Category — Sweets

I took the best parts from Marisa’s (Food in Jars) and Bon appétit’s recipes for tomato jam and made the most deeeeeeelicious spread imaginable. Thank you both for the recipes.

I had seen recipes for tomato jam before, but it wasn’t until we had tomato jam with our appetizers at DiVino the other week that I realized exactly what we were missing.  And with several pounds of garden tomatoes ripening in our basement, I suddenly knew just what to do with them.

Out came the canning supplies: mini jars, stock pot, funnel and tongs.  Ready to go.

The greatest thing about the Food in Jars method is that it’s SO easy.  All you have to do is chop the tomatoes and toss the ingredients in a pot to cook away.  No blanching the tomatoes or removing seeds, everything goes in the pot.

I served my jam with bread and goat’s cheese and I’m not sure there is any better possible pairing.

Aren’t these little 1/2 cup size jars cute?  And my favourite part of the process?  Making the stickers for the lids.

This is a super easy allergy-friendly ice cream recipe that takes almost no time to prepare.  If you can measure coconut milk and Sunbutter, you can make this.

I was flipping through my Vegan Scoop book again over the weekend and the peanut butter recipe gave me the idea to substitute Sunbutter.   We love our Sunbutter in this house.

(Side note: our giant sunflowers finally opened up and Alden’s eyes nearly popped when I told him that’s where they get seeds to make Sunbutter.   Shazam, kid!)

Ok, so Sunbutter was the first substitution.  Next, I replaced the soy creamer for some of my homemade coconut milk.  (I’m sure canned would totally work too.  But right now, I’m kind of obsessed with making coconut milk.)

Other than that I followed the recipe as the book suggests.  However, since the Sunbutter contains sugar, in my next batch I’ll reduce the amount of sugar I use.  The final ice cream was RICH.  Ritchy Rich.  Although, no one really seemed to mind.

(And yes, Alden’s nails are painted blue.  They did it at school.  He loves it, I … love it less.)

I was flipping through my vegan ice cream book for inspiration for my next batch – I knew I wanted to do chocolate, but I wanted it to be a bit quirky too. The herb garden is overflowing these days, so I’ve been trying to incorporate herbs into as many dishes as possible (like tabbouleh, I made a lot of tabbouleh this weekend).  Adding mint seemed too common and I was on the fence about adding basil. What about the rosemary?

Rosemary and chocolate. Hmm.

I Googled around to see if anyone else had done this combo before. There were loads of honey and rosemary version … and I stumbled on one person who made a non-vegan chocolate rosemary version. Perfect!

Another search today turned up this blog from jolly old England who confirms that a grocery chain on the other side of the pond sells a chocolate-rosemary ice cream.  I guess, it’s not quite as unique as I thought!   It’s a flavour created for Waitrose in partnership with Heston Blumenthal, so I guess I feel a bit chuffed that we both thought of the same flavour. (Hi Heston!  Call me, we’ll make ice cream!)

I used the chocolate recipe from the Vegan Scoop as my base, but again sustituted the soy milk for my homemade coconut milk.  I added a large sprig of rosemary into the mixture while it heated on the stove to infuse the rosemary-ness into the ice cream base.

We had to sample it right away when it finished churning in the ice cream mixer.  Mmm.  Just a hint of rosemary is detectable in the final version.  It adds a nice woodiness to the chocolate, dare I say umami?  No… I won’t.   It’s definitely a complex chocolate taste.

Best of all… it pleases the wee one as well as the adults.

Here are some other good spoon-licking rosemary ice creams (albeit non-vegan variations):

• Honey Rosemary Ice Cream 
• Buttermilk rosemary ice cream
• Rosemary olive oil ice cream
• Honey orange rosemary ice cream

Vegan coconut cinnamon ice cream

Have you ever cracked open a coconut?  I hadn’t until today.  Coconuts were filed in my mind alongside pineapples in the “too tricky to open at home” category.  But, the urge struck to buy a coconut last week so into the cart it went.  And sat at home for days.  What to do with it?  And moreover, how do I open this thing?  What was I thinking?

A few YouTube videos later, I was feeling pretty confident that I could totally crack open a coconut.  In fact, it seemed so easy I started feeling guilty for not trying it sooner.  This tutorial by Jenny over on Nourished Kitchen was particularly inspiring.  Jenny also lists about 80 or so (I kid) reasons why making coconut milk from scratch is all around better than canned.

