Happy Vegan New Year!

Happy New Year to all our loyal readers - may the new bring you peace, prosperity, and health. What better way to start the year (or celebrate the end of 2008) than with delicious vegan cuisine? For dinner last night, we enjoyed whole wheat pasta with marinara sauce and sauteed portobello mushrooms, fresh baked breadsticks made with my vegan hearty pizza dough, and a delicious house salad that Grechen put together. Nothing really new here, as the marinara sauce and pizza dough are existing favorites, but the sauteed portobellos we're a nice touch.

Dessert was quite an adventure: vegan crepes with homemade, flambee'd vegan caramel sauce. Thankfully I managed to keep things under control and not start a major fire.

For the crepes themselves I actually used this very simple recipe from a recipe site. The batter was very easy to make, but getting the crepes themselves cooked is not so simple. I was not able to get the type of texture that you could fill and roll, so I decided to just serve them flat with caramel sauce on top. As for the caramel sauce itself, well, this is something you frankly should not try at home. In my pre-vegan days I would have done this with butter, but of course now, I substituted with Earth Balance.

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The mixture was simple:

2 tbsp Earth Balance,

1/4 cup brown sugar,

1 tsp vanilla extract,

and 1 tsp ground cinnamon.

Just cook that in a skillet over medium-low flame until everything melts together, stirring occasionally. Then add 1/4 cup of 80 proof rum, turn the heat up to medium-high, and ignite the surface with a long match or lighter. Well it turns out that Earth Balance made this thing like napalm, and the flames we're a lot more intense than what you should experiment with in a small kitchen. Try 2 feet of sustained burn for over 1 minute, where the flames we're so tall they we're reaching the bottom of the under-cabinet microwave oven. I remained calm, decided that I was committed at that point, and gently slid the pan partially off the burner to reduce the heat a bit. After about 1 minute the flames died down, and eventually extinguished. I shook the pan a bit during the burn to ensure all the alcohol combusted properly, but in hindsight, next time I will probably use far less Earth Balance for safety's sake! Thankfully the results we're delicious - this was one good caramel sauce, and totally vegan. It was like a nice heavy syrup in fact - beautiful, and very tasty.

I sure hope everyone had a great New Year's Eve, whether you stayed in and cooked (like us), or went out for your vegan dinner. Once again, best wishes for the new year!

I have to give appropriate credit for this posting mainly to https://allbritemaintenance.com/. I actually got the idea from something I read up on from there site.

Inspirations For This Article

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Posted in Cleaning Services Post Date 12/01/2015