September 8th, 2008

Say "Yes!" to France!
In honor of the bike-in movie at Spider House tonight, The Triplets of Belleville, we decided to make a French meal.

Ashley versus the groceries.
The large bucket is for collecting coconut water and you can clearly see the giant stack of tofu beside her.

OKAY, FIRST WE NEED A SALAD

1/2 cup lemon juice
1/2 cup shoyu
10 cloves garlic
1 cup oil
a little pepper
=
the best salad dressing on the face of yum!

This dressing was stupidly good. We ate it over greens and spiralized beets. It would also go well with a cold noodle salad.

VEGAN QUICHE - 5 kinds

We made the quiche crust from scratch and saved about $10 by doing so. I used the recipe from Veganomicon and let it chill for about 30 minutes.

While I prepped the quiche innards of tofu and tempeh, Ashley prepped little bowls of veggie fillings to go in the quiche. Pictured above is tomato and basil.

To prepare the tempeh: simmer 3 tablespoons earth balance with fresh diced garlic and scallion. Add 1/3 cup shoyu and 1 cup water. Simmer tempeh for 20 minutes.

This is the filling for the quiche:
1.5 blocks of tofu
2 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons nutritional yeast
4 tablespoons yellow mustard
4 tablespoons shoyu
Mix in:
green onions
cooked and spiced tempeh, one block

Quiche mixture all mixed up - woo hoo!

Little quiche before baking. Look at what a good job Ashley did on those crust ridges! I baked this little guy for about 1.5 hours at 350F (our oven sucks and everything takes 2x as long).

Basically I repeated the above steps (making the basic filling in the blender, then adding the veggies and mixing them all together) for the rest of the quiche.
Finished Quiche: tempeh, tomato/basil, squash, pepper x 2

RAW SOUP

In a blender, Ashley mixed up whole lot of greens (basil, broccoli, celery), garlic, dill and cashews with coconut water. Salt and pepper to taste. I think we made 4 blender fulls to feed our crowd.

SPICY COCOA TRUFFLES

Coconut Meat, 1 cup
Almonds, 2 cups
Cashews, 1 cup
Dates, aprox. 5
Agave, 1/2 cup
Vanilla Extract, 2 tablespoons
Cocoa Powder, 1 cup
Cayenne Pepper, 1 teaspoon
Nutmeg, 1 teaspoon
Cinnamon, 5 teaspoons
all blended into yum and altered to taste.

Don't forget the secret ingredient!

Using a ice cream scoop, I made individual truffles and put them in the freezer to harden.

CAN'T WE EAT NOW?

Salad with spiralized beets (raw)
Creamy garlic dressing (raw)
creme of celery soup (raw)
Quiche: tempeh, tomato/basil, squash, pepper
Spicy Cocoa Truffles (rawish)

What a spread!

The Verdict from house members:
- Many members ate the dessert before and after the meal (quelle surprise!)
- The soup was a big hit
- The quiches that we let cook longer turned out better
- People actually like beets!!!

What we listened to while cooking:
Dolly Parton - Little Sparrow (whole album)
Eels - Blinking Lights and other Revelations (whole album)
The Faint - Misc. songs