For my contribution, I baked because it’s what I do. I figured everyone would like ciabatta rolls, so I made some of those. There was also a maple walnut oat loaf made with white whole wheat. Kind of healthy but didn’t taste like it.

Somehow I didn’t get any pictures of the snickerdoodles I made. They were definitely a hit though. Who knew such a simple cookie could be so popular? The main dessert was this pumpkin cinnamon swirl cheesecake. Tasty, but I think I would have liked it a little denser. Others liked the fact that it was a little softer. It was perfectly set up though and cut and stayed together nicely. I forgot to swirl it though so it kind of looks like rock strata.

Here’s my plate of belt-loosening goodness, clockwise starting at 12: sweet potatoes with Dandies marshmallows, mac & cheese,  Stuffed Hazelnut Cranberry Roast En Croute By Field Roast, dressing and mashed potatoes under the gravy, Match Vegan Meats holiday roast (this time the pre-made version), the maple walnut oat bread and green bean casserole in the center. There were also two cranberry sauces: the regular jelled canned kind and a home made cranberry pineapple sauce. I had to clear some space before I could get them on my plate though.

Both the roasts were great but different. A more traditional person might like the Match roast better. I really enjoyed the cranberries, apples and crystallized ginger in the Field Roast. But I know ginger is a strong flavor and can turn some people off.

I’ve been cruising the vegan blogs today checking out everyone’s holiday meals in between working and mopping up drool. As with vegan cheeses, how much does it rock that we have an actual assortment of holiday roasts to choose from now?

© laura for abracapocus.org, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: baking, bread, field roast, holiday, marshmallows, match vegan meats, thanksgiving, vegan, vegetarian

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A couple of weeks ago, I posted about making Vegan Dad’s lunch meat log. These logs have seen me through many meals. Most of them looked something like this:

Yep, that’s the lunch meat nestled between two slices of whole wheat bread I made. The problem with baking your own bread is that it will sneak itself into every meal if you let it. PB&J for breakfast! Lunch meat sammich for lunch! Toasted and buttered with Earth Balance along side dinner! Well, at least it is whole wheat…

Oh, remember the polenta fries? Leftovers made a nice lunch side. Much better than potato chips!

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Post tags: bread, grain, polenta, sammich, sandwich, vegan, veganmofo 2009, vegetarian, wheat gluten, whole wheat

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I wouldn’t change anything about the seitan steaks. The breading was lovely. Seasoned nicely. The gravy seemed a bit bland to me so I added two tablespoons of nutritional yeast. Perfect! The sweet potatoes I steamed in the pressure cooker. It all came together really well but isn’t the kind of meal I would make on a standard week night. Too much work and too many dirty dishes. To add to the chaos, I was also baking off a whole wheat sandwich bread that turned out to be just cool enough to slice and eat with dinner.

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Post tags: baking, bread, collards, fried, seitan, southern, sweet potatoes, vegan, vegetarian

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I enjoyed my first slices with a raw kale salad and marinated grilled tempeh. A pretty healthy lunch.

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Post tags: artisan, bread, jeffrey hamelman, sourdough, vegan, vegetarian

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How did I do it? I pulled the starter out, stirred the hooch in (the liquid on top) and put it on the counter in a new bowl. Leaving it on the counter, I fed it with half a cup of flour and half a cup of water twice a day. At each feeding , I poured off about half the starter into a container of excess. But I’ll get to that later.

Friday night I began the Vermont Sourdough from Hamelman’s Bread. Saturday morning I worked through the shaping and then retarded the two loaves in the fridge overnight. Then Sunday morning I baked them off one at a time on my pizza stone. The first loaf I steamed once with ice cubes. The 2nd loaf I added a second steaming. The second steaming seemed to give the 2nd loaf a little more spring. The taste was mild but clearly the starter did its job. Nice rise, good crumb. Chewy crust. Sourdough bread is such a process that it’s even more satisfying when it all goes well.

So there have been sammichs, bread slice snacks, bread with salad, etc. And I haven’t cut into the second loaf yet! So what to do with the cast-off starter created when feeding? There are a bunch of things you can do with it, but this time I chose scones. (Obviously, I veganized that recipe.) It really doesn’t act to rise the scones, but flavors them a little and keeps you from having to throw the excess in the garbage.

tempeh salad sammich

apple pie sourdough scones

It’s been a while, so I’m going to submit this post to WildYeast’s Yeastspotting. Head over there every Friday for a collection of baking porn from around the internets.

