Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale

The Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale is coming to Brooklyn!

That's right, we're participating in Compassion for Animals' bake sale on June 21 AND 28, with the profits going to Farm Sanctuary and Sea Shepherd.

We'll be hanging out at the Open Source Gallery, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with loads of vegan treats including some gluten free, low fat, low sugar, kosher, soy and nut-free options.

We'll have some free samples on hand for those who doubt the power of vegan baking, as well as some seating, music and drinks available, so come for the cookies but stay for the good times.

The Open Source Gallery is located at 251 17th Street, right off of 5th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn, just one block east of the Prospect Avenue M/R station and convenient from the B63 bus.

More details will be posted soon, so watch this space!

PS: We hope to be up and running around 11 AM and will be around until we've sold everything!

Month of 1000 Birthdays

Well, just five, really. But they were all mine! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

Ahem.

Sorry.

Aaaaanyway...Sunday, May 10, was my birthday, but I've been fortunate enough to have it acknowledged five times this month. All with awesome edibles.

The first time was my office birthday party on the seventh. Since I like baking and finding vegan cake in midtown Manhattan is kind of a pain in the ass, I make my own birthday cake every year and my boss reimburses me $20 for it. This year, I made a giant chocolate mint cupcake (please note the phone in the background for scale):



I tripled the Chocolate Mint Cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and covered it with mint icing, Quick Melty Ganache and chocolate mint lentils. It was dangerously good. The mint makes the cake seem lighter than regular chocolate cake, and this cake pan kind of keeps you from going overboard with the icing, so if you're not careful, you can just keep eating this cake until suddenly your platter is empty and you've gained twenty pounds. Twenty tasty, tasty pounds. If you haven't tried this recipe yet (and like mint), please do. But proceed with caution.

The absolute best part of making the chocolate mint cake is...well...did you ever buy the mint Girl Scout cookies? Do you remember the aroma that would waft out and hit you in the face when you opened the box? Well, when you're making this cake, your ENTIRE KITCHEN SMELLS LIKE MINT GIRL SCOUT COOKIE WAFTINGS! It's an amazing thing. If you have a really tiny apartment, you can probably hotbox yourself in minty goodness. Awesome.

In case you're wondering, I made it using this cake pan, which was a gift from the same awesome people who gave me the boat cake pan. I guess they kind of know me pretty well. If you want to see how the cake assembly works, just browse backward from here.

Then, the Tofu Takedown was on my actual birthday. Obviously, I celebrated with lots of cannoli. Then we moved the party to Curly's Lunch, followed by Lula's Sweet Apothecary, where I got carrot cake ice cream (in a sugar cone!!) which tasted like the creamiest pumpkin pie ever. It was difficult to keep my pants on (especially since I was wearing a dress).

May 16 was mostly a celebration for other people, but I received my share of birthday wishes and brought the Raspberry Chocolate Chip Blondie Bars from Vegan With a Vengeance. They're definitely one of my favorite things and only take about an hour to make, which is pretty awesome. I didn't take any pictures this time, but they looked just like the ones I made for Election Day.

My family and I celebrated my birthday, Mother's Day and my mother's birthday (the 8th) on the 17th because I was busy taking down tofu on the 10th. I tried to make a cake out of the Brooklyn vs. Boston Cream Pie recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, but kind of failed:



Pastry creme is just not what to use when trying to stick layers together. I should have known that from my last pastry creme debacle, but no one ever said I was a fast learner. I spent a good part of my afternoon cleaning ganache and pastry creme off the door of my refrigerator. I will not tell you whether or not I licked the fridge.

Lastly, my friends and I celebrated my birthday on the 24th in Philadelphia. Thanks to an awesome friend who did all sorts of veganny research, we ate at Basic Four Vegetarian Snack Bar and New Harmony Vegetarian Restaurant. At Basic Four, I had the best freaking tofu scramble I've ever eaten that I didn't make myself. Their potatoes are really good too. Most importantly, there was vegan Philly cheesesteak. I don't have words for how good this was, so just eat it with your eyes:



Please note that the picture does not do it justice.

