Chocolate Ice Creme made with MimicCreme

I was in the health food store looking for amazake (another story) and I came across this dairy-free liquid called MimicCreme made from almonds and cashews. I had never seen it before and thought it might be a good candidate for ice cream. I don't know too much about the company but if you're interested here is their website: www.mimiccreme.com. What interested me was the pedigree of the MimicCreme:  dairy-free, lactose-free, gluten-free, vegan, cholesterol-free, non-GMO, kosher, no trans fats, and no saturated fats. I bought the unsweetened, although they did have sweetened, sugar-free and coffee creamer. I made a small batch of ice cream that I could fit into my little Hamilton Beach ice cream maker. You could easily double this recipe. As usual, the ice cream was pretty damn hard after it had frozen in the freezer. You will need to let it sit out on the counter for 10-15 minutes to let it soften up a bit.

Chocolate Ice Cream with MimicCreme 12 oz.
Ingredients
3 TB cocoa
1/4 cup pure maple syrup
1 cup unsweetened MimicCreme
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Directions
I blended the ingredients in a Tribest Personal Blender because it's small. Combine cocoa, maple syrup, and half of the MimicCreme and blend. Add the rest of the MimicCreme and the vanilla extract and blend well. Pour into small container and chill for several hours; overnight is best. Be sure your ice cream maker bowl is chilling in the freezer 24 hours before you plan on using it. Process using your ice cream maker instructions.

Thin Buns

You've seen them at the store for $3 or $4 bucks – thin burger buns full of additives and chemicals, and really, not so good. It's a great idea. If you're like me, you may get carried away making that veggie burger and adding all kinds of good stuff... sprouts, cheeze, sliced bell peppers, avocado, lettuce, jalapenos, tomatoes, and so on and so forth! The last thing you need is some fat, bready, doughy burger bun that gets in the way of the main attraction.

These buns were made from my all time favorite recipe for whole wheat quinoa bread. It's my go-to recipe for pizza dough and pita bread. Now it's doing triple duty as Thin Buns. If you don't have the book Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day, you really do need to get it. It makes life so much easier and tastier! You mix up your bread dough, let it rise for a couple of hours and put it in the refrigerator. After it's chilled, it's ready to use in batches or all at once. I use my KitchenAid mixer to mix it up, nothing could be easier. I make half batches and use half for pita breads and the rest for pizza. And now, thin burger buns!

Thin Buns
Ingredients
Chilled bread dough from Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day
1/4 cup soy milk
1 TB raw sesame seeds

Directions
Take a piece of dough approximately the size of a plum. Roll till it's round and then roll out into a 1/2 inch thick patty. Place on cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. I like to make about 6 at a time. Cover and let rise for about an hour; it will be slightly puffy.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Brush each bun with soy milk and sprinkle sesame seeds over the tops. Bake for about 20-25 minutes until lightly brown.

Note: I'm sure you could use your favorite bread dough recipe on this. Just let it rise once, then shape your buns and let rise again. The beauty of the "Healthy Bread" dough is once you make it, it's there for the baking when the mood strikes.

Chocolate Zucchini Muffin with Minimalist Chocolate Frosting

Healthy, low fat muffin with just a thin layer of chocolate frosting!

I do love my sweets and am always looking for healthier ways to bake my treats. I recently received an email from Chocolate Covered Katie with a recipe for Chocolate Zucchini Muffins. The recipe originated from her friend with The Happy Herbivore blog. The recipe lists an optional 1/2 cup of sugar which I did not use. The muffin was moist and subtly sweet. I wanted just a bit more sweetness so I made some frosting. This is a very small amount of frosting, none will be left over, and you may have trouble getting it to frost all of your muffins! I had 10 muffins to frost (but I did bake 11!). Here is the link for the muffin recipe on Katie's blog:


http://chocolatecoveredkatie.com/2011/06/03/theres-a-zucchini-in-my-cupcake/

And here is the recipe for Minimalist Chocolate Frosting.

Ingredients
6 TB powdered sugar
1 TB cocoa
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1 tsp Earth Balance margarine, softened
1 tsp chocolate extract (or vanilla extract)
-----
soy milk

Directions
Mix powdered sugar and cocoa together until all lumps are gone and it's well blended. Add margarine, extract and about 1-2 tsp soy milk. Mix. Add a few drops of soy milk at a time until desired consistency is reached. Lightly frost each muffin.

