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It’s a thing of beauty, isn’t it? The “ice cream” is not the central player here, it is just frozen creamed banana with some almond butter. No, no, the best part is the homemade waffle cone bowl. Yes! Homemade and still warm and about as thick as a crepe and snapping off into big crunchy pieces I could dip in the cold banana, dripping with bits of chocolate cherry sauce and toasted flaky almonds…. I love dinners like this (dinner indeed) and whatever inspires me to make them.
I’m trying to remember what inspired me to make this….
Oh right! It was watching Hubert Keller make a waffle cone something-or-other on Top Chef Masters (I think it was Keller, don’t quote me on that). And the fact that every time I pass an ice cream shop I basically just stop and drool at the buttery cone smell. Thankfully Gale Gand had a recipe that’s essentially vegan, so I whipped it up with a kind of MacGuyver-esque method of squishing the batter between a liberally lubed-up saucepan and a frypan. ’Cause I don’t have a waffle iron (yet).
Check it out! Method of champions! Ha ha, well, its an interesting progression nonetheless. The first one was floppy-doppy, not hard or thin enough at all. The second was after I broke out the second pan for squishing, and it was much better, much more crisp. Things just improved down the line… none of them were quite as thin as I’d like (I might make a slightly thinner batter next time), and they were lacking the little waffle pattern that I bet contributes to a high shatter-factor, but they were otherwise the real deal!
Leading ultimately to this glorious bowl of sweet sweet goo………… gone in 5 minutes, probably. :)
I’d like to try the others with a real ice cream, though, and I have a few cups of slightly-sweetened coconut milk in my freezer waiting for just a purpose such as this… does anyone have a favourite recipe? It doesn’t necessarily have to be coconut flavoured, but coconut-rum would be pretty cool.
Vegan Vanilla Waffle Cones
(adapted from Gale Gand)
1 cup heavy soy cream
1 1/2 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups icing sugar
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp cinnamon
pinch of ground nutmeg
1 tbsp cornstarch
oil for the iron
In a bowl, briskly whip together the cream with the vanilla. Sift together the dry ingredients, then add them to the wet and stir just to mix smooth the biggest lumps. Let the batter sit for 30 minutes.
Heat up a waffle cone iron (I don’t know! Maybe waffle irons come with attachments!) and brush with a little oil. Pour in some batter and close to lid to bake and brown. Open the iron and remove the browned batter and shape it while it’s still warm. You can wrap it around a cone shape to make a classic cone, fold it over a ramekin to make a deep bowl, turn it into a taco – whatever possibility you like, as long as you’re fast and use oven mitts to protect your hands from burning!
Let them cool, devour with ice cream.
I’ve been raw for 5 days now!! I’ll save writing about that for the next post, but in the meantime here’s a whole bunch of photos from the past few weeks I never got around to posting but are kinda making me hungry right now…
Allright, we’ve got up there… chili cashew dosas (my favourite recipe so far from Vegan Brunch), with a notably amazing chutney I made from the back of Indian Cookery, ie: this book ——>
Which is basically my favourite indian cookbook ever, even for the chutney chapter alone, which covers pretty much anything you’d want to stew and preserve in a super authentic, full of interesting tidbits kind of way. Like, that peach chutney I ate with the dosas had paprika, poppy seeds, cloves, green chiles and cashews, oh my! Totally easy to make, too.
Another perk of making chutney is that you get to re-use little jars and give them away after they’ve sat for a month on the shelf looking very pretty. On the right is the peach, and in the middle is a pineapple chutney with about a ton of ginger and garlic in it, yay!
Okay, what else – this was astoundingly good. It looks kind of grey, I’ll admit, but so so so good. Velvety corn creamy chinese wedding soup, or something like that, with bits of savoury tofu floating in it and fresh peas. It’s Bryanna’s recipe, and incidentally my introduction to creamed corn (I’m a fan, it turns out).Oh, and Singapore green beans from Tropical Vegan Kitchen in the background. Once that stuff marinates it’s addictive!
East Coast Coffeecake for an omni BBQ! Plus adorable sign. :)I loved how I could even make this in my dad’s kitchen – it’s the sign of a perfectly adaptable baked good. (flour, sugar, oil, check!)
My favourite PB cookies ever, are the Crispy PB Cookies from Extraveganza with the cereal flakes inside. They crackle like pop rocks and have that perfect dense chew, and are so easy to make. I usually quarter the recipe and make them into the size of quarters, and have them as little pick me ups throughout the day.
Polenta Rancheros from V.Brunch, with noticeable flecks of toasted coriander that perfume the whole thing, it’s really nice, especially when made with fresh tomatoes cause that’s all I had. Surprisingly light for a bean dish!
