Hi Everyone, it's Jane writing as the August Daring Bakers Challenge is revealed today.  What was this month's challenge you ask?  Something different for me anyway... chocolate eclairs!  And while my eclairs may not win any beauty pageants, they tasted scrumptious!  I will make this recipe for company next time.

So, details... This month's challenge was issued by MeetaK and Tony Tahhan.  The original recipe comes from Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme (visit Meeta or Tony for the challenge recipe). An eclair consists of a Pâte à Choux (dough), Pastry Cream (filling), and Chocolate Glaze.  The challenge recipe called for a chocolate filling, which is not how Lane and I remember eclairs, but I was making enough modifications to the recipe (and a little more chocolate is usually a good thing).

Of course, the Pâte à Choux wasn't written as a vegan recipe, so I looked for a bit of help from the Alternative Daring Bakers.  The suggested recipe the ADBs can be found here.  I halved the recipe because we didn't want to wind up with a zillion eclairs, and wound up with 8 very  small eclairs, which was perfect for the 4 of us who were tasting my results.

I'd never done this type of baking before and really enjoyed how the dough worked up.

Here's the recipe for the cream puff/eclair dough I used, including my modifications (note, this is the full recipe):

1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
2 teaspoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon cream of tartar
2 tablespoons Earth Balance
2 tablespoon Ener-G Egg Replacer whipped until stiff with 1/3 cup water
1 cup almond milk

Directions:

Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees. Line baking sheet with non-stick mat. Prepare egg-replacer. Stir together flour, sugar, salt, cream of tartar. In a non-stick sauce pan, bring the milk and margarine to a boil, stirring constantly. Add the flour mixture all at once, and reduce heat to low. Stir constantly until the dough forms a ball that pulls away from the pan and the spoon and is glossy and smooth.  Smooth the dough and stir together a few times.  Cooking time after flour is added should be about 3-5 minutes. Working quickly, remove from heat and add the egg replacer, about a third at a time, beating well after each addition until the dough is glossy, smooth, and pulls away from the pan.  (I used my mixer with dough hook attachment, but that didn't work so wel.)

Shape the dough as desired. Bake at 400 degrees for 20 minutes, then lower heat to 350 for another 20 minutes, then turn off oven and allow to cool, with door slightly cracked for another 30 minutes, then cool completely on wire racks before serving or filling.

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Some of the Daring Bakers had issues with their eclairs deflating.  The general consensus was that the pastries were undercooked.  Some of the ADBs used baking powder in place of the cream of tartar.  I didn't make that change but baked everything much longer than the original recipe called for.  None of my eclairs deflated and they were all cooked through and a light golden brown.

Also, I tried to pipe my eclairs, but that didn't work so well.  So after I piped them, I wound up rolling them around in my palms a bit.  Next time, I'll skip the piping.

As for fillings.... I did a chocolate filling and chocolate glaze.  Hubby was very complimentary.  The crust was light and flaky and definitely tasted as we remembered an eclair to taste.  However, we both remember eclairs as having a custard-like filling, so the chocolate seemed a bit odd, but hey, it was chocolate and yummy anyway.  I'm not including my recipe for the filling and glaze as they didn't come out well enough to recommend.  But the original recipe is easy enough to veganize, if you're interested.

Bon Appetit!

I was poking around on Vegan Momma recently. Earlier in July she wrote:

I’m always amazed at the huge disconnect that many people have with food and how it affects their bodies. You would think I would get used to it after all these years, but it still surprises me. We’re not helpless we have control of a lot of the conditions that happen within our bodies. If we continue to feed our bodies junk why in the world do we expect to receive peak performance, sorry (in most cases) it’s not going to happen. Remember GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) yeah that applies to our eating habits also.

As I blogged on Monday, Jane's been disinterested in cooking and we've gotten tired of the local restaurants. So we've been eating a bit more junk food. Now it's nothing like when I was in school, and I'd have a bag of Doritos for dinner. It's the height of summer and there's always some kind of veggie salad in the fridge. But we've been eating a bit more vegan junk food. And I feel it. Perhaps it psychosomatic. Perhaps it's the heat. But I've been a bit more sluggish this week.

We all know that junk food is bad for you. The thing that I'm finding a bit ironic here is that it doesn't taste as good as it used to. Over time my taste buds have changed. Maybe next time I'll remember that and will save myself and just eat good, healthy food instead.

Anyway, Jane and I have promised ourselves to get back on track after the holiday weekend. No more garbage in!!!

One of the fun things about blogging is that, occasionally, you are asked to review a product. Recently, we received a package from Nutiva. The package contained a variety of goodies. There was a jar of coconut oil, hemp oil, a bag of hempseed, a package of hemp protein, three HempShakes (Berry Pomegranate, Amazon Acai, and Chocolate), and a hempseed bar.

