Sunday, March 31, 2013

Easter treats

I have had another nice weekend visiting family to celebrate Easter. Honorable mentions this time go to my grandmother. Her contribution to the meal was salad and she made sure to get a dressing I could eat. It was very kind and is definitely appreciated. She also gave me first pick on the Easter chocolate to make sure I got dark chocolate. Little things like this make me warm and fuzzy inside.

Anyway, let's move on to the food! There was the typical Easter meal for the omnis. I contributed a Veggie Pot Pie. It was super yummy and enjoyed by most. Only one family member skipped out on trying it. (although one person did 'accidentally' take some not realizing it was vegan). I received good feedback for the pot pie so I am sharing the recipe. It's based off of one from allrecipes.com and can be found here. However, I made modifications to it.

Vegan Pot Pie

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup of frozen peas and carrots
  • 1/2 cup of veggies of your choosing
  • 1/3 cup of chopped onion
  • 2 cups of chickpeas (drained and rinsed)
  • 1/3 cup of flour
  • 2/3 cup of almond milk
  • 3/4 cup of vegetable broth
  • 2 unbaked pie crusts (check ingredients to ensure vegan-ness)
  • Spices (I used Italian and onion powder)

 

Steps:

  1. Pre-heat oven to 425 degrees F.
  2. Boil peas and carrots to desired tenderness. Drain and set aside.
  3. Fry onion and chickpeas (and other veggie of your choosing) until the onion is translucent or everything is cooked through. Add spices. Stir in the flour, almond milk, and vegetable broth.
  4. Pour filling into the waiting pie crusts, placing one on top of the other. If frozen, allow them to thaw enough that you can pinch the crusts together. Cut slits in the top.
  5. Bake in the pre-heated oven for 30-35 minutes. Check part-way through and cover with tinfoil if the crusts are browning too quickly. (I didn't have to do this).
  6. Cool for ten minutes and dig in!

In my pre-ovo-vegetarian days, I would also contribute a kick-ass dessert. However, this is an area that I'm struggling with. I was moderately pleased with my Vegan Cadbury Creme Eggs but they didn't blow me away. I did receive compliments on them though. I had also used the filling part of the recipe to try to make creme egg brownies. These were not successful. I cut the icing sugar down to make it easier to work with, drizzled it on the brownies, and poured melted chocolate on top. They are edible but you can't really taste the icing so it wasn't worth it.

It's a bit of a challenge for me to provide mediocre desserts since that used to be my speciality. But currently, I just can't compete with contributions made by other family members when they bring oh-so-good butter tarts covered in milk chocolate. I've pictured them here because they are truly yummy and the closest I could get is a picture. They are in no-way vegan or ovo-veg but I wanted you to see the kind of competition I'm up against.

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