dang toasted coconut

Have you had Dang toasted coconut chips? I LOVE THESE THINGS.

They're just chips of coconut, with sugar and salt. They're lightly sweet, but the sweetness is mostly to enhance the flavor; they're not candy/candied by any means. Each bag is supposed to be 2 servings, which feels about right--even though the bags are small, coconut is filling. You can also use them as a topping for sweet or savory dishes, but I haven't gotten past just eating them straight out of the bag.

True Bistro, my favorite vegan place in Boston

Back in my (now out of date, I know) "Vegan Eating in Boston" post, I wrote this about True Bistro:

Tasty upscale vegan food, and they offer vegan cocktails and wine pairings. While there aren’t a lot of nightshade free options, they do have some, and the waitstaff has been really helpful when it comes figuring out what I could have. Dinners are quite pricy, but they charge average prices for lunch and brunch. (Website here.)

True Bistro is one of my favorite restaurants in Boston, and definitely my favorite veg*n place. The servers are really friendly (though there are always, at MOST, 2, so if things get busy, service can be slow), and the food is consistently great. Kevin and I have been there dozens of times, and of all those times, only once were we not impressed with the food (and it was stuff we'd had before and liked, so it must have been a rare off day for them).

They are incredibly helpful about food allergies, and list gluten- and nut-free menus on their website. As I said above, dinners are pricy, but not overpriced. I don't normally like to order salads when I go out, but I've loved every salad I've had here, which makes me inclined to order them more often!

But my absolute favorite thing to eat at True Bistro is the Cornmeal-crusted oyster mushrooms. I actually think that of the dozens of times I've been here, there have only been one or two dinners where I didn't order these.

They come with a chipotle sauce that is usually on the plate, but because I am allergic, we ask for it on the side so Kevin can still enjoy it. The other sauce is a horseradish-dill aioli that I sometimes just want to eat with a spoon. The mushrooms are always perfectly fried, never overly greasy. They remind me of fried clams, which was my favorite seafood dish as a kid.

The entrees can be a little limited if you're allergic to nightshades, but there is always an option. The menu changes by season, but there are a few regulars like the mushrooms and the Vietnamese Crepe in the back of the picture below. (Gluten free, and nightshade free without the dipping sauce.)

The front dish is a pasta dish with spring peas that I had last spring.

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of their desserts for you, but the desserts are great. I especially love the Napoleon with white chocolate mousse. I've always loved white chocolate, and haven't found a satisfying replacement in all my years as a vegan; their mousse is the best vegan white chocolate I've had.

Have you been to True Bistro? If you've been to the Boston area, what's your favorite veg*n restaurant around here?

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.

vegan sorbet at Picco

Last week I started a new job: I am an English instructor at a college here in Boston. I'd been applying for positions like this for a while now, and finally got this job, which is EXACTLY what I wanted. I love my colleagues, I love the school and its mission, I love the students I met during our orientation sessions--I am so happy to be starting this job! It makes doing VeganMofo kind of tricky, since it takes a lot of my time, but I'm hoping I'll be able to keep it up.

Anyway, as you may remember from my Vegan Eating in Boston post a couple years ago (which, I now notice, has since gone out of date--a few of those restaurants have closed! I'll update it again sometime soon), Picco is a a surprisingly vegan-friendly restaurant, and is home to some of my favorite ice cream since going vegan: their dark chocolate sorbet. It's so rich it tastes like ice cream, not sorbet. And the place is right around the corner from my new job! So when I received the job offer, to celebrate, I just walked around the corner, plunked down in a booth, and bought myself two scoops of sorbet: dark chocolate and strawberry.

Celebratory ice cream is the best kind of ice cream!

Today is my first day of teaching classes. Wish me luck!

fava beans

Have you ever had fresh fava beans before? I have had them in restaurants, and have had canned fava beans (which are brown), but until last month I never had them fresh. My friend Michael at the Dazed and Infused blog and I split a CSA share from Waltham Fields Community Farm, a great organization in our city, and they had pick-your-own fava beans for a while. So I decided to try them! They turned out to be more labor intensive than I'd thought.

First, you pick them and bring them home and wash them:

Clean and shiny. THEN you remove the beans from the pod (which is inedible unless it's really young):

But wait! You're not done! The beans have a thick coating that is not pleasant to eat, so you have to PEEL EACH BEAN.

