CMS/Colloquium knitting

 I made pretty good progress on my second embossed leaf sock in CMS and colloquium this week. 

Robert harvested the last of the basil on Saturday.  Here's what the plants looked like - they were getting pretty sad-looking, but Robert picked every single last leaf and we had enough green leaves to make a good-sized batch of pesto, and then we tossed the purple leaves whole into our pesto and homemade pasta.  Delicious!

Robert planted new plants from seed, so in a couple of weeks we should be eating lots of basil again!

Adventures with Rudy - and a recipe!

Robert and I spent last weekend taking care of this wonderful, sweet, and energetic dog. Rudy's owner, Taylor (who is one of my office mates) was at a conference, so we stayed at her apartment and walked and fed and played with Rudy.

We almost always have a "special" breakfast on Saturday mornings - usually it's pancakes from Robert's mom's recipe (which I veganized with a flax egg and soy "buttermilk") or vegan french toast with our own home-made breadmaker bread (Robert puts pecan bits in the bread to make it extra delicious). So I brought the more unusual pancake ingredients with to Taylor's place, but to my great surprise, the only flours she had were whole wheat flour and vital wheat gluten! So here is Robert's mom Lynn's oatmeal-buttermilk pancake recipe, adapted to be vegan and whole wheat, and scaled for two people:
Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups "soy buttermilk" - a splash of white vinegar to cover the bottom of the measuring cup, and then the rest filled up with soymilk
1/2 cup oats - not the quick-cooking kind
1 flax egg - 1 Tbs flax seeds ground up and mixed with some warm water
2 Tbs canola oil
1 1/4 cups whole wheat flour
1 Tbs vital wheat gluten (this keeps the pancakes from being too whole-wheat heavy and dense. Don't leave it out)
2 1/2 Tbs brown sugar
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
a few dashes of cinnamon

Method:

1. Mix the soy buttermilk and oats and let them sit for 10 minutes or so. Then add the flax egg and oil.
2. Combine the dry ingredients in a medium-small mixing bowl, and whisk them together to mix.
3. Add the wet ingredients to the dry. I always have to add a few extra splashes of soymilk to the batter at this point to make it the right consistency. Even so, the batter should be pretty thick.
4. Fry up the pancakes. I usually scoop the batter using a 1/4 cup measure. (Lynn's recipe recommends using a 1/3 cup measure for this, but I like to have more pancakes, even if they're smaller.)
5. Serve with margarine and real maple syrup!
   

The whole wheat version was a success! They were fluffy, not heavy, and they had a nice nutty kind of whole wheat flavor.

Bread Machine!

Many things have happened since the last time I posted. I will make an attempt to post them in the order in which they were done, but no guarantees.

First up, We received a breadmaker as a housewarming/"thanks Robert for dogsitting" gift. We have been enjoying it a great deal. The first loaf of bread Robert made in it was a simple white bread:

This loaf of bread was very delicious, and lasted less than 24 hours. We try to have a "special" breakfast on Saturday mornings, and the day after the first loaf of bread happened to be a Saturday, so I made vegan french toast. We devoured it with margarine and maple syrup.

Vegan Donuts

As I mentioned in a previous post, Robert and I have now made donuts twice. We use the Pioneer Woman's recipe, and veganize it by subbing flax "eggs" for the two eggs. The recipe makes about two dozen. For Robert's birthday brunch, we doubled it. This was kind of a mistake, since it produced 52 donuts and 62 donut holes, which took up just about every flat surface in my apartment until our friends ate almost half of them.

That said, they are DELICIOUS! Here you can see one frying. I recommend using crisco for frying instead of canola oil. The canola oil makes you cry when it heats up and starts to break down, but with crisco you're okay until you get too much residue in the bottom of the pot. It took 3 batches of oil to fry all of the birthday donuts.
After they're fried, the recipe says to glaze them with a powdered-sugar glaze. We did that the first time, but the second time we dredged about half of them in cinnamon sugar and glazed the rest. Both options were delicious, but we preferred the cinnamon sugar ones. Here you can see Robert glazing a donut hole:
I heartily recommend this recipe. It is kind of a big production, but it is not difficult. Just make sure you have lots of friends coming over to help you enjoy them!

CMS knitting, finished socks, & dinner

Here are my new colloquium socks. They really are a nice color pink - the picture is kind of orange. I started them on Sunday night, and since I've been knitting my way through Tuesday teaching seminar as well as CMS/Colloquium the past few weeks (and I had knitting time during my TA session this week, when all the students left after the first hour) they've been growing quickly! It helps that k3p3 rib is easy, but still - I'm already started the heel flap, and we didn't even have colloquium today.

We don't have colloquium next week, either (or CMS for that matter) since the university has "midterm recess" next Thursday and Friday. But Robert and I are going to visit my family, so I'm expecting to get in plenty of knitting on the plane.
Here are the finished "church auction socks." Even though I didn't love every second of knitting them, I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out. I hope they keep the recipient's toes warm and cosy for a good long time!

In other news, I tried out a new recipe tonight: mock cheese sauce from the Vegan Delights cookbook. I also roasted some cauliflower to within an inch of its life (possibly my favorite way to prepare cauliflower), added some asparagus to the roasting pan when I started making the sauce, and heated some chicken-less nuggets from the freezer. I liked the sauce, although I really have no way no know if it tastes like dairy cheese. It was more "sharp" (I think? this is more dairy vocabulary I don't really know the meaning of) than the sauce I usually make with store-bought vegan cheese - kind of more like I imagine cheddar would taste. It was also quite a bright yellow color. Next time I might make it with veggie broth instead of water, to make the flavor a little more complex and try to make the color a little less neon.

Vegan Dinner Party

Last night Robert and I made dinner for our friends Evelyn and Jon. Robert made homemade mushroom ravioli, and I made mock tomato sauce (from the Vegan Delights cookbook) and vegan banana-chocolate chip bread pudding (from Veganomicon) with caramel sauce. All of the food was delicious, and we had a lovely time.

Here's Robert making the ravioli:
Rolling out the dough


Arranging the filling


After adding the second layer of dough, cutting the ravioli apart



And the finished product!

Here's the bread pudding. I forgot to take a picture before we served it up, but you can see how much we enjoyed it: