Recipes

♪ Love was such an easy game to play ♪

I'm vegetarian-going-on-vegan. Not eating dairy becomes slightly less of a choice by the day, yay self-inflicted lactose intolerance. It was only a few years ago I made the swap, and I've never been great at cooking for myself (occasionally adequate, but never great). For a while I used Hello Fresh, but eventually I stopped; a few months later I turned to Factor for about a year and a half and stopped cooking entirely. I also got into Huel during that time. (Drink Huel! It's good, really!)

Now I've finally gotten tired of the dozen or so vegetarian and vegan Factor meals and gone back to cooking for myself again, with the added help of having Huel to let me eat smaller portion sizes and therefore need to cook fewer times each week. I quickly burned through all the vegan prepared food options at Costco and I've eaten almost too much of the couple of things I can still cook by heart, so I kind of need to lock in and start upping my recipe game in short order before the whole charade goes bottoms up.

Pirating Hello Fresh

Part of the reason I stopped doing Hello Fresh in the first place was, like Factor, I worked through all the vegan and vegetarian recipes fairly quickly, and at some point you start thinking, hey, I could just buy this stuff at the grocery store and cook it myself, saving hundreds of dollars a month. That worked great for about two months before I had some kind of cooking mental breakdown I still don't quite understand.

The year and a half Factor break plus Huel was healing, but now I've forgotten all my Hello Fresh recipes. I went through the stack to review them, and there are indeed some bangers in there, and not just bowl slop with cream, either. Unfortunately some of my favorite ones *are* bowl slop with cream, and given I'm only cooking vegan at home, I'll either need to figure out a replacement for the cream base or put those recipes to bed.

I store all my recipes in Nextcloud's Cookbook app on my Nextcloud instance, and thankfully Hello Fresh doesn't block scraping, so it was straightforward to add all the Hello Fresh recipes I wanted to keep to Nextcloud so I can edit them when/if I figure out vegan versions of things.

Some reading reveals cashew cream as the go-to cream sauce base, and fortunately during the break I came into a second-hand heavy duty Ninja blender, so I should have no trouble atomizing some cashews. This brings us to my secret weapon.

The Power of Science

Not my science, someone else's. It turns out that if you tell your mom you're thinking of baking some ridiculously vegan-gluten-free-whatever type baked good there is a small(?) chance you will proc her getting sort of existentially annoyed at the concept and about a week later the greatest cookbook you'll ever own will show up at your front door.

This is Vegan For Everybody from America's Test Kitchen. I was extremely dubious at first, having had enough experiences with vegan "versions" of things to mistrust the entire concept, but it took only a single baking experiment for me to become ATK's biggest fan.

(My copy came from ThriftBooks. At time of writing they're available for ~$6.50 USD. Buy this cookbook!)

I believe I started with the chocolate chip cookies--or I might as well have. At any rate, they're *indistinguishable* from non-vegan chocolate chip cookies, y'know, the kind with egg and butter in them. Every recipe in the book (that I've tried, but at this point I'm a true believer) is like this. I've admittedly only baked, but between the cookies, the brownies, the blueberry muffins, and the pancakes, I have no reason to believe America's Test Kitchen knows how to lose.

The recipes themselves are only half the value, though; the introduction consists of a 30+ page survey of vegan ingredients, including the aforementioned cashew cream but going on to cover every kind of vegan dairy, analysis of essentially all relevant grains, tofu, beans, the pros and cons of oat vs. almond vs. coconut milk for use in baking, and four whole pages on egg substitutes.

I'll reproduce some of my favorite recipes in the appendix of this post, because everyone should know that vegan baking is exactly as good as non-vegan baking (better, even! fewer biohazards!), but reading the recipes here is no substitute for the real thing; besides the introduction, the original recipes include generally extensive discussion of why the occasionally delightfully odd ingredient choices work, which is excellent for building intuition. Buy this cookbook!

I have to open a book..?

Unfortunately if you open the ATK link above and try clicking on one of the recipes, you'll see their little popup asking you to log in for your 14 day free trial. Friendly to scrapers, they are not. And as much as I love this book, I'd really prefer not spending however many hours manually typing the recipes into my Nextcloud instance (or even copy-pasting them from the web).

