Chocolate Chip Pecan Cookies

A while back I was referring to my significant other and I called him my "other half." I didn't call him my "better half" and the person I was talking to (can't remember who it was at the moment) thought that was pretty funny. I didn't mean anything by it, except that we are equals perhaps. At any rate, today I will say that my "better half" is not with me and was not able to take pictures of my food in the spectacular way that he usually does. You will have to live with me and my shitty phone snapshots. Although, he just got this awesome new camera and he already has to send it back to be recalibrated or something anyway, so even if he was here it might not have gone well in the picture department.

At any rate, I'm starting a cookthrough. You know, you get a cookbook and you make every recipe in it and document it. I haven't done this before so I'm sort of excited. Actually, I'm more than excited. Since graduating I feel the need to conquer something large.

My son has been going nuts for the baked goods lately and even though I said I was swearing off white flour and sugar, I guess I lied. Things have been a little stressful at our household -- both good and bad stress -- and I feel like eating cookies, damn it. So, the book I chose is 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes by Kris Holechek.

I think I'm going to just start at the beginning and plow through. (Maybe I should call it a plowthrough, then?)

These cookies are the Chocolate Chip Pecan Cookies on page 30. The author of this book plays it pretty fast and loose with the ingredients. She just says things like "milk" or "margarine" and you can choose your own favorites or whatever is easiest for you to get. Mix and match, do what you wish. I like that since I never know what the flavor-of-the-week is going to be in milk around here. Currently we're on an almond milk bender, but I did manage to find some soy that needed to be used up for this recipe. Then I thought to myself, "When did I open this thing?" and couldn't remember, so I settled on using almond milk anyway. I also ended up using Earth Balance in the tub. I try finding it in the sticks (I mean, not out in the country, but stick-shaped product rather), but I just don't go to Whole Foods that often and that's where they have it. Even so, the tub stuff is cheaper, just more of a pain to measure. Oh well.

Ingredients. Pretty simple and luckily it was all stuff I had sitting around the house, otherwise this whole thing would have been delayed because I do not feel like going to the grocery store today. And yeah, I like Costco, okay? I am a Kirkland product junkie as you can see. It's very Idiocracy of me, I know.

I have been using Ghirardelli chips for a long time because they have some that are dairy-free. But, lo and behold, what did my little eyes see right before Christmas this year at Costco? Only this metric friggin' ton of dairy-free chocolate chips. They are tasty, too.

Also, I know that some vegans won't even eat things that are made in factories that share machinery with dairy and eggs, but I am not that kind of vegan. Commence pearl-clutching right away.

My son has a corn allergy and this recipe called for corn starch. Usually in baked goods, I use arrowroot powder because tapioca starch can sometimes give off a funky flavor when it's heated. I was all out of arrowroot, however, and this was only a teaspoon, so I figured it would turn out all right. This starch, mixed with 2 tablespoons of almond milk replaced the egg usually found in a cookie.

Not enough pecans to warrant getting out my Slap-Chop. Ha. I do have one, though. Well, I had one that was one of those that came out before the infomercial. A Zyliss or something. I got as a door prize at a Pampered Chef party. Then we got another one as a gag gift at a gift swap. They're actually kind of fun for some things and great for kids. But in this case, will stick to the Henckels. I got some new ones for Christmas this year and have already cut myself like a hundred times. My old ones need to be sharpened and I didn't realize how badly till I started handling the new ones the same way as the old ones. Ouch.

Eleven damn cookies. I'm not great at spacing and am always afraid I'm going to end up with one giant cookie blob on my stone.

But as you can see, I would have been fine and probably could have squeezed that last sucker in somewhere, Tetris-style. This recipe called for the cookies to bake for 8-10 minutes on a parchment-covered cookie sheet. Parchment is expensive and I am loathe to use it except when the cookie batter is really low-fat or high-syrup. Otherwise, I use a baking stone. I also usually add about 5 minutes to the cooking time, especially on the first couple passes because the stone needs to heat up. The cookies above are at the 8-minute mark and are nowhere near done enough for me.

The longest part of making cookies is not the 20 minute prep time. No. It is the time from cooling rack to mouth that is like watching grass grow.

Ta da. I started out with all chocolate chips since my other better half doesn't like getting nuts all in his teeth. Then, when I'd made about half the batch, I added pecans to the rest of the batter. Nuts on the left, please.

