sunday brunch: chicken-fried tofu and waffles

I don't really understand why "chicken and waffles" became a thing in the Boston area recently, but it did--lots of friends on facebook were posting about how this or that new restaurant was offering chicken and waffles. I think it's a Southern thing that only recently made its way up north? ANYWAY, this inspired brunch a while back:

Chicken-fried tofu and waffles (with gravy and spinach). The waffles are a strange purplish color because I used blue corn meal (and the cornmeal waffle recipe from Vegan Brunch). It tastes the same as yellow/white corn meal, but doesn't sell as well at my parents' natural food store, so when it goes past date, I sometimes end up with an abundance. ;) I couldn't quite bring myself to deep fry in the morning, so the tofu isn't too heavy, either.

So final thoughts on the chicken-and-waffles thing? It was a lot of work for a morning brunch, so I see why people get excited about it being available at restaurants rather than making it at home... but the flavors together are delicious. I'd do it again!

sunday brunch: savory waffles and coconut bacon

This morning's brunch consisted of pancakes so full of yellow zucchini and corn that they were essentially veggie fritters. For savory pancakes like these, I use the Perfect Pancake recipe from Vegan Brunch, leaving out all the sweet stuff (cinnamon, syrup, vanilla). I added generous sprinkles of black pepper and cumin, and more salt... and 1 ear's worth of corn and an entire grated yellow zucchini.

Served with gravy made with a chickpea flour roux, and Jess Scone's Coconut-Balsamic Bacon.

The flour I've been using lately is Einkorn flour. Have any of you used this? It's a variety of wheat, supposedly one of the oldest known strains, and while the bag tells me it has a slightly nuttier taste than normal white flour, I don't taste that at all. It's something like 80% whole grain and acts (and tastes) like white flour in the recipes I've used it for, so I am a fan.

Vegan Brunch's tofu benny

I talk about brunch and brunch foods a lot around here, because Kevin is obsessed with brunch. I think this stems back to when he was a kid and his father made a big brunch every Sunday. So we have a nice brunch at least once a weekend. Vegan Brunch, therefore, is one of our most-used cookbooks.

I rarely make the tofu benny recipe directly out of the book, but Kevin does a great job with it, and it's worth it every time. Because I can't have tomatoes, we use lightly cooked zucchini (a replacement you may remember from my post on how to replace tomatoes). And we were lucky enough to have a very happily flowering chive plant the morning Kevin decided to make these. I really think that every meal looks (and tastes) nicer if there are flowers involved.

Sunday brunch: gluten-free high-protein pancakes

I can't take any credit for this idea, only for the meal above. My mother is gluten intolerant, and her go-to gluten-free flour of choice is chickpea flour, which has worked for almost every recipe she's tried to de-glutenize... including the Vegan with a Vengeance/Vegan Brunch Perfect Pancakes, which here are made with all chickpea flour. You make the exact same recipe (which is readily available by googling it if you don't have the cookbooks, but you should have at least one of those cookbooks!), but swap out chickpea for wheat flour, one for one. For help binding, you also have to add a flaxmeal "egg" (one Tbsp flax meal mixed with 3 Tbsp water). The texture is the same, and the taste is only a little nuttier. My parents most often make blueberry pancakes with this, and you really can't tell at all that they're gluten-free.

Sunday Brunch: Omelettes

A quick post, since we spent most of the day at a friend's wedding. I was worried I wouldn't get home in time to post! But phew, just in time (it's 11:55pm as I write this).

On Sundays, the fiance makes brunch! (I usually make it on Saturday.) When he asks for a request, I almost always demand the omelette from Vegan Brunch. It's really tasty, and a good way to use up extra veggies as fillings!

This one is stuffed with the fiance's famous tofu bacon (I'll try to get that recipe up this month!), daiya cheese, and some veggies, with sauteed carrots on the side. Yummmm.

"Food from Literature" is on summer break. Here are some pickles!

Last month I promised you two "Food From Literature" posts in June... and I have not followed through. While I've been doing a lot of reading, the heat has meant that i haven't been as interested in trying new, long-cooking recipes. I've felt so guilty about falling behind on that, though, that I got stressed out and stayed away from my blog altogether.

