Tag: food

cooking

When eating tofu makes you a rebel…

wittychild

…you definitely need to loosen up a bit.

Okay, so my job has a lot going for it.  It has a comprehensive benefits package.  There is room for advancement for motivated employees.  It’s in a well-maintained building that is close to my bank, dentist, favourite restaurants, shopping, foxy former co-workers, etc.  They’re also remarkably understanding and accommodating at office functions re: my strictly voluntary dietary restrictions.  I am deeply grateful for that.

But…they don’t like people eating lunch at their desks.  The girl who trained me explained the philosophy thusly: “Nothing that requires a utensil!  If you’re fiddling with utensils, you’re not working.”  O…kay.  Yet Bake Club members are free to use forks to eat cake at their desks.  Bizarre.

So covert finger-food it was!  I’ve spent the past two years surreptitiously nibbling a PB&J at my desk.  Yes!  I became a walking vegan stereotype, and decided it was high time for a change.  (By now you might be wondering why I don’t just eat in the lunch room.  I tried that for a while, but prefer actually leaving the office to stretch my legs, run errands, etc.  Not unreasonable after a morning in front of the computer.)  I decided that tofu sandwiches were the way to go: whole grain and fibre from the bread, plus protein and calcium from the tofu, with only a fraction of the sugar of a PB&J.

A couple of weeks ago I made the Sweet Chili Lime Tofu from Vegan Yum Yum.  A little mustard, some lettuce, and it was delicious.  Last week, I was lazy and made Southern Fried Shake n’ Bake tofu.  I still had a package of the coating left and could have done it again this week, but I wanted something a little different.

I used the basic bread-and-bake method for the Cornmeal Crusted Chili Lime Tofu from Veganomicon, but made my own coating of panko crumbs and a Roasted Chili and Tamarind/Roasted Garlic and Peppers mix (both by Clubhouse seasonings).  It’s got just the right amount of kick, and a wonderfully crispy finish – and the only way it could be even easier to make is if it breaded and baked itself.  Seriously.

Behold, the healthy-eating rebel!

baking

Son of Cookie Monster

wittychild

Last week, I celebrated my two-year anniversary at my job.  That’s right: for 731 days, give or take, I’ve been delighting and entertaining my coworkers with my very presence in the office.  Okay, maybe not.  And not that anyone else would have remembered the date, but I wanted to do something just a little festive.  I had some extra time one evening and decided that mini cupcakes were in order.

The conversation went something like this:

“I thought I’d do vanilla cupcakes with a pink frosting.  Maybe I can use some maraschino cherry juice for flavour.  Ooh, or that Dr. Pepper stuff I got!”  (At this point, I was picturing something all princess-y.)

“Oh.  But your chocolate ones are so good, have such a nice flavour.”

“Okay.  Sure.  I can do chocolate with a cherry or Dr. Pepper frosting.”

“Why don’t you do blue raspberry frosting again?  It tasted really nice.”

Okay, so I did the blue raspberry frosting again.  (It worked so nicely with the pale blue liners you can’t really see for the chocolate cake.)  I thought I was smart by dissolving my drink crystals in the almond milk before adding it to the frosting, but they didn’t provide me with a sufficiently intense flavour or colour, so I added a smidge of raspberry extract and some blue food colouring.  Maybe it was the addition of the extract, but it had almost a blue-bubblegum flavour this time.  They might lack the characterization of their Cookie Monster predecessors, but they hold a certain charm nonetheless.

My coworkers loved them!  Between 8:00 and 10:00, they managed to polish off 30 of the little suckers.

I still have to try Dr. Pepper frosting, though…

baking

“C” is for “cookie”

wittychild

The Oscar the Grouch cupcakes I made a few weeks back went over well with everyone who tried one – and I was so excited by the way the grass tip created his fur.  I couldn’t wait to try other Sesame Street characters!  I was pretty sure that Cookie Monster was going to be next on my list, because I’ve always felt a strange kinship with him.  My grammar may be better than his, but honestly, the reason I learned how to bake was to feed my cookie addiction.

While searching the bulk food store for some chickpea flour, I happened upon bins of flavoured drink crystals, including a vibrant blue-raspberry.  It was fate.  Yes!  Now I absolutely had to buy some, and mix them into my frosting instead of/in addition to blue food colouring, and I had to make Cookie Monster cupcakes post-haste!  This was going to be great!

