Cashew French Toast (vegan and soy-free)

In an effort to reduce the amount of soy in our diet (it just felt like too much) I came up with this recipe. I didn't do anything brilliant - mostly just found a recipe for cashew french toast and combined it with our usual tofu french toast recipe to get the same great flavours.

Cashew French Toast

ingredients

2 cups cashews (soaked if time allows)

3/4 cups almond milk

1/2 tsp vanilla

2 TBSP maple syrup

1 tsp cinnamon

dash salt

~10 pieces of soft whole wheat sandwich bread, stale or lightly toasted

oil for pan frying

Put all ingredients except the bread and oil in blender and blend, add a little more milk if it seems too thick.

Dip the bread in the mixture, if there's lots of excess scrape it off.

Fry in oil on medium heat.

Serve with maple syrup.

PS - Happy St. Patrick's Day from Henry. We went out for dinner in uptown and afterward walked around the festivities (the weather was beautiful and it is a university town so there were a lot of party-ers out and about). And Henry had a wonderful time. One woman gave him a little hat and once he had the hat everyone loved him. He ran all around the main public square. He danced to a man playing a drum. Another woman danced with him and gave him a necklace. He was a little nervous about the attention sometimes but mostly he was having so much fun and was very interested in the people.

Soy-free Vegan Creamy Pasta Recipe

I want to share this new recipe that I've come up with and am quite proud of. It is delicious and super healthy - overflowing with vegetables. Oh and it's super easy to make too. I adapted it from this vegan alfredo recipe that I've been using for years. Since I'm cutting back on our soy consumption recently I wanted to try to make this recipe soy free. It tastes just as good as ever and now contains more veg! Makes a generous amount of sauce for one box of pasta.

Ingredients

Sauce

1 1/2 cups cashews or almonds or a mix soaked in water for 4 hours or more

1 1/2 - 2 cups chopped cauliflower, steamed till soft

2 cloves garlic

1 cup almond milk

4 TBSP olive oil

1 tsp lemon juice

1/4 tsp nutmeg

1/4 tsp pepper

1/2 tsp salt

~375 g of pasta

optional

~1 lb mushrooms, chopped

a bunch of chopped spinach, fresh or frozen

Directions

Start sautéing the mushrooms in a large pan and cooking the spinach and cooking the pasta. While they're going make the sauce:

Drain the nuts. Place all sauce ingredients in a blender and blend well. When the mushrooms are done add the sauce and the spinach to the pan, mix and heat. You really just want to heat the sauce to warm. But heating it also mellows the raw garlic taste so you can heat for longer and taste as you go.

Since you don't really taste the spinach in it too much I like to serve it with another green such as steamed broccoli or asparagus on the side. It is also good with a side salad of course.

It is so good even Henry likes it usually. Just not this night for some reason. Actually I think this was because he wasn't in the mood for getting his hands dirty and he couldn't get his fork working. The next day he was a pro with the fork and ate lots of leftover pasta.

New Food

We tried some interesting new vegan foods this past week.

The first was my second go at this nut cheese recipe. This time I used half almonds and half cashews so it didn't taste so much like cashews. It doesn't taste like too much of anything on its own so is easy to flavour with some herbs and garlic powder and makes a perfect cream cheese spread for bagels. It was nice to have a bagel with cream cheese for the first time in years and also nice to have a really quick filling snack or lunch in the house that is not hummus, something that my mostly vegan diet lacks. The recipe is from the book Live Raw.

The second was this steamed sausage recipe. I used the bratwurst spice mixture so that I could serve it up with my sauerkraut. (If I make sauerkraut again next year I must remember to give some away, one cabbage makes a lot!) This is a good and simple recipe. But it's not quite perfect, it's the kind of recipe that makes you want to tweak it and tweak it to make it just right for you. For Kevin and I that will mean attempting to make it juicier. One of the cool things about them is that they hold together so amazingly well so I figure we can sacrifice some of that hold together power to add some extra oil to the recipe and maybe even some onion pieces too? Got to experiment!

And here's Henry's food experiment of the week - taking a bite out of a giant kohlrabi. He saw it on the cutting board and insisted that it was a big apple even though I told him it wasn't. He also insisted that it was Henry's big apple. He seemed to believe me finally when he managed to get a bit off and spat it out. But then he tried it again when he saw it all cut up on the counter, again he spat it out. If only he was always so adventurous with all his eating - he is still on a diet of mostly smoothies and bread.

Almond Cheese

I made this Almond Cheese Spread last week and want to share it here because it turned out so good. I thought I was completely turned off vegan cheese substitutes after some disgusting recipes I'd tried but this one had such good reviews I had to try it. And I had just made crackers and had nothing to put on them. It took a bit of time to make it but it really was good. And I just used dried herbs for the oil and it turned out great. One thing I will change is to put a lot less lemon juice in, had too much lemon juice flavour for sure. And I will make a double batch.

Henry didn't like the cheese but he did like the crackers. Here he is stuffing a whole one into his mouth.

