Hella Vegan Meats

Chickwheat lemongrass chicken

When I'm into something, I'm really into something. So what is it now? Making mock meats from scratch. It turns out, although I don't know why I'm surprised, that I can make delicious mock meats as good as Field Roast at home. 

Chickwheat stir-fried with mustard greens

It all started with this chickwheat recipe from Avocados and Ales. The next logical step was to substitute different beans for the chickpeas to make fake beef and lamb.

Freshly shredded fake meats

The method is simple: blend up your mostly umami-filled ingredients with some liquid. This may include mushroom powder, miso paste, Marmite, soy sauce, and either tofu or beans. Then, knead the blended ingredients with vital wheat gluten and perhaps some chickpea flour or potatoes. Steam your loaf, and then shred it once it cools down. What your left with is homemade chicken/beef/meat substitute that is perfect for stir-fries! I've been making double batches of this and freezing it because I know that my obsession will come to an end and future me will be happy that I have a quick protein to cook.

Unribs using the recipe in The Vegan Pantry

No more Field Roast or sketchy mock meats from abroad! The boy, my eternal guinea pig, has given everything a thumbs up so far. The favorites are lemongrass chickwheat, and the Now and Zen burger and unribs from The Vegan Pantry. I tried a vegan corned beef recipe from Connie's RAWsome Kitchen, but I think I overcooked it and the allspice was overpowering. I'll try it again since I like the idea of using a raw beat in the wheat meat.

Have you experimented with mock meats and cheeses? I'd love to try some new recipes, so please lemme know in the comments!

Greaseball Hates Your Plant-Based Foods

Greaseball is a straight up carnivore, and as such, he frowns upon my plant-based food experiments. They leave him hungry.

Speaking of plant-based food, I watched "Forks Over Knives" last week, and everyone in that movie avoids the "V word" and instead says "plant-based foods." Come on! Just say "vegan" and don't dance around it! At first, I thought they were avoiding the word because they were going to talk strictly about diet and not lifestyle changes, but that wasn't the case. It reminded me of the movie "Let Me Be Frank," when Frank who had already signed a contract to let Cafe Gratitude take over his diet and lifestyle, was dumbfounded when his keepers cleaned out the microwave from his apartment. You know why? Because no one told him, or he didn't figure out, that Cafe Gratitude was a vegan raw food joint. I understand that there is power in words and many people have negative associations with veganism, so it was interring to see how "Forks Over Knives" rebranded vegainism as "plant-based diet."

As many of you know (and probably why my RSS subscribers are leaving by the handful every week), I am a bit obsessed with nut cheese. I even went to a panel discussion on vegan cheese during Oakland Veg Week, although that was a little weird. The woman next to me said earnestly "You are very brave" during a show of hands of omnivorous audience members - I suspect I was the only one there who was an omnivore because I didn't see anyone in front of me with a raised hand I a felt too weird to look behind me in the room of about 100 people. I was the most excited person in the audience, though! The discussion was interesting, but it was more geared towards vegetarians who were thinking about crossing over to veganism and not those of us who just want to make a good nut cheese for the sake of nut cheese.

And speaking of nut cheese, a phrase I find myself saying often, I made the most amazing vegan nacho cheese sauce from Kenji at Serious Eats. We paired it with corn chips and black bean burgers and we felt fat and happy afterwards. Why is oozy cheese sauce such balm for the soul? The most interesting part of the recipe was that it achieved it's stretchy properties from russet potatoes that have been put through a high speed blender. There was no kappa carrageenan, agar, or xanthan gum added. Just potatoes! I want to tweak with the flavorings to make a smoked gouda cheese sauce because my last attempt with some carrageenan was a little funky. This nacho cheese sauce is going to get a second life as mac and cheese very soon.

Vegan Cheese is the Gateway Drug

Experimenting with vegan cheese has lead me down a a path lined with sprouts, essene bread, raw foods, and vegan yogurts. Anyone who has been around me in the past week will attest at my inability to talk about anything else. A few people have made it over to our house during this high experimentation time, and they've been lucky enough to not have any of these offerings foisted on them, but they can't escape so long as they know me. Yes, I lure people into my lair with cocktails, and then cram vegan cheese and raw crackers down their throats!

