hot for food

On a daily basis I am faced with all kinds of comments about how “radical” my diet/lifestyle choice seems. It really isn’t, at least I don’t see it that way. So look… if Oprah can influence 378 or so members of her staff to go completely vegan for a week (including herself), I’m pretty sure you can too. I’m just happy momma O has devoted an entire episode to talking about veganism. To me, this is monumental. If Oprah is talking about veganism to ALL of America it therefore can’t be that “crazy”.  Here’s a chunk of the show that aired Feb 1, 2011.

So it’s been just about a month of my new updated version of my diet. I haven’t had any white bread! But I do know some other refined sugar has snuck in, in small small amounts. I had some vegan chocolate chips that I was NOT about to throw out! (I’ll post those baked goods another day) No alcohol and no coffee. Not NO caffeine, I’ve had maybe 3 black types of tea. But that’s a HUGE step. I feel better. But I’m still working on it. I still haven’t kicked the movie popcorn!!

I made a Barley Risotto recently that was really good. I actually prefer it to using Arborio Rice which is a white starch. Barley is a whole grain and good for the immune system. I just cooked it slowly, the same way as a risotto, and added hot water and stock in small amounts stirring constantly until absorbed and the barley looked creamy. I added sauteed mushrooms and peas to the mix as well, AND lots of black pepper. Delicioso!

I attempted to make crepes for the first time in my life. What a crappy experience. Well crappy is a little harsh, but I definitely don’t have a natural talent for making crepes. I actually made 2 whole crepes out of an attempt at probably close to 15 or 16 times. These are the only 2, yet beautiful and tasty results.

Vegan Asparagus Mushroom Brown Rice Crepe with Hollandaise

Vegan PB & Apple Cinnamon Buckwheat Crepe with Maple Syrup

The recipes for the crepe batter, asparagus, and vegan hollandaise sauce are from VeganYumYum. I made some modifications, trying brown rice flour and buckwheat flour for the crepe batter. Which also make these g-free as well as vegan! These 2 lonely crepes worked out perfectly and tasted amazing. You can’t even imagine how incredibly close the vegan hollandaise sauce is to the real thing; at least from what I can remember of eating eggs benedict! The buckwheat flour crepe is quite a full bodied flavor – perhaps too nutty for some. You could use only half buckwheat flour with another type. But I thought the flavor of buckwheat was great, especially paired with peanut butter, apples, cinnamon and maple syrup.

The whole crepe creation problem is a combo of having an old non-stick pan, burners that are very sensitive and difficult to regulate temperature on, and the fact that I’ve never done it before. While I even followed the very helpful video tutorial Lolo posted, I think that I kept fiddling with the pan temperature too much. Ultimately, this recipe requires patience… hmph. I’m just glad I didn’t attempt it with a room full of starving brunchers!

Ice Cream equals summer, if you ask me. I used to eat ice cream… lots of it… all summer. Problem is, I wanted to die every time. That’s not a fun summer. You know, having to pre-plan my entire ice cream excursion (making sure I could get to a err uhh… bathroom). How ridiculous is that?! Now that I’m a changed woman, I no longer have to worry about such silliness. Though I still can’t have that spontaneous ice cream on a nice summer stroll, I can deal. I just go home and fulfill my cravings with my trusty food processor. No freezing required!

You know I’ve raved about frozen banana ice cream before, but I recently saw a new creation on (never home) maker. Great blog, by the way! If you want to be way jealous of someone’s house, go check out the pics of Ashley and Steven’s, here. Anyway, recently they posted a recipe for a variation of this frozen treat. Check it out…. peanut butter chocolate banana vegan ice cream… awesome!

I used natural peanut butter, so I added a bit of sea salt as well. I bet if you used the “not so good for you” PB it would be a bit tastier, or sweeter. Maybe even add a drizzle of maple syrup. I’m going to try some other versions of this too. Jennifer of sweetonveg pointed me in the direction of this Banana Caramel Pecan version just the other day. That’s next on my list of to eat’s!

Of course, I can always go for a bowl of my favorite Fruity Summer Sorbet. Probably the easiest, healthiest treat one could eat while still feeling indulgent! This is just frozen raspberries, mango and 1/4 of a banana with a drizzle of lemon juice. No added sugar! It’s SO friggin good.

