Evi's First Haircut! (aside from bangs)

This turned out cute, in spite of me. It must be the power of the Eves coming though my incompetent hair cutting skills.

Just so you understand the horror that normally is a Marcella Cut, here is a photo remembrance of The December 2007 Bangs Massacre:

At least my Evangeline had what it takes to rock a mullet.

A chip off the old block

There is certainly no shortage of vegan chocolate chip cookie recipes in the world, most of them very delicious. An advantage of vegan chocolate chip cookies is that many of the recipes are a lot healthier than the traditional one -- made with quality oil (such as coconut), whole grain flour, and so on. I will add, it's with no detriment to taste. HOWEVER! There are times when I need to go back to my childhood...to those gooey, soft, chewy morsels of love that are completely and utterly non-nutritive. My mom made the best ones. I remember coming home from a dance class or school soooo hungry I could eat 10 or 12. (Teenagers have such amazing appetites!) While I am no longer able to down them with such abandon, I am very happy that after a year of trying, I am finally able to replicate them to my exact memory with vegan ingredients.

Here is my delicious, vegan junk food, Mrs. Bartausky-style:

Mom's Chocolate Chip Cookies

Preheat oven to 350. (My oven thermometer said 375, but I don't know how accurate it is)

Prepare two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Cream together very well:

1 c earth balance non-dairy stick "butter"

3/4 c brown sugar

3/4 c unbleached sugar (Fair trade organic sugar if at all possible!)

Whip together in a food processor, blender, or cup with immersion blender til creamy:

1 1/2 T (4 1/2 t) egg replacer (tested with EnerG egg replacer)

6 T water

Whip the egg replacer mixture and 2 t vanilla into the "butter" and sugar until everything is very light and fluffy.

Sift together:

2 1/2 c. all purpose flour

1 t baking soda

1 scant t salt

mix into the sugar mixture until a nice dough forms, and then stir in:

1 1/2 (or 2 if you want) chocolate chips (fair trade and organic again, if possible)

1 c chopped toasted nuts, optional

Drop dough by tablespoonfuls onto prepared baking sheets and bake for 10-12 minutes, until barely, just golden. Let sit on sheets for a minute and remove to racks to cool. Enjoy with your favorite non-dairy milk. Makes about 45, depending on how much dough you eat while you're baking. Oh, you don't do that? Must be just me....

Sprinkle some love!

One of the ingredients I missed most when I became vegan was Parmesan cheese. It wasn't necessarily the flavor I was most lamenting, but that finishing touch. Something rich to sprinkle on top of pasta or soup...

Of course, you can buy vegan Parmesan substitute, but it's so easy to make your own and avoid those highly processed cheese substitutes. An old recipe standby is 1 to 1 toasted nuts or seeds and nutritional yeast, ground together with a pinch of salt, but I wanted something a little more hearty and crumbly. Here's what I came up with:

Cashew Sprinkle

3 T olive oil

1 t mild miso

1/2 t umeboshi paste

1 c. small cashew pieces

1 c. nutritional yeast

Heat oven to a slow temperature, about 250 degrees.

Whisk the oil, miso, and umeboshi paste together in a medium sized bowl. Add the cashews and nutritional yeast, and stir to coat everything with the oil mixture. Spread onto a parchment lined baking sheet, and let the mixture dry out in the oven 40 minutes or so. Everything should be smelling nice and toasty, but obviously, you don't want it to burn. Remove from oven and cool to room temperature. Grind by pulsing in a food processor until the mixture looks like coarse sand, but don't let it turn into a paste! Store in the refrigerator in a covered glass jar.

Sprinkle on salad, soup, or pasta. You could also use this mixed with breadcrumbs to fry eggplant and make eggplant "Parmesan".

Spelt Bread

Mmmm...fresh bread. Warm and sweet and cozy. I don't want to give it up when I'm pressed for time, so I turn to my bread machine. I know that, for bread snobs, a bread machine is the stuff nightmares are made of. Yet I beg it's reverence as a tool that busy people can use to keep homemade bread consistently available. Whatever you do, though, please try and bake it in your oven. There is (In my humble opinion) something scary about the dice-shaped loaf that emerges from "the machine". So when I don't have time to make bread the old-fashioned way, I use the dough cycle on my bread machine and at least bake it the old-fashioned way! Then I have the best of all worlds: time for homemade bread, a house that smells like heaven, and lovely, burnished brown loaves that are the proper shape for slicing into sandwiches.

Here's my favorite recipe for the bread machine:

Spelt and Whole Wheat Bread

1/2 c + 1 T water

1/2 c soy yogurt or 1/2 t vinegar mixed into 1/2 c non-dairy milk and left to curdle for a few minutes

1 T olive (or other) oil

1 T "butter" or coconut oil

2 1/4 c spelt flour

3/4 c whole wheat flour

2 T dark brown sugar

1 T + 1 t gluten flour (for best texture)

1 1/2 t salt

2 1/2 t yeast

Place in bread machine according to manufacturer's instructions. Set to dough cycle. During the cycle, check and see if you need to add a touch of water if the dough is crumbly, or a little flour if it's very wet. When cycle ends, press the air out of the dough. Form it into a loaf and pinch the seams. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Let the dough rise for about 45 m. in a well-oiled loaf pan (it should slope gently just over the top of the pan when it's ready to bake). Bake for 35 m. When it's done, it should sound hollow when tapped on the bottom. Cool until warm and devour, preferably with tasty jam.

I like to use white whole wheat flour for my bread baking. It's available from King Arthur Flour Co. and Bob's Red Mill.

Creative Endeavors

My recent fun includes making a little rubber duckie cake for my niece Jasmine's first birthday party, and also sewing a little doll for the same event. The duck is banana cake and the recipe comes from talented Hannah Kaminsky's book My Sweet Vegan. The frosting is just plain "butter"cream. I used licorice for the eyes and a vegan jelly candy (by Sunspire -- I got mine in Fred Meyer's bulk dept) for the beak.






The doll was made from leftover scraps of this and that; I was most happy to find a perfect use for the black eyelash yarn my mother-in-law gave me...hair! It made the perfect little fuzzy 'fro. I hope to make more of these little dolls for Christmas presents...I have lots of little ones in my life, and this doll was so fun to make. I used this pattern, but I did the doll's hair differently than the instructions suggested. Using a needle and thread, I made "ladders" of stitching on the doll's head, and then wove the yarn into it. I thought it would be sturdier this way.


Fun times!