Toronto eats
Home again after an eventful weekend. (Though not as eventful as planned, thanks to a decidedly unplanned migraine 
.) I love Toronto, and miss living there. There’s always so much going on. And the food — yum! Anyway, since I haven’t cooked for myself in a few days I thought I’d post a few reviews of some old and new favourite haunts in TO. Places like…
Raw!
Today was a blast. I got up too early (any morning hour is too early on a weekend), grabbed a quick shower, and headed downtown to the Kitchener market to meet K. We found each other, and then spent a pleasant hour or so wandering around, restocking on fruits and veggies. Eventually we headed to her place to drop off our things and say hi to their adorable dog Sammy, and then it was off around the corner for our raw food workshop.
The workshop was two hours of numminess, with a side helping of good company. We were joined by around eight others, plus our instructor. She started us off with edamame hummous dip, which was quite fresh tasting. Then we each received a plate of several samples:
Clockwise from the bottom, you’re looking at bean-free refried beans, mango salsa, dairy-free sour cream, corn tortillas, and guacamole.
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?
Pi Day!
Happy Pi Day! Those crazy mathematicians may claim they need pi to do complicated things to circles, but I know it’s just an excuse for a day filled with the other pie.
In honour of the day we’re just starting a round-themed dinner. Two pizzas (topped among other things with round little roasted cherry tomatoes and rounds of veggie sausage), a cherry pie, and a couple dozen wee little lemon tarts. Everything round!
The lemon tarts are an adaptation of the lemon squares in the Veganomicon. Square didn’t fit with the day, so I adapted the recipe to make tarts instead. If you have the book, I highly recommend the recipe — they make perfect little lemon meringueless pies, utterly divine. Just a note: If making tarts, bake the crusts for only 12 to 15 minutes, not the full time in the original recipe. Also, I followed a long-ago tip and filled each tart with about a tablespoon of dry beans to keep the tart crusts from shrinking and ‘puffing’ when I baked them. (But do remember to take all the beans out before filling the tarts with lemony goo.) Yum!
Devil Ducky Cake
Back from Cuba, but why, oh why did I come back? It’s -11C with windchill today, and we got enough snow and freezing rain overnight that I can’t see the walkways between houses anymore. And to think that a week ago I was frolicking in the ocean.
More on Cuba later. It wasn’t all sun and beach and rum — we spent most of our time in Havana, exploring and learning and experiencing culture shock. I’ll write something up later this week, when my thoughts have settled a bit.
In the meantime, yay for being home! Yay for running amok in my own kitchen again! For some reason I got hit with a massive craving for chocolate cake yesterday, and after lusting for the stuff for several hours I finally got off my *@@ and looked up how to make one. (No, I’d never made chocolate cake from scratch before — behold my shame.) Based on some googling I settled on a PPK recipe, but then another search led me to a most fascinating article. It turns out that a few years ago Cook’s Illustrated took on the challenge to create the perfect vegan chocolate cake. *gasp!* I really wanted to try it, but didn’t have everything I needed. In the end I created a hybrid of the two recipes, and thus was born Devil Ducky Cake…
(Devil Ducky is actually functional — it keeps the saran wrap off the icing. 
It’s very, very dense. Sweet chocolate, you are my density. Also, my breakfast.
Sekrets revealed
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.