These turned out great and I will definitely make them again. It made 46 cookies (rather than the stated 30 which is always a bonus in my book, although I probably don't make huge cookies). The starch added a really light texture to them and the edges were crispy but not at all hard. Not "crunchy" or anything. The tapioca starch didn't funk up the flavor at all, either, so corn-allergic folks can adapt this easily.

I am not the only one to make these cookies and live to tell the tale:

• Greenderella - she cut the sugar and they turned out just as good.
• DesertStandard
• Raspberry Swirl
• Bite-Sized Thoughts - Adapted the recipe to make Strawberry and White Chocolate Cookies and Cranberry and Dark Chocolate Cookies

You can also visit the author of this cookbook on her blog nom! nom! nom! or on her Facebook page where she is pimping a new cookbook based on vegetarian stuff you can get at Trader Joe's.

Baking Vegan Bread Every Day

I've been really unhappy with store-bought bread and it's sometimes hard to find brands that are 100 percent vegan. I've been seeing a lot about no-knead breads lately, so I thought that I would give it a try, but never got around to it last year. Then I was researching a couple of cookbooks to give to my boyfriend's sister for Christmas. One of them was Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking.

I decided to go with a different book for her, but was still intrigued by this book. I mean, hell, if I added up all the time I spend looking at the list of ingredients on bread packaging at the store, it could easily add up to more than five minutes a day. I roamed around the Interwebs and found several links to the "master boule" recipe (including this one at Mother Earth News and this one with videos at Instructables) and it seemed easy enough. The steps are basically:

• Put four vegan ingredients in a big container with a NON-AIRTIGHT lid: 6.5 cups of flour, 1.5 tablespoons yeast, 1.5 tablespoons kosher salt, 3 cups lukewarm water.
• Stir it up like you would a brownie batter (just till the flour disappears).
• Let it sit on the counter for about 2 hours (more if you have a cold kitchen).
• Pop the whole container in the fridge.
• When you want bread, flour a spot and then dip your hand in to grab a grapefruit-sized piece and snip it off. Quickly shape into a ball and throw onto a floured pizza peel or an old AirBake aluminum pan that you never use anyway because it's such a piece of crap and makes you waste so much parchment paper because everything sticks to the damn thing. (YMMV on that one.)
• Let rest for about 40 minutes.
• About 20 minutes into that resting period, preheat the oven to 450 degrees and pop a pizza stone onto the middle shelf and the bottom of your broiler pan onto the bottom shelf.
• After 20 minutes, flour the top of the dough gently and make some slits in the top of the bread about 1/2 inch deep and then slide it onto the stone. Pour 1-2 cups water into the broiler pan and shut the door.
• Bake 30 minutes.
• Watch family devour loaf and rejoice that they will have fresh bread every day.

Take that, honey, Sodium stearoyl lactylate, l-cysteine and mono / diglycerides! Get outta my bread basket!

And it may seem complicated, but compared to kneaded dough, it's really not. Once you do that first part, you've got four or five little loaves before you do those first steps again. Then, once you get the hang of the order of the last steps, it's super simple. And you don't even have to clean the container when you make a new batch. It kind of gets all sourdoughy if you don't. Even if you don't make bread every day, the dough is good for two weeks. After that, it won't rise so well.

Other thoughts regarding this method:

I ended up buying the 24-cup version of this Sterilite Ultra Seal Container thinking that if all goes awry, I still have a container to store cereal or something. It has a little flap on the top for you to pour stuff, so I just leave that part unsnapped so gases can escape. When I was at the store, I looked at all sorts of other containers, but decided that I wanted something tall that could fit on the top shelf of the fridge and not take up a lot of other real estate in there.

The part about making the slits in the bread is imperative. Otherwise you get a hard log that you need an axe to cut through. The slits help the bread expand in the oven. That's where it will do most of its expanding, by the way, so don't be alarmed when your bread has been sitting on the peel for 40 minutes and hasn't done much of anything.

I used a wooden spoon to mix the dough. It's really wet and the spoon worked, but as I read about people making bread this way, I came across this utensil that is called a Danish Dough Whisk and this one is now on its way to my house because I am a kitchen gadget whore.

I have not read the entire book, in fact, I have only made this one recipe and checked out some other bits on the authors' blog. There are a couple other books from them, too. One has 100 more recipes and one is about pizzas and flatbreads. My library has all three, so being the library girl that I am, I'm going to check them out and see if they're worth adding to my permanent collection. I'm aware, too, that some of the recipes are not vegan (egg, milk, etc. are common bread ingredients, especially for sweeter breads) so maybe I can make some modifications to make them vegan and talk about them here.