© laura for abracapocus.org, 2009. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: baking, bread, sourdough, vegan, vegetarian, yeastspotting

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The Cajun Tofu from Yellow Rose Recipes has turned out to be a great quick week night dinner star. Once you have the spice mixture around, the rest can be made up of staples I keep around. This time we had it with some of the collards that are filling my freezer and some hash browns that cooked up quicker because I diced ‘em smaller. Oh, and that’s a little bowl of home made apple sauce.

When I saw this fairly quick recipe for bread bowls, I knew I’d eventually be dumping come Cholent from Veganomicon into them. I was right! The dry milk powder was replaced with soy milk powder.

Trying to keep the healthy cruise diet going, I baked up some Asian tofu and ate it on a salad of raw kale and bok choy seasoned with sesame oil.

And finally, this Peanut Butter Quick Bread recipe looked interesting. I thought it would be even more interesting as Peanut Butter and Jelly Bread. So that’s what I did. The bread itself is not all that sweet like a lot of quick breads, so the jelly does not make it too sweet. I veganized by using a flax egg and soy milk as replacements. The recipe worked in both bread and muffin form.

© laura for abracapocus.org, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: baking, bread, cholent, kale, muffins, peanut butter, tofu, vegan, veganomicon, vegetarian, yellow rose recipes

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When I saw this recipe while cruising VeganMoFo blogs, I knew I’d be making it soon. I mean, I had JUST cooked up a big batch of chickpeas. How could I not? Plus I’m apparently obsessed with pumpkin right now. I even bought one at the farmer’s market this weekend to bake up for myself. But for the hummus, I used the lazy canned kind. But I made up for that laziness by making my own pita.

For the pita, I used the recipe in The Bread Bible. It’s pretty simple and the dough can rest in the fridge for up to three days. So it’s easy to make them on your timetable rather than letting the yeast rule you. 

resting pita dough

all rolled out

 Oh yeah, I almost forgot the really fun part about the pita. I mixed up the dough Sunday evening. I was a little tired. When I was getting the water, I just filled a measuring cup with water, then checked the temperature to make sure it was okay. The next step would have been to poor off the excess and pour the amount the recipe called for into the bowl. But I just dumped the whole thing into the bowl. Crap! So I added a little more yeast and flour until it felt right. Apparently I am learning what “feels right” means because they came out just fine. All but one even puffed like it should. And that one half puffed.

puffy fresh baked pita balls

So, what about that hummus & chard? I gave you the link to the pumpkin hummus at the beginning. I don’t know if my garlic was super strong, but if you’re garlic shy, you should start with half the amount and see how you like it. I liked it just fine! It’s also a wee bit spicy. It mixes up really nice and smooth in the food processor. Sometimes hummus recipes don’t behave as well. The chard is Tunisian Braised Chard from Olive Trees and Honey. Flavorful and juicy. The pot liquor was so good that I’ve been drinking it after I finish the veggies. 

pumpkin hummus, tunisian braised chard, pita

This post brought to you by: Kevin’s old powerbook! Which is really cute and small and sort of makes me wish the new MacBooks had a little bitty version. Bad news: someone broke into my house and took my shit. Good news: I’ll get a new computer a little sooner than I was planning. Bad news: probably not replacing camera. 

Oh, and it might be too late, but I’m going to send this to Susan at Wild Yeast Blog for YeastSpotting. Even if it doesn’t make it, you should check out the YeastSpotting round-up every Friday. You’ll drool over all the bread yummies people have been making.

© laura for abracapocus.org, 2008. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bread, hummus, pita, pumpkin, swiss chard, vegan, veganmofo, vegetarian, yeast

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Half of a plain bagel with cream cheese, half eaten

Not the first bagels I’ve eaten, but the first ones I’ve ever made. Like most bread, there is a series of timed steps that each contribute to the yumminess. For this batch, I used Rose Levy Beranbaum’s recipe in The Bread Bible. I have some steps for you here in pictures. I skipped pics of the sponge and bulk rise parts though. Too bad, you could’ve seen the dough almost bust out of it’s container.