Not, perhaps, a spitting image, but certainly recognizable.  My fatal mistake (I realize now) was adding in the drink crystals along with some food colouring after I had mixed all the other frosting ingredients and already had a nice, fluffy buttercream.  I had thought because the icing was “wet” – as in, not yet dried and hardened – that the crystals would dissolve.  They did not, at least not entirely.  And they might be miniscule, but that didn’t stop them from clogging up my grass tip.  After six incredibly frustrating cupcakes, including several attempts to clear and re-clear the holes in the tip using a toothpick or just unscrewing the coupler and rinsing the silly thing out with water, I got fed up, switched tips, and did this:

It may look and feel like a cop-out, sure, but I’ve always liked blue-and-brown as a colour combination, so it’s not that bad.  They’re still whimsical, just in a non-licensed way.

Oh, and in case you were curious: the drink crystals did impart a lovely blue-raspberry flavour that is noticeable without being overpowering.  I’ve learned from my mistake, though, and next time they’re being dissolved in the almond milk first before being mixed in.

baking

A birthday without a cake…

wittychild

…is like pillaging without burning?  No, that can’t be right…

But I do have a theory that if I don’t make somebody a birthday cake (note: cupcakes, cheesecakes, and pies are all perfectly acceptable alternatives), I don’t truly care about them.  So for my dad’s birthday a few days ago, I made him the Peanut Butter Chocolate Dream Cake from Kris Holechek’s Have Your Cake and Vegan Too.

It’s a fairly standard chocolate cake with a peanut butter filling in between the layers and topped off with a chocolate-peanut butter ganache – garnish as desired.  The recipe was easy to follow, and the cake easy to assemble; if and when I do it again, the only thing I’ll do differently is grease-and-cocoa the pans instead of greasing-and-flouring them, to avoid that flour residue (since it’s not frosted all over, it does kinda show).

And yes, I probably will make it again.  Not only did the birthday boy love it, but it went over extremely well with my omnivorous coworkers, too.  Such is the power of chocolate and peanut butter together.

cooking

You put the lime in the coconut

wittychild

When I was just a wee tyke, the Grade 3 class in my school would learn songs from the Anne of Green Gables musical – Canada’s longest-running musical; who knew? – in music class, and as part of this curriculum, would actually get to make ice cream, just like they sang about*.  This was probably the most hotly anticipated moment of my entire educational career, particularly when my cousin, who was a year ahead of me, got to do it and I got to hear about it in greater detail than ever before.  For reasons I still don’t understand, her class was the last to do it, and I felt sorely robbed of the opportunity to waste valuable class-time making ice cream, of all the crazy things.

I eventually got over this snub, and really hadn’t had much of a burning desire to make ice cream since, because you can buy it at the store/I don’t eat dairy anymore/you can buy non-dairy ice cream at the store, too.  Besides, ice cream is just not one of those things I really crave too frequently.  But…every so often, in perusing a cookbook or website, I’d see an ice cream recipe and think, “Dang!”  Since we’re having a heatwave (a tropical heat wave), I finally took the plunge this weekend.

This product is particularly awesome for three reasons (besides the taste!):

1. It’s homemade (duh – who blogs about store-bought ice cream?)

2. It’s vegan

3. I made it without an ice cream maker

Yes!  Thanks to the Brown-Eyed Baker’s handy tutorial (found here), I was able to experiment with homemade ice cream without having to shell out for an ice cream maker that would sit and collect dust in the basement roughly 360 days out of the year.

Oh, the recipe?  Just a little gem from Hannah Kaminsky’s Vegan Desserts, “Toasted Coconut Key Lime Ice Cream”.  I’ve fiddled with key limes exactly once in my life, decided they weren’t worth the trouble, and employed one standard lime instead to get the necessary juice and zest.  It yields approximately one pint once all is said and done, which was the perfect amount to slake that cold-n-creamy craving.  The texture was nothing short of velvety, and it tested very well with omnivores.  Although the coconut milk makes it rich, the tartness of the lime provides the perfect balance.

Oh, yeah.  This opens up all sorts of possibilities….

