Recipe of the Month: Coconut Cauliflower Curry (with bonus bread and dessert)

As I've noted before, my husband has a bit of a cauliflower problem. When he spots a cheap cauliflower at the store, he just can't resist buying it, even if he has no idea what he wants to do with it. Last week, he found himself in this position once again, and rather than fall back on an old standby like aloo gobi, he decided to look for something new. On a site called Rebel Recipes, he found a cauliflower and chick pea curry recipe with coconut milk, which he adores, so he decided to give that one a try. He didn't modify it much, aside from scaling dialing back the chili flakes to just a pinch and adding a teaspoon of salt, which the original recipe lacked entirely.

Visually speaking, this curry wasn't very appealing. It was a sort of orange, gooey mass, without much contrast in color or texture. The flavor, on the other hand, had a lot going on—a bit too much for my taste. Against the tang of tomato and the sort of musty coolness of the coconut milk, there was a huge array of spices—onion, garlic, ginger cumin, coriander, turmeric, garam masala, cinnamon, cardamom, fennel, chili—all fighting for attention. I found it a bit overwhelming, and I felt no urge to go back for more when I'd finished my bowlful. Brian, on the other hand, absolutely loved it. He's promised not to "subject me to it too often," and I've agreed to put up with it once in a while for his sake. Perhaps it'll grow on me after a while. And if it doesn't, he can have all the leftovers to himself.

But this was not the only new recipe we tried in August. We're only halfway through the month, and we've already tried two others: a simple bread that wasn't a stunning success, and a dessert that was.

The flatbread recipe was something I discovered while browsing Reddit. On the r/Frugal forum, a Redditor posted with great enthusiasm about a two-ingredient flatbread that he swore was a "gateway drug" for baking. To hear him tell it, this recipe could work for just about anything: pizza crust, burger buns, wraps, even crackers. It sounded interesting, but the original recipe called for Greek yogurt, which wouldn't fit our mostly dairy-free diet. So I hunted around and unearthed a vegan version that also called for only two ingredients: soy milk, which we had, and self-rising flour, which is easy to make by adding three teaspoons of baking powder to two cups of regular flour. (A third ingredient, salt, was listed as optional.) 

I showed the recipe to Brian and he agreed to give it a try with the next night's dinner, falafel. Making the flatbreads was pretty similar to the process he uses for the homemade tortillas he usually serves with this meal: mix the dough, knead it briefly, form balls, roll them out, and pan-fry them. However, since the dough got to rise a bit before cooking, the flatbreads came out larger, puffier, and more substantial than the tortillas. And at first, that seemed to be a good thing. The sturdier flatbreads could hold a larger volume of falafel and veggies without letting any spill out, and they felt more secure in the hand. And I found their chewy texture quite enjoyable.

But after a couple of days, the weakness of this recipe became apparent. The flatbreads that had been so firm and flexible when fresh out of the pan grew drier and more brittle with each day they stayed in the fridge. By the time I tried to use the last one four days later, it was so crumbly that it couldn't wrap around the falafel at all; it simply fell to pieces, leaving me to finish up the meal with a fork. Since the tortillas are about as easy to make and stay good much longer, it makes more sense to stick with those for all our sandwich-wrapping needs.

But on the dessert front, there is good news. For background, a couple of months ago, we discovered a vegan whipping cream at Trader Joe's that worked beautifully for plain whipped cream, in a fruit fool, in ice cream, and even in our anniversary cake. So we were devastated to discover on our next trip to the store that it had been discontinued. (This is an ever-present danger with Trader Joe's products we get too attached to, like their toothpaste and shampoo bar.) I thought maybe we could make our own plant-based cream using the TJ's product as a model, and I came up with what seemed like a promising recipe combining soy milk, coconut oil, and canola oil, with guar gum as an emulsifer. But apparently there was some key element of the alchemy missing, because the stuff stubbornly refused to whip.

But then the story took a happier turn. Last weekend, Brian stopped by Shop-Rite to use up a gift card, and while there, he noticed a plant-based cream from Country Crock in the refrigerated section. Both the package and the ingredient list looked pretty similar to the Trader Joe's product, suggesting that the taste and texture might be also. And when we tried whipping some, we found that was indeed the case. It needed more sugar, since it wasn't as sweet as either the TJ's cream or real cream, but the texture and mouthfeel were just fine.

After that, of course, we had to test it in an ice cream. Brian asked me to pick a flavor, and I suggested a fruity ice cream made from some of our frozen or preserved fruit. That reminded him that last year, he'd tried making a batch of raspberry jam that hadn't set up very well, so it was more of a raspberry sauce. And, recalling a particularly tasty black raspberry chocolate chip ice cream he'd had once at a place in New Hope, he decided to add chocolate to it as well. Solid chocolate chips aren't ideal for this purpose since they don't melt that quickly in the mouth, so he decided to use a technique he'd seen in another recipe: melt the chocolate with a little oil, then drizzle it into the ice cream base as it mixes.

The result: a truly delicious vegan ice cream. The flavor had the perfect balance of sweetness and tartness, and the mouthfeel was just as smooth and creamy as you'd expect from real dairy cream. It's good enough that, unlike the other two vegan recipes we tried in August, I think it's worth sharing in full. (This is a small batch sized for our baby ice cream maker, so adjust the proportions as needed).

Vegan Raspberry Chocolate Chip Ice Cream 

Combine ½ cup Country Crock vegan heavy whipping cream, 3 Tbsp. soy milk, 5 Tbsp. seedless raspberry jam, and ¼ tsp. vanilla. Refrigerate the mixture (if most of the ingredients are already cold, a couple hours should be fine). Place in ice cream maker and run for 10-15 minutes. Melt 1.33 oz. chocolate chips and 1 tsp. canola oil in a double boiler until liquid. When the ice cream is soft-serve consistency, slowly pour in the chocolate either while the maker is still running or while stirring. Run the ice cream maker for a little while longer, then freeze the mixture for a couple hours before eating.

Dessert experiments

If you live anywhere in the eastern half of the country, you already know we're in the throes of a heat wave. Here in New Jersey, we got a bit lucky today: a heavy thunderstorm hit this morning, keeping today's heat index down to a mere 99 degrees F. But by 9 am tomorrow, we're expected to be in triple-digit territory, and we won't be back to a more normal level of summer heat until Wednesday night. All of which makes this an excellent week to enjoy ice cream and other frozen treats.

But before I get to my lighthearted dessert content, I'd like to take one minute to talk seriously about this massive heat wave. We all know, or at least nearly 80% of Americans do, that climate change is real, and that it's making dangerous weather like this much more common. And a solid majority of Americans want the government to do something about it, supporting a variety of policies that would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In particular, three-quarters of all Americans think we should regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. 

Unfortunately, EPA director Lee Zeldin is not one of them. He recently announced a plan to eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions standards for fossil fuel plants, arguing that this pollution is not "significant." He bases this claim not on how much of it there is or how much damage it does, but on the fact that, in his opinion, it's too expensive to fix. And if there is no "cost reasonable" solution, then by definition, there is no problem. To add injury to this insult to our intelligence, he's also decided this is a good time to repeal the rule that regulates power plants' emissions of mercury and other toxic substances, such as arsenic.

If you agree that this is mind-blowingly stupid, there's a way to make your voice heard. Elders Climate Action (ECA) has created two simple forms you can use to submit comments to the EPA on these proposed rules changes. All you have to do is enter your contact info, make any changes you like to the sample comment ECA has provided, and click submit. The comment form for the greenhouse gas emissions repeal is here, and the one for mercury and toxic air pollution is here.

