Even though a lot of instant gravy granules are vegan friendly, I decided to have a go at making my own. It's really tasty and you don't need to be vegan to enjoy this recipe! The quantities can be amended to suit personal tastes and needs. And you can add other ingredients for variety, ie chopped mushrooms, herbs, horseradish for a bit of bite, chilli for some heat; the possibilities are endless. 

Peanut Butter Cookies are my very favorite comfort food. These are absolutely as good as I remember them... minus the eggs, dairy and gluten! Perfection :)

As I progress in my vegan baking adventures I strive for quality ingredients that give me as much control as possible over the flavors and textures I'm trying to convey. I also love breaking foods down to their most basic components and building them back up again, learning and getting unnecessarily excited along the way. For some people it's TV. For me it's this sort of food hacking. 

I recently decided that I wanted to create a high quality vegan butter because I began to tire of the store bought yellow goop that I was so steadily relying on. What if I don't want all that diacetyl flavoring, beta carotene coloring, palm oil and who knows what else? It reminded me of one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits from the 80's: Happy Fun Ball. "Don't taunt Happy Fun Ball". My vegan butter experimentation ended up being more successful than I imagined. What if I made my own shortening?

I love caramel because it's the closest thing there is to food alchemy. Ok, maybe chocolate is close to this too but caramel involves a few basic non-exotic ingredients and a simple process. The end result is something that's truly extraordinary and more than the sum of it's parts. One of the great things about caramel is how you can just swap in certain fats and sugars to create caramels with amazing layers of flavors. The more I experiment with working with caramel this way, the more surprised I am. 

Making this vegan Easy Granola recipe is only slightly harder and much more fun than scooping it out of the bulk bins at the local health food store. It features almond butter for its base, rolled oats, cinnamon and nutmeg and just the right amount of walnuts and pecans to round out the crunch. A touch of raisins add a welcoming sweetness. 

I prefer to not overload with sugar in the morning so my granola recipes tend to err on the side of reduced sweetness which is a contrast from most store-bought granola. If you like your granola sweet then you may consider adding a few Tablespoons additional sugar. The reduced sweetness allows other flavor nuances to come through. The almond butter toasts during baking which brings on a rich flavor. A small amount of unrefined coconut oil increases flavor complexity further. Use this granola recipe as a base for future granola recipes. Enjoy it with non-dairy milk, top it with non-dairy yogurt or crumble it over ice cream.

Let me just say, I'm a vanilla girl. Don't get me wrong, chocolate is great! But when I had to give up gluten & dairy I really just missed good old vanilla cupcakes. I tried a lot of recipes but they were too dry or too grainy or too plain or too... well, gross. So I got to work! It took me awhile to perfect but I'm SO proud of this recipe and I really think you'll love it. So far I've gotten great feedback from my "taste testers" (most of whom aren't gluten free OR vegan). Enjoy!

Some vegan recipes are a bit complex, or use a few too many ingredients for more liking. I wanted to see what would happen if I paired a chocolate cake recipe down to almost nothing. Result- a really nice sponge cake made without specialist ingredients and easy for a baking beginner. for my party piece I scribble the recipe down on a paper napkin to share with others.

I glanced over at my fruit basket yesterday and found four moldy looking apples at the bottom. They had been languishing there for over a week, with no one paying them any attention. Now, I'm a bit of a purist with my apples. I only like them tart and crunchy with faint green veins running through their flesh. Bruised apples with brown spots go straight on my list of foods I most hate to eat. Still, something had to be done with those apples, and without much of a plan, I peeled, cored, and chopped them up. 

Then I spied a jar full of demerara sugar that I'd bought recently, and inspiration took form. I decided I'd bake an apple bread. The principle would be the same as banana bread, only since apple has a higher water content, I could consider lowering the amount of fat in my recipe, and under bake slightly, so my cake would remain moist. A small quantity of vinegar provides just enough acid for leavening, and the baking soda helps it rise. This bread bakes up dense. 

Holiday dinners at my Godparent's house was always a special occasion. The food was inspriational but the the one dish that my brother and I looked forward to all year was the simple but perfect implementation of garlic bread. This consisted of a store-bought flute of San Fancisco sourdough, sliced but leaving the bottom crust intact so the slices could be torn off as the loaf worked its way around the table. This loaf was buttered between the slices, wrapped in tin foil and warmed in the oven. Buttering the slices while leaving the loaf intact had the advantage of ensuring both sides of each slice was buttered. Wrapping the loaf in tin foil had the benefit of allowing the entire loaf to be saturated with buttery aromas and flavors during its time in the oven and the tin foil could be folded back over the loaf in between servings to keep the bread warm while it was on the table. Brilliant!

My brother and I eventually begged my parents to adopt this bread tradition for holiday feasts at our house. When I adopted a vegan diet we switched from butter to margarine and although the results were satisfactory, there seemed to be somthing lacking; substituting margarine doesn't always work as well as butter 100% of the time. 

Several years later I was having a dinner with friends and everyone at the table was falling over themselves in anticipation for Vlad's famous garlic bread spread. What was in this bread spread? I never found out but it was thick, dairy-based, rich, spreadable and smelled what a bread spread would probably smell like if you took the best elments of butter and sharp cheddar. Without even tasting it I was mesmerized by it. What if I combined these two garlic bread methods to make a vegan rich, buttery bread spread that could take garlic bread to another level? 

This bread spread recipe features extra virgin olive oil, onion, garlic, fresh tarragon and just a touch of white wine vinegar to envoke a complex buttery flavor with a sharp cheese inspired finish.

Traditional flour is ground endosperm powder which is the result of the flour mill removing most of the hard pieces and hence, nutrition from the wheat berry. I'm a huge fan of whole sprouted grains because they're more flavorful and contain significantly more nutrients than bread made with traditional flour. This Flourless Sprouted Whole Wheat Bread recipe utilizes sprouted wheat berries that are then ground into a purée. This requires a substantially hardy food processor. If you're not sure if your food processor is powerful enough, look on the bottom. It should say at least 6.5 Amps or "6.5 A". 

This bread was difficult to design due to the nature of the wheat berry. This hardy seed contains the germ which is the heart and soul of the seed. The germ is the embryo of the plant in its dormant state. It's accompanied by the starchy endosperm which acts as fuel for the germ when it sprouts or germinates. This package is encased in a firm fibrous shell called the bran. This protects the seed kind of like an egg shell protects an egg.