*”Ice cream!  Is anything more delectable than ice cream?  Why, even the most respectable eat ice cream!  It’s wonderful on a summer’s afternoon in June,” etc.

baking

Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a mousse out of my hat!

wittychild

I desperately wanted to bake this weekend – had a serious kitchen itchin’ going on – but it was so hot.  To make a long story short: yes, there is air conditioning in the house.  I absolutely hate it; it’s a battle royale over whether it goes on at all, and so its use is restricted to those days with crazy, 40-degree humidex.  I figure, I freeze my tuchus off six months out of the year or so, and so I can suck it up for a few steamy days because come February I’ll be wistfully reminiscing, “Remember how hot it was in July?”

Baking wasn’t going to happen unless I felt like waking up early and starting while the grass was still vaguely dewy.  So what about a cool, refreshing dessert instead?

I took the basic recipe for Chocolate Mousse Topping from (where else?) Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and added two teaspoons of raspberry extract to the works to give it a twist.  This ain’t your grandma’s Jell-o pudding!  And thanks to Pyrex bowls and the microwave,  I didn’t even have to turn on the stove to melt the chocolate in a double boiler!  It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

I have a hunch – but haven’t tried it yet – that this mixture would be great frozen in popsicle moulds for creamy tofudgsicles, too.  The dollar store is definitely on my must-go list.

Summertime…and the livin’ is easy.

baking

Where the air is free, but the cupcakes will cost you

wittychild

There’s something about the last week of June that just brings with it a certain magic.  For kids, school is almost out for the summer (and I freely admit to watching “Kamp Krusty” the other day and bemoaning that I no longer get to enjoy that last-day euphoria).  For adults, the long weekend is imminent; an extra day off work to celebrate your country with barbeques and street fairs.

In my dad’s case, he got the best of both worlds, since he decided to retire at the end of June.  I sighed, and told him what a lucky bum he was: it’s like graduating, only without the worries of university in the fall or finding a job.  Since he first announced his intentions, it’s been a running joke in our household that he’s going to turn into Oscar Leroy – with all this time on his hands, he’ll find all sorts of little things to complain about and generally become a crotchety old man.  Naturally, I thought this momentous occasion required some sort of festive dessert, although “crotchety old man” is really hard to convey in cupcake form.  (Just for kicks, try Googling “Oscar Leroy cupcakes”.  They don’t exist.)  So I did the next best thing:

It’s an Oscar, he’s grouchy…it’s not such a stretch, really!

I used the basic chocolate cupcake recipe (love it!) from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and made a massive batch of buttercream to do the fur and eyebrows.  I finally got to use my grass tip!  I had bought a tube of black icing from Wilton to do the mouth and pupils, but when I went to do the first mouth I realized that, colour-wise, it was difficult to tell the icing from the cupcake, and so just left the mouth unfrosted.  Note: the eyes and tongue are both marshmallow and therefore are not vegan, but I was under time constraints and this was the path of least resistance.  If you have a little more time, the frosting could be further split and coloured to pipe on eyes and tongue.

My dad loved them!  So much so, in fact, that he was inspired to wear his Oscar the Grouch t-shirt the next day.  Fashion inspiration from cupcakes…strange.

Up next….Cookie Monster cupcakes – a Muppet after my own heart!

P.S. Happy Canada Day, everyone!

cooking

Some like it hot

wittychild

I usually don’t bother making New Year’s resolutions anymore.  Oh, I understand the psychological appeal of a new, unsullied year to finally kick that bad habit or start a good one, but it’s just not my thing.  Most resolutions fail, due either to lofty goals, ill-defined goals, or zero execution plan.  For example, “I resolve to lose weight” is too vague.  “I resolve to lose 50 pounds” is ambitious – but not totally impossible, if it’s accompanied by a list of Hows, which it usually isn’t.  “I resolve to lose 20 pounds; to do so, I’ll cut out my daily can of soda and walk for half an hour four times a week” is manageable and well-laid out, but most people don’t demonstrate this foresight.

