It’s a pesto fiesta in my pants, and… everything green is invited? (I might want to rephrase…)

I was feeling super pesto-y a couple of weekends ago, but I didn’t really want to have a pesto baby two days in a row, so I went for Isa’s inaugural Yet To Be Named Lower Fat Cookbook recipe of Spinach Fettucine with Edamame Pesto.

This is a bullshit picture, but you’ll live.

For being so much lower in fat than I’m used to, this is a pretty good recipe. The sauce is extremely thick and creamy, but yet light and full of basil goodness. I can definitely handle a main course of this if the next night’s dinner is…

Isa Pizza

As seen with whole wheat crust, homemade pizza sauce, pesto sauce, tofu basil ricotta, mushrooms and capers (because olives are the deeeeevilllll.) I don’t think that it’s  my most favoritist homemade pizza ever, but the Green Goddess Garlic is extremely hard to top. Also, I’m slightly sad that my whole wheat dough didn’t rise as much as my AP version, but that’s hardly the recipe’s fault.

Recipe from Vegan With A Vengeance

Chocolate Mint Melties

I made these for New Year’s Eve and brought them over to the place where we were celebrating that evening. I made these with regular AP flour, and probably could have used to add a little more oil and maple syrup just because the batter was a little more dough-like than it should have been – I could have ended up with a rounder, less brownie-like cookie.

Dreena’s not kidding when she says to only bake these for 11 minutes and to be careful with them – I thought for sure that I wouldn’t be able to get them off of the wax paper (I need to switch to parchment) and the bottoms were very slightly burnt. However, once the cookies cooled off, the slightly “cajun” part was completely undetectable. I’ll take that as a win.

Trader Joe’s came through on the mint chocolate, so I didn’t have to go to Whole Foods or Henry’s to pick up a bar of the mint Endangered Chocolate. Trader Joe’s has something at the moment called Dark Chocolate Mint UFOs (or something similar, I’m not near the bag and I’ll have to fix this later if I’m wrong) – basically large vegan chocolate mint chips. If you look at the picture, you’ll see that there’s a half chip on the top of each cookie. Yum!

My omni friends said that they were really great and (I hate using the following phrase) that they don’t taste vegan at all. Word.

Recipe from Eat, Drink and Be Vegan. Dreena has kindly shared her recipe here.

Green Goddess Garlic Pizza

Homemade pizza crust, roasted garlic paste, pesto, basil-tofu ricotta, broccoli, garlic, spinach and capers.

I’ve missed making this! It really does kinda take forever, and it takes a ton of bowls, but it’s still worth it. I do prefer to make my pizzas whole wheat, but I only had AP flour in the house – oh well. This time, I omitted the green olives and replaced them with capers – thanks zpizza for the inspiration! I’m not sure that the spinach really brings anything to the table, but when  you have a pizza this full of olive oil, more vegetables is probably a good idea.

You can make the pizza dough the night before if you’re so inclined, but I’d prefer making the pesto and ricotta the night before. It may be a good idea to roast the garlic beforehand as well. Since I enjoy this recipe so much, I think I might try to make some less labor intensive pizzas in the future. With the exception of the pain in the ass making the dough is, I really don’t see why I should ever order pizza out again.

This is garlic flavored love.

Recipe from Vegan With A Vengeance. Isa has the recipe for the Basil-Tofu Ricotta here.

Pretty simple stuff, the fries and the BBQ sauce are from Vegan With A Vengeance. I just baked the tempeh in the sauce for probably 30 minutes at 350. It was very slightly crunchy when we started eating it, so steaming it a little beforehand would have been a good idea. It was a lot more moist the next day, but I should have gone with the tried and true tofu instead.

I’ve been really lazy about a) cooking and b) porning about it. My pants size reflects this, boo. Also, when I have been cooking, it’s been all in the dessert kingdom. My pants size reflects this, too.

This is the Chai Cheesecake from My Sweet Vegan, with Macadamia Creme from Vegan with a Vengeance on top. I’ve made this cheesecake probably three times since I first tried the recipe, and it’s super simple and extremely satisfying. Just remember that you have to let it sit in the fridge overnight to really let the flavor develop, because it’s worth it. My suggestion is to use the crust recipe from The Uncheese Cookbook, because I didn’t really like the flavor that brown rice syrup brought to the table in the original recipe. (It gave it sort of a burnt flavor, but I’m the only person that noticed it. You’ll probably like it.)

So, I decided that I was going to alter the recipe and make Maccha Cheesecake. I’ll post the recipe here once I’m completely satisfied with it, which should be soon. Gimmie comment feedback, it’ll make me post it that much quicker.

