Thanksgiving eats, green beans, collards, cranberry and pumpkin!

So I've been making Thanksgiving dishes this week, trying to figure out which ones I want to do for Thursday.

It always bothers me that a lot of Thanksgiving plates consist only of brown blobs..I try not to make all my food brown and mushy.

First I made PPK Butternut Alfredo!, substituting canned pumpkin for butternut squash. This was excellent and superduper easy to make. Beside the soaking time for the cashews, the dish came together in less than 30 minutes. I also upped the sage and used fresh, since we have some in the garden. Try it with soba noodles if you have them. They are my favorite and take less time to cook.

I had also been wanting to try the Herbed Cream Collards from Vegnews. I've been getting ginormous bunches of collards at the farmer's market for $2 and while they usually go to a big pot of hoppin john, I thought these should be tried in something new. 

This recipe is pure fatty mcfatt goodness. These are incredibly rich with a can of coconut milk and a cup of almond meal (You don't need to buy almond meal..Just grind almonds in the food processor.) and a little goes a long way. When I tried them fresh out of the pan, I could taste the coconut, but when I heated some up the next day, I could not. So depending when you eat them, they're appropriate for coconut lovers and haters alike. (I used a whole can of coconut milk, but used olive oil instead of coconut oil, as called for.) Also got to use more fresh sage and some rosemary from the garden for this one. I think I will be doing these on Thursday.

They don't get creamier than this!

I wanted to try a quick green bean recipe last night and found Green Bean Shiraae which intrigued me based on it's uniqueness. It's basically green beans with a crumbled tofu/miso/sesame mixture. It's interesting, but not something I would recommend for a traditional Thanksgiving table. I left out the sugar and added a bit more soy sauce (I used Nama Shoyu, which isn't as salty as regular soy sauce. And speaking Nama Shoyu, I laugh every time I think of the name. An old coworker of mine, and my favorite person in the whole world used to say "NAMA SHO-YU!" in a sassy ghetto voice like it was supposed to be "Nah, I'm gonna show YOU!"..OK maybe you just had to be there...)

But I did discover a new favorite tofu while making this recipe. I used my first package of Wildwood Sproutofu with this recipe and found this tofu has this really creamy texture different from the Nasoya or 365 brands I usually get. The texture was great for sticking to the green beans and I can see using the Sproutofu in a future cheezecake (even though I don't think they make silken) for an extra creamy texture. 

sooooo creamy!

The cranberry blob on my plate is a prototype for a veganized version of my mom's jelloicious cranberry salad. I tried it with just homemade cranberry sauce as the gelling agent (since cranberries have a high amount of pectin-the compound in fruit that gels jellies) but it did not hold together as I would have hoped. I'm still working on it and will probably incorporate some agar.

Hopefully I can get the recipe right tomorrow and post it.

And of course for the dessert, I used more of my fresh cranberries to make an adaptation of Cranberry Streusel Bars from Vegan Desserts.

Cranberry Streusel Bars

3 - 3 1/2 cups fresh cranberries

1 cup granulated sugar

1 1/4 cups water

pinch of salt

3/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1 1/4 cups brown sugar

1 1/2 cups white whole wheat flour (or you can use all white flour)

1/2 cup all purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 cup almond milk

1/2 cup canola oil

1 1/2 cups rolled oats

1/2 cup pecans, very finely diced or pulsed several times in food processor and toasted

(To toast diced pecans, lay them out on a sheet of aluminum foil and bake for 5 minutes at 375.)

Combine the cranberries, sugar and water in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cook for 10-15 minutes, until the berries pop and the sauce thickens. Remove from heat and stir in salt and cinnamon. Set aside. (Congratulations. You have just made homemade cranberry sauce.)

Preheat oven to 375 degrees and grease a 9x13 baking dish.

In a large bowl, combine brown sugar, flours, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Add the soymilk and oil  and mix well with a fork. Add oats and pecans and mix well.

