Vegan MoFo 27: Cake

One thing that just grinds my gears is when someone decides to write a review to publish on Amazon of a vegan dessert book, and complains that there's sugar, oil, or flour being used. They always say the same things about being vegan for health and looking for healthy desserts.

If you want a healthy dessert, eat some fruit. Cake, cookies, pies, candies, ice creams - these things are not healthy by definition. Listen, my sister is a total health nut, and she's always making lovely healthy desserts out of sweet plants. I'm less motivated to eat by health, so I just eat my 22.2 tsp. of sugar each day and mind my own business.

What really bothers me about these reviews though is that it perpetuates the myth that vegan=healthy. I eat a lot of healthy food, but the first week or two of MoFo was nothing but grief eating for this blog.



Whiskey and ice cream for breakfast, pizza from down the street, and lots of brownies composed the bulk of my intake. All were vegan, all were distinctly not healthy.

Even when I righted things by eating foods that were light and nutritionally dense, I kept eating my desserts. I always reduce the amount of sugar that I use in recipes, but even still I know what I'm getting into.

Even when I make something in the fruit crisp/crumble/cobbler spectrum, and even when I reduce the amount of sugar, and EVEN when I add oats, I know that the word "healthy" has no business lurking around my post-entree ritual. In fact, I don't even want to get close to it by claiming that any of my desserts are "healthier" than the non-vegan versions. Mine are better for other living creatures, but I'm not about to be a guest of Dr. Oz for my groundbreaking work in diets.

Or maybe I will be ...

Well until then, I'll continue doing my current job, which requires me to bake a cake for a celebration for the students. I love making cake, and I have the library to do it well. But to be honest, I don't want to be bothered. I don't want to mix all of the ingredients and do all the fancy groundwork for a cake that will be won and eaten (probably in a few messy bites) by a school age kid.

And so for the first time in years, I bought a box of cake mix and a can of frosting. I never realized that some varieties from Duncan Hines were accidentally vegan. On top of it, I don't even have to do much more, since soda replaces all of the other ingredients.

I can't help but think this is a little gross. I try to avoid soda as a rule. I once had a serious Dr. Pepper problem, and having a soda kicks off a lot of cravings and sugar intake. These cake mixes can't exactly be low in sugar either. So while this kind of cake won't become my regular Saturday night thing, it'll do its job for an event like this.

I did learn that with this method, you have to bake it significantly longer than the box times, and that the toothpick test seems a little less reliable.

Obviously, I couldn't resist the urge to at least zhuzh it up a little, so I added a little orange food coloring to the can of frosting and a handful of chocolate chips. I wanted to do some Quick Melty Ganache from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, but I ran out of time. I had to run the the grocery and everyone in Baltimore is doing the same for hurricane preparedness, so lines were long. Additionally, there wasn't good light for the picture.

Today, I'm going to health it up with an apple crumble.

Vegan MoFo 26: A Reason to Pay What I Did for Those Mushrooms

Once you've reached the point that you'll pay $11 for mushrooms, you may as well pay $14. Or so I've been told.

At the Baltimore Farmers' Market there is a really nice group of mushroom farmers that bring a nice variety every week. I've bought exciting new kinds of mushrooms there before, but never felt justified buying one of the mix trays.

That changed when I chose Mushroom Hash from How to Pick a Peach as one of my fall recipes to try. The recipe calls for a pound and a half of mixed mushrooms, and I figured I may as well go balls to the wall. Incidentally, that phrase is about airplane acceleration, so let's keep this clean, yeah?

I was looking over the $11 trays, but my companion pointed out that I may as well throw down the extra $3 dollars and experience the taste of "deluxe."

So I did.

Then I made Mushroom Hash for breakfast one day. The only changes I made were to substitute ingredients that I didn't have on hand. I used apple juice with a bit of vinegar to stand in for white wine, and almond milk instead of cream.

I was almost late to work because I was having seconds. This is a decadent breakfast option, and I won't hesitate to buy exotic mushrooms again if I'm entertaining and need to impress. It was an easy dish to make, and took under 45 minutes to do, start to finish. All of the ingredients seemed to work to bring out the flavor of the mushrooms, and then that was imparted to the potatoes.

