Pie with nothing wrong

Pie with nothing wrong

I nailed it, the pie with nothing wrong in it! 

Gluten-free diary-free sugar-free vegan / parve crust

2 cups of Medjool dates 

2 cups of cashew nuts 

Lemon juice from 1/2 lemon

Vegetable oil (avocado, corn, grape, safflower - any vegetable oild without strong taste) - 1/4 cup

Vanilla extract - 1 tea spoon (optional) 

A pinch of salt

Blend dates with lemon juice, add cashews, salt, vanlla extract, oil and blend together. 
Press the paste against the bottom  and walls of the pan. 

Keep in the fridge for at least an hour, overnight or not at all. 

Gluten-free diary-free sugar-free vegan / parve filling

Genrous amount of cut cooked sweet squash

         For best results, use kabocha squash, delicata / sweet dumpling  squash

1 sour apple cut in small chunks

Mix together 

Cholesterol-free dairy-free meringue  --or-- egg-free sugar-free whipped cream

Egg whites from 3 eggs

Sugar powder or white sugar - 60 mg

Lemon juice

A pinch of salt

Cream of tartar or vinegar - small amount to stabalize the foam
Beat egg whites in a glass or metal bowl (no plastic)

Beat them slow, beat them faster, get some peaks before adding sugar  and other ingidients, 

beat the mix to get soft peaks, medium peaks or stiff peaks depending on your preference. 
Stiff peaks are nice for decore. 

--or--

Whip heavy cream (guess you can explore a vegan whipping cream option, I used a regular whipping cream / heavy cream) 

And now all together  

Start preheating the oven at 200F

Take the pan from the fride, add the filling, top with meringue

Bake for about 45 min 

--or--

Preheat the oven at 400F

Take the pan from the fride, add the filling 

Bake for abot 20 min

Cool

Add whipped cream on top

Bottomline 

Truth to be told, I almost nailed it down. 

It still contains either egg whites or dairy cream (unless you figure it out with coconut cream option). 

If egg whites are involved, you'll need sugar for meringue. But then it's parve. 

In any case the crust and the filling are vegan, parve and sugar-free.

 

Savoury galettes

I am talking about thin blintzes with buckwheat. They say crêpes are made with no yeast, but crêpes is the best way to describe this dish.

My galettes are made by pouring a thin liquid batter onto a hot frying pan and tilting the pan to embrace as much of cooking surface as possible. 

My version is lactose-free, dairy free and therefore vegan. When I try it with milk or sour milk or yoghurt I'll tell you all about it. But for now let's stick to the recipe that worked for me.

2 1/2 glasses of warm water, 3 eggs, 6 rounded tablespoons of buckwheat flour, 8 rounded tablespoons of of wheat flour, a teaspoon of yeast, a teaspoon of salt (flat), a rounded teaspoon of sugar... Mix all the ingredients well with a wooden spatula. Let it stand for 20-30 minutes. Add some water to make the batter perfectly liquid. Meanwhile heat your favourite crepe pan, grease it with oil. I use grape-seed oil  and I dip half or an apple or potato into to it to then create a thin oil film on the hot surface. I use ladle to pour batter onto the pan and then tilt the pan to spread the batter evenly. I flip crepe once it produced myriads of tiny holes and thickened.

Warning: these  are not gluten free. I experimented with proportions of buckwheat and wheat flour and 3:4 ratio worked best for me.


Now you can add anything you like to your crepe, roll it or fold it as an envelope. You may simply put some sour cream and chopped strawberries and roll it. You may stuff the envelope with ground beef or farmer's cheese and lightly fry it. Possibilities are endless.  

Cafe Kiraz

Warm nice day, slightly intoxicated youth in green, pipers in plaid skirts at Kendall Square...

Me bumping into this random place. I don't expect pleasurable food experience in plain places with plastic tables and obvious take-out ambiance. Therefore I try to avoid them. Life is too short to waste it on obviously bad food. But something attracted my attention - and I went in: grilled peaches and grilled plums salad.
I asked it "for here" and it was served on a ceramic plate - in a plastic box... Utensils are plastic. Espresso is served in paper glass and is bad. They won't deny you a glass of water though (paper glass, of course). Which is better than their coffee.

But the salad - oh, my. It was positively made to order.

I thought I won't be able to finish it. Which is not a compliment. It was humongous, densely packed in aforementioned plastic box - and as I thought mostly made of mesclun greens.

But I happened to be wrong. The salad had peaches and plums on top and dry cherries and almonds and blue cheese all over the place. So I put good size portion on my plate. And then some more. And then I had some cheese crumbs and almonds left on the plate, so I had to add more greens. And eventually I finished it all, no single leaf left. Which is a compliment.

This salad - great for your diet.

Grilled peaches and grilled plums salad

Dried bing cherries, blanched almonds, blue cheese over mesclun mix. Grilled peaches and plums on top.

