At the 12 o clock is Portobellos and clockwise: Oyster Mushrooms, King Oysters, Shiitakes and White Button Mushrooms.

 Makes about 2 cups

• 4 tablespoons Earth Balance Traditional
• 1 yellow onion, very thinly sliced, a little over 2 cups
• 1 pound white button mushrooms, about 4 ½ cups thinly sliced
• ½ pound shiitake or king oyster mushroom caps, trimmed and sliced, about 2 cups
• 1-teaspoon fresh minced thyme
• 1 1/4 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon cracked black pepper
• 1-cup raw almonds
• 1-teaspoon minced garlic, about 1 small clove
• 1-teaspoon fresh lemon juice

 In a large non-stick skillet over medium heat, melt the butter until bubbly and add the sliced onions and cook, stirring occasionally for 15 minutes. You want them to be browned but not blackened, turn down the heat if they are burning.

 Add the mushrooms, thyme, salt and pepper to the skillet and cook for 11 minutes. It looks like a lot of mushrooms raw but they will reduce dramatically. Take off the heat and allow the mixture to cool to room temperature.

 While the mushrooms are cooling, in another skillet toast the almonds over medium heat flipping the nuts frequently for about 5 minutes. Be very careful while toasting nuts, they can go from delicious to inedible in a flash. When the mushroom mixture has cooled and the nuts toasted, add the mixture with the lemon juice and garlic to a high-powered blender or food processor.  If you have a smaller appliance, you will have to do it in batches. I wanted my pate to be very smooth so I used a Vitamix, however I did experiment in my food processor and though it wasn’t as smooth, it was still very tasty.  Serve however you like!

 Now I know this doesn’t look like anything special but it is full of flavour and carnivores will exclaim: This is vegan?!

Sandwiches are weirdly difficult to photograph. I wanted the pate to be in full view but then you don’t see the extra cracked mustard under the lettuce and if  I just put the two together, it just looks like a piece of bread with lettuce sticking out of it. Plain as it may look I ate one of these a day for as long as the pate would last. 

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Makes 1 loaf

For The Pan

• 1 tablespoon Earth Balance
• 1 tablespoon unbleached all-purpose flour

Place rack into middle slot of your oven and preheat to 350 degrees. Butter and flour your loaf pan (I used a Pyrex loaf pan), tapping out any extra flour. With a sheet of parchment, create a sling for your pan.. If you have a non-stick loaf pan the parchment isn’t essential.

Dry Ingredients

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• ¾ cup evaporated cane sugar (I used Bob Mill’s)
• 1 tbsp. baking powder
• ½ tsp. table salt
• ½ cup peeled and diced apple (I used Cortland)
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

Wet Ingredients

• ½ cup unsweetened almond milk + 1 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
• 1 flax egg (3 tbsp. warm water + 1 tbsp. golden flax seed meal mixed and set until gluey)
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• ½ cup Earth Balance Butter, melted and cooled
• 1 cup No Sugar Added Apple Butter or store bought apple butter

Topping

• ½ cup sliced almonds

In a large bowl, whisk the dry ingredients together until full combined.

In a medium bowl, whisk the wet ingredients together until well blended.

With a silicone spatula, gently fold the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients, leaving a few streak of flour. Do not over mix; the batter will be very thick.

Transfer to the loaf pan and spread evenly. Sprinkle the top of the loaf with the almonds, pressing the almond gently into the batter.

Bake for 55-60 minutes rotating the pan half way through the bake time. Let the loaf cool in the pan for 10 minutes.

Transfer to a baking rack over a plate and let the loaf cool completely. Slice and serve with more apple butter if you like. 

This cake is great by itself with a cup of chai tea or you can add more apple butter to it if you like. This cake is moister than a normal cake and kind of reminds me of those sponge pudding cakes my mom made in the 90s.

Please forgive the little drops of water on the plate. It started to rain as I took this picture. 

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The foods that Fall has to offer are among my favourites: pumpkins, apples, squash, pears and root vegetables. Best part is you are no longer afraid to turn on your oven to roast all these tasty foods.

I was walking down Bloor and saw a lot of fruit vendors had pumpkins of all sizes. I hadn’t carved a pumpkin in years, probably since my childhood because as a teenager I thought I was too cool to carve pumpkins. I bought two small pumpkins since that was all I could carry on the bus and headed home. Mark prepped the table with some old The Grid newspapers and I got out the markers and pairing knives. We cut the caps off and pulled out all the pumpkin guts and seeds. This was my most dreaded task as a kid. I hated the cold wet fibrous goo that came out of the pumpkin. I always asked my dad to take them out for me but regretted it almost instantly as he would chase me around the yard with a handful of it. I am a grown up now (I use this term loosely) and I took the guts out all by myself (with the help of a wooden spoon). Mark was too consumed with his pumpkin to chase me around with the guts. Before I drew anything on my pumpkin, I envisioned doing this great piece where it was so beautifully carved it would be featured on some Halloween special but then I quickly remembered I have no artistic talent. I wanted to go for Alex from A Clockwork Orange (you know because pumpkins are orange…ha-ha I am so creative) but when that quickly failed all I was left with was a smiley pirate.

