Vegan MoFo Day 10 – Angel Food Cake

Happy National Angel Food Cake Day!

Here’s a little fact about me:  I HATE ANGEL FOOD CAKE.  I’ve hated it since I was a kid.  And it’s a good thing, too, since angel food cake is one of the vegan baking holy grails… as far as I know, nobody’s really come up with a wholly satisfactory way to replace all those egg whites and have it taste like something other than yuck.

In case you’re not a baker, angel food cake is a type white sponge cake made super light and airy with whipped egg whites.  It’s pretty bland and really only makes an appearance on most peoples’ tables as a base for strawberry shortcake.  Personally, I prefer my shortcake with sweetened biscuits.  Partly because biscuits are awesome and easy to make, and partly because I really hate angel food cake.

I’m boycotting this holiday.  So is Merry.  This is how she feels about angel food cake:

Apparently both of us are more the devil’s food type.

So in honor of how much I hate angel food cake, here is a list of five other things I also hate as much as angel food cake. (In case my theme makes it less than obvious, these are links.  You should click them.)

1. Celery
2. Exercise
3. Candy Corn
4. The Color Pink
5. Shock Collars

Have a great night!

Vegan MoFo Day 9 – BBQ Sandwiches!

Happy (Belated) National Hoagie/Hero/Grinder Day!!!

This is my favorite food holiday so far.  I just finished celebrating, and I am SO FULL.  I want to go down and eat the leftovers straight out of the fridge.  I want to put all the food IN MY MOUTH, even though there isn’t any more room in my stomach.

To start things off, Julie Hasson is a goddess.  If you don’t know about Julie, visit her blog at http://www.juliehasson.com/ or check out her amazing cooking tutorials here: http://www.everydaydish.tv/ or on YouTube.  And Julie’s cookbook, Vegan Diner, is probably my most used, most loved cookbook.  If you like diner-style comfort food you owe it to yourself to get this book.

The reason that I’m reminding everyone that Julie is a goddess is because I decided to make Barbecue Soy Curl Po’Boys to celebrate National Long Sandwich With Many Names Day.  And I used both of the BBQ sauces in Julie’s book.  And they were SO GOOD I licked the very last fingerfuls of sauce out of the pot before I washed it.

You can find Julie’s recipe for Rough Rider BBQ sauce here.  I made the spicy variation, which added a really wonderful heat on the back end of the sauce.  It’s pretty sweet on its own, so I recommend the variation unless you really don’t like spice.  I also made her Carolina BBQ Sauce to drizzle over the BBQ soy curls and cut the sweetness of the Rough Rider sauce a bit.  She recommends it in the book… and usually if someone recommends it in their own book, it’s a good idea.

To make my BBQ soy curls, I rehydrated the curls, strained out the soaking water, and sauteed with the Rough Rider BBQ sauce.  It looked like this in the pan:

Seriously, you all know by now that I’m a pretty crap-tastic photographer, but even I can’t make these look bad.  They’re that good.

Since neither of the sauces I made had any garlic in it, I made a simple garlic vinegar slaw to add to the sandwiches.  I used the half-head of green cabbage left over from taco night; a quarter of an onion I found hanging out in the fridge, diced; three cloves of garlic (I like garlic A LOT) smashed through a garlic press; seasoned rice vinegar (I wanted sweet and mild, not sharp, but you could use apple cider vinegar); and a generous amount of salt and pepper.  I let it sit and meld while everything cooked.

Then I assembled my sandwich.  Here’s the end result:

I used a sourdough baguette for the bread because when I lived in Louisiana I fell in love with po’boys on baguettes.  I love the chewiness a baguette brings to this type of sandwich.  A generous layer of sauced soy curls, a drizzle of Carolina BBQ sauce, and a heap of garlicky slaw.

Soooo goood.  These are going into regular rotation at our house!

 

Vegan MoFo Day 8 – Fluffernutter!