So, desserts. I mentioned in last week's post that we'd recently tried Trader Joe's new vegan whipping cream and found that it lives up to its name, at least as far as whipping is concerned. Well, this week we got around to trying it in an ice cream base. We went with plain vanilla, since it has so many possible uses, and topped it with fresh berries from our garden. And I have to say, the result left absolutely nothing to be desired. This was the first plant-based ice cream I've ever tried that I literally couldn't tell was vegan. There was nothing about either the flavor or the mouthfeel that would make me suspect it was anything other than good old vanilla ice cream.

In short, this vegan dessert experiment was an unqualified success, and we've still got a little bit of the vegan cream left to tinker with. My idea is to try using it for a small batch of either the chocolate mousse or the raspberry mousse that goes into our anniversary cake. If it works for that—and there seems to be no reason it wouldn't—we can buy some of this stuff, rather than a pint of real cream, and make the cake dairy-free this year. It still won't be vegan, as the sponge cake itself contains eggs, but it will be one step closer to it.

But Brian and I were not content to rest on our dessert laurels. Tonight, we tried yet another new vegan ice-cream alternative, this time a healthier version made mostly from fruit. 

This one has a bit of a story behind it. Yesterday morning, we noticed that our neighbors across the street were having a yard sale. We wandered over to take a look, and the one thing on the tables that looked most intriguing to me was a Magic Bullet Dessert Bullet—a machine that claimed it could make "all natural, dairy-free, gluten-free, diabetic-friendly, low fat, low sugar, low calorie desserts everyone can enjoy." I couldn't tell whether the price sticker on top was a 6 or a 9, but when I asked my neighbor about it, he said he'd let me have it for $5. 

Well, I knew we didn't actually need this gadget, and there was a possibility it wouldn't even be able to do anything our blender couldn't. But I remembered that we'd thought the same thing about our regular Magic Bullet when we first acquired it on Freecycle, and it proved to be so useful that when it finally died, we went straight out and paid full price for a new one. There was always the chance that this $5 investment would prove just as worthwhile, and even if it didn't, I knew I'd have no trouble finding a new home for it. We'd only be out $5, and that was a price I was willing to pay just to satisfy my curiosity.

So I took the Dessert Bullet home, opened it up, and perused the recipe book that came with it. All the recipes in it appeared to be built around frozen fruit, with a few additional ingredients like yogurt, peanut butter, chocolate, or coconut thrown in here and there. They were basically smoothies, but with less liquid. The booklet provided instructions on how to prepare and freeze the fruit and how long to thaw it before putting it into the Bullet to get the right consistency.

For our first trial, we decided on a simple chocolate dessert recipe with just three ingredients: a frozen banana (broken into chunks), 2 tablespoons of "raw cacao powder" (which we figured we could swap out for cocoa powder without harming the flavor any), and a drop of vanilla extract. We popped straight out to the Superfresh for a bunch of bananas, peeled two of them, broke them into chunks, and put them in the freezer. 

The instructions said to freeze them for at least 24 hours, so we had to wait until tonight to give our new machine a literal whirl. It has several parts: the base containing the motor a chute to insert the fruit in, a pusher to shove it down with, a rotating screw attachment that grinds it up, and a couple of different orifices to extrude it from. We chose the basic oval mouth rather than the star-shaped one. Following the instructions, we let the frozen banana pieces thaw for 5 minutes and sprinkled them with the cocoa powder. We ran the vanilla extract through first to coat the screw attachment, then dumped in the bananas and pushed them down as the motor ran. After a few seconds, the banana reemerged, transformed into a wide ribbon of roughly soft-serve consistency.

The process was interesting to watch, but the finished product was far from life-changing. It did not taste at all like chocolate ice cream; it tasted, unsurprisingly, like a banana coated with cocoa powder. It wasn't bad, exactly, but it wasn't any more enjoyable than just eating a banana, which is a lot less work. If anything, it was less enjoyable, since the texture was a bit slimy. As a dessert, it wasn't nearly as satisfying as a cup of my low-sugar hot cocoa. 

Out of curiosity, I tried topping the banana mixture with a spoonful of the vegan vanilla ice cream we'd made the night before. As you might expect, this combination was vastly superior to the banana alone, but it wasn't nearly as good as the vanilla ice cream with raspberries. And I think adding more than that one little dollop of the vanilla stuff would have nullified any claim this banana dessert has to being healthful. 

So far, the Dessert Bullet doesn't look like a game changer, but we're not giving up on it yet. There are a couple of recipes in the booklet that don't depend primarily on banana, like Creamy Berry Sorbet (a blend of frozen strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries with unsweetened coconut) and Coconut Colada (a misleadingly named blend of frozen coconut-milk yogurt, frozen pineapple chunks, and unsweetened coconut). We'll try at least one of these, as well as a few other combinations of fruit, before deciding whether this gadget deserves a spot in our crowded kitchen cabinets.

[Edit, 7/2/25: Nooooo! We just tried to buy another carton of the vegan whipping cream at Trader Joe's, only to learn that it's been discontinued. The only plant-based alternative to cream we've ever found that was really satisfactory, and it's gone forever. I guess at least we know now a true vegan cream substitute is possible, but that's cold comfort if we can never find one again.]

Even more ecofrugal episodes

Nothing happened this week that seemed big enough to warrant an entire blog post on its own, so instead I'm doing another of my ecofrugal episodes posts—a roundup of the small successes and failures in our ecofrugal life. Fortunately, this time the successes outnumber the failures. 

Item #1: A grout makeover  

My birthday request this year was for Brian to replace the grout in our upstairs tub-shower, which had developed stains that no amount of scrubbing could remove. (This photo—taken after the grout had just been cleaned—doesn't really do it justice, but it should give you an inkling of how bad it was.) It wasn't until this month that we finally had a free weekend to tackle the project, and we ran into a couple of setbacks while carrying it out. 

First, after he'd already scraped out as much as he reasonably could of the old grout, Brian discovered that the pre-mixed grout he'd bought to replace it was was actually sanded grout, which isn't recommended for narrow gaps like this. (It would have been nice if the package had said this on the front, rather than in small print on the back.) So we had to make a hasty trip to Home Depot to replace it. We also grabbed an extra tube of caulk, just in case we needed extra. At first, Brian thought this purchase had been a waste of money, since the old tube ended up having enough in it to fill all the joints. But he learned otherwise the next morning, when he discovered that the caulk he'd just applied, which was supposed to set up within two hours, was still liquid. Clearly it was no longer good, so he had to spend part of that morning laboriously removing all the goo and replacing it with fresh caulk from the new tube. 

So this birthday request proved to be more of a hassle than we expected, but it turned out well in the end. Every time I've stepped into the shower this past week, I've been delighted at how fresh and clean the grout looks now. Brian even took the extra step of repainting the grungy-looking trim on the tub window, so the whole enclosure now looks sparkling and new. Once the new grout has had a couple of weeks to cure fully, we're going to follow up by applying a sealant, which will allegedly keep it fresh and stain-free  for the next few years. And even when it wears off, we can just apply a new coat, rather than going through this entire messy job again.