Yum.

Beer Battered Chicken-style Seitan & Mushroom Gravy, Steamed Asparagus

Coconut Chocolate Pudding

Yellow Rose Recipes came in the mail the day before yesterday and I wasted no time in making a batch of chicken-style seitan cutlets. My main gripe with seitan recipes is that the vast majority of them are beef-style.  I’ve said it a thousand times, but I hated red meat even as an omni, so beef-style seitan really doesn’t appeal to me. Hail to Joanna for making an amazing, awesome recipe. If I had kneaded the dough by hand and maybe a bit longer (Kitchen Aid mixer dough hook FTW), chances are I could have produced super firm cutlets that would be omni-friendly as a chicken patty sammich. These are so, so, so, so good.

I’m not real great with breading and frying things yet, but I think I did pretty well with these. The tricky part is in the second frying – the beer batter really doesn’t want to stay put. I think in the future, I’ll try dusting the seitan with cornstarch before battering. The mushroom gravy is pretty good, but I think next time I’ll want to try the Vegan with a Vengeance Punk Rock Chickpea Gravy since it’s a little more suited to my personal tastes. I even remembered to steam up a vegetable, I’m a good kid.

For dessert, I whipped up the Coconut Chocolate variant of the Chocolate Pudding recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance. I’ve been experimenting with pudding recipes lately, and while I do like how this one came out, it’s very ‘homemade’ tasting. If you want something that’s ‘pudding cup’ish, go with the recipe from the Sarah Kramer books that’s basically silken tofu and friends in a blender. I do notice that all of these recipes are all chocolate flavored, and I’m wondering how to go vanilla with it. Extract would be too alcohol-y to try to use a lot, so I’m thinking instead of cocoa powder in these recipes, to maybe use vanilla soy milk powder. Go with vanilla flavor (glycerin based) instead of extract? Hmm… I’ll have to experiment.

Yum.

I haven’t made this pizza, or any other from scratch, in about two years. This particular one uses every bowl in the kitchen, but it’s worth it. Whole wheat crust, roasted garlic paste, spinach (not used because Trader Joe’s ran out when I was there and I was too lazy to go to another store), pesto, tofu-basil ricotta (substituted for the green garden puree, which I found to be somewhat bland last time), and then the various veggies you see on top – broccoli, green olives and more garlic.

Obviously, this is a date meal (and with all of the olive oil in it, it’s obviously low cal and low fat.) It’s the garliciest garlic pizza in Garlic Town. There’s roughly 1.5 heads of garlic used on each pizza (the recipe makes two.) I live for garlic, and I’ve never met a garlic-based dish that I didn’t like. I should probably look into one of these.

The ricotta came out perfectly, and even Captain Snotty About Vegan Cheese had no complaint, despite the amount of nooch in both the pesto and the ricotta. See? You just have to learn how to tame the savage nooch.

I really should make pizza more often, even if kneading pizza dough for 10 minutes straight is kinda ass.

Merry Giftmas, or as the Pastafarians like to say: Happy Holiday

I’m updating from the comfort of my sickbed, which I’ve been nestled in since early on Giftmas Day.

Pro Tip: If you feel too sick to go to work, you’re too sick to go to work.

I went in on the next day and left work two hours later after slumping over in my cubicle, on the verge of passing out and puking. I think I scared my boss when I called her from my cubicle, which is about four feet from hers, to tell her that I felt sick and she had to ask me if I was sitting up because she couldn’t see me. I literally couldn’t move or do anything but stay slumped over. So much for being the stoic office worker. However, since my parents were super generous and got me a brand new laptop this year (I know, I still don’t believe it), I’ve been sickbedding relatively comfortably, with the Inkernet and Team Fortress 2 (SteamID: reiliel) always within reach. Also, I’ve been reading the hell out of the Dexter novels that my guy got me for Giftmas. Nothing says love like forensics and sociopathy! <3

You’re here for the snot tales and the blood spatter, right?

Just in case you came here for the food, I was super busy before Giftmas making all kinds of food to take to my parents for Giftmas Eve, and other food just to have to stay alive. I made it all in the same evening, and you know what that means – something had to suffer. I managed to fuck up the one recipe that I’m pretty sure that no one in the history of the world has ever fucked up before: falafel from Vegan with a Vengeance.