And then I realized: it's summer! There is no reason to be stressed, nor is there any strong argument for sitting in front of my computer typing blog entries when I could be enjoying the weather! Plus, this time of year is when students take breaks from academics--so I am declaring a summer hiatus of "Food From Literature." We will resume in the fall! In the meantime, I won't feel guilty for post content/lack thereof.

I think I write about pickled vegetables a lot, but I love them. I love them so much that when my parents accidentally ordered a case of half-gallon jars of dill pickles for their natural food store, they gave two to me and the boyfriend, and it took us surprisingly little time to go through them.

One half-gallon jar of pickles.

Once, when I was making the Beer Battered Tofu recipe from Vegan Brunch,, I had some leftover batter. I don't like throwing away food if I can help it, so I looked around the kitchen for what else I could batter and fry. And then it hit me: PICKLES.

They're on the left; the tofu is on the right. Deep-fried pickles are a special treat, obviously, but ohhhhhh man if you have the opportunity to try them, you should.

I love summer, and I love almost everything that comes with it. (The one exception being how hot our apartment gets. But I'd rather be hot than cold, so it's tolerable.) One thing I'm really looking forward to this summer is when the farmer's market starts selling local watermelons! I love watermelon, and I recently ran out of my stash of Citrus-and-Spice Pickled Watermelon Rind. I made them two summers ago, and as you can see, I had quite a few:

And this was after I halved the recipe! I got the recipe from Bryant Terry's Vegan Soul Kitchen, and I LOVED it. The pickles don't taste like watermelon, but the syrupy, spicy brine (spiced with cloves) does taste like sweet, down-home pickles my elderly Scottish and Irish great-aunts used to make and bring to family events. Basically, they taste like summer, and like childhood. I love Bryant Terry's book, but if you can't get it, you can find the recipe here.

Whew, and now onto July! Maybe our hot apartment isn't the one thing I dislike about summer; I also dislike how quickly it goes by!

weekend brunch: cinnamon rolls

The Cinnamon Rolls from Vegan Brunch are amazing. You will eat more of them than you suspect.

Though I have made a ridiculous number of recipes from Vegan Brunch, I held off on the cinnamon rolls for too long. See, I really think of them as a breakfasty food, and yeasted breads are not easy to have warm and fresh and out of the oven for breakfast, since they take so darn long. But! Letting the dough do its first rise overnight leads to fairly quick preparation in the morning.

Also, when recipes tell you to sift your powdered sugar, sift your powdered sugar. I didn't for the icing, and you can see the little clumps of sugar that remained. The clumps are tasty, but not as photogenic.

know what I'm thankful for? My oven.

Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Kitchen Appliances.

Happy Thanksgiving! I'm in upstate New York for a couple days, with little access to the internet, so I wrote this post (and the next couple days' posts) ahead of time. Whether you celebrate the day or not, I wish you all good food and the ability to recognize the good things in your life--today and every day!

I am thankful for many things, and I like to think I have an idea of how lucky I am in life, but there are always things you take for granted. For example, THE OVEN. And THE STOVE. Think about it: how much of your food today, or any day, would be possible without one? Earlier this month, we didn't have gas at our house for almost two weeks, and since we have a gas oven/stove, I went two weeks figuring out how to cook in a kitchen without any fire.

Gas ovens and stoves have been around for about a hundred years; before that, people still cooked on heating stoves, in fireplaces, and in ovens built into fireplaces. I found myself wishing for the first time that our adorable decorative fireplace was functional. Alas, I had to figure out how to make two weeks' worth of meals (well, okay, we went out to eat twice, out of desperation) without fire.

Some of you are probably laughing at how easy this sounds: there are many heat-generating appliances in the kitchen! But while I cook constantly, and while I cook well, I am conversant in only the most basic of kitchen appliances. Stove, oven, toaster, food processor. Even the blender confuses me sometimes. We don't have a microwave. Before a year ago, I never knew how to use a rice cooker. Our toaster oven intimidates me (toasters are so much simpler!) with its non-numerical settings (what kind of setting is "frozen foods?" Is it supposed to thaw things, or cook them through, or...?). I've never made successful waffles in my waffle iron. But in the early days of November, I learned how to love the toaster oven, the rice cooker, and my waffle iron.

