Peanut Butter Pie

I love tofu, but I didn't think it belonged in dessert until I made this pie. I have never made anything so delicious. And it's surprisingly easy to put together, so I've already made it three times this month. Even my tofu-weary father likes it.

I struck pretty closely to the recipe I found here.



Ingredients

- 12 oz. Extra-Firm or Firm Silken Tofu
- 1 cup peanut butter
- 1/3 cup powdered sugar
- 1/3 cup + 2 tablespoons agave nectar
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/4 cup non-dairy milk
- 3/4 cup semisweet chocolate chips
- 1 graham cracker crust (recipe here, or get a pre-made crust)
- peanuts, for garnish

Drain and rinse the tofu and squish out any excess water. Combine the tofu, peanut butter, powdered sugar, and 1/3 cup of the agave nectar in a blender or food processor. Blend until smooth. Pour into pie crust and refrigerate. There will still be quite a bit of room in the pan; that's for the ganache.

Now comes the chocolate. Bring your vegan milk of choice to a gentle boil in a small saucepan. As soon as it boils, remove it from the heat and mix in the chocolate and 2 tablespoons of agave syrup until everything is fully melted and evenly combined. Let sit for 10 minutes at room temp until it solidifies. Take the pie out of the fridge and pour or drizzle the ganache on top. Add garnish if you'd like. Put in the refrigerator for two hours before you eat it. An hour in the freezer will also do.

See, it's eaaaasy. And delicious.

Chewy Ginger Molasses Cookies

Molasses, fresh ginger, and just a little bit of cocoa powder. These cookies are DELICIOUS. This recipe was adapted from one that I found here.



Ingredients:

• 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 tablespoon cocoa powder
• 1/2 cup vegan margarine
• 2 tablespoon grated ginger
• 1/2 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup unsulfured blackstrap molasses
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 1/2 teaspoons boiling water
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 cup organic granulated sugar

Directions:

In a medium-sized bowl, mix the flour, cinnamon, nutmeg and cocoa powder.

In a large bowl, blend vegan margarine and grated ginger with an electric mixer until fluffy. Blend in the brown sugar and molasses.

Dissolve the baking soda in 1-1/2 teaspoons of boiling water in a small bowl and add to the wet mix. Beat in half of the dry mixture until combined and then beat in the other half until everything is combined.

Pat this all down flat on wax paper and refrigerate for about 2 hours.

Heat oven to 325° F. Hand roll dough into 1-inch balls and roll in granulated sugar to coat. Place on a greased baking sheet and bake 10 to 12 minutes or until the surface cracks. Make sure they cool for five minutes.

Eat them with spiked apple cider when it's way too cold to go outside.

The Multnomah County Library

Turns out The Multnomah County Library has quite the zine library. I've been quite impressed. It's exciting to see a public library encourage and celebrate alternative lifestyles to the extent that this one does:

"An effort is made to purchase zines on subjects that are not well covered by materials in other parts of the library's collection, for example: vegan cooking, dumpstering, raw foods, anarchism, bicycle culture, animal rights activism, grassroots and community activism and organizing, and the culture of underground music." -from the library's Collection Policy

Photo taken from DIY Alert

A couple zines that I've really enjoyed recently have been The Frugal Vegan's Harvest and Holiday Survival Guide because it includes lots of cheap ideas for holiday gifts as well as cheap ways to stay happy when its cold outside. Also, Coffeeshop Crushes because everyone likes good crush stories.

I've also been looking at a lot of cookzines. One of my goals for 2010 is to make my own cookzine, so I've been doing a lot of research at the library. And in the kitchen, of course.

Transitions

I made a kind of big decision a few weeks ago.


I wasn't getting enough hours at the women's shelter and the cupcake sales were dwindling as the rainy season began. Instead of finding a new job in Bellingham, I somewhat impulsively decided to move (Joel came too). We're living at my mom's house in Vancouver for awhile, until we make enough money to move to Portland. Later this month I'll be starting a part-time job as a sexual assault educator.

For now, I'm spending a lot of time being domestic in suburbia. Taking my dog on walks and playing ping pong while the cats try to interfere. Making dinner for my mom and sister when they get home from work/school. Reading through elementary school journals. Trying to convince my family that brewing kombucha isn't gross.

