I don’t know where I first came across this recipe (if you can call it that; it’s so simple), but grapefruit and avocado has been one of my favorite hot weather treats for a while now.  Chop a chilled ripe grapefruit and chilled avocado half (I like it when it’s still slightly firm) and mix them together.  I top them with seasalt and pepper because I put salt and pepper on everything.  I find that duo actually brings out the sweetness in the grapefruit.  Enjoy!

I’m curious what everyone else’s favorite hot weather snack is?  I know there are a bunch of good ones out there, so let’s share the wealth.  If you have a foodie blog, you could link to your vegan recipes in the comments.  Thanks everybody…and stay cool!

A couple years ago, after eating a delicious dinner with our friends Bei Li and Blue, Blue treated us to a fantastic frozen, creamy, berry-laden dessert. It was a lot like ice cream, but subtly different. Blue challenged us to figure out what was in it. Title of this post notwithstanding, what would you make of something like this:

Or perhaps this:

Most of the way through finishing this delicious treat, we established that the secret ingredient was bananas; Blue used frozen bananas in his juicer to make a frozen dessert.

For those of you lucky enough to have a juicer (we have the Omega 8005), this is a deceptively easy treat, and a great way to use up those bananas that are about to go bad. When your bananas are just starting to brown, peel them and put them in a sealed container or bag in the freezer. On a hot summer morning, run the bananas through your juicer–with its non-juicing/grinding attachment–in thirds. Drop a strawberry and/or a couple of blueberries/raspberries/small-edible-berries-of-some-sort into the juicer before each piece of banana. Freeze the berries ahead of time (and be sure to cut the stems off the strawberries!) for a smoother, cooler yumyum.

Alternatively, on a hot summer night, this makes a great dessert. Try the same method as above, subbing almonds or peanuts, along with some chocolate chips, for the berries. Again, this will be smoother if you freeze all of the ingredients ahead of time. This is perfect if you want to steer clear of store-bought ice cream and don’t have the time make your own or are eating raw.

Every time we visit Amy’s folks–and every time they visit us–Amy’s mom makes us these phenomenal oatmeal cookies. She veganized her original recipe by subbing Ener-g Egg Replacer ™ for the egg–that simple!

Originally, she made two batches for most visits (one for us, the other for them and Amy’s brother), but for the last year or two, she’s just made the one batch for everyone. No one seems to to notice or care that they don’t have eggs, because they’re amazing–chewy and sweet with a hint of saltiness.

And they have oatmeal in them, so they’re good for you, right? They’re practically healthy.

Marty’s Famous Oatmeal Cookies

• 3/4 cup vegetable shortening
• 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• Ener-g Egg Replacer ™ substitute for 1 egg
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 3 cups oats, uncooked
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking soda

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Beat together shortening, sugars, water, and vanilla, until creamy. Add egg replacer and mix well. Add remaining ingredients. Mix just until moistened. Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls onto cookie sheet. Bake for 11 minutes.

Let’s just start this with a picture:

Every year when fall blows in and we buy that first jug of cider, a desire for apple cider doughnuts begins worming its insidious way through our brains. This is fueled largely by nostalgia for visits to the apple orchard as kids. Knowing this does not help quell the desire. What does help is making freaking apple cider doughnuts!

And since we rarely bake sweets, I thought it was only right to finish off Vegan MoFo by making something I wouldn’t normally make, challenging myself a little.

As you’ve quite possibly learned by now, we’re not into frying so Amy hunted down this baked apple cider doughnut recipe. I took great pains to veganize it by, well, leaving out the egg. That simple. They were still light and fluffy, so I’m not really sure what the egg was supposed to do in the first place. Maybe in the olden days people had more eggs than they knew what to do with? Like me and zucchini.

It’s been a long time since I had a proper apple cider doughnut, and these weren’t fried, so I can’t compare very well. Amy thought they were delicious, but not a perfect replica of the platonic form of ‘apple cider doughnut’.

I should mention in advance, that you’ll need a doughnut pan for thus. You can get them pretty cheap in the intarwebs–be sure to get a nonstick one.

