File under yum.  I adore cheese.  Soft, hard, blue, orange, creamy, tangy.  You name it – I like it. But did you know that even soy cheeses have trace amounts of milk protein?  So even fake cheese is off the menu.   (I’m not so sad about that after eating soy cream cheese – awful – and SO not fooling anyone.)

I had bookmarked this cashew ricotta recipe in Veganomicon to use as a sandwich spread.  Have you read Veganomicon?  It’s awesome – even if you’re not vegan.  It’s a fun read.  I like to think that’s how I’d write a cookbook…  anydoodle…  cashew ricotta.  It sounded intriguing.

I decided to make a half batch.  Why waste so many cashews on a sucky recipe.  I’ve been burned before with making fake cheese.  (I’m looking at you horrid nutritional yeast ricotta.)

Into the food processor – whirr whirr… whirrrrrrrrr.  I cautiously stuck my spoon into the mixture to test it out.  Hmm.. zingy.  Wait a second…  this is really good.  I called the husband in to the kitchen for a second opinion.  He agreed, really good.  We tested it out a a friend from France.  France!  She agreed, yummy.

I’m making it again tonight.  If you don’t own Veganomicon, you can find the recipe online.

To say that I surf the internet and books for recipes that Alden can eat is an understatement.   I scour the internet for recipes: vegan blogs, allergic-living online magazines, baby food sites.  You name it, I’ve been there.

Last week I found a recipe for vegan sweet potato cornbread on one site and you know what… I STILL had to tweak it.  Maybe it’s just because I think vegan margarine is still a bit weird.  And it makes me a little ooky to feed it to my son.  I’d eat it, but for him?  No.   I like to keep things as unprocessed as possible.

So I started out – adjusting the recipe as I went along, ignoring some instructions as I usually do.   I had low expectations.  Vegan baking is tricky… sometimes recipes just decide not to work.  (Like my banana bread on the weekend.  It just never cooked.  Why??  It was fine the last time I made it.   Gah.)  Everything got tossed in the new blender – whirr whirr – and went into the muffin pans.  I rolled my eyes a little as it went into the oven… this is never going to turn out. And yet, it did.    They were really good.  Photos don’t lie.  I might add a bit more oil next time – just to keep everything nice and moist.

Sweet potato cornbread

• 3/4 cup yellow cornmeal
• 3/4 cup flour
• 1 Tbsp + 1 tsp. baking powder
• dash cinnamon
• dash ground nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/3 cup canola oil
• 1/4 cup turbinado or raw sugar
• 1 cup mashed sweet potato
• 1 Tbsp apple juice
• 1/4 cup plus 2 T. water
• 1/2 cup frozen corn, thawed

Preheat oven to 350°.  Mix all ingredients in a food processor.  Bake 35 to 40 minutes, until edge is golden-brown and break springs back when lightly touched.

Last week I took the Vrtucar to run some errands at Home Depot and decided to shop at the Loblaws at Baseline / Woodroffe.  I heard months ago that their Kosher aisle had Israeli cous cous and there’s nothing like a little food-venture to spice up otherwise boring errands. ( So far, this Loblaws is the only place in Ottawa that I have found this type of pebbley cous cous, but if anyone knows of a more central location, I’d love to know!).

It took a few days to figure out what to make with my long-coveted cous cous.  I no longer remembered why I had been so keen on the cous cous in the first place.  Was it from a Zen Kitchen dinner oh.so.long ago?  Perhaps.

Based on the veggies that remained in the fridge it looked like we were headed to soup city. So Google and I spent a bit of quality time together and found this soup recipe from Gourmet Girl.  Perfect.  And what a great way to use up the last of my fresh herbs from the garden.  Bonus.

It didn’t take long to get everything simmering away in the pot.  Some modifications were made (as usual).  I used an entire 28oz tin of diced tomatoes instead of the suggested 14oz.   Other than that,  I pretty much stuck to the recipe as written.

The Israeli cous cous is a really nice change – part tapioca pearl / part pasta.  I really enjoyed these little chewy glubs in my soup.

The husband and I got 2 dinners and 3 lunches out of the one batch (9 meals!).    Totally economical and totally delicious.

What I did:

• I roasted a butternut squash with a little olive oil for about 40 minutes.
• I poached some chicken (one breast)
• cut up some mango (about half?  maybe more)

I tossed the roasted squash in the blender with the chicken, mango and some water to make it smooth.  Blitzed.  Voila, instant dinner!

I need to get out of my squash rut – Alden loves it so much, but I’d like to keep him trying new things.

Until that point, I had never heard of a tomato allergy. Sure enough, Google confirmed that some babies are sensitive to tomatoes. At this point, I’m not sure if he’s sensitive to all “nightshade” plants or whether it’s just the acidity in the tomatoes. (He’s fine with potatoes, but I haven’t given him any peppers yet.) We will see when he goes for allergy testing.

In my recipe search, I came across this recipe for a tomato-free pasta sauce. I bookmarked it. Then cringed. Then turned up my nose a bit. Pasta sauce made with beets and pumpkin? Sounds horrid. How could it possibly be a decent substitute for a juicy tomato sauce?

I cooked up the nomato sauce last night with very low expectations. When all the ingredients had finished simmering, I dipped my spoon into the sauce and it tasted good. I stood in the kitchen completely dumbfounded. I asked the husband to sample it for a second opinion. We both agreed, it was eerily similar to tomato sauce, but a bit more … savoury. Weird. I felt like I had just done vegetable voodoo on the stove.

But the final test rests with the boy.

*Note: in my version, I used a 14oz can of beets (that’s the smallest can I could find) and about 1 1/2 cups of roasted squash instead of canned pumpkin.

To be continued!