Well, no, I still don't actually love them. But I sure learned how to use them.

First timid step, turn the plates in my waffle iron over to use the "griddle" side, which I tried once and gave up on after everything stuck even though it's supposed to be nonstick. I made savory pancakes, first putting some chopped leeks and carrots on the griddle with some oil, Mongolian-grill style. Once softened, I scraped them off the griddle into pancake batter, then poured the batter on the griddle.

Result? Some tasty pancakes! I used hot water from the tap to dissolve some miso with black pepper and oil for emulsifying, so it was sort of a gravy (because the water didn't stay how long, it was actually more like a thick salad dressing, but it was tasty!). It turns out it's probably not my appliance ineptitude; this griddle takes a lot of time to get hot, then at no matter what setting, it gets really hot and everything still sticks to it. The food was good, but the process was not fun. So no more of the griddle, I figured. That's cool, I still have THE RICE COOKER.

I'm not completely rice-cooker challenged; it's just that I'm not comfortable with it, since I've always been a boil-your-rice-in-a-pan kind of girl. In the last year or so, since I moved in with the boyfriend, his rice cooker and I have come to an uneasy truce, as using it allows me more space on the stove. I have always imagined that grains other than rice would work in a rice cooker, so my first adventure was to cook quinoa in it for a quinoa salad. That went well, so later in the week, I decided to step it up a little; I made paella by turning on the cooker and leaving the top open to sautee veggies with some oil, cooking those till soft, then adding the rice and some flavorings before finally closing it. After it shut off (as it does when it's done), I turned it back on to get the crispy rice along the bottom/sides. It was pretty good, though it got a little mushy. I even made some pasta in the rice cooker (by boiling water in it, then cooking pasta accordingly) and tossed it with roasted veggies (from the toaster oven) some arugula, and a vegenaise-mustard-vinegar sauce to make a tasty pasta salad.

At this point I felt pretty confident with my rice cooker skills, so for my next big experiment: SOUP IN A RICE COOKER.

Broccoli and Pumpkin Cheese Soup from Vegan Today. This was delicious, though I didn't cook the carrots long enough, so they didn't get super smooth when blended. I served it with toast, from the toaster oven.

It looks evil, but the toaster oven became my best friend for two weeks. I started out only using it to toast bread as a side for whatever else I was making.

For example, I made Chilled Avocado Soup, from the Elephant Walk's recipe.

The Elephant Walk is an upscale French/Cambodian restaurant that is surprisingly good to vegans. I can't have the soup at the restaurant because it has tomatoes, but upon hearing people rave about it, I made it at home without them. It was easy to make without a stove, as the soup is raw. It was good, but be generous with the avocado, since it's the only thing that really helps cut the acidity. We had a side of warm bread with cheese sauce, courtesy of the toaster oven.

Soon, however, I wanted more than bread. Two weeks without baked goods is, for me, a very sad two weeks. And/or an impossibility. Neither muffin tins nor baking sheets fit in the toaster oven, but it CAN hold 8x8 baking dishes and springform pans, so I opted for brownies.

Melting chocolate without a stove is not so easy, though. I made a makeshift bain-marie with two bowls, filling the bottom one with hot water from the tap. I covered it and let it sit for five minutes, then stirred the chocolate and replaced the water (which had cooled) with hotter water--the whole process took almost half an hour. But! The chocolate melted, and two cycles of the toaster oven's "Cake" setting later, I had brownies! And not just any brownies:

Pumpkin Pie Brownies, from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. (Online version of this recipe here.) Because I had to guess at cooking times and temperatures (surprisingly, the "cake" setting isn't 350, but ranges between 325 and 350, and the cycle is only 25 minutes, so I had to run it twice), I was worried it'd be a little dried out, but I really think this was the best recipe I could've gone for, since all the pumpkin kept it nice and moist. We had a bunch of friends over shortly after I made these, and everyone was crazy about them.

