Recipes #6 , #7, and #8

Sometimes the time gets away from you! I have only made three new recipes since I wrote last, though I have made more food from scratch than that.

One of the problems with cooking 100 new recipes in roughly 100 days is not that I don't have enough that sound interesting to me, but that even over the summer with a reduced teaching schedule there are constraints. The leftovers I have to finish eating (without the Baker's help the last few days since he's had some kind of stomach virus), as well as the unpredictability of whether or not I will like something after working on it and getting hungrier for 2 hours, and the huge bags of greens I've been getting from my CSA it means that I sometimes either don't have time or it doesn't make sense to make something new when I have so many pounds of salad greens and leftovers from a previous meal clogging my fridge.

One way around this was making cookies! I decided to make snickerdoodles from Kris Holechek's 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes. I considered making the Vegan Cookies Take Over Your Cookie Jar version instead, but I didn't have enough Earth Balance butter. Kris' version substitutes some with applesauce, something I've been doing a lot with my baking lately.

The snickerdoodles, if I may say so myself, were pretty darn good. They did take longer to cook than expected, which happens a lot with my oven, and I did accidentally cook the second tray too long. The first was perfectly textured and chewy, the second, too hard. Also, I threw a lot of the sugar/cinnamon mixture away that I had rolled the cookies in; I think I would halve it when using it again. I also thought the cinnamon was a touch too heavy in the mixture.

The Low Down: Will I make them again? Very probably, though with all the baked goods I do make, I'm not sure they will feature in my rotation again soon. The breads and muffins I make require less fat and sugar, usually, and I don't have to get out the mixer. A-

The next thing I did was to make some seitan while baking up those cookies on Friday night. The jury is still out on the seitan, as I packaged it up and put it into the fridge for use in a later recipe. It was easy to make, and looked and smelled good however. It was Isa Chandra Moskowitz's recipe from Appetite for Reduction and I plan on making many more seitan recipes this summer for comparison.

Last night I made a socca, or a garbanzo bean flour pancake type recipe from Donna Klein's Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen. The idea of these had intrigued me for a while, and I thought my iron skillet sufficiently seasoned to try. However, while it was fairly simple to make, the results were not pleasing to me. It turned out the way it should have, it just didn't suit my personal tastes. Reminded me of an omelet, in taste and texture, and a slightly underdone one at that. I'm not a big fan of eggs, was one of the easiest animal products for me to give up.

It's just another one of those recipes that are just fine, I'm sure, but remind me why I'm the picky gourmet. Some things don't suit the kinds of flavor profiles that I like. That's okay. But sometimes, a new flavor profile is exciting or inventive in a way that expands my palate. I can't always tell when this will happen, and that is part of the fun of this journey. 92 recipes to go!