Item #2: Pride pants 

Recently, I noticed that my older pair of blue jeans was starting to wear out in the thigh area. This is a common occurrence for me, but this time the pattern was a bit unusual: instead of spreading across the whole inner thigh area, the threadbare sections were confined to a line right along the inseam. I thought this would be a good spot for a little visible mending, but wasn't sure whether it made more sense to darn these tiny holes individually or try to cover all of them with a patch. 

I went hunting for suggestions online and came across this image: a long row of stitches in different colors of embroidery floss running down the length of the seam. I decided to try a similar idea, but with a rainbow color scheme. The whole worn area was about 12 centimeters long, so I divided it up into sections of roughly 2 centimeters for each color. I started at one end putting in parallel stitches in red embroidery floss, then about 2 centimeters down I tied off the red thread and started on orange, and so on down the spectrum to purple.

I've only done one seam so far, since the wear on the other isn't quite as bad, but eventually I intend to do the other one to match. The stitching is far from perfect, but it's colorful and cute and gives me a little boost of happiness every time I wear these jeans now. And it's just in time for Pride Month!

Item #3: Repair, then replace 

About a year ago, our old toilet seat broke. Rather than buy the cheapest model to replace it, we decided to spring for one with "soft close" hinges. I quite enjoyed this feature, but unfortunately, these slow-closing hinges weren't very durable. A couple of days ago, I noticed that the lid was askew, and when I examined it, I discovered that one of the hinges had snapped clean through. I managed to wiggle it through so that the lid could close fully, if no longer softly, but this clearly wasn't going to be a long-term solution.

Rather than run out to buy a whole new toilet seat, Brian decided to try repairing the hinge with epoxy. He applied the glue to both broken edges, then clamped the lid in the open position overnight to give it plenty of time to set. But sadly, as soon as he unclamped it in the morning and tried lowering the lid, it snapped straight apart again. 

Although this repair wasn't a success, I still think it was worth making the attempt. It didn't cost us anything except a little extra time, and we had no way of knowing it wouldn't work unless we tried it. And now that we know, we feel no guilt about discarding the broken toilet seat and spending $40 on a replacement. (This time around, we spent $10 more for one with metal hinges, which we're assuming will hold up better. Paying the extra $10 now seems like a better deal than spending $30 to replace the whole thing again in another year.)

Item #4: Whipping it good 

Ever since we first started cutting back on dairy products back in 2018, we've been looking for a decent substitute for whipped cream. We tried numerous homemade versions using various combinations of coconut cream, aquafaba, and plant milk, with results ranging from near success (but not quite) to colossal failure. We tried a commercial product called Coco Whip that worked reasonably well in a raspberry fool, but the store where we found it has since stopped carrying it. And we tried one or two commercial plant-based cream substitutes that were so unimpressive I didn't even bother blogging about them.

But on a couple of recent trips to Trader Joe's, we've noticed a product in their dairy case called "Vegan Heavy Whipping Cream Alternative." We couldn't remember if we'd tried this one before, but at only $4 a pint—about the same price as regular cream—we didn't have much to lose by giving it another go. So we grabbed a pint, and last weekend Brian took a crack at using some in a honeyberry fool (a phrase I love having the opportunity to say). And right away, we noticed that this stuff actually was whipping up like real cream. It formed genuine stiff peaks that held their shape and didn't collapse even when we folded in the berry mixture. And if the flavor and mouthfeel weren't exactly identical to real cream, you could hardly tell by the time it was combined with the berries.

We only used about half the pint for this experiment, so we're going to try tinkering with it further, seeing if it can make a plant-based ice cream that works better than our iced coconut cream (which didn't turn out so well the second time we tried it). If it works for that too, we'll probably stop messing around with DIY versions and make this our go-to substitute for any recipe that calls for cream—possibly even our anniversary cake.

Item #5: Extension cord life extension

One of the items we picked up at last year's yard sales (or, to be exact, from the piles of discards after the sales) was an electric hedge trimmer. It's just a light-duty plug-in model, but since our property only has one hedge and we only trim it a couple of times a year, it's been perfectly adequate for our needs. But last Friday, Brian discovered its biggest drawback: make one false move with it and you cut right through your extension cord. To add insult to injury, he had noticed that the cord was in harm's way and was just attempting to move it out of the way when it happened. 

Naturally, he was quite annoyed that this one brief slip had, as he thought, totally destroyed an extension cord that would cost around $17 to replace. But then he discovered that it's actually possible to cut off the damaged portion and attach a replacement connector, which only costs about $3. You just end up with a slightly shorter cord—in this case, 47 feet instead of 50, which is still plenty for our small yard. Less cost, less waste, and less frustration about having damaged the old one. (Of course, if this keeps happening, the cord will gradually get shorter each time until it's too short to be of much use. But I suspect after this incident, he'll take extra care to keep the cord out of danger in future.)

What's holding back plant-based protein?

I recently discovered The Tyee, an independent Canadian news site with a leftward bent. Flipping through to see what sorts of stories it covered, I happened on one about a "revolutionary" new plant-based protein made from mycelium, the root-like fibers that connect networks of fungi underground. The company profiled in the piece, Maia Farms, claims it can cultivate and harvest its mycelium protein in just seven days, as compared to 18 months to grow a calf to adult size and slaughter it for beef. Its process produces 84 percent lower carbon emissions per "unit of production" than chicken, which in turn has only about 12% of the carbon footprint of beef. The founder of Maia Farms calls his product "arguably the most efficient form of agriculture that will ever exist" and says it could be a "global solution" to the problem of meeting the protein needs of a growing population. All of which, obviously, sounds fantastic. 

But I was not impressed. Why not? Because I've heard this same story so many times before from so many other producers of plant-based protein—all of which have, so far, completely failed to make a significant dent in humanity's meat consumption. 

In 2023, for instance, the Climate Coach column in the Washington Post ran a story (free gift link for non-subscribers here) about Plantible, a California startup producing a protein called rubisco from fast-growing duckweed. The article touted rubisco as a versatile protein that can easily step in to do the job of eggs, meat, or butter. It also noted how easy the duckweed is to grow, producing "36 metric dry tons per hectare — roughly 10 times more than soy." It sounded like it should be utterly revolutionary. Yet in the 19 months since that article came out, I have not seen Plantible's Rubi Protein, nor any product that contains it, in any store. Obviously, it takes time for a new product to scale up, but based on Plantible's website, I can't find any evidence that its product is available anywhere at all.

If these plant-based proteins are so revolutionary, so efficient, so sustainable, then why aren't they everywhere? The Climate Coach article implies that the main barrier to wider adoption is taste: plant-based proteins, it says, "fall short of the savory appeal of eggs, dairy and meat." But I don't buy that argument. Brian, a longtime fan of beef, says burgers and bratwursts from Impossible are, to him, indistinguishable from the real thing. That is, until you look at the price tag. On Target's website, a bag of six Impossible Burgers (in their new red packaging, designed to appeal more to carnivores) costs $13.59, or $9.06 per pound. A 3-pound bag of store-brand beef burgers costs $13.99, or $4.66 per pound—roughly half as much. At those prices, what reason would anyone who isn't a vegetarian already have to switch?

I can only see two ways that plant-based proteins will ever become more popular than the animal products they're meant to replace. Either they'll have to get a lot cheaper, or the animal-based products will have to get a lot more expensive. And there's some chance that economies of scale will, in fact, drive down the cost of plant proteins. A 2021 analysis from the Good Food Institute (GFI) shows that, while plant-based meats and cheeses were about 40 percent more expensive in 2020 than corresponding animal products, plant-based products in "more developed categories," such as plant milk and butter, had a much smaller price premium of 7 to 11 percent. So maybe, once mycelium and rubisco proteins have been around as long as soy milk, they'll be more affordable. But they won't be doing much to halt the growth of food-driven carbon emissions in the meantime.

