Stroopwafels

I found a stovetop waffle-cookie maker at a charity sale recently. I hadn't realized that I wanted one, but for $2 I couldn't resist.

And so, stroopwafels!

For the wafers, I used the yeast stroopwafels recipe on this page, minus the egg. (One third of the recipe made 10 wafers -- each dough ball was about 28 grams. They were a bit bigger than the circumference of a mug -- just the right size for the traditional trick of perching them over a cup of tea or coffee to warm up a bit.)

For the caramel filling, I used Hannah's recipe. (I halved it, which was more than enough for 5 cookies.)

These were really delicious. I liked that they were not as sweet as other ones I've had. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy the cookie maker was to use -- even though I have an annoying electric stovetop, it wasn't too hard to get the temperature right. Maybe ice cream cones are next...

Every Grain of Rice

I love this cookbook by Fuschia Dunlop. Previously I have found Chinese cooking to be a bit intimidating, but these recipes are really simple and come together very quickly. The book also includes an excellent glossary of ingredients, with pictures, to make shopping for some of the more obscure ingredients much easier.

We've had some excellent dinners from this book. The standout recipe so far is a very simple one: you cook greens (e.g. gai lan or choy sum) briefly in salted water with a little oil, so that they are still somewhat crisp. You drain and shake them dry, then put them in your serving bowl. You top them with finely chopped ginger and spring onions. Then you heat up a few tablespoons of oil until they are really hot, and pour the oil over the veggies. Then you add a mixture of half soy sauce and half hot water. Done!

Here you see: (clockwise from top left) Chinese chive (chickpea) omelet; spicy firm tofu with garlic stems; spinach with chilli and fermented tofu; smacked cucumber in garlicky sauce. The second picture shows vegetarian 'gong pao chicken' (though I used tofu rather than mushrooms); the simple greens recipe mentioned above; green beans with black bean and chilli; vegetarian clay bowl 'chicken'. The last picture is ma po dou fu (vegetarian version), but with the tofu crumbled rather than cubed.

As you can see, we had a few fancy meals with lots of dishes, because I really wanted to try everything. But the great thing about these recipes is that you can actually make an interesting and satisfying meal quickly and easily. I threw the ma po dou fu recipe together one night when we were starving. It took less than 10 minutes. It was superb.

The only bad thing I can say about this cookbook is that it has the worst index I have ever seen. Like, I think you would actually have to go out of your way to make an index this bad.

Garden salads

I'm not really sure why I planted 12 lettuce plants. We've gone from eating salad maybe once a week, to having shopping bags full of lettuce in the fridge and resorting to lettuce soup to get rid of the stuff.

We have had some nice salads though. The first is lettuce, rocket (leaves and flowers), baby broad (fava) beans, golden beetroot, and mulberries. The second is lettuce, rocket, roasted golden beetroot, and homemade tofu misozuke. I really love that almost all of these ingredients came from the garden.

Biscuits

I just remembered these biscuits that I made a while ago. What made them so amazing was the addition of chives and homemade cashew cheddar (from Artisan Vegan Cheese).

Mulberry pie

Thanks to a little urban foraging, we had mulberry pie.

For the filling, I was inspired by the blackberry pie in Vegan Pie in the Sky, but even though I used less lemon than the recipe suggested, I still found it overpowering. Maybe the long cooking time doesn't suit mulberries -- a quick mulberry sauce I made (mulberries, sugar, lemon, heated on the stovetop just until juicy, then pureed) had a much better flavour.

My quest for good vegan pie dough continues. I tried this Serious Eats recipe, using mostly shortening with some vegan margarine, but the crust ended up on the short/crumbly side.

Saffron

I don't really know what saffron tastes like. I've had it quite a few times, mainly flavouring rice, and I just can't pick out the flavour. It tastes good; tastes different from the same dish without the saffron (I think), and yet I couldn't really tell you how it tastes.

So now that you know how untrustworthy my tastebuds are when it comes to saffron: I made these saffron-vanilla snickerdoodles from 101 Cookbooks recently. I really liked them, but they taste like marzipan to me. I should say that this photo doesn't quite capture their golden yellow colour. (I veganized them of course, made smaller cookies (a half batch made a dozen), left out the vanilla bean, and also skipped the refrigeration step and baked them straight away.) I think this recipe, minus the saffron, and plus the regulation cinnamon-sugar, might become my standard snickerdoodle -- the cookies puffed and crumpled nicely, and they had a soft chewiness that I really liked.

