Individual Baked Apple Crisps

Another chapter in the 1001 things you can do with apples! But first...

Next weekend is the SECOND ANNUAL PRE-THANKSGIVING VEGAN THANKSGIVING POTLUCK here in the Albany, NY area. More specifically, in my house. If you are in or around or willing to travel to the NY State Capital Region, and are free on Saturday, November 7th from 2pm until we can't move anymore, and want to share some awesome vegan food, let me know and I'll send you further details!

Onto the apples!

I was a whiny mess last week when I was sick, so I wanted to make a nice treat for the boy because he put up with me. With just the two of us, making an entire apple crisp or an entire apple pie is just a bit much, and while I love baked apples, the boy typically would prefer a dessert with a bit more pizazz. These turned great. They were super simple to make, and really delicious! I didn't have a recipe, I just winged it based on the size of the apples and the proportion of stuff I wanted to put inside of them. Dried fruit or chopped nuts would also make great additions to the filling if you've got them around.


Individual Baked Apple Crisps

2 large apples
1 tbsp vegan margarine, melted
2 tbsp dark brown sugar
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
Heaping 1/4 cup rolled oats

1. Peel a band of skin off of the outside of each apple. Cut a hole into the top of the apple as though you were cutting a pumpkin for carving. Scoop out the seeds and core, leaving just a little bit of apple at the bottom to help hold the filling in. Snack on the extra apple bits that came out.

2. In a small bowl, mix the brown sugar and cinnamon into the melted butter to dissolve the sugar, then add the oats and stir to coat in the sugar/margarine mixture.

3. Fill the empty apples with the filling and bake at 350 degrees for about 45 min to 1 hr or until the apples are tender when poked with a fork. (This will depend on the size of your apple!) Serve warm for optimal deliciousness.

Recipe Mix & Match

I have been delinquent. I haven't actually cooked at all since the last day I posted because I've been sick. I'm still not feeling 100% but I'm certainly doing better than I was last week. I was going to post my method for crispy tofu, but it seems those pics are still on my camera, and the battery is charging right now, so I thought instead I'd show you my creative recipe combining to make a new recipe.

My wonderful friends came and watched my cats for us while we went downstate for Nana's bday last weekend, and so I paid them like you pay any good friend pet-sitters -- in baked goods. The request this time was for chocolate brownies with chocolate chips and peanut butter frosting. I looked through my different cookbooks to find recipes that would fulfill this need and ended up choosing the Chocolate Brownie recipe from The Joy of Vegan Baking and to top it, I made the Peanut Butter Caramel from the apple bars in Veganomicon. The results??


Delicious! I didn't realized until I'd mixed up the ingredients for the brownie batter that it was, essentially, a fat free brownie recipe. Not that that makes it healthy... but I was worried that they wouldn't be rich enough. I was wrong, they were definitely rich enough!! The recipes says that they'll be fudgy if cooked for the instructed time, but I had to bake them for an extra 10 minutes because the middle of the pan was absolute liquid when the timer went off. They weren't totally fudgy, they definitely had a cakey feel to them, but they were definitely a brownie and not a cake! The peanut butter caramel frosting paired very well with them. It made them nice and gooey and sticky and delicious.


The moral of this story is don't be afraid to just take parts of recipes that you like and put them together to make new recipes! The results could just be delicious!

Crispy Tofu

And so, this is the last meal I cooked last Tuesday before I got sick. This isn't really a recipe as much as it is a method for getting some nice crispy tofu!

One step that I'm leaving out of this is the draining/pressing step, which should happen before you marinate your tofu. The tofu I use is made by The Bridge (http://bridgetofu.com/). If you can get your hands on this stuff, definitely do. It is so creamy and firm it doesn't need to be pressed. People who eat my tofu think I've done something magical to it, but really, I've just used that awesome tofu.

Anyway, the reason behind this meal was the boy was "mmmm"ing over the thought of mashed potatoes and gravy, so I had to figure out a meal around them. I especially do not like mashed potatoes, so it had to be something where I could enjoy an alternate side. And so, I marinated the tofu in a "gravy marinade" ( strongly concentrated unchicken broth, tamari, nutritional yeast, poultry seasoning) which I later thinned with some more water (so the taste wasn't so strong) and then thickened with a roux (so that we weren't pouring broth over our food!) and it multitasked as a really excellent gravy. I had my crispy tofu with cider roasted brussels sprouts and baby carrots and a baked sweet potato. The boy, of course, had mashed potatoes in lieu of the sweet tater. It was really yummy and had a very chicken-nugget esque feel to it. I think next time I'll cut the tofu thinner/smaller, but otherwise this was the best crispy tofu to date.