New Harmony was a vegan Chinese buffet of awesomeness. Even the tea, orange slices and pineapple chunks were better than most. I gave faux shrimp another try (the first time I tried it, it tasted like fish - BLECH!) and even liked that.

Another friend brought Mexican Hot Chocolate cupcakes from VCTOTW. They're always wonderful and were a great pick-me-up between finding twenty (yes, TWENTY) geocaches and visiting The Mutter Museum, which is more than slightly awesome.

If you're reading this, good job with the vegan food, Philadelphia! I want to walk in your subway tunnels and eat many of your sandwiches!

Please Note:

This post may be slightly blithering.

VEGAN BRUNCH IS HERE!!!



AND IT'S GOT MY NAME IN (spelled correctly!)!



AND VINTAGE PYREX!



AND LOTS OF YUMMINESS SO YOU SHOULD GO BUY IT!

I don't make commission off of it, I swear. It's just really fucking good. I have access to most of these recipes online and I'm STILL excited to have it in hand. And I'd sell my little brother for some carmelized onion quiche right now, but I'm only supposed to cook tester recipes for Isa and Terry's upcoming books right now. At least that's what I've been telling myself until this fabulous book showed up. So many pretty pictures!

This is my advice to YOU for free. No charge. Gratis: Get this book and make some quiche, lemon poppy seed muffins, beer battered tofu, and pain au chocolat. You're welcome.

Get up with the get down

Or the Takedown. Whatever.

Last Sunday, May 10, was the first ever Tofu Takedown! Presented by Matt Timms, of Chili Takedown fame, at the Highline Ballroom, the Tofu Takedown was a chance for people to compete to the death for the honor of the cherished soy product.

Or something.



I entered the competition with vegan cannoli, not so much because I wanted to compete, but because I wanted to participate. I'd never done anything like this before, so I knew winning wasn't an option. However, feeding a couple hundred people cannoli was. Despite the preparation difficulties (which everyone has come to expect when I'm in the kitchen), I'm really glad I did this and would definitely do it again. The next event is a Curry Takedown, which I'm not really feeling, but I've already got some ideas for then next tofu one.



I'm not posting my recipe because I really just mixed and matched aspects of recipes I found online and I don't think a recipe that includes lines like "Add sugar until contents of bowl no longer smells like tofu" is all that helpful. However, I will give you a basic outline of how to make cannoli (I wanted to take pictures of the various steps, but got too lazy. Shocking, yes?):

Make some dough. It usually has egg in it, but I used ground flax in water instead.

Roll the dough out, cut it into circles, wrap the circles around cannoli forms (by the way, anyone need THIRTY-EIGHT CANNOLI TUBES?!? What the hell am I going to do with THIRTY-EIGHT CANNOLI TUBES!?!) and fry it in a pan of 360 degree oil for two or three minutes.

Make your filling. It's usually mostly drained ricotta cheese, but I used really well pressed firm tofu, some lemon juice, granulated and confectioners sugar, vanilla extract, and some mini bittersweet chocolate chips, of course.

Pipe your filling into your shells and viola! Cannoli! Simple, right? It might be a little less simple when you think you need to make 200 of them. It gets even less simple when you show up and the organizer says you actually need 300 of them. It gets even less simple when instead of coming out like this:



about half of your shells come out like this (and I still have no idea why):



That made dealing with runny filling a cinch by comparison. I just drained it overnight in my handy dandy cannoli filling draining apparatus (not pictured: two pieces of pizza used to apply pressure and wedge the bowl tightly in the fridge):



It took four tries on the shells and two tries on the filling to get them right. Thankfully, even when they were wrong, they were tasty. My family is still snacking on fried dough.

Here's another picture of the cannoli:



The event itself was very fun. So many people showed up that I would have run out of cannoli really early on if my friend hadn't been there. She washed off her pocketknife and cut as many as she could in half. We still ran out before everyone got to try them, but two other people ran out first, so that's not so bad.

There were seventeen entrants: four savory dishes and thirteen sweet. Maybe about half were vegan, though one of the dishes (a winner) was called vegan despite including honey. Whatever I tasted was quite nice. I think I would have given the prize to the vegan cheesecake, but mostly savory dishes won. This may or may not be because they were so scarce and people just got tired of looking at desserts.