Pizza

I've got a new favourite pizza dough: it's the New York Style Pizza dough from Serious Eats. It's easy to whip up in the food processor, and can sit in the fridge for a few days until you need it. I think it tastes best after at least 2 days in the fridge.

Last night's pizzas were delicious: caramelized onion, mushroom, cashew cheese, tomato (pictured); lemon, cashew cheese, tofu mizozuke, rosemary, rocket; and pear, cashew cheese, tofu misozuke, walnuts, rocket.

Broad bean burgers

I had some leftover cooked-from-dry broad beans (fava beans), and remembered that there was a recipe for broad bean burgers in Ottolenghi's Plenty (also appears here). It turns out the recipe called for fresh beans, but the cooked dry beans worked really well. I also replaced the spinach in the recipe with a bunch of greens from the garden: rocket (arugula), fennel fronds, broad bean leaves, and nasturtium leaves. We ate the burgers with a 'coconut sour cream' with lemon and chives. (Inspired by a bunch of experiments with vegan nut cheeses, I made the sour cream by fermenting pureed young coconut flesh with rejuvelac.)

These were really good -- I made them again a couple of days later, which is saying something.

Corn on the cob

I got over my Western-Mass.-induced corn snobbery and bought a couple of ears at the market this week. I decided to go for the classic corn on the cob, and then I felt the need to go all southern for the rest of the meal: seitan ribz; kale cooked collards style, with smoked coconut flakes and magic shroom dust; broccoli, not really fitting into the theme; and biscuits. I based the BBQ sauce on the apricot one in Veganomicon, but used dried apricots and a few random smoked prunes in place of the fresh apricots, used less of the sugary ingredients, and added some vinegar.

100% sourdough bagels

Recipe from Wild Yeast.

Vegan poached egg

I used this recipe, and even though it kind of seemed like a silly thing to make, it ended up being tasty and fun to eat.

I added a little black salt to both the white and yolk mixtures. I also added a few drops of soy sauce and Maggi sauce for a little extra umami in the yolk. I was really pleasantly surprised by the airiness of the white.

Pizza patate

As I've said once or twice, I love the pizza patate at Sullivan Street Bakery. A few years ago, I read about a recipe for it on Smitten Kitchen. But there was a lot of uncertainty -- Deb concluded that there must've been an error in the recipe because the dough would've been way too wet. Reading around about pizza bianca, though, I decided that I wanted to try the original version of the recipe -- it really is supposed to be a very wet dough.

I think the main problem is that the recipe doesn't talk you through the parts that go against your normal baking instincts. The dough really is more of a batter. (After about 10 minutes in the stand mixer, it did sort of pull away from the sides, but when the mixer stopped it slumped right back again.) And the 30 minute baking time just seems much too long for a pizza, but it turned out to be just right.

I let the dough rise for 2 hours. The directions call for you to split the dough in two, and spread it on two baking sheets, but I just used one large baking sheet, so it was slightly thicker than intended. To spread the dough out, I had to rub my hands with oil because it was incredibly sticky.

Overall, this was very very close to that delicious pizza bianca from Sullivan Street. The crust was excellent, like a thin, chewy foccacia.

Secret ingredient

The first time I tried making a passionfruit-flavoured cake, it didn't work very well. I added the amount of passionfruit called for by the recipe, and the batter tasted of nothing. I added more and more, and yet the final cake did not taste of passionfruit at all. (I saved the cake, somewhat, by topping it with a passionfruit ganache that was excellent -- the chocolate-passionfruit combination is delightful.)

Anyway, cut to last week, when I bought some feijoas at the markets. To me, they smelled intensely of passionfruit. (Other people compare them to guava or pineapple.) They tasted okay, but mostly just made me want passionfruit instead. And luckily enough, this week at the markets I found passionfruit on sale.