I just want to point out that you don’t have to do this in a food processor. A blender works too, but it might take a bit more fiddling with a spatula to get everything well blended.

I was passed along a recipe for Vegan Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies. I occasionally get recipes from people so that I can test them, as the person giving me the recipe doesn’t want to  go to the trouble! Which is totally cool since I love to cook, especially bake. And I’ll try anything. A perfect combo and childhood fave of mine, chocolate and mint, can’t go wrong! This Vegan Mint Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe is supposedly from a real live bakery/baker, Krissys Cookies. Her gourmet vegan cookies look incredible, don’t get me wrong. But this cannot possibly be her recipe, as posted on Ready Made. The dough was totally dry and impossible to ball up into cookies, let alone flatten slightly on the cookie tray. Mine do not look like the picture on Krissys website, or even the picture posted on ReadyMade.com. What gives? Sometimes I truly HATE following recipes, as I find they often turn out wrong. Maybe this was scaled down from a larger batch recipe and therefore messed up somewhere.

Vegan Mint Chocolate Chip Cookie #1 (krissyscookies.com)

This was the first time I’ve ever seen Peppermint Oil used in a recipe as opposed to Peppermint Extract. I bought 100% pure organic peppermint oil, and boy is it strong. The recipe calls for 1 tsp, which FYI is WAY too much. You can barely even eat these cookies, even though they look rather edible in my pic. They’re like some kind of aromatherapy cookie. Seems a little like your eating medicine or something. It’s  so over powering that you can’t taste the cookie or chocolate. I also used white all-purpose flour and coconut oil instead of spelt flour and safflower oil, which this recipe calls for. Really, the only part that ruined these is the amount of peppermint essence.

I always get bummed when a recipe doesn’t work and so I immediately have to re-do it with variations to fix it.

Vegan Mint Chocolate Chip Cookie #2 (recipe below)

Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups non-dairy chocolate chips
1 cup chopped walnuts
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
pinch nutmeg
2/3 cup maple syrup
2/3 cup canola oil
2 tbsp water
1/4 tsp peppermint oil

Combine wet ingredients in a bowl. Sift dry ingredients, except for walnuts and chocolate, into another bowl and combine. Add dry to wet and stir until combined, without over mixing. Line baking trays with parchment or spray with cooking spray. Roll 1 1/2 balls and place on cookie tray, then slightly flatten the dough with your hand. Bake at 350 F for 15 minutes. Makes 16 regular sized cookies or 8 large cookies.

Cookie #2 is the winner! It’s still minty fresh, but the batter tastes better, the chocolate comes through and it doesn’t feel like you just drank mouthwash!

Am I weird if I want to stay at home and cook on my Saturday night? I don’t want to go out and drink at a bar with my friends and yell talk. And if I’m going to spend money on something to put in my mouth I would rather it be food and not alcohol. Tonight I made a yummy naturally sweet and raw snack (which I will post tomorrow). While those are refrigerating, I am prepping components for a vegan lasagna so that it’s all ready for tomorrow’s dinner, and I just tried Jennifer’s (Sweet On Veg) Blueberry Chocolate Frozen Treat. OK, this is the second time this girl has changed my life! The first time, if you recall, was with her Raw Chocolate Ice Cream. So my boyfriend is in heaven right now over it and I’m singing “yummy yummy I got love in my tummy”. I think it might have made us high… it’s not such a boring Saturday night after all!

I had so many oranges lying around (2 for 1 special on bags ‘o’ oranges) and I decided to use up what I could and make candied orange peel and a flourless orange cake with orange sauce/glaze. Things I learned: both are not worth the time it takes, you can’t make a flourless AND eggless cake, and I don’t like the taste of orange unless it’s in its natural state.

The candied peels worked out. My boyfriend and roommate who are candy hounds, ate them straight up and liked them. Except I know they’re supposed to be more orange instead of this rusty orange brown color. I don’t know what to do with them either? I might garnish cupcakes next week for Easter or include some chopped candied peel in some kind of spice cookie. If you look up candied orange peel online you’ll be faced with many different ways to candy peels. I’m not sure what works best and why, but I followed Candied Orange Peel on this page. I will never be doing this again, so feel free to experiment on your own time, if you so desire!

