Your Vegan Mom

Your Tuesday Tip: Freeze Stone Fruit

Summer fruit freezes really well and makes great smoothies all year round.  I bought 15 pounds of "cosmetically challenged" (I thought they were gorgeous and not just in a mother's love sort of way.) organic peaches for $11 through my (sort of) csa, Abundant Harvest.  Sliced from the pit, spread out on waxed paper to freeze, and then stored in heavy ziploc bags, I'm hoping to jam enough in my freezer to give the frozen mango and pineapple from Thailand a run for its money.  

When we lived in Louisiana for a short time, Desmond and I drove out into the woods to a blueberry farm, where we picked buckets and buckets to stock our freezer.  

What's your source for copious amounts of summer fruit? 

Your Tuesday Tip: Jar Labels

To keep tabs on the dozens of otherwise unmarked jars that wind up in my fridge, I cut out labels from cardboard cereal boxes (thus reducing my guilt over buying packaged food - it's the circle of life).  I use an appropriately sized biscuit cutter to trace circles, and then cutting them out is the perfect thing to do while you put your feet up and listen to Good Food.  There's a stack of circles, a glue stick, and a pen in the drawer next to my sink to help me resist that little voice that always claims, you'll remember what that is.  These labels come off so much more easily than anything else I've tried, plus they look cute.  

Your Tuesday Tip: Self-Rising Flour

Today's tip comes via Southern Biscuits by Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubert with some minor whole grain modifications by me.

To make your own light, semi-whole-wheat self-rising flour: 

Whisk together 1/2 cup white whole wheat flour, 1/2 cup all-purpose flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder.  

Your Tuesday Tip: Halloween Soup

Black sesame seeds make good eyes for (vegan) sour cream ghosts floating in a bowl of black bean soup.  Pipe the sour cream from a plastic sandwich bag with a tiny corner snipped off.  You could even get fancy and pour the soup side by side with a sweet potato bisque, gently swirling them together with a knife to make spooky patterns, but next time I'll just stick with a simple black bean soup.   

Fig Tart

Our best pals are in town, and I am beside-myself excited.  I made a tart this morning to celebrate - my favorite tart filled with my best pal's favorite fruit.

I remember a few years ago in the LA Times food section, Russ Parsons talking about how easy it is to make frangipane (that puffy almond-y paste) in the food processor, and when I looked at the recipe I realized that it would totally work with flax-y goop in place of the egg, but it took me until now to actually try it.

It works.  Beautifully.

So, here's Your Tuesday Tip:

Any vegan can tell you that 1 tablespoon flax meal + 3 tablespoons water = 1 flax egg, which works well in most baked goods - cookies and muffins and pancakes and such.  If you let it sit for about 5 minutes and then whisk it up, you will see that it has created an egg-like gel that will work as a binder. 

But you should also know, that if you need to replace an egg yolk, in say a sweet tart dough, you can just cut the water in half.  So 1 tablespoon flax meal + 1 1/2 tablespoons water = 1 flax egg yolk.

Armed with flax eggs and vegan butter, a half dozen figs and a bag of almond meal from Trader Joe's, you have everything you need to veganify and fig-ify, Dorie Greenspan's excellent tart recipe.