Note from Renae: I’ve been promising you Fortinbras’ Christmas post forever, and he decided Easter was as good a time as any to get around to it. (He exists! He exists! I didn’t make him up!) So with no further ado…

heeeeeere’s Fort!

…and just in time for Easter, I Eat Food Presents:
Peanut Butter Salvation Cookies (a delicious story of addiction, decadence, and ultimately redemption)

WET INGREDIENTS:
6 bottles of champagne
1 cup of granulated sugar
1 cup of light brown sugar
2 sticks of margarine (slightly cool and softened)
The equivalent of 2 eggs using egg substitute (we used egg replacer)
1 teaspoon of vanilla
1 cup of unsweetened, salted all natural crunchy peanut butter (Crunchy is what the recipe calls for, but smooth can be used instead, really the decision is left to the discretion of the baker. Remember: Life is short, as Jesus has taught us, so you use the type of peanut butter that you desire because, who knows? Tomorrow somebody may want to crucify you and you don’t want to be hanging there wishing you had used the kind of peanut butter that you prefer. Amen)

DRY INGREDIENTS:
2 1/2 cups of all purpose flour
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup of soy milk chocolate chips (optional)

Preheat your oven to 350 and get ready to make the most delicious cookies you have ever eaten in your entire life. Seriously, they are life altering good.

LETS GET STARTED:
Go on ahead and pop open that first bottle of champagne.

Pamper yourself and pour a nice healthy glass and take a big ol’ swig from the bottle, as if you could be, if given the proper circumstances, a rock star or a naughty politician.

Now that we all feel better about life let’s begin to mix together the essential wet ingredients. Mix the sugars, the egg substitute, the vanilla, the margarine and lastly the peanut butter together in a large bowl.

When incorporating the margarine it is very important that it be soft and slightly cool. If the margarine is melted or room temperature your cookies are still going to taste good, but they will be more thin and crisp after baking. Also, the cookies tend to come out better if the peanut butter is added last, I have no idea why this is but I do know it has something to do with physics and viscosity, parallel dimensions and the letter W. VERY SCIENTIFIC COOKIE STUFF, Y’ALL.

By now you should have finished, at the very least, one of your bottles of champagne. So lets open another, shant we? Why yes, yes we shall.

Now, children of the New Testament Era, it is time to sift the flour and the salt and the baking soda together in a bowl of your choosing. So take a few sips, refill that glass and hop to it.

After sifting the dry thangs together, you should be tired, so reward yourself for all of your hard work by taking a long smooth drink of your cool bubbling champagne. Feel free to laugh as the bubbles tickle the back of your tongue and throat, knowing in your heart of hearts that you deserve this moment. Lucky, lucky you.

NOW FOR THE DEAL, THE OPUS, THE SHOW! Grab your wet ingredients and your dry ingredients and get thee to a mixing station! If you are using a hand mixer I am gonna tell you now, there comes a point with this dough, that you will have to get in there with your hands and mix it using the raw power of all ten digits. Don’t be afraid, it will be okay, take a sip of your fourth bottle of champagne and get in there and make that magic happen! Humph! For those of you who own a professional mixer you may want to forgo allowing those ingredients to fornicate together in the relative privacy of the mixing bowl and just pretend that you own a hand mixer and get in there as well. Let’s keep it clean, but let’s not forget to keep it sexy as well. Everyone begin to add the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients until they form a firm dough.

And for the love of God do not forget to take that fifth bottle of champagne out of the freezer!

Now, at this point you should have a good buzz and a stiff cookie dough going. Form the dough into a ball

And, if you were raised in the circus as I was, feel free to toss it about as if it were a bowling pin or a baby.

But remember, accidents can happen.

So if you are not circusy you should probably just take that ball of dough and put it in a bowl and chill it in the fridge for 15 to 20 minutes. Use this time to prep your cookie sheets with parchment paper or tin foil, again, remember the cross, and do what you prefer. LET THERE BE NO REGRETS DURING YOUR CRUCIFIXION!

15 minutes and one bottle of champagne later:

IT IS TIME TO GET TO SMOOSHIN’!

By now you should have lost the pretense of the glass and you should be drinking long and deep directly from the bottle, you should also be removing the ball of dough from the fridge and getting out a tablespoon sized scooping apparatus from your drawer of apparati. Now get your cookie sheet in front of you and get that scoop in your hand and I want you to take a very healthy tablespoon sized scoop from your ball of dough using your scooping apparatus of choice and then I want you to roll that scoop of dough between your palms until it is in the shape of a ball.

I suggest that you start with eight scoops on your first tray, spacing them evenly until you gage how much your dough will spread during baking.

Now that you have your dough balls spaced evenly on your baking sheet I want you to smoosh them down slightly, giving each potential cookie a little smack down.

