Vegetation

So today I got busy. I've been meaning to make Hommus for ages. J (4) who is so completely in love with chickpeas she will eat them straight from the tin (blech) also adores hummus and I like to send it to school, although I'm not so keen on the smell of them when they come home :P Goodness knows, their teacher probably curses me like crazy when I send it, little bunch of garlic breaths!!! Anyway, as I keep moaning I've put on so much weight and I wanted to try and keep it as healthy as possible so I went searching through Susan's Fat Free Vegan Blog and found this. So off we went ahead and made it (with help from the kids who basically stood there wanting to eat chickpeas). I made a regular version just as she said (only double) and scooped out a few tablespoons of it to a separate bowl for me and added a number of drops of liquid smoke and a big shake of smoked paprika. YUM! I LOVE it!!! ) (too bad any amount of hummus gives me a big belly ache, but I'll be eating this one anyway).

I won't worry about repeating Susan's recipe, it's clear as a bell and she has a printer friendly version too! But try it! It's awesome! J said that it tasted even better than the shop one (and given that I get about 250g from the shop for about $4 and each tin of chickpeas cost me 99 cents you can't go wrong! It made about 600g at a guess, probably more!)

What else we got up to was Vegan Banana Bread. It seems like everyone in the blogging world has been making some type of banana bread and I had me a craving. So I did some searching and found this posted by Isa over in the PPK recipe section. I did some major fiddling with the recipe though and here's what I eventually did. And yes, I understand that it's a total joke to make a low sugar, low fat baked bread and then throw in half a kilo of choc chips but meh, sue me :P

Choc Chip Banana Bread

1/6 cup Brown Sugar
1/6 cup white Sugar
1/4 cup Margarine, at room temp
3/4 cup Applesauce (mine was sweetened because that's all I could find)
3 very ripe Bananas, mashed well
2 cups Self Raising Flour
1/4 cup Rice Milk, mixed with 1 tsp Apple Cider Vinegar (I forgot the vinegar!) plus extra in case
1 1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract
1 tsp Cinnamon
1/4 tsp Allspice
1/2 tsp Salt
1/4-1/2 cup choc chips (if you're nuts like me and rip the bag open instead of cutting it then drop in most of the bag never mind! The more chocolate the merrier after all!)

Preheat oven to 176C (aha, make it 175ish) (350F).

Spray an 8x4 bread pan with non stick cooking spray, or lightly coat with margarine.

Sift together flour, baking soda, salt and spices.

Cream together the margarine, applesauce and sugars. Add bananas, soy milk and vanilla.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry. Mix well and add more milk if it looks way too dry (I just winged it but it was probably about 1/4 cup to 1/2 cup). Add chocolate chips Pour batter into pan. Bake for an hour to an hour 10 minutes (mine took the extra 10).
I have to confess that we didn't let it cool down completely before cutting slices so the choc bits melted all over the place and it just looked like someone had spread it with nutella or something so I didn't photograph the cut the pieces but this was the most moist, soft, delectable banana bread I think I've ever had! YUM! Next time I might try making it with some carob (chocolate doesn't like me much, we have a love hate relationship, I LOVE it, it HATES me :( ) or maybe even just leave it at banana bread.

After all that yumminess today I was feeling a lot like something fairly simple and not TOO heavy (it is still freezing today so I didn't want a mid summer snacky type meal). So just for fun 2 Australian Eatwell Vegetable Patties, Sour Dough Rye Bread with Susan's Fat Free Smokey Hummus and a massive salad (just some prepackaged one I got at the shop) with me throwing in extra Alfalfa Sprouts, Pea Shoots and some other type of sprout (can't remember, they're little green balls and yummy!). I then topped the whole lot with a drizzling of Fat Free Ranch Dressing (I like the full fat version SO much better ::sob::) and that was as exciting as it got, heh.

Posted by Vegetation at 7:31 PM |    

Labels: Miscellaneous Things, Sweet Stuff, Vegan