Homemade Cinnamon-Pecan Praline Vegan Ice Cream

It turns out good vegan ice cream isn't terribly hard to make at home if you have a Vitamix. We came up with this recipe by tweaking one that comes with the Vitamix cookbook. Their version is also based on nuts, but they use water instead of soy milk, and their version is good fresh but freezes into solid ice if you don't finish it right away. Our version can be eaten fresh (~soft serve texture) or frozen and just set out for a few minutes before serving. Here's the recipe, with pics of each step along the way:

Pecan praline coating:
¾ cup pecans, chopped
¼ tsp salt
½ tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cayennne pepper (optional)
1 Tbsp margarine
1 Tbsp brown sugar

Ice cream:
1 cup pecans, chopped
3 cup vanilla soy milk, frozen into cubes
½ cup vanilla soy milk, chilled
¼ cup maple syrup
1 tsp vanilla
1 Tbsp dark rum
1 tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp salt

At least 4 hours before making your ice cream, freeze 3 cups of the vanilla soy milk (I do it the night before). Also, dry roast all of the pecans in a skillet until fragrant and golden (be careful not to let them burn). Set aside 1 cup of the pecans and freeze them. Put the rest of the pecans in a bowl, and keeping the skillet hot, melt the margarine. Add the salt, cinnamon, and brown sugar and mix well, followed by the pecans. Keep stirring until the pecans are coated, and the coating has mostly dried and crystallized onto the pecans. Set aside (separately from the 1 cup of plain pecans).

Once the cubes have frozen hard (they should be totally dry), add all of the ingredients listed under “ice cream” (except the frozen cubes of soy milk) to your Vitamix (please don’t try this in a normal blender; it will likely break). Chip the cubes out of the ice cube tray (mine always stick pretty badly) and add them to the Vitamix. Select variable 1, turn the machine on, and quickly increase to 10 and switch it to “high.” Use the tamper to press all of the ingredients down into the blades. Wait ~30-60 seconds for the sound of the motor to change and four mounds to form. Be sure not to overmix or it will melt extra. Pour into a bowl, fold in the praline pecans, and freeze.

Note that I made this recipe with the intent of freezing it after you make it and having it still be good. You could reduce the rum and liquid soy milk if you wanted to eat it right away, which will make it firmer up front.

Here are pics of each step:

I find that using a silicon ice cube tray (in this case, a gummi bear shaped one) prevents the frozen soy milk from sticking to the tray.

Note that the tray always ends up with some soy milk in it, and I have to use a knife to chip them out.

This shows the texture of the ice cream when it comes out of the Vitamix, it is definitely on the soft side due to the rum / salt / soy milk.

This is the cinnamon pecan praline awaiting being stirred into the ice cream prior to being frozen, and the finally eaten!

What does a vegan butcher shop look like?!

Just so you're not in suspense, here's the short answer (a shot of the deli case):



Gutenfleischer's is a vegan butcher shop located inside a vegan bakery (Dough) in Atlanta, GA. The basic setup is similar to a traditional deli. OK, it's not really a vegan "butcher shop" because you don't get to choose a particular "cut" of wheat or soy (e.g. "I'll take a radicle, two cotytledons, and a lean cut of endosperm"), but you do get to choose from an array of homemade fake meats (made from wheat gluten, or seitan) which are then sliced super-thin on a real meat slicer:



The end result looks like this, not terribly different from what you'd buy at a normal deli. Super-thin slices wrapped in plain brown wax paper (please ignore the old toaster oven tray they're sitting on):


Being curious, I naturally had to try every one, and I knew that Sarah would want to as well. So I ordered a quarter-pound each of all nine flavors, which kept her slicing for quite a while. Those were ham, Cajun ham, Canadian bacon, roast beef, Genoa salami, pepperoni, pepper turkey, buffalo turkey, and herb turkey. I also got a hot sandwich (a roast beef "au jus" thing which was surprisingly tasty and satisfying), a vegan sausage biscuit with tofu scrambled egg, and some desserts.

Unfortunately I visited about two months ago, so I don't have a perfect recollection of each of the meats. However, overall we enjoyed them quite a bit. Relative to their meaty cousins, these certainly tended to be significantly less juicy, although to be fair it took us a few days to get to all of them, which likely dried them out a bit. As you'd probably expect, they didn't taste just like meat, but they did have lots of flavor. The ham and bacon were the closest to tasting like the real thing, and might even fool someone not paying close attention. Most of them were very different, but good in their own way. For example, the Genoa salami didn't taste like salami much, but it did have a lovely peppery flavor. The turkey buffalo was nice and spicy, the pepperoni was complex and delicious, and while the roast beef had a mild flavor I still definitely enjoyed it.

If you find yourself visiting Atlanta it's definitely worth stopping by. Aside from the surreal experience of watching logs of vegan meats be sliced, and the unique culinary experience, you also may get ideas for changing up your diet at home.

Portland Eats n' Vegan Conference

For my readers who weren't at the Vida Vegan Bloggers Conference and who don't currently reside in Portland (Hi Mom and Dad!), I'm going to give you a re-cap of the conference, my impressions of Portland, and discuss stuffing my face.


(This is brunch at Sweetpea Vegan Bakery. It was transcendent, and I ate only the biscuit portion of this offering to the Gods. Clearly, we have to move to Portland.)