I attempted a solution to this problem earlier this year:

Recipe import screen

Recipe review screen

That is, I vibecoded a little tool that was intended to supplement or replace the Nextcloud Cookbook "download recipe from URL" feature:

• It supports downloading from URL using recipe.json data, but also via scraping, and furthermore it supports raw text input and image upload.
• The images get OCR'd, and all unstructured text (from scraping, direct input, and OCR) is run through an LLM to be cleaned up and structured into recipe data.
• Then, the structured data is displayed against the input, for user review/editing/approval.
• Finally, approved recipes are added to Nextcloud via the Cookbook API (and WebDAV for, e.g., images, because Cookbook recipes are just files in your normal Nextcloud filesystem).

I'm between Anthropic API keys at the moment (er, something like that), so I haven't used it in a while, but I know that realistically if I want to have any hope of actually cooking out of Vegan For Everyone I need the ingredient lists accessible on my phone (I must make food decisions when the inspiration strikes), so presumably I have a date with some API credits.

Until I get around to doing that, pray for me as I contemplate whether I can stand to eat spaghetti three nights a week for the third week in a row.

The kanji of the day is 食

• Its Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course keywords are EAT and FOOD.
• Its readings are く, た, は, ショク, and ジキ.

The radical hiding under the roof is 良/GOOD, so you can see that it's GOOD to EAT some tasty vegan FOOD at home under your roof. (I promise I didn't start out intending to do this many themed kanji of the day, I've just been behind on KKLC for a while so I can't choose something I learned day of)

Appendix

These are all recipes that I've made not only for myself but also for my family and extended family, most of whom have no dietary restrictions and all of whom have very high standards for chocolate chip cookies and brownies especially. No complaints, and indeed, many compliments!

Chocolate Chip Cookies

The secret ingredient to this one is almond butter! ATK says it's where the "toffee" flavor comes from that you'd usually get from the milk butter. Also, note that our replacement for the eggs is... nothing!

• 2 cups (10 oz) all-purpose flour
• 1½ teaspoons baking powder
• ¼ teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1⅓ cups packed (9⅓ oz) organic light brown sugar
• ½ cup coconut oil, melted and cooled
• 6 tablespoons water, room temperature
• ⅓ cup unsalted creamy almond butter
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1¼ cups (7½ oz) semisweet chocolate chips or chunks

1. Whisk dries together. Whisk wets together (sugar is a wet). Fold dries into wets until smooth, then fold in chocolate chips.

2. Rest dough at room temperature 1-4 hours. (You can refrigerate up to 24 hours, but let it sit at room temperature 30 minutes before baking.)

3. Bake at 350°F on middle rack, 12-14 minutes.

Fudgy Brownies

I especially like this one because... there is no secret ingredient! I think the baking powder is the closest we come, to get a little extra rise, and you do admittedly have to be careful with it so you don't get bitter brownies. Don't skimp on the Dutch-processed cocoa, it's chemically different from normal cocoa (neutral instead of acidic) and that's relevant here.

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ¾ teaspoon salt
• 1 cup boiling water
• 3 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped fine
• ¾ cup Dutch-processed cocoa powder
• 2½ cups organic sugar
• ½ cup vegetable oil
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• ½ cup bittersweet or semisweet chocolate chips

1. Whisk flour/baking powder/salt together. Whisk boiling water, unsweetened chocolate, and cocoa until melted and combined. Whisk in sugar, oil, vanilla. Stir dries into wets, then fold in chocolate chips.

2. Grease a 13x9" pan, or use 2 sheets of aluminum foil to create a sling. Scrape batter into pan and smooth.

3. Bake at 350°F, 30-35 minutes, until a survey toothpick comes out mostly clean.

Pancakes

The ground golden flaxseed is our egg substitute, providing binding and structure. I had some trouble getting my hands on this, but one bag is probably a lifetime supply for how often I make pancakes. Also, my oat milk is usually not room temperature. Sometimes I microwave it for a few seconds for a lark.

• 2 cups (10 oz) all-purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons organic sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon ground golden flaxseeds
• ¾ teaspoon salt
• 2 cups unsweetened oat milk, room temperature
• 3 tablespoons coconut oil, melted and cooled
• 2 tablespoons solid coconut oil
• 2 tablespoons lemon juice

1. Whisk dries together. Whisk wets together. Add wets to dries, whisking gently. Stop when the batter has barely come together. Do not overmix.

2. Heat 1 teaspoon oil in a skillet over medium heat until shimmering. Portion batter ¼ cup at a time for medium-small cakes.

3. Cook each cake 2-3 minutes first side, 1-2 minutes second side. Apply remaining oil as necessary.