Since things covered in powdered sugar are pretty, here's another shot of the cannoli. Please ignore the awkward-looking human with the tongs. That's just me.



For more pictures from the Takedown, including my failed attempts and other entries, click here.
For the Village Voice writeup (with pictures) click here
For the Metromix writeup (with pictures) click here.
For the Time Out New York writeup (with pictures) click here.
For a New York Times writeup of NYC cooking competitions that includes a mention of the Takedown click here.
Grub Street didn't say much, but they did mention my cannoli!
Slashfood writeup.

And that's it. Unless you've seen this mentioned someplace else on the Internet that I've missed. If so, please comment with a link!

Hello, I Suck

At this blog thing, anyway. It's been ages, and I still haven't posted about Passover.

In short: it ruled. I cooked two totally vegan Seders and my family loved them so much they even ate the leftovers days later. Sometimes, Passover feels like a real chore and all everyone wants is a bagel or pizza, but this year, no one seemed to mind missing out on leavened things or meat. Awesome.



Pictured above (clockwise from top): Sauteed Spinach and Tomatoes, Tomato and Roasted Eggplant Stew, Sweet Potato-Pear Tzimmes with Pecans and Raisins, Quinoa Tabouli and Asparagus Spinach Dip on matzo (all from Veganomicon, except the Tabouli from Yellow Rose Recipes).

With variety like that, who needs meat and bread?

I've never really been involved in the whole Passover process before and I learned many things:

1. Always remove the thermometer from the oven before telling it to clean itself.



2. Don't leave plastic spatulas on the stove top (I've melted at least three already).



3. Produce in the suburbs is HUGE.





4. And CHEAP!



That carload of fresh produce cost $75! I usually fill up my knapsack and/or reusable Whole Foods bag with groceries for $50!

5. Happiness can be sold by the bucket.



(Those are sour pickles up in there.)

6. If you fill the kitchen with grocery bags, you will have trouble getting to the other side.



7. It's not THAT difficult to make caramel.



8. The best tasting foods are often the worst looking. Especially via camera phone.



That stuff was so good I made it twice. The second time, I substituted a pound of peaches for one of the pounds of strawberries. So. Good.


PS: Sorry for the even crappier than usual quality of a lot of these photos; they were taken on the fly with my BlackBerry.

PPS: I kind of stowed away on my mother's shopping trip and she didn't want to wait for me to get out my reusable bags, so alas, plastic.

Note to Self

Long story short: my family has agreed to two totally vegan Seders this Passover* and I'm all but crapping my pants as we get closer to the holiday. I think my mother and I have finally settled on a menu, but all the handwritten notes are driving me totally batshit, so here are our menus:

Night the First:

Roasted Butternut Squash Soup from Vegan With a Vengeance
Quinoa Tabouli from Yellow Rose Recipes
Stuffed Twice-Baked Potatoes from Yellow Rose Recipes**
Tomato and Roasted Eggplant Stew with Chickpeas from Veganomicon (sans chickpeas)
Roasted asparagus with a metric assload of garlic
Matzo Almond Brittle

Night the Second:

Creamy Tomato Soup from Veganomicon
Cinnamon Lime Quinoa with Apricots & Almonds from Eat, Drink & Be Vegan
Herb-Roasted Potatoes from Vegan With a Vengeance
Sweet Potato-Pear Tzimmes with Pecans and Raisins from Veganomicon**
Sauteed Spinach and Tomatoes from Veganomicon
Strawberry Rhubarb Compote with Matzo Streusel Topping

I also wanted to do some straight up vegetable salads, but my mother thinks it's unnecessary. Everyone's getting old and they just can't eat so much so late.***

For the rest of Passover, I'll probably just eat leftovers and matzo with some random spreads. I'm considering:

Tapenade (YRR)
Guacamole (VCON)
Sweet Basil Pesto Tapenade (VCON)
Asparagus Spinach Dip (VCON)

Also, ED&BV has an interesting-looking focaccia recipe and I'm considering subbing matzo for the pizza dough, just for shits and giggles. We shall see what shall be. I'll probably make truffles again too, since they were much loved last year.