White bean, mango and rosemary tacos!!! My surprising invention that worked, plus some leftover Tempeh Wingz made with tofu, cold and chewy out of the fridge. (That red sauce is illegally finger-licking…. wow.)
Fresh organic vegetable pasta spirals with a sauce made from tomatoes, raisin-sage sausages, capers, zucchini & basil, NOM.
Banana Rabanada!!! Not only is this delicious but no refined sugar, either, so it’s perfectly viable to eat for lunch! Isa was spot on about the syrup & cinnamon-mopping, too.
(Heart-shaped) Fudge-pops from How It All Vegan, since I found my ancient copy in my mom’s garage a few months ago and figured I’d give it a whirl again. These were sooooo good, and almost exactly like fudgesicles, which is no mean feat!
Sausage and eggplant quiche from V.Brunch with a homemade crust I put too much EB in but was still okay. And I think that’s about it for cooked stuff! Phew, sorry for the cursory writing about it all, too. Somehow I think the pictures speak loud enough that it’s okay I don’t remember the details, plus this raw food thing is making me spacey… zomg. It’s great, but I’ll be glad to bring it down to maybe 60% raw after the next few days. Can’t wait to show you what that’s been like, though!
(psst the hottie ain’t me, it’s my sis)
(I am kicked out of veganism for this decorating job. of pure awesome.)
I’m still alive, I swear! I blame a flu for holding me hostage and making me kind of hate my own kitchen – a flu that has lasted for a month and is STILL CAUSING WHEEZY DEPTHFUL COUGHINGS IN THE NIGHT. Argh I say. I’m only sort of (maybe) remembering what an appetite feels like.
Chocolate PB banana smoothies + popcorn for dinner much? Anyway.
I turned 25 recently! And this year I insisted that a cake be made for me, because ha ha I was hating the sight of baking tins. Me mum made an amazing spice cake that I really want the recipe for – it was like eating a ginger cookie, except in cake form, and with plum frosting (and the best decoration job this side of my sister’s taste level). Amazing, and I polished a good chunk of it off with actual soy ice cream, which I haven’t had since high school. Happy birthday to me!
Later at home in montreal I had a wee shindig on my actual birthday, and flexed my rusty pastry muscles to pull off… the mushiest cake EVAH. Haha, it was good, but completely not cooked in the middle. (my oven is also teh sux, but we take responsibility for our disasters, yes?). I used the banana split cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and probably trying to make a full cake out of it accounted for the mush (also I only had whole wheat pastry flour, which is good, but not THAT good, you know what I mean? Forgive me but I like 50% white flour in cakestuffs).
At any rate the company was the greatest in the world, and I got a japanese unicorn mug, a pineapple, a decoupage candle-glass, a drawing of fish, some chamomile and ylang-ylang oils, and uhhh… my own tupperware back! Huzzah.
I also treated myself to a 10 kg bag of good old emptily nutritive white flour this afternoon. Aw yeah. :)
(^ psst that hottie is me)
I lost my camera cord! And I lost the internet due to crazy summer storms and their ease at destroying routers! So I’m sitting on a lot of pictures… will you bear with me? I have forgotten which are worthy of blogation, but I assure you, most 94% of it was delicious. Highly chewable. Well… I guess you can’t chew jam. But doesn’t it look pretty? Lame peaches became perfect ice cream topping, even though I pouted and danced all the while my mom made this, because I wanted to eat them raw. But I’m an annoying daughter like that. Yep. :D
And I invented a pizza! Which I would bet anything has actually been done before, but if you get the chance, you MUST try making a batch of samosa potatoes and laying it over pizza on a bed of pureed pineapple. It’s my new absolute favourite.
Oh, and speaking of pizza, I’ve been introduced to Ottawa’s gourmet pizzeria, Pavarazzi’s. It sounds so much like paparazzi!! Paparpizza? They have good taste in vegetarian toppings, though. No lame soggy mushrooms/green pepper combos. Sesames and roasted red peppers, artichokes and olives are the standard. Good show!
**note: I avoided the cheese bits encroaching on my nice side like the absolute plague, and am I the only vegan who takes pleasure in an increasing dislike for the smell/accidental taste of animal products? Cause cheese kind of tastes like fermented fluuuuuuuid to me now. *cough*
Appetizing! You can keep your squishy olives, sis!