In my own case, “I resolve to become a gourmet vegan chef” is just…not…gonna…happen.  But I do have a bit of an addiction to printed matter, including numerous cookbooks.  I buy them, ooh and aah over the recipes, and then put them back on the bookshelf without actually doing anything vaguely domestic.  So, for the last couple years, I’ve had an “unspoken resolution” of sorts: I resolve will endeavour to cook at least one new dish per month.  The only catch?  It has to be “real food”, and not a cupcake or cookie recipe – something that can be eaten as a meal.  That’s only twelve instances of real cooking per year; who can’t handle that?  Some of my experiments have been…less than pleasing…but for the most part, this has been a really fun undertaking, and I’ve been motivated to try dishes I might not have otherwise.

I realized last week that I hadn’t yet tried a new recipe for June, but after flipping through a couple of books, it didn’t take me long to come up with a relatively cohesive meal plan.

Left to right: “Better Love Your Beans Bake” from Hearty Vegan Meals for Monster Appetites, and “Curried Cabbage and Peas” from Appetite for Reduction.  And before you ask, no, I’m not a professional food photographer.  😛  The cabbage dish looks way prettier in person, with curried-yellow cabbage, plus bright green peas and orange carrots dotting it.

Cross-section of the bean bake:

It looks all rich and creamy – it is! – and cheesy – it isn’t! – but the topping is reasonably healthy, with a cup of puréed chickpeas making up the bulk of it, plus some nondairy sour cream, almond milk, nutritional yeast, and spices.  I’m a little obsessed with chickpeas, so finding a new way to use them in a recipe was A-OK by me.

A note on Hearty Vegan Meals: that books is full of recipes that will satisfy omnivores.  Quite a few of them call for deep-frying, which doesn’t thrill me, but I haven’t hit a bad recipe yet out of the ones I’ve tried.

The curried cabbage is hot-hot-hot – I could have halved the curry powder and been happy – but the bean bake worked wonders to temper it.

The best part?  I get total points for cooking something that everyone can enjoy.

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Happy Mother’s Day!

wittychild

This year has been a far cry from last year’s adding French knots and framing on Sunday morning.  For once, I actually came prepared for Mother’s Day.

Besides the towel that I posted last weekend, I stitched up a little card for Mumsie:

It was a free kit that came with a recent issue of Cross Stitcher magazine.  The kit included googly eyes that looked freaky-deaky (the mama koala looked merely surprised; the baby looked like a strung-out Keane kid), so I added French knots to give a somewhat more natural look.

And you can’t have Mother’s Day without dessert, can you?

This is a variation on the raw strawberry cheesecake from The Post Punk Kitchen.  I made the filling as per the recipe, but used the vanilla cookie crumb crust from Vegan Pie in the Sky instead.  I’m not normally a cheesecake fan, but this wasn’t bad – light and mousse-ish, with a nice strawberry flavour.

The cake, incidentally, made a lovely finish to our breakfast of cocoa-Kahlua pancakes from Hearty Vegan Meals for Monster Appetites.  Dense and chewy, they were like eating brownies for breakfast.  Yum!

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

baking

It’s a marshmallow world in the…spring?

wittychild

A normal person would, much in the style of Charles Emerson Winchester III, do one thing at a time, do it very well, and then move on to the next thing.  My approach is somewhat more chaotic, and I have found myself with one Mother’s Day project on the go, one yet to be started (eep!), one baby sampler due early summer started, and one anniversary present due late June started.  Everything is slowly getting done, bit by bit, but thanks to my own special brand of multitasking, nothing is really getting finished.  Thank goodness for long weekends.

I did, however, manage to steal a bit of time to try my hand at homemade marshmallows.  These are not vegan, alas, as my experiences with agar agar have been somewhat unpredictable and I actually wanted these to work; if anyone knows a good gelatin-to-agar agar equivalency rate or other vegan option, I’d be thrilled.

That said, they turned out perfectly!  I used Alton Brown’s recipe (found here), although I used nearly 2 1/2 Tbsp of vanilla instead of the recommended 1 tsp to enhance the flavour.  They do get a little sticky if left at room temperature, despite the powdered sugar/cornstarch coating, so I’ve been keeping them in the fridge.

Some of them have extra “skin tags” because I cut them once in the pan, then turned them out and re-cut on the bottom, and some of my cuts didn’t quite line up perfectly – but that’s purely cosmetic.  I’ve never used a candy thermometer before or attempted anything quite like this, but if I can manage, anyone can.  They are vanilla-y, soft, and smooth, and I can’t wait to make s’mores out of these babies!

Oh, yes: Happy Nabokov Day!