With successful toaster-oven brownies under my belt, I felt like I could handle anything, so I took on a FULL HOMEMADE TOASTER OVEN MEAL.

I felt like toaster oven McGuyver! Oven-fried tofu, roasted sweet potatoes with arugula, and biscuits. (I made a quick balsamic sauce on the side, in case things were too dry.) This took a lot of advanced planning, as obviously all these things can't go into a toaster oven at the same time. I made the biscuits first; they're the cornbread biscuits from Vegan Brunch, my latest carb crush. Half a recipe would fit on the tiny baking tray that comes with the toaster oven. Then, I tossed chopped sweet potatoes and arugula in salt, pepper and oil, then folded them all up into a foil packet. These went into the toaster oven on one of the higher settings ("Frozen Foods," I think, or "Roast." I imagine this is somewhere around 425).

THEN the Oven-Fried Tofu!
This is actually really easy, and can be made in any kind of oven. It serves 3-4, depending on how much other food is on your plate.

1-2 Tbsp vegan margarine (I use Earth Balance)
1/2 C flour
1-2 tsp dried herbs: I like sage and garlic powder, but you can add any you'd like.
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1 16-oz block of tofu, sliced into slabs (their thickness is really determined by how many you can fit into your pan. 8 can be squeezed into an 8x8 baking dish, 10 into an 8X12, so cut it according to your pan size.)

If you have an oven, preheat it to 425. (I only had a toaster oven, and it was already on.) Put the margarine in a baking dish, then put the baking dish in the oven so the maragrine melts while it preheats.

Combine the flour and seasonings in a large ziploc bag. Put in all the tofu slabs, and SHAKE LIKE CRAZY until all the slabs are coated.

Take the baking dish out of the oven, and swirl it around so the bottom is coated with margarine. Take the tofu slabs out of the plastic bag one by one, shaking them a little to get off excess flour. You only want a thin coating of flour on each piece. Put the tofu in the pan, then placei n the oven. Cook for 20-30 minutes, flipping the tofu about 15 minutes in. You want the tofu to get at least a little golden on both sides before it's done. Serve with a dipping sauce or gravy.

Having only a toaster oven, I made this recipe and set the pan on top of the foil packet of veggies. Everything took a little longer than normal, but came out great, and super hot. While I put those on the plate, I popped the bisuits back in the toaster oven on "toast" for a minute or two, just to warm them up, and we had a full meal from the toaster oven! And fortunately had our gas hooked back up soon after.

I'm glad to know that if for some reason we don't have gas again, I can still eat well, but right now, I am SO thankful to have our oven back.

weekend brunch: tofu frittata

I love the frittata recipes (like this Shiitake Dill Frittata) in Vegan Brunch, especially because they give ideas for frittata "bases" that you can improvise off of.

For instance, I made Zucchini and Dill Frittata by swapping out the shiitakes with zucchini, but I've also made it with broccoli and no dill, or with cauliflower or chard (also from frittata recipes in the book). But one thing I don't like about the Vegan Brunch frittata recipes is that they recommend you use a glass pie plate to bake them! This "glass pie plate frittata" stuff doesn't fly with me. Frittatas get the BEST "crust" when made in a cast-iron skillet (as I did, above). You can see the nicely browned edges in my photo above; a pie plate wouldn't give you quite the same crispiness.

My cast-iron skillet is my best buddy in the kitchen, especially at brunch time. The ability to go from the stove top to the oven to the table is one of my favorite things about cast iron in general. I think that after my knife and chopping board, the cast-iron skillet gets the most use out of anything in the kitchen.

What about you? What's your favorite kitchen ware? What do you use for any and every recipe you can?

weekend brunch: chesapeake tempeh cakes

I actually made these babies a while ago, but while looking over pictures of brunches past to figure out what to post today, I realized they'd never made it into the blog. They're the PPK's Tempeh Chesapeake Cakes, also in the Vegan Brunch cookbook. Obviously I didn't add hot sauce, and I used finely diced zucchini instead of red pepper (just like I recommend you do to replace chopped bell peppers in yesterday's entry!). They're like what I imagine crab cakes would be if I 'd ever had crab cakes. Served on the side: my boyfriend's famous homemade tofu bacon. I'll write out the recipe sometime this month; it's amazing.

