Recipe Round-Up: Hearty Vegan Meals

Hearty Vegan Meals For Monster Appetites, by Celine Steen and Joni Marie Newman, is now sold under the name Home Cooked Vegan Comfort Food. Whatever title you have it under, it is full of decadent and filling meals. I've already done a few round-ups from this book, so be sure to check them out for more recipes that I have made. Today's post starts with a salad, but then is pretty much all about dessert! As I wrote this, I realised that all but one of the desserts have marshmallows. There was a time when I had a bunch of marshmallows and marshmallow creme that I brought home from the US to use up. I guess this was that time!

East Cost Meats West Coast Pasta Salad: This salad is packed full of tofu, artichokes, red onion, broccoli, olives and tomatoes. I left out the pepperochinis. The dressing uses quite a lot of oil, I always sub some out for water mixed with guar gum otherwise I feel a bit icky, but is tanky (lots of balsamic and Dijon) and makes for a lovely salad. I used half the amount of pasta, but the same amount of vegetables (you could even use more), and decreased the dressing quantity a little. Rating: :)



S'more Pie: This is a very rich treat - a biscuit crust (I used Digestives as graham crackers are not a thing here), with a chocolate/tofu/cream cheese/marshmallow cream filling. Oh my! The base was a bit crumbly, especially up the edges, so might need a touch more melted butter to firm it up. The base is baked, then cooled, then the filling is added and it is chilled in the fridge. The final touch is to top with more marshmallow cream, and then caramelise it using a kitchen torch. I have a torch, but it doesn't work, so I took the option of using the grill (which is what we call the broiler in the oven in Australi), but I wouldn't recommend it as the filling also started to melt a little!
Rating: :)



Grasshopper Pie: I am not a huge fan of mint myself, but I made this for a mint-mad friend. A buttery Oreo base (we don't have Newman O's here, so Oreos it is), filled with a cream cheese and marshmallow filling. Unlike the S'more Pie, this one uses melted marshmallows rather than marshmallow cream. The filling has one teaspoon of peppermint extract in it, which was very pepperminty for me. But I still enjoyed a small piece, plus then I had minty fresh breath after.
Rating: :)



Sugar Rush Cereal bars: These look a little ugly, but they are a gooey and sweet treat. The cereal in question is a crispy corn cereal, suggested is either Cap'n Crunch or Gorilla Munch. The Cap'n has never made it to our shores, but I was able to find some Gorilla Munch. The box was a little less than the 12 ounces required, which probably added to the gooey-ness! As well as cereal, these have butter, marshmallows, and chocolate clips.
Rating: :)



Red Eye Treats: These have coffee in it, so I was making them for a friend. I only tried a bit, as I don't coffee, and I did find the coffee taste to be quite strong. Though I didn't have any coffee powder, only coffee granules, so they may not have melted into the mixture quite as well. I didn't want to buy coffee, so I just used whatever Mum had in the cupboard. This also had peanut butter, puffed rice, and lots of syrups.
Rating: :| (but my friend liked them, I just don't like coffee taste much)



Graham Cracker Cake: Well, really a Digestive Biscuits Cake, but whatever. Delicious! Biscuit crumbs are part of the cake mixture, which is then topped with Dandies and baked. The recipe says to bake for 30 minutes, the I needed 50 minutes. The Dandies came out of the oven puffed up and quite hard, but then they softened overnight. An excellent treat.
Rating: :D



Peanut Butter Rocky Road Pound Cakes: I made these for a bake sale, and they were well received! The recipe says it makes 8 mini-loaves. I only have 6 mini-loaf pans, so for the rest I used a Texas-style muffin tin (which took the same quantity of batter)... and I still got 12. 8 loaves would be pretty big! There was meant to be dandiesin the batter, but in a tragic twist something ate into my bag of Dandies. Devestation, so I had to leave it out of the batter but was able to put some on top of each portion. The muffins took 35 minutes to bake, and the loaves 30 minutes.
Rating: :)



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Dim Sim is shocked. Shocked, I tell you. This photo was taken shortly after I manually removed some calculus from her tooth (read, cracked it off using my thumbnail), and she wasn't quite sure what to make of it!