What I eat, apparently

As I rule, I tend to think of ‘delicious vegan baked goods’ as an oxymoron. But only in the ‘vegan’ attached to ‘delicious baked goods’ sense. I have had food that is both delicious and vegan. I have had more experiences then I could ever count where I’ve had ‘delicious’ plus ‘baked goods’. In any case, vegan baked goods, are far as I am concerned, are generally like eating spruced up cardboard. The vegans who eat them are so strung out on vitamins that they truly believe that their baked goods could actually be called ‘delicious’. Or, when they say they are delicious, they are in fact really saying ‘delicious as compared to cardboard’, but are leaving the last bit out for the benefit of those of us that enjoy the juices from cow bosoms and such.

There is an exception to all of this, however. Emily’s cookies (or some similar female name beginning with a vowel), sold at Ellwood Thompson’s (a local health food store). It’s not necessarily that they’re delicious for cookies, but more that they’re delicious for granola bars. Crammed full of oats and nuts and bits of chocolate (vegan chocolate, apparently, but I couldn’t tell the difference) and tons of delicious.

Then I attempted trying to make them, based on a recipe I found that seemed to share the same ingredients.

The almost-vegan granola bar-ish cookies were a strong showing in mediocrity. I say ‘almost vegan’ as I totally used regular milk instead of soy milk. Just like I totally used semi-sweet chocolate chips, which probably contain dairy. And I totally buttered the pan with butter, rather then oil. Hmm, come to think of it, I buttered the pan with pseudo-butter, some margarine knock-off, so I might still be good there! In any case, the ’strong showing in mediocrity’ has been stated due to the fact that they’re slightly palatable, but only if there’s nothing better around. Too many peanuts (shoulda used walnuts-d’oh!), a little too burnt, and just not nearly enough flavor.

However, I have a better success story (but, err, not involving vegan food). These babies were awesome:

Did you know that you can make cookies from cake mix? Just leave out the water, and use one less egg then usual! Incredible! Oh, and I dumped in chocolate chips. So soft and squishy! I have fantasized so long for easy access to the softest of chocolate chip cookies. Too often have I been plagued by the cruelty, the sheer mediocrity of hard chocolate chip cookies. And now, the secret to the softness has been revealed. And it tastes much like cake.

My original plan was to make orange chicken. I had the orange juice rather strategically located in my fridge, and everything else just a cabinet’s length away. I even had a pre-existing recipe, and by ‘recipe’ I mean ’scrawled-up piece of paper’. The recipe called for oranges, and I had juice, so I figured I’d just dump things in at random. This was my first mistake.

Apparently there’s a big difference between ‘1 tbsp of sherry’ and me just casually adding a vaguely largish dollop. No matter how much sugar I added, the sauce kept tasting like a screwdriver gone horridly and vomitously wrong. The soy sauce didn’t help either. Albeit, the recipe I was vaguely following didn’t actually call for soy sauce, which right there might have been part of the problem. So I gave up and strained it all out.

Luckily, I’d only added carrots, which strained out quite well. I dumped them back in the pan, and added the green pepper and gluten. I then proceeded with the ‘teriyaki sauce, garlic, and sesame oil’ approach, which worked much better. I stuck to safer addons like sesame seeds and pepper. Look, it’s pretty! There’s even steam rising! It’s like a train got buried in a tragic avalance of vegetables!

These gluten balls are awesome, btw. So squishy and just the right amount of absorbent! Like, I wish I had a giant magical bed of gluten I could curl up on and go to sleep on. Then if I got hungry in the middle of the night I could just start gnawing. I suppose I’d need to douse myself in teriyaki or sweet and sour sauce before going to bed though, otherwise the gluten wouldn’t have too much flavor. I could just shower in the morning, I suppose. These things are so complicated!

Oh yeah, it all got gloriously dumped on rice for the final consumption. I had a serious case of consumption…of teriyaki! Woo!

P.S. I’m putting the ‘vegan’ tag for this, so kindly ignore if you are Buddhist, as apparently garlic is non-vegan for Buddhists. I always knew garlic came from those cloven beasts that haunt the hills and meadows of the lands no vampires dare enter!

There really are very few things that wouldn’t benefit from having a large quantity of chipotle tabasco sauce dumped on top of them. Well, maybe not ice cream I guess. Or my car. Nonetheless, the point here is that chipotle sauce is the Sauce of the Gods.

So I was feeling Tex-Mexey tonight and decided to dump a bunch of crap in a pan and see what happens.

Ingredients used: Can o’ black beans, can o’ diced tomatoes, a pile of frozen corn, a pile of cilantro, a bit of cut up onion, vegetable oil (with the onion at the beginning, before dumping everything else in), vinegar, cooking wine, chili pepper, chipotle sauce, and cumin. Err, and rice.

First lesson of the night: don’t dump in the cilantro until the last minute. It may be tempting to just fling it into the pan all willy nilly whenever it strikes you, just don’t do it. It may be begging you on it’s flimsy little legs flashing you cilantro currency, but don’t do it. I put it in at the beginning, and not too long after that was met with some severely spinachey and flaccid Cilantro. Flaccid Cilantro! No good at all! Luckily, I had some extra that I dumped in at the end, for maximum cilantro-ness.

It really was quite tasty. However, you know what I completely forgot about that would have seriously maximized the taste? The cheese! I had gotten some cheddar explicitly for this, and of course I only remember this fact several hours later.

It means that this dish is officially vegan! That is, unless I got the can of meat-eating killer tomatoes. Again. Oh well, At least they’re high in protein.