Press half of the mixture into the bottom of the greased baking dish. Bake for 10 minutes. Remove from oven and immediately spread cranberry mixture over the bottom layer. Sprinkle the remaining streuel mixture over the cranberry layer. Bake for 24-26 more minutes, until lightly browned. Cool completely and slice into bars.

Think about adopting a turkey for Thanksgiving from Farm Sanctuary.

Happy Thanksliving!

Pumpkin Pie Challenge

Are you fretting over which vegan pumpkin pie to make for Thanksgiving??!?! Tofu based? Corn starch? Agar? Soymilk? Which one will impress the skeptical omnivorous killjoys in your extended family?? Surely there must be only one perfect pumpkin pie recipe!

I know everyone freaks out at Thanksgiving because they want everything to be perfect and this certainly includes vegans. We try to go above and beyond to challenge the unfair stereotype of gross food that so many people unfairly carry around. And our freaked-out-ness tends to manifest itself in pumpkin pie. There are so many recipes out there! Which to choose? Will people really not notice there is tofu in there? How does it compare to the old evaporated milk recipe most people are used to?

I've made several recipes over the years and I don't really remember which ones...but I do remember none of those recipes have ever been met with sad tastebuds or disappointment. I know I have made the  Vegetarian Times recipe because I have a printout in one of my cookbooks. I believe I have also made the Bryanna Clark Grogan recipe before. I know I've done a tofu-based one, and once I did a pumpkin/pecan hybrid.

But this year I decided to test 2 side by side..the two most popular (purely my conclusion of looking online) Bryanna's and the Tweaked Voluptuous Vegan recipe from Vegan Pie in the Sky.

VV/VPITS in the front and Bryanna in the back

And guess what! They both tasted almost exactly the same. The only noticeable differences were the nuances in spices. Now I did deviate from the VV/VPITS recipe a bit, so maybe it invalidated my results, but I don't ever buy maple syrup because it's so expensive..so I used agave and some maple flavor instead of the syrup called for in the recipe.

Oh maple extract, you are about $17 cheaper that your authentic cousin.

I also used store-bought graham crusts for both of the pies..cause I'm lazy about some stuff.

Bama brand pie crust..from Oklahoma..

I also had three different brands of pumpkin and I thought the differences were interesting.

These two came from the dollar store. The one on the left is from China and was thicker and grainier than the other.

On the left is the dollar store brands mixed and on the right is Libby's.

Did you know that a lot of canned pumpkin is actually various squashes? I think that definitely accounts for the differences in texture between the brands. They still all made great pie though.

I'm going to recommend Bryanna's recipe because it's easy, cheap and pantry-friendly. You probably have everything you need in the pantry right now! As the recipe states, make it in advance! I found that when made in the morning, it was a good slicing consistency by night, but next day is ideal.

potato weight

These are both Bryanna pies from a few days later.  

Here's the list of recipes that I chose from. I'm not trying to confuse you or overwhelm you with options, but you can see that a lot of them are very similar. It can also be helpful to read about other's experiences. But seriously, don't freak out! It will be OK!

"Impossible" (crustless) pumpkin pie. Gluten-free

This one has avocado and cashews.
Dad's pumpkin pie, veganized
Dreena Burton's chocolate pumpkin pie
Pumpkin pie with Speculoos crust
Pumpkin pie served at Millennium's Thanksgiving dinner
Adapted Bryanna recipe using coconut milk
Sour cream swirl pumpkin pie
No-bake healthy pumpkin pie
6 ingredient (plus crust) pumpkin pie
Tofu-based

Another tofu-based one

Tofu-based pumpkin pie #3
Tofu-based #4
This one has vegan cream cheese in it and a cute cashew border.
No-bake chocolate-pumpkin pie
Tofu #5
Gluten-free pumpkin praline pie with LOTS of ingredients
This one is interesting. It has persimmons in it.
Tofu #6 very simple
Pumpkin cheesecake from Vegan Pie in the Sky
Layered pumpkin cheesecake that uses Tofutti...
...which is an adaptation of the fatfreevegan one (not actually fat free)
Another pumpkin cheesecake...This one is so pretty!
Pumpkin pecan pie
There's even an Instructables for Bryanna's recipe.

