Better than the Originals: Vegan Samoas!

Every once in a while I get a craving for those caramel-coconut-chocolate Girl Scout Cookies. But since the originals are full of mystery ingredients and partially hydrogenated miscellany, I prefer to make my own.

I found this recipe here and it just knocked my socks off. I mean, someone has to take these away from me before I eat myself to death.

I had planned to make these in three stages: shortbread cookie base + coconut-caramel topping + carob drizzle. And then I found they were just fantastic without the attempt at non-chocolate chocolate and skipped the last step.

Here it is.

Ethereal shortbread cookies:

3 oz palm oil

1 oz coconut oil

1 Tbs hazelnut milk

2 Tbs raw sugar, ground in coffee grinder

½ tsp vanilla

4 oz whole wheat pastry flour (freshly ground from Soft White Wheat)

1/8 tsp baking powder

1/8 tsp salt

Cream oils and sugar in an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Incorporate remaining ingredients, gently mixing in the flour last. I tried shaping them into O's on the parchment, but they all melted down into thin, impossibly light and delicate circles in the oven. I got sixteen of them.

Bake at 375 for 14 minutes, or until starting to brown at the edges. Let cool.

Awesome caramel-coconut sauce:

1 cup full-fat canned coconut milk

2/3 cup brown sugar (I'd use less next time!)

¼ tsp salt

½ tsp vanilla

1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut

Mix first three ingredients in a saucepan and simmer until thickened to maple syrupy consistency.. about 20 minutes. Remove from heat and add in vanilla and coconut.

Spoon the caramel onto the cooled cookies, if any of them are left, and spread it around gently. I only was able to use about half of the sauce, and I have a sneaky suspicion the rest will end up swirled into some homemade coconut-caramel ice cream...

Vegan Mac-UnCheese WIN! [New-to-me #2: Black-eyed Peas]

It didn't last long enough to take a picture.

Ever since I heard of nutritional yeast (since going dairy-free) I'd been wanting to take a stab at vegan mac-n-cheese. Craving it. So the other night I adapted this recipe. Served it up at the dinner table with corn chips. Hubby gave an authentic “This is really good!” (not the tepid make-you-feel-better “this is good... do you think it's good?”) and took seconds. In my book, that's a big huge flying win!

Here's what I did:

Sauce:

¾ cup nutritional yeast flakes

1 ½ cups cooked black-eyed peas (I didn't have any white beans. Surprised how quickly these cooked from dry. I was just trying to do a quick-soak and they were practically done!)

2 Tbs soy sauce

1 tsp garlic powder

1 Tbs Dijon mustard

a few grinds of black pepper

1 medium sweet potato, cut into chunks and steamed

¼ cup olive oil

1 Tbs maple syrup

Some tomato-basil pasta sauce

Combine everything in a food processor. Toss with hot cooked pasta, or use for dipping chips directly! The way I made it had a texture like hummus because I forgot to thin it with non-dairy milk at the end. The flavor was excellent, though. Strangely reminiscent of cheesy Doritos, minus the fluorescent aspect. And way healthier than the electric orange boxed stuff! Plus I LOVE that it doesn't rely on soy or nuts.

New Food #1: Chia Seed

Here's a new ingredient for me: chia seed. It's very nutritious, contains calcium (bonus!), and is a natural thickener. I decided to mix some into my pancake recipe to thicken the liquid ingredients in place of yogurt or buttermilk.

The recipe I used was King Arthur Flour's Homemade Whole Grain Pancake Mix. Instead of a cup of buttermilk or half yogurt / half milk, I used a cup of whatever non-dairy milk was open at the time (probably coconut... not the canned kind) plus a teaspoon of ground chia seed. The pancakes came out nice and fluffy – perfectly fine without dairy. I might add a teaspoon of lemon juice next time to get some of that cultured-milk tang.

Vegan Cream Cheese FAIL

So, if you're eliminating dairy from your diet, and find yourself tempted to try a soy-free cream cheese recipe from a book entitled Dairy-Free and Delicious, just don't. Put it down and walk away. Unless you were one of those kids who liked eating paste in school.

The problem (and I should have seen this coming a mile away): it's a non-dairy milk thickened with oats (bland), cashews (bland and slightly sweet), and corn starch (bleh!). I'm trying to avoid soy and tree nuts, but might try an all-cashew version next time.

Maybe their tofu-based recipes come out better... tofu seems to be the ubiquitous stand-in for just about everything. I was a little disappointed that of the recipe book's “over 100 recipes,” 50 of them require tofu and the other 31 do not. Figure that one out?

A New Food Resolution

The first week when I was thinking I'd have to cut out dairy, but before it really hit me, I was strolling through the grocery store looking for alternative sources of calcium. As I picked up a bunch each of kale and collards, pondering how to cook them, it occurred to me that I, like most Americans, had fallen into a rut of cooking the same things all the time.

