What Kate Ate

If I were stranded on a desert island with one of my sisters, I would definitely pick Alyssa. Because I love Alyssa more, right? FALSE. What a terrible thing to say! Everyone knows I love Erin way more! Actually, it’s because Alyssa and I eat virtually none of the same foods. So, I wouldn’t have to share my food supply with her. But Erin and I, on the other hand, love the same foods! In fact, we made a bunch of these foods this weekend when she came to visit. So many foods, in fact, that I will probably need three entries to discuss them all.

Exhibit A: chickpea cutlets. Chickpea cutlets are from Isa and Terry’s newest cookbook, Veganomicon. They are über famous for their awesomeness. Basically, you mash up some chickpeas with gluten flour, bread crumbs, vegetable broth, garlic, and spices. You knead the dough a bit and then you form them into, well, cutlet shapes. Erin was the expert cutlet-shaper sous-chef.

Then you just cook those suckers in a frying pan. And that’s it! They take less than a half hour to make in total. Beside them are some steaming hot lemony roasted potatoes from Veganomicon as well. They might be my favorite way to make potatoes yet. I also ate mine with asparagus and kale, and Erin had hers with carrots.

The chickpea cutlets actually don’t taste overwhelmingly like chickpeas, but they do taste overwhelmingly like happy. Just like Isa says, they are vegan food that you can cut with a steak knife. Erin and I both thought they would make the best burger ever as well. I even think Alyssa would like them. And that’s saying something.

Bonus picture! Erin and me in Cascadilla falls.

Up next: banana ice cream and pancakes! But not together. Though that would be a great breakfast.

If you are on the fence about veganism, take heed, ye nonbeliever! There is one reason, and one reason only, to go vegan. It is not about abstaining from thousands of acts of murder over your lifetime. Nor is it about arming yourself against cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. These are just the fringe benefits, folks! Truly, if there is one reason to go vegan, it is for the sweet, sweet loving that may be delivered to your door by your friendly neighborhood postman for the low, low price of kindness and compassion!*

In February, I organized a care package exchange with my fabulous veg*n friends. Care package exchanges are just like the secret Santa’s you did in elementary school (religiously motivated celebrations of materialistic wealth in the public school system! Don’t you love it?) but without the blatantly gender-specific toys that someone else’s mother picked out from the dollar store . As organizer-in-chief of this event, I gathered up all of our addresses, tossed them into my secret Santa hat, and matched them into random pairs.** Then we each assembled a treasure box of goodies based on the likes and dislikes of our partners. We even have a name for our exchange–BBV’s: benevolent baking vegefactors–so named because baking tends to be central to the care package experience, though it is not required.

Now, we know from previous posts that my two favorite things are pineapple and coconut. But my three favorite things are pineapple, coconut, and sending people letters and gifts. So, assembling a care package is absolute bliss for me. I had the pleasure of making a package for lovely Miss Laura, who writes the Vegan University column at tastebetter.com. As happenstance would have it, Laura and I have remarkably similar interests. In fact, I am not yet convinced that I didn’t accidentally match myself up with myself. Specifically, we both like tea, scones, and Anne of Green Gables. This actually complicated matters quite a bit; while the package was a breeze to assemble, I secretly wanted to keep it for myself and pretend like it was lost in the mail. It was a trial, but I persevered.

The package looked like this:

Clockwise from the left, we have Really Good Vegan Raisin Scones, Kiss-Ass Molasses Cookies, a mug with an assortment of teas, a recipe box, a crocheted cupcake, coasters, and mini cookie cutters. Sadly, I hadn’t the foresight or the willpower to take pictures of the package I received from Kelsi, my own BBV, but let me tell you, it was chock full o’ coconutty goodness.

A thoughtful package can make a person’s day. In an earlier exchange this past December, I received my package on what felt like the longest day of my college life: a five-hour Teach for America interview followed by several hours of studying for a final that same evening. But when I arrived home, I found a package from “Cali,” my oh-so-benevolent benefactress. Inside was an assortment of goodies of the knitting, tea-drinking, and baking variety, including these handmade stitchmarkers:

The package changed my day entirely.

