Ideas for Vegan Wedding?

I'm trying to work with my future wedding caterer to come up with a vegan wedding menu. It's really hard!

There are some ideas at VegNews, and while these all sound great, I still feel a little...uninspired. So...anyone have any favorite vegan foods? In particular, anything wedding-feast-worthy? I generally like stuff that's just "naturally" vegan, as opposed to meat substitutes or faux-cheese knockoffs (not that some of these aren't great, too).

I can't even decide on a theme - vegan soul food? Asian? Indian? Fusion? ARG! Any ideas at all would be very welcome. I must communicate with the caterer soon!

Edited to Add:It's June '09, and I am still open to ideas! I've heard from friends directly, but there's still plenty of time if anyone has thoughts. Oh, heck, I'll re-post along the way. What does it take to get people to comment?

Pancakes updated, Plus: Blondies

I recently made a few small revisions to the vegan pancake recipe. This recipe is still awesome -- I just made'em again this morning. I've been hooked on Alton Brown's "Good Eats" lately. He had some good tips on pancakes.

I also did vegan Blondies.



Ingredients

6 oz container vanilla soy yogurt, OR 3/4 cup soy milk with 1 tsp of apple cider vinegar*
1/4 cup + 2 tablespoons canola oil
1 cup + 2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla
2 tablespoons molasses
1 1/4 cups flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup vegan chocolate chips
optional: 1/2 cup walnut or pecan pieces
optional: 1/4 cup flaked coconut

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 and line an 8x9 brownie pan with parchment paper and set aside (or spray w/ non stick cooking spray, or do whatever you usually do for non-sticky baking). Prepare the soy milk, if using that option.*

In a medium bowl, sift together flour, baking soda and salt.

In a large bowl combine yogurt (or curdled soy milk), oil, vanilla and molasses Add the sugar and whisk until well combined (about 30 seconds).

In batches, fold the dry ingredients into the wet, slowly, whisking as you go. Fold in chocolate chips, nuts, and/or coconut.

Pour batter into the prepared pan, and smooth with a spatula. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until top is firm and brown.

Let cool completely before serving.

*IF you do not have the soy yogurt, you can use this substitution: pour 3/4 cup of soy milk into a small dish.

Add one tsp of apple cider vinegar and mix gently.

Allow to sit for at least one minute. The mixture will curdle and thicken: this is what you want.

Using this substitution results in slightly more cake-like blondies. I think that adding 1 or 2 teaspoons of ground flax seeds might help to make them denser and chewier, but I haven't field tested that yet. If you try it, let me know how it goes!

Coconut-Key Lime Bundt Cake...OMG!

Last night I decided to try the Coconut-Lemon Bundt Cake from the Veganomicon. I made a few modifications, because the lemons I had were no good, and it turned out I was out of flaked coconut. Oops!

So it became a Coconut-Key Lime Cake. But it came out beautifully. Seriously: super-duper delicious cake! It's fine by itself, or with powdered sugar and strawberries. I bet it would be awesome with coconut frosting. Or a citrusy glaze of some kind.

All the cake recipes I've tried from these authors have turned out not just good, but REMARKABLY good, as in "professional bakery good".

With the coconut flakes left out, all I could taste was the key lime. Yum. So, here's my very slightly tweaked version:

You'll Need This Stuff:

1 1/3 cups granulated sugar

1/2 cup canola oil or applesauce

14 ounces coconut milk

1/4 cup key lime juice

1/4 cup rice or soy milk

3 tablespoons finely grated lime zest

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract, 1 tsp butter flavor extract

3 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

(The recipe called for 1 1/2 cups shredded unsweetened coconut, which I left out because I didn't have it. But if you have it and you dig coconut, by all means, add it).

a few tablespoons confectioners sugar for topping

Make the Cake:

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees and oil a 8 or 10 inch bundt pan.

2. Mix in a large bowl the sugar, oil, coconut milk, soy milk or rice milk, lime zest and lime juice together.

3. Mix in another bowl the flower, baking powder soda and salt

4. Mix the ingredients of both bowls together. When it is well mixed you add the shredded coconut, if you happen to have any!

5. Put the mixture into the prepared pan, and bake for 45-60 minutes at 350.

6. Take the cake out the oven and let it cool for 15-30 minutes.

When the cake is completely cool, you can flip it out of the pan and sprinkle it with sugar and messily devour it, because it is wonderful.

Something We Can All Do

This report appeared on WBAL, the local Baltimore news channel yesterday (and again this morning). Someone abandoned at least 29 dogs in the freezing cold in Frederick, MD. They are all small dogs, like Poodles, Yorkies, Chihuahuas, and Cairn Terriers, and NONE were spayed or neutered. I say "at least 29" because 29 were found, but obviously it's possible that not all the abandoned dogs have been found. One of the dogs was struck and killed by a car.

This story just screams "puppy mill" to me. It's a total outrage and I think that, vegan or not, all thinking and feeling people are against these.

