holiday meals

Normally my family uses tofu turkeys for their holiday entree, which are simple: you just take them out of the box and bake them. If you haven't tried tofu turkeys, they're simple marinated/seasoned tofu shaped like a happy turkey. They're gluten free and come with an easy-to-make gravy. And they're just so cute!

However, my sister-in-law is sensitive to soy,  and I wanted something we could all have. Many vegan entree options have gluten, but half the people at our meal were gluten-free, so I was pretty much left with one option: THE VEGDUCKEN. This recipe (and similar ones) was circulating around the internet for a while, just calling to be veganized. First, I have to tell you, this recipe is good, but poorly written. Or, at least, poorly organized--the list of ingredients isn't in any particular order. I ended up rewriting the whole thing in a Word doc just to make it make more sense.

Here's what I changed: I used vegan butter (homemade, but Earth Balance would work) and halved the butter for the layering/sauce, and never used any mint. This turned out just fine, and we had plenty. I used two flax "eggs" (2 Tbsp flax meal mixed with 6 Tbsp water) to replace the eggs, and to replace the parmesan cheese, I just used 2-3 Tbsp light miso. (Because of the miso, this means the recipe wasn't completely soy free, but you could use a soy-free vegan cheese like Daiya to make it so.) I used gluten-free breadcrumbs--the Hannaford store brand is just corn, sugar, and salt. Oh and my mushrooms were reconstituted dried. Finally, because I am allergic to nightshades, I replaced the eggplant layer with lightly steamed sliced celery root.

And here's the thing: even with all these (in some cases rather dramatic) substitutions, it tasted great. And went together really easily.

Here it is before putting the sides together and baking:

And here it is, baked and with some slices taken off.

I recommend carving it at the table and serving it one piece at a time; when we tried to cut several slices in advance they fell apart and were not as pretty to serve.

It serves a lot! I actually made two because there were 11 of us eating and my family are big eaters, but we never ended up finishing the first, let alone cutting into the second. And everyone really liked it!

We hosted Thanksgiving so we wouldn't have to travel with the baby, but our dining room is small so half of us ate in the dining room and half of us ate in the makeshift second dining room (the living room).

My side of the family! My brother is holding the baby in the back.

Christmas dinner was a much smaller affair, with just us and Kevin's mother, so we cooked the meal together. Our entree was Elizavegan's vegan tourtiere, made with sweet potatoes instead of white potatoes, and phyllo dough instead of pastry crust--which was a delicious substitution! The crisp of the phyllo went well with the sweet potato and made up for the lack of starch the white potatoes would have provided.

For Christmas dessert, I wanted to make something special. Inspired by The Great British Baking Show, which I watched in less than two days during my first week home with the baby, I decided to try my hand at a Swiss roll (also known as a jelly roll). And it went GREAT!

The cake is the chocolate cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, spread out on a baking sheet and baked for only 10-15 minutes. I cooled it just enough to handle, then rolled it in a tea towel and let it cool completely.

After that I unrolled it, spread it with strawberry jam and Coco Whip (I didn't have time to make frosting), rolled it back up and decorated it. It was huuuuge, so I only used half of it to decorate and serve (halved, with edges trimmed off for neatness, it served 5 people). I couldn't believe how simple and yet elegant it was! I'll definitely make Swiss rolls in the future, hopefully with yellow cake that I can decorate with batter like they do on the show.

I also dressed my baby as a reindeer.

Finally, New Year's brunch is a big meal in my parents' house, with loads of food and plenty of relatives to eat it all. With a baby in the house we were lucky to make it till midnight, and were not up for making a huge brunch the next morning, but we did something a little special: Kevin made a delicious fruit and nut coffee cake (from Angelica Kitchen) and I made tofu florentine with a hollandaise sauce from Vegan Diner. I usually make the one from Vegan Brunch, but I don't find it too flavorful. The Vegan Diner one has a lot of flavor, but I think the wine comes through a little too strong. Still a delicious New Year's brunch!

Now the holidays are over, we're back to simpler meals... more on those later!

cookies and cream cake!

"Cookies and cream" is one of my favorite flavors, so when I feel like splurging on Newman Os, I return again and again to the cookies and cream cupcake variation in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.

When friends and I got together to watch The Room (often hailed as the worst move ever made) a while back, I decided to make some food to go along with the theme: since there is a birthday party, with cake, in the movie, a cake would do! (We also had pizza--some of which was vegan, of course--to fit with the theme.)

I doubled the recipe to make a two-layer cake, with more frosting in the middle. I should have taken a picture of cutting into the cake, so you could see that middle part, but we were running late to the movie.