I know I said that I'd wait to try recipes from all the seasons before reviewing the book, but I don't think I need to. I will, but really, just check out the book already.

Vegan MoFo 25: Barley Chili

I've enjoyed my recipes from How to Pick a Peach, but I haven't forgotten my decision to work through the soups chapter of 500 Vegan Recipes either. I was on my own for dinner tonight, so I decided to take it easy.

I thought I'd finally gathered all of the ingredients for the Smokey Black Bean Soup, but I had already cooked my black beans, which the recipe does not want, and I had a 30 oz. can of diced tomatoes, but not any 15 oz. cans. None of that bothered me, but I realized that it might be easier to make the Barley Chili, and to use up my yellow squash from the farmers' market.

The other major change I made was to use up a half red onion that had been in my fridge for a few days and been browned a bit by a misguided attempt at iced coffee. I recommend it. It might have been the coffee, but I think the red onion really added something. In addition to that flavor, it was pretty spicy. I had to use two kinds of chili powder to make up the required 2 tablespoons, but I think that also worked in my favor.

However, one thing that did not work in my favor was the barley. I managed, despite 3 cups of broth and 15 oz of tomato sauce, to burn the barley. I'm no stranger to this when I'm cooking straight up grains, but this is an entire chili. There was still liquid in the pot ... how does the grain burn? No one knows.

I was too lazy to make corn bread, so I ate some day-old baguette on the side. I also added some fresh cilantro before digging in. Definitely a repeater! This chili was hot, rich, and chewy. The cilantro should be a requirement, and the baguette did a lot to mitigate the spice. I'll probably go crock pot next time though.

Vegan MoFo 24: Asian Pear Crisp with Walnut Topping

I had an Asian pear once awhile back, and I wasn't really wild about it. It was pretty, but a little syrupy-sweet for me. I was intrigued, though, by the promise of a fruit crisp flavored with a bit of bourbon, like the one in How to Pick a Peach. Besides, this recipe specifically mandated the use of ramekins for baking, and I'm always looking for an excuse to use them.

So we made Asian Pear Crisp with Walnut Topping to take to our engagement with friends. The recipe called for 3 pears, or 1.5 lbs. My pears were a little small, so I had to use about 10 of them to get enough. Coring the little buggers was a pain, but probably the worst part of the job.

I will complain about the two setbacks though. First, I had toasted the walnuts for the topping, and I suppose I didn't give them enough time to cool. So instead of the crumbly textured dough I was supposed to end up with, I had a buttery spread on my hands. I topped the fruit mix with it anyway though, and the dessert still ended up smashing. It was just more of a smashing cobbler than a crisp.

The second came when I was finally using my box of Healthy Top. I take issue with the name, because come on, dessert is not healthy, but I was still excited. I refrigerated it prior to opening, and started whipping. Then I noticed a after-factory sticker on the tetra-pack box that said "Oops!!!! Freeze Immediately And Whip As Soon As Possible." So I bought this off a shelf, but I have to freeze immediately? What the hell?

Well it tasted awful. So we snagged some vanilla So Delicious on the way out, and it was great. I'm just bummed that I didn't get to have the bourbon cream recommended by the book.

All of that aside, this knocked everyone's socks off. Everyone loved it, especially me! And I felt like I had brought it, so to speak, on the behalf of fancy cocktail hour vegans everywhere. This was no more difficult to make than a plain old apple crisp - in fact it had fewer ingredients than many of the crisps I've made over time. But it sounds so showy, and it has bourbon-soaked raisins in it.

Vegan MoFo 23: Pasta with Broccoli and (Tofurky) Sausage

So as promised, we did the big farmers' market shop this weekend. We got there a little earlier than usual, which is nice because the market gets uncomfortably crowded by mid-morning.

