New Year, New Diets...

... Sounds like a good time to make some dessert!

Happy New Year!

Tomorrow starts the new year, and unlike the rest of America, I won't be starting a diet that will end a week later. Why? Because I started my last week and hopefully won't be failing.

Anyway, I'm celebrating New Year's Eve with some friends potluck style and decided to find some fun, new recipes. It just happened that these recipes were both desserts... Oops! Luckily, I am still in the I'm-on-a-new-diet-and-will-pretend-to-have-self-control phase, so I haven't been eating, and my Dad is the official taste-tester.

The first recipe is from Babble.com, but I found it here. This recipe is for Chocolate and Peanut Butter Shooters. I'll retype it all because I made a few changes, and I have a few notes. Note that I doubled the recipe in the link, but didn't double the number made because I didn't have tiny shooters, so I needed to put more in each so that they didn't look totally ridiculous.

Chocolate and Peanut Butter Shooters

Made 19 shooters in small, clear plastic cups.

Ingredients:

- Chocolate Teddy Grahams (crushed)
- 9 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips (mini size!)
- 2 cups heavy cream
- 1 teaspoon vanilla
- 4 oz. cream cheese
- 1/2 cup peanut butter
- 1/2 cup powdered sugar

Directions:

- Crush 2-3 cups of Teddy Grahams.
- Put about a teaspoon of crushed cookie in each cup.

- Heat 1 cup of cream in a sauce pan until edges bubble (don't wait until it boils) and then immediately pour it over the chocolate.
- Whisk the chocolate and heated cream together until smooth.
- Add the vanilla and allow to cool.
- When cool, whisk again and then spoon about a tablespoon of the chocolate mixture into each cup over the cookie.

- Using an electric mixer, beat together cream cheese and peanut butter.
- Separately, beat 1 cup of cream with the powdered sugar until "thick with stiff peaks".
- Fold the whipped cream in with the peanut butter mixture. At first, when I added these together, it seemed like the two weren't going to combine, but it soon became a fluffy peanut butter mixture!
- Put mixture into the corner of a large zip lock back (or a piping bag if you're cool enough to have one).
- Add about two tablespoons into each cup.
- Use a spoon to smooth the peanut butter cream over the chocolate layer.

- Put another teaspoon of crushed cookie in each cup and shake so that the cookie covers the peanut butter layer.

I've always wanted to use this meat-pounder, but a rolling pin might
have been more effective. Also, it felt a little evil to crush the bears.

Peanut Butter Cream

Chocolate Cream

Finished product!

This recipe was surprisingly easy, though a bit messy. They ended up being delicious (according to all taste-testers)! Definitely a good thing to make!


The second recipe is for Banana Wontons. I found the recipe on ohmyveggies.com, which is a great blog. The recipe is here, though I didn't make the sauce. Instead, I added sugar into the recipe to make it sweeter.

Banana Wontons

Ingredients:

- 2 large bananas (ripe)
- 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/4 cup sugar (plus more to sprinkle)
- 36 wonton wrappers
- oil spray

Directions:

- Preheat the oven to 400 F.
- Mash the bananas with a fork and mix in the sugar and cinnamon.
- Put about a teaspoon on a wonton wrapper.
- Dip your finger in a bowl of water and wet all four sides of the wrapper.
- Fold the wrapper over diagonally (to make a triangle) and press the wet edges together to close.
- Once all the wontons are made, place on two baking sheets.
- Spray the wontons with oil, flip them all, and spray again.
- Sprinkle sugar onto the wontons.
- Cook for 8-10 minutes.

Wonton wrappers with banana mixture

Ready to bake

Finished product!

These are so great! Success #2!!!

Rosemary Onion Potatoes...

... Mashed?

So, I was making some of my rosemary potatoes, and decided to add onion. Basically, what I had was some cut up potatoes, olive oil, kosher salt, rosemary, onion powder, garlic powder, and sliced onions. I had them in the over at 350 F for probably a bit over an hour (or until the potatoes were soft).

SIDE NOTE: I couldn't sleep (at 4 am), and I had more of my burger patties that I had just been defrosting, so I made a delicious snack (hamburger meat, onions caramelized in honey, tomato, onion powder, garlic powder, cheese, etc) seen below. It was delicious, but I think I added too much onion powder (or garlic powder? or both?) and my eyes wouldn't stop watering! Kind of ruined the meal... Another fun fact? I ran out of "good" cheese, so this snack included chopped up string cheese. Those things are so great and versatile!

Anyway, after the potatoes were ready, I had an epiphany. Or maybe it was just a good idea... I'm not sure where the line is between idea and epiphany (said in an airy and magical voice). Anyway, the idea:
What would happen if I put the entire potato mixture into my mini blender? WHOA, right? Or, maybe you're saying EW. If you are, you're wrong. After a few batches through the blender (it is very small Ninja), I had a delicious snack. I essentially (or literally?) made rosemary onion mashed potatoes. Easy. Peasy. Win.