Have any of you seen The Room? My friends and I still quote it to each other from time to time.

flour frosting

If you've spent much time around this blog, you might have picked up that I'm not normally a big frosting fan. I almost always halve frosting recipes and still have some left over, since I prefer it used sparingly. When Kevin and I go out to eat and order cake, I usually just taste the frosting and then eat around it. It's usually too sweet, and I don't like the greasy feeling it leaves in my mouth after eating it.

But this frosting has changed my mind. Referred to in old recipes as "boiled flour frosting," it may not sound too appetizing at first (that combination of words makes me want to gag)... but the actual product is AMAZING.

I have made both vanilla and chocolate varieties of flour frosting; the most reliable recipe I have found is located at the Obsessed with Baking blog. Warning: the blog and the recipe aren't vegan, but veganizing it is really straightforward. I swapped Earth Balance (margarine) for the butter, and soymilk for the milk. And it came out beautifully! For chocolate, I added 1/3 cup cocoa powder to the cooking phase and a little over 1/2 cup of melted chocolate chips (cooled) to the mixing phase.

So what's the difference between this frosting and normal frosting? To me, it tastes richer than normal vegan buttercream without feeling as heavy. It's also fluffier. It spreads beautifully, keeps for quite a while, and freezes well. My only suggestion is that when you thaw it from frozen, thaw it in the fridge. Thawing it on the counter on a hot day like I did can make it separate. (Oops.)

Have you ever heard of flour frosting? After I started telling my mother how excited I was to have found out about it, she told me that this is the kind of frosting her grandmother used to make! I love exploring/discovering my roots through cooking, however accidentally.

Friday Dessert: hazelnut cake

My parents own a natural food store in Cooperstown, NY. That means that whenever they come to visit, they bring a huge amount of groceries: some things I need, and other things that they need to get rid of. This is awesome, since I love food and can always find a way to use unusual ingredients, but sometimes I get a little hard-pressed to think of new ways to use the same old stuff (remember when I had 7 quarts of Mimicreme to use up?).

Once, the hazelnut meal was about to expire, so they brought me 3 bags of it. I actually use it most often as a gluten-free, protein-containing substitution for breadcrumbs in a lot of recipes, and I like to toast it and mix it with a little nutritional yeast to make a parmesan-y topping for pasta dishes.

But sometimes you just have to make dessert. Like this Hazelnut Cake!

I doubled the hazelnut cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World for the batter. You can find an online version here at the Daily Meal, but really, why don't you own Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World already? Since I'm not really that into frosting, put blackberry jam in between the layers and on top. And of course, made it pretty with more hazelnuts.

I left the finished product out on our counter when we were having open houses in our old place. I like to think it helped sell the place.

March eats

February and March have been really busy months. We're looking for a house while trying to sell our own place, my job has been especially busy, I've started taking yoga courses, and I've been trying to get outside in this amazing weather as much as possible.

I don't really have time to sit and write a full recipe or how-to post. But I can show you some of the food I've been making lately!

First, while I didn't post about it, I "celebrated" pi day by baking a pie! I wasn't going to, since pie is a lot of work, but everyone else's blog posts about their awesome pies made me jealous. So! After work I put together possibly the quickest pie in Vegan Pie in the Sky:

Curried Macaroon Pie, with a biscoff cookie (in lieu of gingerbread cookie) crust. I didn't know how I'd feel about curry in my dessert while making it, but ohhh man I really loved it. Cookie crusts, however, tend not to be a hit with me because they're so sweet--I ended up giving my crust to Kevin (the husband) every time we ate it.

That was not the only pie I've consumed of late! We had a game night with our friends recently, and since one of them is gluten intolerant, I tried a recipe I've been wanting to try for a long time:

Chocolate Covered Katie's Deep Dish Cookie Pie, which is gluten-free if you use gf oats. Mine has kind of a marbled top since my chocolate chips started melting. The recipe calls for beans--white or garbanzo. I used garbanzo, but would probably use navy beans next time--I thought I could taste the beans a little bit, but no one else at the table could. That recipe is definitely a keeper.

I'll stick with this pie theme for one more:

My Valentine's Day present from Kevin was a Maple Blueberry Pie (also from Vegan Pie in the Sky.) We were a little short on blueberries, so he tossed in some blackberries, which made for nice, juicy surprises in every slice.

Much to his horror, I proceeded to have it for breakfast every day, too. Breakfast pie is the best pie!

He also made me an enormous, decadent meal from The Voluptuous Vegan:

A Tofu Leek Tart on top of French Lentil Sauce, with a side of Fennel and Asparagus Salad with Beets. Yummmm. I love everything I've had from that cookbook, but the recipes are often a lot of work, so the best thing is with my wonderful husband MAKES me things from there.

I also made this Damp Orange Cake recipe from The Kitchn.

