A Leisurely Saturday at Home...

I decided today to stay the heck home and putter around the house, maybe experiment with some recipes I've been thinking about for a while. One of those things is Broccoli Soup. I tolerate broccoli raw, but cooked, well....I keep trying to prepare it in different ways in the hopes it will grow on me a little more. When something is as healthy as broccoli, I am willing to keep trying.
So, I whipped up a small pot of Vegan Broccoli Soup. I followed a recipe in my Betty Crocker Cookbook as closely as possible, making subsitutes for the animal products like milk and butter. What I ended up with was surely close to the way broccoli soup should taste.

My opinion? Blech!! Yuck!! Gross!! This soup was crap-tastic!! Vile weed! The taste was downright nasty, and the way it made my kitchen smell was God-awful. Needless to say, I will NOT be making this again. It wasn't even worth taking a picture of. Thank God for my stash of scented candles.
I then moved on to something happier- Double Chocolate Cookies, veganized of course. These cookies truly are the richest, most melt-in-your-mouth cookie that I make, hands down. Each one is like a tiny brownie in cookie form. Here they are coming out the oven:

And here they are dipped in chocolate glaze:

They may not look like anything special, but don't let that fool you! If you make this recipe for any kind of event where omnis are around, you will get rave reviews as the most brilliant baker on the block, even if you are a Vegan. (God knows, Vegans live on sprouts and wheatgrass, right?? Who knew that they could make ass-kicking cookies! )

For your baking pleasure, here is the recipe:

Preheat oven to 350

2/3 cup margarine
1 cup white sugar
(Cream together)

Then add:

2 tsp vanilla
Replacer for 2 eggs
½ cup cocoa
½ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
2 ½ cups flour

Roll in small balls, flatten with a fork, and bake for 8 minutes. When cool, dip cookies in glaze. Glaze is made on the stovetop in a small pot:

Melt 2 Tbsp margarine
Add 3 Tbsp cocoa
2 Tbsp Water
½ tsp vanilla1 cup icing sugar

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For lunch today, I decided to dig out the bag of Spelt flour I had picked up a month ago and never got around to using. I made a soy cheese pizza, using used the pizza crust recipe at: http://www.bobsredmill.com/recipe/detail.php?rid=81

It was delicious! Just a little different from what we are used to. I highly recommend it.

For supper, I was feeling ambitious. I decided to try out a tofu idea that has been percolating in my head lately.

I started with a pound of very firm tofu, sliced thin and marinated in turkey-like spices. The recipe is in the cookbook "How It All Vegan." You let the tofu sit for an hour, then bake the slices for an hour in the same marinade for another hour.

Then, you fry the slices until fairly firm, in a frying pan with just a little oil.

When cool, I took the tofu slices, and made little "sandwiches" using Uncle Ben's Stuff 'n Such. I covered the "sandwiches" with Yuba - a thin, crispy coating made from the skin that forms on the top of the liquid while soy milk is being made. You can buy this in Chinese grocery stores.
When baked, Yuba forms a crispy skin that holds in the moisture and flavour of whatever you've wrapped in it:

I find this kinda looked like a tofu Mallomar!

Anyway, we added potatoes and gravy, and fancy sliced carrots to make this into a meal. Bob also had steamed broccoli, but I was having none of that.

Overall, we gave this meal a four, simply because this was my first time using Yuba, and I think with practice I could make the texture and taste more appealing. All I did was spray it with PAM, but I am thinking maybe brushing it with an oilve oil/soy sauce type mixture would have made it tastier.
Well, time to watch a movie. Hope you all have a relaxing night. Sweet Dreams!