Every Course is Covered!

I think I've made enough new things when put altogether would serve as a 10-course meal!

I was feeling a little under the weather, but Vcon's Chickpea Noodle Soup hit the spot! I think it was so dark since I didn't have any light miso. Cool thing about this soup - it turns into a noodle casserole the next day!

This looks like next day's Chickpea Noodle Soup, but is actually some spaghetti recipe from an old copy of VT. It said to roast the spaghetti first in the oven before adding it to broth to cook, as it would give it a nutty taste. I didn't notice any difference and was annoyed at the time it took to do that extra step. It's served with some delicious potatoes from our garden that Kyle cooked up.

Speaking of Kyle cooking, here is his delicious salad!

Salad:
Shaved Carrots (garden)
Honey cherry tomatoes (garden)
Beefsteak tomatoes (garden)
Lebanese cucumber (garden)
2 cloves garlic (garden)
Basil (garden)

Dressing:
3 parts olive oil
1/3 part balsamic vinegar
1/3 part lemon juice
Salt-pepper-onion powder

I made VwaV's Gigantoid PB Cookies with a few variations...one of the moms in my mom's group has celiac issues, and the other is severly allergic to nuts! So I made these with soy nut butter (which really doesn't taste like a nut butter at all much to my disappointment) and rice flour. There were OK, but I really do prefer the original recipe and am thankful I don't have any allergies!

Ah, summer...time for Peach 'Custard' Pie! Peaches, sugar, soymilk, flour and nutmeg...delicious! I think I've blogged about this before!

I think this was from VwaV...these Stuffed Peppers were AWESOME! The black bean-quinoa filling is so great and can be eaten as a grain side dish, or a stuffing for squash or anything!

From a recent VT...Peanut Butter Coconut Ice Cream. Of course I added chocolate chips. I think I'll stick with Vcon's Ice Cream recipe since I found this one to be very 'icy' - and I don't mean too cold.


I was watching Ricardo and Friends on the Food Network, and he made this cool sandwich from a loaf of hollowed out round bread. I imitated using layers of pesto, roasted veggies (eggplant, zucchini, peppers and onions), Tofurky slices and VwaV's Tofu Ricotta. I weighed it down and kept it cold. It was delicious!

I was craving something with peanut butter again, so I made up the sauce for the Cold Udon Noodles from VwaV, but added warm noodles, coriander, red pepper, cucumber and cubed tofu that I cooked up. Yummy and easy.

How to make a fast birthday cake - take a graham pie crust, add some softened neopolitan soy ice cream and freeze for 4 hours. Spread some ganache on top and top with nuts, and re-freeze for another 4 hours minimum. Then serve! Just like Baskin Robbins! In this case, I topped with fresh strawberry slices before serving.

Another fast snack - tortilla chips tossed with sugar and cinnamon. The first time I tried it I warmed them in the oven then sprinkled with organic sugar and cinnamon. They were like Beaver Tails that I used to eat as a kid. However, they are easier to make when simply tossed in a bag with a little icing sugar and cinnamon (no photo). This time they were like waffles that we used to get an old southern Ontario amusement park.

Yummy Experiment

I honestly don’t set out to modify recipes – especially when they don’t need changes! But sometimes as you re-invent a good recipe you end up coming up with something totally awesome.

Case in point – Vcon’s Vanillla Ice Cream. Delicious. Just like traditional ice cream in terms of texture, but without the sour taste of cow’s milk. So on Wednesday night, I set out to make a repeat batch. I encountered a few issues. I had exactly ½ of a package of silken tofu, which was the required amount according to the recipe, yet 1 cup of coconut milk left (2 times what the recipe called for). Obviously I didn’t have enough tofu to save for a third batch given the excess coconut milk, and I didn’t have any other recipes that would have used up the excess coconut milk. So I decided to dump the tofu in the blender and add the whole cup of coconut milk. I’ll just cut the required 1 cup soymilk down to ½ cup, I thought. Problem was, I was out of plain soymilk! I decided to then use ½ cup of chocolate soymilk, so I scanned the Chocolate Ice Cream option in Vcon and noticed that it called for melted chocolate chips to serve as the chocolate base. I decided not to go that route, and was now on an adventure.

I dumped in the ½ cup chocolate soymilk, but thought a chocolate ice cream should have more chocolate. I added in some cocoa, and was on my way. I added the required sugar and vanilla, and blended everything together.

