"Ricotta" Gnocchi w/ Roasted Garlic Marinara

Sarah made me this for Valentine's Day! She started with a recipe she found online for ricotta gnocchi, but made some tofu ricotta instead of the real thing, and had to use more flour. The sauce was more or less from Emeril's roasted garlic marinara recipe. They were super-garlicky and delicious!

Beet Burgers

Sarah started with the recipe from the Post Punk Kitchen:
http://www.theppk.com/2012/02/quarter-pounder-beet-burger/, but she used 2 tbs of tahini butter instead of almond butter, cooked moong dal (instead of regular lentils) in better than bouillon not beef broth and 1/2 tsp onion powder, and skipped the salt b/c the better than bouillon stuff is super salty, and didn't chill them. They looked like this when raw:

and when cooked they looked like this:

Pumpkin Cake with Chocolate-Almond Ganache and Cinnamon-Coffee Sauce

We made this cake from the Millennium Cookbook for our neighbors Ben & Dawn. It was almost very tasty, but it definitely came out too dry. We used almonds instead of hazelnuts b/c who wants to peel those dame hazelnut skins off?!

Here's how it looked when cut:

Rustic Kale-Squash Tart

This recipe is from Bryanna Clark Grogan's World Vegan Feast:

It was super delicious.

Tacos w/ Scorpion Paste

We've been taking pictures of food we have made with the plan of writing a nice blog post for each one, but we seem to be too busy for that to happen, so we decided just to post a bunch of pictures with brief descriptions for each. Here's the first!

The recipe for Scorpion Paste comes from my sister-in-law Gudrun, and we ate it with my standard freestyled tacos (chayote, onion, black beans, chipotle peppers in adodo sauce, fresh herbs, etc. etc.). I posted a very rough guide of what I put in the tacos, and the scorpion paste recipe is below that:

Mexican Beans (from Jon)

2 Tbsp vegetable oil

2 cups chopped onion (1 small onion or ½ big onion)

1 red pepper (optional)

4 chipotle chili peppers in adobo sauce, minced (they come in cans, save the unused ones)

½ tsp garlic powder

1 ½ tsp cumin

1 ½ tsp Mexican oregano

¼ tsp salt

5 cups cooked beans (black, pinto, it’s all good) or 3 cans

½ cup water

Tortillas

1 lime (optional)

Cilantro (optional)

Salsa (optional)

            Heat up the oil in a skillet, and when hot add the onion (and the red pepper if you’re using it), and sauté for a few minutes until they get soft. Add the chili peppers and spices, and cook for another minute or so until it smells good, then add the beans and stir well. Cook them for a few minutes, then add the water. I like kind of half-refried beans so I just use a masher to break up roughly half of the beans in the skillet but leave some whole, and keep mixing them up. Eat on tortillas, and add lime and/or cilantro and/or salsa if you like.

Scorpion Paste (from Gudrun Danielson)

1 7 oz. jar, or 2/3 cup roasted red peppers

½ tsp cumin, whole or ground

½ tsp salt

4 cloves raw garlic, peeled and chopped

2 Tbsp olive or vegetable oil

6 (or more, if you're cocky) whole dried chiles (pequin, tepin, Japanese) that have been softened in hot water.

            Combine all in a blender, making sure to scrape down the sides with a spatula once or twice, until it becomes a uniform emulsion.  If using whole chilies, you'll have to blend a bit more, so that the seeds are pulverized, adding their heat to your concoction.  The finished product should be as thick as mayonnaise.  Pack the paste into a small jar, cover with a thin film of vegetable oil, and refrigerate indefinitely.  If you want to add some quick heat to stews, burritos, or curries, or kill a cold by spreading it on toast and eating it, well, this is the recipe for you!  It keeps marvelously well, and increases its potency as long as it has a thin coat of oil on top, and is refrigerated.

How to peel garlic super fast (20 seconds)

Since we have been remiss in posting lately, we thought we would show you that Vegan Lady not only Eats, she Vlogs (or whatever) too! Observe her prowess in demonstrating that one can indeed peel a head of garlic in twenty seconds. Note that this works better if after a single round of shaking, you remove the peeled cloves before shaking up the unpeeled ones again. We peeled these for some Scorpion Paste to go with Tacos (stand by for another post).

Spumoni Cupcakes

When I recently saw some Neopolitan vegan ice cream in the freezer, it made me realize how much I used to love spumoni ice cream. Then it hit me: we had pistachio butter we’d bought in Portland, and I could make spumoni cupcakes instead.

The basic concept was to make three kinds of cupcake batter (a 1/3 recipe of each) then layer them into the cupcake pan (note that the original colors were actually green and red as they should be, despite what they turned into after baking):

The recipes we used were the basic chocolate cupcake from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (unmodified), a modified version of Peanut Butter Cupcakes from the same book (but we substituted the pistachio butter for the peanut butter, and agave for molasses), and a modified version of Strawberry Cupcakes form the Joy of Vegan Baking (but instead of strawberries, we took about 2/3 cup of frozen cherries, thawed and pureed).

Since in the end the chocolate was the strongest flavor, we decided to make pistachio and cherry buttercream. I thought they were pretty good, but not worth the effort (and the cherry flavor was never really strong enough). Sarah thought they were just mediocre. It was fun to change it up though!