Scallion "pancakes"

How does one eat leftover mashed potatoes with a stir-fry?

Mix leftover mashed potatoes with some dry breadcrumbs (I used panko) and ginger-scallion oil.
Pan fry.
Eat, marvelling at the way they remind you of the real deal.

Creamy broccoli soup

I'm not usually a cream-of-whatever soup person, but this was easy and so delicious.

You need:
broccoli
onion
veg stock
almonds
miso
preserved lemon
salt and pepper
Sichuan chilli oil

Saute onions, add broccoli and stock and cook until soft.
Meanwhile, in a high-speed blender, puree almonds, preserved lemon and miso with a little bit of water.
When the broccoli is done, add to the blender and blend it up. You can puree it all, or leave some chunky. Finish with some chilli oil and pepper.

Why I'm googling "nonstick egg rings"

Discarded sourdough starter = crumpets.

Birthday cake

A veganized version of Black Star Pastry's Strawberry Watermelon cake:

For the almond dacquoise, I used my recipe, but with aqua faba in place of the water + versawhip (and I also didn't heat the mixture, working on my unproven assumption that baking would activate the agar). I made two layers a bit over 20cm in diameter -- next time I might make smaller, taller layers.

For the cream, I used rad whip with some rosewater added. Next time I might use Soyatoo, which I expect would hold its shape better -- the rad whip didn't whip up a lot to begin with, and then as the cake sat it deflated a lot.

Overall, not as impressive looking as its inspiration, but it tasted superb, and was still delicious when we finished it a day or two later.

The best seitan

I've had this recipe for seitan from the Vegan Epicurean clipped for ages, but only got around to trying it recently. It's brilliant! I've been making seitan for more than a decade, so I thought I'd tried every method around, but this one surprised me with its unusual texture: it's soft and juicy, and definitely not brainy.

What's unusual about this recipe is that you pan fry the dough before cooking it in liquid (in the pressure cooker).

I halve the recipe (142g vital wheat gluten), skip the onion flakes, nutritional yeast and marmite, and add some mushroom seasoning to the dry mix. For the cooking liquid, I use vegetable stock with some soy sauce. I pressure cook the cutlets for 25 minutes.

After pan-frying:

After pressure-cooking, the cutlets increase a lot in size. They are quite soft. I like to cut them into pieces and brown before serving.

Posole

One of the foods I miss most from the USA is hominy. Occasionally you will see an overpriced can for sale here, but never dried hominy. For years, I've been hoping to try making it from scratch -- starting with field corn, and nixtamalizing it (cooking/soaking with slaked lime) -- but I couldn't even find field corn for sale.

Then, suddenly field corn turned up in my favourite continental grocery store. So, I made a trip to the Thai grocery store to pick up some slaked lime. I consulted a long-bookmarked post on the Cooking Issues blog. And then today I made nixtamal, and posole.

Only took 6 years or so...

Vegan chorizo and potato tacos

SO GOOD!

With homemade vegan chorizo, and perfect fried potatoes (parcooked with vinegar) -- all from Serious Eats.