Gluten-Free Vegan Cream Cheese Chocolate Chip Cookies with Muscovado and Fleur de Sel

It will probably take you about 2 seconds of scrolling through this blog of mine to see that I have zero problems with gluten. So why, you may ask, has there been a significant increase of gluten-free posts recently? The answer is simple, a good friend of mine is gluten intolerant and she's coming to my wedding, which means it's time to figure out how to make gluten-free, vegan desserts that don't taste like they were made out of sand! And lucky for you, dear reader, I will be posting about this fun learning process along the way.

For these cookies, I started with the recipe for the supposed "Best Chocolate Chunk Cookies You'll Ever Have," which Joanna Goddard posted on her blog, A Cup of Jo. However, as you'll see if you navigate on over to the original recipe, it's gluten-free, but not vegan. But since the only non-vegan ingredient was the egg, that was easy enough to substitute out with my tried and true egg substitute. Other than that little vegan modification, I stayed true to the recipe. In the end, they had a great flavor, but still had that crumbly, kind of grainy texture to them.

So I thought and I thought and then I saw Bake or Break's post for Cream Cheese Chocolate Chip Cookies and wondered if cream cheese might save my grainy gluten-free cookies.

So I tried it and...........it worked! I still think my non-gluten-free chocolate chip cookies are better, but these ones I would say are in about the 90th percentile of all chocolate chip cookies, which I think is pretty good, especially for gluten-free.

I might still play around with the proportions a bit to see if I can make them even better. Or I might just call this a win and advance into the gluten-free cakes. 

Vegan Lentil Loaf

As I was casually looking through some of my favorite blogs, I came across Fat-Free Vegan Kitchen's post for Dreena Burton's lentil loaf and on a whim decided that's what I wanted for dinner. I read through the recipe, checking off in my mind whether I had the ingredients and concluded the only thing I didn't have was the bulgar. Before canceling my dinner plans altogether, I did a quick Google search and found that quinoa would probably be a reasonable substitute. So I got to cooking and was halfway through, when I discovered I only had 3 tablespoons of ketchup, not the required 7-8. Yes that's right folks, I had quinoa, nutritional yeast, even flax meal, but not ketchup. Since it was already 9 o'clock at night, going to the store was really not a desirable option. After a slight panic, I remembered my stash of fast food ketchup packets I had been holding on to for far longer than I care to admit. I unfortunately barely made a dent in my ketchup packet supply, but fortunately, I had enough to finish making my dinner!

All in all, I would say this is probably in the top 10 of lentil loaves I've had. I think the best is still the one I ate a St. Dames, a vegan restaurant in Seattle. But who knows, if I had used bulgar, this might have given St. Dames a run for their money.

Sourdough Bread

A few days ago I posted this picture:

and asked if anyone knew what it was. Well, albeit hard to believe, this bowl of bubbling mush transformed into these:

I unfortunately cannot take credit for these lovely and delicious loaves of sourdough. That recognition goes to the bread master of the family, my father. And after seeing the consistent nurturing he provided to his starter (the afore mentioned bowl of mush), I don't know if I'll be able to take credit for any loaf of sourdough any time soon. That might have to be a project to save for when I grow up and am more patient. Plus, why go through such work when I can do nothing and still get fresh sourdough?

So how did he do it? Click through for the recipe.

There's Something Brewing...

Can you guess what it is?