First things first, MoFo-ers!  I am officially a day behind on my holidays.  Blogging every day is more challenging than I thought it would be… my deepest respect goes out to all the year-round bloggers out there who manage to juggle jobs and family and fun and still take fantastic photos and write blog posts that make me laugh and make me hungry!  I leave for work at the crack of dawn or before and I get home at about 6pm, and I can’t even imagine having their energy!    So in the spirit of MoFo, which is all about having fun and celebrating amazing vegan food, I’m trying to cut myself a little slack.  So don’t be surprised if I miss a day now and again and have to catch myself up later.  I promise I’ll get all the holidays… I just might be a day or two behind!

Yesterday was National Fluffernutter Day!  I had to look this one up.  Apparently the fluffernutter was invented in New England once commercial marshmallow fluff came into being.  The name came from the marketing department of the company that made the fluff, in an attempt to make marshmallow fluff seem like part of a well-rounded meal.  A fluffernutter is basically a peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich on soft white bread.

 

We used Ricemellow Creme (which I was pleasantly surprised to find at our local health food store)  and chunky peanut butter.  I’m a smooth peanut butter girl myself, but the dude of the house likes crunchy so that’s what we had in the pantry.  The bread is a soft white Italian loaf that we got at our local grocery store.  I probably should have used Wonder Bread to be authentic, but I just could’t do it.  Even the thought of Wonder Bread makes me die a little on the inside.  (Plus I have no idea if Wonder Bread is vegan.)  With the Italian bread, at least I know I’m going to use the rest of the loaf for delicious noochy toast.

Unlike noochy toast, which is a fantastic idea, I was pretty skeptical about the fluffernutter.  I’m not sure why it seems so weird to me; peanut butter and marshmallow on, say, a graham cracker or something sounds pretty good.  But something about putting it on bread just sounds yuck.

The ooze factor was definitely there when we cut it in half.  It had grilled cheese level ooziness.

If we would have spread the fluff any thicker, it would have been a big, sticky mess.

So how did it taste?  It tasted like peanut butter and marshmallow fluff on soft bread.  Sorry, I can’t think of anything more clever.  It was actually pretty bland for an item with such an interesting name.  If you do decide to try it, I recommend you use smooth peanut butter… the peanut bits were the only thing in the sandwich that weren’t smooshy, and it sort of kept the sandwich from melting in your mouth the way it was trying to.  In fact, I might try to recreate this another day using a smooth chocolate nut butter, Ricemellow Creme, and a sweeter, more dessert-y bread.  In a panini press.  There’s some definite room for improvement from the original, and a grilled dessert sandwich just might do it for me.

The upside of this experiment is the word “fluffernutter.”  It has become the unofficial replacement swear word at our house.  We’ve spent the last day telling each other to fluff off and laughing hysterically.  Simple pleasures.  🙂

Today is both National Moldy Cheese Day, and National Submarine Sandwich Day.  Tomorrow I will bring you a delicious Sub Sandwich! See you then!

Vegan MoFo Day 7 – Milkshake!

Happy National Frappe Day!

Did you know that in New England, a frappe is the same thing as a milkshake?  I didn’t until Wikipedia told me.  I thought I was going to have to make some foofoo coffee drink that I wouldn’t really enjoy (I like simple coffee), but then I found out that I was going to get down with my ice-cream self.  It made my day.

So through the magic of Google, I discovered that somebody actually loves strawberry milkshakes enough to buy a domain name.  http://www.strawberrymilkshakerecipe.org/.  See?  And that kind of dedication demanded my respect, so I used their recipe as a starting point.

I had everything in the house, with a few tweaks.  I used frozen strawberries, vanilla Coconut Bliss ice cream, and vanilla soy milk (left over from the flan).  Because I was using a flavored soy milk I left out the sweetener, and because I was using frozen strawberries I left out the ice cubes.  A couple of minutes in the Vitamix and I had a strawberry milkshake frappe!  I haven’t had one in years, so to celebrate I immediately gave myself an ice-cream headache.

I think I’m going to celebrate this every year.

Vegan MoFo Day 6 – Spaghetti!

Happy National Noodle Day!