Shaping bagels is pretty easy. After you’ve separated the dough into pieces, you poke a finger in the center, pick it up, stretch until you can get both fingers in the hole (yeah, it’s pretty naughty) and either pull and rotate around until you’ve got a 2 1/2″ hole (it’ll snap back) or wind it around with your fingers as kind of spokes like Kevin did and it’ll go really fast. That last bit is hard to describe. Oh well, you’ll figure it out.

Bagels taking a boiling bath

You boil them up for about 2 minutes per side. Then let rest for a minute on a clean towel to drain before transferring to a baking sheet.

Boiled bagels ready for baking

Bagels baking in my crappy oven

Bagels just out of the oven

These are spongy and chewy crusted like bagels should be. We also made a few onion bagels. They were even more amazing. I was concerned because it looked like the onions were burninating while they were baking, but it all turned out fine.

Onion bagel

In addition to this being a VeganMofo post, I’m submitting it to Wild Yeast Blog’s weekly Yeastspotting feature. Every week Susan rounds up yummy baking posts from around the ‘net. Check it out.

© laura for abracapocus.org, 2008. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: bagels, baking, bread, vegan, veganmofo, vegetarian, yeastwatching

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First thing I did was feed all my cultures. And I saved some cast-off to make sourdough waffles. 

sourdough waffles

First bread up is the Golden Raisin Bread. This one calls for a culture plus a little bit of commercial yeast. I still have two cultures I haven’t used yet, so this made use of one, the Alaska. With a good % of whole wheat flour and some rolled oats thrown in for good measure, this turned out to be a pretty hearty and healthy bread. My slashing is definitely a problem. Nothing I’ve tried is sharp or thin enough to do the job properly. I have some proper lames on the way though.

golden raisin bread

golden raisin bread crumb

Those went off without any problems. But I do dumb stuff from time to time. Like, I’ve had a dough rising in then oven, forgot and turned on the oven to preheat. Der. This weekend my dumb thing was to have the olive levain dough on top of my stove while the oven was preheating for the raisin bread. Oh yeah, on the burner above the oven vent. So I ended up cutting a chunk of that dough off. See, here is the olive dough cooking away on the burner with the raisin dough next to it and my waffle batter.

doughs

So, I kind of thought I might have killed the olive levain, but I continued as planned anyway. After a couple of folds, I shaped it and put it in the fridge to retard for what ended up being about 24 hours. It came out of the fridge a little sloppy and flat, so I kind of pulled it back into an oblong loaf shape, slashed it, spritzed it with water and threw it in the oven to bake, a couple of ice cubes chucked in the bottom for steam. Sure enough, it started rising. I hadn’t killed all the yeast! Sure, I lost some oven spring, but it still turned out wonderful. It has received nothing but compliments so far. I can only imagine how good it’ll be if I don’t try to ruin it!

olive levain

olive levain up close

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Post tags: baking, bread, sourdough, vegan, vegetarian

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So, this time, I decided to make the same recipe, the Vermont Sourdough from Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread using two different starters, Australian and Danish Rye. Just to see the difference and as an excuse to make even more bread. I mean, if you’re gonna heat up the oven for 4 loaves, might as well make it 6!

The difference between the two was subtle. In the end, I think the Australian wasn’t quite as sour. The rise and crumb seemed to be about the same. These are the loaves with the Rye starter, but the other looked about the same:

Here is the crumb from the Rye starter:

The crumb of the Australian starter. As you can see, I fear my oven going crazy and shooting up in temperature and burning my breads, so I have a habit of taking them out as soon as the internal temperature reaches 205-210 degrees F.

And here is a slice of each side by side. The Australian wasn’t actually flatter than the Rye, I was just further into the Rye loaf when these were cut.

All in all I was really happy with both. Obviously there’s lots of room for improvement, but I think I’m doing pretty well for someone that has no idea what she’s doing.  

How did I use all this bread? Gave a bunch away, of course. Ate it sliced with Earth Balance. Sliced with peanut butter. Toasted with EB alongside Lentil and Pastina Soup. Made French Toast with it and had with tofu scramble and obligatory green vegetable, broccoli. And had this morning toasted with EB and pomegranate jelly and with leftover scramble.

Coming soon, experiments in laminated dough, or, OMG I’m covered in Earth Balance. Ewww!

© laura for abracapocus.org, 2008. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: baking, bread, jeffrey hamelman, northwest sourdough, sourdough, vegan, vegetarian

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