Drunk Vegans

Lilacs and Dandelions and Jelly

Everything is blooming! I love it.

 

This is normally the post where I would be making my springtime batch of dandelion wine. But, I got lazy this year; Too lazy to spend hours picking dandelion petals off of the flowers until I have enough to fill a one gallon crock... really my back can't handle it anymore. So.... Jelly only needs two cups of flower petals. I can do that.

 

Flower Jelly

 

This is kind of a two-day project, so be patient! First, on the evening or afternoon of the first day, pick a LOT of flowers. I made two batches of jelly, one each of lilac flowers:

and dandelions:

And then I picked a handful of violets because I thought they would help to make the lilac jelly more purpley:

You can use any edible flowers to make jelly. Lavender makes a nice jelly. Rose petals make a nice jelly. Elderflowers make a TERRIFIC jelly. If in doubt, taste a (Non-poisonous. Duh.) flower before you pick a bunch to be sure it tastes worthy. I think nasturtiums and marigolds are probably too tangy to make a good jelly, but you can try them and let me know.

Pop in a movie and spend the next couple of hours picking all of the petals off of the flowers. You don't want any of the green stuff or it will make the jelly bitter.

Ok. You and Godzilla have picked your petals clean. Remember, you needed 2 cups of them. Squish them down in the measuring cup to be sure you have enough. Put them in a largish bowl and pour 2 cups of boiling water over them. Cover the bowl, and let it steep overnight. The petal decoction can sit for up to 24 hours.

On the next day: Line a colander with cheesecloth or a clean handkerchief and strain your petal mixture into a medium saucepan. You will want to squeeze as much liquid out of the petals as you can. Discard the petals (they make really good compost).

 

 

LOOK AT HOW PINK THIS IS. Ha. Sorry. To the liquid in the pot, add four cups of sugar and 1/4 cup of lemon juice. Stir really well and bring it to a  boil.

When the mixture comes to a ROLLING boil (That means it is probably boiling over and killing your stovetop. Watch it closely.), add one 3 oz packet of liquid pectin.

This is messy, but oh so pretty:

 

Boil for about 2 more minutes, and then pour into jars. Did I forget to tell you to have canning jars ready? Yeah. You'll need about 6 half-pint canning jars...

At this point you can refrigerate the jelly, or process it in a boiling water bath canner for ten minutes to seal the jars for longer storage. Voile. Jelly.

Lilac jelly:

Dandelion jelly:

OMG RADIOACTIVE JELLY:

 

Like this? Hate this? You should also try:

Dandelion Coffee

More Dandelions!

Boil and Bubble

Another Breakfast Scramble

So I haven't been blogging much lately. Big surprise. The weather has been really off-and-on weird so I haven't been able to do much gardening or foraging. In fact I should really get out there NOW and pull the sheets off my pepper plants because the frost is melted now.

But, first. Breakfast.

 

You can throw almost anything in with tofu and call it breakfast. Cube a potato and saute it with onion, mushrooms, bell pepper, and/or any leftover veggies that you have in your refrigerator. When everything is soft and browned and just about done, crumble some tofu over the whole thing and cook it a little longer. I like to season my scrambles with turmeric, black sea salt, and a garlic and herb spice blend. But you can season it with just about anything! Tofu is AWESOME because it takes on the flavor of whatever you are cooking it with.

 

Serve the scramble on a bed of greens and tell everyone you had a salad for breakfast. A salad with fried stuff. But green stuff makes it healthy, yeah?

 

Like this, hate this? You should also try:

Scrambled Tofu

Tofu!

Bribing people with cupcakes

It is finally SPRING! I am so happy. We had a surprise-blizzard on the first day of spring in Ohio… but this past weekend it was finally warm enough to go outside and smell daffodils and play in the mud.

 

And, I was able to bribe people to help dig up my garden. With cupcakes. Because people will do ANYTHING for cupcakes. Apparently.

 

Key Lime Cupcakes! With zesty buttercream frosting.

 

For the cupcakes:

 

1 cup non-dairy milk (almond milk is good)

juice of one lime

2 cups flour

2 tbsp corn starch

½ tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

¾ cup sugar

½ cup coconut oil, melted (You could use margarine. Melt the oil in the microwave for about 30 seconds.)