My blogs for the next few months will probably consist of detailed descriptions of the food I'm making with all my free time, and maybe a few rants about the absurdities of suburbia.

Vegetable Broth

I can't believe I didn't start this sooner. There is absolutely no excuse for buying veggie broth from the store when I use as many vegetables as I do.

Here's what you do:

1. Collect all of your vegetable scraps for a week (onion peels, garlic ends, broccoli stalks, pepper stems...) Keep them in a covered container in the fridge.

2. At the end of the week, put all the scraps in a covered pot with water. Add a little salt and thyme or oregano.

3. Let the pot simmer for an hour and a half (it makes the kitchen smell so nice).

4. Strain the broth.

Voilà! I'm going to use the broth for a soup, but you can also freeze it and use it later.

win/lose

My sister turned 15 last week. She asked me to make cupcakes for her birthday party, but with a few conditions: they were not allowed to be vegan and they needed to be topped with Twilight Sweetheart Conversation Hearts. I complied.


BUT only under the condition that I was allowed to use juice from beets to dye the frosting. I promised her that her friends would never suspect it. And I was right.

Thanks, Moby.

Remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger cut ALL of the state funding for California's Domestic Violence Shelters?

I work at a DV shelter, and 100% of the money I make comes from the state, so when I heard about what Schwarzenegger did I really started to worry about the future for women experiencing DV in California.

Well, Moby recently made a fool out of Schwarzenegger by deciding to donate 100% of the profits from his upcoming California shows to California Partnership to End Domestic Violence.

He told the L.A. Times, "It was such an insignificant amount of money, it felt like somebody was going out of their way to be mean-spirited. The people that use their services are the most disenfranchised of the disenfranchised. If these shelters are open, people's lives improve, and if they close, people die. There's nothing abstract about it." (In other words: "You're an asshole, Arnold.")

Since Moby and so many feminist organizations were attracting attention to what Schwarzenegger did, he had no choice but to sign a bill restoring the $16.3 billion in funds to DV shelters.

We need more stories like this.

I've got some celebrities to call in favors from.

Cooking for 7

Monday nights are my dinner night. I cook for the other six people who I live with, and in exchange I am served dinner for the rest of the week. It's a nice arrangement. Cooking dinner for seven isn't easy, though. And while my roommates stick to the stuff that makes sense for feeding a huge house, I tend to make kind of complicated dishes. Given the fact that I've only been cooking from scratch for a year, this can be difficult. I've been making these dinners since January, when I moved in, and last night was the first time I felt like "shit, I've got this." I made a vegan cheese sauce in five minutes. I tended to the stuff in the oven as well as the three pots on the stove. And dinner was only fifteen minutes late.

My favorite feeling is the one you get when you're finally starting to get the hang of something you always thought to be difficult. It's super exciting when this feeling comes sooner than expected (like, whoa, brewing kombucha is incredibly easy, and so is playing the ukulele), but it's also pretty exciting to see hard research and practice finally pay off after months and months or years and years of working on it. I've learned enough about food to cook without recipes sometimes, and I know that if I'm out of baking powder, all I need is baking soda and cream of tartar. Making dinner for seven? Sure. No big deal.

The highlight of last night's dinner: Sweet Roasted Vegetables. They're covered in cinnamon, ginger, and maple syrup. So they're kind of like french toast vegetables.

Sweet Roasted Vegetables

Ingredients:

2 lbs. Root vegetables (I used carrots, parsnip, celeriac, and turnips)
2 lbs. Potatoes
10 cloves of garlic
Olive Oil
Maple Syrup
Cinnamon
Fresh Ginger

Directions:

Set your oven to 400° F.

Cut the ends off of a bunch of root vegetables. Dice the roots so that the wedges are about 3/4 of an inch. Peel as much garlic as you think you can handle. Leave these whole. Cut potatoes into one inch wedges.

Oil a pan with olive oil and then drop in all of your vegetables. Cover them in olive oil; make sure they're drenched. Grate some fresh ginger and place it in the pan. Drizzle maple syrup over the whole thing, and sprinkle some cinnamon on top.

The vegetables need 35-45 minutes in the oven, and they should be turned over after twenty minutes. They're done when you can stick a fork through them.

I'm feeling awfully domestic, so I think I'm going to go balance myself out with some basketball.

I'll love you in the country way.

