food without fungi, seafood or shellfish

$2 beer in Vancouver. Whoa.

Pear, apple, grape, celery juice

This one was mostly pear and apple with a healthy dose of grapes and 2 celery stalks. It was pretty thick with a strange yellowish colour but man was it good. Possibly my best juice yet.

Ingredients:
3 large Bartlet pears
3 small Cox orange pippin apples
2 big handfuls of grapes (very exact, I know)
2 stalks of celery

Sometimes I wake up so hungry that it’s hard to pick just one delicious meal to have for breakfast. When this happens I usually end up with a strange combination on the plate. Last weekend for example I made potato latkes (recipe to come), peanut butter french toast (I will post this one soon too), berry smoothies and fried eggs (holy weird combo) but everything was delicious and hit the spot. Would I serve it in a restaurant? Absolutely not. Would I make it again at home? Totally.

All this talk of breakfast food has me hungry. Time to get out of bed and see what lies behind the fridge door.

update: Waffles and bacon were indeed made (see comments) and they were delicious. Thanks Chris!

Waffles and bacon

grape, pear, carrot, apple, celery juice

Recently we bought a juicer. We did lots of research into the features we wanted and models that were available and decided to drop a little extra cash and get a good one, well… middle of the range anyway. The Breville juicers all seemed to get rave reviews, even the lower end ones. They are quiet, good at getting the most out of the fruit and seemed to be well made. We ended up buying the Ikon 5 speed juicer and haven’t been disappointed. One of the handiest features is the large feed tube… we don’t even have to cut apples or pears!

So far we’ve juiced a half dozen or so times and here is how we feel about the ingredients we’ve used so far:

• Carrot – yummy in moderation
• Apple – fresh apple juice is so much better than store bought and makes you wonder why the stuff at the store is so light coloured
• Pear – delicious! – it’s really like drinking a pear and really thick (Chris says moderation is key)
• Celery – can make juice taste bitter so we limit to 1 or 2 stalks depending on the quantity of juice we’re making
• Grape – super sweet, almost too sweet so a little goes a long way
• Mango – great taste, but a pain to prepare

The photos are of our most recent juice combo, which was grape, carrot, pear, apple, celery. It was delicious and we loved it. We went light on the grape & celery, moderate on the carrot, and heavy on the pear & apple.

This year was my first Apple Fest at the UBC Botanical Garden. The event took place October 17-18, 2009 and despite the rainy weather on Saturday there were hundreds of people lined up before the event opened. I had a great time, met a lot of apple loves and got to host an iReporter from CNN for the day on Sunday. What a great weekend.

I learned more than I could have though possible about apples and bought more varieties than I’d like to admit. We’ve been eating apples at home almost daily since then. My favourites are Topaz, SPA 493 (hasn’t been named yet), Yoko, and World’s #1 (huge). We’ve baked with them, juiced them, eaten them straight from the hand and sliced them. I’ll have to make something else with them and post about it before they are all gone.

If you’re an apple lover put it on your calendar for next year.

crispy and delicious vegan bread

An inherited bread maker has been sitting gathering dust in  our storage area for longer than I’d like to admit. I tried once about a year ago to make bread but it was not as successful as I’d like to report. The first batch, although I followed the recipe exactly ended up expanding so much that it forced the top right off the bread machine. I salvaged the dough (which was actually excellent) and made some killer buns with it, but it wasn’t the overall bread experience I was looking for.

This time around I tried a french bread, cut down on the yeast and used the bread maker to help mix the dough, but baked it in the oven (only half cheating). The loaves were beautiful and tasty. I changed the recipe slightly from the book and excluded the egg wash to make vegan loaves so I could share it with my coworkers at the office. I’ll post up the receipe for anyone who has a bread maker soon.