Vegan Mofo Day 10: Sweet Potato and Apple Bake

Before I begin this post...

I MADE IT TO DAY TEN!!! One third of the month complete!! I'm so proud of me for keeping up with my blog for the past ten days!! I've even kept with the Thanksgiving theme for this long. Still not sure how much longer it will last. I don't think much longer, but I'll come up with something else, I'm sure.

Phew, ok.

A lot of people grew up eating the sweet potatoes baked with marshmallows on top for Thanksgiving. I have never in my life had such a concoction. I'm pretty sure my parents would have never permitted Marshmallows to be part of dinner, and my father would not have allowed Marshmallows to be part of food he was eating, and really, the thought of eating it kind of makes my teeth hurt. Instead, we had a conceptually similar, but infinitely healthier (albeit not completely healthy, cause it's got heaps of sugar), Sweet Potato and Apple Bake, which is a recipe my non-cooking mother bastardized from a recipe in a really old edition of Betty Crocker. I LOVED this more than anything. It's sweet potatoes with brown sugar and cinnamon topped with apple slices and baked. All I needed on Thanksgiving was this and stuffing and I was a happy girl.


Sweet Potato and Apple Bake
2 lbs of sweet potatoes, peeled and sliced into 1/4 inch slices
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup melted margarine
1 tbsp all purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon (plus extra for sprinkling on the apples, if desired)
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
2 apples, peeled, cored, and sliced into 1/4 inch slices

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees

2. In a small bowl, stir together the sugar, margarine, flour, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg. Toss with the sweet potatoes until they are coated, then arrange them in a baking dish.

3. Top with apples, sprinkle with cinnamon, if you like that sort of thing

4. Bake for 50-60 minutes or until the sweet potatoes and apples are tender.

Vegan MoFo Day 8: Harvest Fritters

We are a fritter lovin' household. Over the summer when I had an obnoxious overabundance of zucchini, we ate a lot of zucchini fritters with fresh corn. In the winter potato fritters are a great side dish. I love the Vegetable Fritters recipe out of 500 Vegan Recipes by Celine Steen and Joni Marie Newman, and this recipe is extremely loosely based on that (in that I've changed nearly every ingredient and quantity). I guess it can better be described as "inspired by" the Vegetable Fritters recipe. The beets in this recipe give the fritter batter a delightful magenta hue. Keep the oven on warm while you fry these up so you can serve them all fresh and hot when you're done frying!

Harvest Fritters
1 1/4 cup grated, peeled sweet potato
1 1/4 cup grated, peeled beet
1/2 cup apple, cut into small dice
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
pinch ground cayenne
1 1/2 cups unsweetened almond milk
1 6oz cup plain soy yogurt
1/4 cup canola oil + oil for frying

1. In a large bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, spices and salt.

2. Stir in the wet ingredients to make a batter. It should sort of resemble pancake batter.

3. Fold in the sweet potato, beets, and apples

4. In a large cast iron skillet, heat 1/4 inch of canola oil over medium/high until it bubbles around the bottom end of a wooden spoon when placed in the oil (scientific, right?).

5. Place batter into pan, about 2 heaping tbsp at a time, spreading a bit so it isn't too thick. When the edges start to look dry, and the bottom is golden brown, flip over. Fry the second side until it is golden. Drain on brown paper or paper towels and sprinkle with salt. Repeat with the rest of the batter until you've used it all up!

Vegan MoFo Day 6: Apple Pie

So you've made your pie crusts, now what? The fillings for pies are truly limitless. From a breakfast quiche to a savory pot pie to a sweet dessert, you can't go wrong with pie. Since I'm milking this Thanksgiving theme for all its worth, I thought I'd go with the fall classic, apple pie. When I make fruit pies, I don't use a recipe... or measure. I just throw a bunch of fruit together and call it a pie. This time, I actually measured how much I put in and made a (mental) note of it so I could share it. It's a damn good pie. It's not too sweet, not too tart, with tender apples and nice spicy cinnamon. When the filling is all nestled inside a light and flaky crust, you can't ask for anything more!

There's a lot of difference of opinion on what the "right" apples are for apple pie. I used to always use granny smith apples, but my co-op rarely has local grannies, so I branched out into other things. Now I use a combination of whichever crisp, tart, apples they have in stock when I'm going to make pie. This week I believe I had at least one gala, one spy, a mutsu, and another bright green one whose name escapes me, and a few more that looked food. The combination of a few sweet and a few tart really gives a great depth of flavor to the pie.




Apple Pie
6 Medium/Large apples, peeled, cored, and thinly sliced
1/2 cup dark brown sugar, packed
1 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp all purpose flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp fresh ground nutmeg

1. Preheat the oven to 425

2. Toss the apples with all the other ingredients until well coated.

3. Put into pie pan lined with pie crust.

4. Top with other pie crust. Crimp the edges to seal. Slice vent holes in the top.

5. Bake for 45 minutes or until apples stabbed through the knife hole are fork tender.

Allow to cool and re-set up. This is very important. Serving it warm is great, but right out of the oven there's no way you'll get a decent looking slice. If that doesn't bother you, then grab a form! The smell is irresistible!

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.

Mom's Apple Cake

Can you tell school started again on August 28th? Yep, it's been busy around here. I've had to get more creative with my meal planning since I get home late at least one night a week, but we've still been eating! I have pictures that I have to figure out what recipes coordinate with them, and some I should have finished jotting down the ingredients as I went along. Here's one that I do have a recipe written down for, and pictures!

This is a veganization and slight altering of my mother's apple cake. I only call it my mother's because she used to make it, though she didn't invent the recipe, someone gave it to her. It is VERY sweet and very rich, and also really moist and delicious. To celebrate the beginning of fall, I made the cake with apples, pears, and dried cranberries, whereas Mom's is just apples. All apples is good, and all pears would probably be good too! If you want to use pears, be sure to choose ones that aren't too ripe since they'll just disintegrate.



Mom's Apple Cake
5 cups apples OR 2 1/2 cups each apples and pears; peeled, cored and diced
1/2 cup dried cranberries (optional)
5 tsp sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 cup crushed pecans or walnuts (I like pecans)
2 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup plain or vanilla soy-yogurt
2 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup orange juice
1 cup vegetable oil
2 cups flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

1. In a large bowl, toss together the fruit, 5 tsp sugar, cinnamon, and nuts. Set aside.

2. In another large bowl (or the mixing bowl to your mixer), beat together sugar, soygurt, vanilla, orange juice and oil.

3. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. Gradually add to the wet ingredients until combined. Do not overmix.

4. Thoroughly grease and flour a tube pan (you can see I didn't do a good enough job and I couldn't get the cake off the middle!). Layer the cake batter and fruit in the grease pan as follows: batter -> fruit -> batter -> fruit -> batter -> fruit. Try to do about 1/3 of each for each layer. The fruit from the previous layer often peeks through. That's fine.

5. Bake for 90 minutes, but DO NOT open the oven during baking! Let it cool, then fight to remove it from the pan.