The vegan truffled brie experiment went well, although Sesame got first crack at tasting it. I've been drying my cheese near the back of my stove, and she actually pushed a step ladder over to the stove and swiped a huge chunk of cheese while I was at work. Undeterred and much to the boy's disgust, I cut off the bits my dog's mouth touched and continued aging the brie, this time in pet-free zone.

Does it taste like brie? Well, although I do like the taste, both the taste and the texture reminds me of… Condensed cream of mushroom soup. It's like I dumped a can of mushroom soup, air dried it for a few days so it develops a skin, and served it on a cracker. Does this mean I like it? Yes,  I do like it, but I think the next time I make this, I will skip the aging step, reduce the tapioca flour and agar powder, and just run with it as a delicious soup.

The plethora of cheese means that we need crackers and bread to eat with the cheese. (Unless you're Sesame. But, she has a laundry list of questionable favorite foods, so for the sake of this discussion, her opinion does not count.) I had leftover sprouted kamut, so I made some essene crackers. To make the crackers, I put the kamut into the food processor with a dab of honey, salt, and olive oil. There resulting mass was spread onto a silicone mat and dried at 150 F.

The resulting crackers are on the sweet side, so to fix that, my next batch of kamut won't be sprouted for as long and I'll reduce, or even omit, the honey. Essene bread can be bought commercially as Ezekiel Bread, a sprouted wheat bread that is dense in texture and nutrition.  I'm making it because I need more crackers and I don't want to buy them at the store when I have a pantry full of raw materials.

I made another batch of non-dairy yogurt, this time using a thick cashew milk as the base. This yogurt is much better than my last batch of soy and cashew yogurt, maybe because this time I used a spoonful of Nancy's Organic soy yogurt as a starter. The yogurt was tangy in about 6 hours, and it was creamy! The picture below was from when I first made the yogurt, but now that it's been in the refrigerator, it has a lot more body. I'm definitely making this again - the cashews are soaking as I type. We used the yogurt as a topping for a beet risotto, and it was fantastic! I also ate most of it with a spoonful of Meyer lemon marmalade.

The marmalade was gifted to me, and now that I'm out, I want more! I found this recipe and I have all the ingredients, so hopefully I'll have some more marmalade tucked away for future yogurt topping.

Ballerina Dreams and Vegan Cheese

When I saw Sesame taking over the chair, I thought she was dreaming of being a goofball. My friend Jenni, however, said she was dreaming of being a ballerina. I like Jenni's description better than mine.

I've been dreaming of vegan cheese since tasting the lovely non-dairy cheeses from Miyoko's Creamery. Cheesemaking has always been something I wanted to try, but the boy is allergic to dairy and raw milk is hard to come by (and a pretty penny). Nuts, however, store better and are a bulk bin away.

I checked out Artisan Vegan Cheese by Miyoko Schinner, and I've made two cheeses from her book. The first was the basic cashew cheese mixed with sun-dried tomatoes. It was good, and it would have been even better if I mixed in basil and some pine nuts. Since I had so much cheese, even after halving the recipe, I used some of it to make raviolis, and those were delicious! The filling held up well to boiling.

The second cheese was the vegan Gouda. This cheese was air dried, with a little bit of salt spread on the outside to keep it from molding. It's now been aging for 4 days, and although I want to age it longer, I don't know if it is going to last. It is so delicious! The texture is creamy on the inside with a semi-hard rind. For this recipe, I made my first batch of soy/cashew yogurt, and that yogurt is also a treat, especially when mixed with lemon verbena marmalade. As a side note, my Vitamix and my foldable proofer box (incubator) are two kitchen tools I cannot live without.

Today's experiment is going to be a vegan truffled brie, this time from Miyoko's website. I don't see the recipe currently up, but I was able to find a link to it on the Wayback Machine (update: link no longer works because I suspect this recipe is very similar to the truffled cheese sold my Miyoko's). I have high hopes for this brie!

While at Berkeley Bowl, there were two of us staring at the 6 different truffle oils. The other person had his smart phone out and was furiously typing away, and he was still trying to figure out which truffle oil to get for his scrambled eggs when I left. I wonder if he's still there? I grabbed the second smallest bottle that was around $10, because in my experience, I don't use the stuff up fast enough to pay anymore than that for my oil. The volatile compounds that make it so good dissipate after a few months. I also found agar powder, bulk cashews, and an economy sized jar of refined coconut oil.