Happy holidays, everyone!****



* Passover generally means no bread or grains or things involved in leavenedness. As an added bonus, my family also doesn't eat any legumes or seeds, making the whole vegan thing a nice challenge.

** We had these on Thanksgiving and the family liked them so much a return engagement was requested.

*** Speaking of everyone getting old, my grandmother is moving in with us for a while, so things are going to be pretty damn hectic. Therefore, I'm not promising any pictures when all this is over. However, I'll be sure to return in a relatively timely fashion to at least review the dishes (which will probably just involve me saying "Holy crap! Isa, Terry and Joanna are geniuses!" as usual).

**** Sorry, this wasn't really all that short.

Franzycakes V 2.0

As I mentioned last March, I have a friend who really likes Franz Ferdinand. Her birthday came around again, and lucky for me, they've come out with another album. Behold! Franzycakes: The Return!



Those are Mexican Hot Chocolate Cupcakes with Quick Melty Ganache from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.

Most of the cupcakes simply said TONIGHT: YOUR BIRTHDAY



But that got boring, so I made a few hands, too:



Then I realized I wasn't actually giving her the cupcakes on her birthday. She picked them up from my office almost two weeks later and I didn't want my cupcakes to be living a lie:



The cupcakes themselves are very tasty, but were a little dry. That may have been because I couldn't get my flax seeds as well ground as I should have (I used a wooden mortar and pestle).

The decorating went easier and faster than I expected it to. I would have gone slower if I thought it would help, but it wouldn't have. As I was working on the cupcakes, I thought to myself "Wow, these look like crap. I'm going to look up the pictures of last year's Franz Ferdinand cupcakes and will see absolutely no improvement in my lettering. That fucking sucks." Then I realized "Wait a minute, I don't think I've done any writing since last year's Franz Ferdinand cupcakes. How the hell can I improve if I don't practice?!" and that made me feel a little better. What made me feel even better (and worse) was actually looking at last year's cupcakes. Go click the link in the first line of this post. I'll wait.

Done laughing yet?

Holy crap! Those were fucking TERRIBLE! How the fuck did I take those out of the house?!? CHRIST! My friends should have confiscated my pastry bag then and there. Shit.

So yeah, one quick way to improve your piping skills (and maybe even your self esteem) is to start out making something that looks like TOTAL CRAP because you couldn't get your icing the right texture. I remember those taking fucking hours to decorate, too. What the shit.

This time, the icing was the perfect consistency. I was just a lazy asshole and didn't feel like getting a second pastry bag for the orange icing, so I washed the bag in between colors and refilled it wet, making my orange icing nice and runny. YAY I'M AWESOME!

They don't look anything like professional, but they taste good, all of them were legible and two people (including the birthday girl) were able to recognize what they were supposed to be without being told. For me, that's a creative victory.



(Also: two posts in one week! What the balls?!)

Oh Hi

Wow, I'm really crap at this blog thing, huh?

Hmmm....what's happened since my last post of any substance? Let's see.



(please excuse the crappy photo. It's taken with my BlackBerry and apparently TwitPic* doesn't let you embed photos without shrinking them. This picture really isn't worth reuploading to Flickr, but we'll make do since it's all I have from the past few months and this post needs something. You can click through to see it in it's larger, overbroiled, glory.)

Vegan Brunch testing ended. Pre-order your copy today! (thus concludes the shameless plug portion of this post)

I successfully completed about a week doing Eat to Live really hardcore. During that week, I made loads of non-photogenic soup, which was not worth posting about.

I spent two months doing my own modification of Eat to Live, which basically meant making more ugly (though tasty) food and not eating any Luna Bars. Success!

I gave up fried foods for the period of time known as Lent (also chewy candy, but that's not relevant to what you see here).

I baked a lot of chocolate chip cookies. They didn't come out anywhere near as pretty as Isa's.

Testing began for Terry Hope Romero's Vegan Latina. WOOHA!

So far, I've made Tropical Pumpkin Soup, which uses Calabaza pumpkin instead of the kind you usually use on Thanksgiving. It's really good and creamy and kind of thymey. Yum.