It's sunny and warm in Boston, and everything is such a bright color after all the rain and gray of this week. Happy Saturday!

weekend brunch: lemon walnut muffins

As you may recall from this post, the boyfriend is obsessed with weekend brunches, so while most of the week our breakfasts consist of toast and fruit, on weekend mornings (okay, or afternoons) we like to start the day with more substantial food. Each weekend of VeganMoFo, I'll post about some of the brunch foods we enjoy, starting today with lemon walnut muffins.

I am probably one of the biggest chocolate fiends you know. I don't necessarily have a lot of chocolate in one sitting (anymore), but I have chocolate probably every day. Not on purpose, even; it's not like I think "Hm, have I had chocolate today? No? What a shame, I shall remedy this situation with a single chocolate chip." There's no thought process. Instead it's more like "La la, just typing at my computer, hey, how did this chocolate get in my mouth? when did I even get up to get it? and where did I set the chocolate bar, because now I want more..."

So it will probably come as a surprise to you, as it does to my friends, my family, and even myself, that my favorite baked goods are ones that don't involve chocolate at all, but ones that involve citrus fruits. Don't get me wrong, I won't turn down a brownie in lieu of an orange, but if a baked good has that light irridescent yellow glow suggesting there's lemon zest in it, or that little sour hint of lime juice emanating from it, I will forget that I am a chocolate addict and devote myself to acquiring that citrusy goodness.

Lemon poppyseed muffins are one of my favorite baked goods, probably of all time. As you now know, I love lemon, I love poppyseeds, and I love being able to eat baked goods in the morning just because I can call them "muffins" instead of "cupcakes." But recently I had guests coming to visit who planned on going on a couple day trips with us, and I realized that if I wanted to offer them quick breakfasts-on-the-go and/or have a snack to grab during our wanderings, I needed something a little more substantial than poppyseeds in my muffins. I figured replacing them with nuts would be a good way to keep us fuller longer (since they have more protein and fat) while adding a little more in the way of nutrients. I was thinking of going for pecans, but the boyfriend asked for walnuts. Almonds could work, too, but would be much crunchier.

I will tell you right now, though I'm reproducing the recipe here, all I did was take the Lemon Poppyseed Muffins from Vegan Brunch, replace some of the flour with whole wheat pastry flour, and replace the poppyseeds with a cup of chopped nuts, so I wasn't especially inventive. They were delicious, though!

Lemon Walnut Muffins
Makes 12 muffins

2 C flour. (You can replace up to half of this with whole wheat pastry flour--I did 1/2 C)
2/3 C sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3/4 C nondairy milk
1/4 C lemon juice
1/2 C canola oil
2 Tbsp lemon zest
2 tsp pure vanilla extract
1 C walnuts, chopped

Preheat the oven to 375. Line a muffin tin with liners.

In a large bowl, mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Make a well in the center and add milk, lemon juice, oil, zest, and vanilla. Mix just until all wet ingredients are moistened, then fold in the chopped nuts.

Fill each muffin cup three-quarters full and bake for 23 to 27 minutes, until muffins are lightly browned on top.

A quick tip if any of you find zesting tedious, like I do: when a recipe calls for zest, don't just zest the amount you need. Zest the entire fruit (or fruits) and freeze what you don't use. I freeze mine in leftover spice containers, but a small ziploc will do just fine. You can use the extra zest right out of the freezer for later recipes.