Here’s how I cracked it open (I have an added step that makes getting the meat out much easier):

I held the coconut in my left hand and tapped around the circumference with a small hammer.  I kept tap tap tapping until the shell cracked.  I opened the coconut over a bowl and saved the coconut water.  Now, you should be left with two halves.  Turn on your oven and heat it up to about 350 degrees.  Toss the halves on a cookie sheet and bake for about 10 minutes.  Doing this, loosens the husk from the coconut meat.  It makes getting the meat out a breeze.  Then, I used a vegetable peeler to finish the job of peeling the brown skin off the meat.  Voila, coconut meat.

Coconut inspector.

Alden enjoyed tapping the coconut with the hammer. The CHEO part of my brain said giving him a hammer was a bad idea, but my Saturday brain said “ok.”

Toss meat and hot water in blender

The meat got tossed into the blender along with about 1 1/2 to 2 cups of hot water.

Milk strained from coconut meat shreds

Using cheesecloth or muslin, strain the mixture into a bowl.  Less water will make your milk “creamier”.  Tada, you now have coconut milk.

Coconut milk and coconut shreds ready to be dehydrated

I made about 1 1/2 cups of coconut milk out of one coconut.  With the remaining shredded meat, I tossed it into the dehydrator on the fruit roll-up tray and dried it out.  This resulted in a generous one cup of dessicated coconut.

With my coconut milk, I whipped up a batch of cinnamon ice cream, a variation on a couple of recipes from the Vegan Scoop.  It was easily the best ice cream I’ve ever made at home.

Sunday update: I checked my grocery bill. The coconut cost $1.79, cheap! You can’t even buy a can of coconut milk at Loblaws for that amount. It makes the ice cream even sweeter now.

Tuesday update: It’s even better in a cone.

Yay! Ice Cream!

One of the few things ready to eat in my parents’ garden during this unseasonably cool early summer on PEI is rhubarb. My mom grows strawberry rhubarb (some stores seem to sell it as Macdonald rhubarb) in her garden, so it seemed only natural to give the rhubarb syrup recipe a go.

This rhubarb doesn’t grow as thick or as large and it’s much sweeter.  Alden helped collect stalks from the garden as the cows watched over us.  This rhubarb is also much more red – as most things tend to be on PEI (sand, dirt, Anne braids etc.) giving us a deep pink syrup.

We washed up the rhubarb and half went into the pot to make syrup and the rest was used to make a quickie compote (or as they’d say here, stewed fruit).  The compote couldn’t be easier: sugar, a touch of water and a zap in the microwave.

We served the compote over a post-toddler bedtime banana split with all of the fixings.

Vegan pizzelle!

One week, my coworker brought in some homemade pizzelle and I was super impressed. They were pretty and crunchy and not too sweet and I’ll I could think was “I want to make these too!”. Two hours later (at lunch hour!) I had ordered my very own pizzelle maker online. (I ended up buying it from Sears – they were having a small appliance sale and it was only $45!)

Regular pizzelle are made with eggs – lots of eggs. And often nuts. Scratch that for our house. I did some research for vegan versions and only had luck finding a couple of recipes.

I decided to use the version with baking powder because I thought it would give a better result. Also, I only had vanilla soy yogurt on hand, so I substituted it and reduced the amount of sugar by 1/4 cup. Despite the switcharoo, they were still sweet enough for our tastebuds.

I didn’t dust this batch with any powdered sugar or do anything fancy other than to trim the pizzelle that weren’t quite the right shape. The pizzelle maker worked like a charm, I didn’t need to oil it at all and the pancakes easily came out when they were cooked.

These were a hit with the wee one and we packed a stack to take along to this weekend’s big Touch-a-Truck event.  During the outing we ducked inside the mall to escape the rain and decided to picnic on a mall bench.  When one of Alden’s friends came along, he stuck out his “cookie pancake” for his friend to share.  The mark of toddler approval – “hey friend, you’ve GOT to try this cookie!”

Oh jam.  Ugh jam more like it.

Everyone wants to learn how to save the season’s bounties these days (me too!) – pickling and jam making cookbooks are all the rage on Amazon (I’ve bought several!).  I got all hyped up about making my own pickles and jam this summer.  And I had pretty good luck with the non-jam recipes: ginger pop, apple butter and pickled radishes.  But the jam… that I only attempted when my Mom was visiting.  Even with her help, she couldn’t rescue my dandelion jam making scheme from going straight to the garbage.

The jelly that would not set.