There are so many ways to enjoy noodles that it was almost hard to narrow down what to do to celebrate.  But since yesterday was a full day of work followed by Apple Betty AND Flan, I decided to keep today simple and share one of my all-time favorite recipes.

I used to be a HUGE fan of America’s Test Kitchen and Cook’s Illustrated.  I still enjoy them but don’t subscribe anymore since about half the recipes are centerpiece meat dishes, which isn’t really my cup of tea now that I don’t eat meat.  So I catch the show on PBS when I can, since I like the techniques and reviews, and I’ve kept all my Test Kitchen cookbooks and Cooks Illustrated back issues.  The spaghetti sauce we make regularly is the Quick Tomato Sauce from Cook’s Illustrated, which is naturally vegan if you replace the 2T butter with Earth Balance.

You can find the recipe here:

http://thereviewlady.blogspot.com/2009/03/cooks-illustrated-quick-tomato-sauce.html

Seriously, make it.  It takes 15 minutes, and it’s absolutely delicious.  Perfect for a weeknight dinner with a salad and bread.  Plus it’s super modifiable.  Usually we add a good sprinkle of red pepper flakes in with the onions, or you can add sauteed mushrooms, olives, or whatever you have that you want to use up.  Because it’s such a quick sauce, you’ll want to pre-cook any additions and add them while the sauce simmers… both because they probably won’t cook through before the sauce is done, and because you really don’t want to add any extra liquid to this sauce or it’ll be too watery.

And I know it sounds weird to grate the onion on a box grater.  It will make your eyes cry so many tears, but it really does make all the difference in the sauce so don’t skip that step the first time you make it.  I’d also suggest following the original recipe the first time, since it’s really good and will give you a better idea of what you’re working with if you decide to modify it later.

My better half was in the mood to try a Puttanesca sauce tonight, so we took our standy recipe, above, and added about:

• 2T drained capers
• 1/4C roughly chopped olives (kalamata are traditional, but we used a Greek olive mix that we had in the house)
• 1/2t-1t red pepper flakes
• 1T olive brine from the jar

We added all of these ingredients right after we added the crushed tomatoes to the pot.

Puttanesca also traditionally uses anchovies, and we just left them out rather than replacing them.  To make up for that savory flavor, I suggest a good sprinkling of nutritional yeast on your finished spaghetti, or vegan parmesan if you have some.  I used nutritional yeast, because I love it and rarely have any commercial vegan cheese in the house.

Here’s the finished dish:

 

The garlic bread was a loaf of french bread, halved horizontally, coated with Earth Balance, garlic salt, granulated garlic, and dried parsley and then broiled until brown.  Pretty much everyone’s standard garllic bread recipe!

It turned out pretty good, but I prefer the original recipe (plus a half teaspoon or so of red pepper flakes, added with the oregano) to this variation.  Fun to try, though!

So go forth and make yourself some spaghetti!  Use the recipe in the link and you will have a delicious plate in front of you in less than a half an hour.  There are still a couple hours of National Noodle Day left to celebrate!

Vegan MoFo Day 5 & Belated Day 3 – Apple Betty & Flan!

Yesterday was National Apple Betty Day!  And to celebrate I made Apple Betty.

There are actually two types of Bettys.  There’s regular Betty, which is fruit baked with a buttery crumble topping, and Brown Betty, which uses cubes of buttered and toasted stale bread (usually a layer of fruit on the bottom, then a layer of spices and buttered bread, then more fruit, then spiced buttered bread for topping).  I am phobic of soggy bread, so I went with a regular Betty.  I took the recipe from one of the old Better Homes and Gardens cookbooks, from somewhere in the 1970’s, and mixed it up a bit.  Here’s what I did:

Apple Betty

• 4 medium-large Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored and cut into 1/4″ thick slices (you could use a mixture of Grannys and another baking apple you like)
• Juice from half a lemon
• 1/2 C  light brown sugar
• 1/2 C  granulated sugar
• 3/4 C all-purpose flour (you could easily use a different flour here)
• 1/2 C  Earth Balance, refrigerator temperature

First peel, core, and slice your apples.  I used the 1/4″ setting on my mandoline, but you could do it with the slicing blade of a food processor if your processor will cut thick enough, or with a knife.  Toss the lemon juice with the apple slices to keep them from turning brown, then mound them in an 8×8 glass casserole dish.  (You could really use any kind of oven-safe dish here… a pie plate would work well too.)  The number of apples you use is pretty much up to you… I found that 4 medium-large apples was about right for my dish, but if you use more or less it won’t mess up the recipe.

