vegan mofo!

I've signed up for Vegan MoFo (Month of Food), which starts tomorrow. Vegan MoFo involves a load of blog authors (501 so far) who pledge to blog about their adventures with vegan food for the month of November. I made a brief attempt to do this last year, but I never officially signed up and it didn't last long.

I write this as I'm scarfing down my second slice of runny vegan pumpkin pie. Every month or two, I get an urge to make something complicated that blows a whole Sunday. This time it was a whole foods based pumpkin pie. I started with two baby sugar pie pumpkins at about 9am, from which I made a nice puree. At noon, I made a homemade crust with spelt flour and coconut oil, which turned out extremely well, despite the fact that it required twice as much coconut oil as the recipe specified.

Around 2pm, I made the pumpkin pie filling - the usual spices, coconut milk, maple syrup, cornstarch, a bit of silken tofu, and the puree from the morning. I should have known things were going awry when the filling was the consistency of melted ice cream, but I figured the vegan cookbook author knew something I didn't, and I poured the liquid into the pie crust. A few minutes into baking, the pie started dripping copious amounts of coconut oil onto the pizza stone, which was in its usual location on the bottom rack. (My pie pans have holes on the bottom for some unknown reason.) Hmmm.

I continued with the recipe, making the cashew cream in our trusty Vitamix blender. This also turned out a bit watery, but really tasty. Cashew cream is a great substitute for a creamy sauce - I'm not sure what French concoction it stands in for, but it's very good. After baking for 50 minutes, the crust was threatening to burn, but the pie was still completely liquid in the middle. Oh well - I figured it would still taste good.

I served it as our pre-trick-or-treating treat, with straws. No just kidding, that was Sean's joke. He always very sweetly keeps me from taking my cooking failures too seriously. I have a lot of them. A few months ago I tried a friend's Irish Soda Bread recipe and forgot half the water. Last year around this time I was obsessed with making my own sourdough starter, and spent countless hours (as well as about 50 pounds of flour) following Peter Reinhart's supposedly foolproof recipe, which didn't work for this fool. But I will not give up! I will try again!

In that spirit, I embark upon Vegan MoFo! Not without trepidation, but with an undeserved dose of hope.

Oh and the pumpkin pie? It did taste good, and after a few hours in the fridge, it's almost as thick as soft serve!