In any case, here they be:

Baked Apple Cider Doughnuts

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1½ tsp baking powder
• 1½ tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp salt
• 2 tsp ground cinnamon
• ½ tsp ground nutmeg
• 2/3 cup packed brown sugar
• ½ cup apple sauce
• 1/3 cup pure maple syrup
• 1/3 cup apple cider
• 1/3 cup plain yogurt
• 3 tbsp vegetable oil

Preheat your oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Combine all of the dry ingredients, except the brown sugar, in a large mixing bowl. Combine all of the wet ingredients plus the brown sugar in another, mixing thoroughly. Pour the wet mix into the dry and mix until just moistened.  Lightly oil or spray the doughnut pan and pour enough batter in each pocket to fill about half way. I filled them my first time using the pan and the doughnuts were all huge and lopsided. Caution, dear readers, caution. Bake for 15 minutes, or until they spring to the touch. Let them cool for a few minutes, then remove them from the pan using a knife to pop them out. In a small bowl, mix about 2 tsp cinnamon to 1/4 cup sugar (until it tastes sweet and not too sharp). Spray/brush the doughnuts with oil lightly and dunk the doughnut in the dry mix, coating thoroughly. BooYa!

Eat with hot cider. Or else:

Happy Halloween!

Happy Final MoFo!

Hello friends. I know we here at IV haven’t been a fantastic source of vegan desserts. But. It is almost Halloween, so it’s about time we stepped it up with some hot confectionary action.

Like many of you, How it all Vegan was my first vegan cookbook. Hell, it was my first cookbook, period. Observe the love:

To date, I’ve still never encountered a better recipe for homemade Peanut Butter Cups than theirs.

In atypical fashion, perhaps for nostalgia’s sake, I didn’t augment the recipe one bit! Quite a feat for a guy such as and including myself.

Here’re the goods:

The Peanut Buttery Part

• 1/2 cup Earth Balance
• 3/4 cup peanut butter (we like Maranatha)
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup graham cracker crumbs

The Chocolate-y Part

• 1 cup chocolate chips
• 1/4 cup milk-like beverage

Making these is easy! Put whole graham crackers in a ziploc bag and roll into crumbs with a rolling pin (I used to do this with a water glass). In a saucepan, melt the Earth Balance over medium heat. Once it’s melted, add in the peanut butter. Once that’s melted and evenly stirred, add in the sugar and graham cracker crumbs.

Pour the peanut butter mix into 24 small cupcake liners in a cupcake pan. Small ones. I know, How it all Vegan doesn’t say anything about small, but trust me. They’re awesome this way.

In the same pan (unless you love doing extra dishes), melt the chocolate chips and milk-like beverage, stirring until totally smooth. Pour this  on top of the peanut butter in the mini-cupcake liners.

That’s it! Now you just want to freeze these li’l guys. They get kinda gooey, so the colder the better.

In the words of animal rights advocate and philosopher Mylan Engel Jr.: “These things blow Reese’s out the ass!”

Thursday night I got a late night wild hare to make this Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe from vegweb. I have to say, this is probably the best chocolate chip cookie I’ve ever made. Over the years, I’ve made tons of different chocolate chip cookie recipes, occasionally deciding that one recipe or the other is “it”. But I think I’ve finally got it–they key is reproducibility. So. I’ll post back the next time I make these–if they’re as awesome as they were this time, we’ve got a winner.

I added 1/4 cup of soy milk and baked for 18 minutes (instead of 9). Adding in some chopped walnuts would probably be awesome too.

NOTE: You’ll want to use SAFFLOWER OIL for these. That’s what I used the first time, and they were awesome. The second time I used regular vegetable oil, and they were terrible!

Who’s a great little mousewife? It’s me, that’s who.

Amy was gone all weekend, so as the household garbage disposal, I ate leftovers all weekend. On Sunday I got a wild hare to cook it up, so contrary to usual form, I actually followed (mostly) other peoples’ recipes.

For dinner, it was Raw Vegan Caprese Salad and homemade sauce from the garden on spinach noodles.