Speaking of good taste (haha) and vegetarian accommodations, mum and me broke out this cast-iron grill pan that magically appeared in the pantry sometime between this visit and my last to grill up everything in sight, and some fennel besides. I also get to take the pan home! (vcon grilled tempeh tacos, here we come!). Simple dinner, yes, but I was raised on the good art of arranging a sandwich spread, and forgive me for my stereotypical tastes, but I SO do love a grilled vegetable. I think I ate 3 dinners worth of food here. It was worth it for the rosemary bread. The rosemary bread that was made of olive oil. Droolular.
Bit o’ baking. Ever tried a flapjack? I um…. hadn’t. But I was mad curious, I mean – golden syrup, margarine and oats, plus major associations to my UK heritage, I had to at least try. I succeeded at making floppy oat chews? The fat content alone is scaring me away from attempting this again… but if anyone else wants to try, I CAN highly recommend adding some lemon or lime juice to the mix, cause it makes it all lip-smacking more-ish. Too bad about the melty texture, though…
Banana bread is friendly. It shall redeem me. (yum)
As will peach right side-up cupcakes with toasted candied almond slivers on top (I should think). Which are perfect from the fridge, cold… teeth sinking through the cold fruity layer to moist almond-y crumbs…. acklejackarggggg…. s’good. I got the coveted “vegan baked goods are soooo much better than normal baked goods” comment from not one, but three separate eaters of cake. Suke-sess!
To make thine own, take one pineapple rightside-up cupcakes recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, replace fruit with appropriate fruit, add almond extract, and enjoooyyyyy. With joy! Man, I love that book, it should be renamed the Little Vegan Cake-Creation Sourcebook.
More to come in part 2!
It’s funny when you don’t eat during the day, how certain activities grow in fascination to replace the habit of cooking. Case in point: cat watching. Oh, Satchmo… curled up with the collected works of Lewis Carroll… so peaceful. I spent a lot of time reading over those ten days (a LOT), drawing, walking around late at night with legs that felt oddly leaden but powered by this strange eternal sense of energy. I even went to a party on the weekend stone-cold sobre, swizzled my lemonade and had a blast. Near the end there was a definite natural high going on, and I could see how people could continue for 14, 20, 40 days….
Not that I was going to. I’d have to take out real estate to manage all the recycling!
P (hereby referred to as “Pomme”) came off the fast one day before me, so we went to work together making a pottage of soup with about half a garden in it, it was the most nourishing amazing thing I’d ever seen… (turnip, celery, carrot, zucchini, sweet potato, leek, onion, cabbage, mushrooms, broccoli, tomato, green beans, wakame, brown rice and barley). It was so tempting, in fact… that 3 AM of day 11…. I crept out of bed………….. and had a bowl of it!
I know you’re supposed to wait and spend a whole day drinking orange juice to break the fast…. but I am not patient! And my trusty guts of steel worked like a charm! It was delicious, and sat perfectly. (I’m not recommending this to anyone, though – I almost ate it in the spirit of science, to see if I doubled over in crippling cramps or something equally bad, and that might still happen if your stomach is sensitive)
This is my first real meal! On day 2 of breaking the fast, I woke up to the most enticing smell ever, and Pomme had made the most perfect and delicious (and spicy!) dhal, which we had for dinner with brown rice, steamed veggies, salad, and this very cool sesame coleslaw I made weeks ago that magically started fermenting all on it’s own. I’ll have to see if I can recreate that…
And then, after dinner, because we are daredevils after all…. we made a raw pie, and (oh dear) ate the whole thing between us! Okay, I had most of it. ;)
It had a walnut/almond/cinnamon crust, and the filling was a blend of banana, cashews, mango, blueberries and maple syrup, and it was pretty amazing. Raw pies are especially fun to make because they involve using the blender a lot! And they’re easier on the post-fasting tummy, too.
So that’s pretty much it! There’s loads of other things I could talk about the fast, but it’s already kind of fading in my memory… it really wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be at all. I was positive I’d give up somewhere around Day 3. I did spend Day 3 reading every dissenting opinion on the cleanse that I could find, and almost thought of stopping. But I didn’t, and I’m so glad, because the real treasure I got from it was I SUCCESSFULLY QUIT SMOKING, I’m free! There was no craving, no coughing, no weight gain, no insomnia, no irritability… it’s basically the most perfect way to quit, ever. I hope anyone who wants to quit tries this method, I can’t recommend it highly enough! And little things like pickles and curry taste like absolute heaven afterwards. :P~~~~~
(next post: my veganversary and I finally get to try tempeh!)
Curiously enough, I have a habit when drinking to RUN NOT WALK to the kitchen and see if I can’t whip up something edible with blurry vision. And I usually can! Maybe it’s the challenge… and it’s certainly better than singing off-key, I should think.
