Patchwork Underground

It’s zucchini time! Julia and I had some serious blue ribbon zucchinis in our garden this year and this turned out to be the yummiest, vegan-est thing you can do with 4 cups of grated zucchini. Who knew?

It’s soooo good toasted with Earth Balance (vegan butter stuff). We also liked it with last year’s pear butter. (It’s almost pear time again so we thought it would be prudent to eat up last year’s batch to clear room for this year’s…yummy yum yummm)

We have to give credit to Orion (Julia’s brother) and his friend, Aaron, for digging this recipe out of the Stern Family Cookbook several years ago. More credit is due to my mother-out-law, Deb for preserving the Stern Family Cookbook for posterity. It’s actually a really cool DIY family relic….may if I bother her about it she’ll send a pic of it to me and I can post it here. =)

So, originally, Orion and Aaron veganized this zucchini bread by substituting flax seeds for eggs. I’m not a huge flax so I used banana instead. YUM!

We also added walnuts and raisins for extra grubness…

Hey look, I learned how to use my macro!!!!! (Thanks Allegra!)

The nitty-gritty:

We took this recipe and doubled it. We filled 3 bread pans this way and used up all our zucchini…4 cups of it.

3 cups flour
2 tsp. cinnamon
1 1/4 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt (or to taste)
1 tsp. baking powder
2 cups sugar (we used honey, not anywhere near 2 cups tho)
1 cup oil (we used 1/2 cup applesauce & 1/4 cup oil & 1/4 cup earth balance)
1 1/2 bananas (instead of eggs)
2 cups grated zucchini
1/3 cup orange juice
2 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. lemon zest
1 1/2 cups chopped nuts (walnuts, pecans)
1 cup raisins

Sift together dry ingredients. Add raisins & nuts. Beat oil & sugar.
Add eggs. Stir in zucchini, juice, vanilla & zest. Ad dry ingredients
& nuts. Spoon into oiled pan or tube pan (WTF is that Aunt Lil?!) Bake at 325 degrees for 1
1/4 hours. Enjoy!

First…

The Story ———

(psst…scroll to the bottom of the post if you just want the recipe!!!)

So, no, I’m not officially vegan…yet…but things seem to be tending towards that direction. I’ve been a vegetarian for ages, so the meat thing isn’t a barrier. But giving up cheese?! I couldn’t imagine it until recently.

See, it all started with oat milk, which I discovered I like better than milk milk. Then, I started getting real serious about nutritional yeast and olive oil instead of butter….on everything! It is so-o-o yummy. (FYI- My most recent discovery in that field is that nutritional yeast and olive oil makes a totally amazing substitute for parmesan cheese on pasta.) Next, when I stopped buying dairy stuff at the grocery store I noticed a major drop in our total grocery costs - cheese and yogurt and butter are way expensive and it really adds up! Beans are cheeeap! The relative difficulty we have with consistent refrigeration on our housebus is also a major incentive to give up perishable (dairy) foods.

Enter Cookies ——–

(Disclaimer: this is NOT an actual image of my cookies…I ate mine before I thought about blogging them, dammit…)

Anyway, vegan baking was a mystery to me until last night when my friend, David, suggested making vegan cookies. We busted out the oatmeal and loosely followed the recipie on the back of the box for cookies, substituting palm oil for butter, bananas for eggs and a molasses/agave combo instead of sugar. I added a little extra water to get the right consistency. David put chocolate chips in his batch but I left mine plain. All was good until we went to turn on the oven. TOTALLY BROKEN!

Enter Woodstove ——–

David opts to bake his 4 at a time in the toaster oven. I decide to take mine over to the huge woodstove they have in their house. It was all fired up and putting out a ton of heat. I’d never baked on a woodstove before so I learned a few things the hard way:

1. You can’t just put the baking sheet on the top of the woodstove. It will burn cookies something awful. (This was obviously my first instinct - a bad one.)

2. You gotta prop cookie sheet up on something - stones, bricks, cast iron pans - to get it up and away from direct contact with the woodstove.

3. Tin foil over the top is a must.

4. The side closest to the chimney pipe is going to be getting the most heat. You may want to rotate the pan halfway through your baking session to get a more even heat distribution.

5. Don’t underestimate the power of a serious woodstove fire. THEY WILL COOK, and FAST. (Don’t be like me and wait for someone to ask if something is burning…)

In the end, David’s toaster oven cookies turned out perfect. I burned the living crap out of half of mine but there were about 4-5 that survived. They were AWESOME! I feel that I definitely won the prize for most hippie-dip baked good ever.

The Recipe ———–

Basic Vegan Oatmeal Cookies

In a bowl, mix:

• 2 sticks vegetable shortening
• 1/4 cup sugar something (we used a half-and-half mixture of agave and molasses…the standard recipe calls for 1.5 cups brown sugar, which I thought that was way extreme. There was a household debate: some people thought my 1/4 cup mixture was prefect, some people wanted more sweetness…you decide)
• tsp. vanilla
• and
• 1 bannana (instead of 2 eggs)

Beat all this together with a fork. Then add:

• 2 cups oatmeal
• 1.5 cups flour (we used quinoa flour)
• 1 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 cup water
• cinnamon and nutmeg to taste

Mix that all together. Mix in chocolate chips if you’re David. Mix in raisins or cranberries or walnuts if you’re me and you have access to them. Smear veggie shortening all over your pan and plop the cookies on there. Bake at 350 degrees until it’s done. On a wood stove, this took about 15-20 mins (1/2 an hour if you include the trial-and-error period) and I think it would be 15-20 mins in a conventional oven, too. Enjoy!