After dumping the mixture in my ice cream maker, I had a thought. What if I could mimic the Soy Delicious (also called Purely Decadent) Peanut Butter Zig Zag ice cream that Kyle and I buy almost every week? While the ice cream was mixing, I stirred together some natural peanut butter and maple syrup (to make it sweeter) and stuck it in the freezer to chill, until the ice cream was ready and I had thought about what the heck I was going to do. I decided to take my soft serve ice cream and pour it into a shallow container, then swirled in the chilled PB mixture. After letting the ice cream firm up until the next night, Kyle and I took a sample, and it was awesome. Would have been better if I had ground some chocolate chips up and swirled them in too, for some crunchy bits. Next time!

Choco-PB Swirl Ice Cream
1 cup lite coconut milk
¾ cup sugar
½ pkg (6 oz) silken tofu
½ cup chocolate soymilk
3 tbsp cocoa
1 tbsp vanilla
½ cup natural peanut butter
¼ cup maple syrup
¼ cup coarsely ground chocolate chips (optional)

Mix coconut milk, sugar, tofu, soymilk, cocoa and vanilla in a blender until smooth. Pour into ice cream maker, and follow manufacturer’s directions. Meanwhile, stir together peanut butter and maple syrup. Set aside in freezer. After ice cream has churned for about 35-40 minutes, pour into a shallow oblong container. Drop clumps of PB mixture and ground chocolate chips (if using), and lightly swirl into ice cream using a knife, trying to maintain ribbons. Store in freezer overnight to harden further.

Soft-serve (pre-overnight freezing) and hard ice cream pics shown below...notice the yummy bands of PB!

Veganomicon...Continued!!!

After waiting patiently for Tracy to bring me my copy of Vcon on Saturday (OK, maybe I wasn't that patient), I quickly flipped through the pages to find out what I would make. It had been a very long time since I had a new cookbook to flip through (I think VCTOTW was my last purchase!), and I could barely contain myself.

I set out immediately to make some exciting new recipes. I have been keen on trying new salads lately, and the Corn and Edamame-Sesame Salad sounded perfect. I decided to serve it on spinach, since it's all I had anyways, and I wanted it to be more of a meal. Of course, after making it, I read the 'Tip' bar which said not to use canned corn...too late! Geez, I had the cookbook in my little paws for only a few hours, and I already screwed up! Oh well, I'm not sure why you can't use canned, but it still tasted great. I don't have a recipe scoring system like Tracy, but I definitely noted in my copy to make this again! Next time, I'll try adding some minced red onions or chopped green onions for added flavour and some red pepper to add a little more colour.

About an hour later, I made an executive decision to bake some cookies. I'm trying to reduce my sugar intake, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Chewy Oatmeal Raisin Cookies called for much less sugar than I was used to seeing in other cookie recipes. I thought it would also be interesting to see how brown rice syrup works in cookies, as I don't have much experience baking with it and this was the first time I'd seen it in a cookie recipe. I found this recipe to be quite similar to the oatmeal cookies that I was used to making, but I was happy to see that it called for oil instead of Earth Balance - especially when I only needed 1/2 cup of oil compared to my usual 1 cup of EB. This time, I read everything around the recipe (to avoid a similar corn incident), and noted that it would be OK to use chocolate chips. I also added in the last of my chopped walnuts. These cookies are awesome! A must bake!

On Sunday morning, I was STILL in a baking mood! I decided to make my sweetie some Banana-Walnut Waffles. Again, I had to make a small substitution of pecans for the walnuts (due to using them all up for cookies...that was poor planning). They were great! I just think that next time, I won't add maple syrup to the batter and use it as a topping only, as I found that the waffles were sticking to my non-stick iron, no matter how thoroughly I sprayed it with oil. It made so many, that I managed to tuck some away in the freezer to enjoy this weekend!


Finally, I ended my spree by making the Vanilla Ice Cream. Over the past few weeks, I tried doing some online hunting for 'ice cream' recipes, but didn't have much luck. I'm too lazy to cook something first to make a custard, I don't like the idea of xanthan gum or soy lecithin, and I found my recent attempts at using cashews left my ice cream too gritty. Yes, I was being fussy. But I have found the perfect recipe in Vcon - I simply pile the ingredients in a blender, whiz them up, and pour into the ice cream maker. I was skeptical about the recipe calling for silken tofu, as a previous attempt with tofu was too icy and not creamy. Despite that, I remained open-minded. I bought a can of coconut milk (once home, I noticed I got the low-fat kind out of habit), and put it in the fridge, as per the instructions, so that I could skim off the 'cream' the next day. Well, when I took it out of the fridge, I wasn't thinking and tipped it so far back that skimming cream would likely not happen - even if the low-fat kind would have even produced it! So I just poured the required amount of coconut milk instead and hoped for the best. I have to say that after mixing for 35-40 minutes in my ice cream maker, it produced the firmest soft serve that I have made to date. Still, I poured it into a shallow container and froze it overnight to firm it up a little more, as per my usual practice. The next day, I tasted the best ice cream ever, and will not be buying anymore Soy Delicious from now on! I still have enough leftover ingredients to make another batch tonight, and can't wait to try the other suggested flavours!