Next place 1 to 3 soy milk chocolate chips in the center of each of the smooshed down dough balls.

Now it is time to raise your bottle and your adorned cookie sheet in celebration of the fact that you have come this far. You are very intelligent and gifted, by this point in the recipe you should already be aware of this.

NOW, very carefully, (because by now if you have been following this recipe to a tee, you are drunk) place the baking sheet with your unbaked smooshed down cookie dough upon it onto the middle rack of your oven and remember to close the door .

You are going to want to bake these cookies for 13 to 16 minutes depending upon your oven, if you have a slow oven you may need to bake them even longer. After you get a feel for how the dough bakes you can increase or decrease the temperature of your oven if you feel that it is necessary. Baking times are so inconsistent between ovens that I refuse to draw a hard line where time and temperature are concerned. Just know this: These cookies aren’t going to be golden brown; at the golden brown stage after they have cooled they tend to be a little over done, still more delicious than any other cookie on the planet, but a little over done. Instead, I recommend that all bakers everywhere should shoot for finding that point where they are simply cooked thoroughly. I find that tasting the first tray of cookies, even if it means that you have to eat them all, can reveal the subtleties of the cooking process that will give you the information necessary to bake these Peanut Butter Salvation Cookies to perfection, just the way Jesus would.

HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE!

Fort out – it’s Renae again. I CAN’T BELIEVE OF ALL THE PICTURES OF ME FROM THAT DAY I SUPPLIED HIM WITH, HE CHOSE THE ONE CALLED “VERY UGLY RENAE.JPG”. Why is he my best friend again? Oh yeah, because he’s hilarious. And also he thinks it’s okay for us to drink six bottles of champagne while doing all of his holiday baking. And also “very ugly Renae.jpg” was probably one of the least horrible looking photos of me in the batch. (I’ll never let very ugly Renae-2.jpg get out to the public, boy.) Yes, I love Fortinbras. But since he didn’t include any of the nice pictures of the ole Tiggster from that day, I shall:

Tigger used to always hang out with us during parties, no matter how raucous we got. Brachtune, on the other hand, doesn’t know what to make of us when we get rowdy and tends to hole up in a safe place:

And with that, I wish you all a happy Easter as well!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, a day late! I made “corned beef” last night:

I was going to share the recipe with you, then decided it’s not quite there yet, but worth working on. At least it was edible. Whenever someone says to me, “everything you make is so good,” Mark is always quick to say, “not EVERYTHING”. When asked to elaborate, he never fails to bring up “the corned beef”. I tried to make “corned beef” seitan about five years ago – following a recipe from the internet, I don’t know which one – and it was so salty it was completely inedible, and it’s saying something when Mark finds something too salty to eat because he’s a saltasaurus. A complete disaster. So I went very easy on the salt in my invention last night, although I think real corned beef is fairly salty. (I’ve never actually had corned beef. I know, I led a very sheltered life before going vegetarian! What’s weird is I think reubens would have been my favorite food ever had I ever had one.)

The other thing that I have made that was not good was the infamous “gasoline cake” that I baked for a friend’s birthday shortly after going vegan. However, that incident was entirely Fortinbras’ fault. It must have been a wacky cake because it had vinegar. Fortinbras showed up at my apartment to help decorate as I was mixing the batter, which I tasted and found to be “off”. I claimed I was going out to buy more flour and mix up a new cake because I’d ruined that one, but Fortinbras tasted the batter and said it was “fine”. I was still pretty new to cooking and baking and didn’t really feel like running up to the store, so with some misgivings, I listened to Fort and baked it up. I decorated it nicely and it looked quite lovely. After singing Happy Birthday, the cake was sliced and pieces were handed around. Suddenly people were making faces and politely putting their pieces down without finishing them. “What’s wrong?!” I shrieked. “It tastes like gasoline,” the birthday girl (never one to mince words) informed me. The only thing I can think of is I added too much vinegar. Only Fortinbras finished an entire slice, claiming it was “fine”, while I yelled at him because I’d TOLD him it there was something wrong with it and had wanted to make another.

A year or two later, though, I baked a cake for another friend who said it was the “most incredible cake” he’d ever tasted and who took the leftovers to his family who also said it was the most amazing cake they’d ever had. So I redeemed myself, just as I hope to redeem myself in regards to the corned beef incident.

I really like the texture I get from pressure cooking seitan, but I’ve been noticing that whenever I do, no matter how many flavorings I put in the seitan and in the broth, the finished product always tastes somewhat bland. I’m really quite baffled by it. Both the liquid for the seitan and the broth I made last night were very flavorful and I thought that seitan was going to be amazing, but it was just…seitan. Like all the flavor had cooked out of it. So I think I have the ingredients right, I need to work on the execution. I’ll try steaming this time. Has anyone else encountered this problem? Were you able to fix it?