Then combine the flour, sugar, and brown sugar in a bowl.  Cut up your stick of Earth Balance and add it in.  Rub the margarine into the flour/sugar mixture with your fingers to make big crumbs of sugar/flour covered margarine bits.  You could easily do this in a food processor too, or with a pastry cutter.

Pour the topping over the apples, covering the whole thing with crumbles, and bake in a preheated 375 degree oven until your apples have softened and the topping has browned and crisped.  Depending on your pan, start checking at about 20-30 minutes.  I cribbed the cooking time out of the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, which told me 45 minutes and that was WAY TOO LONG.

Here is the end result:

Now remember I said that I used a 45 minute cooking time, which was too long?  Well, the apples in my Betty disintegrated.  I essentially ended up with Applesauce Betty.  It looked a little gross, and my preference is for firmer fruit, but it actually tasted SO GOOD.  It was a really great contrast between the sweet, crispy topping and the slightly tart fruit.  I love fruit desserts, and this was so much better than I expected!

See?  Applesauce with topping.  Looks yuck, but tastes fantastic.  I’ll definitely make this recipe again, only with a shorter cooking time, because it was really easy and absolutely delicious.

I didn’t post this yesterday because I also celebrated a belated National Caramel Custard Day, which was on the 3rd, and by the time I was ready to refrigerate the flan I was ready to fall asleep on my feet.

So happy belated National Caramel Custard Day!  In honor of the day, I made the Vanilla-Coconut Flan from Viva Vegan by Terry Hope Romero.  If you like latin food, you should really get this cookbook.

Now I started working on this while the Betty was in the oven, and I had worked a long day before, so I wasn’t at my best in the kitchen.  The first time around I way overboiled the agar powder and it turned into small bits of rubber in my pot.  The second try my agar boiled fine, but I managed to boil the pot over once I added the soy milk and coconut milk.  But I persevered and had six little flans in my fridge last night!

And fair warning (which Terry emphasizes in the book): melted sugar is the hottest substance on earth, except possibly for lava and molten lead.  Don’t get it on yourself!  I managed to drip a tiny bit on my left index finger while I was pouring the caramel into the ramekins, and I have a blister the size of a pencil eraser today.  It hurt like crazy, so beware!!!  Don’t do that!

Today we tried one of the little flans.  It came out of the ramekin perfectly, and the caramel turned saucy just like it was supposed to.

Now I have never had dairy and egg-laden flan.  Based on what I’ve seen, though, I suspect that the texture on this flan was just a bit firmer than a dairy custard.  That could well be a side effect of overboiling the mixture, I don’t know.  Still, these came out pretty good!  Even though making them is a bit time consuming and filled with burning caramel danger, it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be!  And it’s pretty!  I love individual desserts because you don’t have to share and can poke people with your fork when they get too close.

I’ll be back tonight, since today is National Noodle Day.  Not sure how I’ll celebrate yet, but you can bet I will!!!

Vegan MoFo Day 4 – Tacos!!!

Happy National Taco Day!

Also, happy National Vodka Day, and to our Swedish friends, Happy Cinnamon Roll Day!  Because of my work schedule I could only do one of the three celebrations, and since I can’t resist a taco…

We have a lentil taco recipe in our household that we’ve been using for years.  It’s a really good recipe and offers itself up to endless variations.  The recipe used to be available on allrecipes.com, but it’s not there anymore.  Fortunately, it lives on in our house!

