Cooking Update

Friday night, I made some coffee ice cream. I modified the Chocolate Ice Cream recipe from How It All Vegan! I used Trader Joe's coffee soy milk, omitted the cocoa powder, and added 3 teaspoons instant coffee powder. So far, I think it ranks as the best soy ice cream I've made.

Saturday morning I made the Basic Buckwheat Pancakes, also from How It All Vegan! Quite yummy; they're great with just a little soy margarine.

This morning I started prepping the Vegetarian Pot Roast from The Vegetarian Meat & Potatoes Cookbook by Robin Robertson. The gluten is made and marinating in the frig; will probably cook it Tuesday night. I also got started on another dish I'll make for dinner later this week. I'm going to make "Chicken" Parmesan with seitan. So, I made the Buffalo Mostarella from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook by Joanne Stepaniak. I haven't tasted it yet, but it sure smelled good as I was cooking it up. I did actually cook it in my usual make-shift double boiler, a stainless steel bowl set on one of my pots, instead of cooking it in a saucepan. I've had trouble with nutritional yeast "cheese" sauces burning over direct heat, so I use a double boiler.

Also this morning I made the Death by Chocolate Pie from The Garden of Vegan because I wanted it to chill long enough to have this evening. I used the crust that goes with the Banana Hazelnut Cream Pie from Vive le Vegan. I didn't use the hazelnuts, but increased the amount of chocolate cookies instead of the graham crackers called for in the recipe. And since the filling of the Death by Chocolate Pie is essentially a chocolate mousse, I added 6 tablespoons of Amaretto. It turned out well, though I think I baked the crust a little too long; it was hard to cut, but tasted fine.

This afternoon I made Cootie's Coconut Cookies from How It All Vegan! They turned out good, but weren't great. I'm going to keep looking for a good cookie recipe that calls for coconut.

And from my own recipe, I made some hummus. We bought a huge bag of baby carrots at CostCo yesterday, and I just love dipping carrots in hummus.