Post on the Noisy Library

This entry kind of concerns food and health, so go check it out at my blog.

Late autumn comfort food

So it just hit me: I'm really craving some falafel right now. If you've never had it, try it; I've only ever had homemade, and I can't stop eating the stuff.
It's traditionally fried (and usually fried at our house, too), but that crosses the danger threshold a bit more than I like. You know, holding the batter at arm's length and slooowly putting it in the two inches of boiling oil that could set everything on fire... Not really fun.
But I think some baked falafel with Sour Supreme and steamed veggies would make me ridiculously happy now.
The problem with falafel is the grease, basically; otherwise it's healthy, and I hate the fact that it makes my hands greasy. So I did a Google search and found that, apparently, it's quite common to bake it instead. So maybe I'll give that a go.
I'd like to try making falafel as patties, and putting them on a hamburger bun with tomatoes and lettuce. A good summertime lunch, maybe?

Hooray for cake!

Success! Sort of. The recipe worked well and, despite some disasters in the kitchen, the cake was rather rummy.
Yummy.
Gosh, I'm tired.
Anyway, I'll post pictures later.
Now: sleep.

Cupcakes... remixed

So, I used Isa's Fauxstess Cupcakes recipe as a sheet cake last night.
It was after the meeting and I was dragging, but there was something wonderfully adventurous and weird about baking something at 10 o'clock at night.
I'll have to double the recipe when I make it again tonight (it's better after it's cooled) and create a layer cake.
The frosting was from the recipe book, too, but since the good-eaters I'm cooking for are allergic to soy, I used rice milk instead. The chocolate frosting turned out a perfect consistency, but it was bittersweet, and along with the fairly dark cake, I was worried that it wasn't sweet enough.
It was fantastic this morning. Something about the frosting cooling and the cake settling was just perfect.
I think I'll still use chocolate with a slightly lower cacao percentage for the frosting, though; kids like sweet things, right?
Twas yummy.

Who are the real turkeys here?

Oh, yeah. Another reason why I hate Thanksgiving.
Run, turkeys, run!
I'm not a crazy animal-rights activist (you wouldn't, for example, find me in a ridiculous costume by the side of the road with a placard), but to me there is no excuse for animal cruelty. It's all right to eat meat; we're allowed to do so. But part of that involves respecting life and thus respecting the animals. Just because it'll soon be filled with stuffing and covered in gravy doesn't mean it should suffer beforehand.

This has nothing to do with food...

This post has been moved to my new, non-foodie blog, The Noisy Library.

Just curious

How's the layout looking?? Is everything legible?
(Cupcake pictures coming soon! Plus, I've hit 30,000 words, so it's all downhill from here... in a good way.)
In other news, I started work on Friday, and I'll be at the office pretty much full-time starting tomorrow. It's a nice office, good environment, nice people. Espresso machine. ;)
In other news, I think I'm getting sick. I've got a wicked sore throat and it'll be a miracle if I make it to the meeting this afternoon. So. Here's me hoping that my first week at work will be as good as my first day was.
Also, I had a weird dream last night that involved: field service, an abandoned town, Daniel Craig as 007, and a Wal-Mart. And Doctor Who.
Do I need psychotherapy or what?!

Vegan Cake

All right. So, in my quest to stay (mostly) vegan and still eat good desserts, I'm seriously loving the cookbook, Vegan with a Vengeance (by Isa, from the PPK). I especially love the Lemon Gem cupcakes, made nice and tart with lots of lemon zest in the batter.
There's an anniversary party coming up soon, and two of the kids can't have soy, milk, or eggs. So, I'm going to have to experiment with making some vegan, soy-free cakes.
I figure I can accomplish this by using rice-milk or almond-milk instead of soy, but I'm a little curious about the small amount of soy-protein in Earth Balance (my vegan butter substitute that is even better than, um... butter).
This is going to be a challenge.
Seriously, I'll need an award for this.
I'm also wondering if chocolate cake is the way to go, or to transform the lemon-gem cupcakes into a sheet cake. They're cupcakes, so the batter is light and fluffy and frothy; maybe I can add some density to it somehow.
Anyway. Chocolate, or lemon?

