Recipe Roundup

It's that time again! A roundup of all the latest culinary adventures that didn't earn a blog post of their own (though some certainly should have! And some should probably just be forgotten about, but I include them to show that I can create some massively bad cooking).

First up: Vegan ice cream! This one was fairly simple, and involved just throwing semi-frozen bananas and some of my homemade peanut butter into the food processor and watching her go! Very tasty.

I used this recipe for a cauliflower-crust pizza. I had to do some major substituting as I didn't want to use all that cheese, but I did throw in some aged sheep cheese. I used a regular pasta sauce as the topping with more sheep cheese, and the results were so good I ate the entire thing in one go. The cauliflower created a bit of a different taste to the crust, but overall it was a great recipe!

I loved the idea of these red lentil koftas, but the execution was a complete failure. First of all, I had forgotten to purchase spinach. As this is the main ingredient that provides flavor, the lentils and bulgur just couldn't carry the day on their own. I topped with some homemade hummus, but it was even more of a failure, since I used tahini that I'd also made, and which was a flop. So, these provided sustenance, but not a whole lot of pleasure.

Having successfully created my own peanut butter, I was desperate to make peanut butter cookies. I love all kinds of peanut butter cookies, but Talea had introduced me to flourless ones, and I love them even more! I took a whole cup of my precious, new peanut butter and whipped up a batch of these, only to have them go utterly wrong. They charred instantly (I later discovered that our upper heating element in the oven is faulty) and irrevocably, and I was left trying to scrape tastiness out of the unburnt (but also undercooked) centers of the cookies. I was so disheartened by this experience, and by the waste of my peanut butter!

Undeterred, I decided to try an unbaked peanut butter sweet. I mixed some of that peanut butter goodness up with some powdered sugar and proceeded to dip them in dark chocolate. This was quite good, and I ate the entire batch within a couple of days, even though I meant to save some for Matt. Ooops!

Being a recent convert to Instagram, I've enjoyed seeing what else people have posted under the hashtags I use to describe my culinary adventures. When I searched for other "sheepscheese" posts one day, I found this Texan chef's recreations of beloved Middle Eastern recipes (@charredsquash). When I saw his pide, so beautiful and familiar from my time in Turkey, I asked for the recipe and instantly whipped up my own batch of pide, topped with melted leeks and sheep cheese. I had never heard of melted leeks before, so used this recipe, and supplemented his pide recipe with this one. The results were drool-worthy, and I ate both of them, much to my digestive regret.

I love veggie burgers of all kinds, and have particularly favored those based on beets and sweet potatoes. I decided to take a stab at one with white beans and sweet potatoes, and to make my own hamburger buns as well. The results were less than satisfactory. The buns were hard and burnt on the outside, underdone inside (thanks to my oven), and my proportions of sweet potato to beans were off, creating a badly textured burger. I will be eager to give the burgers another try to correct the proportions, but I might just be happy with store-bought buns in the future.

One of the few items that earned a place in my suitcase crossing the Atlantic was a bag of Anasazi pinto beans. They were a last minute addition, cabbaged onto when my sister was cleaning out her apartment cupboards for moving. I hadn't had Anasazis in so long, and I like their sweet, smooth texture so much better than regular pinto beans. These ones from Adobe Milling are a family favorite, and my mother and grandmother will often go together to place a large order, since shipping is quite expensive. Well, the time finally arrived to cook up the first half of the bag, and we more than did justice to those beans. I even made my own tortillas (see below), and we found the best, buttery, local avocados to top them with. And best of all for me, I found a new vegan cheese that received high approval. I have quite fallen in love with the Minimalist Bakers!

Making my own tortillas has been a high-priority goal in the last couple of months. After tasting the melt-in-your-mouth tortillas that one dig team member whipped up in the middle of Jordan with nothing more than oil, flour and water, I was eager to try my own. Taking her advice together with this recipe, I created my first semi-successful batch. Success: Tasty. Semi-Success: very odd shapes. I gotta keep working on that one!

When Matt got home and found out that I'd consumed all of my chocolate-dipped peanut butter, I was in trouble. We immediately went out and purchased Reeses-style wrappers and I put together my own peanut butter cups (no Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups around here, unfortunately). I used just my own peanut butter in straight chocolate, which had to be refrigerated when not consuming to keep the peanut butter from oozing out. I need to work on the recipe quite a bit, but we don't want to add a lot of sugar. For now, a very good treat!

Right before Matt left on one of his trips, he bought a giant bag of local tomatoes. I like tomatoes, but I don't eat them nearly fast enough on my own, and was horrified at watching the entire bag mold away. So I made my own bruschetta-inspired salad. Ripe, delicious tomatoes topped with aged sheep cheese, dried basil, salt, and olive oil. Delicious!

Thanks to Talea, I am a big fan of The Great British Bake Off. When Paul Hollywood recently gave the bakers the challenge of making ciabatta, my ears perked up and I paid close attention, as I love ciabatta. We used to get the most amazing ciabatta baked fresh from the Medici Bakery in Hyde Park, Chicago, and I've not yet found an equal. Well, I pinned the recipe from their website and recently decided it was time to take a stab at it. I was momentarily unable to access the main recipe from the GBBO webpage, and found the one off of Paul Hollywood's own website. While they didn't turn out perfect, they were quite good and I will be making this again!

Pollen seems to be a big thing here in Spain. Matt was introduced to it when he moved in over the summer, and was quick to share it with me when I arrived. I enjoy the sweet taste and the crunchy texture, and like to add it to my soy yogurt along with honey. Yum!!

Our small Thanksgiving this year featured roasted chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and my attempt at a new sweet potato biscuit recipe. The original recipe calls for pumpkin, but sweet potato pairs equally well with sage and I can't get regular pumpkin here outside of Halloween. I must have got proportions off somehow with the biscuits because they were too wet to shape into biscuits, and had to be dropped on the baking sheet. They baked well, but were a bit leathery on the outside and dry inside. I wasn't impressed, but Matt finished the rest of the batch off in a day, so I guess he liked them!

I really wanted to be able to make a vegan peanut butter fudge this holiday season. I love fudge, and especially peanut butter fudge. But there is no marshmallow cream in sight, and I can't add all that butter that normally goes in. So I searched for vegan recipes and came across this one. I gave it a try, with quite a few substitutions, and met with complete failure. Without a thermometer, I had no idea when the mixture was at the right temperatures, and so the fudge never set. I enjoyed eating it straight, however!

In desperation for some cookies recently, but without any butter in the house, I turned to a search for "butterless cookies". I found this recipe that uses olive oil instead, and it turned out surprisingly well! Despite the flattening of the cookies, they are very tasty, if not beautiful.