Lentil Tacos

Ingredients:

• 1 C   diced onion
• 1-2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
• 2 t   oil, for sauteeing
• 1 C  brown/green lentils, rinsed
• 2.5 C   vegetable broth (low sodium if possible, or you can use water if you don’t have broth)
• 1 T   chili powder
• 2 t   cumin powder
• 1 t   dried oregano  (if you feel lazy, you can replace the chili, cumin, and oregano with a packet of taco seasoning)

In a large skillet, saute the onion and garlic in oil until soft.  Add the lentils, chili powder, cumin powder, and oregano.  Saute for 1 minute.  Add the broth and bring to a boil.  Reduce to a simmer, cover, and cook for 25-30 minutes.  If your lentils are older or stubborn, you may need more time, but this usually works for us.  Use as you would any taco filling!

It doesn’t get any simpler, so to spice things up a bit we tried something we’d never done before.  We made tortillas!  Let me tell you, the first time you make your own tortillas, you’ll smack yourself in the forehead for not doing it sooner.  I’d post a recipe, but there are recipes for corn tortillas all over the internet and on the back of the masa package (we used Maseca) and they are all pretty much the same.  It’s basically corn masa, warm water, and salt.  You knead everything together into a firm, pliable dough, make walnut shaped balls, and smash them into tortillas with a tortilla press.  You could also use a rolling pin to flatten them out, but I splurged and treated myself to a press.  The aluminum ones are inexpensive, and after today I know we’ll use it often.  Besides I had a groupon for a local kitchen supply store to use up, and what better to use it on than a tortilla press?

I also made cabbage salsa.  So good!  I made enough to have extra to take to work and eat on my morning break tomorrow with tortilla chips.  The recipe I used is a loose conglomeration of lots of recipes all smushed together to my liking.  Here’s the rough outline:

Cabbage Salsa

Ingredients:

• 1/2 small head of cabbage, roughly shredded with a knife (you could use a food processor, but I like the pieces a bit irregular)
• 1/2 medium red onion, diced
• 2 roma tomatoes, seeded and diced small
• 1/2 bunch cilantro, chopped
• 1 small jalapeno, seeded and chopped (you can leave the seeds in for more heat, if you prefer)
• juice of 1 medium lime
• 1-3 T juice from a jar of pickled jalapenos, to taste (if you don’t have a jar of jalapenos lurking in your fridge, or if you don’t want a little extra heat, a splash of vinegar would work fine too)
• salt and pepper to taste

Mix everything together in a large bowl.  Adjust flavors to taste.  This is good right off the bat, but even better after a few hours or overnight when the flavors have had time to meld.

So here they are, our delicious lentil tacos with homemade corn tortillas and all the fixins!

Every day should be taco day!  And seriously, go buy some masa and make yourself a batch of homemade tortillas!   For under $3, you can purchase enough masa to make a hundred delicious tortillas!  DOOO EEEEET!!!

!!!

Vegan MoFo Day 2 – Mock Fried Scallops

Happy National Fried Scallops Day!

Scallops are more interesting than I thought.  Did you know they can have up to 100 eyes?  Seriously! SCALLOPS HAVE EYES!!!  Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scallop.

So since scallops are alive and have 100 eyes and all, I am really glad I don’t eat them.  But because it’s National Fried Scallops day, I had to cook something scallop-y.  I thought about scalloped potatoes, but I’ve never really liked scalloped potatoes so that was out.  I thought about building a scallop out of agar and kelp powder and magic, but I don’t have those kind of skills.  So I basically went to the supermarket and bought veggies with interesting, possibly scallop-y, textures.  So today I made mock scallops from tofu, eggplant, and plantain.

As a sidenote, I have a coworker (not vegan) and we batted the idea back and forth of what foods would have the appropriate texture to make a vegan scallop.  She had the really interesting idea of using lychees.  Long story short, she actually tried it.  She leached out the sugar by soaking them in water, marinated them in salt and fish sauce, then breaded and fried them.  She reported back that the lychee smell never went away, even though the sweetness did leach out and the saltiness seep in, so it was somewhat of a failure unless she plugged her nose.  But as far as I’m concerned, anyone who gets excited about trying to make a scallop out of a lychee gets ten million bonus points in the game of life.

