Dessert Success

Resting dogs

I started the day with a Fruit Salad and some of the Orange Oatmeal Coffee Cake. The salad was made with peaches, blueberries, pear and cashew nuts. These fruits have so much more flavor than the melon mixes that most restaurants use.  I spread some peanut butter and apple jelly on the slices of coffee cake.  Once fresh fruit season comes around, I hope to make some fruit preserves.

Lunch was a salad and an Olive Bread Roll spread with Hummus.  The salad was made with spinach as the greens with some black olives, cherries, and sugar snap peas. I used the Cranberry Vinaigrette to dress it. The bread and hummus were the ones I made earlier in the week.

Dinner was my version of a Blue  Plate Special of meat, potatoes and a vegetable.  For the 'meat' I tried a new variety of faux sausage. This one was made from soy protein and had a much better consistency than the last one I bought.  I was able to grill it along side Tommy's chicken sausage.  It was spicy.  The heat was a bit more intense than I like. It was probably just right for most people.

I finally used the rest of the butter on the Onion Gravy and Mashed Potatoes.  From this point on I will be using Earth Balance.  For the gravy, onions were cooked in butter then I added whole wheat flour as a thickening agent.  That cooked for a minute then I slowly  added vegetable stock until it reached a gravy thickness.  The potatoes were boiled and hand mashed with butter and oat milk.  For the vegetable, I sauteed collard greens, broccoli, green beans, and sugar snap peas in vegetable stock.

For dessert we had some Lemon Tarts.  This was a big time success.  I adapted a recipe from an old Bon Appetite magazine.  I started sugar, corn starch and water. After that started to simmer, I added a mix of silken tofu and lemon juice.  The original recipe called for 8 egg yolks that were beaten.  I used almost a cup of tofu and beat it with the lemon juice. Some lemon zest was added and the mixture cooked until it boiled. That was removed from the heat and half a stick of Earth Balance was added in.  The curd was transferred to the refrigerator to cool down.  The crust for the tarts was a basic vegetable shortening crust with no adaptions necessary.  Once everything was cool,  the lemon curd was spooned into the crust.  The curd was nice and thick and would accommodate fresh fruit as decoration. We just ate them plain.  This came out prefect. I had extra curd leftover that I can use as a dressing for a fruit salad.