ there), and since all have finally been delivered I can now post about them. Besides, this way I get in one last free entry before disappearing on vacation for a week.

So, the projects. I wanted to send a Valentines-y surprise parcel, but filled with what? I figured it should be something sweet (Valentines seems a very saccharine festival). Also there should probably be hearts of some sort. Finally, I wanted something a bit more involved than my normal baking, just to show I cared. (Egads, I’m devolving into Hallmark-speak just thinking about it. Enough!)

For prototype projects I chose two things — “Perfect Vegan Sugar Cookies” and the peppermint pucks from Squirrel’s Vegan Kitchen.

The sugar cookies proved fairly easy to make, despite the two-stage process of baking and glazing. I found that the cookies weren’t sweet enough on their own, though, but with the icing they seemed a bit too sweet. (Even if they were pretty!) Admittedly they grew on me as I slowly ate my way through the test batch. *g*

The peppermint pucks (or in my case minty hearts and other assorted shapes) were a pain to make — literally since I singed all my fingertips dipping the mint innards into hot, dark, melty chocolate. But omg, mmmmmm, so good! Peppermint Patties for vegans, woot! (Only better.)

In the end I decided against the peppermint treats as the final winner, though, because they really did need refrigeration to stay nice and firm. (Oh no, that means I still have a dozen of the test batch in the freezer. How will I survive?!?) I just couldn’t be sure they’d survive even a single day in the mail. That meant going with the cookies. But wait, I could borrow from both prototypes! And thus were born chocolate-glazed sugar cookies. The glaze I made from approximately 1 oz unsweetened chocolate, 1 oz good dark chocolate, 1 T corn syrup, and a healthy splash of vanilla. These all melted down in a double boiler, into rich, dark decadence. It was too thick a mixture to dip the cookies, so I had to ‘ice’ them with the molten mixture — quickly, because the chocolate started to set almost as soon as I scooped it up. Overall those cookies were tasty, but I think the dark chocolate glaze actually needed a bit more sweet to it. Next time! I’m told they were very good with peanut butter.

So those were the Sooper Sekret Valentines Projekts. Strangely, I somehow missed taking any shots of the final dark hearts. Fie.

I engaged in a few Sooper Sekret projects for Valentine’s Day, including these peanut butter cookies for my housemate:

Y’know, I don’t think I’d ever baked vegan cookies before last week. Fortunately the PB cookies turned out perfectly. They’re dense and peanut buttery and juuuuuust sweet enough.

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