rants & recipes

This past weekend, we made ice cream. (We made some pancakes, too, but, well, Evin's were passable and mine - not so much, so that's probably all I need to say about that effort.)

We've had some very pricey freeze-dried strawberry powder for a while and we finally used it. Our ice cream recipes are all fairly similar, but here's the ingredient list anyway.

Ingredients:

• 18-oz bag frozen organic strawberries (saved out about 1/3 for adding later)
• 1 box aseptic extra-firm tofu (minus 2 tbsp for my pancake attempt)
• about 3 tbsp mimic cream (opened for my pancake attempt, and 3 tbsp were left over from freezing the rest)
• 1 1/2 cups (unsweetened) soymilk
• 1/8 tsp xanthan gum
• 1/8 cup lecithin granules
• 1/4 cup rum
• 1/4 cup sugare
• 3/4 cup corn syrup
• 1 tbsp maple syrup
• pinch salt
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 2 tbsp oil
• 40 grams Earth Balance
• 1/4 cup strawberry powder
• 1 tbsp tapioca powder (intended but forgotten)

Instructions:

1. Chopped reserved berries for adding later.
2. Mix all remaining ingredients in blender until smooth.
3. Freeze according to your ice cream maker's instructions.

Notes:

• I didn't like the frozen berries in this - tasted like frozen, unsweetened chunks of red ice. Next time, I'd blend them all.
• We left this ice cream in the ice cream maker, put the whole maker in the freezer. It's the first time we've ever done that, usually remove to bowl. Finding this works much better (for this amount of alcohol, especially  - canister probably insulates from the on/off cycle of the freezer?) Ice cream has seemed to melt slower this time. Hence a photo, with no puddles visible at all. (And this was about photo number four!)

Oh, and we also made tempeh again. This time, our new temperature probes behaved perfectly and we were NOT alarmed out of sleep in the wee hours of the morning. We let the tempeh go for closer to 24 hours this time and the result was much darker than before. I was surprised, to find that frying this tempeh, in a little (safflower) oil, yielded the closest thing to eggs I have tasted since going vegan. Really hard to describe - it was the taste of eggs but somehow, not at all the way indian black salt tastes of eggs. Which leaves me thinking that crumbled, fried homemade tempeh plus a pinch of black salt (and other tofu scramble ingredients), would make a pretty awesome egg dish.