The method for this was as follows:

Cut the tofu in whatever size you like and marinate it in whatever you like. Put about a cup of rice flour into a large bowl. Season in generously with salt, pepper, and whatever else you like (I used poultry seasoning). Toss the tofu in the rice flour a few at a time to coat, then dip them in the marinade again, then toss them around in the rice flour again until they are thoroughly coated. Heat about a centimeter of oil in a cast iron skillet over medium-high heat and place the tofu in to the pan. Cook the tofu until it's golden brown, then rotate it to another side. Keep browning sides and rotating until all sides are cook. Take out and allow to train a bit on brown paper or paper towels. Enjoy while hot and crispy.

Many Cakes

As predicted, I did not get a chance to post all weekend. The boy and I went downstate Friday and came back Monday, only to have to rush and prep dinner for seven, as his extended family was visiting his parents and they wanted to come see the house. I was cooking the entire time I was away pretty much though, so I do have a few pictures to share.

My Nana turned 90 over the weekend, and wanted a big party, hence my trip downstate. I helped cook a bunch of stuff including two cakes. I used Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World recipes and made 9 inch round cakes. Each one recipe of cupcakes makes one layer of an 8 or 9 inch round cake, if you ever want to convert them. It tends to take an extra 10 minutes or so in the oven, but they bake up just fine!

This first cake is a hazelnut cake with raspberry filling, vanilla butter cream, and chocolate ganache. The raspberry filling is from the Raspberry chocolate chip blondie recipe out of Vegan with a Vengeance. This cake had a major structural problem and the entire back end pulled out from under it when I tried to remove the wax paper (to protect the serving platter) after I decorated the cake, hence the downward slope in the back.


The second cake was a Vanilla Agave cake with Lemon Buttercream decorated with pomegranate seeds, blueberries, strawberries and kiwis.

And, while many guests commented on how beautiful they were, the cakes mostly went untouched in favor of this bakery monstrosity: (And it's not even because it was "ew vegan cake" or anything since no one knew it but my immediate family)

My dad did say my vanilla agave cake with lemon frosting was the best tasting of all 3 of them :P

Ahem, moving right along...

Last night for dessert I made a pumpkin chocolate chip cake with cinnamon cream cheese frosting. It was super yummy and really moist, despite the cake having been made a solid week ago and frozen (made the frosting fresh last night). The decorating left a bit to be desired, but after the other two this weekend, I was about fancied out, so it's just drizzled with chocolate and sprinkled with fall themed sprinkles.


Here's a graphic inside shot for you folks who are into that sort of thing:

And so, that is my tale of three cakes. I think I'm just about caked out for a while now!!

Not-Quite Zucchini Bread

HEY MEGATARIAN!! What's with all the breads??

I dunno, it's cold out, I'm baking again.

My last run of squash this summer were pattypans. I ended up with more than I knew what to do with, and despite giving a bunch away, I still had a bunch of pattypans in my fridge. I'm down to the last couple now, and instead of throwing one into a stir fry like I normally would, I thought it might be nice to bake a loaf of zucchini bread.

Only without zucchini.

Pattypan is just another type of summer squash. They look sort of like scalloped flying saucers. They're in the top right of this picture of one of my garden hauls taken in August:

Back on topic: I mutated this recipe from vegweb for zucchini bread into pattypan squash bread with blueberries, but certainly you could use zucchini, or any other summer squash you have handy.

"Before"
"After"

Summer Squash Bread with Blueberries
1 tbsp ground flax seeds
3 tbsp water
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
3/4 cup ~milk (soy/rice/almond/whatever's open in your fridge)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 3/4 cups white whole wheat flour/whole wheat pastry flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1/4 + 1/8 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
large pinch ground nutmeg
large pinch ground cloves
1 1/2 cups grated summer squash
1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a loaf pan.

2. Combine the flax and water and let it sit for about 10 minutes to get goopy. (This is a good time to grate your squash)

3. Combine the flax goo, sugar, oil, ~milk, and vanilla in a large bowl. Stir in the dry ingredients until just mixed. Fold in the squash and blueberries, then pour into the pan.

