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.

My Sweet Vegan just came in the mail today (dude, Cosmo’s Vegan Shoppe ships their stuff out lightning fast, also buy your vegan cookbooks from vegan stores and not Amazon, ok?), and my fat pants are stretching themselves out in excitement. There’s two things that you’ll probably hear about this book (kind of like how the only thing people know about Asia Carrera is that she’s in MENSA – she’s a retired porn star, her website is obviously NSFW) in the hype and that’s that the author is very young and that she figured out how to make vegan meringue. Hannah also runs Bittersweet, which pretty much every vegan faps over anyway.

The moment I opened the book, I found a bunch of things to be excited about, and with no surprise pretty much all of the cupcakes are making me want to eat them. Go figure. One trick pony-ville over here.

Here’s a short list so far of what’s caught my eye:

Strawberry Love Muffins
Cheesecake Thumbprint Cookies
Maple Pistachio Cremes
Pfeffernusse (they look like the Russian Teacakes my mom loves during Christmas)
Strawberry Spirals
Bananas Foster Cake (though the person I had thought about making it for showed exactly no interest in it when I showed him the picture. So, I think he’s going to get a big “Fuck You” instead of a lovely cake.)
Chai Cheesecake (OHMYGODYESYESILOVEYOUHANNAH)
Decadent Almond Cake
Lychee Cupcakes with Raspberry Frosting (I don’t know about raspberry with lychee, but these look better than the lychee cupcakes in VCTOTW)
Mini Icebox Cheesecake (can you tell that I love cheesecake?)
Pomegranate Ginger Cupcakes
Root Beer Float Cupcakes
Wasabi Chocolate Cupcakes (only because they sound like something you’d trick people with and then laugh when they choked on it)
Pink Lemonade Tartlets
Flaming Hot Peanut Brittle
Green Tea Freezer Pops (I love you. I love you so much.)
Green Tea Tiramisu (Did I say I loved you? No, I want to marry you, Hannah.)

Hope you like fat chicks, Hannah, because you’re gonna chunk me up good!

Also, my cupcake carrier is getting old and too small, someone buy me a Cupcake Courier (in blue) pretty, pretty please?

I’m restructuring the organization of the site a little, and since I got a couple of new books in the mail, I figured I’d try something new and start a list of the recipes that immediately catch my eye as I flip through them.

It may not be exciting for you, but it may help me remember when I think I’ve run out of cooking ideas.

Up first is the cookzine Papa Tofu. If you want this, order it now because it’s popular and kittee probably didn’t print many of them. Many of the recipes are on her PakuPaku site, but in convenient printed form. Lots of stuff from Ethiopian fare to New Orleans cuisine (and a buttbusting load of sweets) are in here.

Since Mardi Gras is coming up, I’ve been eyeing her king cake recipe and maybe something like the red beans and rice from Veganomicon, I’m not entirely sure yet. I’ll probably not do anything because I’ll be lazy, heh. The stuffed tofu has been winning hearts all over the Inkernet, so that will probably make its way into my tummy some time before the end of the universe. Yay kittee!

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.

Cinnamon Rolls. Yummmmm…

I had seen Isa make these, from Katie’s recipe. I wanted them. I wanted them bad.

But I didn’t make them. Weeks passed, sadly without cinnamon rolls.

Then a few days ago, I saw Lolo post a different recipe on her blog, but it was a huge recipe so I started hunting around for recipes to satisfy my sweet tooth. And then I came across and old post of kittee’s. It was destiny.

And it’s delicious. Other than some kneading and rising time, they’re super easy to make – even I couldn’t screw them up. I dare you to try! I made them kittee-style, which is to add 1/4 teaspoon of cardamom to both the dough and the filling.

The one thing that I think I would add would be some golden raisins to the filling. I don’t know why, but it just sounds really good.

And an inside shot, so you can see how pumpkiny they are.