In conclusion, a reassessment of my favorite things in life is in order:

1. pineapple coconut

2. pineapple

3. snail mail

4. Anne of Green Gables tea

5. tea Anne of Green Gables

6. Colin Firth/knitting/running/red wine (about equal on any given day)

7. spreading happiness to the people I love with simple words and actions

8. cupcakes/Lost (again, about equal).

*Shipping and handling not included. Some restrictions may apply. Offer not valid with any other offers, discounts, or promotions. Valid within the continental United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, and Guam.

**Bold-faced lie. I created an Excel spreadsheet, assigned each participant a number, then used a random number generator to produce a second sequence of numbers. I then juxtaposed these lists to generate a set of pairings.

Cookie dough is a strange creature. Everyone likes to eat cookie dough, but no one really considers it a legitimate treat. It’s one thing to eat a tube of Tollhouse when you are sitting around watching The Girls Next Door or Sound of Music in sweatpants with your friends on Thursday night. It’s quite another to say at the dinner table, “Why yes, cookie dough would round out this meal quite nicely.” Why is this so? Some people are afraid of salmonella and still hear their mother’s voice foreboding death upon raw dough consumption. Daft omnivores, just leave the eggs out! Also, cookie dough is seen as the lazy person’s dessert. It says, “Well, I was making cookies, but they looked so delicious, and I was too hungry to bother baking them, so I just ate the raw dough!” I say, if you want to eat cookie dough, eat it like you mean it! Stand and proclaim, “I just ate a spoonful of pure margarine, refined sugar, white flour, and vanilla extract, and I enjoyed it!”

Enter the Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Brownie. This concoction is a recent vegweb favorite. It comprises three layers: a brownie layer, a cookie dough layer, and a chocolate glaze. You bake the brownies, let them cool, spread cookie dough over them, and slather the whole thing in melted chocolate. The result is a classy dessert which embraces cookie dough as the foundation of a dish rather than closeting it as a shameful late night snack.

While the yields of the various layers were off–I ended up with several doughless brownies–these goodies are a trifecta of cake-like, fudgy, and crunchy. In fact, the brownies are so cake-like that referring to them as brownies is a transgression against the brownie gods. Slicing them was also a challenge-the lighter brownies sagged beneath the dense dough and hard topping. I had to use my sharpest chef’s knife to slice them apart.

Even though this recipe would benefit from a firmer brownie, I think we’d be hard pressed to find a person who did not enjoy this elopement of brownie and cookie, baked and unbaked, and chocolate and chocolate-chip.

Update! I brought these to a party at work, and my friend Alex said, “Well, I don’t usually eat dessert, but I have to save room for those.” He ate one and took about five home. By the end of the party, the entire pan (the size of a cookie sheet) was gone. Cookie dough brownies: SUCCESS.

So, I’ve never really liked mangoes. It’s not that I was scarred by a bad mango encounter. But they’ve always tasted….chemical-ish….to me. Like a delicious fruit that’s been dunked in a bucket of bleach. I do, however, like mango-flavored things, though it is often the case that fruit flavors taste nothing like the fruits themselves. Take banana. Banana-flavored things are, in general, nauseating. One exception to this rule are banana Runts. Are these vegan? I haven’t yet had the opportunity to check. It’s a shame if not, because they are the only example of delicious banana flavoring I know of. Don’t even get me started on banana Laffy Taffy. It is evil and putrescence in candy form.

Did I say this was about mangoes? So I really want to like mangoes. It’s silly, really. But they’re so darn pretty with their greenness and their pinkness and their yellowness. And lots of recipes use mango. So, I’ve been buying it. And I must say, it’s not half as bad as I remember. I learned from videojug.com how to cut it into pretty cubes, which already makes it twice as yummy as it would be otherwise.

So, I’ve been enjoying mangoes in my fruit salads and sometimes (blasphemous!) by themselves. They’re nice for something different. They’ll never come close to my beloved pineapple, but I think we can get along just fine.

Update: Runts are probably not vegan.  They contain stearates, which often come from animal fats.  Le sigh.