Mark cut way too much of his off so his did not turn out the way he wanted it to either. Nevertheless we proudly displayed them in our window and put candles in them. I don’t know what I was thinking as a teenager not wanting to carve pumpkins. Yes it is kind of lame but so are a lot of things that are actually really fun. Pumpkin carving did teach me a lesson in doing lame stuff, if it makes you happy and you think it is fun, why not do it? I told a few friends that I carved a pumpkin they seemed a little bummed that they hadn’t carved one of there own this year. With this post, I had meant to put up a pumpkin seed recipe but unfortunately during the clean up Mark accidentally threw them out. Oh well. Here is a No-Sugar Added Apple Butter recipe that I made while we carved pumpkins.  This recipe can be halved but it does take a lot of apples to make apple butter. I used 14 cups of chopped apples (about 16 medium sized apples) and it only made 3.5 cups of apple butter. Use a variety of sweet and tart apples for this recipe. I used Royal Gala, Jonagold, Golden Delicious (sweet) and Cortland (tart).

For the juice

• 5 medium variety apples, cored and diced
• 1 cup of water

In a high power blender or food processor, puree apples in the water until it looks like applesauce. Place a milk nut bag or fine mesh strainer lined with cheesecloth over a large bowl. Transfer pureed apples to bag or strainer and strain the juice out of the pulp. If you have a juicer, feel free to juice the apples. You should have a little over 2 cups of juice. Add water if you are short on juice. If you are short on the kitchen appliances, you can substitute 2 cups of apple cider but I cannot guarantee it will be sugar free.

Apple Butter 

• 16 medium variety apples, cored and diced (about 14 cups)
• Pinch of kosher salt
• 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice or apple cider
• 1-2 teaspoons cinnamon

 Add apples, juice or cider, salt and acid to a large pot over medium low heat. Cover with a lid and cook apples for 1.5 hours, stirring occasionally. After the 1.5 hours, transfer apples to high power blender or food processor (in batches) and puree until very smooth. Pour the puree into a fine mesh strainer over the now empty pot and sieve out any apple peels that haven’t pureed fully. You want super smooth apple butter. Cook for an additional 1.5 hours with the lid propped open with a wooden spoon. The mixture gets very bubbly and you don’t want to be burned. Stir occasionally until it is a light to medium brown.

Now this is the time to season it. Take the pot off the heat and start by adding ½ teaspoon of cinnamon at a time and gradually increase it to your taste. I love cinnamon so I added the full two teaspoons. The butter will darken as you add more cinnamon. I love to spread apple butter on toast with some Earth Balance but you can do whatever you like. Use as a wet ingredient in muffins or cake loafs instead of eggs. 

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These Chocolate Dipped PB Crispy squares are a perfect example of recipe failures turned into success with a little patience! I looked up a bunch of the traditional rice squares and noted a lot of powdered sugar and of course marshmallows. I did not want to take this route because vegan marshmallows are hard to find and some square recipes had up to 3 cups of powered sugar. Yikes! It makes my teeth hurt thinking about it. I turned to natural sugars in the form of pureed dates. Fail. Weirdly colored rice and it didn’t set at all. Just a big bowl of nada. I don’t know why I thought dates would work but now I know dates won’t work. I turned to liquid sweetener in the form of agave but it had a weird taste. I was about to give up entirely when I was looking through my copy of Forks over Knives cook book and notice they use a lot of brown rice syrup in their desserts. I had a jar of it in the back of my pantry that I had completely forgotten about so I pulled it out in one last attempt. To my delight the squares had set the way I wanted them too and tasted great. Brown rice syrup has a fairly neutral taste and I got my jar at Tutti Frutti in Kensington Market but I have seen it in most well stocked health food stores.

This recipe reminds me of part Crunch bar, part Reese’s cup, my two favourite Halloween treats. My sister and I had some serious negotiations when it came to our Halloween candy but we held on dearly to our Reese’s cups. My mother always hid our candy from us so we wouldn’t overdo it but every year one of us always found the bag. However there was a code to finding the bag: we always had to tell the other person where the bag was because if I was caught eating candy by my sister she would tell my mom and all the candy would be taken away so we snuck the candy together instead. Oh we thought we were so clever.

You can use less chocolate on the squares with a drizzle instead of a dunk in the chocolate (but really who likes less chocolate?)

 What is your favourite candy? Something you looked forward to or traded with a sibling? Leave comments below.