We stayed with our friend Bernie, who began a string of awesome host actions by picking us up at the metro station. Although we'd had all sorts of dreams of exploring Portland together by bike, Jon had unfortunately broken his toe boogieboarding so instead was relegated to one of those embarrassing knee scooters.

Before I arrived in Portland I printed out my list about 90 restaurants in Portland, and didn't even bother including food carts. I don't know if you've ever been to a food cart in DC - a tiny rectangular tin coffin with gummy oversalted soft pretzels and hot dogs - but I was entirely prejudiced against food carts - how could good food come from them? Thankfully, my yelp-loving husband convinced me to try the highest yelp-rated food cart in all of Portland Kitchen Dances. H-O-L-Y S-M-O-K-E-S, that is some GOOD FOOD.

We feasted on the tempeh Reuben, the raw beet ravioli, and then bought tacos not due to any hunger or actual room left in our bellies, but because that's just how good the food was. We then said 'boy, we should have photographed this food before we wolfed it down like savages'. I kind of felt like with a conference of 200+ vegan bloggers, someone else would probably do the heavy lifting and take better photos than I would have anyhow.

At the conference I got to try two new products which I'm super excited about.

1. Earth Balance's new coconut oil based margarine, cuz it doesn't taste like coconut people, it TASTES LIKE BUTTER!! I totally went back for a few extra samples.

2. Upton's Seitan Italian Sausage style seitan. I'm not much of a sausage person, even when I ate actual sausage, but I really like this product.

3. Is it even possible that I didn't even try the new greek yogurt despite my husband being an old friend of Ken's who MADE the greek yogurt himself? Yes, somehow I didn't realize it was even there. I probably spaced out during an important conversation in which Ken stated "we will have samples of the Greek Yogurt there". Instead of hearing this important information, I was off in Vegan Lady Land..."OMG Isa is here, she is like at the same bar I am at. She is my hero but I can't be a complete fan girl and say anything stupid to her. Okay, think of something not stupid". So as you can see, I was unaware of the greek yogurt being available for tasting.

Our friend Bernie got us two loaner bikes to bike around Portland with! Although Jon couldn't use his too much, I was able to bike to the conference and all around town - hardly getting lost at all, which is unusual for me. I'm lucky Portland is basically a grid - it was designed with the map challenged like me in mind :)

I had a total bikegasm when I encountered my first street sign that indicated that cars HAD to turn left or right, despite the fact that a perfectly full sized street lay ahead, but bikes, and bikes ONLY, could proceed straight. I can't tell you the amount of joy it brings to a cyclists' hard and leathery heart (yes, we cyclists are all very tough and leathery from exposure to the elements and hard bike seats) to see things like a big fatty green painted bike crosswalk with a flashing light that says "yield to cyclists" on a big high speed bridge. Yes you motorist, with your eco-disaster death machine, YOU must stop for ME! (Oh, by the way in case you wondered if I am sometimes an eco-disaster death machine driver, yes I am) anyhow, BikeJOY.

Back to food. Yeah, we had the vegan donuts. They were okay, but I was spoiled long, long ago by the best donuts in the universe, to which none can measure up. My family who eats non-vegan donuts agrees with me that this one bakery in Wildwood, NJ has the best donuts they have ever tasted, and no other donut can ever measure up. Next time I'm there I'm going to do some outreach and see if I can get them to make me a vegan donut. Wish me luck!

Portobello: a fancy vegan restaurant in Portland. Jon is making me write about it, but I'm not a fancy food lady. I don't think I can give P. the proper treatment in writing, but I'm pretty sure Jon will wake up masticating and moaning 'Gnocchi' for several months to come. For the potty minded out there, masticating means chewing.

I highly reccomend a food tourism trip for any vegan who has the cash to spare. Would you like to eat a vegan caramel, a vegan danish, a vegan donut, a vegan _______? <----fill in the blank. Go to Portland.

Gluten Free Vegan Donuts

I had a donut party, where we ordered vegan donuts from vegan treats. But in case anyone with gluten intolerance showed up, I made some gluten free vegan donuts. I got very excited about the glazes, and made strawberry (with actual crushed strawberries!), peanut butter, mexican chocolate, and pineapple. I sort of used bryanna clark grogan's gf flour recipe Gluten Free High Fiber Flour Mix, except that after stressing out my poor seed grinder with just 1 cup of brown rice (to make brown rice flour), I decided it had gotten too hot and so for the rest of the brown rice flour I used Arrowhead Mill's otherwise useless GF baking mix. Its otherwise useless because it is gritty and made gritty brownies. However, as a component of the donuts, along with the other flours (tapioca, potato starch, flax seed, soy flour), it worked really well. They turned out tasting much healthier than a normal donut, but still very tasty and worth eating. They were really best the first day, so if you make something like this, make it on the day of the event. I have extra gf flour which I think would make lovely waffles or muffins. Even though I halved her gf recipe it still was more flour than I needed. I got both a normal and a mini donut pan. Though, the batter was super super thick (even with extra soy milk added), and wasn't going into the pans nicely, so the mini donuts look more like donut holes really. Another note I think is relevant is that I think brown rice flour and tapioca flour might be smoother purchased from the store because I'd imagine they have some sophisticated grinders which do a better job than a seed grinder at home. That's just my guess.