In other news:

Speaking of library girledness, I apologize for the time away from the blog. The last few semesters I have been in school and working on my internship at a library. Two of those semesters I was taking 18-hours (plus home schooling my high-schooler) so I didn't find much free time for writing and really, cooking took a back seat, too. I just found I was so tired I didn't care and we ate tofu scrambles about twice a week and canned beans quite a lot. Nothing too exciting there, but luckily we're past that and I now have this to show for it:

Cum Laude! How about that?! What a long journey it's been. Now, on to grad school... and job hunting. Now that school is over and the holidays are past, I have been waking up every morning kind of directionless. The house is getting really cleaned out and organized, though. And I am cooking a lot! Now I just need to keep writing about it. :)

Dear Starbucks: Soy Shouldn't Even Be a Reward

Because it should just be free. Period. Every other coffee place around me offers that to their customers, so if Starbucks would like the loyalty of the folks who either choose soy for personal reasons (taste, less saturated fat, vegans) or out of necessity (dairy allergy, lactose intolerance) then they should change this policy. Some places even offer almond milk and rice milk for free so what gives?

I hadn't actually been going to a Starbucks store for a while but we did purchase their House Blend from Costco quite often. It tasted good and was Fair Trade and was reasonably priced. Coffee can do a little bit of a number on my stomach, however, and my significant other likes his very strong. We do pour-over coffee each morning so that we both get it just to our tastes. Starbucks recently introduced some "Blonde" varieties and that was really the ticket for me. I had no problems with it at all and loved the lighter, smoother taste. I didn't want to buy the gigantic bag at Costco, however, because I only use one small scoop each day (whereas he uses 3 scoops each day!). I like it to be fresh and so needed to buy a smaller quantity at a time.

Enter the Starbucks Reward Card. Yay! It had two free perks I loved: A free cup of coffee for every pound of beans and free soy milk every time you buy coffee. That's great for me, because they usually charge $.60 per cup for that. Significant other is lactose intolerant, so that's $1.20 every time.

Starbucks likes feedback, so I gave them mine and others who are disappointed about the changes are also letting them know. Hopefully they will make some changes in this area that make everyone happy. I left the following comment on their blog to let them know how I feel about the issue.

--

I really enjoyed the perk of getting a free cup of coffee every time I bought beans even though it was a little bit pricier than beans elsewhere. It was truly a reward. It was a little time for me to just enjoy coffee that I didn't get up at the crack of dawn to make. With that gone, I will just buy beans at Costco. Their Seattle Mountain Blend is pretty good. I see that they are carrying your Veranda lately, but I don't know if I will buy that because I'm feeling a little slighted over this whole reward thing.

I never used the syrups (though the comments here indicate a whole lot of folks love them) but I did enjoy the soy milk reward. I am vegan and my significant other is lactose intolerant. Other coffee shops near us don't charge extra for soy so having this card was what kept me coming to your store instead of theirs. I would love to stay loyal to Starbucks, however, I don't feel that punishing me for wanting / needing soy milk is the way to go. (Especially to the tune of $1.20 every time - where on earth are you buying your soy milk that you feel you need to charge me *that* much?)

I could have lived with the free drink with beans going away, because like I said, that was a BONUS feature. A reward. Something special. You could shuffle those rewards around any way you like and it wouldn't bother me too much. I'd adjust. It was just something that really made me feel that there was some value added to that bean purchase. But free soy milk should not be a BONUS feature. You shouldn't even have to have a card for it. It should just be a given. If you're not going to offer that, you could at least, perhaps, offer an array of reward choices and when people are already online registering their cards for the reward program, they could then make choices about which rewards (within a set limit) they could attach to their card. It could be individualized and customers could choose the rewards that mean the most to them. You know, here are six options, choose the three you love most.

At any rate, I've cancelled my auto reload on the card and won't be coming here any longer once my balance is used. I understand that you have to make choices about these things. You're a business. I get it. But I'm a customer and I have to make choices, too. So, there's mine. I'm just offering this explanation to you since you made these choices based on customer feedback and because you said you are excited about offering flexibility. My feedback is that this doesn't feel very flexible to me. For what it's worth, I think the free food idea is stellar. However, given a choice, I would still rather have free soy milk.

