the cooking fiend

At least being without a computer for the next two weeks gives me more time to focus on my goal of improving my very limited cooking skills. I have a few cookbooks and a sundry stack of printed recipes that I will be working from. So to begin, I finally cracked the binding and spilled all sorts of ingredients upon my copy of Vegan with a Vengeance. I saw this book referenced repeatedly when I was searching through vegetarian blogs for recipes, so I figured it should be a pretty good place to start. Below are my first three tries. (Since the recipes are under copyright and I followed them to a tee, I won't post them, but the book's easy enough to find.)

Lemon Gem Cupcakes:

I brought these to the annual holiday party at work, which I usually ditch but I had to make up time for the week. The initial batch of lemon frosting tasted like frosted urine, so I had to make another batch sans lemon juice. The real test was what my carnivorous co-workers thought of my vegan dessert: two mentioned an odd aftertaste, which I didn't notice when I tried them. I can only guess that either the soy or rice milk are the culprit, since both can taste a bit odd if one is not already used to them. Otherwise, there was surprisingly little complaint.

Moroccan Tagine with Spring Vegetables:

Yes, this is me trying to plate my food in a pleasing manner so it doesn't look like a heap of underexposed slop. Well, it still kind of does, but this is far more presentable than the plate I actually ate from. As for the entrée itself, apprehensively I took all the seeds and white interior out of the serrano chile, which ended up rendering it useless. Next time I'll add more heat to it, but otherwise it made for a set of yummy lunches to bring to work this week... the more lemon the better!

Corn Chowder:

I just made this one tonight. This time I used the two jalapeños as suggested and it came out WAY too spicy. I'm still not sure how I'm going to try and neutralize them out, but otherwise the soup tastes pretty good. Yeah, I probably shouldn't have squeezed the lime before adding it as garnish (kind of looks like a green millipede crawling into a grave of yellowy-orange goo... mmm!).