White chocolate

Home made vegan white chocolate.

This was my second attempt, and it was better than the first. The first time, I used some gross soy milk powder, and had to add tons of sugar to try to mask the flavour. This time, I used half soy milk powder and half almond meal -- much better flavour, but the texture is not perfect. I think if I had a decent soy milk powder that would solve the problem, but the only one I can find here has a really strong soy taste.

I am basing my experiments on this recipe (without the hours of grinding, though. I just use the stand mixer for 5 minutes or so).

Fake injera

My adventures in fake injera continue... this time I used some old sourdough starter (not active) and added more flour, some carbonated water, some baking soda and baking powder. It worked out pretty well.

(I should point out that a few days later I tried it again, but added too much baking powder or something, because they didn't taste as good. Winging it has its advantages and its disadvantages.)

Pho risotto

This is risotto made with leftover pho broth. It rocked!

I love this risotto recipe -- the trick is that you 'wash' the rice in the stock that you are going to use, so that the stock ends up full of starch. This is actually the source of the creaminess -- it has nothing to do with stirring. This version of risotto cooks basically unattended.

Green mango

Let me introduce my new love: green mango.

Mangoes are absolutely my favourite fruit. They may be my favourite food full stop. But until now, I hadn't investigated green (unripe) mangoes. Wow, they're amazing. When you start peeling the skin off, the mango scent just hits you. The scent and especially the flavour is of course much different from a ripe mango -- they are mouth-puckeringly tart -- but there's a commonality. Interestingly, the texture is much less fibrous than a ripe mango.

One great use for them is shredded in a Thai-style salad, similar to a green papaya salad. There are also Indian pickles and chutneys. But this recipe I tried from 660 Curries was fantastic: Mango, Bell Pepper and Onion in a Pigeon Pea Sauce. (I didn't have any pigeon peas, so I used yellow split peas.) This was tangy and spicy and just wonderful.

Blueberry pie

This was my first blueberry pie. I usually think of pie as something to make with excellent seasonal fruit, but this one was made with frozen blueberries and it was pretty great. The filling was blueberries, lemon zest, sugar and some tiny tapioca pearls.

I used the 'one pie dough to rule them all' recipe from Chez Pim, but with refined coconut oil instead of butter (80% by weight). (I liked the dough technique, where you push the fat into the flour with the heel of your hand to make long flakes. But cold coconut oil tends to be hard and lumpy, so I don't think it worked as well as butter. The recipe has you fold the dough several times, kind of like the laminated dough for croissants, but I found that the coconut oil dough was very fragile, and the carefully-formed layers were falling apart. I wonder whether whipping the oil might work -- Lagusta uses this technique for her croissants.)

I am nitpicking. The crust worked out fine, and the pie was delicious!

What does a vegetarian do with a meat grinder?

I love my stand mixer. Recently in an op shop I spotted an attachment for it: a meat grinder. Although they're not that rare (you do see attachments on eBay -- they can be pricey) I was so surprised to find it that I bought it right away without thinking about what I would use it for.

Quite some internet research later, I read that you can grind chickpeas for falafel with a meat grinder. And so I did. The falafel worked out really well. I convinced myself that this was because of the excellent texture, but it may well have been because the previous few times I've made falafel I have wimped out and baked them in the oven, and this time I (shallow-)fried them. Another vote in favour of the meat grinder was that it was really fun to throw the chickpeas, parsley and garlic into the hopper and have them come out homogeneous. (Okay, that happens when you use the food processor too, but I swear this was more fun.)

Emboldened, I ground some seitan, and some cauliflower, and made a version of larb with cauliflower 'rice' from Stone Soup. This was delicious! We had a green mango salad alongside (sort of along these lines).

Overall, I'm happy to have the meat grinder. It's a bit of a hassle to clean, but not that much worse than a food processor. I like that the stuff you grind comes out a uniform size. I also like that you can grind a large amount. I think the next thing I'm going to try is bigoli.

Chocolate stout cupcakes

These cupcakes set a dangerous precedent.

I am not one of those bakers who enjoys precision. I try to measure things accurately and follow the recipe, but the urge to just eyeball it, and change things on the fly is just too hard to resist.

Anyway, the day I made these cupcakes on the spur of the moment, I surprised even myself in how far I strayed from the recipe. I didn't have tofu or sour cream, or self raising flour. I used less chocolate, and more sugar. And yet they worked out beautifully. The flavour combination of chocolate, prune and stout is just perfect.