Unpeeled, half-peeled, peeled. It is really hard to peel them raw, so you blanch the beans, then slit the skin, then poke each bean out. And only THEN can you actually prepare the beans.

I cooked them with some garlic, olive oil, and a splash of cooking sherry, then mashed them to top some toast (pictured below with a salad).

They're tasty beans, but I didn't think they were worth all that work! From now on I will probably only buy prepared fava beans, either at restaurants or in a can.

vegan chocolate from Bees Knees Supply Co.

Bees Knees Supply Co. is a gourmet grocery store and deli that opened up right underneath my office this summer, so I had to check them out. I never went through their deli counters, but it looks like they have some sandwiches that could be made vegan, and some snacks that already are there. Their fridges and freezers have some vegan (non-hydrogenated!) puff pastry and canned cinnamon rolls, as well as some vegan pates and such.

But the REAL reason I would go down to Bees Knees during the work day was their CAFE/CHOCOLATE BAR. They have a great selection of teas, coffee, and juice, soy milk (and possibly almond milk?) available for all drinks, and at least one freshly-made vegan chocolate of the day.

LIKE THIS LUCKY CAT CHOCOLATE! It is filled with a raw chocolate ganache. (In addition to the prettier chocolates I'm showing here, they also have raw chocolate truffles with coconut oil rolled in hemp seeds, coconut, or sometimes chia seeds.)

Look at this little chocolate mouse! He's all shimmery! They do such a nice job of making the chocolates pretty there.

This one was called a "peace mouse."

It was delicious.

Vegan Mofo Begins! ...a camping post!

It's the first day of VeganMofo, the Vegan Month of Food! In honor of Vegan Mofo, I'll be posting every day this week with some pictures of, links to, and/or recipes for delicious vegan food.

Check out VeganMofo.com for more information, or to look at blog rolls and check out events and giveaways throughout the month of September.

Just an hour ago, I got home from a weekend camping trip on Lovells Island, one of the Boston Harbor Islands. Kevin and I have been to a few of the islands on day trips, but not to Lovells, one of the more secluded islands. So we chose that one for camping!

Lovells Island was used as an outpost in the Civil War,  WWI, and WWII, then was just abandoned until the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation acquired it in the 1950s (it would otherwise have become either a landfill, a fuel outpost, or a nuclear waste depository). The ruins of Fort Standish and various gun batteries are still here, though mostly overgrown.

 ...And you're totally allowed to explore them!

 (Bear with me, pictures of food are coming soon, I just wanted to post some of the cooler things from the island!)

 

 All this hiking and exploring worked up quite an appetite!

 This was our campsite. We did have a fire in the grill at one point, but we didn't do any cooking this time around.

These St. Dalfour "Gourmet on the Go" meals were awesome camp food! There are 4 different types, but only 3 are vegan, and only 2 are nightshade free: Couscous with Veggies, and Three Bean with Sweet Corn (the 3-bean one is also gluten free). We packed two of each, and alternated the ones we ate for dinner one day and lunch the next. This was the first time we'd tried them, and they're really good for canned meals! They come with a packet of "gourmet culinary sauce," which is basically oil, vinegar, and pineapple juice (kind of weird, but not bad).

Our second dinner was the spinach dal Tasty Bite (for Kevin, obviously) and New Harvest Kitchen's teriyaki mix (for both of us) over kelp noodles; no heating or prep required! This was the first time I had the New Harvest Kitchen stuff; it's a little pricy ~$8 a pack, but I ate less than half and was REALLY FULL. It's soy based (I think the little soy nuggets are supposed to resemble beef chunks?) and gluten free.  Pretty salty on its own, but it would be good with a bunch of veggies added.

Breakfasts were apples and Clif Bars, but I was too sleepy to remember to take pictures in the mornings.

We hung our garbage from a tree branch and jokingly called it our "bunny bag" instead of bear bag. (Lovells was, for a while, a rabbit run, and when later abandoned, was covered in rabbits. The hawk population increased in the last few years... so bunnies are fewer and farther between now.) There are no bears on the island, but there are some rats, so we figured our garbage shouldn't just be lying around.

That concludes my first entry of VeganMofo!  I'll see you all tomorrow with more posts about vegan food... and I'll leave you now with a few shots of the view from our campsite--the Boston skyline!