crack the plates

Brunch: Mattar tofu:

It was my first attempt at Bryanna Clark Grogan’s recipe from Twenty Minutes to Dinner and it came out beautifully. Running on only a chocolate peanut-butter pillow (see below) and with something painfully stuck in my eye, I kept her honest: even making a separate pot of rice, it took less than 20 minutes to throw the whole thing together. Better still, it was one of the best iterations of the dish I’d ever had, the flavors perfectly balanced. (Only a little bit of credit goes to the superior curry blend from Frontier that I use.)

This book is especially handy because it contains recipes for traditionally dairy-based items such as ricotta cheese, cottage cheese, sour cream, cream cheese, pourable cream, melty pizza cheese, and more. If you’re a vegan or vegetarian & you’re not already familiar with Bryanna Clark Grogan, head over to her blogspot to learn more ASAP. Young, hip vegans worship Isa Chandra Moskowitz (and rightly so), but there’s no doubt that Grogan inspired even her–as a 20+ year vegan, she’s basically already successfully veganized everything. Angel Food Cake? Done. Marshmallows? No problem. Cheeses, from feta to blue? She’s figured them out. The first of her recipes I ever tried was “fresh tofu, Indian style” and it has been a favorite since college. She tests her recipes so rigorously that seemingly anything you attempt will be delicious (so long as you have the right ingredients–on rare occasion, that’s the tricky part). Highly recommended!

Now…back to that chocolate peanut butter pillow. Because we were snowed in last night, Nate & I couldn’t make it out to celebrate Earlham Animal Advocates United’s third birthday. A damn shame, too, as Jenny had prepared homemade vegan ice cream in her new maker and Suzanne wowed with red velvet cake…or was it coconut heaven? To make up for it, I finally tried out Isa’s recipe. They were surprisingly easy to make–most of the work went towards shaping the chocolate dough around the peanut butter filling. Very yummy, but two concerns: overly sweet, and only very, very soft–pillowlike!–fresh from cooling. Once stored, they became very chewy. But, really, when you’re eating a peanut butter frosting-filled chocolate cookie, neither of these issues come up.

And finally, because Richmond is in the throes of the snowpocalypse, I whisked together some snowcreme:

the raw materials

whisking

I hope you took similar advantage of the snowmageddon. Let me know!