I thought about making a (slightly late) New Year's resolution to introduce more variety into my cooking. And why not formalize that, like my abbreviated Year of the Dumpling experiment in 2010, with some blog posts?

So here it is: I'm going to try cooking with one unfamiliar ingredient every week. These might be common to other people (like collards) but new to me!

Chocolate is Out Too. Hi, Carob.

 Whereas Baby Bear responded to dairy with quiet intestinal bleeding, he reacts to chocolate with good old-fashioned Excessive Fussiness. Bedtime? Forget about it! The good news is that as soon as I cut out the chocolate, he went straight back to zonking out after his 8 PM nurse.

So, I pulled out the carob again. Chocolate it isn't, but it's close enough to trick my body into believing it's chocolate, and that chocolate isn't so great after all (same thing stevia does with sweets). One thing I do like about carob is that it isn't excessively bitter like cocoa so it doesn't necessitate tons of added sugar. And there's no caffeine or theobromine. Carob looks and acts like cocoa, but has a more fruity taste, almost like chocolate + honey.

Here's how I made the carob chunks pictured above:

1/2 cup palm oil, just melted and removed from heat
1/2 cup carob powder
1 Tbs turbinado sugar, finely ground in a coffee grinder
1 tsp vanilla

Mix everything together, pour into a parchment-lined 8"x8" pan and refrigerate! Break into chunks after cooling. I tried these in brownies, and the palm oil just melted away, leaving carob-lined pockets behind. Not the effect I was hoping for!  But tasty enough raw.

This Isn't So Bad

First lesson of the day: cereal + rice milk + splash of full-fat canned coconut milk is not half bad.
I reeeeaally miss butter. I could have buttered toast with raw milk for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and love it. In the early days of Baby, I'd often make just a tall glass of milk for a meal.
But when dairy's out.., thank God for coconuts. Coconuts are a close second to raw milk on the scale of food awesomeness.
So, pictured above, we have homemade graham crackers surrounding a bowl of COOKIE DOUGH DIP.

Graham Crackers:
4 oz palm oil (Spectrum shortening)
4 oz tropical oil blend (Earth Balance organic coconut oil spread... but since this is just a blend of coconut and palm oils, I might just substitute one or the other for this next time)
5 oz brown sugar

7 oz. all=purpose flour
4 oz. stone-ground whole wheat
1 t cinnamon
1 t baking powder
1/2 t salt

Blend oils and sugar in a mixer until light and fluffy.
Whisk together dry ingredients, and introduce to wet ingredients, mixing until fully incorporated. Pat into a disk, as for pie dough, and wrap and refrigerate 30 minutes, overnight, whatever.
Next day, preheat oven to 350. Roll out into 1/8" layer (thicker is okay... it still comes out crispy and ridiculously addictive), cut into squares with a pizza-cutter, prick THOROUGHLY with fork. Bake for about 20 minutes, start checking after 10. Kitchen will smell kind of like a movie theater concession stand, with the smell of cooking coconut oil (often used for popcorn). Break these apart and let them cool just as soon as they're out of the oven, and they'll crisp up like a dream!

Cookie Dough Dip: (warning - this recipe is VERY SNEAKY. Adapted from Chocolate Covered Katie, a super-skinny dessert-loving vegan genius blogger. I am tantalized by ALL of her recipes.)
The secret is hummus.

In a food processor, blend:
1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
Brown sugar: I used 2/3 cup, but could get away with less next time
3/16 t salt
1/16 t baking soda
2 t vanilla
2 oz almond butter
2 oz rice milk
3 T oats

After blending, mix in 1/3 - 1/2 cup chocolate chips. Dunk away!

Both totally dairy-free and delicious. Seriously. If we weren't having company this afternoon, these would not have lasted long enough for a photo op.

Bye bye, dairy

I LOVE MILK. I've been known to drive for hours in pursuit of the white stuff - rich creamy grass-fed life-giving immune-supporting raw milk. Rain, snow, gloom of night notwithstanding. And I love its many friends - yogurt, butter, sour cream, cream cheese, mozzarella, and all the lovely things to be made from those.
I drank raw milk throughout pregnancy and the first few months of breastfeeding. And then last week, baby let me know that the milk had to go.
Dairy sensitivity is pretty common among little babies. Cow/goat/sheep's milk protein comes straight through into human milk, and is very hard for immature digestive systems to process. There is a hope that eventually, the little one's gut will "seal" and be able to digest cow's milk protein once again. Sometimes it happens around six months, sometimes later.
So here I am, desperate for butter (melting into fresh-baked bread with cinnamon sugar, or a fried egg), but willing to give the casein-free diet a go. And since caregiving finds me often seated in front of the computer, why not document this stage of my culinary adventures with a few blog updates?