So back to my mock scallops.  I marinated the tofu, plantain, and eggplant in a mixture of water, vegetarian fish sauce, and wakame.  It smelled pretty ocean-y.

I let it go for about an hour and a half (note: not long enough!) then battered and shallow pan fried them in a cast iron skillet.  I used seasoned flour (flour + Old Bay + wakame ground to a powder in my spice grinder) and soy milk to flour/dip in soy milk/coat with flour.  Then I fried them at about 350 degrees.  I picked seasoned flour rather than breadcrumbs because it was 8:30 at night and it seemed like the simplest option.

Here’s what they looked like.  Keep in mind that I’ve got zero mad blogging photo skillz.  And nothing I fry comes out beautiful and delicate looking… it comes out looking like I fried it until it SUBMITTED TO MY WILL.

(Plantain to the left, eggplant in the center, and tofu to the rear right.)

Verdict:

• Plantains: Ick.  Just ick.  Seaweed flavored plantains were just wrong, and the texture was totally not right.  Don’t do this unless you enjoy weird contrasts.
• Tofu:  Definitely tasted like tofu.  I think the texture was close, but the marinade really didn’t penetrate enough to cover up the bean curd flavor.  Given my experiences with tofu, I’m not sure I ever could have gotten it to marinate well enough to flavor it all the way through.  Still, it was fried tofu so we gobbled it up.
• Eggplant:  This one had the most promise.  The texture was a bit too soft for sea scallops, at least according to my memory of the one time I ate them years ago.  But the eggplant soaked up the seaweedy flavor pretty well, and they were really good. (Hello! Fried eggplant nuggets!)

My better half (not vegan) made the observation about both the tofu and the eggplant that he had eaten frozen processed fish products in the past that had less seafood flavor than my mock scallops, so I’ll cut my losses and consider it a victory.  And then I will go have another eggplant nugget.

But before I go, Merry would like you to know that she is sad that the whole world is not playing with her.

And tomorrow is National Caramel Custard Day!  I have plans to celebrate it, but I’ll be taking a rain check until later in the week.  We’re going out for dinner and drinks with a couple of friends who will be in town for the evening, so I don’t think I’ll have time.  BUT I’LL BE BACK!!!  AND I’LL BE MAKING FLAN!!!!!

Vegan MoFo Day 1 – Coconut Shortbread

Happy National Homemade Cookie Day!

I made cookies!  And to keep things interesting, I didn’t make any of my normal cookies to celebrate National Homemade Cookie Day. No peanut butter or oatmeal raisin, and nothing from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar… all of which would have been wonderful choices and which I know would have turned out delicious. Instead I decided to kill two birds with one stone: make a new recipe, and alter it to use up a pantry ingredient that was embarrassingly expired (as in, “Best By January 2012” expired).

So I made shortbread for the very first time. And I had a whole jar of pretty expensive raw coconut butter (basically coconut oil with bits of coconut flesh finely ground up in it) that was technically expired as of January but still smelled and looked fine. It was like fate… I needed two cups of butter for the recipe… the jar of coconut butter had exactly two cups in it! Here’s the recipe I started with:

Scottish Shortbread

• 2 C butter
• 1 C brown sugar
• 1-4.5 C all-purpose flour

Cream butter and sugar together. Add 3 to 3-3/4 cups of flour and mix in. Knead for 5 minutes until a soft dough forms, adding more flour as necessary.

Roll out to 1/2″ thickness and cut into 1″ by 3″ rectangles. Poke holes with the tines of a fork and bake on an ungreased cookie sheet, in a preheated 325 degree oven, for 20-25 minutes.

 

Obviously I substituted raw coconut butter for the dairy butter called for in the original recipe.  Sounds pretty easy, right? It probably is if you have half a clue what you’re doing. The first problem I ran into was that after three cups of flour my coconut butter/sugar/flour was basically crumbly and could in no way be considered a soft dough. I could have built a sand castle out of it, it was so crumbly. It looked like this:

 

But the upside was that my whole kitchen smelled like coconut.