But there's also the second possibility: a spike, or even a sustained rise, in the price of animal proteins. We're starting to see it right now with eggs, which have jumped in price to an average of $4 per dozen from $2.50 just a year ago. That inflated price is still considerably cheaper than Just Egg, but it's significantly more than scrambled tofu. One large egg weighs about 2 ounces, so a two-egg scramble would be about 4 ounces' worth and cost 67 cents. Last time we bought tofu, we paid only $1.29 per pound, so a scramble made with 4 ounces of tofu would cost only around 32 cents. Even if you throw in a pinch of turmeric for color and a pinch of black salt (kala namak) to give it an eggy flavor, it won't cost more than about 34 cents—roughly half the price of real eggs.

Honestly, I'm thinking the next time we make a recipe that includes scrambled eggs, like our staple weeknight meal of roasted Brussels sprouts with eggs and potatoes, we should just scramble up a corresponding volume of tofu instead. At both half the price and half the carbon footprint, it's an ecofrugal no-brainer. The only downside is that the leftover tofu in the package won't keep as long as eggs in their individual shells, so we'll need to make sure to use the rest of it up within a few days so it won't go to waste. But with the number of recipes we know that use tofu, that shouldn't be difficult. And it will allow us to save our precious eggs for the jobs that only they can do properly, like holding matzo balls and rice casserole together.

Fun with legumes

After last week's partial success with the Spicy Orange Broccoli, Brian did not rest on his vegetable laurels. Over the past week, he has continued to explore our two new vegan cookbooks, preparing not one but two of the recipes I flagged as interesting. Both of these involved beans—but not beans served in their natural form, as in last month's recipe. Instead, they were mashed up and formed into new shapes to masquerade as something else. Neither of these bean disguises was entirely successful, but one worked much better than the other.

Last Sunday, even as I was writing up our first recipe from Everyday Happy Herbivore, Brian was in the kitchen working on the Chickpea Tenders from the same cookbook. This was a lot more complicated than the previous recipe. Before he could even get started on the tenders themselves, he had to whip up three mixes from the same cookbook that were ingredients in the recipe. First, there was a Poultry Seasoning Mix made from five dried herbs (thyme, rosemary, sage, marjoram, and basil) ground together. Next came the No-Chicken Broth Powder, made from nutritional yeast ground up with various herbs and seasonings (onion powder, garlic powder, fresh sage, dried thyme, paprika, celery seed, dried parsley, and turmeric, which I suspect is mainly in there for color). And finally, he had to blend up a small batch of Vegan Mayo from silken tofu with Dijon mustard, white vinegar, lemon juice, and agave nectar (for which he substituted simple syrup).

With all these ingredients ready to go, he began on the laborious process of preparing the tenders. First, he had to drain and rinse a can of chickpeas and mash them thoroughly with a fork. Then he mixed the resulting mash with the seasoning mix, broth powder, vegan mayo, and some Dijon mustard and soy sauce. (The recipe called for low-sodium soy sauce, but as with last week's recipe, he just used regular.) Once he had that combined, he mixed in a third of a cup of vital wheat gluten and a few tablespoons of water and kneaded it all together. He divided the resulting dough into four balls and shaped them into long, flat ovals, which he laid out on a baking sheet. And for the final step, he baked them for a total of 40 minutes, removing the pan to flip them over every 10 minutes. 

After all that work, he ended up with four flat oblongs that, frankly, didn't look much like the chicken tenders they were meant to replicate. They were more like veggie burgers, but not particularly good ones. They were dry and somewhat crumbly, and their flavor, despite all the elaborate seasonings that went into them, was unremarkable. Brian had served them with frozen green beans and roast potatoes, and the cutlets were by far the least appealing part of the meal. I had to slather each bite of mine liberally with the two dipping sauces Brian had prepared—the rest of the vegan mayo and a vegan "honey" mustard from the same cookbook, containing equal parts Dijon mustard and simple syrup—to get the whole thing down. Brian didn't have as much trouble with his, but he certainly wasn't enthusiastic about it, and he sees no reason to attempt this recipe again. It's much less interesting than any number of other things you can do with chick peas, most of which are a whole lot less work.

It occurred to me after trying this dish to check the other vegan cookbook, Anything You Can Cook I Can Cook Vegan, to see if Richard Makin had any better ideas about how to make a vegan replica of a chicken tender. He did, but his recipe was even more ludicrously complicated than the chickpea one. His called for wheat gluten and cannellini beans and silken tofu and seasonings (some of which we don't have), all processed together in three our four stages in a high-speed blender (which we also don't have). Then the resulting dough has to be kneaded and rolled out into ropes and tied into knots and simmered in broth for an hour, after which it has to go into the fridge and marinate in the broth for at least another four hours before it's ready to cook. So, yeah, we're not doing that. 

The recipe Brian actually selected from Anything You Can Cook was a much simpler one: Cannellini Gnocchi with Pesto. Brian has made his own gnocchi before, both a simple version using potato flakes and a more elaborate, but tastier version using baked potato, but this recipe had one thing those lacked: protein. With canned cannellini beans in place of the potatoes, it would go from a starchy meal to one that balances carbs and protein, with some fiber to boot. 

Making the gnocchi from beans wasn't that much more complicated than making it from potatoes. The recipe called for them to be mashed and then strained through a sieve to remove lumps and skins, but Brian didn't bother with that step. He just mashed a can of beans and blended them, lumps and all, with a cup and three-quarters of flour and a bit of salt and pepper, kneading it until he had a reasonable ball of dough. He rolled that out into a long snake, cut that into little nuggets, dusted them with flour, and pressed each one with the back of a fork to make ridges—more or less the same process he uses for regular potato gnocchi. Then, as directed in the recipe, he dumped them into a pot of boiling water and cooked them until they floated up to the surface.

Brian did not use the pesto recipe that accompanied the dish in the cookbook, since he already had his own. He just combined about a half-cup's worth of frozen basil-and-olive-oil cubes with a third of a cup of toasted pine nuts, two cloves of garlic, 2 teaspoons of nutritional yeast, and half a teaspoon of salt, and blended it all together to get a smooth paste. Because the basil had been frozen, the pesto came out a sort of olive-drab color instead of the nice bright green you get with fresh basil, but it tasted fine.

The cannellini gnocchi themselves, to my taste buds, were also fine. They didn't have the same light, pillowy texture as Brian's potato gnocchi, but their chewier texture was satisfying enough. Brian, however, found them too stodgy for his taste. He thinks they could still work, but next time he'd make them about half as large, and he'd serve them with a nice, thick tomato sauce that would add more moisture to them than the pesto. So this recipe wasn't a failure, but it's not quite ready for prime time.

Based on these two experiences, I'd say there is some potential in the idea of using beans to mimic other things. I can certainly think of at least one more recipe I'd like to try that uses them for that purpose (the Kidney-Quinoa Burgers in Everyday Happy Herbivore). But, to be honest, I think there's even more potential for interest in recipes that use beans as, well, beans.