I tried healthy-ing it up with all whole-wheat flour and date sugar, which made it very brown, but very tasty. I think next time I'd do it with white flour, though, since the whole wheat nuttiness sort of masked the citrus, and I looooove citrus baked goods.

On a healthier note, I've been getting into making smoothies for breakfast this week. Veggie scraps, frozen fruit, browning bananas, a little homemade nut-based yogurt, anything goes!

Green ones are my favorite.

I hope you're all enjoying this amaaaaaaazing "spring" (more like summer here) weather!

lemon cake with ginger

I spend more time than you would suspect on the Martha Stewart website, browsing through recipes and craft ideas. There's something so soothing about everything on that site; it makes you feel like you feel like you could do anything as long as you follow all the step-by step instructions and pretty pictures. Maybe that's just me. Anyway, one thing I noticed while looking through a cake gallery (yes, there are galleries of cakes and cupcakes. How did you think I got sucked in?) is that a bunch of layer cakes just had icing on top. Or no icing at all, just some powdered sugar or fruit. Icing is always my least favorite part of the cake, so to me, this technique is the perfect cake decoration! I find it quite elegant, and very simple.

For an example of elegance combined with deliciousness, here is a Lemon Cake with Ginger that I made on Monday.

For the cake, I used the vanilla cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, with the lemon variation. I made a double batch so I could make layers.

The icing is a variation on basic buttercream (also from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World), using a touch of powdered ginger and ginger juice instead of vanilla extract. And the filling is something new my mother gave me:

Ginger Spread! Have you heard of this? The only ingredients are ginger and sugar. It's like a thin jelly. So far I've only used it for this cake and to put on an otherwise-savory sandwich; it's very warming and delicious. I still have half a jar; what else should I do with it?

Read a Banned Book! In the Night Kitchen: Mickey's Morning Cake

I love food and I love to read. As a result, the first entry of each month, I'll combine these two interests in a post about food from literature. I'll mostly be sticking with books from classic literature, so you're likely to know the storylines anyway, but just in case you don't: warning: there may be spoilers ahead.

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BANNED BOOK WEEK 2010: 9/25-10/2


This week is Banned Book Week, a week which, according to the American Library Association, "highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States." You can read more about Banned Books Week at their website, and at the websites of all their affiliates.

Find a list of the top 10, 50, or 100 books that people most often want banned. You will be shocked. People aren't trying to ban, say, books on how to build bombs. No, they want to ban books most of us read in middle and high school, ones we considered boring. No specific type of book is left out of these lists: classics, books written last year, books by minority people, books by old dead white men, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, adult books, young adult books, children's books. Some examples: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Bridge to Terabithia, Of Mice and Men, The Scarlet Letter, pretty much everything by Toni Morrison, And Tango Makes Three (a picture book retelling a true story in which two male penguins raise a baby penguin). And that's just scratching the surface.

To me, the most disturbing thing about these lists is a large portion of the books people want banned are for young adults or children. Shel Silverstein's books of poems, which I thought were too silly even when I was in grade school--controversial because they could be bad influences. Other books that people want banned because they contain seditious and/or rebellious behavoir: James and the Giant Peach, Catcher in the Rye, Harriet the Spy, the Lorax.
THE LORAX!!! A HUGE number of books are also controversial for "promoting witchcraft" or containing occult references: Harry Potter books, Narnia books, The Lord of the Rings books, A Wrinkle in Time. And any book, children's or young adult, that contains even the vaguest of references to human bodies and/or human relationships, becomes controversial for showing "sexuality" or "sensuality." Also, several books on these lists are controversial simply because they're scary for kids, or depict cruel behavior.

The reasons people want to ban books are, mostly, the exact reason those books shouldn't be banned: they depict religions or politics people may not agree with, sexism, racism, violence, sexuality, just plain meanness. But so does the world. These books exist and survive because we see our world and sometimes ourselves reflected in them. And if we don't like what we see, that's okay--these books could be perfect learning opportunities. If you are very strictly religious and you're afraid your kids will get ideas about witchcraft from reading Harry Potter? Don't try to keep your kids from ever seeing "the occult;" tell them what makes you uncomfortable about the idea of them reading about it. If you're afraid that rape and racism in Toni Morrison's books will scar your teenage daughter for life, remember that these forces are still active in the world--she should know about them and you should talk about them. (Besides, she's probably already seen Law and Order SVU, which is as disturbing and isn't nearly as well written.)

I think banning books is wrong. It is this simple: if you don't want to read a book, don't read it. If you don't want your children to read a book, tell them why, and let them make their own decisions. If you don't want me to read a book? BACK OFF. You can keep your head in the sand, but you can't, and shouldn't, force someone else to do the same.

