Squirrel’s Vegan Kitchen

Thanks to everyone for all your camping suggestions. I have to admit, we’re not going real camping. We will be sleeping in a tent at a campground at a music festival, with food vendors, water, toilets and the like. I have yet to truly go camping and while being out in the wilderness sounds great, I think I would like it better with a cabin to retire to. For now, I’ll just enjoy listening to people jam on guitars under the stars and fumbling with my Maglight in the middle of the night in a Honeybucket.

There is supposedly vegan-friendly food there, but I don’t want to hold my breath, nor buy food for two for every meal, so I’m going to make some serious muffins, maybe some granola bars too and bring nuts, fresh fruit, plenty of water and Clif Bars and hope for the best.

And now, the food!

Yum, yum! This was from a dinner we had a couple of weeks ago- it was so, so good that I forgot to take a picture until we’d moved on to seconds!

Manicotti filled with Real Food Daily ricotta cheese, with the addition of 1 cup of fresh basil, and some seasoned and grilled zucchini on the side, it was delicious! I also spread some garlicky Earth Balance on some French bread loaves (not Italian, I know) and browned them under the broiler for some serious garlic bread, but of course that was all eaten before I remembered the camera.

For dessert, the mother lode:

Vegan tiramisu! As you can see, this isn’t set up like a traditional tiramisu, with the ladyfingers and all. The thought of all that bored me, so I went with a tiramisu layer cake, which I’ve been seeing a lot more lately. I used a 6″ pan, which made a classy looking cake, the perfect size for a party of 4. The bottom layer had some coffee baked into it and the top layer was plain. Each layer had holes poked into it and espresso drizzled on them and it was filled with a creamy marscaphony filling involving Tofutti cream cheese and Kahlua. For the icing, I just firmed up the filling with a little more sugar and garnished it with some chocolate shavings. Yum! While I don’t drink coffee, I have a deep love for things with that rich flavor and aroma.

Not Italian (but it has zucchini in it!) but tasty nonetheless:

Herbed chickpeas and zucchini over a ricey pilafey thing from, where else, Trader Joe’s. The pilaf has Mediterranean couscous, red quinoa, orzo pasta, baby chickpeas and some other random grains. The chickpeas were cooked with sauteed onion and garlic and loads of herbs (oregano, sage, thyme, basil) and in the last few minutes of cooking I tossed in some diced zucchini.

Finally, a good reason to bust out the spelt flour I scored at Veg Fest:

At a recent trip to Food Fight I bought a new cookbook called Little Vegan Monsters. Naturally, my fingers did the walking to the back of the book and I found myself paging through the desserts. The majority of the book is wheat free and when I saw these brownies and remembered my flour, I knew I had found my calling for the evening. I was a little concerned with baking with pure spelt flour and not a blend, like I normally do, but these brownies quickly showed me that I was wrong to ever doubt the holy union of flour and chocolate. I added a half cup of raspberries to the mix and they were delicious. The spelt flour had a crumb and mouth-feel like the middle ground between white flour and whole wheat pastry flour, it wasn’t as delicate as white, but not as gritty as WWPF. I see big things in store for spelt and I.

I hope you all are doing well! More food and adventures to come!