Stuffed Mushrooms

I have disliked mushrooms most of my life, but am now training myself to like them. Wine helps. It also helps when you use wine to cook the mushrooms (haha). But seriously, it makes them fabulous.

I used baby bella mushies for this. Remove the stems and finely chop; fry in a pan with oil and diced onion, garlic, fresh cracked pepper, and thyme. After a couple minutes, add in some bread crumbs & sautee until they seem crisp from the oil - that's when you add the red wine!

Fill lightly oiled mushroom caps with the mix, and top with fresh shredded spinach and mozzarella-style Daiya if desired before popping in the oven for about 15-20 minutes. Yum!

The Ultimate Banana Split

The ULTIMATE banana split! (And perhaps, ultimately pretentious. It's worth it, though!) The summer heat has been oppressive, so I made some homemade mint chocolate chip ice cream with coconut milk and agave nectar to try out my mint leaves I bought. That was great by itself, but then I stumbled across a blog that professed to have an ultimate banana split with three homemade ice creams, and three homemade sauces.

The vegan chef, outdone? Ha! Not on your life.

So I proceeded to construct a plan for more ice cream flavors and corresponding sauces. A simple hot fudge sauce would be perfect for the mint chocolate chip--no such thing as too much chocolate. Then I came up with more ice cream flavors I could make with the ingredients I had on hand (which required an abundance of the thick, creamy, canned coconut milk). And they are lemon lavender vanilla cheesecake flavor, made by steeping real food-grade lavender flowers and a vanilla bean with lemon zest, coconut milk and better-than cream cheese:

And the sauce that obviously would go with a cheesecake-flavored ice cream is of course, strawberry cherry:

                                                          (mmmmm, vanilla bean flecks!)

And the next, pumpkin spice flavor (had some extra pumpkin leftover from a pumpkin streusel cake), with pumpkin pie spice, naturally - cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and cloves. And I had some leftover coconut milk caramel sauce - perfect!

                            (pumpkin spice in the middle, with fudgey mint chocolate chip on the right)

And finally, after wracking my brain, I decided on apple cider flavored ice cream, with a hint of cinnamon and cloves. I wanted a strong sauce for this to complement its delicate flavor, so I went with orange sauce (that's cider-ish!) heavy on orange zest and nutmeg:

And....just serve it up quickly on a chilled dish with a split banana! I didn't really want chopped nuts with this (in truth, the ice cream flavors alone are complete), but if one were to add some, I'd go with almonds over the cheesecake, pecans over the pumpkin, pistachios over the mint chocolate, and walnuts over the apple cider.

 I also realized hat the flavors could represent the seasons of the year! I think the light, flowery lemon cheesecake best fits spring, while the mint chocolate chip reminds me of summer, pumpkin spice is definitely autumn, and of course, apple cider is winter. So if you made a sundae with these, you could taste all four seasons in one "Sunday." (Ha, ha. I never said I was a witticist :)