Before I start, let me wish Colleen a belated happy birthday. No, I didn’t forget about her birthday on Friday but I did forget to write a post about it. If you haven’t already done so, make sure you wish her a happy (belated) birthday!
Unfortunately, to go along with missing the birthday post, we also have missed a couple days of posting for Vegan Mofo. Since my schedule is a bit screwed up this quarter—night class on TuTh and late dates on MW—it is going to be a real challenge to keep pushing the envelope with yummy vegan related posts. In any case, this weekend I was able to make a few new things which I will happily report about now.
Yesterday I realized that I couldn’t wait any longer and needed to use up our CSA pears from a week ago. I was going to make a pear tart but I couldn’t find a recipe that knocked my socks off so I decided on a pear and hazelnut crisp instead. Of course, I am the type of person who can’t settle on a decision so I kept looking around and decided to make a pear pie instead. Unfortunately, I have a sordid past with pies.
I usually only make them on the major holidays (e.g. pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving) and even in those cases, I buy those frozen, premade crusts. The first time I tried to make a double crusted pie (a delicious apple pie from my “Vegan Planet” cookbook), it was awesome. It was a hell of a lot of work but damn did it look and taste great. As fate would have it, my pie crust making abilities peaked at that point and have been crap ever since. I always end up mangling the crust when rolling it out, then letting out a stream of curse words that would make a pirate cry. Colleen generally runs in fear when I announce that I want to make a pie. Yesterday was going to be different though. I had the will, the energy and the pastry flour to make a kick ass pie. What I lacked was a known-good pie crust recipe that used the pastry flour.
I managed to find a recipe (I think it was on vegan.org) so I rushed, headlong, into the process. Fifteen minutes later and Colleen was in damage control mode as I had wound up with a crappy recipe. I am pretty sure I followed the recipe to a T but the result was horrendous and the dough had to be thrown away. Gone was not only my will to bake, but my will to live. Alright, it wasn’t that bad but only because I have gotten more mature over the years, or so I tell myself 
After a bit of simmering (and a short walk with Colleen), I decided to go back to my initial plan of fixing the pear crisp. Crisps are brain-dead easy to make so, luckily, nothing went wrong with the recipe. Oh, sure, I screwed up the recipe once again but it was a fairly minor gaffe; I forgot to mix the nuts in with the crisp topping so I just sprinkled them on at the end. The resulting crisp was pretty decent, although not spectacular. I felt like it need a bit more crisp and a bit less pear. The picture of my pretty crisp is shown below.
Today I was full of energy once again so I decided to try my hand at some more baking. The last couple of weekends I have been making bread so I thought I would continue that trend today. My previous two attempts at bread have come from the Outrageously Easy BIG Bread recipe that is highly regarded on VegWeb and has garnered decent reviews from in our household. I wasn’t 100% satisfied with the texture though so i decided to look for a sandwich bread recipe. Sometimes Google is a lifesaver but when it comes to searching for recipes, I find myself first trying AllRecipes or Recipezaar. (On a side note, where do you, our loyal reader, go to first when you want to find a recipe? Post a comment and let us know!) Recipezaar was the winner this time, providing me with Sabrina’s Sandwich Bread. The recipe, like most bread recipes was pretty simple, although I managed to screw it up once again, this time forgetting to include the melted butter in the dough. Again, the mistake was minor and overall the resulting bread was a big winner. The texture was exactly what I wanted, and Colleen agreed. I would not hesitate in calling it my best bread so far. The one knock I have with the recipe is that it seemed to call for an inordinate amount of salt. It was 1.25 Tbps for my 9×5 loaf and, while not terribly distracting, the salt content does seem noticeably high. The yummy result is pictured below.
Well, it seems to be getting late so I think I’m going to wrap this post up now. Colleen should be here tomorrow to talk about our special little snack we had for dinner tonight. In the mean time, don’t forget to leave a comment telling us where you look first when you want to find a new recipe.
- Sat