--

There is also a petition where I left the same message and added to the other voices there.

I know that for some, this is not a big deal because they use independent shops or make coffee at home. We do that, too. Still, in principle, I'd like to see soy milk offered there for free. And not just for vegans. Some people don't have a choice about cow's milk. They just can't drink it at all.

All this has motivated me to stop being so slack, however, and to make a more concerted effort to stop by Avoca Coffee when I'm in the neighborhood, or hell, to make the effort to get over to that area more often. They don't charge for soy milk, they changed their mocha recipe recently to make it vegan, they offer locally baked vegan delights from Stir Crazy Baked Goods (which also offered om nom noms at my CSA) and they've got vegan bagels from Boopa's Bagel Deli. Can't get that at Starbucks. On top of that, they often have food trucks nearby that have vegan food.

Why the hell am I going to Starbucks, again?

In other coffee news, the Hario carafe was shattered after a slippery hand incident. A cup fell out of significant other's wet hand while he was doing dishes and the cup landed on old Hario. RIP. You were a good little carafe and I will still use your cone filter top in remembrance.

Wraps, Smoothies and Cold-Brewed Coffee

Yesterday, I made some wraps. As a result, I think wraps are kind of annoying. This recipe was "White Bean and Roasted Red Pepper Vegetable Wraps with Spinach" from Supermarket Vegan. There's a nice adaptation to this recipe over at Resolute Woot if you want to see what the recipe is like.

First, I should say, though this cookbook is called Supermarket Vegan, I don't actually do a lot of the Supermarket bits of it like using canned beans, etc. So, I pressure cooked some white beans (Great Northern because I was out of Cannellini) and seasoned them with bay leaves, pepper, herbs and garlic. Then when those were cooled, I made the spread, which was good, but even after adding extra garlic, was still a little bland.

When I got to the wrap part, I found that the Ezekiel 4:9 tortillas had already molded all over the place. I guess this is one of the things you realize when you start buying processed foods that are a little less processed than your usual processed foods. They're not as bathed in preservatives to keep them on the shelf for months. I should have just made the tortillas myself. At any rate, I had some roti dough in the fridge, so I just toasted those up in a pan and assembled the wraps. Jacob doesn't like spinach so I made his with cabbage and I made mine with a mix of cabbage and spinach. I also added shredded carrots. In hindsight I should have added green onions, too. That would have been nice.

The roti were sort of small, so getting them to have enough filling without spilling all over the place was a pain. I think that next time I will just skip the "assemble and refrigerate for at least half an hour" step and refrigerate the wrap contents and then let everyone assemble their own wraps at the table more like cold burritos.

I also made the "Easy Lentil Soup" to go with it which was, indeed, easy. It was pretty good. Floof in my Food has an adaptation of the recipe for that one. Jacob is a huge lentil soup fan and he liked this one better than the last version, so I guess I can toss that one out. I added about twice as many carrots and onions as were called for, as is my way. I like everything to have lots of veggies. Boyfriend added Sri Racha to everything as usual. I sometimes find it hard not to be insulted by this, but, it is his way. He likes everything to be spicy.

This morning, I made some smoothies since I bought a metric ton of strawberries this weekend and they are ripening fast. They're so good and juicy I want to spread out a blanket on the grass with a book and some sun and just eat them all day long. But there's school, so I will stay inside and drink my smoothie and do statistics instead.

My smoothie this morning was 1/2 cup frozen berry mix (blueberry, raspberry, blackberry), a handful of strawberries, half a banana, 2 tablespoons of almond butter, 3/4 cup of unsweetened soy milk and a cup of spinach. I don't usually add spinach or greens to my smoothies but my boyfriend's sister is crazy about it, so I thought I would give it a try and start with a cup.

I haven't been very happy with my blender's performance lately and it is on loan to a friend right now who doesn't have one and is just getting into cooking and stuff. Actually, I think I just gave it to him, and if I didn't and you're reading this right now, please, just keep the blender and pass it on when you get a nice one. It's good for small, light jobs but it's not up for making smoothies every day, so I just use my food processor which absolutely murders some frozen fruit. It's so fast it basically makes ice cream of it if all I use is frozen fruit and some milk or yogurt. Anyway, it did a great job this morning, but I should have mixed up the spinach first all pesto style, because I did have some leafy bits floating around. Next time. I couldn't taste the spinach at all, though, which was cool. I felt like I was sneaking myself vegetables. Not that I have to do that, but I definitely don't eat as many greens as I should.