My most classic preparation is some sort of seitan barfood after stumbling home. I guess 3 am and soused isn’t the best time to attempt to recreate a vegan hotdog, but I tried! It wasn’t hotdogg-y, but it was delicious, even if J was passed out like a rock by the time I set down a warm fresh chapati with a seitan-dog and all the fixins in front of him. (It made a perfect breakfast the next day, though!)
A week or two later some crepes were made, and turned out more perfectly than any sobre pancake I’ve ever attempted. The Vcon recipe is lightning-fast, delicious, and got rave vegetarian reviews (“these are even better than the kind with eggs! more flavourful and chewy!”). I did add a bit of extra oat flour, too, which gave them a nice homey touch.
Yum jam! Strawberry, blueberry, merlot, sour cherry, plus caramel sauce, cinnamon and fresh peaches.
And then last night (we all get off work on wednesday. we call it “fake saturday”), some whiskey prompted a mini-muffin adventure. What kind? Uhhhh…. banana! With blueberries! (we are also blueberry fiends, oh my yes). Use a recipe? Bah! That takes time and reading. Better to just throw some whole wheat pastry flour in a bowl with some ginger, cinnamon, baking soda, salt, soymilk, brown rice syrup, oil and vanilla. And they TOTALLY turned out. Not too sweet, loaded with berries and banana, and perfect for munching on while playing with plastic dinosaurs and discussing 37 ways the world is an unfathomably weird place. Rarr brontasaurus rex!
There were even 3 (oops, I ate one – 2) left over the next day!
Smashed Vegan’s Warning: please please please do not attempt to drink and bake at home, unless you’re of legal age and are prepared to find a huge mess waiting for you in the morning. I don’t want to be a bad influence… :o
It’s interesting these sayings one hears and doesn’t think about, like “cheap as dirt”. Yes, apparently dirt is very very cheap! Shows me. I picked up a ginormous bag yesterday and lovingly transferred my slightly cramped tomato plants to their rightful places in separate pots. They’re so beautiful, and not even so stunted for a few mishaps along the way (icy cold nights with the window accidentally open, and Satchmo deciding to munch on a few of them, ack). I’ve never grown things before, but I hope I get tomatoes by the end of the season. At the very least they make the apartment look great!
So that was the living part. The LEARNING part is hoboy, I should listen when a cookbook author describes something as a warming defense against winter weather, and possibly not make that on a gorgeous sunny evening. I mean, it used up all these mysterious odds and ends of things I had, and I tallied the total cost of this meal to be pennies (so really nothing lost), but I just wasn’t in the mood for braised seitan with chicory and brussel sprouts. The broccoli polenta was awesome, though. Thank goodness for freezers, maybe there’ll be a cold night later on.
And this isn’t living nor learning, but actually the exciting lead-up to what has immediately become my new obsessively favourite dessert thing ever —
Banana chocolate chip bread pudding! Oh yes, oh yes yes yes. Feel the mapley cinnamony soft deliciousness through the computer screen? I hope so, I would devise a device to do so if I could, forget wonka bars through the television, I wanna make bread pudding for everybody.
Seriously, I’m completely gah gah for this, I’ve had it for lunch for the past three days (with, you know, some bean salad so I don’t drop dead of malnutrition). Thumbs up again, Vcon!
Blub blub! Miso soup with real kombu (finally) required some sort of infantile time-wasting awesomeness, hence carrot-fish. I swear it made it more delicious!
And I actually ate something besides oatmeal for breakfast the other day! I love how sleeping in means I have to budget my time which means pancakes, ooh, life is hard. These weren’t perfect (oatmeal chocolate chip, for the record), but maybe I’ll fix the liquid ratio and put them in the zine someday. Chocolate for breakfast, though… it’s great.
This was another one I was thinking of putting in the zine, but then I was like, “uh, no. Everybody has a banana bread recipe and I actually suspect I got this from the ppk years ago, before I even knew what the ppk was.” Tasty, but I mostly just made it to see if I could still make banana bread, ha. (quartering a recipe and making it in a tiny pan turns it into banana bars, though, which is pretty cool!)
Yummy black bean and wheat berry salad, with corn, red onion, radish, carrot, cilantro, lime, cumin and cinnamon. It could use bell peppers and/or tomato, but not bad at all for an empty fridge kinda thing!
And banhi mi, banhi mi!! Okay, “vietnamese seitan sandwich with savoury broth dip” (from what else but Vcon). I was too excited to eat it to take a decent photo at all, but you can probably see that I deviated from the recipe and tried to make it more authentic, I suppose. So there’s cucumber sticks, sweet pickled carrot, green onion, radish, jalapeno, tomato, mayo, cilantro and delicious satan. I mean seitan. I’d never dipped a sandwich before, it was lovely, mushy spicy and bready.
