Hello again!

Whew, I did not intend to leave that last post up there for so long without making a new one, especially since it was kind of negative-sounding. I’d started writing a post weeks ago but then school got in the way and I never ended up finishing it! Anyway, here’s a post! Sorry about the absence!

Some updates on the last post: the ice cream was even weirder after it’d been in the freezer for a while – it became kind of dry and crumbly. I need to make a new, different kind of chocolate ice cream! The brownies were thrown away (actually they were stored in a cupboard by someone – not me-, forgotten, left there to be discovered after a week and then thrown away). It’s sad, but they just weren’t good. The muffins on the other hand were still good and satisfying and I ate almost all of them by myself as snacks during the next week.

My parents left to go on holiday a few days after my birthday, so I was home alone for a week. This meant I had to cook for myself every day, too. Normally this isn’t the case; I cook dinner only sometimes and have meals prepared by my Mom on most days (she’s vegetarian herself but cooks pretty much only vegan dishes these days!). Not that I minded, though, I obviously enjoy cooking. I did forget to make sure I had all the ingredients I wanted before the stores closed a few times, but luckily the fridge and basement were still full of enough food to make many, many decent meals.

As I had to spend most of my time studying for exams, I chose to make simple and quick meals. Here are some pictures I took:

A simple lunch: wholewheat pita bread with a salad and olive tapenade.

Pasta! I love pasta. Especially pasta with pesto, because it’s so easy to make and so full of flavour. One of these dishes has a regular basil pesto, but I made pesto with arugula when I ran out of basil and that was delicious as well. The upper picture has pasta with pesto, eggplant and sundried tomatoes, the other has sautéed mushrooms and kalamata olives. yum!

This pizza has all kind of yummy things combined. It’s a simple wholewheat storebought crust with some tomato sauce, eggplant slices, olive tapenade and basil leaves. I think I also incorporated some leftover pesto into the tomato sauce for extra deliciousness.

These are one of the few baked goods that I made during the past weeks (I also made cookies today, to celebrate the beginning of the summer holidays!): Black Bean Brownies! This is the recipe I used. I’d been planning on making it for a long time, but I had to get myself some black beans first. I thought they would be hard to find (and I still think they are), but then I discovered a can of them in the basement! It had probably been there for a long while, but I never noticed it before. Weird! Anyway, I felt I had to make them right away, and I did. And they were good. You can really taste the bananas, coconut and cocoa in there, but you can’t taste the beans! Next time I come accross a store that sells black beans, I’ll be sure to buy a couple of cans.

Super-simple but so good: a fruit salad of melon, grapes and (frozen) raspberries. Perfect summer food.

Now, I spent the last few weeks focusing on exams, but as I had the last two today, I’ll have some more free time again! I have been peeking at pictures on blogs I’m subscribed to in Google Reader, and they looked so delicious and really made me want to be in the kitchen cooking (or eating) instead of buried under a pile of books studying, so I’m going to take the time to take a closer look at all of them now! Either that or I’m just going to fall asleep on top of my keyboard and will continue reading the posts tomorrow.

I’m going on holiday in a few days, though, so I won’t be home next week. In any case, I’m so relieved to have finished all these exams! and I’m hoping, hoping, hoping that I passed them.

Woo-hoo!

Welcome to the failed baked goods post! Which also happens to be my birthday post. I turned eighteen yesterday, which I thought was the perfect excuse to bake some goodies. Unfortunately for me, they didn’t turn out all that well.

These are the Low-Fat Double Chocolate Muffins by Celine, only with about two tablespoons of cocoa instead of the 1/4 cup the recipe calls for. I didn’t realize that I didn’t have enough of it until I had to add it to the flour, so I just continued to follow the recipe and hoped for the best. They really aren’t bad (my Dad thought they were the best muffins I’d made so far – he somehow never likes muffins, but he did like these), I just wish I’d been able to make them the way they were supposed to. I made 12 small muffins instead of 6 big ones, by the way.

These brownies, however, were a real mess. They’re the Ten Minute Brownies from the Student’s Go Vegan Cookbook, a recipe that I’ve made before, but somehow they were much worse this time than the last time I made them. It started when I was making the batter. This recipe requires that you
melt a cup of chocolate and mix that into the wet ingredients (which is why I chose to make this recipe; I was out of cocoa powder, but still had some chocolate left). All that went very well, but when I wanted to add the wet ingredients to the dry, it turned out that the cocoa had already turned solid again and the two were kind of hard to mix together. I just put the whole bowl in the microwave for a few seconds and all seemed good again after that. I even took them out of the oven a little earlier to make sure that the brownies wouldn’t turn out too dry, but that happened anyway. As you can see on the picture, they completely fell apart. Some people who tried them said they didn’t taste like brownies at all, either, so I don’t know. I liked this recipe the last time I made it, but I guess I just need to get myself some new cocoa powder and try a new recipe.

I also made some more ice cream. Chocolate ice cream, this time, hoping I would get at least one chocolate flavoured treat right. I’m not sure about this yet. I had some guests try it and they didn’t dislike it, but it didn’t really taste like ice cream to them either. It was more of a very cold chocolate mousse, according to some.

I think it’s time to stop randomly mixing things together in the food processor and calling it ice cream, and start trying other people’s recipes for a change. Especially Celine’s Frozen Tiramisu is one of the top things on my list of things to try when I finally get off my lazy butt and go to a place that sells silken tofu.

So yeah, the things I made weren’t much good. I’m glad my Mom at least baked three great apple pies. She makes the best apple pie… I think I’ll post the recipe sometime, because it’s so good. Now, maybe it’s best to stop baking for a (little) while and go back to doing some schoolwork… and hope my food will turn out a bit better again after that.

Cinnamon ice cream & some fancy restaurant pictures

As the weather continues to be wonderful, I haven’t stopped making ice cream yet! This is more an autumn kind of ice cream than a summer one, but it was still enjoyed by my parents (and me!): cinnamon ice cream. I made it by mixing half a cup of almond butter, a cup of rice milk, about 2 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon, 1/4 cup + 2 Tablespoons (I think?) of agave, half a teaspoon of vanilla extract and half a teaspoon of lemon juice all together in the food processor, blending it up and chilling it for a while before putting it in the ice cream machine. I served it with an appelflap (on the above picture, in the back), because they’re so easy to make.

Then I have a couple of pictures that I took on a recent visit to one of my favourite restaurants, de Kop van ‘t Land in Dordrecht. I chose to have a six-course suprise menu, which resulted in an awesome meal consisting of so many small dishes that I can hardly remember all the things I ate there. I’m glad I took pictures, so I can still share them with you. I’ll just post them all here with quick explanations of the dishes, there are a few more details on the photo pages themselves on Flickr. I’m sorry about the low quality of the pictures, the lighting in a restaurant just isn’t the best to take photos. It is very pleasant when you actually are dining there, though.

First course (after eating some bread & olive oil): sweet potato soup.

Red beetroot, apple, lentils, fava beans, nicely put together in this pretty little dish.

Asparagus (they were so good!) with a crouton.

Bits of bell pepper rolled into eggplant and zucchini slices, a dolma. A really good one, too. I’ve had dolmas before and thought they were okay, but I really liked this one. Especially the filling was just so tasty.

Mushroom soup with fresh soy beans.

Coconut curry with rice, mango and avocado tempura (I’ve had something similar to the tempura at this restaurant before, so delicious).

Viola sorbet with poached pear slices.

Rhubarb compote, sliced fresh strawberries.

I guess that’s it for now – I’ve been baking some other things, so I’ll make a post again soon!