Real American Apple Pie

Mmm, made from scratch apple pie. You're not an American if you haven't baked or eaten apple pie at least once in your life. And if you haven't ever thrown a pie/shoved someone's face in it/accidentally dropped a pie on a sidewalk on the way to a neighbor's pool party, you haven't had a childhood, either.

So back to the real, good, made-from-scratch apple pie. You're going to need pie crust (recipe here) along with a couple other ingredients, namely, eight apples.

They can be apples of any color/variety. I've done Granny Smith before and this one uses Golden apples, which were the only ones available in French springtime. This is a great recipe to use for Thanksgiving, but why not make it for Easter as well?

Ingredients:

8 apples
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup vegan butter
1/4 cup water
3 tablespoons flour
Pie crust

#1. Do the pie crust. It takes a while. When you're done, separate the dough in two (a slightly bigger dough for the crust, and a smaller one for the lattice work on top).

#2. Peel, core, and slice the apples thinly.

#3. Melt the butter in a saucepan, and add the flour. Stir until combined, and add the water.

#4. Add the sugar a little bit at a time, and bring to a boil. Then, reduce the heat and let simmer. The sauce needs to be slightly liquid.

#5. Arrange the sliced apples inside the pie crust in neat circles, packing the slices together.

#6. Preheat the oven, then cover the pie with a lattice work. If you don't know how to do it, watch the friendly video below.


#7. Pour the sauce on top for a crunchy sugary touch.

#8. Bake for 40 minutes at 180°C. Enjoy!

Vegan pot pie

Now, what does one do when there are fresh zucchini, asperagus, and carrots in the refrigerator?

Vegan pot pie, of course!

I came upon this recipe by chance and adapted it to whatever I had in my refrigerator. I used these vegetables right here :)

Ingredients for the filling:

One large zucchini
A carrot
A can of corn
Half of a leek
Chickpeas (quantity is up to you)
Three asparagii
1 onion
2 cups vegetable broth
Bay leaf
1/4 cup flour
1/4 non-dairy milk
1 tsp. Paprika
1 tsp. Thym
2 tablespoon vegan butter


And you'll also need pie crust. Check out the recipe for pie crust here.

Steps
1. Make the vegetable broth and let the bay leaf simmer in it for about 5 minutes.
1. In a seperate pot, sauté the onion in the butter for 10 minutes, until soft.
2. Add paprika, thym, and flour. Stir until combined, and cook for 5 minutes.
3. Add milk.
4. Add the vegetable broth and take the bay leaf out. Add remaining ingredients, except for the asparagi (I added them on top of the pie,  at the end).
5. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat, and cook for 10 minutes. It should look bubbly and sort of creamy. Pre heat your oven for 15 minutes at 180°C.
6. Place inside pie crust and decorate with asparagi.

Almost done. . .now it just needs to bake!

7. Cover the pie crust and make a few holes in the top with a knife. Bake for 20 minutes.

A slice of vegan pot pie when it's finished:

Vegan pizza n°2

This is just an idea of the wondrous ingredients you can add to a hearty vegan pizza. And this is also the third pizza I make this past two weeks- it's becoming my favorite dinner to whip up at the last moment.

The beautiful place mat is made by my mom. She sells them in Brazil.

This delicious pizza has:

• Purple cabbage
• Swiss chard
• Dried tomatoes
• Black olives
• Corn
• Soft tofu
• Olive oil & herbes de Provence :)
• Tomato sauce.

Basically, spread the tomato sauce onto the dough, and top with everything else. 

Here's the recipe for the pizza dough.  I substituted the white flour with whole wheat flour and it turned out beautiful. Enjoy!

Vegan pizza with mushroom topping!

A couple weeks ago, I showed you guys how to cheat by making pizzas in 3 minutes. 

Here's the real thing. You can top your vegan pizza in many, many ways. I chose to start off simple, with only three ingredients: onions, mushrooms, and broccoli stem. You can also use spinach instead of broccoli stem, or chopped bell pepper. As there's no sauce involved, this pizza topping makes a dry pizza- it's good for a light snack.

To start with, you'll need pizza dough. Click here for instructions. Once that's done,

1. Preheat your oven to 180°C.
2. Chop the broccoli in thin strips, dice your onion, and cut your mushroom in thin slices. They should look like this:

3. Heat oil in a skillet. Grill the broccoli stems, then add the other ingredients until mushrooms are browned and onions are transparent. Let cool for a little bit.

4. Spread your pizza dough on a pizza pan, oil it, and spread your topping over it.

Before going in the oven. . .

