Vegan Gluten Free Karaoke

This might be my favorite vlogisode yet for a few reasons: 1) I used up the last of my hand-picked blueberries from the beautiful Pearl River Blues farm in Poplarville, MS; 2) I haven’t posted in such a darn long time; 3) I made up the recipe myself!

These fruit and cream stuff blintzes are a Rachel original! I brought them by my friend Ann’s house and they were gobbled up, along with the yummy vegan chai, cupcakes and hummus that she was serving up.

Here’s approximately how I made them:

1. To make the blueberry sauce, heat about a cup of fresh blueberries in a small saucepan over medium heat. Squish them with the side of a spoon so they release all their juices. Cook them for awhile so that the juice boils down into more of a sauce. I ended up adding a little bit of cornstarch, but you don’t really have to do this. Set aside in the fridge.

2. To make the sweet ricotta filling, blend the following ingredients in a food processor: about a cup and a half of soaked cashews, about half a can of coconut milk, about a teaspoon of vanilla, agave to taste, a pinch of salt, half a pack of firm tofu crumbled in your hand. Blend to the consistency of ricotta cheese. (I pretty much made this up as I went along, so you should totally experiment! It turned out freakin’ delicious!)

3. Now for the magic! Soak a rice paper wrapper in hot water so that it becomes wrappable. Fill it with a stripe of ricotta and a stripe of either blueberry sauce or strawberry jam. Wrap up like a burrito and then place in your serving dish. Continue until you have filled up your serving dishes with blintzes. Cover with a healthy coating of both fillings and a few strawberries (fresh would be nice, but I used frozen). Put in the fridge until ready to serve.

This post is my contribution to Meatout, a grassroots food education campaign. Here’s a description from their website:

On (or around) March 20, thousands of caring people in all 50 U.S. states and two dozen other countries get active to host educational events for Meatout- the world’s largest grassroots diet education campaign. Activists distribute free food, educate their communities, and ask their friends, families, and neighbors to “kick the meat habit” and explore a wholesome, compassionate diet of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

I’m not a proselytizing vegan most of the time, but I do think this is an important effort. According to Wikipedia, “the production of protein from grain-fed animals requires eight times as much fossil-fuel energy as the production of plant protein.” Vegan food is delicious AND saves tons of energy.

On another note, this video has a very special guest star…my sister! We came up with a whole back story when we were filming so that we could get into character. See if you can figure out what it is…

I noticed that this blog had a spike in viewership yesterday, which happened to be Mardi Gras. Is this a coincidence? I hope not! Please leave a comment if you enjoyed one of my videos on Mardi Gras!

In other news, I received a fabulous song request from Bluszcz via Twitter. He suggested I make a video to the song “Be Healthy” by Dead Prez. I’m going to pass on the recommendation because me lip-synching to rap (other than the Ludacris solo in “Baby”) would not turn out well, but I highly recommend you listen to the song:

This song has an awesome message and made me think of the Rethinkers. It also made me hungry for some of the yummy vegan soul food I had on a recent trip to New York.

I’m suuuuuuper excited about this new web community for folks who are vegan and gluten free. Those of you who follow this vlog because you are actually interested in vegan and/or gluten-free cooking and not just because you like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber should totally check it out here!