vegan cooking

This is my late grandma’s (*pours out 40, kisses two fingers and places hand over heart*) recipe she clipped from a newspaper sometime in the late 40s or early 50s. My sister in law is from Taiwan, and when her parents tried this recipe (they had to go to an American food market to find molasses), they loved them so much they seriously considered opening a chain of cookie stores in their country.

These cookies make and break hearts. These cookies soothe the savage beast. These cookies start wars. These cookies write peace treaties. These cookies are pretty much the best thing that’s ever happened to you. To commemorate my grandma’s bad-assery, this is a very special HEAVY METAL episode of this here blog!

Your black, empty soul will need:

1/2 cup soft shortening
1 and 1/4 cups sugar
egg replacer equal to 2 eggs
6 tbsp. molasses
1 and 3/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp.salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 cup raisins
2 cups rolled oats

Preheat the eternal damning flames of your oven to 350 Fahrenheit. (The original recipe calls for 400, but I like my cookies chewy and I find this temperature always makes them just too crispy. Great for dunking in coffee, but not so good if you have had any sort of dental work in the last decade.)

Measure out your flour and throw up the horns.

Sift together your flour, baking soda, salt, and sin-amon.

A word on shortening: I only use Spectrum’s non-hydrogenated version because hydrogenated oils are for squares and totally not subversive at all.

In a bowl separate from your dry ingredients, measure out your shortening and add your sugar. Add your egg replacer, too, but make sure that if you use Ener-G that you mix up the starch and water in a little dish outside of the bowl to give the starch plenty of room to soak up that moisture so it doesn’t just turn into a big clumpy mess in your dough.

I love me some Ener-G.

Add your molasses. I use dark molasses because it reminds me of my soul.

Stir this mix well. Think black, Nordic thoughts.

Make a little well in your dry ingredients and add the goopy wet stuff in there and stir well. Make sure Satan is watching over your work.

After everything is nicely incorporated, stir in your goats, I mean oats…

…and raisins.

Lightly grease a couple of METAL baking sheets and drop the cookies on them in rounded teaspoon-fulls about 2″ apart. This should take several batches, so it makes a ton of cookies.

Watch those babies like a hawk. They burn fast, so keep a close eye. The recipe says 6-10 minutes, and I usually find it’s on the low end of that (depending upon the oven). If you use dark molasses, it’s harder to tell, but just look for when they start to lose that fatty shine. If you like them chewy, and you do, take them out right then. If you want them on the crispier side, like a square, then go right ahead and leave them in for the full 10 minutes and never speak to me again.

Ah, there we go. These cookies can’t help but make even the most metal of hearts wholesome and presentable. These are the kind of cookies you take home to momma. These are the kind of cookies with which you want to sign a lease. These cookies will bring you hot tea in bed when you’re sick. These cookies will burn you masterpieces of mix cds and let you wear their lucky wristband. You love these cookies.

And they love you, too.

Hey all you out there in the interbutts! I thought my readers (all 14 of you, including my mom) would enjoy seeing some photos from a cooking competition in which I recently competed at my school (Cal State Northridge). Our chapter of SDFSA put on its second annual Iron Matador competition, and my good buddy Carly and I competed against two other teams as team Vegan With a Vengeance! (With apologies to Isa and Terry.) We had three and a half hours to present three dishes: an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert. We were presented with three secret ingredients, which we were instructed to include in our recipes as much as possible: ginger, almonds, and lemons. Here’s a look at the action!

Our first dish, a salad, was the Jicama-Watercress-Avocado Salad with Spicy Citrus Vinaigrette from Veganomicon.

It was a big hit with the crowd because it was so gosh-darned pretty, and the dressing came out perfectly. We incorporated the secret ingredient, fresh ginger, into it pretty well, I think.

Here’s us buttering (er, Earth Balance-ing) up the judges.

The next dish was my grilled tofu fajitas. The kitchen smelled fantastic and we had a whole grip o’ spectators coming over sniffing out what had such a lovely aroma once I got it on the grill. We served it along with refried black beans and a fresh pico de gallo salsa with lemon juice (secret ingredient #2!).

Finally, we served the spicy mexican cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, along with a cinnamon coconut and soy ice cream that refused to set because it was so warm in the kitchen, and a yummy chocolate ganache sauce. Almond meal just happened to already be in the recipe, so woot. This was by far our most popular dish. I still have people raving to me about the melty, gooey center of the cupcakes and the perfect spice to the coconut cream. We were pretty proud of this one.

After that, it was just a matter of waiting for the judges to decide and biting our fingernails off.

Judgement Day:

In the end, we got second place. We heard it was a pretty close race, with us only being off by one point. Though we had wanted to take home the big prize (or at least the gloating rights), we were so exhausted by the end that we were just amazed it was over. We had a great time! Mad props to my buddy big C for being such an awesome partner, the other teams for being such a pleasure to battle, to SDFSA for hosting and organizing a rad event, and the judges and audience for being so awesome. I had a blast and would do it again in a heartbeat.