And there are few more I'd like to try.
Vegan: grilled tofu salad.
Vegetarian:

Grilled beets salad

Red & yellow beets, sweet corn, goat cheese & pumpkin seeds over mesclun mix.

 Autumn salad

Toasted pecan, fresh sliced pear, cranberries, blue cheese, mesclun mix.

People rave about their sandwiches, so may be one day.

It's a strange place, really. It's extensive and interesting selection and reasonable prices ($8 tops for most salads and sandwiches but for simple ones it's $6) along with pretence to be Mediterranean or Turkish... But something tells me it's ethnic  favour is from elsewhere. What is the secret here?

Kiraz salads

YELP reviews  (146 as of March 17, 2012 - a lot)

Café Kiraz  

119 Hampshire St
Cambridge, MA 02139
Neighborhood: Inman Square

Vegan cosmetics: castor oil Hot Mama Lip Gloss

We here, at The All Natural Face, care more about our customers than we do the bottom line. Our mission is to provide you with truly pure cosmetics. We use the purest form available for each ingredient in our products. We use organic whenever possible...but do not throw around words for sales like a lot of companies do. The word Vegan is used on tons of products. All that really means is that it doesn’t contain animal products. If you are striving for purely vegan products please read the labels carefully. Just because it is vegan does not mean they can’t put chemicals in there…just not those derived from animal sources.

For all you vegans out there….did you know that carmine is ground up African cockroaches!? Love that tube of bright red lipstick? Read the label. If it contains carmine….that is what you are ingesting. To bring that a little more into the light….the average woman ingests 6-10 lbs of lipstick over their lifetime.

We then formulate from there, making stuff from its purest, simplest forms... We then test it on human guinea pigs…no animal testing here! Our products and raw materials are not tested on animals...


Many people have converted from Bare Minerals, Everyday Minerals, Bare Escentuals, Physicians Formula, and many, many more. The secret is that we use pure natural ingredients here. No bismuth oxychloride, parabens, talc, carmine, silk powder, d &c lake dyes, just to mention a few!



7) Lake lake (lac) dyes: those contain lac, which is rubbery secretion of some insects.

6) Silk powder: obviously non-vegan, comes from cocoons of larvae of silkworms.

5) Carmine: carmine is a  pigment of a bright-red colour obtained from the aluminium salt of carminic acid, which is produced by some scale insects, such as the cochineal scale and the Polish cochineal (wiki). 


4) Talc: how this is non-vegan? Dolomite and silica is one way to compose talc. They contain  bio materials from long long ago. 

3) Parabens: parabens are found naturally in plants, nothing non-vegan about them. The rumour is they cause breast cancer. Scary! Because no matter hat you do in regards to cosmetics, they are still everywhere, like in blueberries!



2) Bismuth: unuasually low toxicity for a heavy metal; used all over the place, in pharmaceutics (Pepto-Bismol etc.), cosmetics. Formerly used to treat syphilis, nowadays used to treat gastric ulcers and like.  Vegan!


1) No animal testing:  I protest. Humans are also animals. No vegan or vegetarian will eat a human or even drink his blood.
Non-vegetarians do eat other humans as pictured in 400+ Cannibal movies.

Price: $4.60 

Ingredients: Cold pressed castor oil, Candelillia wax, Mica, Oxides

Red Hot Mama Lip Gloss

Ice cream recipes

Strawberry parfait 

Mine is not exactly ice cream, It's rather parfait.

Beat (1 cup of cut strawberries, 1 cup of whipping cream and 1 teaspoon of sugar) x as many batches as you want in the blender. Keep in the freezer in small batches and than thaw as needed in the refrigerator. Light and not too sweet dessert.

Three-minute Ice Cream 

from  Anne's Food (Stockholm, Sweden)

500 ml heavy cream 1 can sweetened condensed milk (about 400 g)mix-ins, optionalWhisk the cream into soft peaks. Open the can of milk, stir into the cream. Stir in any mix-ins, and pour into a tin. Freeze until completely frozen - 5-6 hours, or overnight.

  

Banana & Mango "Ice Cream"

 from Cloudberry Dreams blog (Melbourne, Australia) 

4 large, ripe bananas

2 large ripe mangoes

If you’re after a super-creamy product, peel and roughly chop the bananas and mangoes (removing the stones from the mangoes) and freeze overnight in a container. Otherwise, simply peel roughly chop the fruit and use it fresh if you’d prefer a slightly more sorbet-like result.

Place fruit pieces in a food processor ( a blender would also do nicely) and process for around 2 minutes, or until completely smooth. The consistency of the mixture should resemble a thick soup...

  The rest of the recipe is in  Banana-Mango Ice Cream recipe entry

and requires some repetitive blending,freezing and defreezing. 

By the way, it's a vegan dessert.

DIET & DIETING
Since I'm totally convinced that whatever food you make yourself is much healthier than processed foods you buy in the store, I believe that any of the above desserts are healthy and good for your diet. Unlike dieting which is typically not good for you. Eating good foods is a better way to become or stay well and fit than not eating particular foods.