Spring Rolls

I really was super-excited to make spring rolls with a peanut dipping sauce. The main reason why I was so excited was that I got to make a trip to Mitsuwa, Mitsuwa is none other than the largest Japanese supermarket in the West, and it is also right down the street from my new house. Walking into Mitsuwa, I imagined finding tons of hidden vegan jewels and walking out with a full cart. Instead, I left shell-shocked, bewildered, and generally shaken, but with spring roll wrappers.
It was very, very strange to be in a store where I literally could not read the labels. Most of them had english on the back, but it was so tiny and indecipherabl, that I was not really sure of what went in anything. I perused the produce section, which had so many umeboshi products that a macrobiotatian would have thought they had died and gone to heaven. On the other hand, I do not much care for umeboshi after a particularly nasty incident with a weight-loss tea consisting of umeboshi, daikon, carrot, and (wait for it) soy sauce. Surprisingly, it was not as good as it sounds.
Back to my trip. I wandered shell-shocked up and down the aisles, occasionally picking up funny-looking boxes and straining to read the ingredients. Definitely NOT vegan-friendly. Even the breads seemed to all have either milk or butter in them. I'm sure I would have had more luck if I had gone with someone more familiar with the cuisine or the language. Fortunately, I did make it out in one piece and with my spring roll wrappers. I got home and was very excited to make my peanut dipping sauce with fresh peanut butter from the Whole Foods. Unfortunately, the peanut butter had some hard, grainy substance in it. Now, I was never emo enough to eat broken glass (I just walk on it), but if I had, this is what I imagine it would have been like.  I was very much into these spring rolls when we had them for dinner, and very much not into them the next day. So the lesson there is that they do not keep well. The other lesson is that Whole Foods puts plastic or something in their fresh-ground peanut butter, or at least they did that day.

Alternative Pizza

Sometimes I get to share my great successes with my readers, and sometimes I feel the need to own up to my mistakes. The following is an account of a pizza gone wrong:

During the week that I stuck to the McDougall plan, I decided to play around with their concept of replacing the cheese on pizza with hummus. It seemingly makes sense, hummus is delicious, oil-free, and easily spreadable. My pesto recipe is also oil-free, delicious, and easily spreadable. Throw either one of them on top of a pizza crust, top with vegetables, and you're in business. Or so I thought.
My first mistake was in the cornerstone of any good pizza: the dough. A good pizza dough is made of yeast, flour, and water. It only uses olive oil to coat the bowl it rises in and prevent sticking. This adds a negligible amount of oil to the recipe, and I should have just accepted it and moved on with my pizza making. Instead, I allowed myself to be seduced by the novel idea of crafting a pizza crust out of whole wheat pastry flour and beer. Yes that's right, beer-crust pizza. It sounds like a great idea, because the two usually make for an excellent pairing. On this particular occasion though, the two did NOT go together. The crust was hard without being cooked through and lacked any flavor whatsoever. Fail.
The second shortcoming of said pizza was in the lack of cheese. The hummus and pesto would have been ok, if I hadn't cooked them within an inch of their life while waiting for the beer dough to solidify and the vegetable toppings to cook. In the future, I would probably pre-cook my veggies and crust, so that I didn't inadvertently suck all the moisture out of the sauce.
The final shortcoming of these pizzas came in the form of the Most Cursed Vegetable. I'm talking about the artichoke. I did my internet research. I trimmed the leaves. I steamed it with lemon. I ended up with a purple-tinged artichoke heart. Now I've never worked with fresh artichoke before, but purple food is just weird. I learned a very important lesson, however. That lesson is to never try to cook fresh artichokes, because I will end up with a mess of purple leaves and very weird pizza.
We ate it anyway.

Blueberry Bliss

My coworker Kristin is a ray of sunshine. Even though she spends her days ,like me, as a warden at the mental institution, she has a great sense of humor about the whole thing. Yesterday, Kristin gifted me with two recipes for blueberry bread as well as a recipe for Indian Batata Nu Shaak and a collection of carefully labeled Indian spices. It was like a culinary Christmas. One of the blueberry bread recipes comes from her friend Jess Thomson, who has her own very wonderful health food blog. You can check it out at jessthomson.wordpress.com/. However, you have to promise to come back to this blog, because hers is much better and I wouldn't blame you for wanting to spend the whole day browsing over there.

Anyway, Jess's recipe for Almost Unforgettable Blueberry Breakfast Bread incorporates some really great healthy ideas, like a hearty walnut topping, whole wheat flour, and yogurt instead of some of the oil. I took some steps to veganize it, omitted the flaxseed because I didn't have any, and further reduced the fat content by using applesauce instead. I've had great success cooking with applesauce lately, as it makes my cakes and breads deliciously moist and has about 1/10th the calories of margarine or oil. If weight isn't an issue for you, I reccomend using the original recipe, just using soy yogurt and ener-g egg replacer. If you, like me, need to watch what you eat in time for swimsuit season, I hope that my recipe will do the trick.

Let me be straight with you, gentle readers. My real motivation behind this recipe is to come up with something very delicious and very vegan for February 28th, when I am attending my very first vegan potluck, with a great group of Vegan Foodies I found on meetup.com. It's going to be my first event on the Los Angeles vegan "scene". Sure, I've been to Golden Mean and shopped the Whole Foods salad bar, but on the 28th I'm going to become a real part of it. Needless to say, I'm suffering from a bit of "performance anxiety", and really want to come up with a brunch recipe that is simple, delicious, travels well, and is super-healthy. I ordered business cards, and I am hoping 1: that they will arrive on time and 2: that I won't give anyone food poisoning because they will be able to trace me back here.