So, I bring you passionfruit cupcakes (with secret ingredient, feijoa):

These worked out well. The passionfruit taste was definitely there. I topped them with some lemon 'cream cheese' icing which was a nice combination.

1/3 cup canola oil
3/4 cup sugar
1 feijoa, pureed with soymilk to make just over 1/2 cup total
4 large passionfruits
1 t vanilla extract
1 cup plus 2 T flour
1/2 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
1/4 t salt

Fill cupcake liners 3/4 full. Bake at 350 for about 20 minutes.

Pomegranates

I saw this video ages ago, but I only tried the technique out this week. It wasn't quite as easy as it looks in the video -- the ribs on my pomegranate were a bit wonky -- but I liked pulling the fruit open in this way. You don't lose any arils or make any mess.

Kung pao monkey head mushrooms

One of our favourite things we ate in Singapore last year was monkey head mushrooms cooked kung pao style. Monkey head mushrooms have a really excellent texture -- quite meaty, a bit chewy, and a bit spongy so they are great at soaking up sauces.

Following these directions, I soaked the mushrooms several times, then squeezed them out, cut them up and deep fried them. (I didn't soak them in a marinade.) I then made the kung pao, adding ordinary mushrooms and capsicum. (I didn't have any leeks, unfortunately.) I added a bit of water to the sauce, because I wanted there to be enough for the monkey heads to absorb.

With all the soaking and frying, it was kind of a hassle to make this, but it was so good!

Caramelized white chocolate

I really love my pressure cooker, and I love finding new uses for it. One that I've been curious about for a while is using the pressure cooker to caramelize white chocolate. You put the chocolate in a jar, fill the cooker partway with water, and cook. I think I first read about this on Ideas in Food, but it wasn't until I got their cookbook (Ideas in Food), that I got up the nerve to try it out. (Although I am almost totally over any fear of the pressure cooker exploding, it was a little scary putting a closed up jar in there.)

On the left is how the white chocolate started, on the right is after an hour in the pressure cooker. (The recipe called for 30 minutes, but mine had hardly changed colour at that point.) I used the same vegan white chocolate recipe I used last time (with half almond meal and half soy milk powder).

I'll definitely do this again. Caramelizing the white chocolate gave it a really complex and delicious flavour. My favourite discovery came when I mixed a small amount of the caramelized chocolate into the uncaramelized stuff -- say, 1 part caramelized to 4 or 5 parts uncaramelized.

I used most of the caramelized white chocolate as Kamozawa and Talbot suggest: in their Popcorn Gelato. Mine didn't work out that popcorny (partly I think because I used plain popcorn, not butter-flavoured; partly because I wasn't able to strain the popcorn mixture thoroughly enough). However, it did work out white chocolatey and delicious! Here it is as a choc-top with caramel sauce.

Coconut-oil croissants

For the first time ever, I managed to make croissants. (Last time, I ended up with something like croissant-shaped brioche.)

The secrets of my success: (1) Lagusta's recipe and its use of coconut oil, (2) it not being the middle of summer this time, (3) letting the dough spend each rest period in the fridge.

I ended up making mini croissants because I had halved the recipe, but hadn't thought through the consequences when it came to the part where you cut the dough into triangles ready for croissantification. Also, my triangles should have been taller/longer, to make prettier croissants.

I used mostly refined coconut oil, but some non-refined. They tasted great -- not coconutty specifically, just delicious. I found the dough really easy to work -- I think that Lagusta's suggestion of refrigerating it for 10 minutes between turns is really helpful. Depending on the temperature of the house, I think next time I might let them have most of their final rise in the fridge (say an overnight rise, with an hour to warm up before baking.) As it was, although the coconut oil was fairly solid in the morning when I started, by afternoon when they were rising, it was melting out.

Sambhar masala

Toasted spices, waiting to be ground up:

(Recipe from 660 Curries.)

Hamantaschen

Same recipe as last year. Half apricot and half poppyseed. Yum.

Icebox cake

I think I first read about icebox cake on Smitten Kitchen, which if that is true, means it was 5 years ago (!). Anyway, since then I have had it in the back of my mind to try a vegan version. I finally did it yesterday, prompted by (1) leftover rad whip, and (2) weather too hot to turn on the oven in.

