The book is awesome. SO awesome, in fact, it was extremely hard to decide what recipe to try out first. Go. Buy. It.
We nailed out a plan to have a lavish two course meal. For starters, we cooked up Tempeh Sausage Pastry Puffs, and served them with a delicious bannanaberrycocount smoothie.
The combination of the sweet smoothie and savory puffs was delicious! I used So Delicous Coconut Milk Kefir in the smoothie for the first time, and it turned out great.
BananaBerryCoconut Smoothie
1 cup of frozen mixed berries (my mixed bag came with strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries in it)
3 large ice cubes
About half of the container of So Delicious Cocnut Milk Kefir
1 large banana
Just whir it all up in a blender and pour it into glasses!
I'm not going to discuss exactly what Isa Chandra's recipe was for the Tempeh Puffs is here, because I think you should go buy her book (seriously, I'm not being a suck up, it's great and she should make money off of it) but I can say that instead of marinating the tempeh for an hour like it says to, I marinated it overnight. I omitted the fennel, because I don't like fennel. Despite the omittance, the tempeh had a great flavor due to the thyme, garlic and red pepper. I added a little bit of sage, too. I think next time I make it I'll use less olive oil. I followed the directions, and it came out a bit oily for my taste.
The next course was Banana Rabanada (Brazilian French Toast) and mimosas. I have not had anything this french-toasty since turning vegan, and let me tell you--these things were mouth watering. So craveable and delicious!
Again, I'm not going to fully disclose the recipe, but I'll share my experience. I used one of the "La Panette" baguettes from Top Foods. I sliced it into pieces and set them out on a wire rack the night before, so they would get nice and stale. I used a really, really ripe banana, the kind we normally make banana bread with, it was very sugary and ripe...at the point where the peel is quite brown, but the inside's still ok. Making the banana custard mixture that you soak the bread in (what makes it french bready) was stupid easy. I just mixed it all up, soaked the bread in there while we ate the first course, and then heated them up on the skillet afterwards! We served it up with some sliced strawberries, a dusting of cocoa powder and cinnamon, and a Jackson Pollack-y swirl of real maple syrup. Delish!
I had some inexpensive Spanish champagne that we used for the mimosas, and it was quite good.