Ice cream without the cream

Ever since Brian and I went off dairy for most purposes in 2018, we've been trying to find a reasonable dairy-free alternative to ice cream. You can, of course, buy nondairy frozen desserts, and we've tried several, but we never found one we loved enough to justify the fairly substantial price tag. And the homemade versions we've tried, such as iced coconut milk and plum whip, didn't quite satisfy that ice-cream craving. They were cold and sweet, but they didn't have the creamy smoothness of the real thing. 

So, this week, Brian decided to go for broke and try making a frozen dessert from coconut cream. This stuff is much richer than coconut milk, with around 83 grams of fat per cup, putting it roughly on a par with heavy cream—and it's even higher in saturated fat than real cream. So this vegan dessert would not be, by any stretch of the imagination, a healthy alternative, but he wasn't going for healthy; he was going for satisfying. If the recipe succeeded in giving us the creamy texture we wanted, we could always tweak it later to see how much we could lower the fat content without losing that smoothness.

Another thing Brian thought might help with the texture would be to add more sugar. As a trained chemist, Brian knew that having sugar dissolved in a liquid inhibits the formation of ice crystals, which might prevent this dessert from turning into a solid block of ice the way our iced coconut milk did. The problem there was that the original iced coconut milk recipe was already a bit on the sweet side for me, and adding more sugar would probably make it outright cloying.

However, he thought of a work-around for this problem. We happened to have a container of allulose sweetener in our pantry, left over from my carb-counting period. Allulose is a naturally occurring sugar, but the body doesn't absorb it like other sugars. Thus, it has about two-thirds of table sugar's sweetness with only one-tenth of the calories, and it doesn't spike your insulin levels. Brian figured that by replacing sugar with allulose and scaling up the amount by 50 percent, he'd get roughly the same level of sweetness in a more sugar-saturated solution.

So, Brian took the original coconut milk ice cream recipe from Chocolate Covered Katie and began making modifications. First, he scaled it down by about one-third to fit our new, smaller ice cream maker. Then he replaced the coconut milk with coconut cream and the sugar with allulose. And last, he added cocoa powder to temper the coconut flavor and keep it from being overpowering. 

After mixing up this base and chilling it overnight, he put it in the ice cream maker and turned it on. And it didn't take him long to notice that this coconut-cream mixture was behaving differently from the original coconut-milk base. Not only was it not forming ice crystals, it didn't seem to be freezing at all. It had a fairly thick, smoothie-like texture when it went into the ice cream maker, and after half an hour of mixing, it still had that same smoothie-like texture. Only around the very edges of the bowl did it show any signs of solidifying.

But he wasn't prepared to give up yet. Remembering that the coconut-milk ice cream had turned from a soft-serve consistency to a solid block once he put it in the freezer, he decided to do the same with this mixture. And after a full day of freezing, he discovered that it had indeed firmed up—and in the right way. Instead of freezing solid like the coconut milk, it had developed a smooth, scoopable texture, very similar to a high-fat premium ice cream. And, as we'd hoped, it was almost perfectly smooth, with no detectable ice crystals.

The flavor was pretty good, too. Naturally, it was very coconut-forward, but the distinctive bittersweet note of the cocoa balanced out that nuttiness. The level of sweetness was just about right. Brian described the flavor as having a "bright" note from the coconut milk, but I couldn't detect it. I did find the taste a little on the salty side, but that's easily explained by the fact that Brian couldn't figure out how to reduce the eighth of a teaspoon of salt from the original recipe to one-twelfth of a teaspoon, so he'd just left the amount unchanged. If he took it down to an imprecise pinch, I think the flavor would be just about perfect.

So, on the whole, I'd say this iced coconut cream is our most successful vegan ice cream to date. We'll most likely continue to fiddle with the recipe and see how much of the coconut cream we can replace with soy milk to tone down the richness while still keeping it as smooth as possible. Also, next time we might try skipping the ice cream maker, which didn't seem to alter the texture much, and just putting the coconut-cream base straight in the freezer. But I think the recipe in its current form is good enough to be worth posting in full:

ICED CHOCOLATE COCONUT CREAM

• 1 cup coconut cream
• ⅓ cup allulose
• Small pinch salt
• 2 Tbsp cocoa powder
• ½ tsp vanilla
• ¼ cup soy milk

Mix all ingredients in a saucepan and heat until allulose is dissolved. Refrigerate mixture overnight, then chill in an ice cream maker for half an hour. Freeze until solid.  

According to the recipe tool from My Fitness Pal, one-quarter of this recipe (a smallish scoop) contains 128 calories, 13 grams fat including 10 grams saturated fat, 19 grams carbs including 1 gram fiber and 1 gram sugar, and 2 grams protein. However, most sources indicate that the carbs from the allulose shouldn't really count toward the total, so really the carb count for this dessert is only about 2 grams—low enough for even keto dieters.

A cheeseless adaptation attempt

Before Brian and I started cutting back on dairy at home, we used to be very fond of a recipe we called Cheesy Rice Casserole. This was a slightly modified version of the "Hellzapoppin' Cheese Rice" from Peg Bracken's I Hate to Cook Book, slightly lighter on the cheese and butter. It was a staple in our kitchen repertoire because it was both easy and cheap and required only ingredients we routinely kept on hand, making it perfect for those what-should-we-have-for-dinner occasions.

But since we stopped buying cheese at the store, this trusty recipe has fallen by the wayside. Our homemade vegan mozzarella has allowed us to keep making some of our cheesy favorites, but it doesn't have the right flavor to take the place of the cheddar cheese in this dish. And the one time we tried making it with a dairy-free cheddar we found at Lidl, the result was so weird and unsatisfying that I didn't even think it was worth mentioning on the blog.

A couple of weeks ago, though, I got to wondering if we could replace the cheese in this recipe some other way. Since it already had eggs to serve as a binder, it didn't really need the melted cheese to hold it together. Maybe, I thought, we could just throw in some nutritional yeast for flavor and some tofu to up the protein content and see if that was good enough.

Brian was willing to take on this experiment, but he wasn't entirely convinced that the nutritional yeast alone would give the dish enough flavor. So he found a recipe for a vegan cheddar cheese at Minimalist Baker and borrowed the seasoning mix from that: tapioca starch, nutritional yeast, apple cider vinegar, garlic powder, salt, and a smidgen of mustard. He blended all those ingredients with silken tofu and soy milk to replace the cheese and milk from the original recipe, then mixed that with the eggs, rice, spinach, and seasonings. He also threw in a little lemon juice to increase the brightness a bit. He could have used some of our homemade plant butter to replace the melted butter that would normally be poured over the top, but he thought there was no point in wasting it on something that didn't need to be solid, so he simply whisked together some canola oil, soy milk, and salt. 

The modified casserole came out quite a bit lighter in color than the original, but texture-wise, it seemed pretty close to the original. It held together nicely when sliced, coming out of the pan in even squares. The flavor, however, was severely lacking. It didn't taste bad or weird, like the version we made with the fake cheese from Lidl; it just didn't taste like much of anything. We both had to sprinkle it pretty liberally with our homemade "spaghetti salt" (12 parts nutritional yeast ground up with 1 part salt) to get it down. I found that a dash of smoked paprika was also helpful.