I'm so glad that I now sound like a Vcon salesperson instead of an Yves' Cuisine salesperson.

Chocoholic's Delight

As I had mentioned yesterday, I decided to make some ice cream, and resorted to my favourite ice cream book, Vice Cream. I made the Chocoholic's Delight (for some reason, I feel like I've made this before...ah, I just checked my photo file and I did make this recipe, but without the chocolate chips). I made a sub for the purified water, and used organic chocolate soymilk instead for extra creaminess and chocolate flavour! My new blender did a much better job at pulverizing the raw cashews than my food processor did.

I just realized that I don't have a snack for this week at work (somehow bringing in my ice cream seems a little impractical). I saw somewhere that someone made a banana split loaf from Vegan Planet, so I'm going to check the recipe and hope I have all of the ingredients or come up with a recipe of my own that incorporates the browning bananas on my counter and homemade freezer jam that I made.

Honestly, I Don't Have an Imaginary Sister...

Yes, this blog is called ‘Two Vegan Sisters’, although I seem like the Blog Hog Sister. Tracy truly does exist – despite not posting her photo nor any entries over the past week. She is busy moving into her new house (which I have yet to see). I can’t wait to see what she will cook first in her gleaming new kitchen! Thankfully there won’t be any fluorescent lights like in her old house – the photos taken in that light probably didn’t make for good blog fodder.

And now onto food - In addition to making tasty treats on Tuesday night, I decided to make another batch of ice cream using the Chocolate Delight recipe from Vice Cream. As you may note in an earlier blog, I tried another recipe from this same book, with fantastic results. Only thing was the ‘cream’ seemed a little gritty. I had thought that this could have been caused in part from the natural peanut butter that was added to the recipe, but the other night, after a taste test, I confirmed that the gritty texture is also caused by the ground cashew base. I have to think of something that will grind these nuts much smoother than what my current food processor can do. And buying cashew nut butter is not a financially-viable option. Otherwise, I’ll have to live with the grit, or maybe try straining it. I was going to add some crushed Oreo-style cookies, but at the last minute, I found the ice cream’s almond extract flavour made it seem like a chocolate-almond ice cream, with bits of ‘almonds’, yeah…’almonds’ crushed into it.
Anyways, I didn’t post a pic of the ‘soft-serve’ style from when the mixture came out of the ice cream machine. This is because I made a dark chocolate variety of ice cream, that would cause critics to be grossed out by my creation. Instead, I stuck it in the freezer overnight and scooped it into a bowl, which you see below.

Guilty confession – I didn’t make it onto the elliptical on Tuesday night since as I was turning out the light in my office, I noticed an odd dark blob in the hallway. I turned my light on only to confirm my worst fear - a big kahuna spider. I’m petrified of spiders, and was forced to run downstairs, grab my central vac hose, and suck it up (that doesn’t sound very vegan of me). I was so stressed out from that experience that I decided to vacuum my upstairs, to ensure that the spider was safely in the central vac cannister in the garage. While that frightening episode forced me to avoid the basement - and hence, my elliptical - for fear of running into another spider of that magnitude, it did allow me to get half of my vacuuming done :)

Day of (Un)Rest

I was a busy girl today! Kyle is feeling a little under the weather, as he is busy at work installing the ice for the curling rink. So I wanted to make him a yummy dinner to help lift his spirits. I cooked up 1/2 a recipe of Seitan from Vegan with a Vengeance, then used two of the three seitan chunks to make Jerk Seitan. I use red onions and red peppers instead of what the recipe calls for to add more colour. This was my second time making it, and I wish I had more time to marinate it (the recipe says to marinate the seitan for one hour, but the first time I made it I marinated it overnight - much better). Nonetheless, it was great! I served it over steamed brown rice, with some broccoli on the side. Kyle really liked the broccoli - all I did was sauté it with garlic-seasoned rice vinegar and soy sauce, and sprinkled it with sesame seeds.


For Dessert #1, I pulled out some of my Peanut Butter Chip Ice Cream from yesterday. My mom and stepdad came over and taste-tested this earlier in the day, and were very complimentary! My mom isn't a fan of soy, and she said that she never would have guessed that that was a main ingredient!