And maybe it's overkill, but vegan overkill is the best kind of overkill. Make some pumpkin ice cream to go with your desserts this year. This easy pumpkin ice cream has been well-received at my Thanksgiving table more than once.

best way to eat pumpkin! 

More Thanksgiving posts coming soon!

Apples! cake and scones

I made two apple baked goods this past week. Apple rosemary scones from Vegan Brunch and a veganized apple cake from an old spiral bound cookbook.

First the scones...

I hate scones..I do not understand the scone. It's like a biscuit that wants to be a cookie...and ends up combining the worst aspects of both. They're hard and only a little sweet, and they're tea party fare. But tea party fare is what I needed for...a tea party. So I broke out Vegan Brunch and decided to try the most interesting flavor variation listed...apple rosemary.  I'm also going to mention I don't particularly like rosemary.

But I was still intrigued by this combination. I had some gala apples and we have endless amounts of rosemary in the yard, so this seemed like the thing to do.

The batter was really tasty. And I loved the flavor of the apple and rosemary with cinnamon and nutmeg.

But my opinion was not changed on the finished scones. Still not for me. 

But what is for me is cake! 

...and for Mimi too. (She said this was her favorite of all my desserts she's had..This cake is certainly good, but somehow I think she forgot about the Kblog pumpkin cinnamon bun cake that I made last year.)

So some granny smith apples and a little veganizing later and we have a delicious fall dessert. The batter for apple cakes is interesting because you make it and think you've done something wrong because the batter will have the consistency of drop cookie dough. The large amount of chopped apple pieces added will release the moisture necessary to turn the batter into a cake and not a giant dense cookie.

Vegan Apple Cake

1 cup canola oil

2 cups sugar

1/3 cup flaxseed meal

1/2 cup water

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon cinnamon (recommended: Penzey's Vietnamese)

1 teaspoon nutmeg

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

4 cups chopped peeled apples (your choice of apple..I used granny smith)

1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts, toasted

Brown Sugar Glaze 

adapted from The Joy of Vegan Baking

1 cup packed brown sugar

1/2 cup almond milk

1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons Earth Balance margarine

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 2-piece angel food pan (or if you must, a springform pan. A removable bottomed pan is necessary.) Combine flax meal and water in a small bowl and set aside. In a large bowl, cream the oil and sugar until well incorporated. Beat in the flax mixture and vanilla. Sift the dry ingredients and beat into the wet mixture. The dough will be stiff and cookie dough-like. Fold in apples and nuts. Press batter into pan and bake one hour or until a knife comes out mostly clean. There will be a hard crust on top of the cake. Cool.

While the cake is cooling, make the glaze. 

In a small saucepan, combine brown sugar, almond milk and Earth Balance. Bring to a full boil and boil for three minutes. Reduce to a simmer and cook 10-15 minutes, stirring until thickened. Remove from heat and add vanilla. It should thicken up a little bit as it sits.

Remove the tube and cake from the outer pan and place on a cake platter. (This cake stays on the tube base so we can keep the crust on top.) Spoon glaze over the top.

The crust on the top is phenomenal. Once the glaze soaks into it, it is amazing in indescribable ways! 

Squirrel apple by FloArmengaud

Cinnamon Roll Cookies

Is it bad that I get excited about going to a party just so I can bake something? I was being particularly lazy yesterday and debating between going to my neighbor's Halloween party or sitting on my ass and watching The House of the Devil on repeat for about the 8th time yesterday. As much as I adore THOTD, 8 times was a little excessive..and there would be lots of kids at the party and old people, which might make a lot of people go for a 9th viewing of THOTD, but I enjoy handing out glow sticks to the kids and watching them go batshit insane over them. (Seriously guys, hand out glow sticks for Halloween, not candy.) and I always enjoy listening to old people talk..I've always found it much more substantial than the talk of many people my age.

So what to bake?