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conquerynge,
The dredful joye alwey that slit so yerne:
Al this mene I by Love, that my felynge
Astonyeth with his wonderful werkynge
So sore, iwis that whan I on hym thynke
Nat wot I wel wher that I flete or synke.

Okay, okay…I won’t subject you to any more of The Parliament of Fowls, but consider yourselves lucky because I’ve been known to read the whole thing on Valentine’s Day. Yes, I am a Chaucer geek, and in the days, so long ago, before I met Mark, I was particularly enamored not only of the idea that the first written association of St. Valentine’s Day with romantic love was made by my buddy Chaucer, but also that it ends with the female bird choosing none of her three tercel (eagle) suitors. (As I was picky about men myself and spent many Valentine’s Days alone.) I copied the above out of my battered but beloved Riverside Chaucer, but I’ve found both the original and a modern translation for you. Enjoy!

I’ve been fortunate to have a Valentine for the last eight years and I asked him what he’d like me to make for dinner tonight and he requested lasagne. It occurred to me that I’ve never featured lasagne here, so I documented it. Pour a glass of wine and sit down: this is going to be long. Not because it’s particularly hard to make lasagne, but because I took a gazillion photos….

Love Day Lasagne

1 lb lasagne noodles
1 1/2 quarts marinara sauce (recipe follows)
1/4 recipe cashew cheddar (from the Real Food Daily cookbook; the recipe is here. I only made half a recipe and barely used half of what I made.)
12 oz fresh spinach
1 lb vegan sausage (optional; Mark requested this)
1 cup sun-dried tomatoes
1 recipe vegan ricotta (recipe follows)
vegan mozzarella and parmesan, for topping (optional)

Vegan Ricotta
1 lb tofu
2 Tbsp nutritional yeast
1 Tbsp miso
1 tsp salt
1 tsp dried basil
juice of 1/2 lemon

Marinara Sauce
1 onion, diced
2 carrots, diced
1 head garlic, minced or pressed (I love garlic, reduce the amount if you’re a vampire)
2 28 oz cans diced or crushed tomatoes
1 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp crushed red pepper (optional; I like a little punch)
1 tsp salt
freshly ground pepper, to taste
juice of 1/2 lemon

First, start the marinara sauce. In a Dutch oven or large pot, heat a bit of olive oil then add the onions and carrots. Saute for 5 minutes.

Add the garlic and saute another 5 minutes.

This is about the time Tigger was taking a shower in the sink.

He was really thirsty.

Anyway, when the onions and carrots are soft, add the tomatoes and bring to a boil.

Then add the rest of the ingredients except the lemon juice and turn down the heat until the sauce is just simmering. Allow to cook for half an hour.

While the sauce is simmering, fill a large stock pot with water. This is where I encountered a problem:

Is this normal?!?

When you are able to get rid of the cat, bring the water to a boil and add the lasagne noodles. I have never had luck with no-bake noodles, or not pre-cooking regular noodles, so I always cook my noodles. If you’ve had better luck than I have not cooking your noodles, go for it.

When the sauce if finished cooking, blend in batches in a blender (only after cooling!), or use an immersion blender. (This step is optional.) The stir in the lemon juice.

Chop the sun-dried tomatoes.

Crumble the vegan sausage.

To make the ricotta, place the tofu in a bowl and use your hands to crumble it.

Add the remaining ingredients.

Mix thoroughly; it’s easiest and most fun to just use your hands.

Unmold the cashew cheese.

The last time I made the cashew cheese, it firmed up enough to shred, but I had blender issues this morning and added more soy milk than called for, so it was too soft to shred. So shred it if you can, otherwise, you can just smear it on!

To prepare the spinach, stick it in a bowl and microwave it for 2 minutes. I had to do it in two batches because I didn’t have a large enough bowl to handle it all at once.

Before:

After:

To assemble:
Spread about 1/4 cup of the sauce on the bottom of a 9×12 lasagne pan.

Add a layer of noodles.

Add a layer of cashew cheddar.

Add a layer of sauce.

Add a layer of noodles.

Add a layer of sauce.

Add a layer of sausage and sun-dried tomatoes.

Add a layer of noodles.

Add a layer of sauce.

Add the spinach in a layer.

Add a layer of noodles.

Add the ricotta in a layer.

Add a layer of sauce.

Add a layer of noodles.

Add the rest of the sauce, making sure it slides down the sides of the lasagne.

Cover with foil.

Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for half an hour. Remove the foil.

Add shredded vegan mozzarella and/or parmesan.

Return to the oven, uncovered, and bake for an additional 20 minutes. Remove and let sit for 10 minutes before serving.

Serve with fresh, crusty bread!

Enjoy!