Converts and disasters

I swear I've been cooking things since March. Good grief, it's been a while.
So my family went veggie for a while, but this has ended in what I call, eh, disaster. My sister, Grace, was the first to go. She called one day and after much "ehhhh"s and "ummmmm"s said that she'd broken down and gone carnivorous.
"How, exactly?" I said, my eyes squinted with the squint of cynicism.
She'd apparently eaten a chicken nugget. Well, four chicken nuggets. And a burger. And some bacon.
"I fell off the wagon," she said.
"No. You fell off the wagon, rolled down a cliff and burst into flames." I was trying to be positive, you see.
"Meh," said Grace, sounding depressed yet relieved.
All I could think was, thank Gordon I didn't buy her that subscription to the 'Vegetarian Times'.

Anyway, hope you're all having a lovely autumn. I made a ridiculously good potato soup two weeks ago, and a pretty good apple pie. I shall get back into the swing of things and post photos from now on! I swear it!! Arrgghhh!!!

I'm back

Hallo good citizens of the net... (or is that netizens?) Anyway.
Here are just a few things we've been eating lately.




About a month ago I made the "corned beef" and cabbage, and the roasted potatoes, from Fat Free Vegan Kitchen. I liked everything but the LightLife Steak Strips. I thought the smokey flavor was just weird, so I replaced them with some Quorn "ground beef."



We were out of dill so the potatoes were mostly plain but good. (There weren't many left by the time I was done snacking.... :) )

Also, there was a wonderful vegetarian chili that I made from a Splenda cookbook recipe (weird, huh?).



Mom sort of condensed the ingredient list as to what we would actually need (not Splenda; go figure), and then I basically put it in a pot. Chili is so easy, it makes me wonder why I never made more of it before now (even when I wasn't vegetarian). Mom made it again this past week.

Influenced by 1) the fact that I love to eat, 2) the vegan cooking classes, and 3) the fact that I love to cook, I've kind of gone vegan over the past three weeks. I haven't had any dairy for about two weeks, and the only thing non-vegan I've eaten is, I think, Veggie Slices (not COMPLETELY vegan, but a good alternative to cheese) and the Quorn products. All in all, it's been a pretty good change so far. I think having to concentrate on what you eat every day also makes you more conscious of what you should be eating, anyway, so there's many more things in my diet (like whole grains and fruits and veggies) that even non-vegans neglect. But I feel better and my skin is actually starting to clear up some, so this seems to be worth it.
(Rebecca, if you're reading this, doesn't this sound very similar to what I was saying on the phone today....? LOL, no, I wasn't reading from this :-P )
Anyway, that's about it for now. I'll leave you with some words from the person that first inspired me to cook.
"

Whoa, just spent WAY too long trying to get into the blog. (I forgot my username AND my password. Duhhhh.)
Okay, so you want to see a really messed up kitchen?



Ahhh. Nice. Now on to the cooking!
Everyone in our house is going to attempt a mostly vegan diet, with Mom and Dad able to eat non-fat dairy and egg whites. (I'll probably eat egg whites, too, but I'm gonna stay away from dairy.) So we've been having lots of fun at our vegan cooking classes and shopping for vegan foods.
Last night, I cooked this stuff.



If you go to Quorn's Website, and if you read enough, you will eventually discover that it's, basically, err... fungus.
Ick.
But so are mushrooms, I said, so just get over it!
The product is not strictly vegan, by the way (it has egg whites in it).
So I cooked half an onion and some garlic and then added the... um... let's just call it fungus, okay? So the package said not to overcook it, so I added it to the pan last.

In the meantime, back at the inn...

I had a pot of pasta and spaghetti sauce cooking (yes, out of a jar, who do you think I am?!). After the fungus was cooked, I mixed it all together.
And you know what? It was really, really good.
I tasted the fungus before I added it to the sauce, and it tasted like ground beef. This is good stuff, folks!! (I ate the leftovers twice today, they were so good!)


In other news, we had delicious 'sausage gravy' at cooking class last week, so we bought a roll of the Gimme Lean sausage grounds(Gimme Lean... get it, get it?). Mom and I decided to have waffles and sausage for dinner.
(When you shape the grounds into patties, make sure your hands are oiled, cause this stuff is STICKY.)

Voila. 'Sausage.'


And whole wheat waffles. (From a mix, yes... sigh.)


A successful week, I'd say.
Oh, a couple of more things:

Go buy this. It's awesome.


And this, too.

Swedish Chef Day #1

It's Sunday, so you know what happens next!
Oh, you don't?
Well, since we have late meetings on Sunday and I never really feel like cooking anything, Sunday is now reserved for my favorite cook to make an appearance:
The Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show.