I just got back from a day and a half on Willowood Farm, a farm on Whidbey Island where my friend Willow has been an intern this season.

I grew up spending each summer on my grandpa's ranch in Oregon, so hanging out on this farm made me feel like a kid again. Especially the riding in the bed of a pickup truck part.

Here's Willow:

They have SO many birds on the farm. I love noisy birds. I don't care what anyone says, they are the best alarm clock. Here are the turkeys..

Joel figured out how to get one of them to hug him.

We cleaned a bunch of beans before packaging them. Much harder than it sounds...

We also delivered vegetables for their CSA.

And ate a lot of delicious farm fresh food, accompanied by PBR.

I'm back home, extremely positive that I am going to sign up for a CSA this coming year, and trying to figure out what I want to be for Halloween this week.

Sm'apples

So my friends and I got really excited about fall and decide to go apple picking. We filled up a wheelbarrow, which is apparently 130 pounds of apples...


At the time, I didn't realize that I would be dedicating the next week of my life to those apples. Two days spent making applesauce...My roommates dumpstered some pie crusts, so I spent an afternoon making pie. Then we made some juice...and half of the apples are still sitting in my kitchen. I have moments where I think I'm sick of them, but there really is nothing better than the smell of apples cooking on the stove, or making apple juice in the kitchen with your best friends while singing along to "I Can't Make You Love Me" at the top of our lungs (yes, I am talking about Bonnie Rait).


Along with the apple endeavor, I pickled beets and roasted red peppers with my friend Kathryn earlier this week. I am finally getting the hang of food preservation and it feels really satisfying and exciting.

I am actively working to fight off seasonal depression this year, and I'd like to think I'm as persistent as my grandmother is about fighting off colds. I am constantly reminding myself that it wouldn't be green here without the rain, and I am pushing myself to embrace and appreciate seasonal foods and activities so as to keep in mind that sometimes the bad weather helps balance me out. The rain pushes me indoors, which encourages me to spend time with people I love, drink more cider, take out the knitting needles, listen to music in my room, write letters, make more bread, and finally learn how to play the ukulele.

Not that it's all bad weather yet. There's still plenty of time to play in the yard with the chickens.

Left to right: Donna, Molly, Lois

ordinary people completing out-of-the-ordinary assignments — with extraordinary results

I recently checked out Learning to Love You More from the library, and so I've been feeling really inspired and excited about simple and sweet things.

I am currently working on my first Learning to Love You More Assignment.

#14, Write your life story in less than a day.

Can't stop

So, we reached our goal of selling enough cupcakes to get to Texas.

Why stop there?



I really enjoy dressing up, feeding drunk people vegan treats, and going home with some grocery money.

her 2010 calendar

Nikki McClure's 2010 wall calendar looks amazing. I leafed through it while at a little shop in Portland earlier this week and gasped when I saw this print:


Seriously, this is beautiful. I'm adding the calendar to my Christmas list right now.

San Francisco has the most breaktaking street art

Trinidad, CA

So we sold $500 dollars worth of vegan cupcakes and drove to Texas. Our first stop? Trinidad, California. We stayed with Carol, a witty school teacher who lives in this amazing town with a population of 300. I found her on couchsurfing (Couchsurfing is the best thing about the internet. I'm not kidding). Carol was on Day 1 of an Eat Local Challenge, so she prepared all of the food in her refrigerator that wasn't local and made us eat it. It was great to feast on pesto potatoes, rice pudding, mozarella stuffed chili peppers, and a green salad after a long day in the car. Carol showed us the virgin Redwoods in her backyard and talked to us about her life as a teacher. We sat around the table for a couple hours and then Carol went to bed. She gave us directions to the beach, a short walk away. We sat on a log and watched the tide come in. Here's a photo of the beach in the morning...


And below is the GREATEST coffee shop that I have ever been to, The Beachcomber Cafe. If you look carefully, you'll see that the words above the counter read: We have no paper cups. The Beachcomber appears to be the only coffee shop in downtown Trinidad, so they can probably get away with this without losing any business. I wish there were more coffee shops following their lead. Everyone who came into the shop had their own mug, and a couple people used the cafe's cups. This place felt like how you would want home to feel. Everyone knew everyone else, and they were extremely friendly to us tourists. We met a woman sitting on a couch in the back of the cafe who was happy to put down her book and chat with us about the best spots to see in The Redwoods. Little kids ran around with pear scones up to their mouths while their moms invited each other to birthday parties and potlucks. On top of the fact that there is no waste coming out of this cafe and everyone there was so nice, they make amazing coffee and delicious vegan goods. We kept going back to the counter for more scones.


