Buchty

By Monica on April 2nd, 2008

Buchty, Czech baked donuts, also known as “a delicious, but gross misuse of butter”. If your arteries are just too clean these days, look no further.

These donut-style mini-cakes are extremely dense and rich, and stuffed with your favorite homemade jam or preserve. These aren’t quite as fluffy as the egg and butter laden buchty I ate as a kid, possibly due to the veganization, but they are still sinfully rich, flakey, and moist, with a very sweet, crunchy exterior… Kind of a donut-croissant!

Buchty
1/2 cup soymilk
1 packet dry yeast
2 cups flour
1/4t salt
4 Ener-G eggs
1/2c sugar
3/4c Earth Balance, separated
Your favorite jam or preserves
Confectioners sugar

Warm the soymilk slightly, add yeast and dissolve.
Into a large bowl, add flour and salt.
Whisk Ener-G eggs into the yeast-milk mixture, then add to the flour. Mix well.
In another bowl, whisk together the sugar and 1/2 cup EB until it is light and creamy. Fold this into the dough. Dough will be very sticky! Cover and let rise for 45 minutes.
After dough has risen, tear off a tennis ball sized chunk and work it into a round shape. Poke two fingers into the dough to make a small well, fill it with 1T of jam, then cover up the well and pinch it closed.
Fill up all the donuts this way and let them rise for another 15 minutes.
Grease a 9×13″ baking pan. Melt the remaining 1/4c EB. Place the doughnuts close together in the pan and drizzle the melted EB on top.
Bake at 375 degrees for 30 minutes, until golden brown. When done, tear dougnnuts from each other and serve warm or cooled, sprinkled with confectioners sugar.

In the ‘other food that won’t kill you’ category this week, we had a Mexican Pasta Casserole from VegWeb. I used TVP as the taco “meat”, added black olives, omitted the vegan cheese, and doubled the recipe to make an extra casserole for a rainy day. Easy, easy, easy!

I also found a recipe on VegWeb for a seitan “Chicago Italian Beef”. I went into this pretty skeptical. I tried the recipe as written, then doubled the giardiniera, added more garlic, and more fennel. I was still disappointed, though the seitan did improve drastically after letting it marinade in the “aus jus” for 2 days after cooking. Looks good though, no?

And then with some melted vegan mozzarella, which I am absolutely done buying. This cheez had been sitting around in my refrigerator for a long time and now I’m finally rid of the waxy, flame retardant crap. Good riddance! (The ‘beef’ was also better without its overpowering grossness!) But again, looks good, no?

Cranberry Pear Snackcake

By Monica on March 27th, 2008

This is one of my favorites from the “Grandma Files”. A versatile little cake, you can easily alter this to fit whatever you have in your pantry at the time. No cranberries? Use raisins, or any kind of fresh berry. Buy too many walnuts? Throw them in! And I truly feel sorry for those who do not have 30+ jars of homemade pearsauce in their cold cellars, but if you don’t, applesauce works too. The combination of delicately sweet pears and tart cranberries is tough to beat though, this is what I always come back to. As usual, Grandma was right.

Cranberry Pear Snackcake
1/2 cup canola oil
1 cup brown sugar
1 1/2 cups flour
1t baking soda
1t cocoa
1/2t cinnamon
1 cup pearsauce (unsweetened)
1 cup fresh or frozen cranberries

Cream canola oil and brown sugar. Sift together flour, baking soda, cocoa, and cinnamon, then add to the oil/sugar mixture. Add pearsauce, cranberries and mix until blended. Pour into a lightly greased 9×9″ baking pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 40 minutes.

In other food this week, I took advantage of affordable fresh asparagus and added it to Joanna’s Penne Alfredo from Yellow Rose Recipes:

And lastly, SusanV’s ridiculously easy, ridiculously delicious Smoky Refried Bean Soup. I have made this twice since she posted the recipe this month!

The belated St. Patty’s Post

By Monica on March 20th, 2008

So I’m a few days late, but better late than never! I’ve been waiting for St. Patty’s Day to roll around ever since I first saw this recipe for Corned Beef Seitan on Everyday Dish.

It looks pretty corned ‘beefy’, no? I followed the recipe for the seitan roast, but decided to add a little flare: After cooking the seitan, I coated it in about 4 tablespoons of horseradish and then rubbed it with fresh cracked pepper. Now it really looks corned ‘beefy’!

Into the oven it went, along with a load of cabbage, carrots, potatoes, a couple onions, and about 1 cup of vegetable stock. Covered at 350 degrees, about 45 minutes did it until all the vegetables were tender.

This was good enough to be omni-approved at our St. Patty’s Day feast and made for wicked sandwiches the next couple of days. I’m so glad I have that 25 pounds of vital wheat gluten now; having so much on hand frees me up to try these fun seitan experiments!