Right before posting this, Mark mentioned that he told his younger sister that the crunch in a Crunch bar are spider eggs so she would give him the chocolate bar to eat himself. To this day she will not eat a Crunch bar despite being told by countless people that they are not in fact spider eggs. I am dating a monster. Happy Halloween!

Chocolate Dipped Crispy PB Squares

Makes 12 squares

• 4 cups Rice Krispy Cereal*** (Or another rice cereal)
• 2 tablespoons salted roasted peanuts
• 1.5 tablespoons Earth Balance
• ¾ cup natural peanut butter
• ¾ brown rice syrup
• ½ teaspoon kosher salt
• 1-cup vegan chocolate chips or dark chocolate chips (I used Whole Foods 365 Brand)

In an 8×8 Pyrex dish create a sling with some overhang off each side with two pieces of parchment paper. Please do not skip this step; you will never get a square out if you do. Line a baking sheet with parchment or waxed paper. Place cereal in a large bowl and set aside. In a blender or food processor, pulse the roasted peanuts until a fine crumb and set aside.

Over medium heat in a small saucepan, combine the butters, syrup and salt. Whisk until very smooth and melted. Turn off heat and pour mixture onto the cereal. With a spatula fold in mixture until cereal is well coated. Transfer coated cereal to Pyrex dish and press into the pan using your fingers or spatula, spreading the mixture evenly over the dish. Place in freezer for 10 minutes. While the cereal is setting, melt in the chocolate in a double broiler (a stainless steel or glass bowl over a pot of barely simmering water work well). When the chocolate is just about melted take the bowl off the pot and stir until chocolate is completely smooth. Take the cereal out of the freezer and using the overhang from the sling lift the cereal from the dish. Cut into 12 squares and half dip in the melted chocolate, scraping any excess chocolate off the square with your finger. Set on lined baking sheet and sprinkle the peanut crumbs on the chocolate half.

Continue with the remaining squares and place in fridge until chocolate has hardened slightly, about 5 minutes. At this point the squares are semi frozen so you can bring it up to room temperature but they are still delicious this way too. Serve!

***According to this http://www.peta.org/living/vegetarian-living/breakfast.aspx Rice Krispies are vegan***

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 Pasta

• 1 454g package of elbow shaped brown rice pasta
• 2 tablespoons Earth Balance Traditional butter
• 1 medium yellow onion, chopped (about 1 cup)
• 2 teaspoon Dijon mustard
• ¾ teaspoon kosher salt
• ½ teaspoon smoked paprika
• ½ teaspoon hot sauce
• ¼ teaspoon cracked black pepper
• 1/8 -teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1 medium cauliflower, chopped into bite sized pieces (about 4 cups)
• 3 cups unsweetened almond milk
• 1/3 cup chopped roasted red pepper (jarred is fine)
• 1 cup nutritional yeast
•  2 heads of broccoli, chopped into bite sized pieces (about 2 cups), steamed
• 1 tablespoon Earth Balance butter (for the pan)

Topping

• 2 cups panko crumbs
• ¼ cup melted Earth Balance butter
• ½ teaspoon smoked paprika
• ¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
• Pinch of kosher salt

In a large pot, bring 10 cups of water to a rolling boil. Add the pasta and bring heat down to medium and allow to simmer until pasta is al dente. While pasta is cooking, in a medium pot melt the Earth Balance over medium heat until bubbly and add the onions. Cook until onions are softened, about 8 minutes. Add the mustard, salt, paprika, hot sauce and peppers and cook until fragrant about 30 seconds. Add the cauliflower, almond milk and red pepper to the pot and bring to boil. Allow to simmer for about 15 minutes until cauliflower is fully cooked.

Take pot off heat and stir in yeast. Transfer mixture to a high power blender or food processor and blend until very smooth. You should have about 7 cups of sauce. Remove one cup of sauce from the food processor and set aside. Butter a 13×9 Pyrex pan and preheat oven to 375 degrees. Drain the pasta and spread out on a paper towel lined baking sheet. Water is the enemy of any creamy sauce so dry the pasta.

In a very large bowl combine the sauce, pasta and cooked broccoli. With a spatula gently coat the pasta and broccoli with the sauce until well coated. Transfer to the Pyrex pan and spread evenly.

In a small bowl mix the panko topping until combined. Sprinkle on top of the pasta and bake for 15 minutes until the panko is golden brown.

Let cool for about 5 minutes and transfer to a serving plate with a flipper.

What do you like to put on your Mac and Cheese? What is your favourite comfort food? Leave your comments below!

P.S. Ok why the extra cup on the side? I found that the whole 7 cups was too wet for the pasta and yes you can increase the pasta but I didn’t want you to have to buy two pounds when using so little of the second. However an extra cup of cheese sauce in the fridge? Heck yes. Put on steamed broccoli, corn chips or whatever you like. 

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