Curb Your Cheese Addiction with Italian Cashew Cheese

This cheese is dairy free! Did you know dairy contains casein, which is actually addictive? Home-made dairy-free cheeses are helping to free me from my cheese addiction. It's a great feeling to not have cheese cravings. And I am not clogging up my arteries.

This cheese is good too! Nice flavors from the spices and you can slice it for cheese and crackers if that's your thing. After it has chilled, it grates up very nicely. Add grated cashew cheese to your pizza halfway through the baking cycle. Yummy – I guarantee it!

Here's a quesadilla I made with it. The "cheese" is even kinda melty!

Here's the recipe for the cheese. The sky's the limit when it comes to seasoning; just be sure to add enough or your cheese may be too bland.

Ingredients
1/4 cup agar flakes
1-1/2 cups filtered water
-----
1 cup raw cashews, finely ground to a powder
4-1/2 tsp fresh lemon juice
1 TB olive oil
2 TB nutritional yeast
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp Italian seasoning
-----
1 TB oil packed sun dried tomatoes
1 TB fresh basil, chopped

Directions
Spray 2 ramekins with nonstick cooking spray and set aside. In medium saucepan, combine water and agar. Turn heat to medium and stir. While you're waiting for it to come to a boil...

Add cashews and all of the ingredients EXCEPT the sun dried tomatoes and basil, into a food processor and process until fairly smooth. Add tomatoes and fresh basil and pulse until chopped and mixed in with the rest.

Go back to the water and agar and turn heat up till it comes to a boil; then stir constantly for 5 minutes. Add the cashew mixture, take off heat, and mix until well blended. You will probably need a whisk to fully incorporate. It will be thick. Pour into ramekins. Cool for about a half hour or so and then cover and place into refrigerator until completely cool. It's ready to eat! You can freeze one of the cheese rounds if you can't consume in a fairly timely manner.

This cheese recipe is adapted from a recipe in 500 Vegan Recipes by Celine Steen and Joni Marie Newman. I haven't had this cookbook long enough to review it but I am impressed by the number of recipes (500!) and the variety. Although the book has no photos it's typeset nicely and there's many, many great looking recipes. I really need to put it on the top of my stack!

Italian Cashew Cheese on pizza pie. Mmmmmm!
The crust is the quinoa bread recipe from Healthy Bread in 5 Minutes a Day.

Vegan Pizza with Homemade Cashew Cheese

This pizza's crust was made with my quinoa bread recipe (see Healthy Bread in Five Minutes a Day), chunky tomato sauce, shredded cashew cheese, and some sun dried tomatoes. It was the day before shopping and I did not have any fresh vegetables. This pizza was still delicious. Add the cheese during the last 5 minutes or so of baking the pizza.

I'm such a pizza hound. Can't get enough. However, just try and get a decent vegan pizza at a restaurant – you can't. That's why it's so empowering to cook. I have my crust down. I'm happy with my basic tomato sauce. Toppings are not problem. It's the cheese thing. You need something to hold it together. If you like the fake cheeses on the market, that's great. But the one I really liked I discovered that it had casein in the ingredients. Casein is a milk ingredient. People rave wildly about Daiya cheese but really, I just don't care for it. So I've gone back to basics and I'm am going through cookbooks and blogs trying out vegan cheese recipes. I made one a couple of weeks ago that was very promising and I shredded it on my pizza. It was GOOD! I made a quesadilla with it, and it was GOOD! There was nothing fake or weird tasting about it. Didn't taste like nuts either. Now it doesn't melt but it does get soft when heated. So here is the cashew cheese recipe. Expect more cheese recipes in the future. But this one turned out quite nicely.

Cashew Cheese
Ingredients
1/2 oz agar flakes
1-1/2 C water
-----
1 C raw cashews, finely ground
1-1/2 TB fresh lemon juice
1 TB sesame oil
2 TB nutritional yeast
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp garlic powder

Directions
Spray a couple of ramekins with oil and set aside.

Place the agar flakes in the water and bring to a boil. Boil for 5 minutes, stirring often. Watch to make sure it doesn't boil over.

Mix in processor bowl the cashew powder, lemon juice, oil, nutritional yeast and spices and process until smooth. It's going to be thick.

Scoop this mixture into the pan with water-agar and stir until creamy and smooth. Take off of heat and pour into ramekins, smoothing over top. Let cool, then cover and chill.