Jacob's smoothie, on the other hand, was a different story. He doesn't like the seeds of the berry mix and he likes his fruit a bit more tropical. And he knew there was spinach in mine. One drink and he was like, "Something isn't right about this." Then he stuck his tongue out and there was a little leaf bit on it, so there wasn't going to be any tricking him this morning. I made his with a handful of strawberries, frozen tropical fruit (pineapple, mango, papaya), half a banana, 2 tablespoons of peanut butter and a cup of unsweetened soy milk. He had enough for a big glass and a snack glass for after he works out.

Boyfriend's treat this morning was some cold-brewed coffee. I've been wanting to try it after having some that his cousin made that was so good. I looked around at various recipes and then just kind of winged it. I have a French press and a Hario carafe (see below) that we use for making pour-over coffee, so I figure even when one is full of grounds waiting to go to the garden I can use the other to make the next couple day's coffee. Plus, I don't need to buy any extra equipment.

At about 6:00 p.m. last night, I coarsely ground about 6 scoops of coffee and then filled the rest of the carafe with water, gave it a good stir, put the lid on it and let it sit till 8:00 a.m. Filtered it into a mason jar so I could store the excess in the fridge. Into his travel cup, I added 6 ice cubes, a spoon of sugar, some soy creamer and about a cup of the coffee and gave it a shake. It looks like I can get two days of coffee out of one batch. He said it was the jam and that it tasted like a frappuccino.

He likes his coffee really strong, so I used more coffee grounds than the recipes I found called for. America's Test Kitchen says go for a 4:1 ratio of water to coffee by weight or 1:1 by volume. The New York Times recipe says 1/3 cup grounds to 1 1/2 cups water. I just used 3 Hario scoops (which is apparently 36 grams) per cup since that's what I use when I make him a strong cup of hot coffee in the morning. I'm going to experiment with making ice cubes out of coffee for the next batch. I may also try a 24-hour steeping time just to see how that works out.

Am I crazy to be so happy about this coffee thing? I am so happy about it. I mean, I figure it will save me time in the morning. I can even fix it at night and he can just grab it out of the fridge and I won't feel bad if I stay up late studying and want to sleep in a little instead of getting up to make coffee. Also, it will be that much less energy to heat up a kettle every day and that much less heat set loose in my house. I know it's not much heat, but if it's going to be 110 degrees every day this summer like it was last summer, every little bit counts. Plus, he runs hot anyway and I'm sure the last thing he wants in the summer is a hot cup of coffee when it's already 90+ degrees as he's walking out of the house.

Whole Wheat Vegan Pancakes

This weekend marks the first time in about seven months that I've seen strawberries that made my mouth water. I know they're from California, but I couldn't resist. We need to eat more fruit in this house!

This morning I sent boyfriend to work with whole wheat pancakes leftover from the weekend plus a bunch of strawberries. I had been making this pancake recipe with just unbleached flour but since I'm trying to get away from most of the overly processed stuff bit by bit, I subbed all of the flour with whole wheat pastry flour. I figure that's a start. I actually like the recipe better that way. Nutty and flavorful instead of bland. I upped the baking powder a little bit to make sure they got fluffy but really, I think they key to that is just letting the batter rest. I wait 10 minutes and the batter gets nice and airy and it stays that way while they cook.

Whole Wheat Vegan Pancakes

• 1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
• 2 tablespoons aluminum-free baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon maple syrup
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 1/4 cups plant milk
• 2 tablespoons oil

Whisk together all the dry ingredients, then add the wet stuff and whisk gently just until the flour is mixed in. Don't overmix - it's OK if it's a little lumpy.

Let the batter rest for 10 minutes. About 6-7 minutes in, heat your griddle or pan.

Brush or spray a little bit of oil on the griddle and use a measuring cup or ladle to scoop batter out and onto it. (I use a 1/3 cup measuring cup so they're all the same size and I get about 8 pancakes that way.)

When pancakes are just dry around the edges and bubbles are starting to form, flip and cook about a minute more.

After I've poured the batter, if I have some fruit around, I will usually toss some onto the wet side at that point (peaches, mangoes, blueberries and other berries, etc.) and they cook up nicely once you flip over. A minute or so is just enough to burst the berries.