Christmas Cooking

Hello

Hope you had a nice Christmas if you celebrate it, and a lovely day anyway if you don't.

I cooked lunch for my family this Christmas and thought I'd share some pictures of what we ate.

As soon as I saw this Double Stuffed Christmas Log recipe by Mouthwatering Vegan pop up online, I knew I had to try it. It looked so good, and it was. It tasted delicious and was pretty easy to make {though I had a bit of trouble rolling it up with out making a giant mess}! The rest of my non-vegan family liked it too so I would definitely recommend this recipe. This is what mine looked like:

{Not quite as pretty as Miriam's!}

It's double stuffed with a curried lentil mix and a hazelnut/herb mix. I really liked the hazelnuts - I think they were the perfect choice.

Then for dessert I decided to try making one of Emily from This Rawsome Vegan Life's raw desserts. I chose this Chocolate Mousse Tart with Lemon Cashew Cream because it sounded delicious.  And it was. The avacado-chocolate-cashew-lemon filling was awesome.

This was my first time making a raw dessert, but I was happy with how it turned out. I had a bit of an issue with the cashew cream, I think because my blender is so old it wasn't as smooth as I wanted it to be so I strained it through I fine sieve. I also found that some of the hard skins from the dates I used didn't blend up - I'm not sure if it was the dates or my terrible blender - but next time I would soak the dates first to soften them up. I was amazed by how sweet it was without added sugar!

And finally, I also made some vegan shortbread using the non-vegan recipe from the back of the rice flour packet and substituting the butter with Nuttelex.

Cashew milk

I finally got my act together and tried making cashew milk. I've been meaning to make it for years ever since I tried someone else's homemade cashew milk and was amazed by how delicious it was,  but always put it off for lack of cheesecloth. So when I discovered an open packet of raw cashews in the pantry I thought the time had finally come!

I made my milk based on these two recipes:

 http://cookieandkate.com/2013/cashew-milk-recipe/

 http://theshiksa.com/2013/06/11/how-to-make-cashew-milk/

Sadly, I think my cashew-milk-making needs a bit of refinement. Even though I followed the recipes in terms of how much water I added, my milk seemed more watery than I expected. There were also some issues with excess grain sneaking through the strainer and into my glass - I may need to get a finer strainer for next time. My blender is also incredibly old - older than me in fact - so probably not the best at grinding up those cashews. I had a lot of pulp left over - more than was shown in the recipe which freaked me out a bit - but again it's probably the blender.

Both recipes say to add a sweeter, vanilla and salt to the mix. Not being a honey eater, I added a little Stevia powder to mine which I think worked well as I did not want the milk to be really sweet anyhow. Maybe next time I will try it without the sweetener just to see what it's like. The vanilla extract on the other hand I'm not so happy with. In my opinion it gives it a really strong vanilla flavor even though I only added a few tiny drops - and to be honest I don't really want my nut milk to taste like vanilla...so next time I'll try leaving that out too.

Since I have so much pulp left over, I am curious to see if I can use it to make something else - gonna have to do some investigating. If you have any tips I'd love to hear them.

** Update ** The milk tastes way better once it's chilled & the strong vanilla flavour faded

Also - I did not use *filtered water* like the recipes said. I do not drink filtered water nor do I have a water filter. I am a bit puzzled as to why every nut milk recipe I see says to use *filtered water* ? IS it simply that the 'types' of people who tend to be interested in drinking nut milk tend to also be health freaks? Or is it that one person used it and then everyone else based their recipes on theirs which used filtered water?...

Also discovered that you can freeze the leftover nut pulp and save it to use in baking or to sprinkle over cereals. Also stumbled upon this pin board which has a few nut pulp recipe ideas. I like the look of this fudge recipe.