Another cleaning out the fridge deal, this time minestrone, with the expected vegetable guests, but also corn because I really really like corn. And macaroni noodles. And I even resisted making it spicy. Oh, and I added ground up toasted almonds to approximate parmesan and this was a good decision, it totally made it right.
So very nourishing!
So it’s been a while… I feel a little overwhelmed by food photos and at least 300 unread entries on my blogroll… but hey, I’m back at school on Thursday and with school comes avoidant tendencies, boredom, and a need to gaze at other people’s food successes/experiments/disasters/what-have-you with rapt attention. I think that’s why I’m opening the first of my re-cap posts with that excellent tangle of stir fry up there. It’s not like, blog-worthy in any classic sense of the word, it involved a lot of green thai curry paste and normal normal stuff… but it was the best stir fry I’ve made so far! And I got to use my mung bean flat noodles (which looked shockingly like glass and tasted like hyper-jello in a very good way). And I threw the whole thai theme in a blender by using lentil sprouts, but anyway, this was excellent. And all a-tangle, which is how I feel right now. (also, for the record I got my fall/winter marks back and I got straight As!!!). A-tangle I say! So on with the foods before my mind ties me in noodley-knots, tee hee…
I should probably just label the simple stuff — here’s some VwaV chocolate pudding with vastly reduced sugar and added pureed strawberries and banana. I err… don’t recommend these adjustments so much. Still hit the chocolate craving, but it wasn’t really pudding in any decadent sense, ah well.
French lentil soup from the Vcon, with a kale & maple-mustard salad. VERY good, all of it. I could eat sweetly dressed kale every day of the week and tarragon-y lentils = Win.
Sopa de Chayote! Alas, my second chayote (or Mirliton) wasn’t quite enough to justify using it in a full-on cool recipe like Kittee’s stuffed squash, I did manage to find a recipe for this easy soup that might beat out gazpacho as my favourite chilled hot-weather repast. Go make this! It actually showcases the oh-so subtle flavour of the chayote, which also lends it this quirky green colour. Mexican dinner party starter soup? Uhhhh…. yes.
Vcon strawberry-plum crisp — amazingly more than the sum of it’s parts. The fruit turns into what I imagine vegetarian vampires would want to nosh – gloopy, crimson, sweet and tart, and also the aniseseed in the crust made me extra happy. I always forget how much I like baked strawberries what with all my raw eating, but this reminded me of the whole “strawberry-bomb” phenomena. Like how they get all warm and explodey when they’re cooked. Hee, anyway…
*drumrollllllll*
Best cookies ever. (okay, best CHOCOLATE cookies ever). Thank you Vcon, the chocolate chocolate chip walnut cookies have pretty much been renamed Supernova Desirious Nexi-Yums in my mind, which is a silly name to be sure, but almost manages to convey what a job they did on my knees when I bit one warm from the oven (those knees wobbled. a lot). I made them for my painting class, then thought better of it, and saved them for my friends and I to gush over at leisure. (oh, and I made the chocolate-orange version… mmmmmmmorange!).
More food to come! Swell Vegan tester scones and redcurrant cupcakes and lots of things in mini-form and egads, well, a lot. Next post soon!
My friend Dilly is leaving tomorrow to go to Jordan for 2 months, to live with her father and get some experience in sustainable development, maybe teach English, that sort of thing. So of course, we had to have a sushi party to see her off well, and my other friend Shine is the whiz-biz at sushi, no joke – she made uramaki’d (inside outed) california with fuji apple, shitake & sweet potato, avocado & peanut, bunny rolls, some with veggie pâté, some with peanut butter (surprisingly good!), mango cilantro rolls, futomaki, various tiny single-ingredient rolls, caterpillar rolls with mango on the outside…. so amazing. We feasted on the floor and drank yerba teas and inhaled gorgeous little sushi pieces until we couldn’t eat anymore.
But then I did have to eat more (poor me, I know!) – they brought out a slice of spelt-crusted chocolate-banana pie with a big sparkler in it, just for my birthday! (it happens to be today but I hadn’t breathed a word of it). So incredibly sweet! I have a hard time with undue attention and a whole birthday cake would have probably blown my mind and made me blush enough to pop a gasket, but one slice of beautiful pie and a small round of ‘happy birthday’… well, it was perfect.
Here’s to 24! :D
(and I’m still making a key lime Pie Of Greatness for my birthday, just probably the next time I go home)