Since I just replenished my supply of THE BEST CINNAMON IN THE WORLD, I was kinda excited to bake something where cinnamon was the star. I will gab about this cinnamon for a minute because I love it so much and I think everyone should have some in their pantry. You know how Red Hots have that intense cinnamon-y flavor that's like cinnamon x 10 but without the woody bark taste? So imagine if that was a natural flavor instead of one created in a lab, minus the heat..and that's what this cinnamon tastes like. It's so intense and cinnamon-y..It's almost laughable when I compare it side by side to my 99 cent jar of cheapo cinnamon. You open the bag and you'd swear there is a batch of warm cinnamon rolls hiding somewhere in the bottom.

So cinnamon roll cookies it must be! I have been wanting to try these for a while. I believe there is a recipe in The Vegan Cookie Connoisseur, but my copy is buried deep somewhere in the basement, and well...spiders. Which kinda reminds me of one of those tongue-in-cheek e-cards I saw on Pinterest.

Perhaps I should have counted my blessings and foraged the depths of the basement. I will have to do it at some point. But I like my recipe a lot.

Cinnamon roll cookies

1/2 cup Earth Balance margarine

1 1/3 cups sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons molasses

1 egg replacer (I used powdered, but use whatever you want.)

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 tablespoons almond milk

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

Filling

1/4 cup Earth Balance margarine

1/4 cup sugar

1 tablespoon agave nectar (or other liquid sweetener)

2 teaspoons Penzey's Vietnamese cinnamon (or 3 teaspoons regular cinnamon)

Icing

powdered sugar

water or non-dairy milk

teeny bit of vanilla extract

Cream the Earth Balance, sugar and molasses together. Add in vanilla, egg replacer and almond milk. Sift in the flour, soda and salt and mix till incorporated. If dough is crumbly, add almond milk by the teaspoon until it becomes manageable. Divide the dough into 2 balls and roll each out in between 2 sheets of parchment paper into a 10-12 inch square. You will probably have to trim the edges to make it square or at least rectangular. I refrigerated the dough for 30 minutes after this, but I do not think it necessary.

Mash the filling ingredients together in a bowl to form a paste and spread on each of the dough squares. (I dyed my dough orange and yellow for Halloween.)

Using the parchment paper, gently roll up each square into a log and freeze at least one hour, preferably until completely frozen. I only froze the first log for an hour and it crumbled a little bit in the next step.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Slice the logs into 1/4-1/3 inch slices. I got 15 slices from each log. The photo above is the first log that crumbled a tiny bit at the bottom when sliced because it wasn't completely frozen. I just pressed each slice back together with my hands and it was fine.

Arrange the slices on a baking sheet lined with the parchment paper and bake 8-10 minutes. They will spread out a lot and should look like this when done. They will be very soft.

Cool on the pan for 5 minutes then carefully slide the parchment paper and cookies onto the counter or cooling rack and let the cookies continue to cool, at least 10 minutes.

Prepare the glaze by mixing a little bit of water with some powdered sugar. Start with only a few teaspoons of water and add more as needed. Mix in vanilla. I added orange food color for Halloween. (I don't ever measure my glaze ingredients, but I am guessing them to be about 1 cup of powdered sugar, one tablespoon of water and 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla.)

Drizzle on glaze. Enjoy!

These were a big hit and I ended up trading the few leftover cookies on my platter to a vegan-curious woman for a big bowl of guacamole. (Guacamole and cookies for breakfast instead of just cookies! Yay!)

watching The House of the Devil for the 8th time...
photo by Johnny Kruger

Happy Halloween!

Chocolate & graham cracker cake

So I was all excited to go see The Texas Chainsaw Massacre last night at the Alabama Theatre since TCM is my favorite movie (or at least tied with Taxi Driver) and The Alabama is an amazing place. The Alabama is one of the few remaining picture palaces from the 1920s. I saw A Nightmare on Elm Street there on Wednesday night, but was most excited about TCM on Thursday night.

Leatherface is not vegan.

And then my cousin called and asked me to come to her last dinner before she moves out of state..