I had already chosen three fall recipes from How to Pick a Peach by Russ Parsons, so we set out to find our ingredients. Surprisingly, broccoli for the Pasta with Broccoli and Sausage was the biggest challenge. There was plenty of broccoli, but a lot of it looked like it was harvested too late into its growing cycle.

I should mention that reading that book reminded me to support my local farmers, but I think it also has influenced me to be a dick about produce. In fact, I had a giggle fit as I watched a shopper direct her friend to smell "that sweet broccoli aroma" on a particularly yellowed and crumbly head of broccoli.

"That is exactly what you should be looking for," she explained and looked happy when her friend bought the most pathetic stalk of the bunch.

I did find broccoli that was in good shape though, so I was able to move on. The broccoli was huge, and I could have multiplied the recipe by 6 from this one head. We made the dish that night, replacing the sausage with Tofurky Italian Sausages. We went ahead and used the whole package, and added a little more broccoli than called for. I was feeling lazy, so rather than making some proper Parmesan substitute, we just dumped a bunch of nutritional yeast in the pot.

At the first bite, we decided that the dish needed some heat, and we added some red pepper flakes. Perfect! We couldn't stop eating it, which is normally fine, but we had cocktail plans with people who had made an effort to provide vegan snacks, so we wanted to go with our appetites intact.

This dish will be in the regular rotation, I'm sure. I really want to try it with some crumbled tempeh in the future, and red pepper flakes will always be added with the nutritional yeast.

This dish went so well that I have high hopes for the Mushroom Hash that I'll be making next.

Vegan MoFo 22: I Wasn't Even Hung Over

Even before I started to eat breakfast today (standing at my kitchen counter), I could hear the voice of my colleague addressing one of her unruly first graders: "How could you be making a better choice right now?"

Beats me, this was great!

It took me like 4 tries to finish this incredibly rich Vanilla and Chocolate Square from One World Cafe.

And that quality material I mentioned is coming. I won't survive if I just keep eating cake and coffee.

Vegan MoFo 21: A Bit Rambly

I very suddenly got calls to do a lot of work over very few days, but I think I've done well by MoFo. I tried to line up MoFo posts, and keep them a bit simple too. I'm out of material that I can preload, so this is a little disjointed. I'll come back next week though with all kinds of great foods that I ate over the weekend!

One thing I mentioned the other day was Rutabaga Fries, which my sister turned me onto a few years back. I've never had them any other way though, now that I think about it. Anyway, I sliced them up and tossed them with olive oil, nutritional yeast, and salmon seasoning. Then I baked them for about 40 minutes at 400 degrees. I would like to work on getting them crispier, to be better stand-ins for French fries. I don't know if they're better for you than French fries, but I'm going to go with yes.

These are really great, if a little unusual tasting. I ate them with left over collards for one breakfast, and felt very full.

In other attempts at easy, I stumbled upon what is now one of my favorite meals ever. I had some leftover chickpeas and roasted sweet potatoes. I cooked up some barley, and added it to those two. I topped with coconut oil, powdered garlic, nutritional yeast, and hot sauce. I'm not kidding, this is a top 10 dish right here.

I had no plans to mention this post-work snack here, so I took the picture after I'd already started eating.

One other byproduct of the crazy work week was some excellent staging. I am no stranger to multiple job sites and functions in one day, so I'm good at planning and packing, but one day this week was a 14 hour one between three sites. So i had to come up with and pack a day's worth of food one evening. Granted, for most of the day I was working near One World Cafe, which has awesome vegan options, but I'm trying to save money. Besides, I had supplies from the farmer's market, either in raw or leftover form.

So this is what I came up with: rutabaga fries and collards for breakfast, green smoothie for snack one, Sweet Potato, Roasted Red Pepper, and Corn Bisque with corn bread for lunch, Brazil nuts with dried figs for snack two, and a dragon bowl for dinner. Naturally, I packed it all into my Ask Me Why I'm Vegan bag so that I could grab it and go in the morning.

I'm really quite good at packing lunches. I do recognize that this is pure boasting, but marathon I thought I'd be completing turned into a train-wreck and all of my staging was for naught, so give me this one at least.