Seitan Corned Beef
Recipe from Brian McCarthy, posted at Everyday Dish

1 gallon of water (to boil loaf)

Dry Ingredients
2 cups vital wheat gluten flour
2T granulated onion
2T paprika
2T fennel seed (coarsely ground)
2T caraway seed (coarsely ground)
1T salt
1t ground cloves
1t ground black pepper

Wet Ingredients
1 cup vegetable broth
1/2 cup olive oil
2T molasses
1T vinegar
Cheese cloth (one double thick 24×16″ piece)
2 6″ pieces of string

Instructions
1) In a large pot, bring one gallon of water to a simmer
2) In a large bowl, whisk together the gluten, onion powder, paprika, fennel, caraway, salt, cloves, and pepper.
3) In a separate bowl, whisk together the vegetable broth, oil, molasses, and vinegar.
4) Combine wet ingredients with dry ingredients.
5) Form into a 4″x8″ loaf that will be about 1″ thick.
6) Place corned beef loaf on a cheese cloth and roll-up like a big fat rectangle tootsie-roll (not too tight). Tie each end with a piece of string.
7) Place in simmering water, cover, and simmer for 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Take roast out of liquid and remove cheese cloth. Serve warm or place in refrigerator to make sandwiches with later.

Eat it, it’s good fuyu!

By Monica on March 6th, 2008

Be still my beating heart, I have stumbled across a new Asian market. It’s not exactly next door at over an hour away, but it is in the same neighborhood as the Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s I visit when I trek into civilization for fancy-pants vegan items. Aisles and aisles of beautiful, fresh, cheap produce - I spent hours in there!

One of the new food items I came home with was a bag of “Fuyu Persimmions”. At 4 fuyus for a buck, I figured I’d take them home, Google what to do with them, and give it a whirl.

Google said I should make this Fuyu Bundt Cake, recipe courtesy of the California Fuyu Grower’s Association. Rarely is Google wrong. Who knew fuyu could be so delicious? (Ok, lots of people probably.) It was like some sort of gingerbread fruit cake, but better! If you ever find yourself with extra fuyus, definitely try this out.

I’m still trying to figure out what to do with my bitter melon, fuzzy squash, and other exotics. In the meantime, favorites like Sourdough Calzones balance out the new, strange goodies I’ve brought home. (Why I bought a can of “vegetarian mock duck” I can’t tell you…) Anyway, I like this dough recipe because it needs only 5 minutes to rise. For those of us with no little patience, that’s a lot better than the usual hour we have to wait for dinner. It’s an incredibly easy dough to roll, is crispy, and durable enough to make a calzone you can pick up and eat with your hands.

And lastly, I’ve been discovering the wonders of minute tapioca lately. Bryanna turned me onto using it in one of her recipes and this week I branched out into Tapioca Apples. This was a super quick way to use up my aging apples and though it’s excellent all on its own, next time I will serve it over vanilla ice cream.

Fuyu Bundt Cake
(I subbed apple sauce for the eggs, canola oil for the butter, and cashews instead of walnuts. I also had to bake mine for a lot longer than the recipe calls for, so make sure to check yours before pulling it out of the oven.)

Grease and flour a bundt cake pan. Preheat oven to 350.
Blend 2 tsp. baking soda into 3 cups of chopped firm Fuyus. Set aside.
In a large bowl, beat 1/2 cup soft butter with 1 2/3 cups sugar. Add 2 eggs, 2 tsp. lemon juice, and 2 tsp. vanilla and beat until fluffy. Stir in Fuyu mix.
Sift together 2 cups flour, 1 tsp. baking powder, 1 tsp. salt, 1 tsp. ground cloves, 1 tsp. cinnamon, and 1/2 tsp. nutmeg. Stir flour into Fuyu mixture just until blended. Add 1 cup chopped walnuts and 3/4 cup raisins.
Pour into prepared bundt pan. Bake at 350 for 55 - 60 minutes or until toothpick tests clean. Cool in pan 15 minutes. Turn onto rack.

Sourdough Calzone Dough
1 package dry active yeast
1/4 warm water
2T vegetable oil
1t sugar
1t salt
6 ounces soy yogurt
2 1/2 cups flour, whole wheat or all purpose

In large bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water. Stir in sugar, oil, salt, yogurt, and 1 cup of flour. Mix until smooth. Mix in enough remaining flour to make sough easy to handle.
Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface, knead until smooth and elastic, about 5 minutes. Cover with your bowl and let rest for 5 minutes.
Divide dough into 4 portions, roll out into circles. After filling and sealing your calzone, bake at 375 degrees for 30-35 minutes.

Tapioca Apples
1/3 cup minute Tapioca
1 1/4 cups water
1/2 cup sugar
1/2t cinnamon
1/2t salt
1/4 cup lemon juice
4 cups sliced apples

Bring water to boil in a small saucepan. Reduce heat to low, and add tapioca and sugar, stirring constantly until mixture is clear and thick. Stir in cinnamon, salt, and lemon juice.
Put apples in a shallow baking dish or pie pan. Pour tapioca mixture over the apples and bake in a 350 degree oven 30 minutes.