Clearly, this modified recipe isn't ready for prime time. However, we think it has potential. All it really needs is more flavor, and we should be able to give it that by bumping up the proportions of all the flavorful ingredients it already contains. The simplest way to do this would be to double the amounts of nutritional yeast, vinegar, garlic powder, mustard, and lemon that go into the dish and maybe throw in a quarter-tablespoon of the smoked paprika as well. Alternatively, we could try adding a dose of all those ingredients to the water the rice is cooked in, along with the amount that goes into the tofu sauce. With the flavor cooked right into the rice, maybe it won't need so much extra seasoning added on top.

For now, I'm going to refrain from sharing this recipe while we tinker with it some more. If and when we come up with a version that I think is as useful as the original, I'll pass it along to all of you then.

[UPDATE, 3/20/24: We tried this again last night, and we think we've got it fixed. Brian basically doubled the proportion of all the flavorings he'd used to replace the cheese: nutritional yeast, vinegar, garlic powder, and salt. He also added a half-teaspoon of smoked paprika. (He accidentally left out the mustard powder he used the first time, but upon tasting it, neither of us minded its absence.)

This revised recipe had a darker golden color than the previous version—partly from the extra ingredients and partly because it browned better. It also had a much fuller, more savory flavor. With plenty of salt, tartness from the vinegar, and umami from the nutritional yeast, it was well-balanced and satisfying. It wasn't the same as the original version made with cheddar cheese, but it wasn't in any way lacking. We both happily ate up one piece and went back for seconds.

This may not be the absolute final version of this recipe, as Brian is always adjusting and tinkering to optimize the dishes he makes. But it's good enough to be worth sharing. So here, without further ado, is what we are now calling...

HELLZAEFFINPOPPIN CHEESE RICE

Cook 1 cup white rice in 1.5 cups water for approximately 6 minutes in the pressure cooker. (Or use 2 cups water and cook it on the stovetop. Or just use 3 cups leftover rice.)

Briefly cook 8 oz. frozen spinach in boiling water to thaw. Drain completely.

Blend together 8 oz. soft or silken tofu, ¼ cup soy milk, ¼ cup tapioca flour, 6 Tbsp. nutritional yeast, 1 Tbsp. apple cider vinegar, 1 tsp. salt, 1 tsp. garlic powder, and ½ tsp smoked paprika.

Beat together 3 large eggs. Add the tofu mixture, 1/2 chopped onion, 1 Tbsp. Worcestershire sauce, 1 tsp. salt, 1 pinch dried thyme, 1 pinch dried marjoram, ½ Tbsp. lemon juice, and the drained spinach. Mix, then add the cooked rice and mix again. Spread mixture into a greased 9" by 13" casserole dish, smoothing the top with a spatula. 

Whisk together 4 tsp. canola oil, 1 tsp. soy milk, and ¼ tsp salt. Pour evenly over top of the rice mixture.

Bake at 375 F for 45 minutes. Let cool slightly before serving.]

 

Ecofrugal episodes

The ecofrugal life, as I've observed before, is a series of little ups and downs. This past week or so, we've had a series of small wins—including some that started out as losses—and one small win that turned into a loss, but can probably be reversed. Here's a play-by-play:

Ecofrugal Episode 1: The Stealth Vampire

Remember how we got a free home energy checkup back in August that included a bunch of free LED light bulbs? Well, this ended up having an odd secondary effect—one that we didn't notice until the nights started getting longer.

Early one morning, while it was still dark, Brian got up to use the bathroom. On his way back to bed, he passed the spare bedroom and noticed something odd: the lamp in there, which was turned off at the wall switch, was ever so faintly glowing in the darkened room. When he went up to it and turned off the lamp's switch, the light went out. But when he turned it back on, the hint of light came back. (I couldn't get a picture of this phenomenon because the light was so faint, but imagine it as a vague, dim aura, just barely bright enough for the eye to detect.)

We couldn't remember this lamp, or any other lamp ever plugged into that same outlet, ever doing this before. But up until recently, the light in that room has always been a fluorescent bulb, not an LED. So Brian's theory is that the wall switch is faulty, allowing just the faintest trickle of current through even when it's turned off—but in the past, that tiny bit of current wasn't enough to activate the bulb. Only now, with our new ultra-efficient LEDs, is it detectable. He tried plugging the lamp into our Kill-a-Watt meter to see how much current it was actually drawing, but once he did that, the faint light went out completely. Apparently that tiny bit of extra resistance was enough to block the current.

So, this ecofrugal win (free LEDs) turned out to be a bit of a loss (a stealthy energy vampire). But it's not much of a loss, since these LEDs use only a tiny bit of electricity even when fully powered, and presumably an even tinier bit when they're only barely lit. And it should be easy enough to eliminate completely by replacing the light switch, a fix that will only cost a few bucks.

Ecofrugal Episode 2: Vegan brown butter

Back in 2018, Brian and I discovered a really delicious recipe for pasta with butternut squash and brown butter. However, we have mostly gone off dairy at this point, and most plant butters (including our new homemade plant butter) don't brown. And it's the brown butter that really makes this dish special. Without it, it's just pasta with squash—reasonably tasty, but nothing to write home about.

But recently, I found a hack online for making vegan brown butter. The trick is to add a spoonful of nut butter, which provides the proteins and sugars needed for the browning reaction. It sounded worth a try, so we picked up a jar of almond butter at Costco, which we knew we could use up even if the recipe didn't work. 

Integrating this vegan brown butter into the pasta recipe was a little tricky. The protocol is designed to make the brown butter by itself, but the pasta recipe browns the butter in the pan with the squash. Brian compromised by making the brown butter first, then adding it to the pan with the squash as it cooked. And it worked! The vegan version of the recipe had the same rich, complex flavor as the original. Take that, dairy industry!

Ecofrugal Episode 3: Board-game bonanza

This ecofrugal win started out with a loss: Brian's year-old boots, which he was expecting to last him through several winters, have developed a leak that Shoe Goo has proved unable to repair. (The Wolverine name is no guarantee of quality, apparently.) Initially, we thought the ecofrugal solution to this problem would be to buy him a really good pair of boots with Goodyear welt construction, which would allow them to be resoled. I did a little bit of research on Reddit and learned that for this kind of boot, you should expect to pay a minimum of $250. (There's one well-reviewed brand, Thursday Boots, that starts at $200, but it's not available in stores; you can only order it online, which makes finding your perfect fit a real hassle.)

Now, for a pair of boots that will last ten years, this isn't such an unreasonable price. But after his experience with the Wolverines, Brian was feeling a bit distrustful of high-end brands. He thought that before shelling out for an expensive pair of new boots, we should at least make the rounds of local thrift stores and see what they had to offer.

What does this have to do with board games, you ask? Well, the first thrift store we visited was the one at our local Reformed Church, only a mile from our house. Their selection is quite small, but their prices are outstanding, so if we happened on a suitable pair here, we knew it would be a bargain. Unfortunately, we had no such luck; there were very few pairs of men's shoes on the rack, and none in Brian's size. But while we were there, we decided to check out the rack of board games in the back room, and there we hit the mother lode. 

Someone had obviously just cleaned out their board game collection and donated the lot to the thrift store, because in amongst the usual motley assortment of old Scrabble and Monopoly sets, we found several like-new games. Three of them, in fact, were still in their original shrink wrap; two others were open but obviously hadn't been played much. I don't want to disclose exactly what we got for fear of holiday spoilers, but we scored five new, interesting-looking games (two that we'd played before and three that were new to us), for only five bucks. So even though we didn't find what we were looking for, it was well worth the trip.

