Dinner Party at Nancy's

Just look at this beautiful table!

A few weeks ago my good friend Nancy had a small dinner party. She made a wonderful curried quinoa, some roasted beets, broccoli roasted with garlic and nutritional yeast.

The quinoa was delicious! And I'm not usually a curry fan. 

I made the salad with some roasted butternut squash, yellow peppers, grape tomatoes, toasted pepitas, and pomegranite seeds. There was going to be avocado as well, but the avocado was brown inside.

 Dessert was a chocolate mousse made with coconut milk "cream", silken tofu, cocoa and Zsweet. It would have been better if it had a chance to chill a bit more. It was more like chocolate soup ~ but still was pretty good.

Great food, good friends, a little wine.... what could be better?

Simple Salads

Spinach, lemon dressing, braggs roasted pepitas

Portabello "gyro" slices, quinoa, baby lettuce, tomato and cucumber sour cream dressing

For the lemon dressing I just put about a tsp or two of tahini hummus in a small bowl along with a big splash of lemon juice a little water and a few drops of Braggs.

Amazing Chocolate Dessert Hummus

So what's a girl to eat for dessert when trying to follow a whole food, sugar free, oil free, flour free diet? And she's a baker?!

This: 

The idea for ingredients came from this delicious fat free cookie recipe:
http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/2007/02/valentines-treat-chocolate-cookies-two.html
And thanks to Dr. Greger for his video on a harmless sugar substitute (that actually tastes good). http://nutritionfacts.org/videos/a-harmless-artificial-sweetener/ 
I really want to like Stevia, but just can't get paste the bitter almost metallic taste.

I made this the other night and had to stop myself from eating the whole batch at once. I may play around and refine the recipe a bit but here's what I did.

Chocolate Hummus

1 1/2 cups chickpeas 
5 pitted prunes
1/4 cup cocoa powder
2 T date paste (or use 3 dates and 1/4 cup warm water)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1 T Z Sweet (or other sugar substitute)
splash of balsamic vinegar (optional)
1 T soy or coconut creamer


Process chickpeas and prunes in food processor. Add rest of ingredients and process til smooth. Add a bit more creamer as needed to get to the texture you prefer. I had this one night with a banana, then the strawberries, and also with a spoon. It would be great with cinnamon pita chips, or even those chocolate tortilla chips. Any other ideas?

Chocolate Hummus

I really thought I had a new idea when I thought of making Chocolate Hummus! Little did I know there were recipes floating all around the internet. 

However....

I began thinking about Fat Free Vegan's Balsamic Fudge Cookies and created a delicious chocolate hummus with prunes, cocoa, chickpeas, balsamic vinegar and cinnamon. 

I want to try another version with black beans or maybe 1/2 chickpea and 1/2 black bean.

Recipe and pics to follow.

Vegan Baked Cheese Dip

 Yeah, so the top didn't quite melt- but it was still delish! Three kinds of veg cheese, "sour cream", refried beans, jalepenos and taco seasoning.

Cookies!

Tami's Apricot Cookies

Pistachio cranberry biscotti

Eggnog cupcakes, sparkled ginger cookies and those apricot cookies again- Yum!

Double Chocolate Chip cookies, PB Oatmeal with Toasted Coconut

Recent Goodies plus a chickpea angel

Lots of baking going on the past few weeks! I am so excited about my new cheesecake recipe. I've never been 100% happy with the recipes I've tried so I combined the best bits from each one and WOW! It came out exactly how I wanted. Take a look~

There is also a slow cooker cake which is a tester recipe for Robin Robertson's new slow cooker cookbook

And more-

Chocolate cakes with balsamic ganache

Chocolate cake with Mousse Frosting

Carrot cakes, both chocolate cakes and cheesecake squares

 

 

 

Thanksgiving plate - see the chickpea angel? I didn't notice til I went to post it