Update:

Note: when using store bought veggie stock read the label very carefully.  I purchased an organic brand that had almost no sodium (yay!) but had tomato paste as an ingredient.  Ugh.  I think I’ll give the recipe another try using my homemade no-tomato! stock.

The husband and I seem a bit torn with our meals lately – we really want to be “foodie” but our energy levels are zapped by the end of the day and neither of us want to wait (too long) to eat. I flipped through one of my Sandi Richard cookbooks on the weekend for some time-crunched-family-type meals. Enter Sandi’s recipe for African-Thai stew.

Both the husband and I were confused by the title – African?  Thai?  Aren’t those two places a bit far away from each other?  I mean, it’s like creating a recipe for “sushi poutine”.  Erk.

We stayed fairly true to her version, but I did make a couple of changes to the recipe:

• I used a 28oz can of diced tomatoes
• I added about 1 1/2 – 2 cups of cooked rice

The recipe only calls for a small can of diced tomatoes, but we only keep large cans in our pantry so I added the rice to soak up the extra juice from the tomatoes.  Worked like a charm.

Boyfriendly rating: Quick and easy.  Perfect for a cold day.  A new recipe for the “keeper binder”.

From VCTOTW, I made the skinny vanilla cupcakes.  I love this recipe – it’s so easy and only takes 3 tablespoons of oil.  You can practically eat the entire batch and feel no guilt.  And you will want to because they are that good.  The recipe calls for applesauce, but I always substitute applesauce for whatever fruit puree I’ve got on hand.  (This time it was mango/pear.)

From the Vegan Scoop, I made the basic vanilla recipe but I used our homemade vanilla.  (Awesome – and potent!)  The little guy gobbled his ice cream (and the tune Ice Cream from Anne of Green Gables the musical played in my head).   If you have an ice cream maker, but never use it, this book will make you fall in love with your ice cream maker again.  (If you are like me, I love ice cream, but I don’t love making the custard base or knowing that there are 8 eggs in one recipe of ice cream.  Seriously, that’s just too many eggs for a recipe that does not include the word ‘omelet’.)

One tip: these soy based ice creams are going to freeze up harder in you freezer than an egg/cream ice cream, so you’ll want to let the ice cream warm up a bit before serving.  It’s really hard to scoop hard ice cream.

It was quite the day – just look at Orville – he partied a little too hard.

I decided to test out a couple of recipes from the Vegan Cupcakes book (VCTOTW) first since the ingredients weren’t quite as uncommon as Babycakes.  (The Babycakes cookbook is not only vegan but also gluten free – so that explains the need for unusual flours and starches.)

From VCTOTW, I made the vanilla and skinny vanilla recipes.  My taste tester husband clearly favoured the regular vanilla recipe over the skinny version.  I had to agree – there was just something a bit off about the agave syrup sweetened recipe.  The kid sampled a few crumbs and had no reaction at all… so we have a winner for his birthday cake!  Woot!

You can see the agave version on the green plate.  The regular vanilla recipe looks much denser on the blue plate.

Next up, ice cream!  Have you seen how expensive non-dairy ice cream is at the grocery store?  It’s sort of ridiculous and the flavour selection is pitiful.  I found the Vegan Scoop book while browsing on Amazon and got a bit excited about making ice cream again.  My little ice cream maker didn’t get used once all summer and I was feeling shopper’s remorse over this purchase.  I really never had much success with my machine, the recipes were either too rich or the low fat versions turned too icy or they just didn’t freeze properly.  After this batch, I’m pretty sure that I am now a vegan ice cream convert.

The vanilla recipe was amazingly simple: soy milk, soy cream, sugar, vanilla and arrowroot powder.  I’m estimating the total cost for a quart at about $4.  Total steal.  If you can boil milk in a pot, you can make this ice cream.  Again, the kid sampled a little and apart from being completely baffled (WHY IS THIS FOOD SO COLD, MOM??) he gobbled it up.  Win win!

So, until then both myself and the kid are going dairy-free.  Because giving up soft cheese when I was pregnant wasn’t hard enough.  I looooove cheese and ice cream and yogourt.  Admittedly, this is going to be a real challenge.  First big failure: soy cream cheese?  That was the most foul thing I have ever tasted.  It was so thin and silky and just not right.  It went into the bin.  Ugh.  The memories haunt my tastebuds.

Small upside, I get to make our dairy-free meals on the new granite counter.  How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways.

As you know, the Boyfriendly household picked up and moved (everything but the kitchen sink) about two months ago.  We’ve been getting to know our new little neighbourhood – through our stomachs of course.  One of our good finds a couple of weeks ago was Morning Owl (538 Rochester Street).   The cute owl sign had us at first sight.  (Side note:  Gourmet Boy’s room has an owl theme, so we are very tuned in to owls at the moment).

So far, Gourmet Boy, the husband and myself have tried their Australian Flat White cappuccino (cappucino made with half and half cream), the breakfast sandwich and the lunchtime BLT made on Art-is-in bread.  I think the reason why we like this place so much is because they make food using all the ingredients that we’d use at home… in fact, it sort of feels like a second home.  Well, if your home is full of civil servants gabbing about strategic planning.

That’s the one drawback – the pleb factor.  Since Gourmet Boy came along, we’ve been enjoying our maternity leave and the absence of government speak.  You know, the acronymns, the coil-bound notebooks, the cubicle gossip and of course, “strategic planning”.  It’s clear that Morning Owl’s customer base is the plebtopian office block across the street.  If you want to check it out and minimize the plebitude, I suggest visiting between 9am-10am or after lunch (once the gang has retreated back to cubeland to Twitter).

Gourmet Boy is off to daycare in the fall, so our fieldtrips to the Owl will be coming to an end (they are only open Monday – Friday).  We’re a little bit sad about that fact.  Please pick up the slack for us in September.  We think you’ll like it too.