Ecofrugal Episode 4: Boots made for walking

Exciting as this thrift-store adventure was, it still left Brian without footwear. So, in the afternoon, we set out in the car to check out the Goodwill store in Bound Brook (the same one we visited for our anniversary). And there, Brian found not one but two pairs of boots that fit him reasonably well: a pair of Timberland hiking boots and a dressier leather pair originally from Banana Republic. Both were in excellent condition, and each was priced at a mere $20.

Each of these pairs had its own pros and cons. Brian slightly preferred the look of the Banana boots, but the way they were constructed made them a bit of a hassle to get on and off. The Timberlands were more convenient, but definitely casual in appareance, which meant he probably couldn't wear them for any kind of slightly formal occasion. When I asked him which pair felt more like the boots he'd want to reach for every day, he said the Timberlands were probably better, but he didn't seem happy about it. 

At that point, I proposed the solution he'd secretly been hoping for: just buy them both. That way, he could use the hiking boots as a casual, everyday shoe, and the Banana ones could be his dress boots. And at only $20 a pop, the two pairs together would cost less than half what he'd paid for his current pair of Wolverines that had let him down so dreadfully.

When we got these home, I did a little searching online to figure out just how good a deal we'd gotten. I found that a comparable pair of Timberlands would cost around $120 at full price, while similar boots from Banana Republic would run around $250. In short, we just acquired $370 worth of footwear for a mere $40—about 11% of retail.

Sadly, with my weird feet, I'd never be able to pull off this kind of ecofrugal shoe coup myself. But I can at least bask in the reflected glory of Brian's success. And if we end up having to blow a couple of hundred bucks on my next pair of winter boots, the $200 or so we didn't spend on boots for Brian will balance it out.

Recipe of the Month: Savory Soy Curl Pasta

October has been a busy month for us. We've had something on our schedule at least one day every weekend: a football game on the 7th, yard sales last weekend, an outdoor show this weekend (which ended up being rained out, but we didn't know that until a few hours beforehand), the Folk Project's Halloween Show next Friday, and a trip to the Renaissance Faire with some friends next Saturday. And that's in addition to our regular board game nights and RPG sessions. With all that going on, we haven't had as much time as usual for shopping and cooking, so I wasn't sure when we were going to find time to squeeze in a Recipe of the Month for October.

Fortunately, Brian came to the rescue last Saturday with this improvised dish. After a day of shopping at the town-wide yard sales and socializing with a friend, he whipped up a last-minute dinner out of what we had on hand: Soy Curls, pasta, broccoli, and a few odds and ends. 

He started by soaking the Soy Curls in a mixture of water, salt, and nutritional yeast, then pan-fried them until crisp. He then used the same pan to cook the broccoli and to make up a sauce from red onion, garlic, mushrooms, and the soaking liquid from the Soy Curls, thickened with cornstarch. He even fancied it up with a touch of sherry and lemon juice before tossing everything together with a half-pound of whole-wheat penne. 

For a totally impromptu meal, this was quite tasty. It's not so surprising that it had plenty of flavor, since all the ingredients that went into the mix did, but they complemented each other better than you might expect. The meaty texture and umami flavor of the yeast-soaked Soy Curls played off against the brightness of the lemon and sherry, the earthiness of the mushrooms and whole-wheat pasta, the piquancy of the onion and garlic, and the green, ever-so-faintly bitter taste of the broccoli. It was an agreeably complex mixture without anything overly fancy. (It's also a dish that an unsuspecting carnivore would probably never guess was vegan. Under all the other flavors, the Soy Curls were almost impossible to distinguish from chicken.)

When I asked Brian, he said the only thing he might change about this dish is to add the lemon juice to the mix earlier, perhaps even putting it into the soaking liquid for the Soy Curls. But he liked the first iteration of the recipe well enough to write it down and even give it a name:

Savory Soy Curl Pasta

1. Soak the Soy Curls. Add 1 tsp salt and 1 Tbsp nutritional yeast to 1.5 cups water and microwave for 1 minute. Mix thoroughly, then add 3 oz Butler Soy Curls and allow to soak for 5+ minutes. Squeeze liquid out of softened Soy Curls and reserve all liquid. 

2. Prepare the veggies. Cut 8 oz broccoli crowns into small florets. Chop ¼ red onion and mince 3 oz mushrooms. Mince 4 cloves garlic.

3. Make the pasta. Combine 8 cups water and and 1 Tbsp salt and heat to a boil. Add 8 oz whole-wheat penne and cook for about 10 minutes, then drain. Try to time this so the pasta is done after the sauce is finished.

3. Saute the Soy Curls. Heat about 3 Tbsp canola oil in a nonstick or cast iron skillet on high heat. Add Soy Curls and cook, stirring frequently, until browned. Remove from the skillet and set aside.

4. Cook the broccoli. Add another ~1 Tbsp canola oil to the skillet with the broccoli. Saute until florets are bright green and slightly browned. Remove from the skillet and set aside.

5. Saute the veggies. Saute onion over medium heat until soft. Add the garlic and mushrooms. When the mushrooms begin to release liquid, add 1 Tbsp sherry. Continue to saute until mushrooms begin to brown. Lower heat. 

6. Finish the sauce. Suspend 1 Tbsp cornstarch in a small amount of water and add to the reserved soaking liquid. Add the mixture to the contents of the skillet and cook over low heat until the sauce thickens. Add 2 tsp lemon juice.

7. Combine. Add the Soy Curls to the sauce and stir to coat thoroughly. Add to drained pasta, along with the broccoli, and toss to combine all ingredients. Add additional lemon juice to taste.

 

Vegan "pepperoni" pizza

So, this probably won't be my official Vegan Recipe of the Month for September, but I thought it was worth sharing. Last weekend, Brian made a pizza using our homemade vegan mozzarella, as he's done this many times since we found the recipe. But this one had a new twist: it was a vegan "pepperoni" pizza. After his success making a facsimile of Polish sausage from Soy Curls, he started wondering if he could also turn them into a close approximation of pepperoni. He searched online for "vegan Soy Curl pepperoni" and found a recipe for exactly that on a site called Courtney's Homestead, and since he happened to have all the ingredients on hand, he decided to give it a try. 

The recipe was pretty straightforward. After hydrating the Soy Curls, he tossed them with oil and a mixture of ground spices—fennel, garlic, smoked paprika, and crushed red pepper—and roasted them on a baking sheet. The recipe called for a whopping two teaspoons of crushed red pepper, but Brian halved this to keep the spice down to a manageable level. He also made only a half batch, using one cup of Soy Curls instead of two, and found that to be a sufficient amount for a whole pizza. However, since he wasn't sure how I would like it, he hedged his bets by putting it on only two-thirds of the pie.

As you can see, this vegan substitute doesn't look that much like real pepperoni. It looks a little bit more like sausage, and to me, it also tasted much more like it. Granted, it had been a long time since I'd had any kind of meat on a pizza, so my memory might not have been accurate, but the main flavor I could taste was fennel, which I associate more with Italian sausage. If garlic and paprika had been the dominant flavors, I might have found it a bit more convincing as pepperoni, but it would still have lacked the "characteristic tangy flavor" that, according to The Spruce Eats, comes from Lactobacillus bacteria. (It also wasn't greasy enough to be a really convincing copy of either sausage or pepperoni, but I didn't consider that a bad thing.)

