I kinda fell off the Vegan MoFo bandwagon, oops. Lots has happened since my last post! The US took a sharp turn towards imploding (election), Thanksgiving happened, my blender started spitting out metal shards, I bought vegan camembert mold cultures, attended my first Veggie Trade Show (VeggieWorld and Heldenmarkt, was great!) and I finally got my new contract at work after three months of negotiations. Starting in December I go down to 30 hours per week at work and get Fridays off. I am super excited to have a life again!
I’ve been slowly working on learning how to code via freecodecamp.com. I want to apply to a coding bootcamp that has pretty intense application requirements, so the goal is to use the extra time this year to prepare for that. If it goes well, you might see me in London for a bit in a year, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m finishing up the parts of the course on HTML and CSS, and am about to delve back into Javascript next. If you’re in Berlin and want to cowork Friday afternoons, give a holler!
Today’s theme is food gifts, but I’m gonna show you food I made/am making instead for the last day.
Right before the blender metal shards incident I managed to just finish blending two batches of vegan cheese. Winter has thrown me back into vegan cheesemaking madness. The top is my adaptation of the Extra Sharp Cheddar from Artisan Vegan Cheese (auf Deutsch), with 1/4 refined coconut oil instead of the canola called for and 2 tablespoons of koji replacing half the rejuvelac (a la premade Brottrunk, the glass jar on the right) so I can age and hopefully harden it. This was a suggestion from the lovely owner of Cashewbert, the new online vegan cheesemaking shop based in Berlin.
Vegan Cheese Fridge!
The bottom one is the beginning of my first attempt at vegan Camembert using real mold spores! Spores and recipe also from Cashewbert.
Beginnings of Vegan Camembert
Today my camembert started growing mold in a good way! Seems to hopefully be the right kind! We’ll see how it develops, it already smells like camembert.
On a totally non sequitur note, here’s my dinner tonight! I decided I haven’t had enough fall food yet so am not ready to make the switch to winter food. I went on a cooking frenzy the day after Thanksgiving and made two vegan chicken seitan roasts from Seitan and Beyond (DE), so today I roasted them with some root veggies, sauteed some kale and ate it all with sauerkraut I got in my farmshare, lingon berry jam from IKEA, and some gravy made from the simmering broth for the seitan roasts (recipe also from Seitan and Beyond).
How’s that for a weeknight dinner?!
In other news, I think I am getting a Vitamix! I won a one year-old Vitamix Pro 300 on eBay for half price and as long as I haven’t been scammed (sending that much money to someone is terrifying even if they have food reviews), I’ll hopefully have one in my possession soon and be blending EVERYTHING. So, if you have a Vitamix please send me all your favorite recipes, Vitamix fan groups, blogs and your favorite things to do with it.
I think that’s a wrap for this year! My most popular post from MoFo so far was my Vegan Cheesemaking Guide, so go check that out! It broke my record for most post views in 24 hours with over 1500 unique views, so apparently y’all really like vegan cheese. Good think I’m deep in vegan cheese experimentation.
This year’s mofo pushed me to try totally new things. Like make a sourdough starter from potatoes in order to bake some Maori Rewena bread, or to make my own yellow curry paste to try my hand at Indonesian food! I’ve basically been eating yellow coconut curry ramen since I made it, hence the lack of posts. 😉
I still have to seriously catch up on everyone else’s posts, but plan to do that over the next month!
Thanks for a great month everyone! I’m gonna aim to keep up my vegan cheese experimentation posts. Until then you can follow me on Instagram, where I post pictures of bags of flour as big as my head:
See you around, lovelies!