The boys are hanging out a lot together, I think mostly because they are stubborn. Greaseball was the first one on the couch. He barely cracked an eye open when Mingus wanted to get on the couch, so I think they've assumed these positions before.

March Happenings

Since the big purge that I just can't stop yakking about, every unused item in our house has a target on it. Lately, I've been eyeing the string hopper press and steaming trays that we brought back from our November trip to Sri Lanka.

This meant that it was time to use the items, or ditch them. I wanted to use them. For the first string hopper attempt, I made a dough of rice flour, water, and a pinch of salt. Since there are hardily any ingredients, the resulting dough tasted just as bland as the rice flour that we used. Yes, steaming hot, those string hoppers were fantastic, but I notice that neither of us have touched the leftovers, so it's time for them to go into the circular file. I was also informed that I made the dough too stiff, and unnatural noises were coming from the boy as he pressed the noodles onto the trays. 

For the next string hopper attempt, I want to make red rice flour. The red string hoppers were my favorite, and it seems impossible to find red rice flour here. However, I can find red rice, so I think what I'll do is make the flour myself by soaking some red rice and possibly germinating it for added nutrition and taste, drying it out, and then blending it up with my Vitamix (I love that blender so much).

Sesame has finished another round of Canine Circus School, and that meant that we were going through dog treats quickly. Since I'm picky about what every creature eats in this household (although I cannot say that I have much control over the largest creature's food and drink consumption), the prepackaged treats I was buying were so expensive for how fast we were going through them. So, I actually baked for my dogs. For the first treats, I used this recipe for Tuna Training Treats (scroll down), but I didn't add the Parmesan cheese because my dogs don't need to be that gourmet. They were a hit!

For my second recipe, I made it up, which is why it turned out really ugly. I had a ton of roasted butternut squash pulp in the freezer, so I defrosted it and blended it with eggs, peanut butter, and rice flour. I need to work on the proportions, but I'm happy to say that the dogs also liked these treats (although Greaseball thinks they are crap - he much prefers the tuna treats). The two batches of treats should last us for a few weeks, and they are much cheaper than the $11 per small bag I was paying.

On a lot of the dog treats, they list brown rice flour as an ingredient, so I want to make some brown rice flour, too.  Maybe April will be the rice flour experiment month. I also found some old chicken fat in the freezer, another ingredient in dog treats. Cleaning out my freezer by making dog treats makes my frugal heart swell.

For now, I've quit my CSA. I had so many melons in the summer and so many winter squashes and turnips in the fall/winter, things that I like in moderation but I cannot choke down on a daily basis. While I love the idea of a CSA, especially when I'm too slammed with work to go to the market, it wasn't working for the household. Partially because begin slammed with work means that we eat out more, so things in the refrigerator were staying there past their prime and ending up in the compost bin. I hope I can join again someday, but it's not working for us right now.

Vegan cheese, or as the state of California makes you legally call it, cultured nut product, is now on my radar. I had a delicious round of smoked farmhouse cheese, and I want to make similar cheeses myself.  Miyoko Schinner, the person behind Miyoko's Creamery, has a recipe book called Artisan Vegan Cheese. Fortunately, my library had a few copies available, so now my kitchen counters are littered with soaking grains and nuts. Her recipes start with rejuvelac, a liquid made from sprouted grains. In my pantry, I had millet and kamut, so those are the two rejuvelacs fermenting on my counter.

Rejuvelac is a stupid word, and when I read the wiki about it, I found that it is a tonic that was popularized/invented in the US by Ann Wigmore. The word is too hippy for me, although I'm sure it will do just fine for my cultured nut product. 

Sandor Katz has a section on nut cheese in The Art of Fermentation. He says to simply add some sauerkraut juice to start the culture, which sounds easier than what I'm doing since I have a vat of sauerkraut bubbling away right now. However, I read that after I started the rejuvelac, so I'll follow the recipe, for once.

Instagram is quickly becoming my online time waster of choice, so if you want to see what I'm up to in real-time, click here: .  There are more dog and cat photos there. Most of these pictures are recycled Instagram photos.