Locro, or Creamy Potato Soup with Avocado, might be my new boyfriend. My whole family loved this. It's so thick and rich and creamy. The avocado adds a nice touch to your usual potato soup and it's garnished with lime juice and raw red onion which give it a nice kick.

Pastel de Choclo, or Sweet Basil & Corn Pot Pie, is kind of like shepherd's pie gone south o' the border. The filling is made up of vegetables, raisins, tempeh and yuca and the topping is a sort of batter made of corn instead of the usual potato. So. Good. The picture above doesn't really do it justice because I broiled the hell out of the top (I've said it before and I'll say it 74289 times more: I like my shit burnt).

In addition to getting to make all sorts of tasty awesomeness, working on this book is allowing me to try out a bunch of new flavors. In one week, I've already added two new spices to my list (annatto, which I used to flavor an oil that was to be used in the potato soup and many other things, and epazote, sort of like Latiny oregano). So much fun!

I think that's all I've got. Now that I'm testing again and Passover is coming, hopefully you'll see a bit more from me in the coming months.

So how've you been?



*Yes, I'm on Twitter, but I don't bother to link it here because I'm not one of those interesting food-related Twitterers who posts all sorts of useful links and stuff, it's mostly just my friends and I bullshitting.

Music for Animals

This isn't a food post, but it's for the animals, so I think it's still safe for a veganism-related blog. Yes? Yes.

Taken from BrooklynVegan:

Today, we are especially happy to bring you "People Got A Lotta Nerve," the first single from Neko Case's forthcoming album Middle Cyclone (out March 3), because for every blog that reposts the song and/or iLike user who adds it to their profile, Neko Case and ANTI- will make a cash donation to Best Friends Animal Society.

The promotion will run from January 13 to February 3, 2009. Five dollars will be donated for every blog post and one dollar for every user of iLike that adds the song to his/her profile.

Everyone and their grandmama has a blog these days, so repost this and let the good people over at newmedia @ epitaph . com know you did, and the animals get $5. I admit I haven't done any research on Best Friends Animal Society, but this is kind of a no-brainer to me; after all, Neko Case kind of rules anyway.

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD! WOOHA!

GOAL!

[Insert mental image of me (or the dork of your choice) throwing my arms up like a referee.]

I have my first goal for 2009. This is pretty funny, since I haven't completed either of my goals for 2008 yet, but please bear with me.

The goal: To acquire and cook with a spice starting with every letter of the alphabet.

My spice cabinet has gotten pretty full over the past year, but some letters are still unrepresented and I'd like to rectify that in 2009. With your help.

After the jump, I've typed....wait for it...the alphabet. The bold letters are the ones I don't have spices for. What I ask of you, dear readers (yes, both of you), are your favorite spices beginning with those letters. And, if you've got them, recipes using those spices. Recipes don't need to be vegan for me to use them as a starting point, so please, give me everything you've got.

Actually, why not go ahead and tell me about your favorite spices, even if their letters are already taken? I'm going to be pretty flexible with my alphabetizing anyway (e.g.: Jamaican allspice counts as J, white pepper counts as W and rubbed sage as R because I already have A, P and S taken care of), so if you have something more exciting than thyme for T, let me know about it, please.

As I get my cook on for the next twelve months, I'll update this post with which spice I've used for each letter, and if I feel really motivated, maybe a link to the recipe I used it in.

Thank you and may your coming year kick copious amounts of ass.

Spice List

Anatto (03/11, Creamy Potato Soup with Avocado (Locro) - Vegan Latina tester!)
Basil (shocking, yes? 03/15 Sweet Basil & Corn Pot Pie AKA Pastel de Choclo - Vegan Latina tester!)
Coriander, cumin (01/11, Spicy Red Lentil Soup)
Dill (01/11, Springtime Soup I know it's winter. So sue me!)
Epazote (03/15 Sweet Basil & Corn Pot Pie AKA Pastel de Choclo - Vegan Latina tester! Woohoo! My first new letter!)
F
Ginger (Red Lentil-Cauliflower Curry)
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
Tumeric (01/11, Spicy Red Lentil Soup)
U
V
W
X
Y
Z