5. Bake in oven for about 30 minutes.

Vegan Thanksgiving : Spaghetti Squash!

Hey guys! :)

I grew up celebrating Thanksgiving with my family in the United States. As I grew up, though, I started to question my turkey-beliefs and eventually I gave up Turkey-day all together. Mostly because celebrating Thanksgiving doesn't feel right when you know it's about how the pilgrims invaded North America and killed off the natives. But today, Thanksgiving is about gathering the entire family together for a good meal, being thankful for everything in your life. For that, I still hang on to some Thanksgiving values.

Minus the turkey, of course.

This year I made three vegan Thanksgiving recipes. Check them out!

Spaghetti Squash with tomato sauce

You will need:

A spaghetti squash
Tomato sauce, or make your own with a couple of tomatoes, garlic, onion, and basil!
A friend to help scoop the seeds out and to share your meal with

#1. Preheat your oven to 220°C. While your oven is heating, make several large cuts in your squash. This is IMPORTANT. The squash might explode if you don't do this. Even if you make a lot of cuts, there might be a time when the squash starts to hiss like a pressure cooker. Don't worry. It's the air escaping.

#2. Cut the squash in half length-wise and scoop the seeds out. Save the seeds to bake for a tasty salty snack later, or throw them out.

#3. Take a fork and shred the squash with it. You'll start to see the spaghetti strands. Scoop that out into a bowl.

#4. When you're done, top with tomato sauce!



 Enjoy the wintery goodness for squash.

How to make mini pizzas in 3 minutes

Got one hour between one class and another and you have to eat? But you really, really don't want to eat insta-noodles again, do you?

No worries!! There are healthier alternatives!

Here's how to transform whatever you have in your refrigerator into a delicious lunch.

#1. First, gather up all the ingredients that you have in your refrigerator.  I used a tomato, tomato sauce, tofu, and the rest of my whole wheat bread. But you can use an onion, bell peppers, zucchini, etc. Any  veggie will work.

Start by cutting your bread and placing the sauce on top (or olive oil, if you don't have sauce).

#2. Decorate your "pizzas" with the veggies that you have. Season with oregano, basil, olive oil and salt.

#3. Bake until your veggies are cooked. Voilà! Enjoy your meal!

Lasagna from Provence

Greetings from Provence!

Provence is known for its lovely lavender fields, olive-rich scented airs, and bouquets of sunflowers decorating the dining room table. From this sun-kissed region you also get recipes using its main produce : tomatoes, eggplants, and zucchini. Since it's an ecological crime to buy these beauties in winter (they're stricltly summer-friendly produce) I'm using them as much as I can before winter hits.

One of these fabulous recipes with three simple main ingredients can be transformed into a lasagna. Mmm!

You'll need:

• Lasagna pasta
• A lot of tomatoes to make sauce from scratch (about 8) or you can do half from scratch, half with supermarket bought sauce like I did.
• An eggplant
• A zucchini
• An onion
• Garlic
• Herbes de Provence (optional)

Here's how to assemble the Provence Lasagna:

1) Preheat oven. Chop the eggplant and zucchini into round slices, not very thick. The thickness depends on whether you the razor-thin touch or leaning towards the chunky side. I went for chunky.

2) Lay the eggplant slices on a baking sheet. Sprinkle with salt and bake in preheated oven for 5 minutes. This will get rid of the bitter aftertase.

3) Dice onion, garlic and tomatoes. Sauté the onions and garlic in a pot with olive oil. When onions are transparent and garlic is golden, add tomatoes. Keep stirring until the tomatoes dissolve. Add salt and herbes de Provence.

Note: Again, I like my sauce chunky. I cut into realtively large pieces of tomatoes and I didn't skin them. If you want perfect, puree-like sause, skin the tomatoes and remove the seeds.

If you cheated and got supermarket tomato sauce, now is the time to add it to the onions and garlic. Add Herbes de Provence anyways and salt if needed.

4) Once sauce is done, lay it on the table next to the lasagna baking dish. Start assembling lasagna like this: first, cover the bottom in sauce so that lasagna won't burn. Lay a layer of lasagna pasta on top. Cover with sauce again. Make a layer of eggplant. Cover with sauce and pasta. On top of that, zucchini. Repeat until ingredients are gone. Make sure that you have enough sauce before laying down another layer of lasagna pasta - you don't want to leave it uncovered or it won't cook.

5) Bake in oven for about half an hour or until it starts to smell really good.

Enjoy!