The best things in life come in cups. Don’t you agree? Tea, boobs, and cupcakes come to mind, but surely you can think of many others.

So far, I have made a handful of the cupcakes from Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. The cookies and cream variation of the chocolate cupcakes were eaten before documentation could occur, which gives you an idea of their radness. But this quartet of cupcakes is just as scrumptious.

Peanut Butter Cupcakes with Chocolate Buttercream

Hello, why didn’t someone think of peanut butter cupcakes earlier? Clearly, it takes a vegan’s unmatched culinary creativity to think up these cups of glory.

I made these for my friends for New Year’s Eve this year. I topped them with chocolate buttercream instead of ganache because I felt rather Martha Stuart that day, I suppose. I also sprinkled on some chopped peanuts and plopped a chocolate-covered peanut on top. And with that, this paragraph has reached its quota of the words “chocolate” and “peanut butter.”

Pineapple Right-Side-Up Cupcakes turned Piña Colada Cupcakes

When it comes down to it, there are really only two things I love in life: pineapple and coconut. I mean, really, let’s not complicate life. Getting caught in the rain is shitty. And I’m too tired to make love at midnight on the dunes at the cape. And hey, maybe I am into yoga! But piña coladas are forever.

These cupcakes are so moist because they have crushed pineapple in the batter. The topping is easy–you just glop on more crushed pineapple. But I, however, was inspired by the bottle of Malibu sitting on my countertop and decided to drink add a couple shots to the topping to make piña colada cupcakes. They were brilliant. I topped each one with a raspberry. Festive, no?

Lemon Macadamia Cupcakes with Lemon Buttercream

These cuppas are oh-so-classy. Lemon was simply destined for macadamia nuts just as Elizabeth Bennett was destined for Mr. Darcy. And just as Colin Firth is destined for me, though he doesn’t know it yet. But neither did the lemons.

I toasted the nuts beforehand to make them good and golden. They really are pretty, even without fancy piping. And the lemon buttercream is divine.

S’mores Cupcakes

These are the only s’mores I will ever need in life. The cake itself has graham cracker crumbs (genious!) and is so yummy. I’d like to make a whole sheet cake out of it someday.

I sprinkled graham cracker crumbs over the buttercream, and I used some leftover chocolate chips from some other recipe to make a small amount of ganache for some of the cupcakes. Next time I think I will use a big round frosting tip to make the frosting even puffier, like the ice cream cones at Dairy Queen.

Trivia time! Why do they call them “cupcakes”? The obvious response is, “Because they are baked in cup form, smart ass!” But some also speculate that the word “cup” refers to measurements–that a “cup cake” was something you made by using one cup of this, two cups of that, and so forth. “Cup cake” is a cousin of “pound cake” in this sense. But in my mind, this is a “cup cake,” not a “cupcake.” A “cupcake” is it’s own separate entity, whereas a “cup cake” is just a special kind of cake with a certain recipe. In my opinion. Just saying. I won’t slap you if you call a “cupcake” a “cup cake,” but I might twitch a little.

This tofu scramble is doubly scrambly (say that out loud, please) because I made it in a hurry. It is really more of a veggie scramble with tofu than a tofu scramble with veggies because of all the vegetables–broccoli, onions, mushrooms, zucchini, yellow squash, and spinach. Well, mushrooms aren’t a vegetable, they are a fungus. But they might as well be an honorary vegetable because it’s lonely in the fungus food group. Heck, it’s not even a group, it’s just “fungus” in the singular. Poor shrooms.

Tofu scramble makes me nostalgic because it is one of the first recipes I made after going vegan. It is, I think, one of my favorite dishes to make. You can use any ingredients you have, you can use any spices you like, and you can make it for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. So much awesome in one little meal.

I used turmeric to make it yellow, which got me thinking about this enigma of a spice. Does anyone really like turmeric? Does anyone actually use it for its flavor and not to color foods radioactive yellow? Honestly, by itself it tastes like powdered sidewalk chalk that’s gone a bit stale, if such a thing were possible. But it does turn tofu into sunshine, and that’s what matters here.