Good Morning! After a crazy week, I finally have a chance to recap my vegan week, which ended this Monday. I ended up trying a lot of new recipes during the week, so I have a lot of pictures to post. I figured why not start with the best meal of the day: breakfast. So, as of my last post on Thursday I had only had overnight oats for breakfast. Now, of course there's nothing wrong with overnight oats, but I was getting a little bored eating the same thing for breakfast every day, so I decided to mix it up.
First up is traditional oatmeal--eaten hot off the stove. This variety has dried cranberries and fresh bananas on top:
Next up is rhubarb applesauce. When I was little, my mom and I would go to the local orchard and buy bushels of apples to make applesauce. I came to my applesauce idea from a different approach.
I was at WholeFoods and saw rhubarb. I thought to myself, wow, I've never actually tried rhubarb. That would be a fun new food for vegan week. So, I bought a few stalks. After way too much thinking and debating over what to make with my rhubarb, I decided to make rhubarb applesauce and bought a few apples as well.
The recipe for my applesauce came from one of my favorite food blogs:
Two Peas and Their Pod. It is very simple. First you chop up apples and rhubarb in a 2-1 ratio. Two cups of apples per cup of rhubarb.
Then, you put them in a pot on the stove with a little bit of water, and cook until mushy (about half an hour). You can also add sugar if you'd like. I added just a couple of tablespoons of raw sugar, and found that my applesauce was very sweet. I think next time I will taste the applesauce before adding any sugar.
The next and final step is one for preference. If you like chunky applesauce, then just stir in a little cinnamon, and your applesauce is ready to go. If you prefer smoother applesauce like I do, then run it through a blender, or use a stick blender to pulverize the chunks of apples and rhubarb. Then, add a little cinnamon, and your applesauce is ready.
The recipe says to enjoy the applesauce at room temperature or refrigerated. I tasted the applesauce as it was cooling on the stove and found it delicious warm. In fact, I had a bowl full before the sauce cooled enough to put away in the fridge.
This recipe was a great success. It was fast, easy, and fun. Who wouldn't want to eat hot pink applesauce??
And finally, my third new vegan breakfast recipe was crepes. The recipe came from my Skinny Bitch cookbook. I'm sure you're not surprised. The first step was to mix up the batter. I don't want to give away all of the recipes in the cookbook, so I'll leave this one a mystery. From my memory, though, it involved almond milk, flour, and sugar.
Then, you make crepes just like you would with any batter. Poor a small amount into a greased frying pan, and then swirl it around so it is nice and thin.
When the batter is bubbly, flip it over and cook until nicely browned. If you look closely in this picture, you can see me and my boyfriend, who actually did all of the crepe making while I ate them fresh off the stove. :-)
I've always found that the first couple crepes come out a little messy and the crepes made later in the batch are the best. Here are the first two:
And the last couple:
For toppings I used soy yogurt, blueberries, bananas, and strawberries. Later in the week I also tried a peanut butter banana combination. The different combinations were very different, but all quite tasty.
I will say that this is the only recipe of the week that tasted better with animal products. The crepes tasted like they were missing something. If you've ever had any sub-par gluten-free products (not my mom's!), it was kind of like that. They were still pretty good, and very edible, just not quite there.