Anyway. Read a banned book this week. The lists are full of good ones.

* * *

As promised, today we'll talk about In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak. Sendak is a favorite with the banning-book-people: not only does everyone seem to want to remove this book from libraries, but Where The Wild Things Are is also controversial (because Max is mean and the monsters are scary). When I first heard In The Night Kitchen was controversial, I thought I understood why. Let me do a plot recap, you can see for yourself why you think this book is ban-worthy:

Mickey, a little boy, is in bed, when he hears a noise downstairs. He wakes up and suddenly floats out of bed, out of his pajamas, and drifts into a world where everything appears to be food-oriented: the night kitchen. He ends up dropping into a bowl full of batter. It's the batter for morning cake! Three huge bakers with little mustasches start adding ingredients to the batter.
For some reason the bakers assume Mickey is the milk, which completes the cake. Now to bake it! But just as they put the cake in the oven, Mickey pops out and announces:
Mickey, now wearing a cake-batter suit, kneads some dough into the shape of an airplane.
He uses his airplane to fly up to where the milk is and plays in it, washing off his batter suit. He pours the milk into the cake. Voila! The cake is NOW ready to be baked! He cheers, then slides down the side of the milk bottle, sliding all the way back into his pajamas and into bed. THE END.

Okay, my first thoughts when finding out this was a banned book? I've heard interviews with Maurice Sendak on NPR (here are two of them). The Sendaks, who were Jewish, escaped Poland to avoid being persecuted by Nazis when Maurice was a young man. His father saved money to bring over all their extended family: he got all the aunts and uncles from Maurice's mother's side (who, Sendak says, became the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are), but by the time he had money to bring over over his own family, they had already been taken to concentration camps. And killed. SO, with this knowledge in mind, I thought the whole "little boy being put into an oven by bakers with little black mustasches" thing could be controversial.

Nope. Censors didn't think of that. Okay, so I know Maurice Sendak is gay, maybe some homophobic parents don't want their children to read his books? Nope, apparently that's okay by the censors too.

You know why this book is banned?

BECAUSE MICKEY IS NAKED FOR HALF OF IT.
Are you serious?! Okay, first of all, half the children to whom this will be read are boys. THEY know what they look like without pajamas. Second, even if the little girls reading this book haven't already seen their brothers in the bathtub or having diapers changed, they know boys and girls are different. Are parents banning this just because they want to avoid an awkward anatomy conversation? Finally, COME ON. A naked little boy? THAT is offensive? Book-banning parents, how on earth did you raise your kids if you find naked children offensive?

Anyway. I liked the idea of a "Morning Cake," which is what the bakers in the Night Kitchen bake, so I found a recipe called "Country Morning Cake" and adapted it. (My version below is wildly different from that one, but I felt like I should give them credit.) This is a simple version of a coffee cake. It comes together quickly and, depending on how much sugar you use, can be pretty healthy. I tried it with half whole wheat pastry flour and it tasted great.

I'll mention now, the original recipe called for an 8" round cake pan. I recommend an 8x8" square baking dish, mostly because I don't have an 8" round pan. But recently I used a 9" spring-form pan beacuse I wanted it to look cute to serve to friends, and it came out nice, just shorter:

Mickey's Morning Cake
This cake itself isn't overly sweet, but the filling is very sweet. If you want to cut down on sugar in the recipe, you can reduce the amount of brown and white sugar in the filling by a tablespoon each. Serves 6-10, depending on how large you cut the slices and/or on how hungry everyone is.

3/4 C non-dairy milk
1 tsp vinegar

1/4 C brown sugar
1/4 C white sugar
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 Tbsp ground flax seed
3 Tbsp water
1/2 C canola oil
1/3 C sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 C flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/3-1/2 C raisins (or other dried fruit, depending on how much you like dried fruit (I used 1/2 C cranberries above)

Preheat the oven to 350. Lightly oil an 8x8" baking dish.

In a mixing bowl, combine the non-dairy milk and vinegar. Stir, then set aside to curdle.

In a small bowl, combine the 1/4 C brown and white sugars with the cinnamon. Mix them well. Set this bowl aside.

Return to the milk mixture. Add the water, flax seeds, canola oil, sugar, and vanilla. Stir (or whisk) well until all ingredients are combined. Sift in the flour, baking soda, and salt.

Pour half of the batter into the baking pan. (If you use whole wheat flour it might seem a little thick; if so, spread it evenly with a spatula). Sprinkle about half of the cinnamon/sugar mixture over it, then the raisins, and then the rest of the cinnamon sugar mix. Pour the other half of the batter on top. Smooth with a spatula if necessary. Bake for 25-30 mins, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
Enjoy!