I layered rad whip, Nice biscuits and sliced banana, and left it in the fridge overnight. It worked out really nicely -- the rad whip has a very pleasant, neutral-creamy flavour, and I really like how the banana flavour permeated the whole thing.

Fig and leek pizza

We had pizza topped with slices of fresh fig, sauteed leek, and walnuts on top of a blue cheese-inspired cashew sauce. This was good. I also made another one with slices of preserved lemon, which made lemon-fiend R very happy.

The sauce was about 1/4 cup raw cashews, blended with water to a creamy consistency, plus nutritional yeast, lemon juice, salt, and two cubes of stinky tofu. It had a nice funk/pungency to taste, but in the context of the pizza it didn't stand out too much, just complemented the rest of the flavours.

Ice cream sandwiches

It's fig season here. This is fresh fig ice cream from The Perfect Scoop (with cashew cream replacing the cream) and honey and oat cookies with walnuts and lavender,  based on Chocolate and Zucchini's Spelt and Honey Crisps.

Tofu

I know this looks like any other chunk of fried tofu.

But I made it myself, from dried soy beans!

It was nice. I think I could taste the love. (I used the recipe in Kansha, which I borrowed from the library, and which I will certainly borrow again.)

Pie

Summer can be brutal here. I try to avoid heating up the kitchen if possible, so I haven't been doing much baking at all. (I think since November I have only made one batch of cookies, and pizza for dinner one night. No bread -- this time of year, my sourdough starter is for pancakes only.)

But this week, finally we have had a break, so I made pie! Totally unseasonal, courtesy of a random bunch of rhubarb that was on sale at the grocery store, this is strawberry and rhubarb pie with a streusel topping:

The recipe is from Vegan Pie in the Sky, but for the pastry I tried veganizing this recipe by replacing the butter with coconut oil. My quest to master pie dough continues. This ended up okay, but the texture was short rather than really flaky. I should have known that something was off, when I blithely added the water called for in the recipe and it ended up way too wet. I was able to pour some off, but still it was too wet. (Normally I would have added the water cautiously, but the recipe claims to be for an unusually wet dough and doesn't urge any caution in adding the water.)

We ate this with homemade burnt caramel ice cream, and it was delicious.

Doughnuts

First time frying up doughnuts, won't be the last:

I used Vegan Dad's recipe (based on Alton Brown's), but added some gluten to approximate bread flour, and replaced a little bit of the flour with some potato flakes for extra softness/moisture. Some were glazed with vanilla, or vanilla-lemon, and some were rolled in cinnamon sugar. Yum! I made half the recipe which was the perfect amount for us two.

(Bread-nerd notes: I gave the dough a first rise the night before, and then put it in the fridge, and then in the morning gave it an hour to warm up before cutting and frying. The first rise was accidentally too long -- I really only meant to give it 20 minutes as a head-start for rising slowly in the fridge, but left it for an hour by mistake. Interestingly, the ones that were cut out of the dough first didn't rise as much as the ones cut out of the re-rolled dough scraps. Overall, the texture of the doughnuts was nice and soft, but I would love to figure out how to make them really airy and light.)

Koreanish jackfruit

One hot day, we needed lunch, I had recently read this article on Bo Ssam, and I had a can of young jackfruit. (I probably bought it intending to make jackfruit carnitas.)

I cooked the jackfruit in the pressure cooker for 20 minutes, with seasonings inspired by the Korean BBQ sauce from Fatfree Vegan. I then shredded it to end up with this:

We ate the jackfruit in lettuce leaves, with a bunch of stuff from the fridge: cold leftover rice vermicelli, pickled shiitakes, sauerkraut (standing in for kimchi), cilantro, leftover butter beans, and a made-up sauce of fermented chili bean paste, miso, sriracha and vinegar. This was an excellent meal. I'm hungry for it again, looking at the photos.

The jackfruit tasted good, but I am not really won over by the texture. I guess it is nice for a change to have a 'meaty' element to a meal that is not seitan or tofu. But I think I am just lukewarm on it because when I was a meat-eater, I never ate meaty foods that have that particular falling-apart texture. (I never tried American-style barbecue or carnitas, for example. I bet people that miss those foods get a bit more out of jackfruit than I do.)