stew from melomeals, and a non-profit you should really know about

Two days ago, Melody over at melomeals posted a recipe for Creamy White Bean Stew with Collards. Not only did it sound delicious, but with pre-cooked beans, she claimed the recipe comes together in 30 minutes. I came home late-ish and starving on Tuesday night, so I put this claim to the test! Unlike most stews, which need a lot of cooking time to develop their flavors, this recipe really does come together in half an hour, and it is delicious, hearty, and warming (which is important, because we are in the middle of some boiler issues and won't have heat till tomorrow). I didn't have poultry seasoning, so I used a variety of herbs and spices--a pinch each of onion and garlic powders, sage, thyme, parsley. I also didn't have any "nutritional yeast base sauce" made up ahead of time (though that's a cool idea of Melody's, making a big batch of cheesy sauce to last you throughout the week. I suspect the boyfriend would eat it all in one go, though, since he's a sucker for cheesy sauces), so I added each of its parts to the stew individually. I put in 1/4 C nutritional yeast, a bit of mustard and garlic powder, and 1/2 C water when it says to add the nutritional yeast sauce. Toward the end of the cooking time I stirred a tablespoon or so of arrowroot powder into another 1/4 C water, and stirred that into the stew. It was so delicious!

I made the cornbread biscuits from Vegan Brunch to go along with it. I am a huge fan of all things that involve cornmeal, so I can't believe I'd never tried these! They are ridiculously easy to make, taking about 20 minutes from when you first get out the ingredients to when you pull them out of the oven.

The combination of the two was awesome.

As a sort of public service announcement, one of the things that makes me come home late-ish (and anxious for a quick-cooking meal like the afore-mentioned stew) each week is the volunteer work I do for a non-profit called RfBD, or Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic. It is an organization that records textbooks for students with disabilities--physical or learning-related--that prevent them from reading at the pace of their peers. RfBD offers students audio files of their textbooks, allowing them to navigate their texts by page, chapter, section, etc, just as if they were working with a book. Because there are hundreds of textbooks to record for students from elementary to graduate school levels, RfBD relies heavily on volunteers to record the content of the books.

Volunteering has always been important to me, and helping people with learning differences and visual impairments is another cause in which I'm personally invested. As a volunteer, I spend 2 hours a week in a sound-proof booth, reading aloud. I was a radio kid in college, and doing this soothes the part of me that misses having a radio show. The training was easy, and if you don't feel like recording, they have other tasks for volunteers to do. RfBD (which is about to change its name, since they cater to a much wider variety of people than only those who are blind or dyslexic) has been around since at least the 1960s (possibly the 50s?), and has over 20 locations in 14 states; they also have some satellite locations in other places. I've been volunteering for them for almost 3 years now, and I intend to do so for many more. If you're looking for a way to spend some of your time (or money; they take donations) helping other people, this is a great way to do it. (Plus, if you're moderately antisocial like I am, this allows you to help people without actually spending time with people--you're in a sound-proof booth!)

Tomorrow, and every Friday this November, I'm going to run a series of entries on how to replace nightshades, since, if you are allergic to nightshades, or just ever try to avoid them, you'll know that you need a little help sometimes. Or a lot of the time. Or every time you open a cookbook. Stay tuned!

Fast, Easy, Homemade Vegan Puff Pastry

Whenever the boyfriend and I feel like deviating from our fairly normal weekend brunch menu of scrambled/fried tofu or tofu benedict, we take out Vegan Brunch and page through it to see what appeals to us that day. I make and remake Isa's seitan sausages often, as well as the whole wheat drop biscuits, and when it's the boyfriend's turn, he makes me the pancakes and waffles.

But there is one thing we have not been able to make. Without fail, every time we open up the cookbook, the boyfriend turns longingly to the Tempeh Sausage Pastry Puffs and asks me if I can make them. "We have to get puff pastry," I always explain.

As it turns out, this is harder than it seems. We shop at a natural food coop that rarely carries puff pastry--and when they do, it has butter. We decided one day to try Whole Foods, who carried, to our initial delight, three kinds of puff pastry! ...but they all had butter in them. Vegan puff pastry is hard to find--especially if you care about what you eat. Vegan Brunch says that Pepperidge Farm's puff pastry is vegan, but guys, do you know what's in Pepperidge Farm's Puff Pastry? Copy and pasted from the nutrition information:

Unbleached Enriched Wheat Flour (Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate (Vitamin B1), Riboflavin (Vitamin B2), Folic Acid) Water, Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Shortening (Soybean and Cottonseed Oils Colored with Beta Carotene) 2% or Less of: Gluten, Mono and Diglycerides (from Hydrogenated Soybean Oil), Soy Lecithin.

