Bryanna Clark Grogan’s Vegan Feast Kitchen/ 23rd Century Table

My grandaughter Hannah's birthday cake, my New Lower-Fat Chocolate Mudpie Cake with Coffee/Coconut/Pecan Frosting-- recipe here!-- we celebrated her 12th birthday (belatedly) on Sunday night.

We had 8 guests for the weekend-- 2 of my daughters and their spouses, and 4 grandchildren, ages 15 to 6. I simply forgot to take pictures most of the time! When I did, the light wasn't great, but below is a bit of what we ate. On Monday everyone headed home, and DH and I went to one of our vegan potlucks, where 5 couples meet to eat great vegan food and chat up a storm. Again, the light was bad and the pics are not great, but the meal was very yummy and we could hardly walk out of the door! This time we had a rainbow theme and I chose yellow, mostly to use up our homegrown patty pan squash!

Friday night my youngest daughter and her husband and son came from Vancouver, so we were few enough to have a sit-down meal. We had a Middle-Eastern meal of hummous (my lower-fat version), Saniya, a Levantine dish in wish I use ground Field Roast Classic Grain Meatloaf instead of meat, topped with my lower-fat Taheena Sauce (recipes here). They loved the Saniya!

We had a green salad with our own tomatoes, olives, and wholewheat pita bread brushed with olive oil, sprinkled with the wonderful herb blend, Za'atar, and heated in the oven. We used this to scoop up both the hummous and Saniya.




Everyone brought food, of course, and we had Terra chips, homemade blueberry popsicles, homemade banana muffins, lots of fruit, corn, chile and cornbread, and vegan posole soup.  DH made crepes for breakfast one morning and on another morning I made Orange-Blackberry-Pecan Scones (recipe here, but I left out the chocolate chips).

On Monday night, we attended a vegan potluck. I made a very simple patty pan squash (from our garden) and fresh local corn casserole in a creamy sauce with thyme and tarragon, with a topping of my "New, Improved" Okara Parmesan Substitute and Daiya vegan cheese. It didn't look like much (and the picture is bad-- sorry!), but it was really delicious!  The recipe is below.

Cheesey Vegan Patty Pan Squash and Corn Casserole

                                     Homegrown patty pan squash

Printable Recipe

I can't believe this week has gone by so fast! Sheesh! And here it is Thursday again! We did have a fun few days with DH's stepdaughter from Montreal and her two lovely 12-year-old twin daughters. We had a picnic the beach with some friends and 2 of my granddaughters, the girls having a great time swimming, canoeing, going out on my stepson's motor boat, and getting to know each other. We went to Salt Spring Island for a night, with the "gang" (as DH calls them) to visit more family-- driving in style in a friend's immaculate white 1972 Chevy Caprice. We would have been squished in our little car, with no air conditioning on the hottest weekend of the year, so our friend offered his ride. Very fun, and a big surprise for the Salt Spring relatives when we drove up!

But, along with company, cooking, the ordinary daily running of a house and job, family, and, of course, the Book-- hours of editing-- it's been mostly work and very little serious cooking, I'm afraid!

I did make an interesting recipe yesterday-- Lucuma ice cream (vegan, of course!). Lucuma is a Peruvian fruit and, as many of you may know, my father was Peruvian. I remember lucuma ice cream from my three months in Peru as a six-year-old. Lucuma is a fruit with a quite dry texture, so it isn't eaten as a fruit, per se. Mostly it is used for a delectable, rich ice cream. Lucuma is rather sweet and has a butterscotch-y sort of flavor. When I was in Vancouver last, I found a store with Peruvian foods and bought some frozen lucuma puree-- what a coup, I thought!

Yesterday I worked out a recipe based on my vanilla gelato recipe made with Instant Clearjel®, with the help of a (non-vegan) recipe from the internet. After splattering the kitchen with soy cream after a little accident (Mercury is in retrograde-- what can I say?), I made the mix and tasted it-- WAY too sweet!! I couldn't figure it out! My gelato is not as sweet as most, and I had used less sweetener than the non-vegan recipe called for (in relation to the volume of liquid, etc.). So, I got out my (new, under-used) reading glasses and read the small print on the bag of lucuma puree-- sugar! I had been assuming that it was unsweetened, since the label did not say "sweetened" and the recipes I found online all called for unsweetened puree. My mistake!

I tried diluting it with more soymilk-- still overpoweringly sweet! (I now have about 2 quarts of very sweet milky liquid in the fridge that I have to think of some ways to use!  Any ideas?) So, I started over and used no sweetener at all. It still tasted too sweet to me, but I know that when food is frozen, the sweetness is not as apparent, so there was hope. I stuck it in the freezer and hoped for the best, as I was hoping to take it to a family dinner with my sister and my mother on Friday-- they will remember this treat, too!

Last night I looked for unsweetened lucuma puree in Canada online-- no luck. But I did find lucuma powder. It seems that lucuma is all the rage in the raw foods community and is even used as a natural sweetener. I found some at a good price from this Canadian vendor, and ordered 2 lbs for future experiments!

