Shavuot

Check out our awesome Shavuot table! We just finished hosting our Shavuot party, which is apparently not a huge deal in the United States. I suspect there are two reasons: its lack of proximity to a heavily commercialized Christian holiday (this, after all, is how Hanukkah became such a big deal) and its strong ties to the land (it’s a harvest holiday.) In kibbutzim and moshavim there’s often a nice parade of first fruits of the year (including the babies born that year) and elsewhere in the country people celebrate with a dairy meal. Why dairy? Apparently, the word חלב״ chalav” (milk), in Jewish numerology, adds up to 40, and Moses was on Mount Sinai 40 days.

I took the challenge seriously and put together a holiday party for our friends featuring a whole array of vegan cheeses, which I learned how to make in Noa Shalev’s awesome vegan cheese course (you should take it, so cough up the 350 NIS and do it.) A lot of improvisation went into this – my cheese flavors are original inventions, save for the spirulina one, and my raw cashew cheesecakes are variations on the lemon-lavender cake I made a couple of weeks ago following Noa’s recipe. This time I made mango-basil cake and strawberry-thyme cake. All I did was replace the flavoring. I glanced at one of my new books, The Vegetarian Flavor Bible, to match fruit and herbs, but I find that I already have a pretty good gut feeling about combinations.

Anyway, from bottom to top: green salad with avocado, nectarines, and strawberries, dressed in quince vinegar from Nan at Vermont Quince; spiralized salad of cucumber, carrot, beet, and radish, dressed in a mix of good mustard and Nan’s quince salsa; cauliflower ceviche; “chevre” cheeseballs flavored with nigella, chimichurri, za’atar, zchug, and ras-el-hanout; leek-mushroom quiche with chickpea base; vegan lasagna with tofu ricotta: four hard cheeses, flavored with spirulina, turmeric-cumin, miso, and garlic-zchug; breads and crackers; and the aforementioned raw cakes.

A good time was had by all!

Fresh Salad with Green Beans, Chickpeas, and Macadamia Cheeses

This salad turned out wonderful thanks to its high-quality components: mixed supergreens, pea shoots, cucumber, radish, chickpeas, lightly steamed green beans, and some of the macadamia cheese from a few days ago. Simply dressed with a few drops of balsamic vinegar, it tasted like something you’d expect to find at a French bistro.

Enjoy!

Citrus-Lavender Raw Mini-Pies

Our friend Adi stayed with us for a few days, and I decided to treat him to a special breakfast pie but I didn’t have all the ingredients on hand, so I improvised. The outcome was stunningly delicious, not too sweet, and fragrant with herbal aroma.

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Flavored Macadamia Cheeses

You guys, I am beside myself with enthusiasm about Noa Shalev’s vegan cheese course. If you’re a Hebrew speaker, cough up the 350 NIS and join the course. It’s so worthwhile. Noa is a fountain of knowledge about fermentation and culturing and about nutrition in general, and her recipes rock!

I’m amidst the process of making hard cheeses, which Noa advises to make from macadamia nuts. I made two kinds: cheeses that I hope to age in the dehydrator and then in the fridge, so that they develop “body” and a rind, and slightly softer cheese balls rolled in spices.

I hesitate to reproduce the recipe, because I really want you all to take this course, but I’ll just mention that Noa ages her cheese with probiotic capsules, which is a convenient method, especially if you don’t have it in you to make rejuvelac or squeeze sauerkraut juices.

This bleu cheese is made with spirulina, and one of the things I’ve learned is that a little spirulina goes a very long way. That’s not a tiny cheese, and I put half a teaspoon of spirulina in it. It brings a bit of that moldy taste into the cheese and looks like the original. I’m quite thrilled with it!

This cheese is my effort at a yellow hue, which I achieved with turmeric. I also threw in some cumin and coriander, because I really like that combination. Next time I’ll do this with jalapeño bits, I think.

Once these cheeses harden in the fridge, I’ll put them in a dehydrator for 24-48 hours, and then I’ll age them further in the fridge. Delayed gratification.

These ones we can eat right away: cheese balls with all kinds of spices and flavorings. Here are my combinations:

ras-el-hanout
za’atar
zchug
chimichurri
nigella seeds-onion
oregano-garlic
sumac-cumin-coriander

Butternut Squash Muffins with Spelt and Teff

Whenever we get butternut squash in our CSA box, I try to bake it right away and store the puree in the fridge. I can then use it in a variety of recipes, and today I decided to bake squash muffins. They came out incredibly fluffy, probably because I replaced almost half the flour with teff. I made a few other adjustments to Isa’s recipe, and it turned out great. Here’s my version:

Dry Ingredients:
1 cup spelt flour
3/4 cup teff
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground or freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground allspice

Wet Ingredients:
1 cup pureed pumpkin
1/2 cup almond milk (I used my turmeric-goldenberry milk, so you might need to add a bit more maple syrup if yours is unsweetened.)
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup maple syrup
3 chopped dates

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Mix dry ingredients and wet ingredients separately. Then, gradually add dry ingredients to wet ingredient bowl. Mix until just combined. Pour into a dozen muffin molds and bake for about 20 minutes or until knife comes out dry.

Cashew “White Cheese”

Many Israelis’ childhoods include a classic culinary staple: gvinah levanah (“white cheese”), a soft and light cheese to spread over bread or eat with vegetables. It typically came in 5% and 10% fat variations, and there were numerous versions with herbs and spices.

With the help of Noa Shalev’s wonderful nondairy cheeses and milks course, I produced a cheese yesterday that tastes even better than the original. The key is to use probiotic capsules for the fermentation. I used two capsules (approximately 30 million microorganisms) for about a cup of soaked and blended cashews. I flavored the resulting cheese with salt, orange juice, nutritional yeast, and fresh marjoram.

Homemade Almond Milks

This month I’m happily taking Noa Shalev‘s terrific vegan cheese course. Just from the ingredient list I could tell that I’d learn a lot. And indeed, it’s a fantastic course, chock-full of nutritional knowledge and kitchen tricks, and of course marvelous recipes.

I won’t reveal the recipes themselves, because I want you to take the full course and learn for yourselves, but I did want to offer a sneak peak into the world of homemade almond milks. Noa recommends adding a bit of vegan lechitin to the blender, because lechitin binds both with the water and with the fat in the almonds. On the left: turmeric-goldenberry milk. On the right: hibiscus-vanilla milk. Both flavors are fantastic and unusual.

The organizers of a big potluck party I’m attending tonight divided the food assignments by birth month, and I was bummed out for half a second that the November people got beverages, as I love to cook (could you guess that? :D). But then I decided to bring creative, made-from-scratch drinks, and I hope people will dig these. The hibiscus flavor is especially delectable.

Pineapple-Oat Cookies

pineapple oatmeal cookies

These cookies turned out quite fantastic: chewy and full of fruit. The basic recipe is at Natural Sweet Recipes, but I modified it because I didn’t have all the ingredients at hand. Turned out great,

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