Sarah's Sexy (Sometimes) Sunday Bread Bake

Okay, okayyyy, as lucky as I am to live with folks who are always making delicious goodness, I can't leech off of them all the time. Y'all got me; I'm guilted into ever-so-occasional productivity. Time to look busy.

Say, what the heck is this doing in Marge's cookbook drawer? Nobody bakes bread any more. Who kneads it? [rimshot]

This basic recipe starts with a "sponge." Hmmm. Why would I start bread with a gnarly sponge, especially one that photographs with this weirdie green hue? It's making me feel ill to look at it.

The dough still photographs green after kneading. Maybe it's because it took a cup and a half more flour this time than the recipe calls for. Maybe whole wheat flour turns you green. Maybe the Wicked Witch of the West was actually vegan and loved to snack on flour late at night, making her highly soluble when that pesky Dorothy showed up with a bucket of water.

Whoa, my questionably tasty bread dough is multiplying like rabbits. Or like cancer. No one should joke about cancer. This is just a very minor, highly curable cancer with nommy side symptoms.

Final rise leaves many questions unanswered. How many pans are under that towel? Can anything worth eating possibly come out from under that grease stained rag? Hey, does the kitchen smell like gas to you, and did the pilot light in the oven go out? (The answer to that last one turned out to be "yes," but we triumphed through the power of internet forums, a long tapered candle, and sheer boldness.)

O well, guess we'll never know.

Vegan Brownies are Salad Too

Sometimes you just get hit by a sugar craving on a Saturday night.  Last night we decided that shortbread cookies were a little too fancy and out-of-reach, even though we had all of the ingredients.  Instead, we decided to go with an old-fashioned American favorite: the chocolate brownie.  Except we were rolling vegan-style.

Our favorite brownie recipe comes from Vegan Cookies Take Over Your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.  Strangely, it starts out with some silken tofu in a blender and creates a creamy white sugary delicious mess.

Since we didn't really think this culinary adventure through, part-way into the recipe we realized that we didn't have enough cocoa powder to make it all the way to 1/2 a cup.  Instead, we decided to substitute some plain dark chocolate we had in the cabinet from our last trip to The Candy House in Davis.  Some random website suggested that we substitute 1 oz of chocolate for 3 tablespoons of cocoa powder.

 The chocolate mixed in pretty well and gave the batter an amazing texture.  It was hard to stop eating it long enough to stick it in the oven.  While we were waiting on our main course to finish baking, we decided to use up some our lettuce mountain.  Lately our CSA has been producing crazy quantities of gorgeous romaine and red-leaf lettuce - so much so that it's been a challenge for us to consume it all.  We put some of it to good use by making lettuce wraps with hummus, grilled veggies, and a precious out-of-season red bell pepper that we scored at Trader Joes.

 The lettuce wraps were a welcome diversion to distract us from the sweet, chocolately smell that was invading our kitchen via the oven.  In our house, we have a saying that vegan desserts are pretty much the same thing as salad.  Because they're both just made of plants... right?  So they're both good for you!  As we see it, this is a little salad-wrap appetizer for our main-dish salad.

Aww yeah... show me the inside!

After we were done with our appetizer-salad, we pulled our entree-salad out of the oven and tried our best not to eat all of it before the night was through.

Don't worry - there was at least a little salad left over for breakfast ;)

Pumpkin Bread . . . so much pumpkin bread.