Then there’s the cake… and I’ll tell you right away this did not work out and I had to throw it out. I hate that, it’s the WORST thing ever! The reason I’m blogging about something that didn’t work out is because I think it’s good to let you know that you can’t win ‘em all and it’s ok. Even though I did waste a lot of money on friggin almond flour and have nothing to show from my deal on oranges! Anyway, I randomly found a beautifully photographed flourless orange cake on a blog called Citrus and Candy. It was a time consuming recipe, but I thought what the hey! After some internet researching I thought I could get away with replacing the eggs in this recipe to make it vegan. I ended up using a combination of one flax egg replacement and 1/2 cup soy yogurt to equal the other two eggs. Well, after 70 minutes of baking I thought this cake is getting too brown on the outside and the toothpick came out mostly clean, so it must be done. Plus it looked great right out of the oven!

Basically I didn’t discover it’s mushy insides until I made the orange sauce topping – which I also screwed up and cooked too long, resulting in the sugar drying like a hard candy top on the cake – and when I cut it it started to fall apart. I was determined to salvage this cake, so I removed the candy coated orange top and put it back in the oven… for a long time. Obviously, that still didn’t work.

After all this, the disturbing thing is I was obsessed with still getting a good end result photo. It’s like if I never told you about any of this disaster you would look at this photo and think… wow what an awesome flourless orange cake! But in conclusion, if you like orange, have at least 4 hours on your hands and aren’t opposed to using eggs, make that cake recipe on Citrus and Candy – I bet it’s good. I so wish this worked out, but I must move on! I didn’t eat this slice, either, in case you’re wondering.

Toronto continues to disappoint me when it comes to dining out. But I was excited to see Now Magazine’s list of Toronto’s best green/veggie resto’s. I still have to experience most of them, but I was really intrigued to try Cruda Cafe – a live, raw, organic cafe located in St. Lawrence Market. Ok, not the most ideal location. You would never come across it if you weren’t looking for it, as it’s tucked away in a far off corner of the lower level of the market. but I trekked there to give it a try. I’m not fully informed about eating raw, but since this vegan transition I’ve been reading more about it, so I get it, and I know what to expect.

At first glance nothing looked appetizing or appealing when I first walked up to this place. It was pretty plain-looking, like someone’s condo kitchen. Raw soup does not sound delicious as it has to be served cold in order to be raw. So I opted for a Rawrap. The “wrap” was made of corn, flax, and herbs, and it was filled with your basic salad bar veggies and a cashew pesto cream. It was tiny and it cost $8.48. While it was good it is not worth the money. The part that made it tasty, really, was the cashew pesto cream, which I now know I can just make at home.

Now this delicious looking raw chocolate raspberry tart was staring at me from the window so I decided to take a piece home. Unfortunately, it was a complete disappointment. The chocolate filling was a combination of raw chocolate and avocado, it had the consistency of pudding, and tasted like nothing. It wasn’t chocolatey or even sweet. The raw crust was soggy and chewy, and I have no idea what it was made out of, but it too, had no taste at all. $5.10 for the tart puts me at almost $14 for the raw meal, if you can call it that. I’m not convinced. Plus if you were a raw foodie, you probably already know how to make these things at home, and I would hope, make them taste better… or taste like something. There was also a couple of vegan cupcakes available, which were the only not raw thing, and I can’t believe how crappy they looked. The ones I made recently are way better!

This disappointing excursion to Cruda is just one of many depressing dining out experiences I have had in the last week or so. I wanted to try the gourmet vegan restaurant Fressen the other night, and while the website said it was open, and so did the hours on the window, it was not. I was totally looking forward to nourishing myself and eating a classy vegan meal and I was so bummed.  I also went to their other, more casual location in Kensington called Urban Herbivore, and had an over priced, small portioned bowl of Moroccan Stew with Millet and Black Beans. Not only was a I treated like an outsider, but what I was served was like a meal from a third world country. And finally after being shut out from eating at Fressen I decided to try the roti at Gandhi Cuisine, which everyone raves about in Toronto, and found myself overwhelmed by too much roti that was so incredibly spicy that I couldn’t eat it, plus it was soggy, and despite the spice would have been very bland… and all that after paying $11.00 for it.

There is nothing worse than paying for horrible food.

Real torture, for me, is looking at hundreds of food photos online and grocery shopping when I’m hungry. For the last 2 hours I have been on flickr.com doing the former. omg. Why do I do this? Because I am obsessed with food…

Anyway, in my perusing’s this eve, I found Mr. Popple’s Chocolate. Another amazing vegan product… that I cannot get! I have checked health store after health store for a raw chocolate bar or an 88% chocolate bar and can’t find one that I feel is “pure” enough. Most still say “may contain milk ingredients”. Mr. Popple is from the UK and I have emailed him to see if we can order it online somewhere. Anyone out here in blog land have a solution for someone living in Toronto on where to buy good chocolate? I don’t want raw cacao beans either. What am I supposed to do with those for baking, cooking, eating?

Tomorrow is Valentines Day – who cares – but I am making my first vegan chocolate cheesecake for my bf and our friends. We’re having an anti-v-day dinner for 4. I will blog it as soon as it’s done! Now, off to dream of food. Night!

Alright, so recently I saw something on Rachael Ray that I thought was totally ridiculous. There was a guest on the show with a book called 101 Recipes for Microwave Mug Cakes. First thoughts: what a stupid novelty, of course RR would feature this on her show, great… another cheap, quick, and easy AMERICAN food gimmick to make us fat, and eww kind of gross – just like eating instant soup or mr.noodles.

The idea of Mug Cakes being, now you can satisfy that sweet tooth in a portion controlled way, and do it all in under 10 minutes. Now, even being skeptical about the idea of making a homemade cake in the microwave, I had to try it out. But with 101 recipes for this thing there’s definitely some not so appealing ones in the book. I have no interest in using things like instant pudding mix and hot chocolate mix. barf!

I did make a rather moist and delectable double chocolate almond cake with pretty wholesome (and vegan) ingredients.

Combine ingredients in a microwaveable mug, stirring well, and microwave for 2 1/2 – 3 minutes.
4 tbsp all-purpose unbleached flour
3 tbsp unsweetened cocoa powder
4 tbsp brown sugar
1/4 tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
1 tbsp melted Earth Balance
3 tbsp soy milk
2 tbsp pure maple syrup
non dairy chocolate chips & chopped almonds (optional)

Now everything worked out perfectly and it tasted great, so I’ll take back my initial rude thoughts, but I wouldn’t consider this a replacement for REAL baking. But if you are challenged in the kitchen this is a neat way to present dessert at a dinner party if you want to cut some corners and save some time. Or if you have a desperate chocolate craving that must be quenched, it’s better than resorting to eating a chocolate bar or a gross grocery store cake.

This is why I wish I lived in the USA. Because for all the horrible food concoctions they may be responsible for, their is a crop of new food products – health food products – being sold too. And in all likely hood they will never make their way to Canada! Check out Alkemie Dairy-Free Ice Cream. Available only in the State of California!

It’s kind of funny when you read how FREE it is… dairy free, soy free, rice free, gluten free. What the hell is it! Well, Cashews and Coconut Cream, are at its basis. It’s completely in line with the essential ingredients I’ve been researching since getting my hands on The Conscious Cook. Now if I can whip me up a batch of this Cashew Cream I’ve been harping about, maybe I can experiment and make my own version of dairy free ice cream too! A huge under taking, I know, but I have to try. My mouth is now watering just thinking about tasting this Alkemie stuff. Alas, I will probably never know…

Point being, I LOVE ice cream… as a concept. I couldn’t HATE ice cream more then I do right now. You can’t even buy REAL ice cream any more. Buyer beware, ice cream from the grocery is ALL “frozen dessert”. Basically a fake, scientifically formulated food product. When it starts to melt in your bowl, it’s bubbling and foamy? I imagine because there is probably toxic chemicals in it. The main reason I don’t want to eat dairy and eggs anymore is because I can’t really be sure I’m eating real eggs and cream. Everything is fortified, engineered, steroid’ed, anti-biotic’ed. Ugh gag me.