2 tsp vanilla

zest of one lime (you get zest by grating the green part of the rind on the small part of a cheese grater)

 

Mix together the lime juice and milk and set it aside to curdle. Mix together the dry ingredients. Stir in the milk, oil, vanilla, and lime zest. Scoop the batter into muffin tins that have been lined with paper cups or sprayed with cooking spray. Bake at 350 for abut 20 minutes, until they pass the toothpick test. Cool thoroughly.

 

For the frosting:

 

2 tbsp margarine

1 tbsp coconut oil (or another tbsp of margarine)

1 tsp vanilla

Juice and zest of ½ lime

Lots and lots of powdered sugar. I don’t know exactly how much I used. Maybe 2 cups?

 

The trick to making fluffy buttercream frosting is to whip lots of air into it. So use an electric mixer, an egg beater, or the whip attachment on your immersion blender. Whip together the margarine, oil, vanilla, and lime juice and zest. When that is nice and fluffy start adding powdered sugar, a big scoop at a time. Blend until smooth, add more sugar, repeat, until the mixture is nice and thick but still spreadable.

 

Frost the cupcakes and garnish as desired. I used edible ball bearings, because apparently people will also do ANYTHING for cupcakes with fake ball bearings on them. And that’s an awesome thing.

 

It’s spring! Go eat something. Go dig something up. Enjoy it!

 

Like this? Hate this? You should also try:

Dandelions!

Applesauce Cake

Red Rum Cake

Stay home and bake something

New St. Patrick's day tradition: stay home and bake something. I had to work today anyway, and I saw enough drunk people stumbling around in green t-shirts and Mardi-gras beads to turn me off of ever leaving the house again.

 

Not that there's anything wrong with stumbling around drunk in Mardi-gras beads... I just wouldn't necessarily do that in a public library.

 

So instead I have been reading ALL the books:

Ok, I only finished three of them. The night's still young.

 

And eating MUFFINS:

 

Damn cats...

 

Yeah. I made muffins! Strawberry ones. Not green ones... Go here for my previous rant on St. Patrick's day.

 

Strawberry Streusel Muffins

3 cups flour (I used 1 cup of whole wheat and 2 cups white)

1/2 cup white sugar

1 tbsp baking powder

1 heaping cup fresh strawberries

2/3 cups milk

1/4 cup plus 1 tbsp vegetable oil

1 tsp vanilla

1 tbsp brown sugar

3 tbsp rolled oats

 

Mix together the flour, sugar, and baking soda. Cut the greens off the strawberries and mash them up with a fork. Mix the berries, milk, vanilla, and 1/4 cup of oil into the flour mixture until it is just mixed; don't beat it. In a separate bowl mix together the oats, brown sugar, and tablespoon of oil.

 

Spoon the batter into greased muffin tins (or use paper liners), sprinkle the crumbly topping on, and bake at 375 for 15-20 minutes.

 

 

Keep away from evil cats.

 

Like this? Hate this? You should also try:

GREEN BEER

Fat Tuesday

Pumpkinesque Bread

Looking for something?

I have been tidying up the website, fixing broken links, and organizing shit. Because library ladies have an OCD need to sort all the STUFF.

 

If you are looking for old posts about a specific topic, here is the place to do it!

 

Information about Veganism

What do you eat?

Where do you get your protein?

Nutritional Deficiencies

Soybeans

Vegan STUFF to put on your food

Hummus is not a vegetable

 

Recipes

Bread (or how to homebrew a loaf)

Cake, Applesauce

Cake, Red Rum

Chocolate-chip Cookies

Cream Cheese

Crackers

Cream of Potato Soup

Cupcakes, Key Lime

Dandelion Coffee

Dandelion-greens and Mushrooms

Fried Green Tomatoes

Fried Rice

Gingersnaps

Granola

Haggis

Jelly, Lilac AND Dandelion

Muffins, strawberry streusel

Okara Burgers

Pancakes

Pie, Applesauce & Bourbon & Walnut

Pie, Chocolate & PB & Banana custard

Pie, Eggnog

Pie, Nuts & Chocolate & Bourbon

Potato Candy

Pumpkin Bread

Quinoa Tabbouleh

Scrambled Tofu

Soymilk

Tofu, homemade

 

Homebrew

Bottling (a primer on green beer)

Drunk Vegans on Beer

Garlic Scape Cooking Wine

 

General Cooking Information

Cooking with Alcohol

an Introduction to Okara

 

Happy Drunk Vegan Cooking!

