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

You remember food, don’t you? Food is that good old friend of yours who is always there to pick you up. Luckily for us, food has been really good to us lately. Well, for the most part…

This past weekend, I decided to make Susan V’s Seitan Ribz. Susan V is, of course, the lovely owner of Fat Free Vegan, one of our favorite blogs. While this recipe is from that website, I actually found it when I was at the Everyday Dish. I don’t know what it is about being able to watch someone make the recipe, but Julie from Everyday Dish seems to inspire me to create something every time. Anyway, back to the ribz. It took literally 5-10 minutes to whip up the ingredients then about 40 more for the baking/grilling that they underwent. It was such a fantastic day out on Saturday that we couldn’t resist getting out the grill for the first time since the fall. Grilling out made me realize how much I miss the summer. After the baking and grilling, the ribz turned out as seen in the picture to the left. The taste was good, although I wasn’t bowled over by it. Part of the reason is that I didn’t use nearly enough BBQ sauce. In any case, the ribz paired well with both the grilled carrots and grilled jicama to create an excellent “feels like summer” meal.

Continuing with my Everyday Dish kick, a couple nights ago I made some of Julie’s “Not Your 70′s” Granola. I was excited to make my granola for the first time and since, like always, Julie made it look so simple I decided to finally pull it off my queue and attempt it. Mixing everything up was easy but I hit a bump in the road when I realized that our baking sheets are about 1/2 the size that Julie used so I had to bring in some cookie sheets to handle the massive amount of granola that was made. 45 minutes (and a couple tossings) later, I had burnt granola. That’s right; burnt granola. Luckily it wasn’t all burnt but maybe 1/3 was and the rest was a little too brown. I don’t know what went wrong. I double checked the instructions and I can’t see anything I messed up. I was pretty disappointed but I did have a bowl of it the next morning and it tasted pretty yummy so not all is lost. Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture of it since it was late when I finished making it and I just wanted to get some sleep.

Moving along, we have another case of “Colleen just does it better.” I don’t know how or why it happens but there are some things that I just can’t get the hang of but when Colleen tries it once, she masters it. Case in point: Big Ben’s Lentil Burgers. A while ago, I decided to try this recipe from How It All Vegan. The recipe is about as straight-forward as you can get: mix in a can of lentils with some onion, bread crumbs, and random herbs/spices then mash them together into burger form. Luckily there weren’t any children nearby when I first fixed them because I let loose a set of expletives that would have made a sailor cover his ears. In short, the damned things wouldn’t stick together. A little searching on the ol’ Internet found out that I wasn’t the only one who had trouble getting these things to stick together. They often showed up on lists of the few (and I mean few) recipes from the aforementioned cookbook that were not good.

Of course, this wouldn’t have been a big deal had Colleen not gone ga-ga over them. She liked the taste and the crumbly texture so I relented and agreed to fix them again. Again, there was no getting them to stay together and I ended up in another cooking-induced rage. Colleen, obviously trying to lead to my demise, put the burgers on the meal list this week. (On a random note, if you aren’t using Gubb, you should. It rocks!) I was prepared though: I was going to make Colleen suffer through the indignity of having to make these demonic, yet tasty, burgers. The result: perfection. Well, they weren’t exactly perfect but we’ll get to that in a moment. What was fantastic was the fact that, as you can see in the picture, the burgers stayed together wonderfully.

What was different? Did Colleen have a trick up her sleeve? I would like to think that her little secret was a thing called “Sat’s Homemade Breadcrumbs.” I decided to quit being stupid and buying breadcrumbs at the store and just to make some myself. I think the doughyness of the fresh crumbs helped things bind together a bit better. Unfortunately, there is one thing I forgot when my breadcrumbs: seasoning. While the burgers looked good, they seemed to be missing something compared to the ones I fixed (and, please, no snarky comments about the missing ingredient being “rage”). That’s when it dawned on me: the store-bought breadcrumbs were had Italian seasoning in them. Next time we fix these burgers, I’ll make sure to add the herbs to make up for it.

Finally, we move onto tonight’s meal: Po’ Boys from Veganomicon. I don’t know what ever made me want to fix these things but I bought all the ingredients when I went shopping this past weekend and have been waiting for the perfect time to make them. That time was tonight. The recipe looked really simple so I figured I could get everything done in an hour or so. Two-and-a-half hours later I realized that I had underestimated the time. No, these things shouldn’t have taken that long. They are basically just baked tofu and coleslaw on french bread (with some chipotle mayo for good measure).

Things got off on the wrong foot when I failed to realize that shredding cabbage is a lot different than shredding other stuff. The handheld grater didn’t work. Then I wasted about 1/2 a head of cabbage when i used the S-blade instead of the shredder blade on our food processor. Then I realized that the shredder blade was the same thing as using the grater, which isn’t what I wanted. I had to make use of my old friend Google to find the following guide on shredding cabbage/lettuce. After finally making my way through the slaw recipe, it looked like a cabbage bomb had just exploded all over the kitchen. Cleaning up was not fun. The rest of the process was pretty easy but it still took longer than I wanted. When I finally assembled the sandwich (shown on the left), I had this wave of fear come over me that it was going to taste terrible. With some reservation I bit in and, to my pleasant surprise, it was good. Real good. I suddenly felt a lot better about myself.

Well, I guess that is all the food-related business I have to talk about in this entry. I will add one note before I leave though: cutting back on salty foods is haaard. My Lenten pledge was to eat less salt (how much less, I didn’t specify) so I have been trying hard to avoid all the usual culprits: highly processed foods, snack foods, etc.. The real killer is not having any salty snacks to munch on mindlessly while I watch TV/surf the web/do whateva. When Lent finally ends, I’ll either be a better person or a dead person. Place your bets now.

- Sat