So what can the average person do to help stop things like this? Not just puppy mills, but the pet overpopulation problem more broadly? I'm happy to say that there are things you could do right now, easy things.

If you're not familiar with the International Society for Animal Rights (ISAR), I strongly suggest that you check out their website and blog and read about their activities.

Here's a link to their Model Mandatory Spay/Neuter Statute. I think it makes a lot of sense, and I think you will probably agree. And now here's the "action" part. I quote from the ISAR blog:

A participant in ISAR’s 2008 Homeless Animals’ Day from Florida has informed us that: “Just so you know, I copied the great model spay/neuter statute you wrote in your blog and forwarded it to all Fla state senators. I’ll do the same with the state reps tomorrow.” The Executive Director of Animal Law Coalition has requested “permission to reprint this wonderful monograph”—which ISAR gratefully granted.

So here's what I suggest:

1) Find out who your senators and representatives are. You can do that here.

2) Contact them by e-mail or, if you have the time and energy, by traditional, classic, paper-based mail, and let them know that you support a statewide mandatory spay/neuter statute.

3) Of course there's always MORE you can do. You could start by passing this on and encouraging others to contact their elected officials and urge them to take this issue seriously.

Voila! You're an animal rights activist! Now you can eat tofu for lunch and sit around feeling morally superior!

Carrot Cake Heaven

Since we moved away from Columbia, the IC and I haven't had particularly good access to health-food stores, organic markets, etc., other than Whole Foods ($$$) and Trader Joe's. We used to have access to the wonderful David's Natural Market and Roots, and we miss them. A lot. It's not just that they had a broader variety of vegan-friendly fare, but that we got so many great ideas for recipes there.

Our fond reminiscences led the IC and I to have a "date-day" on Saturday, and go to Columbia for vegan food at Great Sage, then shopping at Roots. While we were shopping, I stopped by a display of locally baked desserts and made note of a particularly good-looking carrot cake.

My mom used to get this (non-vegan) carrot cake from the grocery store that was OUTRAGEOUSLY good. It had this 1/2-inch-thick layer of cream cheese frosting with walnuts on top, and I don't think I've ever tasted its equal. Frankly, I've tried vegan carrot cakes at restaurants and stores and none of them were especially notable. Come ON, people, we're vegans, we've GOT to take back carrot cake! It's a cake! Made of carrots!

I've never seriously attempted to make a vegan carrot cake, but it's an obvious choice. Moist, dense cakes tend to be forgiving of substitutions, and this was no exception. I started with the most decadent-sounding carrot cake recipe I could find and veganized according to my own design. I borrowed an idea from the raw foodists for the frosting, and it turned out very well.

Carrot Cake Heaven

First, decide which frosting you're going to use. If you're using the cashew frosting, you'll need to start soaking your ingredients before you begin baking. See frosting instructions, below.

Ingredients:

2-1/4 cups all purpose flour (or a gluten-free blend of flours)
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon allspice
1 tsp grated fresh ginger
1 tsp pumpkin pie spice
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup light brown sugar
3/4 cup cane sugar (may substitute agave, maple syrup, or use all brown sugar)
3 egg equivalent in Ener-G egg substitute
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup vegetable oil or applesauce
2 cups finely grated carrots

OPTIONS: as much or as many walnuts, raisins, pineapple tidbits, coconut, or whatever you like in your carrot cake

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°. In a medium bowl, mix flour, baking soda, cinnamon, spice, baking powder, and salt.

In a large bowl, mix sugar and egg replacer until creamy. Add vanilla and oil (or applesauce). Mix wet and dry ingredients together and add carrots, raisins, nuts, etc.

You can use whatever kind of pan you like, and whatever means of greasing it you prefer (spray, oil, margarine...). I used a bundt pan, and my cake was done in about 50 minutes. Bake for 40 - 50 minutes (depending on pan), or until toothpick comes out clean.

While the cake is cooling, you can get to work on the frosting!

Amazing Cashew Cream Frosting

Soak for one hour in room-temperature water:

1 cup cashews
1/4 cup of raisins
1/4 cup dates

Drain and blend in a food processor until smooth. Add 1 tsp of lime or lemon juice and continue blending. You can use it as-is, as a slightly sweet glaze, or add powdered sugar (up to 2 cups) until it attains a more frosting-like consistency.

If you're not feeling adventurous, or if you don't have a food processor, you can always use this old standby:

Vegan Cream Cheese Frosting

1 package vegan cream cheese
1/3 cup vegan soy margarine (like Earth Balance), softened
1 tsp lime juice
2 cups vegan confectioners sugar

With an electric mixer, beat cream cheese and margarine. Add lime juice, then add sugar.

Once your cake is cool and your frosting is ready, you're all set for icing and enjoying your carrot cake! I used a blend of brown rice flour and regular flour, no oil at all (I substituted applesauce), added raisins and walnuts and I did the cashew frosting. The flavor is rich and almost buttery, the cake is very moist and sweet, and thanks to the lime juice the frosting has a little tang to it. It's lovely.