The first things we tried were the oils. Personally, I don't care for the taste of coconut oil over olive oil, but the authors of Skinny Bitch use it in most of their recipes, and I know many of you like it too. I've read conflicting information as to whether or not it's healthy. Neither Jane nor I have any medical training,and haven't done any real research into coconut oil, so I'll leave it to you to decide if it's something you consider healthy or not. It's not a product I expect we'll be buying. The hemp oil, however, has a nutty taste and works well in salad dressing. (If you buy it, make sure to keep it refrigerated.)

The next thing we tried was the hemp bar. If you don't eat honey, this isn't vegan! If you do... well, this reminded us of what most people assume you eat as a vegan - bird food. It's funny because we liked adding the hemp seeds to our salad, kind of like sunflower seeds, but the bar didn't work at all.

Next we tried two of the hemp shakes. Jane wanted to try the chocolate, and I chose the amazon acai. The instructions suggest adding fruit, so we used frozen raspberries, which made for a nice thick shake. However, neither Jane nor I cared for either of the two. But don't take our word for it, this product won best new supplement at the 2006 natural product expo, according to Nutiva.

I've been using the protein powder in my morning smoothies. I really enjoy the taste. Out of all Nutiva's products, the protein powder is by far and away the best, in my opinion, and I would absolutely have that again.

Recently, I wrote about a purchase Jane and I made at the Japanese market in Los Angeles... In case you don't remember, we bought some natto (fermented soybeans). Well we finally got around to trying it last night. I have to admit to having cold feet, all those YouTube videos of people gagging and worse weren't inspiring. So every time Jane suggested we try it, I'd reply "not tonight, I'm not in the mood honey." Last night, she didn't ask, she just prepared the dish.

We have a few simple rules in our marriage. We try not to fight in front of friends/family. We don't spend over $100 without discussing it first. When someone prepares a meal, the other one eats it, unless it truly makes them ill. We can ask not to be fed something again, but we have to at least try it. So, I tried it.

Jane opened the package, and as expected, it was sticky. However, the smell everyone talked about didn't overwhelm us. We'd heard it was supposed to smell of stinky feet or strong cheese. It had an odor, but it was much milder and not at all offensive.

So you're supposed to stir the stuff up a bit before eating it. It gets more and more gooey as you do that (which began to freak me out a bit). Being that this was an experiment, we tasted the natto at this point without adding anything else. It tasted a bit like beans with a hint of beer. Not bad, but in definite need of improvement.

The suggested method of eating natto is over warm white rice with soy sauce and green onion. The natto comes with spicy mustard and some other seasoning packet. Typically we don't have white rice in the house. So we made sure to bring home our leftover rice from the Indian restaurant we ate at on Monday night. Okay, so the rice had a bit of saffron, and the natto would have probably been better over sticky rice, but overall, it was okay. It's way better than Vegemite! We thought the rice was necessary. And the sauce and onions improved the taste dramatically.

We'll eat the other two packages, however we probably wouldn't buy natto again. If it were served to us, we wouldn't hesitate to eat it. Honestly, I don't understand what all the fuss is about.

The package is all in Japanese, but they've put a little sticker on the back in English. So, we bought Kotsumbu Natto which came in three individual packages. The ingredient list:

Natto:

• Soybean
• water

Seasoning:

• Soy sauce (water, soybean, wheat, salt)
• vinegar
• sugar
• mustargd
• salt and citric acid

Nutritional Info:

• Calories: 140
• Total Fat: 7g
• Sodium: 1mg
• Total Carbohydrate: 9.8g
• Dietary Fiber: 1.8g
• Sugars: 8g
• Protein: 11g

I love summer. There is such an abundance of wonderful, fresh food to eat. Shopping at the farmers market is a joy at this time of year. We often have to restrain ourselves from buying more food than we can possibly eat in a week. And the fruit...

We've had a few people write and ask us if we eat raw. For the most part, the answer to that question is no. From what we've read, there are nutritional reasons to eat both raw and cooked foods. And I don't think I'd want to give up lentil stew and freshly baked bread, and the many other yummy things Jane cooks for dinner. But we do eat raw sometimes too, especially in the summer when Jane makes all kind of delicious salads.

For dinner tonight we did have a raw meal. Jane made her hummus with carrots and persian cucumbers, red cabbage slaw, and our usual green salad. We also had sliced tomatoes from our garden. And for dessert, we had blueberries, strawberries, and white nectarines. Overall, a really delicious meal, and raw to boot.

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Note:  Thanks to Sparrow, who pointed out that our hummus isn't raw (who knew?).  Well,  I googled “raw hummus” and found that raw hummus recipes seem to include sprouted chickpeas, as opposed to canned chickpeas (which we assumed were simply picked, processed and put in a can with some water and salt (and preservatives in some).  But it appears that many raw vegans shoot for 75% raw, so if you go by that criteria, we still had a "raw" vegan meal.  Anyway, sorry for any confusion this may have caused!  Hopefully this clears up any confusion. -- Lane