Dinner From the Garden

It was a really hot day today, hot and humid. Henry and I hung out in the backyard all day.

While we were out there we noticed how tall the asparagus had gotten and I thought it was time to eat some. So for dinner we had pasta with asparagus from the garden, sun-dried tomatoes from last year's garden, and walnuts, mushrooms, garlic. Along with it we had a salad from the garden: dandelion leaves and lots of chives and a little bit of arugula and mache left over from last year. And carrots not from the garden. The whole meal turned out really tasty. Whenever I had read before about eating dandelion leaves I'd always had a little taste and thought yuck too bitter. But in the salad with the sweet balsamic vinegar and olive oil dressing the dandelion tasted just fine.We spent all day outside but right at dinner time it started to rain so we are stuck inside this evening. Apart from a little expedition out in the downpour to let Henry experience the rain of course.

Kevin's 27th Birthday

We celebrated Kevin's 27th birthday yesterday. We had a nice day. I cooked him a very special dinner of duck confit (from our local fancy grocery store), roasted garlic mashed potatoes, glazed dijon carrots, and a warm portobello mushroom salad.


We just relaxed for the rest of the evening, took Henry out for a walk and watched a movie.


And I did get his music room all ready in time for his birthday. We were lucky enough to be given a nice desk for the room from Kevin's aunt and uncle, very lucky since I had been planning on buying him one as part of his birthday present.


So all I had to do was rearrange the furniture we already had down there and make and put up the shelves of course.


These shelves go all around the room with just 2 breaks at the window and the door. They hold Kevin's beer bottle collection which he started less than 2 years ago and is currently at around 150 bottles. Of course he has now tried just about everything presently available for sale in Ontario so the collection's rate of growth is slowing.

I tried to make the shelves very simply and cheaply while still looking good. So I cut 2x4s to length, rounded the edges where they meet the door and window using the jig saw, painted them white, and mounted them by screwing small corner brackets (which I also painted white) to the studs. I used the same method as here.


And there is room for the collection to grow (though Kevin has already been talking about a second row!).

An Ode to Tomatoes

I have been harvesting loads of cherry tomatoes but haven't been doing much with them other than drying them. So I decided to make a meal based on them. We had delicious bruschetta. Cutting up the tiny cherry tomatoes bor the bruschetta was annoying but it made it extra delicious. And we had pasta tossed with loads of roast cherry tomatoes, some roast eggplant, gralic, basil, and a few olives. Will have to make meals like this more often.

Iron Chef Flat bread

I was such an iron chef the other day. We had nothing really but salad in the house for lunch so I was going to walk to the grocery store to get something. And then I thought no, I'll save money and use up stuff in the fridge that I was going to throw away.

So instead of throwing away the old bread dough (bread made with old dough tastes like a mix of alcohol and crackers to me) and tomato with a speck of mould, I used them in a flat bread. I got some chives, oregano, and mache from the garden to add. And I used all those ingredients plus olive oil and garlic to make a tasty flat bread to serve along side the salad. And it was very tasty. All those flavours disguised the old dough taste. And I didn't use the part of the tomato that actually had mold on it.

Good Friday 2010

We had family over for Good Friday. I made hot cross buns and fish and dairy-free parsley sauce. The temperature was very nice and we sat outside for a lot of the day.

Apple Fritters

Last night Kevin and I made apple fritters just like the ones you get from the St. Jacob's Market. They were very good and we ate them all last night. We followed this guy's recipe
http://www.duhlicious.com/2009/05/apple-fritters.html

Chili in a Bread Bowl

Kevin had the idea to make some bread bowls to go with our chili on Sunday night. It was pretty fun.

Leftover Porcini Mushrooms

Today I used the porcini mushrooms the were left over from Valentine's to make a creamy pasta. The only porcini mushroom dish we had had before was a creamy pasta that Kevin's mom made a few times and we loved. So I was hoping it would turn out like that. I think it did. Kevin and I both agreed it was really really good. I've made a bunch of different recipes for vegan creamy pasta and I've always liked them but Kevin never has - so finding one he likees is a kind of big deal. I read through a bunch of recipes and tried to pick one that wasn't too nutrional yeast-y (because Kevin wouldn't like that) and not too tofu-y (because Kevin wouldn't like that) and this one was good. I did add a teaspoon of nutritional yeast in the end just because I think nutritional yeast is good in cheese-like recipes even if Kevin doesn't think so.

http://vegweb.com/index.php?topic=14166.0

Valentine's Dinner

For Valentine's Day dinner we made the most expensive pizza we could think of. We went to Vincenzo's to buy porcini mushrooms. We put the mushrooms on the pizza with sun dried tomatoes. We liked it but both preferred our regular pizza that we put eggplant and caramelized onions on.
And for dessert we had pumpkin pie.

Curry and Roti

Today I experimented with making carribean style curry and roti. I didn't have garam masala so I threw in some of all these spices to get something similar. It didn't taste quite like the roti and curry we're used to but it was pretty good. We'll just have to keep going to the Kitchener Market when we want roti.