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Food Blog Vegan MoFo

#VeganMoFo Day 11: Fruit is Nature’s Dessert, or Something

Oh boy, it’s sugar-free (or no added sugar) day. I don’t have any sugar subs (unless you count dates?) and don’t believe the hype about “alternative” sugars that still contain calories. Look. I’m not a nutrition expert by any stretch, and I don’t wish to promote any kind of problematic health food/diet crap, but I’m pretty sure that sugar is sugar, more or less. So I wanted to keep this pretty straightforward and just bake fruit.

A lot of folks might go with dates and/or bananas. I don’t care for bananas and I usually use dates in a raw application, so I wanted to bake a whole fruit that I liked to eat on its own merits. And what I had was a very ripe nectarines.

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Usually a baked fruit recipe will call for sugar, and I think it helps break down the fruit and release juices, but it isn’t absolutely necessary, especially starting with a very sweet fruit. So I simply topped it with a little bit of sea salt (to help with that chemical reaction), a drizzle of coconut oil, and a pinch of cinnamon to trick the palate into tasting “sweet.”

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Baked at 350°F for 30 minutes, after which it is tender and juicy and a little bit browned.

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I enjoyed it with a dollop of unsweetened plain Greek-style almond yogurt for a lovely creaminess. It’s definitely sweet, but not too heavy or cloying, plus it required almost no actually effort. No mixing bowl! Practically no measuring! Easy!

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Food Blog

Collard rolls with tofu and fresh salsa

Tofu, nectarine salsa, and collard rolls

Tonight’s dinner…

Baked tofu with a spicy ginger-sesame marinade (1 tbsp fresh grated ginger, several shakes crushed red pepper, rice vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, and a little bit of coconut nectar)

Mushrooms sauteed with red onions, ginger, crushed red pepper, a pinch of allspice, and fresh thyme, mixed with brown rice and stuffed into blanched whole collard leaves

Tomato-nectarine salsa with red onion and flowering cilantro (finished with a pinch of salt and a splash of white wine vinegar)

Adding thyme to mushroom mixture
Fresh collard greens

Filling greens with rice and mushrooms
Nectarine-tomato salsa