Soup Weather

I love this weather; Cool enough to put on a fuzzy bathrobe and snuggle-up around a bowl of soup.

 

 

Cream of Potato Soup

 

4 or 5 medium sized potatoes

1 carrot

1/2 small onion

1 clove garlic, peeled but left whole

1 1/2 cups cooked white beans (garbanzo, navy, great northern, whatever)

1/4 tsp paprika

1/2 tsp celery seed

1/2 tsp dry mustard

salt and pepper to taste

 

Peel the potatoes and cut into chunks. Chop the onion and carrot. Put the potatoes, onion, carrot, garlic, beans, and seasonings in a big pot (or your crock pot). Add enough water to cover everything by about an inch. Bring the soup to a boil and then simmer until the potatoes are soft (or leave it on low in the crock pot for 6-12 hours). Blend the soup until it is smooth using a stick blender, or in batches in a regular blender.

 

That's it. Eat soup.

 

I love you guys. I love soup, too.

 

 

Like this? Hate this? You should also read:

What do you eat? Day nine.

Stuff!

Dandelions and quinoa polenta

Massive Canning Day

In spite of the drought that we are all experiencing pretty much, well, everywhere, my garden is now producing far more food than I can eat. Even more than my family and friends are willing to eat... And I don't even grow zucchini!

 

So, every weekend I have been spending my day-off making a mess.

 

Nobody in my family cans. I didn't have any wise elder relatives to show me how to do it. And, when purchased canned goods are less than a dollar each, I don't really have a good excuse to waste an entire Saturday steaming up the kitchen on a sweltering 98 degree summer day. But, it makes me happy to see the rows of glass jars lining my pantry, full of stuff that came from my own back yard.

 

 

Canning is not hard. It's so easy that even a lazy, drunk vegan can do it with a little research and preparation. My favorite source is the National Center for Home Food Preservation. Just because canning is easy doesn't mean you want to take any chances with your health. Do it right.

 

So. This is what I have been up to:

 

The cucumber vines are growing so well that they have taken over the apple tree. Now it looks like the tree is putting out cukes instead of apples... I'm ok with that.

 

 

There's a 2 gallon crock of pickles fermenting on the counter. Every couple of days I scoop out the cukes that look “done” and pack them into mason jars. Then I top off the crock with fresh brine and dump in more cucumbers. I have been following the pickle instructions in the book Wild Fermentation.

 

I still have more cucumbers than I know what to do with. So, I made a batch of pickle relish and canned it.

 

 

Over the past month I have canned crushed tomatoes and tomato sauce. Today I did a batch of catsup to add to the stash.

 

 

Lots of boiling tomatoes,

and putting them through a strainer,

and more boiling.

 

I also pulled most of the beets, and made pickled beets. Nobody I know will eat a pickled beet, so these are all mine!

 

 

Now I need to bottle the dandelion and garlic scape wines. Maybe next weekend....

 

 

Like this? Hate this? You should also try:

 

boil and bubble

More Dandelions!

Some stuff I did I did this weekend

Happy Drunk Vegan Independance Day!

I love any holiday that includes good food, good beer, awesome friends and family, and ginormous explosions. Not necessarily in that order. I think we may have outdone ourselves this year.

My local fireworks were almost this epic. Almost:

 

AND. I made the stupidest veganization of a nonvegan food ever:

That's right. Those are deviled eggs. Vegan deviled eggs. I saw the recipe on this blog a few months ago and have been waiting for a chance to try it. They were actually easier to make than real deviled eggs, to my surprise. And the overall consensus of everyone who ate one, veggie and meat eater alike, was that they were pretty damn good. Maybe a little too salty, but that's easy to fix.

I don't make crazy stuff like that all that time. But, it was fun.

I also fried up a bunch of green tomaters:

Slice them, dredge the damp slices through cornmeal and whatever spices you like, and pan fry in a little olive oil. Mmm. I can only eat these about one month out of the year when my tomatoes are still babies, but they are sooo good.

What did you eat and/or blow up over the holiday?

 

Like this? Hate this? You should also try:

Yet another pie

Red Rum! Cake, that is.

Where do you get your protein?

boil and bubble

  "Toad, that under cold stone,
    Days and nights has thirty-one;
    Swelter'd venom sleeping got,
    Boil thou first i' the charmed pot!
    Double, double toil and trouble;
    Fire burn, and caldron bubble"

 

Yep. I'm making wine. All sorts of weird stuff is bubbling away on my kitchen counter.

