3rd Veganniversary

As a vegan, you have to be happy every day that you're alive, because, as everybody knows, it's no way possible to survive at all on a vegan diet. No proteins and such, you know. So, every year that you survive has to be celebrated! Manuel's veganniversary is in January, but we celebrated a bit later. Pictures are not too good, because he was late from the airport and we were terribly hungry ;-)

First: Tofu fish sticks (the german recipe can be found here) with a bit of salad (carrots & apple) and remoulade (vegan mayonnaise I won at the Paris Vegan Day with cucumber and herbs).

Second: Mac & Cheese with alibi green stuff (spinach). Still have sauerkraut left over!

Third: Little layer cake with vanilla pudding and blueberries. The dough I made as in this recipe, the pudding as described here, without the chocolate, but with vanilla soy milk and some extra vanilla. The blueberries I found somewhere in my freezer...

Peanut butter

Or: Reducing a big bag of peanuts to a tiny glass of tasty spread.

When buying peanut butter, you have several choices:

• Regular peanut butter with yummy hydrogenated fats. 
• Organic peanut butter with palm oil. Why does everything have to contain palm oil? This is really annoying because rain forest is destroyed for palm oil plantations. Even some organic companies have been criticized for it recently.
• Organic peanut butter without any other ingredient - no salt, nor sugar... hm, possible, but not optimal.
• I guess there are more options, but these were mine yesterday ;-)

But then you remember that there are some peanuts left somewhere in your kitchen, and just make the peanut butter yourself!

Preparation time: Peanut peeling takes a while, making the spread itself takes about 15 minutes.
Suggested music film: X-Files Season 3 Episode 18 (which has got nothing to do with peanuts, I just watched it while peeling...)

Ingredients:

• peanuts
• salt
• sugar
• oil (anything that does not taste too weird and does not oxidize too fast; peanut oil for example)

What to do:

Start with a decent amount of peanuts.

Watch an episode of X-Files and magically end up with this:

Take an immersion blender or a food processor and puree the peanuts. I use an immersion blender and puree several small batches of peanuts, otherwise the blender becomes hot and starts smelling like burned plastic. It helps to add a little bit of oil - blending will be easier, and the consistency becomes a bit softer. Then add salt and sugar to taste.

Store the peanut butter in the fridge. I'm not sure how long you can keep it there, because mine rarely lasts for more than two weeks.

The hidden powers of sauerkraut

Mac&Cheese seems to be a very famous dish in the US. I had never made it before, but I could not resist the recipe posted by Isa Chandra Moskowitz a few days ago: Click me, I am a tasty recipe! The reason was that it contained a secret ingredient: Sauerkraut! It sounded incredibly weird, but as it came from one of the vegan chefs I would trust the most, I tried it.

Seriously, this tastes fantastic! I have no idea what the sauerkraut does exactly, and how on earth one would try to use sauerkraut to obtain a cheese taste, but it works.

The only downside is that I have a huge glass of leftover sauerkraut in the fridge now, and will be eating it for the rest of the week...