YUCK. Two kinds of hydrogenated oil. Plus soy and wheat are two things that, if you eat organic, you want to be organic, and because cotton is not a food crop, there are way fewer limitations on the types and amounts of pesticides and herbicides used in dealing with cotton plants. Cottonseed oil is nasty, guys, and if you prefer to eat organic, so is Pepperidge Farm's puff pastry.

I would have to make it myself. But traditional puff pastry requires time, energy, and skill with dough that I do not have. It calls for about 24-36 hours of preparation, most of which is chilling, but a lot of which is rolling out dough. Basically, if you can't master a pie crust (which, embarrassingly, I can't), you're doomed with traditional puff pastry recipes.

BUT THEN I found this recipe. A food processor puff pastry dough that only needs to be rolled out twice and refrigerated once? It was worth a try. I obviously veganized and otherwise changed it slightly, but full credit goes to Cooks Illustrated for it. This is a picture-heavy post because the directions are easier to illustrate than to describe.

Fast, Easy Vegan Puff Pastry

The recipe makes 24 puff pastry squares. You can halve it if you want, but the dough freezes well, so if you only want 12 (like I did), just make the whole recipe and save the rest for later. Also, though the original recipe calls for salt, it also calls for unsalted butter, so I figured earth balance was salt enough.

Ingredients:

2 Cups all-purpose flour (plus a bit for flouring your work surface)

20 Tbsp (that's a cup and a half) vegan margarine, cut into small chunks

6 Tbsp ice water

I normally use the organic Earth Balance, but it's much easier to measure 20 Tbsp with the sticks, which are at least all natural.

1.) Put the flour and about 4 Tbsp of the margarine into a food processor; pulse 15ish times to incorporate. Add the rest of the chunks of butter, then pulse again, but only 3-5 times.

2.) Add the water. Pulse for 10-20 seconds, until it starts to form a ball of dough.

3.) Put the dough on a large sheet of parchment paper, form into a rough rectangle. Put another sheet of parchment paper on top.

4.) With a rolling pin, roll it out long and flat; 12 by 18 inches. Remove the top layer of parchment paper, turn the dough over onto a well-floured surface, then pull off the other layer.

5.) Fold the sides over the middle, so it's now about 4 inches in width.

6.) Roll it up length-wise.

7.) Squash it into a square, then wrap this tightly in plastic wrap and put it in the fridge until firm. The recipe I used says 1 hour, but the longer the dough was in the fridge, the firmer it got, so if you can leave it for a couple hours, even better. (At this point, you can freeze it [or half, like I did] for later use; just put it in a plastic bag in the freezer. Simply thaw by moving it to your fridge then night before you want to use it.)

8.) Take the dough out of the fridge. If you are using the full recipe (for 24 pastries), divide the dough in half and just follow these directions twice, keeping the half you're not using in the fridge until you're ready for it. Again, put the dough between two large sheets of parchment paper. Roll to a 10- by 15-inch rectangle, then cut into 12 pieces.

Here is where the recipe and I differ. I had doubts that these thin little strips would really puff up, so I took each piece, folded it over itself twice (you can see an example of the folded square on the right side of the picture), and rolled it out again not quite as thinly before putting them on the baking sheet.

It took maybe an extra 5 minutes total and I was really glad I did it; they puffed up well, and I know I owe some of the layers to the fact that I did that last-minute extra folding.

I loaded them up with the sausage topping, hoping that after all my work they would really actually puff, and followed Isa's recipe directions (400 degrees for 18-20 minutes)... and voila!

Homemade vegan sausage-topped puff pastries! The are very filling; we each had 3 and a salad for dinner and were stuffed.

I still have the other half of the puff pastry in the fridge. I might make something desserty with it, maybe those palmiers... Any other recommendations for use?

For the record, you could substitute some of the flour with whole wheat pastry flour, but it will puff way less, be less flaky, and take a little more water. I recommend trying it with all white flour the first time at least.