VeganMoFo 2017 #25: My Friend Ashleigh (Recipe Round-Up: Great Gluten Free Vegan Eats)

25th: Cook for your best friend – Tell us about your best friend and their favourite dish, make them a vegan version of it.

Ashleigh is my beloved friend and life wife, so she was the natural choice for this post. We have had a lot of adventures, including traveling to Melbourne and the US together. And a lot of fun times at home as well! Every year for her birthday, I give her a new season of Lost Girl and we watch it over several weekends, and I make food. Sometimes it is a set menu from a cook book, other times I pick and choose. If it is her birthday specific lunch, it always includes cake as the dessert!

Lasagna is her favourite food, so I was super excited about making the Handcrafted Lasagne from Veganize It, making the sauce, ricotta, parmesan, melty cheese and even pasta from scratch for her. However, life got in the way. She had to have all four of her wisdom teeth out just over a week ago, and while we were initially optimistic, her recovery did not care for our food plans. Of course I could not make the lasagna without her being able to eat it, so our plans have been postponed.

Instead, here is are a few things that I have made for her at other times. She had to be gluten free for awhile, so I used cooking for her as a good chance to try out some recipes from Great Gluten Free Vegan Eats for her. The first dish, the pasta, I made one night before Ashleigh drove me down to the Gold Coast very early to get my veins zapped. She has been my support person twice for me during my long saga of vein zapping! The others are what I made for her birthday lunch in 2016. Enjoy!

Stroganoff: This is creamy and mushroomy and good. There is an error in the book, which calls for 20 oz or 174 g of sliced mushrooms, which obviously doesn't match up! I used 400g of sliced mushrooms, which is a little less than required, and I used 250 g of pasta rather than 240g, but I also added cannelini beans and peas. The recipe calls for 420 mL of full fat coconut milk, but I used a 270 mL can of light coconut milk and made the rest up with water, it was fine. I also did not add the oil to toss through the cooked pasta, as that seemed unnecessary to me and I don't like things that are very oily. This recipe says it serves 6, we got four serves out of it served over spinach.
Rating: :)



Stuffed Cherry Tomatoes: Nothing says 'you are special to me' like scooping and stuffing some tiny food. Actually, it came together pretty easily and wasn't quite as fiddly as I had feared. I made a half batch of filling, and filled 16 gem tomatoes. The gem tomatoes are a little bigger than cherry tomatoes, which made for easier scooping and stuffing. The filling uses walnuts, which was a little bitter on its own, but then matched with the sweetness of roasted tomatoes and balanced out lovely. I couldn't find any fresh sage, so I had to use dry and it was fine, and I also used garlic powder instead of fresh garlic. I didn't drizzle them with olive oil either, they were great as is.
Rating: :)



Spinach Artichoke Dip: I baked this up and served with some corn chips, GF crackers, and veggie sticks. It uses a blend of cashew cream and vegan mayo (I always use Vegenaise) as well as a hefty whack of nutritional yeast. I sometimes find this sort of dip can be a bit too rich and creamy, but this one was a great blend of creamy and tangy. It says it serves 8, but if you are munching away like us, you can easily get through this.
Rating: :)



Dark Chocolate Chipotle Cake: Another year, another birthday cake. This cake gave me some troubles. It needed an extra 10 minutes to bake, and kind of stuck a bit in my silicone bundt pan. Thankfully you can't tell once it is covered in chocolate glaze! The glaze ended up being more like an icing, it was quite thick. It sets up quite nicely, though is still soft to touch. I don't mind a tiny bit of chili heat mixed with chocolate... but only mild! So I decreased the chipotle powder from 1 1/2 tsp to 1/2 tsp... and then I couldn't taste it at all once it was cooked! The cake had a moist, nice texture. However it uses quite a lot of apple cider vinegar and I found that taste a bit strong in the final product, though no one else seemed to mind!
Rating: :)





Cute Kitty Photo of the Post - Month of Sahara



Sahara was always interested when any visitors came over, and she liked Ashleigh a lot. She would often join in our Lost Girl and Doctor Who days. Here she is giving Ashleigh a head rub... with her own head!