Chocolate pudding (plus: a frightening experiment with whole-wheat flour and a breadmachine)

Well, we always need dessert, right? Right! So I made this chocolate-peppermint pudding. I had tried the recipe before, but the amount of cornstarch hadn't seemed quite right, and since our microwave is a pain I used the stove top instead and (eeekk!) burned some of the chocolate.
Do not give up. Do not give up.
So I tried it again last night, and (shock and awe) it was actually pretty good. I added more cornstarch than before, which made it a touch too sticky, so I added a bit more soymilk to compensate. The texture wasn't, you know, like this stuff, but it was good.
(And a note to all you adventuring types: it says 1/8 teaspoon of peppermint extract. Do not use more than that.
It's dangerous stuff, people. I added 1 tsp. to my hot chocolate once and felt like I'd just been bludgeoned with a peppermint patty.)

All in all, good chocolate, good peppermint, good recipe, good pudding, good dessert, happy Hooded Chef.
As for this:
One day!! One day!! One day, I swear to Gordon, I WILL MAKE WHOLE WHEAT BREAD!! AAAaaaarghhhHHHhh!!!!
I'm gonna go lie down now.

Soup, a tasty soup!

So, since it was rainy, icy, cold, and just generally sad looking outside today, I spent the day cooking. First off: soup!
I tried the 'Dirty Little Secret Soup' recipe for my first attempt at making soup. I love the FatFree Vegan blog, and I thought I'd start with a recipe from there. I had to alter it a bit, since I only had a little bit of veggie stock left. I just put some water in the pot and then some celery, garlic, and onion in and let it cook awhile.

It was a little, er, soupy for me, so I added a pot of rice.


The soup turned out okay, but we were short on a lot of stuff and it was hard to get the seasoning just right. Still a recommended recipe; you just have to be inventive.

The first post: pie

Apple pie is just about perfect in every way: there are a million different options of what to have with it (ice cream? coffee? milk? cool whip?), and it's surprisingly easy to make. A homemade pie is no more difficult than opening a can of pie filling and putting it in a premade crust, and afterwards, you won't have that "did I just eat dessert? I don't remember..." feeling.
When you have some real pie, you remember it.
And then you'll eat too much and you'll regret it, but oh well. That's your own fault, you pig.

Last night, bored with the usual two-crust pie, I saw a picture in my Better Homes & Gardens cookbook of a fruit pie where they used cookie-cutters and just laid them in a design on top.
And behold: PIE!!!!

It was very good, proven by the fact that I ate way too much of it for dessert and way too much of it for breakfast. This is a basic two-crust apple pie recipe, but try the cookie cutter trick if you want. It just adds some, er, cuteness.
(This recipe is from this wonderful cookbook.)

Pastry

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour (if you don't have ap, you can usually substitute cake flour)
3/4 tsp salt
2/3 cup shortening
8-10 tbsp water

Stir the flour and salt together. Cut in the shortening, using either a fork or, preferably, a pastry blender.
Add a tablespoon of water to the flour mixture, fluff it with a fork, and try to keep it aside in the bowl. Do that, one tablespoon at a time, until all the flour is moist. Divide the flour mixture in half and roll each half into a ball.
Roll dough into a circle (about 12 in. in diameter). Wrap the pastry around the rolling pin and carefully unroll it onto a 9-in. pie plate. Try not to stretch the pastry too much. Make sure the pastry is about level with the edge of the pie plate.

Filling

6 cups thinly sliced apples (I like Granny Smith apples, and if you cut the slices thin enough, there's no need to peel them)
3/4 cup sugar
2 tbsp ap flour
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1/3 cup dried cranberries ('Craisins' are great for this)

Mix the flour, sugar, and spices in one bowl, and then add the apple slices and cranberries. (I coat the apples by pouring the whole mixture back and forth from one bowl to another; it works quite well.)
Transfer the mixture into pastry-line pie plate.

With the remaining ball of pastry dough, roll it into a circle wide enough to cover the pie plate. Put it on top and crimp the edges of the pastries together. Cut slits in the top pastry.
To make sure the edges don't get too brown or, worse yet, burned, use aluminum foil. Take a long enough sheet of it, cut it in half, fold/crimp the edges together around the pie plate, and fold/crimp the ends together. Fold the top down slightly over the pie.

Bake in a 375 degree oven for 40 minutes. Take off the foil, and bake the pie for another 20 minutes.
Remove from oven.
Devour.