4. Bake for one hour or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

And on an unrelated note, I'll be gone tomorrow through Monday visiting my parents downstate, and helping with/attending my Nana's 90th birthday party. I will be cooking a bunch, but I don't know how much time I'll have to blog. I'll try my best! Don't be too sad if I'm gone a few days ;) I'm just surprised I got through half the month so far!!

Irish Soda Bread

Getting back to the Scottish stew I never got to eat this week, I also baked some Irish Soda Bread to go with it, which I did get to eat. It was a sort of disjointed tribute to the UK or something. I love homemade bread in any form. The benefit of doing soda bread is, of course, you don't have to knead it for more than a minute and you don't have to wait for it to rise. You can have the whole shebang in the oven in about five minutes.

I had a lot of issues to consider when making this bread... raisins or no raisins? Half raisins? All whole wheat, half whole wheat, no whole what? One recipe? A half recipe? Which recipe? In the end I made a half recipe of the Soda Bread from The Joy of Vegan Baking, all whole wheat, no raisins. My only mistake with the half recipe part. I saw 4 cups of flour and 2 cups of milk and thought it would make much too much bread for the two of us, and it totally would have, half was plenty for two with some left over... but mmm homemade bread?! I should have made more. But of course, it's so fast and easy I could just throw another loaf in the oven and bake it up anytime I like :) I didn't make too many changes to the original recipe other than halving it, and using white whole wheat flour instead of all purpose flour, and I used apple cider vinegar instead of white vinegar (I really feel like that's more for cleaning than eating! ACV is so much milder. Plus I only have white vinegar in a gallon jug and I thought pouring a tsp out of that would be a mess). Also I used soymilk when you can use "any milk" but soymilk curdles so much better than rice or almond. And so, here's a recipe for a small loaf of soda bread adapted from JOVB.


Irish Soda Bread
1 cup soymilk
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
2 cups white whole wheat flour + a little extra if the dough is too sticky
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
2 tbsp melted earth balance or other margarine of your choice

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees and lightly grease a round cake pan (it can be way bigger than your final loaf, it's just a place for it to bake)

2. In a small bowl, combine the soymilk and vinegar and leave it to curdle for a few minutes.

3. In a large mixing bowl, combine the dry ingredients.

4. Mix the wet ingredients (margarine, milk mixture) with the dry and stir until you have a sticky dough.

... This is the point where I deviate from the recipe some more. The dough was WAY sticky for me. Like a thick cake batter sticky. I needed to add about 1/4 cup more flour to get it sticky, but into a ballable dough. Baker beware!

5. Knead the dough about a dozen times, form it into a ball, put it in the pan, and cut an X into the top with a serrated knife.

6. Bake for 40-45 minutes until the crust is golden and it sounds hollow inside if you knock on it.

7. Eat a slice as soon as it's cool enough to handle!! The fresh crust is so delicious!

Black Bean Burgers and Oven Fries

This week is actually a slow week for cooking dinners. I thought Sunday and Monday night's dinners would carry us with leftovers for more of the week, Sunday being the Ziti and last night I made Scottish Broth (stew) out of The Vegan Table, though the boy ate the entire batch of it so I can't even say how it tasted because I didn't get a bowl. Ahem. So that's all gone. We're going away for the weekend on Friday, and the boy is out Wednesday nights so I don't make a proper dinner, so this is about it for me cooking this week. We have about a million hamburger buns in the freezer from our labor day BBQ, so I decided to put some to use and I made black bean burgers with sweet potato oven fries for dinner. Black beans and sweet potatoes go so well together. I'm going to avoid once again professing my love for the humble sweet potato, and just say damn it's a match made in heaven.

I used the Black Bean Burger recipe out of Veganomicon with only one real change -- I used red bell pepper instead of onion. It's about the same, right? Well anyway, it looks pretty and keeps with the southwestern theme. They came out a little underdone in the pan, though they were browning up nicely, but I found baking them a little extra in a 350 degree oven finished them up nicely so you didn't get a chewy gluten blob. Since I so just barely altered this recipe, I'll leave it to everyone to go grab their copy of V'con, turn to page 98, and make it themselves!

Burger! Ketchup! Avocado! Fries!

And to make up for a recipe-free post, here's a picture of two of my cats making out.

Atticus in Black, Sir Didymus in Orange Tabby