Ants on a log ice cream

Celery and peanut butter ice cream with raisins:

I can't remember where I read about celery sorbet with raisins and peanut butter. Rather than a sorbet, I decided to make more of an 'ice cream' by mixing the peanut butter into the celery juice mixture. (Ingredients: celery juice, celery leaves, water, sugar, peanut butter, powdered peanut butter, refined coconut oil, raisins, xanthan gum)

This was pretty good. I was worried about the peanut butter overpowering the celery, but the celery came through clearly. In fact, I think what would put this over the top into utter deliciousness would be a peanut butter ripple. Next time...

Unphotogenic

I couldn't get a good photo of this ice cream, but I want to write about it so I don't forget it. It's a great compromise that pleased both ice cream eaters in our household: peanut butter and chocolate ice cream with peanut butter cookie dough and cocoa nibs.

The chocolate-peanut butter ice cream is from The Perfect Scoop, but I replaced the half and half with soy milk, and added just a touch more sugar. It ended up really rich and creamy, so the original version must be insane. The cookie dough and peanut butter pleased one of us. The chocolate, the cocoa nibs, and the fact that it was peanut butter cookie dough rather than boring old chocolate chip, pleased the other one.

The ice cream contains just sugar, soy milk, peanut butter and cocoa powder. I am thinking that I might replace the peanut butter with hazelnut butter next time, for gianduja.

Parsnip ice cream

I have to admit that I am always more drawn to the weirder ice cream flavours than the classics. And so it came to pass that I made parsnip ice cream, based on this recipe by Barbara Kafka. (I replaced the cream with coconut milk/cream*).

Anyway, this was really good. I loved that I got to taste it: it's really sweet and nutty, in a sort of chestnut/sweet potatoey sort of way. I think that with the right accompaniments, it could be really amazing, but as a flavour on its own I had my fill after a few bites. And now I am regretting that I didn't make something more boring (I mean, 'classic').

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 * I used some mysterious coconut product I had in a container in the fridge. Usually that would be coconut milk, but recently I have been playing around with coconut whipped cream, and have been buying something called coconut cream which is coconut milk with about 30% fat. Most likely it was a mix of coconut milk and cream.

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.

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.

Smoking

I got a stovetop smoker for my birthday. Since then we've been eating lots of smoked things. Probably my favourite things so far have been smoked tofu and tempeh. Here's the smoker packed full of veggie protein (marinated pressed tofu, tempeh, and two homemade seitan sausages).

For the tofu, I press it overnight and then marinate it for a day in soy sauce with a bit of maple syrup and sesame oil. Once it has been smoked for 30 minutes, it's ready to be sliced thinly for sandwiches. The tempeh just goes in plain -- once smoked, it's ready to be cooked however you like. I like to slice it thinly and pan fry, adding flavourings (soy sauce plus whatever other things) at the end for a glaze.

Other things I've smoked so far: cherry tomatoes (10 minutes), garlic, potatoes (45 minutes from raw to cooked -- too long; better to parcook them before smoking), young coconut, coconut flakes (20 minutes), lemon. The young coconut was a bit odd -- I ended up pureeing it and making a smoky ice cream which was pretty good. The coconut flakes were great as a bacon-y element in a salad. The smoked lemon I didn't know quite what to do with, so it is sitting in the freezer waiting for inspiration to strike.

Brownies

Apparently I make brownies once a year, in February. This year's brownie recipe is a new one to me: the best vegan brownies via mostly foodstuffs. The gimmick here is that these contain melted vegan ice cream. Specifically you want a vegan ice cream that has added food gums and things to help with the texture.

I was a bit worried that the ice cream we had (So Good Vanilla Bliss) might not work because it's quite low fat, but these were really great brownies: chewy and candylike on the edges, and fudgy in the middle. Waiting an hour for them to cool down was quite an achievement. I think it might be less than a year before I make these again.

Iron chef: sriracha

I was out of ideas for dinner, so asked R if he had any cravings. I don't know why I asked -- I was expecting him to say no, as that's his usual answer to that question (weird, right?) but instead he surprised me and asked for something with sriracha. This turned out to be an excellent and inspiring answer.

We had tofu omelettes with sriracha (based on the Thai classic); roast cauliflower with a dipping sauce of sriracha, honey and lime juice; and latkes (from the freezer) with a sauce of vegan mayo and sriracha.

All three were pretty good but I think the best one was the cauliflower. The very brown pieces went especially well with the sauce. (I got the idea for this combination after some googling turned up the suggestion to combine this sauce with roasted brussels sprouts.)

After all that heat: ice cream (chocolate and peanut butter, with pretzels. I used soy milk in place of the recommended half and half, and regular cocoa powder, and it worked out fine -- very rich and almost fudgy.)

Frazzled

What can't a dinner of pizza and ice cream fix?

Three small clean-out-the-fridge pizzas (dough is whole wheat from the freezer at Whole Foods; cheese is Follow Your Heart mozzarella):

1. Sauerkraut, caramelized onions, ajvar. (This was my first time trying sauerkraut on a pizza and it won't be the last. This particular pizza could've done with a little something extra, though.)

2. Salsa, caramelized onions, cilantro.

3. Kalamatas, basil (from the freezer -- I threw in a bunch and it held up surprisingly well), caramelized onions.

Then almond and pecan ice cream (just so-so by itself, but much better with chocolate and peanut butter ganache and plantains).

New Orleans / New England

For dinner tonight we had gumbo z'herbes, made with kohlrabi greens, carrot greens, kale, callaloo (amaranth) and beet greens. I used this (apparently inauthentic) recipe. I liked it, but I think the spices were a bit off, or it was missing something. Still, pretty good. We had it with Chesapeake tempeh cakes from Vegan Brunch, which I thought were just okay (but I made a few substitutions -- for instance, I didn't have enough panko -- so they deserve another try, I think).
For dessert we had grape nuts ice cream. It was really good! Apparently grape nuts desserts are a New England thing. I used this recipe, though I didn't add cinnamon and did add a caramel swirl (inspired by what I read about the brown bread ice cream at a shop called Scoops in LA).
I used one cup of mimiccreme, and two cups of oat milk. Since the recipe called for all cream, I added a bit of xanthan gum to thicken the mixture up slightly. I added more sugar than the recipe called for, because I wanted more of a contrast with the slightly bitter caramel, but it ended up a bit too sweet. (The caramel sauce recipe is from The Perfect Scoop. I made 1/3 of the salted caramel sauce recipe, replacing the cream with mimiccreme.)