Fast forward to January and I’m cleaning out our freezer and find a bag of blueberries. I whipped out my Small-Batch Preserving cookbook and thought the blueberry marmalade recipe sounded interesting. I like marmalade. I have blueberries. Easy! YES!

Wrong.

Despite following the instructions, it was clear that my ingredients were juicier than the recipe called for. 2 cups of blueberries and the juice from an orange and a lemon left me with an extra cup of liquid when it was time to put the marmalade into the jars. A cup. As I stood over the stove at 10:30pm last night wondering how long it would take for all that extra liquid to boil off, I figured I would improvise and add some pectin and more sugar.

Every single jam making book will tell you not to veer from the recipe, but I didn’t have much to lose at this point other than valuable sleep.

The pectin worked. Science magic. The batch started to firm up and I was feeling pretty darn pleased with myself. And this morning when I opened a jar and smeared it on my toast, it seemed good. It was the right jam-y consistency, not runny at all. Everything seemed right in jam land. But the peels. Oh. The peels were too bitter. And not in that good marmaladey way. Bad bitter. Inedible bitter.

You see, as I learned in my Google search afterward, the reason why the original recipe didn’t need any additional pectin was because the pith on the peel contains all the natural pectin needed to firm up the marmalade. Naturally. La la la. Greenpeace. What they failed to mention is that pith is pith, cooked or not, it tastes awful. So, here’s my Jam 101 advice: if you’re making marmalade, look for a recipe that only uses the zest. And look for a recipe that has exact measurements rather than “juice of one orange”. Jam making is a science. Don’t mess with science.

After reading the news that a PEI food product, Honibe, had won a fancy schmancy new food competition, I emailed my parents and asked them to send me some… right away. Quick-o stat-o. The product seems so simple, honey candies that you can drop in your coffee or tea for sweetener. I suppose these are for restaurants or coffee consumers on the go? I’m not entirely sure. I’ve never needed honey on the go.

The packaging, although cute, is probably the biggest downfall for me. I totally understand the need to them to be indivually wrapped so that they won’t fuse together into one giant honey mess, but the plastic and metal just seems so wasteful. And I know… it does distinguish the product from your typical “mint in a plastic wrapper” type candies. I get it. Still.

My parents sent up two varieties: one that was a honey “candy” and the other was “dried honey” in the pretty branded box. Now, visually they both candies look identical; however, the boxed one was labelled “dried honey” and smelled AWFUL.  I’m not sure whether it’s a problem with the packaging or the product. Unfortunate.  As for the taste of the “candy” version? It tastes like honey. Pretty simple. And no funny smells.

Since I’m not cafe hopping enough to require packing my own sweetner and I’m not much of a hard candy kind of gal, I wasn’t totally wowed.  Sorry PEI, don’t hate me.

The latest issue of Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food was stellar for recipes.  I shy away from buying food mags since we can’t make most of them, but this issue had so many allergy-friendly ideas.  And great ideas for lunch boxes too.  And you know, just general Martha-niceyness.  (Well, I still think the Emeril feature is lame, but that’s another post.)  It was just a super win all around.

The first recipe that I decided to make was the baked plantain chips.  As I searched Martha’s site for the recipe, I noticed that she also has a deep fried version that is served with a banana/avocado dip.  Hello Alden-friendly dip!  Yay!  Another win.

These were really easy to make and turned out super yummy even though I didn’t have green plantains. Next time, I wouldn’t bake them for 30 minutes. I had a few that were too burnt to eat. Maybe the riper your plantain, the more prone to burning they are? Not sure. Alden loved them, or at least the idea of them, but I think the burny bits turned him off. Well, he had better learn to like them because we have 3 more plantains to cook this week.

Last week, I made the best pie ever!  Literally.  I decided to use up some of the rhubarb from the freezer and was feeling crazy enough to make pie crust instead of doing an easier crisp.  While I was getting creative with the pie crust, I broke out the new alphabet cookie cutters and set to work spelling out the only thing I could think of when making pie at nine o’clock at night: The best pie ever.

Was it the best pie ever?  Well, it was pretty good.  Gone within a couple of days and even eaten for breakfast.  I guess that qualifies it as a decent pie.

I used my standard go-to vegan pie crust recipe – yes it uses vegetable shortening, but I have yet to master making a pie crust with olive oil.  It just doesn’t work for me.  I think this as close to a flakey buttery crust as we’re going to get here.  To keep the transfats lower-ish, I opted for a fun topping of letters and stars rather than a thick crust.  Besides, the crust is really just a berry delivery tool.