The IC tried it and found it delicious. He then told me, "I never thought I would like carrot cake!". It turns out he had NEVER HAD IT BEFORE. Is that completely crazypants or what?

Exploring Consciousness Through The Study of Bees

An interesting article from Scientific American! :

Although bees can’t be expected to push levers, they can be trained to take either the left or the right exit inside a cylinder modified for the DMTS test. A color disk serves as a cue at the entrance of the maze, so that the bee sees it before entering. Once within the maze, the bee has to choose the arm displaying the color that matches (DMTS) or differs from (DNMTS) the color at the entrance. Bees perform both tasks well. They even generalize to a situation they have never previously encountered. That is, once they’ve been trained with colors, they “get it” and can now follow a trail of vertical stripes if a disk with vertical gratings is left at the entrance of the maze. These experiments tell us that bees have learned an abstract relation (sameness in DMTS, difference in DNMTS) irrespective of the physical nature of the stimuli. The generalization to novel stimuli can even occur from odors to colors.

Insect Intelligence
Although these experiments do not tell us that bees are conscious, they caution us that we have no principled reason at this point to reject this assertion. Bees are highly adaptive and sophisticated creatures with a bit fewer than one million neurons, which are interconnected in ways that are beyond our current understanding, jammed into less than one cubic millimeter of brain tissue. The neural density in the bee’s brain is about 10 times higher than that in a mammalian ce­rebral cortex, which most of us take to be the pinnacle of evolu­tion on this planet. In humans, widespread loss of cerebral cortex, as in the vegetative patient Terri Schiavo, leads to an irreversible loss of con­scious­ness. That is not to say that a cerebral cortex is necessary for consciousness in creatures with a different evolutionary heritage.

Bees live in highly stratified yet flexible social organizations with group decision-making skills that rival academic, corporate or government committees in efficiency. In spring, when bees swarm, they choose a new hive that needs to satisfy many demands within a couple of days (consider that the next time you go house hunting). They communicate information about the location and quality of food sources using the waggle dance. Bees can fly several kilometers and return to their hive, a remarkable navigational performance. Their brains seem to have incorporated a map of their environment. And a scent blown into the hive can trigger a return to the site where the bee previously encountered this odor. This type of associative memory was famously described by French novelist Marcel Proust in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Given all of this ability, why does almost everybody instinctively reject the idea that bees or other insects might be conscious? The trouble is that bees are so different from us and our ilk that our insights fail us. But just because they are small and live in colonies does not mean that they can’t have subjective states, that they can’t smell the fragrance of the golden nectar or experience the warm rays of the sun or maybe even have a primitive sense of self. I am not a mystic. I am not arguing for pan-psychism, for the notion that anything is conscious. Nor am I assuming that bees can reason or can reflect on their fate as animated cartoon bees.

What this dilemma highlights is that there is no accepted theory of consciousness, no principled theory that would tell us which systems, organic or artificial, are conscious and why. In the absence of such a theory, we must at the very least remain agnostic about consciousness in these creatures. So the next time a bee hovers above your breakfast toast, attracted by the sweet jam, gently shoo her away. For she might be a fellow sentient being, experiencing her brief interlude in the light, shoehorned between this moment and eternity.

Note: This article was originally published with the title, "What Is It Like To Be a Bee?".

Vegan Chocolate Fondue

I have this amazing little vintage fondue pot. It used to belong to my aunt, and I honestly don't think she ever used it, because it came to me with all its parts in their original packaging and looking absolutely perfect:


It's hard to incorporate fondue into our day-to-day lives. It's messy, it's not especially nutritious, and there are not a lot of vegan-friendly recipes. I've used mine as a way to keep soup warm at parties, and...well, that was it, actually, until this weekend! I finally decided to try my hand at vegan fondue.

I decided on chocolate fondue, since it's easy, and chocolate is pretty hard to ruin. The fondue part was easy: I put 2 bags of vegan chocolate chips into the pot with some soy creamer (about 1 cup) and stirred it until it was creamy. I tried it, and it tasted a little too bitter, so I added some agave nectar (approximately 7 tbsp) and a couple of vegan marshmallows. That really did the trick. If you decide to try it, you'll need to add each ingredient slowly and stir gently until it gets to the consistency and flavor you like.

So...what do you use for dipping? Strawberries were an obvious choice, and bananas, and apricots...if it's melon season, those would be good. Pineapple. Some sort of packaged vegan cookie, like these. Or these.


I also decided to make a vegan pound cake, and cut it into little cubes. That worked wonderfully. I used the Vanilla-Yogurt Pound Cake recipe from the Veganomicon, which was not only perfect for cubing and dipping in fondue, but was utterly fantastic by itself.

The fondue was a big hit with vegans and non-vegans alike!