OK Leatherface, you and I will just have to stick to DVD. Someday we will meet in an old theater with your face lit up at 30 feet wide and I can listen to your brother talk about headcheese and how bludgeoning cows provides jobs for people. (TCM is a rather vegan-inducing movie if you haven't seen it.)

So what should I make in about an hour and a half to take for dinner dessert? I wanted to do a recipe I hadn't done before and since vegan graham crackers were BOGO at the store this week, I went with the S'mores cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World but in cake form. 

There's a high liquid to dry ingredient ratio and the batter ended up being superthin. This worried me a bit, but I didn't have time to do make anything else, so I just went with it. The cake took about 35 minutes and still wasn't 100% done in the middle, but I didn't have time to leave it in longer. And underdone cake actually turns out to be a good thing in many cases..that gooey center that slides out as your fork presses into the cake!

I also discovered I only had 1 1/2 cups of powdered sugar.. So I whipped out one of my favorite chocolate icing recipes from one of those old corporate recipe booklets.

Fudge frosting
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup non-dairy milk (I used lite coconut this time)
1/4 cup Earth Balance
2 tablespoons corn syrup
1-1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Mix granulated sugar, cocoa, coconut milk, Earth Balance and corn syrup in a medium saucepan. Heat to boiling, stirring frequently. Boil 3 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat. Beat in powdered sugar and vanilla.

I added a thin layer of icing to the bottom cake layer, covered it with graham crackers and then another layer of icing.

I did the same for the top layer and topped with graham cracker crumbs and chocolate chips. (The cake was still warm so the chocolate chips got soft and melty..it was awesome.) For a true s'mores cake, a tub of Ricemellow Creme would add in well (or Dandies melted with some Earth Balance), but the cake is very rich as is...and I didn't feel like stopping by Whole Foods on the way to dinner. 

The undone center mixed with the icing to make a supergooey rich treat that everyone loved. I recommend serving warm.

photo by Marina Cano

Vampire teeth cupcakes with dripping blood

These are kinda funny. Usually I like to use spider rings if I do plastic toppers for Halloween cupcakes, but these red vampire teeth just seemed so fun. 

Here are some mini cupcakes I made with the spider rings last year. I swirled chocolate buttercream with orange tinted Biscoff spread for the frosting.

They were a big hit, but I was getting tired of doing spider rings. Originally I wanted to do chocolate buttercream, but then I realized they would look like mouth-full-of-poop cupcakes, so I went with orange buttercream. Only I didn't have any oranges or orange extract...but I did have..orange Kool-Aid! 

I added a little bit with some food color to the VCTOTW buttercream recipe to get some surprisingly tangy icing.

And what are vampire teeth without fake blood?? So I made some classic movie blood (corn syrup + food color) and added a pinch of cherry Kool-Aid. (A little goes a long way! Add sparingly a tiny bit at a time.)

I didn't have an icing tip with a large opening so I was lazy and just snipped off the corner of a zipper bag and iced that way. The swirls are a little haphazard, but it just adds to their general weirdness. After topping with the blood, they were covered with plastic wrap for the next day. The blood soaked in a little bit, so these are probably best decorated right before being eaten to keep their cool blood effect. 

I made two batches, one using Chloe Coscarelli's chocolate beer cupcakes (Did you know Chloe's dad is Don Coscarelli, the guy who made Phantasm? If you haven't seen Phantasm, it's a great cult horror movie with a kickass theme song.)

and the other batch using the chocolate stout cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World: 75 Dairy-Free Recipes for Cupcakes that Rule . I actually didn't use stout at all, but some light beer that had been left from a party a few weeks back. Honestly I picked those recipes just to get rid of the beer. Chloe's recipe was lighter and very cake mix cake-like, but I slightly preferred the VCTOTW recipe. Not a huge difference between the two though. Chloe's recipe filled one cupcake pan with enough left for about 9-10 mini cupcakes.

I decorated the minis with some skull and bones candies I found at the dollar store.

Listen to the Phantasm theme as you make these guys. It always reminds me of Halloween and scary movies.

Bat photo from baturday

Happy Halloween!