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.)