Fall joy

Well the last month has been a whirlwind. The main food-related highlight was my visit to Whittamore's farm in Markham, near the Rouge River with Greg, Michelle, and Arthur. They usually have pick-your-own berries, and we went there looking for some late season strawberries and raspberries. Alas, we were too late and the first frost had just happened a few days before, killing off the last crop.

We did, however, race wheelbarrows with a mom and her kid, pick up some pumpkins and amazing honeycrisp apples, and stuff our faces with farmfresh cheese curds, biscuits, rye crackers, and onion jam. Even if you think onion jam sounds gross, you should give it a try. Think caramelized onions with sugar added till they're gooey, and spread across a cracker with some aged cheddar. A-ma-zing.

And now for photos of said adventure...

Pretty pumpkins from the pumpkin patch:

Me, showcasing my amazing picture-ruining talents:
Me and Arthur, mid-wheelbarrow race:
Tiny pioneery-lookin' church on the property:Greg looking sad because the berries are all dead. We actually ate a couple of full-sized-but-still-green strawberries that had been sheltered from the frost by leaves, and they were delicious! I can only imagine that they would have been amazing given the opportunity to ripen.
Leaving Whittamore's:Then we went to Michelle's parents beautiful home in Scarborough, where I rolled in the leaves:Mrs. Hilscher was nice enough to supply us with bundles of her homegrown chard:And then we finally arrived back downtown with all our booty:All in all, a lovely fall foodventure. Up next, butternut squash madness!

For some reason I've been baking like mad the last week. I baked two brownies, mint chocolate cupcakes and a cake of the same (these were a pretty big hit) and then for my friend's birthday today I made a double layer chocolate cake with creamy peanutbutter frosting. The cake and frosting recipe both came out of the Sinfully Vegan cookbook, which has so far not steered me wrong.
I made the two cake pieces last night. Then I cut off the rounded tops and frosted the first half and added chopped dark chocolate and peanuts:
Then I added the top layer and finished frosting. I used a plastic bag with a hole cut in it to frost around the top edge (which in the end was a little much, decoration wise). I covered the top with more chopped chocolate and peanuts and then pressed the remaining chopped peanuts to the sides of the cake. In the end it looked like this:
And damn was it tasty!

Emily

P.S. sorry for the crappy photos. I'll figure out how to take better indoor food photos one of these days. Also my camera lens is kind of dirty and I have nothing to clean it with.

I have been massively out-flogged lately... but I will now break my long silence for pizza and brownies.

I am back in room-mate land again, living with Katie in a lovely, homey uptown apartment whose windows offer a beautiful vantage of fights outside the Fox and Fiddle. I am once again nice and close to my friends and we've had some pretty good dinners and potlucks here in the last couple months.
Tonight Katie, Owen and I made pizza and peanutbutter brownies. Both turned out delicious!

The pizza, on homemade whole wheat crust, had tomatoes, sundried tomatoes, green pepper, artichoke hearts, black olives, hot peppers and caramelized onion. One side with smothered in the "teese" I bought in Portland. Vegan cheese generally sucks a lot but teese is pretty not bad and if you turn up the heat enough it actually melts. It tastes pretty passably like mozzarella. The other half had some goat cheese on it.


The peanut-butter brownie recipe came from the cookbook "Sinfully Vegan" and was dense, chewy chocolately deliciousness. The peanutbutter swirl part is peanutbutter, maple syrup and silken tofu whipped together in the food processor then swirled into the brownie batter with a knife.