BANANA MUFFINS! I love them. They are amazing. I have always loved banana bread, and muffins/cupcakes are just amazing because of the "individual size" quality. I made these amazing muffins as a tester recipe for a cookbook by my friend, Tess Challis. You can see some of the recipes from the book here and you can buy the book here. I only tried out a few recipes, but they were all excellent! The book focuses a lot on healthy foods, but doesn't give up taste, which is nice. I am against people trying to make oil-less/butter-less baked goods and sugar-free everything. If you really need to be that healthy just give up those foods, because MAN you can't replace them well with "healthy" alternatives. No, she just focuses more on healthy oils and how to incorporate whole wheat into everyday recipes and makes a lot of soy-free/gluten-free things (especially good for vegans with allergies and intolerances). Anyway, these muffins are definitely "I could live of of you"-quality, with a touch of "I just had a mouthgasm". You can also get an eyegasm from looking at the pictures.. amiright? I really don't know what else to write about these, but I don't want Angela to get bored at work from too little reading material, so I will think of more and be posting soon? Haha, hopefully!

vegan mofo and cookies!

Due to popular *coughemilycough* demand, I am going to start updating this thing again. I have some backlogged pictures I have never talked about and I should get my camera fixed soon for more reasons than just more food porn! So this gives me an excuse.

I am also doing this because I am jealous of everyone participating in Vegan MoFo, otherwise known as Vegan Month of Food, which many bloggers are diving into headfirst and probably going to kill themselves in the process. Maybe not the blogging part of it, but reading everyone elses millions of blog posts would be a big pain! I already waste too much time on the internet to be a regular blog reader.

On with the food! I decided to make a version of vegan samoas (yeah, the girl scout cookies) for fancy purposes, but they looked super coconutty but didn't taste that way, so they turned out tasting exactly like twix! This was also due to making the shortbread to thick (I don't own a rolling pin, gimme a break). I can't say I was disappointed, really. Twix was always a yummy candy bar, as far as candy bars go. I wouldn't super recommend making these to anyone because they are pretty labor intensive. I made the shortbread, then made a sweetened condensed soymilk to put it into the caramel (I think if I made it again I would just sub with full-fat coconut milk, which would also solve the not coconutty enough problem). and toasted the coconut... not to mention dipping and striping the cookies. Pain! If you would like to makes these, I loosely based them on a recipe from vegweb that you'll have to look up for yourself, because the website isn't currently working for me! I would just go to vegweb.com and look up "girl scout cookies", it'll be there.

cinco de mayo means vegan tamales

I used to love tamales, but I have not had them for years (since pregan days). I decided that I need to make them and am so glad that I did. The only part that was "labor intensive" like everyone and their mother says about tamales is the wrapping. Kind of obnoxious, but put on some good music and you're golden for the afternoon. Plus, you get better as you go along.
As far as the specifics go, the filling is made with: onions, shallots, garlic, green onions, one pepper, a bunch of tomatoes, Mexican squash, and pinto beans. As for spices: chili powder, cayenne, lemon pepper (was going to use real pepper and lime, but the quality of my lemon pepper is superior to my pepper), fresh cilantro, crushed red pepper flakes, cumin, and oregano. Yeah, I like spicy stuff. I just chopped everything up (and squished the beans up) and it came out to be an awesome consistency like refried beans but had all this stringy-ness because of the cooked down squash which made it more meaty looking. The dough was a modified version of the recipe on the package of the masa corn flour. I used 2 cups masa, 1 2/3 c vegetable broth, 2/3 c oil, 1 tsp baking powder, and 1/2 tsp salt. It turned out beautifully, considering I just randomly decided to lessen the broth and use oil as the fat (I couldn't find any shortening other than Crisco which has hydrogenated oils in it). My "steamer" is non-existent, so I punched a bunch of holes in the bottom of a pie tin and held that above water in a huge pot with... erm... a bunch of random metal kitchen items. Let's not talk about my odd kitchen habits. I don't know what else to say other than TAMALES ROCK!

It has been way to long since I have posted anything. I give you: delicious soup! This soup was probably one of my favorite soups I have ever eaten. I was planning on making a tester recipe for a new cookbook coming out, but someone had already tested it and it looked like it would take a long time to make it so I skipped out on that soup and used a lot of the same ingredients for a soup that was completely different. Basically, this is a potato leek soup with a base "chicken seasoning" (which was a recipe tester) making kind of a creamy broth. It also contains shallots, green onions, garlic, chickpeas, and spinach. Delicious.

teese?!

This, is TEESE. Teese is a new vegan cheese by Chicago Soy Dairy (Made by and for vegans!). Me and a friend ordered some off the internets because we are cool like that and made pizza of course, but then I had leftovers and I put it to the test in the toaster oven quite a few times. The picture is of a "Tuna melt" I made with chickpea salad (my favorite!) and teese. Chickpea salad is a very occasional dish for me because veganaise is out of this world expensive, but I made a discovery: the low fat TJ's mayo is accidentally vegan. Go buy some!

Anyway, to properly enjoy chickpea salad one must mash chickpeas, mayo, mustard, relish, and celery/celery seed. What a delight!

The promised popcorn. This is really good, actually. Pop popcorn and put on soy sauce and some kind of sea vegetable. Yum! Also, soy sauce and nooch. Also, nooch plain. Also, chocolate.

Good 'ol popcorn! So versatile and cheap. Also, a really good something to snack on when you feel like going through the motions of eating (no wonder it's so popular for the theaters).

vegan loaves!

This is my first experience with a "loaf" of any kind. For some reason I just wanted to try one out and I was not disappointed at all. I used the "magic loaf generator" thing-y at Vegan Lunch Box and had fun with it. I actually put in ingredients I didn't have and had to sub stuff anyway. I also put I would use vegetable juice as a liquid and didn't feel like making vegetable juice so I just left it out and it was still really... well, not moist but definitely not completely dense or anything. Anyway, I ate it with sauteed kale and toasted pine nuts and red quinoa. It made a good meal for a few days!