VeganMoFo #5: Apple-Pear Crepes with Soyatoo and Toasted Hazelnuts

I haven't done much cooking this week, partly because I've been sick for most of it, meaning all I want to eat is toast. If I were less culinarily inclined, I might eat toast twice a day. It's good food. But also inhibiting my cooking projects this week was the fact that my oven broke. Which I discovered after spending half an hour assembling a Mexican lasagna that now sits in my freezer. But luckily only the oven is out of commission and the stovetop is unaffected. So to make up for the lack of delicious food this week, I spent a ridiculous amount of time making breakfast this morning. Well, that, and to celebrate my first wedding anniversary. OK, that's probably the only reason I went overboard. It takes the oven being broken to realize that I rely on it heavily for breakfast. Scones, muffins, coffeecake; there's not much else in my morning repetoire. So today I fancied it up with sweet crepes (from Veganomicon) with sauteed apples and pears, vanilla whipped Soyatoo, and toasted hazelnuts. There was also Chicago Diner style tofu scramble with sunflower and black sesame seeds, but it wasn't very photogenic. And how can humble tofu stand up next to fancy ass crepes?

Oh, and hazelnuts are delicious and crunchy and all, but it's much more fun to call them filberts. Especially if you say it in the voice of an eighty-year-old woman. Filberts.

Dan's Birthday Dinner

Last week was my lovely husband Dan's birthday. But since we had just returned from our Seattle/Portland vacation (where we ate roughly 80,000 calories, I'm estimating) two days before, there wasn't much time to plan much of a celebration. On the cab ride home from the airport (at 11:30 on a Tuesday. ugh), Dan declared that he wanted cheesy mac and garlic bread for a birthday dinner. Now, due to those roughly 80,000 calories, I wasn't too stoked on this idea, as what he wanted was one of the first recipes I mastered when I was in college. I have no idea where the original recipe came from, as I think I received a stained print-out from someone along the way. It was incredibly creamy and velvety and delicious but called for loads and loads of both oil and margarine. Add super greasy garlic bread to that, and my vacation-stuffed stomach wasn't thrilled. So I decided it was finally time to de-fat (at least partially) the recipe and see how it turned out. It still needs some tweaking (I think the tempeh needs to be grated for a more "sausage" like texture, and it could maybe be a bit moister), but overall it was a (much-healthier) success. And it gets even better the next day. The tempeh sausage crumbles are straight from Vegan with a Vengeance (minus the spices I had unexpectedly run out of), but the rest is straight from my head.

Tempeh Cheesy Mac

1/2 cup nutritional yeast
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 - 1 3/4 cup water
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/8 tsp turmeric
3 Tbsp margarine
paprika
1 1/2 cups macaroni, slightly undercooked
1 recipe tempeh sausage crumbles

Mix nutritional yeast, flour, water, soy sauce, garlice powder, and turmeric together in a small saucepan and heat over medium until thickened. Melt in margarine. In an 8x8 casserole dish, mix together sauce, macaroni, and tempeh and sprinkle with paprika. Bake at 350 for 15 minutes.

And to totally mess up the "healthiness" of the cheesy mac, Dan made his "world famous" garlic bread. Whenever he cooks something, he calls it world famous, even (or maybe especially) when it's the first time he's ever made it. I think the only time I've disputed this title was when he found a cucumber in the fridge, thought it was a zucchini (not sure how one makes that mistake), and put it in chili! Then again, maybe that is world famous, just not in a good way.

And dessert. Strawberry shortcake, with biscuits from Martha, with WAY less sugar on the berries, and whipped Soyatoo. Oh my God, Soyatoo is the best thing ever. Seriously. I whipped it up with half a vanilla bean and a few spoonfuls of sugar, and it reminded me of being a kid and eating spoonful and spoonful of Cool-Whip straight out of the package. I loved that stuff. But knowing that it's 99% chemicals, 1% whey freaks me out now. So thank you, Soyatoo, for actually resembling whipped cream (or whipped-cream-like product) without being icky. The whole thing was incredible, and such an improvement over those weird little sponge cakes at the grocery store.