And just to illustrate how small (and charming) Trinidad is, here is a photo of their police department...


More highlights of the trip will be coming soon.

street treats

I just got back from my very first road trip. Three friends and I took two weeks to drive to Austin, TX and back. Where did we find the money for gas? We sold vegan cupcakes outside of bars in downtown Bellingham for the month leading up to our departure!

I wish I had photos of the fabulous outfits we wore while selling cupcakes, or of the Birthday Boys and Girls who were excited to find that we were carrying candles on us. But it's normal to forget to take pictures during some of the best nights of your life, right?

I did do a little bit of documenting, though. Here is Forrest decorating his Marbled Chocolate and Vanilla Cupcakes using the Professional Frosting Decorating Shot that I picked up at a thrift store recently. I feel like a cupcake doctor every time I use it, and it makes frosting look fabulous.



We carted the cupcakes downtown on our bikes. This proved to be difficult at times, but was really fun and quite a crowd-pleaser.



And here is my favorite of the cupcakes that we sold. Chocolate with Oreo Frosting! I based the recipe off of the one that I found here.


We made about $500 off of cupcakes in Bellingham, and sold some in Austin as well, which brought our grand total to $550.

This kind of success will definitely make one think about going into the cupcake business.

I finally learned how to sew!

Last month, Jill taught Annie how to make an apron. Earlier this week, Annie passed the skill on to me. Since Annie is also a beginner, we ran into a few road blocks. It's nice to run into those with friends, because had I been alone I might have given up. I went to sleep at 3am that night, rather exhausted, but I had a new apron by my side!

I had never touched a sewing machine, even though I'd been eying them for years. I was so happy to discover how naturally it came once I'd figured out some of the basics (and gotten past those road blocks). I've spent a lot of time this week thinking about what I want my next sewing project to be...

Here's I am showing off my apron:


I brought the apron to our annual family beach trip this week. My mom really liked it, so I gave it to her. Here she is, excited to have a daughter who can sew:

Smile for awhile

This summer I have been fortunate enough to see The Olympia Free Choir perform two times. The first time was at What the Heck Fest, and the second time was at The Stretch Pants Summer Party that Kimya Dawson hosted in her backyard earlier this month. The Olympia Free Choir meets on Tuesdays in a gazebo in Olympia. Everyone's welcome and they sing the cutest songs. Here's a video of them practicing one of my new favorite songs:



This song has been the backbone of my summer. It's encouraged me to step out of my skin and reminded me the importance of checking in with myself. It's really been a mantra of sorts. 10 Things was written by Paul Baribeau and I strongly recommend listening to his version in the morning. Especially if you've got a sun-drenched kitchen and a cup of tea.

When you ask someone to make a list of ten things they want to do before you die, you're getting personal. After The Stretch Pants Summer Party, I went to QB with my mom, sister, boyfriend, and one of my close friends. We ate sweet potato fries with cilantro lime aioli and each wrote down our ten things before sharing them with the table. It's definitely my new favorite thing to do with a group of people. You see the nicest part of a person when they talk sincerely about what they want to do with their lives. I learned a lot about all of them and I think we all realized that the things we want to do the most are totally reasonable and attainable. And that's a really good feeling.

My list:
1. write a book of my very own recipes
2. learn how to play an instrument
3. become fluent in spanish
3. go on a cross-county biking trip
4. learn how to decorate a cake
5. sell something that i've made
6. grow the biggest garden on the block
7. brew my own wine
8. make my own marshmallows
9. take a picture every day for a year
10. perfect the art of cutting hair

You should try it too.

summer BBQ parties

Joel won a free bbq from Trader Joe's earlier this summer (and he's showing it off with Emily in this picture). Since Joel doesn't have a backyard, it's been hanging out in mine all summer. I've never really been one for bbq's. I've thought of them as a steak-eating dad's toy, not a couple of vegan twenty-somethings. Turns out I was missing out. Veggies are delicious when bbq'ed. Which brings me to my new favorite food...