At least one of those will be delicious (dandelion wine, on the left). The other two are very strong garlic scape wine. And now my house reeks of garlic....

Vegetable wine isn't for drinking (trust me). But it is an excellent cooking wine, and I can never get enough of it. It is especially perfect for sauteeing greens like swiss chard or spinach, browning onions, and marinating stuff for the grill.

There is an expansive section in Drunk Vegans on how to make vegetable wine (dandelion wine, too). Your public library has books on how to make wine the correct way. I usually just wing it....

 

The whole wine-making fiasco usually starts when I realize that I have too much of something:

As in, "OMG I can't possibly eat all these garlic scapes."

 

A garlic scape is the flower that a garlic plant puts up right before the bulb forms. You have to cut it off, before it blooms, or the bulbs will be tiny (nobody likes tiny bulbs). The scapes are delicious cooked and eaten like (very strong and garlicky) green onions, in stir fry or quiche or whatnot. But I have oodles of them that I can't use up..... I'm growing a TON of garlic this year.

So. Like any good traditional American, I'm making booze out of the excess. To make wine you need essentially three things: The fruit or plant matter you are flavoring it with, sugar or an equivelant sweetener such as honey or fructose, and yeast. To make really good wine you also need to make sure it has tannins and acidity, but we'll get to that.

I threw all the vegetable stuff into a large (2 gallon) crock: the chopped garlic scapes, some pea pods (Pea pod wine is delicious, btw. It is one of the few vegetable wines that you CAN drink.), ginger root, and the peel and juice of two lemons (there's the acidity). I also dumped in about 4 lbs of sugar. Umm. I might have added a few cloves and some black peppercorns, too. My brain is fuzzy on exactly what got thrown in there.

 For the tannins, I boiled two gallons of water with a couple of bags of black tea. While the water is still boiling hot it is carefully poured into the crock. After the crock is completely cool to the touch a packet of yeast gets sprinkled on top. I used wine yeast this time, but I've used regular old bread yeast in the past and it worked just fine. Remember, this is a cooking wine. It doesn't have to be fancy.

Cover the crock loosely with a clean towel  (to keep out fruit flies) and let it sit for 48 hours or so. You do NOT want to seal the wine at this point or it will explode. Ha.

After 48 hours I added another 2 lbs of sugar, strained out everything solid, and funneled it into glass jugs. The jugs get sealed with bubbling air locks to let gasses escape, but keep air from getting in.

Now I have to wait about 6 weeks before I bottle it. As long as those bubblers are talking to me I'm not going to touch it. And, I have a couple of little bubbly wine robots to talk to while I'm cooking. Fun stuff.

 

Like this? Hate this? You should also try:

Green Beer

More dandelions!

How to homebrew a loaf

yet another pie

So. June 1^st came, with kids celebrating the last day of school and pools opening and barbecues commencing, and it was a bloody freezing 52 degrees out. Last weekend it was in the 90s. My poor little drunk vegan brain can’t handle it.

 

So, as I always do when I find myself unable to cope with reality, I made pie.

Peanut Butter and Banana Custard in a Chocolate Crust

 

For the crust I used:

¾ cup flour

¼ cup cocoa powder

¼ cup sugar

2 tbsp canola oil

2 tbsp cold coffee

 

Stir together the dry ingredients. Stir in the oil until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. Add the coffee a little at a time until it forms one cohesive lump of dough.

 

Roll out the dough, adding more flour as needed to keep it from sticking, and line a 9” pie dish with it.

 

For the filling: 

1 box of silken tofu

1 cup peanut butter

2 bananas

1 cup sugar

1 tbsp rum

1 tsp vanilla

2 tbsp corn starch

 

Put everything in a blender and play with the buttons until it is completely smooth.

 

Pour the filling into the prepared crust and bake at 375 for 45 minutes, or until a knife inserted near the center comes out clean. Let it cool in the fridge for a few hours before you try to slice it.

 

 

Mmm. This was an amazing pie. Kind of the texture of a cheesecake, but with a really rich chocolate pastry and custardy mouth-feel.

More pie porn:

 

That was a Key Lime Pie from Memorial Day weekend. It was also delicious, but I think the peanut butter one was better.

 

Like this? Hate this? You should also try:

 

It's Monday, so I made pie

Nuts, and chocolate, and bourbon, oh my!

It's raining, so I made crackers