Crispy tempeh, Halloween cupcakes & shiny mushrooms

We discovered a really yummy tempeh recipe in the Student’s Go Vegan Cookbook. First you bake it, then coat with seasoned cornmeal and fry for a couple of minutes. The marinade is so flavourful and gets absorbed really well while its baking. I’d be curious to try it with tofu as well. Be careful though, the first time we made it I found it way too salty so we tried again using tamari instead of soy sauce and it was much better. Here is the recipe with a few changes in brackets:

- 8 oz tempeh, cut into slices

For the marinade:

- 1/3 cup soy sauce (use tamari instead… which is always a good idea!)

- 1/3 cup water

- 1 1/2 Tbsp maple syrup

- 1/3 cup orange juice (the juice from a medium orange is nearly perfect)

- 1 clove garlic, minced

For the coating:

- 1/2 cup cornmeal (you only need about 1/4 cup or less)

- 1 tsp dried thyme

- 1 tsp cumin

- 1/8 to 1/4 tsp red pepper flakes

- 1/8 tsp salt (I would omit this – its salty enough)

- Dijon mustard

- 1 Tbsp olive oil

Combine all the ingredients for the marinade and pour over the tempeh in a small baking pan. Cover with aluminum foil and bake at 350 for an hour, flipping the tempeh after 30 minutes. Spread the cornmeal and spices onto a plate, then spread a bit of Dijon mustard on each side of the tempeh and coat it with the cornmeal mix. Fry in olive oil for about a minute, until browned. We had it with homemade fries and steamed broccoli:

I know its way too late to be posting Halloween stuff, but I don’t care! I made the chocolate cake recipe from The Joy of Vegan Baking (but made into cupcakes) with some spooky orange icing. The icing wasn’t as orange as I wanted it to be, but I didn’t have red food colouring because you can never tell if its vegan or not (the ingredient list always just says “colour”). Anyway I had some weird neon purple that I mixed with yellow and it still kinda worked. Oh ya, the cake was soft, moist and chocolate-y and very… traditional. I would almost call it my favourite recipe but without doing a side-by-side comparison I can’t be sure. I also carved a pumpkin, which Jon named “M. Pumpkin” in an attempt to avoid specifying its gender and marital status… too bad M. is the abbreviation for Monsieur in french! Nice try… Here he is, about to devour the cupcakes:

One last thing, and this has nothing to do with food, but we found these cool mushrooms in the forest one day and I think its a really cool photo.

They’re so shiny and disgusting! If I knew how to use Photoshop, I would definitely try to edit myself in so it looks like I’m sitting under one of them…