Although I wouldn't call this a very close facsimile of pepperoni, it was still an enjoyable addition to the pizza. It provided a little added flavor and texture variety, as well as a welcome dose of protein (which our vegan mozzarella doesn't really provide). So, on the whole, I'd say this vegan pizza topping is worth trying, but maybe don't call it "vegan pepperoni." People who are expecting pepperoni will most likely find this disappointing, but if it's labeled as something like "Soy Curl sausage," they'll probably eat it up quite happily.

Vegan Recipe of the Month: Plum Whip

Last Wednesday, Brian and I went to a free outdoor concert of swing music in town. We sat on our camp chairs among a crowd of our neighbors and enjoyed the music and the sporadic attention of a frisky puppy belonging to a couple seated in front of us. Brian remarked that the one thing we could use to make the experience complete was some ice cream...and once he'd said it, I couldn't stop thinking about it. All through the concert and the walk back home. I kept feeling the urge for a scoop of something cold and sweet. 

Even when we got home, I couldn't shake the craving. We didn't have ice cream or any nondairy equivalent in the house, so I started hunting through the pantry and freezer looking for something I could whip up into a reasonable substitute. When I unearthed some bags of frozen pitted plums, I recalled the time we made homemade Dole Whip from frozen pineapple and coconut milk, and I wondered if it would be feasible to do the same thing with plums instead.

We had three different kinds of plums in the freezer, from our three plum trees: Mount Royal (blue), Opal (red), and Golden Gage (yellow). We chose the Golden Gage plums for this experiment, since they were generally the sweetest. We just tossed what looked like a reasonable volume into the blender, shook up a can of full-fat coconut milk, and dumped some in on top of the plums. Then we started pulsing the blender on the "grind" setting, trying to chop up this icy mixture. By repeatedly pulsing and adding more coconut milk and pulsing again, we eventually managed it to reduce it to a smooth slurry—thicker than a milkshake but more liquid than soft-serve ice cream. All told, we used about 10 ounces of frozen plums and 3/4 cup of coconut milk, and we ended up with enough plum whip to fill two of our little IKEA cups most of the way full.

The finished product wasn't quite ice cream. It wasn't as sweet, and it had an icier, less creamy consistency. But it was cold enough and sweet enough to scratch that ice-cream itch, particularly with a generous spritz of our favorite coconut whipped cream on top. As he polished off the last of his cup, Brian remarked, "I think we'll definitely be doing this again." (Next time, he thinks he'll start by blending all the coconut milk with a small amount of the frozen plums, then gradually adding more plums until it reaches the right thickness.)

This improvised plum whip is kind of the perfect summertime treat. It's simple and tasty. It requires only two ingredients—frozen plums and canned coconut milk—both of which we typically have on hand at all times. It's reasonably healthy, made primarily from fresh fruit with no added sugar. It takes only a few minutes to make. And it's suitable for pretty much any type of diet: vegetarian, vegan, raw vegan, paleo. With only about 16 grams of carbs per serving, it would even work on the strict low-carb diet that I'm (mercifully) no longer following. And for those who don't happen to have plum trees in their front yards, it would probably work with almost any frozen fruit: strawberries, blueberries, mango, or what have you.

Homemade coffee creamer, take 2

Yesterday I noticed that I was getting toward the end of my last carton of Silk Protein, the plant-based milk I habitually use in my coffee. That was an annoyance, since replenishing it would require a special trip out to the nearest Stop & Shop for just that one item. So I started wondering whether it might be time to take another crack at making my own plant-based coffee creamer. I'd bookmarked a couple of recipes from PETA that were based on coconut milk, but I had my doubts about them; all they did to thicken the coconut milk was heat it, a method that hadn't worked at all when I tried it with soy milk. And I already knew from experience that plain coconut milk, straight out of the can, didn't come close to producing the creamy texture I was looking for.

While hunting around for other vegan creamer ideas, I happened across a couple of pages mentioning oat milk. That got me thinking about our unsuccessful experiment a few years back with making oat milk from scratch. It was okay on its own, but when heated up to make cocoa, it developed a texture similar to Elmer's Glue. But I wondered: would that still happen if I didn't heat it directly, but simply stirred it into a hot cup of coffee? And even if it did thicken up a little, might that added body be a feature rather than a bug?

There was only one way to find out, so I whipped up a quick batch in our little Magic Bullet. I used a cup of water, a quarter-cup of oats, three-quarters of a teaspoon of sugar, and a pinch of salt—roughly the same proportions that Brian uses in his homemade walnut milk. I let that mixture sit in the blender container for half an hour, blended it for about 30 seconds, then strained it twice. I put it through a regular kitchen strainer once to filter out the big chunks, then strained it a second time through some old pantyhose to remove the finer grit. It was a rather slow process and I ended up having to push the liquid around a bit with a spoon, but I was able to get out all the liquid. (Brian mixed the solid residue into the veggie cakes he was making for dinner, so it didn't go to waste.)

The next morning, I tried some of this in my coffee. I was pleased to see that it didn't turn into glue like it had with the cocoa—possibly because it wasn't as hot, or possibly because I just wasn't using as much of it. Unfortunately, I was less pleased with the taste. I dumped in three to four tablespoons of the mixture, but it didn't lighten either the color or the flavor of the coffee by much. Adding more increased the slippery mouthfeel of the brew, but it didn't do much to lessen the bitterness.

This was disappointing, but I wasn't prepared to give up altogether. I thought perhaps adding coconut to the oat milk, as suggested on my favorite vegan blog, would produce the creamy texture I was going for. But before trying that, I had to figure out what to do with the remaining oat-milk-adulterated coffee in my cup. I thought maybe diluting it a little more would help, so I tried dumping in a little of our Lidl soy milk on top of the oat milk. And to my surprise, this combination worked pretty well. Neither the oat milk nor the soy milk helped the coffee much on its own, but together, they were able to produce the creamy cafe-au-lait consistency I was looking for.

That made me wonder if I even needed to mess with the coconut. Maybe all I had to do was combine the homemade oat milk with some amount of soy milk before using it. That would probably be much cheaper than adding coconut to the oat milk, and the resulting mixture would be higher in protein. And it would stretch out one batch of the oat milk, so I wouldn't need to mix it up as often.

So, for my afternoon cup of coffee, I tried mixing the oat milk with an equal volume of soy milk and adding a generous splash of that to the java. This didn't quite do the trick; it was still too thin and too bitter. But I continued to mix in a bit more soy milk, then a bit more, until I finally got something palatable. It looks like I need to combine roughly one and a half parts soy milk to one part homemade oat milk, and then use nearly a third of a cup of the resultant mixture, to get my coffee the way I like it.

But is this more cost-effective than the Silk Protein? Well, a cup of oat milk uses a quarter-cup of oats (about 7 cents' worth), three-quarters of a teaspoon of sugar (less than 1 cent), and a pinch of salt (negligible cost). And a cup and a half of the Lidl soy milk costs about 35 cents. So that's roughly 43 cents for two and a half cups, which is seven and a half servings. That works out to a little under 6 cents per serving—less than half the cost of the Silk Protein, even if I'm using significantly more of it. It'll take a little bit of work to mix up a new batch of the oat milk every few days, but that's not nearly as inconvenient—or polluting—as having to drive to the store every time I run out of creamer.

All in all, I think this oat-and-soy mixture may be just the homemade coffee solution I've been looking for. I'll keep tinkering with the proportions over the next few days to see what works best. But if all goes well, I can cross Silk Protein—and with it, Stop & Shop—off the list of things I need in my life.