Years before vegan chocolate nut butters were widely available in stores (and before I became allergic to hazelnuts!), I came up with this recipe to sate my cravings for Nutella. While delicious, it called for soy powder, which readers always seem to have a hard time tracking down. At some point I stumbled across a much, much easier way to make chocolate almond butter, so I feel obliged to share my good fortune with all of you! The concept is simple: when you grind nuts into nut butter over the course of several minutes, your food processor generates a lot of heat. Chocolate doesn’t need a lot of heat to melt, so if you throw small pieces of chocolate into your food processor on top of warm nut butter, it’ll melt right in, and voila! Chocolate nut butter! There’s no need to break out the double-boiler or anything. I promise: this is a one-bowl affair. Using chocolate chips or a chocolate bar also conveniently allows you to skip the step of adding vanilla and sweetener, which can make homemade nut butter too thick or give it a weird consistency. Obviously this recipe makes for a spread with less frosting-like sweetness […]

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Attentive readers will note that I do in fact only ever eat one of two things for breakfast: oatmeal or pancakes. Cereal’s expensive, toast is boring, vegan yogurt is constantly being discontinued, waffles are inferior to pancakes, and a worthy bagel is as rare in Connecticut as a respectful mosh at a Hatebreed show. For those of you out there who think oatmeal is boring, check it out: I do not mess around when it comes to breakfast. Loaded with blueberries, dusted with flax meal, drizzled with maple syrup, and topped with cashew cream, this is oatmeal‘s version of an ice cream sundae. This is food for cool, breezy mornings flipping records and reading the latest issue of Cometbus (which is excellent, by the way!). Just put this in your mouth and die of happiness already. 5.0 from 1 reviews Print Blueberry Cream Oatmeal Author: Claryn Recipe type: Breakfast Prep time:  2 hours Cook time:  15 mins Total time:  2 hours 15 mins Serves: 2-3   Ingredients ½ c raw cashews cold water 1 medjool date, pit removed 1 tsp vanilla ½ Tbsp maple syrup 1 c rolled oats 3 Tbsp cornmeal 1½ c water 1 c unsweetened, unflavored plant milk dash nutmeg […]

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A few years ago, I came across a recipe for a cashew-based vegan eggnog on a blog I was following. I was intrigued, but noticed right away that the recipe called for a high-speed blender, which I didn’t have. Having once attempted to soak and puree cashews in a regular blender to lumpy, gritty results, I accepted that homemade nog was not in my future, and glumly scrolled on by. But in the last days of 2013, I broke down and bought one of those newfangled high-speed blenders that I’d previously eschewed.* Hey, I’ve never owned a cell phone or a car, so I probably figured purchasing an absurdly fancy appliance would whisk (speed-blend?) me into a new and long-overdue era of adulthood. (Is it working yet?) In any case, as I unwrapped my shiny new blender, all I could think about was that cashew nog which had haunted my dreams for years. Of course, as luck would have it, when I finally went looking for said recipe, I found that it had disappeared from the Internet. Bummed but not dissuaded, I took to the web once more, where I found a plethora of recipes that called for pecans, full-fat […]

If you live in the U.S., now is the time to buy up all the small cheap pumpkins you can get your hands on! Making your own pumpkin puree is exceptionally easy, and it’s typically much cheaper than buying cans in the store. I’m careful to freeze several containers of my own homemade puree every year, so I have plenty to cook with all season long. Your first step will be selecting your pumpkins. If you can, look for sugar or Cinderella pumpkins, which are supposedly best suited for eating, and try and get your hands on the smallest (2 lb or smaller) and freshest pumpkins you can find, as they’ll have the sweetest and most pronounced pumpkin flavor. For the best deal, look for pumpkins sold by the pound at farm stands and in your grocery’s produce department. Small pumpkins are often the cheapest anyway because they weigh the least and can’t be carved, so they’re less desirable as decorative items and are priced as a vegetable, rather than as a novelty item in high demand. That said, you really can use whatever you have access to. While you don’t want to use carved pumpkins, you can absolutely cook […]

Two years ago, the only thing I craved for breakfast on the weekend was pancakes. For months and months, I ate pancakes — drizzled with maple syrup, alongside a mug of hot coffee — every single Saturday morning before heading out to the pottery studio. If my partner was doing the cooking, I would sometimes tolerate Belgian waffles, because I’m accommodating like that. But much to my partner’s dismay, one day I went head over heels for porridge, and I haven’t looked back since.* This roasted pear and fig oatmeal is my latest love. I’ve been eating a lot of pears lately. This is a funny thing for me to admit, as I was an ardent refusenik of pear consumption for an entire quarter of a century. I’ve never been a picky eater, but I was really scarred by years and years of encountering those mealy, pale cubes in cups and cans of mixed fruit that seemed to function only as cheap, tasteless filler. Yes, I found them even more loathsome than those terrible hot pink orbs that loosely approximated that fruit we know as “cherries.” Anyway, a couple of years ago, I deduced that I have oral allergy syndrome, […]