I added a bit more fat to my crumbles (about 2 tablespoons of Earth Balance, since I was out of coconut oil) and a bit of water, and got it a tiny bit more cohesive than this.  Not much, but a tiny bit.  To be honest I was afraid to push it too far, and some shortbread recipes describe a crumblier dough than the recipe I was using so I wasn’t completely sure where to draw the line.   Since there was no way I was going to be able to roll this out and cut it into strips, I went ahead and smooshed it into the bottom of my biggest springform pan. I discovered that I also lack spatial awareness, because instead of being 1/2″ thick, it turned out that I made it much closer to 1″ thick, which I noticed later when I unsprung the pan sides and set the shortbread free.

So I tossed up my hands and let the cooking gods have their way with the shortbread while we ate dinner. My better half cooked… we had a lovely thrown-together dry curry with potatoes, chickpeas, corn, pattypan squash, onions, and tofu while my shortbread baked away in the oven. I ended up adding an extra 20 minutes to the cooking time to get it golden, probably because, unknown to me at the time, it was two or three times thicker than it was supposed to be. While we were eating dinner I was still mulling over why my shortbread got so crumbly with over a cup less flour than the recipe called for. In hindsight, I think the raw coconut butter (because of all the coconut solids in it) wasn’t a pure fat like regular unrefined coconut oil or Earth Balance would have been. It was probably 2/3-3/4 oil and 1/4-1/3 solids, which may be why my flour ratio was so far off and my dough never came together.

But our story hasn’t ended yet! I took the shortbread out of the oven at about the 45 minute mark, and it was nice and toasty golden on top. It also smelled really good… very much a cross between a toasty coconut smell and a buttery crumbly baking smell. Once it cooled enough to cut, it looked like this:

See what I mean about it being ridiculously thick? It’s not a cookie, it’s practically a pie!

(Apologies for the bad photo… I wasn’t able to take it in a well-lit room.  It was actually much more appetizing looking than this, which looks suspiciously like dry-fried tofu instead of a cookie.)

So I let the ginormous monster coconut shortbread cool and tasted it.  I wasn’t surprised to discover it was a bit dry.  Okay, way dry.  Way, way, way dry.  But it did hold together better than I thought it would.  And the taste?  Really, really good!  Toasty and coconutty with a touch of the richness from the brown sugar.  I will probably need 700 cups of tea to get through this monster dry shortbread (10″ diameter by 1″-ish deep is a lot of shortbread!), but I think I will actually eat it.  And I will definitely revisit the recipe in the future.  I’ll probably try using unrefined coconut oil rather than the raw coconut butter, partially because the coconut butter is pretty expensive and partially to get back on the right track with my fat to flour ratio.  But if I can manage this flavor with real shortbread texture, I’ll be one happy vegan.

And here is a bonus picture, because even if you didn’t know it you need a photo of my cat  This is Merry, mowing down on her wheatgrass while we ate dinner.

Happy MoFo everyone!  I’ll be back tomorrow to celebrate… National Fried Scallops Day!

Vegan MoFo 2012 – Flying by the seat of my pants!

It’s official! Today is the first day of the Vegan Month of Food, and the first official day of this blog.

Did you know that in the U.S. there is at least one food holiday for every day of the year? Some of them are based on historical events, some of them were created by marketing departments or lobbyists to promote a product, and the origins of some are lost in the mists of the internet. And it saddens me that we aren’t taking advantage of these holidays. When was the last time you celebrated National Stuffed Mushroom Day (February 4) or National French Toast Day (November 28)? Well NO MORE! We will embrace our frivolous food holiday heritage! And for the month of October, we will celebrate ALL the holidays! At least one per day! Vegan-style.

Now I work full time, plus some. So I’m sure there will be a few days during the month where I can’t cook and will have to celebrate something belatedly. But I’m good with that! I will celebrate one food holiday for every day in October, even if it takes me until the end of November to do it! And I’m not doing anything ahead… hence the “flying by the seat of my pants” title. I may crash and burn. But if I do, I will share it with you. Because I’m awesome like that, and also because I have no shame.

So cheers to the Vegan Month of Food! I’ll be back tonight for the first food holiday celebration!