You can ignore the chicken and mushrooms on the right in the bottom picture. It was an attempt at a sherry sauce I found online, but it wasn't that delicious. The potatoes look lovely though, don't they?

Then, in what can ONLY be considered an epiphany (prompted by my mother's idea...), I made potato pancakes out of the leftover. 

Please note: potato pancakes are NOT to be confused with Latkes. I am Jewish and my dad makes THE BEST Latkes EVER (caps lock is warranted here), so I am unwilling to categorize something as a Latke just because it includes friend potato.

Terrible quality photo of high quality
rosemary onion potato pancakes

As promised...

... I am a VERY bad blogger.

I was also a very bad vegan. "Was" is the key word in this.

I lasted 2.5 weeks before giving up. What was the last straw? I went with a friend to a vegetarian restaurant that is "open daily" on a Tuesday, and they were closed. It was confusing. Anyway, there was a BBQ place nearby, so we decided it was a sign from God. Obviously.

Anyway, the nice thing about this blog is that I have ACCEPTED that I'm a bad blogger, and can thus return with no explanation of the last month or so.

So, today I got back from Thanksgiving break, which was lovely. I got back in the early morning, so I had all day to avoid my work. I had been craving a burger, and had cleaned out my refrigerator before break, so I was excited to go grocery shopping and attempt to make my own burger. It was delicious, though I would say that, though I felt that I added plenty of salt, pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder, I would definitely add more in the future! I served my burger on an Udi's GF roll with lettuce, tomato, and thousand island dressing.

I forgot I had bananas...

... So I finally get to make banana bread!

I found this super simple recipe: vegan banana bread

I changed it a bit because I needed it to be gluten-free and because I don't have baking soda.

1/3 cup vegan margarine
1/2 cup sugar
2 cups gluten-free flour
1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum
2 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
2 ripe bananas
1/2 cup almond milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup walnuts

I baked this for 50 minutes at 350 F, and it's quite tasty with some margarine on it. It's possibly not sweet enough; something to consider for next time.

Pasta and Pesto...

... Can be gluten-free and vegan and delicious.

The pesto included:
fresh basil, avocado, walnuts, salt, lemon, garlic, and olive oil.

I then served it with some gluten-free pasta!

What a success! The fresh basil makes this super delicious!

I just made delicious gluten-free and vegan burgers...

... Too bad it took me about two hours.

Yesterday, I purchased another vegan cookbook called "Chloe's Kitchen" by Chloe Coscarelli.

Taken with Instagram

I have bookmarked many recipes already, and today I tried the burgers!

The burgers included brown rice, onion, garlic, lentils, walnuts, gluten-free flour, dried basil, salt, and pepper. The recipe also included a "special sauce" that included soft tofu, garlic, Dijon, ketchup, agave, and salt. It also included relish and dill, but I left those out.

I learned about cooking lentils, and found good ways to use my mini food processor with lots of food. I also learned that soft tofu is the same as silken tofu.

Ingredients after the food processor

Cooking the burgers

The finished product!!

The finished product was fantastic. It also tasted good with some sliced vegan cheese (though that didn't add any flavor). Definitely a must have!

If you can't have an omelet for breakfast...

... Might as well have Mac 'n Cheese!

I woke up today at 4 AM after a lovely 3 hours of sleep. What did I have to do at 4 AM? Absolutely nothing. But I was and am awake. Wide awake.

After checking Facebook (strangely, not much had happened since 1 AM besides a few more fantastic Mitt Romney jokes), doing some computer programming (I'm trying to write a MatLab program to do all of my lab work for me...), and paying my credit card bill (yes, that bored), I decided it was time to pull out the new cookbook again!

During my previous trip to Whole Foods, I purchased a few additional ingredients for some other recipes that looked good and didn't require things that would go bad quickly. One of those recipes was vegan macaroni and cheese!

The entire process, from boiling the water (for my gluten-free elbow noodles) to bowl, was only 35 minutes. It was also relatively easy.

The sauce contains: cashews, nutritional yeast, onion powder, salt, garlic powder, almond milk, cornstarch, vegetable oil, miso paste, and lemon juice.

When I bought miso paste, for some reason I was picturing a white soft-tofu like substance. Why is this? Because of those little tofu squares in miso soup. You can make fun of me all you want, but even though I know those are tofu, I still associate them with the word "miso". Fun fact: I used to think those were cheese when I was young and would ask for "the soup with the cheese in it".

Anyway, this is miso paste:

And this is my tasty breakfast:

I would say it's yummy, but not feed-to-a-non-vegan worthy, if you know what I mean.

Either way, I consider it a success!