Day 22 - GIY and Recipes

Finally, finally on Saturday night my stomach was good enough for me to try soy. So I made soy pancakes - soy milk, eggs and soy flour. DON'T do it! They're horrible! Nevertheless it was a milestone to be able to try something new again after 4 days of pain.

Anyway, off the back of the horrible soy pancake experience, I was still hankering for something sweet. One of my favourite sweet things is creme brulee. But, I can't have milk yet, or cream, or sugar. So um, I improvised! I replaced the sugar with maple syrup (the Joy of Cooking suggests this as a bona fide alternative anyway). I replaced the milk with soy milk, and I replaced the cream with silken tofu. It kinda worked! It has a nutty flavour from the soy which actually went nicely with the custardyness and the maplyness. I didn't go in for the bruleeing, instead I made a different baked custard. Here's the recipe:

Soy Maple Custard:

2 eggs
1/3 cup of maple syrup
200mL soy milk200mL silken tofu (squoosh it up in a measuring cup and use a bit less than a full cup).

Preheat oven to 150 degrees C.
Squoosh up the silken tofu until it's smooth.
Put tofu and soy milk in a saucepan and bring almost to the boil.
Meanwhile, whisk eggs and maple syrup.
Pour in soy mix and beat until just combined.Pour into ramekins (this will fill 2x 300mL ramekins, or 2 and a bit teacups).
Place in a baking tray. Fill the tray with boiling water up to halfway up the sides of the ramekins.
Bake for 45mins until just set (use the wobble test).
Pour over a little maple syrup to serve (I liked it better cold than hot).

Also, fried rice is great! Since we have been able to eat eggs we have been making it with brown rice, a little olive oil, eggs, sunflower seeds and beans.

And we've been doing a bit of GIY - grow it yourself. We've been growing alfalfa sprouts. It's pretty easy and kinda cool. In fact, getting the seeds seems to be the hardest bit. We eventually got some from ebay. Once you have them, you just put a tablespoon of seeds in a largish jar and soak them in water overnight. Then you cover the lid with a piece of old stocking or muslin or fly mesh, drain the water, roll the jar to get the seeds to spread out and stick to the glass. The you put the on a window sill, or in this cold weather, somewhere warmish - like the top of the frog tank, or if you don't have one of those then the top of the fridge will do. Leave then for a day and the rinse them, drain them again, and repeat this process for a few days until most of the seeds have fallen off the sprouts. Then put the sprouts out on a tray in the sun for 15mins or so, then eat them! You can save any extra sprouts in the fridge for several days. And if your sprout jar gets too cramped during the growing process then just transfer half the sprouts to another jar. Et voila!