Vegan Duff!

One of the reasons I am enjoying this culinary experience as a vegan is because it forces me to step outside of my cooking comfort zone at times in an effort to not get bored with my food and show others that choosing to remove animal products from one’s diet doesn’t mean you’ll spend your days just eating lettuce and carrots. It’s actually far from that, although from time to time I do enjoy a simple bowl of lettuce. But anyway, next to rum cake, guava duff is an iconic dessert in Bahamian dishes. It is not for the dieter or the weight watcher because the sauce alone has sugar in three forms and lots of butter.

Learning how to make it was a personal culinary accomplishment because it’s not as simple as baking a cake and whipping up a sauce. I also believe that all Bahamians should work towards keeping our heritage alive through food and passing down these traditional dishes. Only since being away at school have I ventured into making it myself. When I visited home during breaks, one of my food quests always involved finding guava duff that was reminiscent of the ones older people I grew up around  made. Here is more about my other duff adventures.

So, since being here I’ve made guava duff for the international food festival to sell and I’ve made it for personal enjoyment and the feedback I’ve gotten is that it’s really good. Sometimes it’s hard to find guavas though. I go into the food store and I have to start off by explaining what a guava is.

There are pink guavas and white guavas. In The Bahamas they’re sold canned with no seeds in syrup. They also grow in people’s backyards. Here, I’ve been able to find them a few times in the Hispanic food aisles.

One of my concerns with making the duff has been the lack of eggs in the dough. I know there are egg replacements out there but the one that I bought (literally called Egg Replacer) is a hit and miss. To me it just seems like adding a slushy starch to an already starchy item wouldn’t work.

In the first two duffs, I made them the traditional way of boiling them. The result was a dense dough. The other two I baked in a water bath and the results were much better. They turned out the way a typical non-vegan duff turns out when I boil it. I think it was due to it not having eggs in it but I could be wrong.

Here is the recipe that I used. I simply swapped out items for non

Weekly Mealy Pics

This week I didn’t go to the store except to replace the coconut milk for almond milk, but here’s what I ate:

The all-inclusive salad. I just throw a little bit of everything in there!

My deconstructed burrito with broccoli. At the very bottom is lettuce followed by mix grain rice, soyrizo I cooked down with mushrooms and taco sauce and guac.

There was one day that the weather was really nice and warm out I decided to stop at Orange Leaf for some fro-yo. The pink lemonade flavor was dairy-free so that was great.

The last batch of conch fritters. Deep sigh. I gave away most of them but I did eat a handful and they were great.

U even ate em for breakfast as the last hoorah.

Then I finally used the vegan cream cheese to make vegan mini pumpkin cheesecakes.
I think the flavor and textures came out really good. I looked up recipes on using the particular brand of faux cream cheese and I followed them vaguely because I was using mini crusts and didn’t want to recalculate the measurements.
Basically I put the cream cheese, canned pumpkin, pumpkin spices, maple syrup, agave nectar and the egg replacer mixture in the blender and blended until everything was combined well and smooth. I baked for an hour at 370°F.

I made some cookies with the leftover batter by adding some flour and a little baking powder. They were aight but not something I’d call a legit thing.

Not No 1-Hour Bread!

I have a culinary background so I’m pretty familiar with the baking process although I don’t like to do much of it myself. However one day perusing Pinterest for vegan recipes I saw a 1-hr homemade bread picture. So without reading it fully, I said sure. I’m going to not buy bread for a while and bake my own.

Low and behold, this here bread recipe was not 1-hour. It was more like 2 1/2 hours and I only made 12 rolls which I devoured half that same night. Granted the little darlings were delicious, I was really hoping that this would be something I could do on Sundays and not feel like it was too long of a time commitment. I did find another recipe claiming to only take 1 hour and it was more like 1 1/2 hours which wasn’t that bad. I did not pin it because I was skeptical that it would really only take one hour so now in two weeks when I make bread again, I’ll be on the hunt but I’ll be sure to pin it and share the recipe.

I’m really one of those people that cooks from Pinterest so quite a few things I’ve pinned I’ve already tried to make or added my own twist to it.