PORTOBELLO MUSHROOM BURGERS. OMG. For some reason I always thought portobellos cost something outrageous, like 5 bucks a shroom. Turns out they're cheap, and all you have to do is brush them in olive oil and minced garlic and then put them on a grill for 15 minutes or so.

SO, SO, SO GOOD.

Tofu Omelets!

Joel and I made them twice last weekend, and when I woke up this morning I was craving them again. Did you know that black salt has a sulfuric taste that is reminiscent of egg yolks? I am quite excited about the discovery. This recipe is from Vegan Brunch, but you can find it online here.

breakfast for ladyfest

I've never actually been that into coffee cake, but I decided to make some for the potluck breakfast a group of ladies and I hosted for Ladyfest B'ham last weekend. I've been kind of crazy about Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Vegan Brunch ever since getting it in the mail in May. I've always wanted to say that I've tried every recipe out of a particular cook book...I think it might actually happen with this one.


This coffee cake was SO GOOD. I followed Isa's basic coffee cake recipe, and then added some banana and blueberries to the batter. Bananas kind of do wonders for egg-less baking. The cake was extremely soft. And the breakfast was delightful! As was the rest of Ladyfest B'ham, which I plan to cover in this neglected blog very soon.

letters, matte, and s'mores

This week's highlights:

1. I wrote a letter to Rudy's Pizzeria a few weeks ago asking them why they don't compost. I got a response this Wednesday that read: "That's for the reminder. We will begin immediately." RESULTS! Who ever said that letter writing didn't work?

2. Tried some of my roommate's freshly bottled yerba matte mead, which he calls "hippie sparks". Delicious.

3. Spent a couple of nights surrounded by the ocean, friends, and campfires. I bought three packages of sweet and sara vegan marshmallows for summertime s'more making while I was down in Seattle a few weeks ago. I just finished the second package and summer has hardly started. I might need to make a substantial bulk order soon because they are QUITE a hit.

4. I've been making some important decisions about my future. Healthy decisions! More updates soon.

spring!

A couple of things that I have been loving lately:

1. Reading zines in the backyard on a sunny day.




2. Hang-drying my clothes. All of my dresses smell like grass.

weekend eats

This last Sunday tasted really good.

Highlights include banana chocolate chip pancakes.


And a tempeh reuben.


Let me show you the reuben one more time, just in case the picture above didn't accurately portray how delicious this sandwich was.

The recipe came from Vegan With a Vengeance. It reminded me of something they'd serve at Hillside Quickie.

a basket-weave hat and a patricipatory democracy

This basket-weave hat has spent most of its life post-knitting needles on my head. It's the first hat I've ever made for myself and I'm pretty into it. It took me a couple of weeks to make (it would have taken longer if it weren't for Jill as well as the women at NW Handspun Yarn). It's an easy pattern, but I'm still pretty new to serious knitting. I've known how to kit for about five years, but haven't made much more than drop-knit scarves for Christmas presents. It's too bad that I'm just now getting so excited about knitting, seeing as the sun is just starting to show its face around these parts. Oh well. I guess I can just spend the summer working on gloves and socks.

Or maybe I'll put knitting with yarn on hold for awhile and dive head first into crocheting with plastic bags. (I tried knitting with plastic bags and it stretched the plastic out too much. Crocheting doesn't manipulate the plastic as much, so I'm going with that instead.) I'm really looking forward to finishing my first plastic bag tote! Hopefully I can distribute them and collect donations for this really cool thing my friends and I are doing...What's that, you ask? We're writing a petition to implement a plastic bag fee in Bellingham! It's been really fun and challenging. I think it's going to be really fun once we start collecting signatures...and a whole lot more challenging, but I'm ready for it.

saving the turtles

Here's some plastic bag yarn that I made this weekend! I am now in the process of using it to knit reusable bags. I found the tutorial for the yarn here, and the plastic bags for the yarn in the plastic bag recycling at Fred Meyer. I've been really stressed out about plastic bag consumption lately (that's what happens when you work at a grocery store), so this feels really therapeutic and constructive. This is also the cheapest crafting I have ever done. It doesn't cost a thing! All it takes is keeping your eyes open for plastic bags in trash cans and recycling bins. As the ladies who wrote Off the Map would say, "take what's free and you find freedom."