Tuesday, March 25, 2008

The weekend home in review

So I decided to make a dessert and I stumbled upon a recipe for vegan samoas. The recipe called for brown rice syrup, which I was unable to get at any store in salisbury..so i substituted half maple syrup and some sugar and well..i'm not sure if that's why they didnt taste like samoas or not, i doubt it. they weren't bad though, quite tasty actually! just not samoas haha.



Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix 1 1/2 cups rolled oats, 1 3/4 cup flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 1 cup shredded coconut, 1/2 cup chopped pecans, 1/2 cup chocolate chips, 1 cup brown rice syrup(i used about 1/2 cup of maple syrup and 1/4 cup sugar), and 1/2 cup of oil in bowl. Put on lightly oiled baking sheet and bake for 14 minutes. (mine took about 11-12 minutes)


For dinner that evening I wanted to make something that my parents would like. I loved cooking with tempeh so I went through store after store in salisbury and finally found some in Giant Food. Things are so hard to find in salisbury, it's ridiculous! Even the health food store said they used to have it..but stopped since they didn't sell enough. Oh well. Anyway, I originally had the intention of making a recipe that I found on vegweb.com called "Spicy Peanut Butter Tempeh" It had some pretty good reviews and I love peanut butter so I figured how bad could it be.
Well the recipe called for coconut milk, and I'm not sure why mine tasted so off..maybe I just don't enjoy coconut milk, but it wasn't very good. Luckily my mother helped me out and we made a different sauce for it that was quite tasty. Saved the tempeh!


All I did really was dice up and fry a package of tempeh with broccoli, onions, and peppers in a bit of olive oil. As for the new sauce that I used instead of the recipe on vegweb.. it was just 1/4 cup sugar, 1/4 cup peanut butter and 1/4 cup soy sauce all mixed over a burner. Probably one of my favorite sauces..and it tasted absolutely fabulous over tempeh and rice. This was quite a filling meal too!


For some reason I had a huge urge to make banana bread as I was home too. Not sure why, but bananas are just so delicious and I was just really craving it. I already had a banana bread recipe saved on my computer, and it called for a lot of ingredients including egg replacers, soy milk, a bit of vinegar, and a bunch of other ingredients. So I searched more for a quicker and easier version. The version I found was for banana nut bread, but I don't particularly enjoy nuts in mine so I ditched them. Anyway, this was so simple and came out so moist and delicious!




Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a loaf pan. Mix 3 mashed bananas and 2 tablespoons of oil in a large bowl. Stir in 2 cups of flour, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon baking soda, and 1/2 cup applesauce. I also added just a bit of cinnamon which also gave it a nice taste. Put mixture into loaf pan and bake for an hour.

This is such an easy and versatile recipe that I feel like anyway you wanted to add things would be quite easy to do. The applesauce wasn't in the original recipe, but I found that it made it more moist and didn't hurt it at all. Too bad I forgot to take some back to philly with me!