I'm posting a new pic of the ice cream, since my aunt had logged onto this blog earlier in the day, and said it looked like dog sh*t. I had stuck it in the freezer overnight, and scooped it out today. I'm a bigger fan of it this way, rather than the soft serve, sh*t style :)


And now on to Dessert #2...earlier in the week, I finally received my copy of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. I am on the Post Punk Kitchen site rather frequently, and have been very jealous of everyone else making tons and tons of cupcakes - it was now finally my turn! I haven't eaten a boston cream donut for I don't know how long, so I knew that this was the first cupcake I would make! I got a little scared when I read that the filling required agar - I have not ever had any luck with that stuff. It either never dissolves, or it does absolutely nothing to thicken or glossen (I don't even really know what it's supposed to do). I followed Isa's instructions for when using flakes instead of powder, and it seemed to turn out A-OK. I was however getting a *little* worried, since there was only like 1/3 cup of soymilk in my pot with the agar, and after 10 minutes of cooking, there wasn't much liquid left. I stirred that thing the entire time, just like the recipe said, because I knew that if I stopped stirring for just one minute, it would likely burn and crust on the bottom of my pan.

When it came time to fill the cupcakes, I tried to think of something else to use instead of a pastry bag. I was expecting to use a Ziploc bag with the corner cut off, but I then remembered back to Xmas of 2001 or something, when I asked for and received a Tupperware 'decorating' tool. I have no idea why I wanted that back then, as I certainly didn't plan on decorating cakes or anything. But man, that tool was perfect for filling the cupcakes! It comes with a variety of tips, and you can stick on the lid and store the contents in the fridge. I had extra filling left over, so I'm going to make a second batch of cupcakes on Tuesday night.


After like 3 hours of slaving away at these cupcakes, I was SO pleased with the final results:



Needless to say, I didn't do my vacuuming :) There's always tomorrow...

I Scream, You Scream...

Well, it doesn't look the most appetizing, but I made some Peanut Butter Ice Cream from Vice Cream, and it was actually pretty good! Five minutes after I piled it into my bowl and it half melted, I decided to snap a pic. Better late than never!

My friend Sam came over after a long day of shopping, and we thought this would be pretty quick to make. I was surprised how well my food processor ground the raw cashews, so I'm looking forward to making a 'plainer' recipe without the gritty natural peanut butter to see just how well they process. I used chocolate soy milk instead of the purified water, and added some chocolate chips (honestly, I DON'T eat chocolate chips with everything, although they have made more than a few appearances on this blog...).

We were going to make the Boston Cream Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, but it would have taken way too much time. I'm going to make them tomorrow along with Jerk Seitan. I had reserved Sunday for vacuuming, but cooking and baking is way more fun instead. Maybe I'll vacuum after all of that...

Awash in Squash!

I also made the Roasted Butternut Squash Soup too on Sunday night. Delish!



However, I now know that I will spend more time in the produce section looking for a scale. I bought 3 squash, as the recipe said, but I did not weigh them to see if I met the 5lb that were called for in the recipe. I roasted them, and started adding the squash to my onion/broth combo, and started mixing with an immersion blender. I couldn't add anymore, since the soup was so thick! I had PLENTY of squash leftover, so I guess I could have given Tracy my leftover squash so that she'd have some yummy soup too.

I also made the Fettuccine Alfreda, as I saw pics of that recipe on a few sites out there. I should preface my review by indicating that I HATE the taste of cheese. For instance, as a little kid eating grilled cheese sandwiches, I used to soak them in pickle brine, then layer dill pickles on top to be able to eat the sandwich. To this day, even when I use vegan cheeze, I still have to do the same. Why do I even eat a grilled cheeze sandwich, you ask? I dunno. I guess it’s just an easy meal. But I digress – I have to admit that I wasn’t a fan of the alfreda, not by any fault of the recipe, but for the mere fact that I hate anything that tastes cheesy. Kyle liked it, so I knew that it was just me. So for all those vegans that miss the taste of cheesy food, this is the perfect recipe for you!

I also added mushrooms to the prepared sauce, to give it some texture.

For dessert, I made another attempt at soy ice cream. I had first tried a vanilla recipe using tofu, but I wasn't thrilled with the results. So I tried yet another plain vanilla to go on top of my homemade apple pie (I was a cooking machine yesterday!!!). I used a recipe for Cookies and Cream (sans Cookies) that used soy creamer, and the results were fantastic! I really liked the fact that I didn't have to chisel it out of the container once I left it in the freezer.