BTW, lucuma is being called a "superfood", but I think this is somewhat of an exaggeration. It's true that it has lots of fiber and beta carotene, but, then, so do carrots! It is high in natural carbohydrates, so it was used by the Incas to provide energy, and evidently the trees are very prolific-- no wonder it was a popular food. Tasting sweet and butterscotch-y didn't hurt! I just feel that we should not go hog wild over exotic foods that are supposed to provide miraculous nutrients, when, in fact, we have foods at home that are just as good, more available, and much cheaper! For me, his is an exotic treat to relive some childhood memories.

Anyway, that said, we tried a bit of the ice cream when I was photographing it and re-packing it, and it is delicious! Here is the recipe I used with the sweetened puree, but I plan to try it again with the lucuma powder and will report back!


Printable Recipe

Update Aug. 2012: See a recipe for Vegan Lucuma Ice Cream using lucuma powder here. And stay tuned for Take 3!

BRYANNA'S VEGAN LUCUMA ICE CREAM (PERUVIAN), TAKE 1 (WITH SWEETENED LUCUMA PUREE)
Servings: 10
Yield: 5 cups

1 1/2 cups soy creamer (plain)
1 1/2 cups nondairy milk
1 1/2 cups lucuma puree (with sugar)
3/4 cup raw cashews or cashew pieces, soaked in boiling water for 10 minutes and drained
(if allergic to nuts, use 1/2 cup more nondairy milk, or soy creamer, and 2 tablespoons oil)
1/2 tablespoon pure vanilla extract or vanilla paste
3/8 teaspoon salt
2 1/4 teaspoons Instant Clearjel® (see info below recipe)OR 3/8 tsp. guar gum or xanthan gum

Place the creamer, milk, and lucuma puree into a blender along with the soaked, drained cashews, and blend until VERY smooth and frothy (make sure that it is not grainy at all).

Mix all of the remaining ingredients, into this mixture and blend again until it is VERY smooth.

Chill the gelato mixture thoroughly, and then freeze according to directions for your ice cream machine. Scoop into a quart plastic container, cover and freeze for several hours (preferably 24 hours) before serving.


Keep cool!

A summer lunch-- Denman Island corn and homegrown tomatoes (and basil!) with homemade salsa (for the corn) and homemade vegan low-fat mayonnaise (for the tomatoes).

The above is a frequent lunch these days, as we eat corn on the cob and fresh sliced tomatoes virtually ONLY in season, when we can eat corn within a few hours of picking, and our own fresh tomatoes. They are soooooo good in season that nothing else is ever as good, so why bother? I tell you, that last tomato sandwich of the early Fall is so sad!

We have had alot of company (and alot of fun!), but not much time to cook anything fancy or to blog!


Some of my grandchildren at play on the Denman playground.


Me supervising my youngest grandchild, visiting from Vancouver

I'm also dancing regularly again, which is great exercise and more fun! (I have lost 20 lbs. so far, BTW!) This also takes up some of my time, but I decided that I need to take more time to do both exercise and something for myself, and bellydancing meets both criteria!

We managed to squeeze in a dinner party with friends last Thursday night, but I failed to take pictures of everything. We had some yummy hummous and pita and grilled eggplant from one guest, Sarah, and a delicious salad from another guest, Pam. It was also a spectacularly beautiful salad, with a vibrantly colorful cooked Blackberry Vinaigrette:



This was the recipe she used. Pam said that she used agave nectar instead of sugar and didn't have any tarragon. It was delicious and, as you can see from the photo, spectacular! Of course, she didn't use the cheese in the recipe, and she used butter lettuce and a mixture of toasted seeds instead of pistachios for the salad itself.

I served a Greek spinach rice pilaf; Turkish-style red lentil patties; Breast of Tofu with lemon wedges; vegan Key Lime Bars; grilled zucchini and pattypan squash with olive oil, lemon juice and basil; and the following bean dish, which sounds so simple you wonder how it can be that good, but it is, and was eaten enthusiastically by all.



Printable Recipe

BRYANNA'S GREEK-STYLE WHITE BEANS WITH PEPPERS AND ONIONS IN OLIVE OIL
Servings: 6
I wanted to make a summer bean dish for a dinner party, and one guest is allergic to tomatoes. I had some canned white kidney beans and lots of peppers and onions, so I made the traditional Greek Lenten dish of peppers and onions braised in olive oil (with not quite so much olive oil as usual!), called Pipironata, and added the beans to it. It's good hot, or at room temperature. (I doubled this recipe and we had leftovers for a couple of lunches.)

2 lbs. bell peppers (preferably a mix of different colors)
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 large onions, thinly sliced
2 large cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
salt and freshly-ground black pepper
OPTIONAL: chopped fresh basil
1/ 19 oz. can Great Northern beans, rinsed and drained