The caprese salad uses a raw cashew cheese as its mozzarella–and it’s amazing. I think recently we hit our maximum-of-fake-cheese point, so this was a welcome break. It’s really more of a “spread” than a “cheese”. No need to front when you’re a cashew. You just have to taste awesome. The tomatoes and basil were all from our garden.

The homemade sauce was:

• olive oil
• an onion
• 4 mammoth cloves of garlic
• 1 serrano pepper
• a yellow squash
• half a giant zucchini
• about 5 medium – large-ish tomatoes
• fresh basil and oregano

I just diced everything finely, and sauteed in the order listed, then let it simmer for an hour or two. Very simple.

And for dessert, Key Lime Teasecake.

I liked this a lot more than Amy did, but she’s a plain ol’ cheesecake kinda gal and never hung with key lime pie…that being said, this thing was pretty awesome, especially considering it doesn’t use Tofutti/cream cheese. It uses millet, cashews, a little maple syrup, and limes. The crust is just flour, water, shortening, and graham cracker sprinklins. It’s practically healthy. You have an obligation to your body to eat this pie. Immediately.

So, almost in time to be too late for the summer, I present: ice cream! We got an ice cream maker for our wedding, mainly because we’d run out of things we really wanted to register for and didn’t, under any circumstances, want to be given something we couldn’t return later. But when the time came, we kept it. This, it turns out, was an awesome decision. Making homemade ice cream is actually pretty easy if you have an electric ice cream maker. It’s a little harder with a hand crank, but still workable. I’m pretty sure you burn off way more energy than you’d use as electricity, so the carbon footprint is about the same either way–chipmunk-sized.

Straight Up Vanilla

• 2 cups coconut milk
• 2 cups soy creamer (Silk(tm) or Rich’s(tm))
• 1/4 cup agave nectar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 4 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 tbsp bourbon (optional)

Mint Chocolate Chip

• 2 cups coconut milk
• 2 cups soy creamer (Silk(tm) or Rich’s(tm))
• 1/2 cup agave nectar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 2 tsp peppermint extract
• 2 tbsp vodka (optional)
• 1/2 cup chocolate chips

Chocolate Peanut Butter Ripple

• 4 cups coconut milk
• 3/4 cup chocolate chips
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/3 cup agave nectar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• 1/3 cup natural peanut butter (I like chunky)
• 1 tbsp Earth Balance
• 2 tbsp agave nectar (this is for something else, not to be confused with the above agave nectar. get with it.)
• 2 tbsp bourbon (optional)
• 1 tbsp ground coffee (optional)

The processes for the Vanilla and Mint Chocolate Chip are (almost) the same: in a large mixing bowl combine all of the ingredients (except the chocolate chips), then follow the directions for your ice cream maker. Generally, this will be: take bucket out of freezer; plug in ice cream maker; put bucket in maker; turn on maker; pour in mixture. Huzzah!

For the mint ice cream, you may want to break up the chocolate chips, either in a food processor, with a knife (if you’ve got a year of your life to kill), or just smacking with the round side of your ice scream scooper. If you leave the chips whole, they get awfully hard. It’s up to you. How good is your dentist? Add the chocolate pieces just before the ice cream is solid.

For the Chocolate Peanut Butter Ripple, you’re gonna have to get your hands dirty.

In a saucepan, melt the chocolate chips in 2 cups of coconut milk over medium heat. Combine the other 2 cups of coconut milk, cocoa, 1/3 cup agave (use more to taste, especially if you’re using unsweetened chocolate chips), salt, pepper, vanilla, and bourbon (if using) in a large mixing bowl. Once the chocolate chips have fully melted in the the coconut milk, add that to the mixing bowl. Once mixed, pour soon-to-be ice cream into your ice cream maker and fire it up. Now, in the same saucepan from before (unless you like doing lots of dishes) melt the peanut butter in with the butter and remaining agave. Once mixed, remove from heat and let cool. Fold in the peanut butter at the very end of the ice cream making–you don’t want it to mix, but rather form little rivers of delicious peanut butter.

For all of the recipes, the alcohol is optional, but will help keep the ice cream from freezing completely, so it’s less icy and more creamy. Your brain would implode from sugar shock long before you could eat enough ice cream to catch a buzz.