Making vegan cooking even more difficult

Last night I had my friends Erin and Liz over for dinner, and I am so impressed with myself because I made us all a dinner that everyone could eat. And it was yummy! Usually that is not too terribly difficult, there are lots of yummy vegan recipes to make, but Liz has the most encompassing food allergies of anyone I know. She is allergic to all legumes and nuts. Crazy! That is so many things! And soy is in everything. But I managed to do it! And we all stuffed ourselves and drank lots of raspberry mojitos and wine. A stellar Saturday night. Now I have to figure some more Liz/vegan menus for all the next times.

I was too impatient to take a good picture since it was already so late. There is a spinach salad with strawberries and a dressing from a Penzeys recipe that was free in the store but now I’ve lost it and I can’t find it online anywhere so I had to remember the amounts. I think I put too much sugar in. Also I did not realize that Worcestershire sauce was not vegan, when my bottle runs out I will just use soy sauce or tamari, I’m sure it will taste just the same without some molecules of anchovies in it.

Raspberry vinaigrette
1/2 cup olive oil
1/3 cup raspberry vinegar
some minced onion or onion powder
some mustard powder
2 tblspns white sesame seeds
1 tblspn poppy seeds
1/4 cup sugar (this is probably less)
little bit of Worcestershire sauce/salty solution
Mix everything together and chill for a little bit. This is enough to dress 2 big salads. And you are supposed to put it over spinach and strawberries and pistachios.

We put walnuts on ours and pine nuts on Liz’s, since pine nuts are not nuts they are really seeds. I did not know that. I also made one of my favorite recipes, the sweet potato crepes with cilantro-tamarind sauce from Vegan with a Vengeance. I changed the extremely not Liz-friendly peanut oil to canola oil, used some strange dehydrated coconut cream block of fat instead of the cashews in the sauce (which meant the resulting filling had approximately 7,000 g of saturated fat), and used spelt flour instead of chickpea flour for the crepes. Other than overcooking the sweet potatoes and making kind of a soup-like filling, it tasted exactly as delicious as the Liz-lethal version. And I made the aloo gobi from The Vegan Table. This is the second time I’ve made this, the first time it was kind of dry but this time it was better. I used oil this time instead of Earth Balance, more water, and fresh Roma tomatoes instead of canned so now I don’t know why it was better. Oh and all this crazy talk about all the BPA in cans is stressing me out, but that is for another day.

Since all my favorite desserts have Earth Balance in them and therefore soy, we found a new recipe to make that required only spending a million dollars on soy-lecithin free chocolate chips, the Minonos from the new Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. They look just like Milanos, but they are too hard. I’m not sure why that is. They still taste very good. Alice enjoyed them very much.