Yield: 2 small round disks of cheese suitable for cheese and cracker, pizza, whatever!

Here is the cheese, sliced. It grates very nicely, too. I pulsed some chopped jalapenos in the food processor just before adding to the water-agar mixture.

Alfalfa Sprouts and Food Recalls

I have a real problem with food recalls. Happens all the time and I get ever so worked up when it's vegetables and what I consider to be healthy food! Do you remember when the cookie dough was recalled? My first reaction was it was the fault of the eggs. Well no, it wasn't! It was the flour! If you think you are safe because you don't eat meat or dairy, guess again. You can only do so much – stay informed*, buy organic, grow and cook what you can, and hope for the best. Since it seems alfalfa sprouts have had more than one recall and the "solution" is to boil the damn things, I've been growing my own. If you buy organic sprouting seeds and keep it clean, you should be okay. I start a batch of sprouts every week and they take 5 days. After each cycle, I run the sprouting trays through the top rack in the dishwasher and that way everything stays clean and sanitary.

My favorite sprouting trays are plastic and they can go up to 3 levels. I usually use only one tray. You can get them from Amazon for $24.50 Sprout Garden 3 Tray Family Sprouting Kit - Includes: Sprouter, Drainboard, Covers, 3 Sprouting Trays, 2 Oz of Certified Organic Alfalfa Seed, Instructions. Grow Healthy Fresh Sprouts in Your Own Kitchen!

Ingredients for 1 pint of sprouts
1 heaping TB organic Alfalfa sprouting seeds or organic sprouting seed mix (my favorite is 3 seed mix)

Directions
Put seeds in sprouting container and soak overnight. Drain the next morning. Rinse every morning and every evening. I do this when I get up and when I get home from work. It's automatic, I just DO it. That way the sprouts are happy and everything stays nice and sweet! If you live in a warm climate you probably ought to rinse them at noon too! But here in Alaska in my 63-67 degree kitchen, twice a day is just dandy. On the fifth day, rinse in the morning, drain and place in the sunshine. At the end of the day, I lift them from their little tops in clumps and place in a salad spinner, rinse under water to get rid of the seed hulls and then spin, baby, spin. I have a nice little plastic container with a bottom rack that I keep them in, in the fridge where they stay perfectly fresh without additional rinsing.

*Stay Informed! On April 15th, I went to
http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/default.htm
(you really need to put this in your bookmark tools) and the first two recalled items were: RAW Organic Food Bar and Archer Farms ground turmeric. For crying out loud, recalls on a raw health bar, and a spice?! Oh, oh, and on April 5th, "Fresh Express Announces Precautionary Recall of a Limited Number of Cases of 9 oz. Bag Spinach Due to Possible Health Risk from Salmonella." It makes me INSANE! The moral of the story is, stay on top of food recalls (and please, if you have a pet watch their backs too!) and grow and prepare as much food at home that you can.

One final thought, some of the recalls for the month of April 2011 (and this was only through the 22nd): 8 different dates for grape tomatoes (may be contaminated with Salmonella); Goodness Garden Chives (possible listeria contamination); and Mountain Pure Drinking WATER (mold contamination). If you eat grape tomatoes, PLEASE check the website to be sure your favorite brand is safe to eat.

Strawberry Ice Cream

I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!

Ice cream – I always feel better about eating the stuff if I'm the one making it. It's that old control issue, you make it, you know what's going in to the ingredients. I bought a 2-pint package of organic strawberries at the grocery store last week, and after a smoothie there was still half a package left and I needed to use them before they went bad. This recipe really does require a VitaMix blender. If you have a powerful blender you could probably use it and this would be just as delicious. It's just that the VitaMix really mixes it all up smooth. Even the strawberry seeds were totally mixed in.

This recipe is slightly tart, but oh so creamy. It does get hard after it's been frozen but 10-15 seconds in the nuker will take care of that – or you can leave it on the counter for 10-20 minutes. I really liked the consistency of this ice cream. Makes about 1/2 quart, feel free to double it.

Ingredients
12 ounces fresh organic strawberries, cleaned and hulled
3/4 cups raw cashew pieces
1/2 cup maple syrup
1 tsp vanilla extract

Directions
Put in your VitaMix and blend until nice and smooth. It should be on the thick side. Scoop or pour into a container and let set for 2-24 hours before processing in your ice cream maker.