And how does one do that? Forget to add flour to the mix. There was an interdimensional pocket on the page between breadcrumbs and onion, apparently. What didn’t fall apart and was salvageable did taste really good, but the majority got turned to oil slurry. Yaaaaay. At least I didn’t fuck up the tahini sauce to go with it. When I’m feeling better, I’ll make another batch. Also, note to self: don’t attempt this in the blender, use the Kitchen Aid grinder until you get a food processor.

The other casualty of the evening was the Sauteed Green Beans and Mushrooms, also from Vegan with a Vengeance. Since my copy is from the first printing, there’s typos in it that I wasn’t aware of, mostly because everything I’ve made out of it has turned out perfectly. That is, until this recipe. 4 teaspoons of salt is too much for any recipe, and you should know better. The proper amount is 1 teaspoon. One. It would have been really good if I had known that, and the dish did nothing to help my mom’s opinion of vegan cooking which makes it all the more painful that it’s pretty much the first recipe I’ve really fucked up. (The falafel were made after the green beans.)

But wait, there’s good news! I prepared mashed potatoes and Punk Rock Chickpea Gravy, which my mom liked but commented that it tasted like split pea soup. Whaaaat? Neither Jake or I like split pea soup, so not only did we find this comparison to be inaccurate, it was also grody. But hey, it came out well.

And for dessert?

Individual Heart-shaped Apple Galettes

I made these quite a bit smaller than the recipe calls for – mine made something like 10 or 11 while the recipe says it makes 6. The reason is that I had a larger, heart-shaped cookie cutter that proved to be a lot easier to work with than cutting out the bigger hearts by hand. As a result, my mom kept referring to them as cookies, but I think I’d like to see them as small tarts. They’re also insanely easy to make, once you get the crust out of the way (do yourself a favor and get a $3 pastry cutter from your local Mega-lo-mart.)

I had to improvise a little with the placement of the apple, with the smaller size of the hearts (the bigger sizes allow for fanning), but I think it worked well. My mom mentioned that the way I placed them was quite visually appealing; I know that if she had said something like that, she really meant it.

Serve warm with a scoop of Soy Delicious/So Decadent soy ice cream. Nom.

I make this soup all of the time when it starts getting a little cold, but I’ve never taken any food porn of it before. It’s not all that photogenic, but it’s seriously got restaurant flavor, as Isa says.

This is the result of two seperate batches of crepes. The first batch half ended up being sink blobs, and the other half turned into plate blobs. They still tasted okay.

After re-watching the crepe episode of The Post-Punk Kitchen, and reading up a little more on crepes, I went back into the trenches to try again. I did a victory squeal when the very first one actually succeeded, mostly. I blame the cheap crepe pan, because it was prone to burning in the middle even if the edges were still totally dough. I did my best, however, and only had three sink blobs. Horray! I’m thinking that I’ll probably have crepes down by the fourth try. And I need a new pan. The blueberry sauce is from Vegan With a Vengeance, and is made with wild blueberries. Yum. It could have used some sort of sweetened tofu ricotta for filling, blintz-style.

Also, have a maccha latte.

Pumpkin Waffles – Vegan With a Vengeance

I own an old school cast iron cook-that-bitch-over-a-flame Belgian waffle iron… that I’ve never used before. I was going to post when I made the first attempt, but I wanted a happy ending, so it had to wait until now.

Attempt 1: Actually, the second of the three gigantihuge waffle slabs that the batter allotted. The first one looks like the third one, pictured below. This one wasn’t so bad and it froze well for later breakfast eating.

Attempt 2: Oh, the shame!

Attempt 3: A few days later, I get my happy ending. Jake was supposed to show me how to use the iron properly, but he ended up making all of the waffles himself because he kept getting distracted. I think I picked up the gist of it, though.

Heat the fucker up on both sides until the gauges read in the middle (mine say cold, bake, hot), then plop the batter in the middle of the iron, don’t even bother trying to fill it. Watch the gauges, but it’s more of a listening thing. When it stops sizzling on that side, flip it over and do the same. You can try to peek after a while to see how it’s doing, but DO NOT PRY THAT BITCH OPEN LIKE A GRILLED CHEESE SAMMICH. If you do, you’ll be making sink waffles. Do you want to eat out of the sink? Huh? Do you?

Anyway, these freeze up really nicely, so I got to have waffles at my convenience while running out the door for work.  As for Captain Jacob, Princess Waffles Can Never Be Good Without Eggs? When I asked him if these would make him stop bitching about vegan waffles, he said yes. At least I think he said yes, it’s hard to talk when your yap is full of waffle. I think I’m going to go for the Banana Nut Waffles out of Veganomicon next.