Brussels Sprouts with Stuffed Mushrooms, Homemade Vegan Sushi, and "Ice Cream"

Today was quite the day for yummy homemade vegan meals. For lunch, my boyfriend, Mark, started with a few recipes online and improvised from there. He made steamed brussels sprouts and stuffed mushrooms, and then made some garlic toast with rosemary and oregano and roasted pumpkin seeds. The original mushroom recipe called for butter (for which he substituted Earth Balance), Worcestershire sauce (for which he substituted a mixture of soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, 1 clove of garlic, and molasses), and 1/4 cup shredded sharp cheddar cheese (for which he substituted about 1/3 cup Wayfare Foods We Can't Say It's Cheese Hickory-Smoked Cheddar-Style Spread.) He also added just a bit of fresh tomato, and put the stuffed mushrooms in the fridge for 20 minutes or so before cooking them. These mushrooms were absolutely AMAZING! Mark says that they were quite interesting to prepare, since stuffing them made them top heavy and they tended to try to escape. The brussels sprouts were steamed with a clove of garlic and some lemon juice in the water, and then drizzled with salted garlic Earth Balance. The pumpkin seeds were done using this recipe, although Mark added some Earth Balance to the canola oil, and decided after the fact that just Earth Balance would have been better. He also sprinkled a tiny bit of garlic salt on them before roasting them.




For dinner, it was my turn! I recently restocked on sushi rice from the bulk section of Wheatsville Co-Op, and still had a packet of nori. While the rice cooked, I shredded a carrot, chopped a handful of fresh spinach and a few pieces of Tofurky jerky (the "wishstix" from the Tofurky feast), and grabbed some avocado, soy sauce, and sesame seeds (as well as some chili sauce and the Wayfare Foods cheese that I ended up not using).



My sushi roll contained spinach, carrot, avocado, and sesame seeds (sprinkled inside the roll since doing the rice on the outside makes a giant mess!)



Mark's roll had spinach, carrot, Tofurky jerky, sesame seeds, and some leftover roasted pumpkin seeds with soy sauce squirted inside the roll on the carrot.



We had enough rice left over for one more roll, so we decided to slice up half of a kiwi and about 1/3 of a banana and make a "desert" roll (we added sesame seeds to this as well). It wasn't as sweet as we'd hoped; some fresh strawberries would have gone well, but all we had were a few frozen ones).



Mark got all mathematical and cut every piece in half, starting in the middle.



Here's Mark's finished roll -



Here's mine -



Since the "desert" roll really wasn't all that sweet, we decided to make a real desert, but we didn't quite know what we wanted. In the past, I've made "ice cream" by putting a frozen banana in the food processor with a tiny bit of sugar and a bit of soy milk. My current bunch of bananas isn't yet ripe, so I haven't frozen them. Mark suggested we slice up the remaining 2/3 of the banana we'd used for the sushi roll and top it with some form of homemade ice cream and chocolate sauce. While he sliced the banana, I improvised on the sauce and the ice cream. I put about 14 ounces of ice, 4 tablespoons of soymilk powder, about 2 tablespoons of evaporated cane juice, and a tiny splash of vanilla extract into my Blend-Tec blender. For the sauce, I put 3 wedges of Ibarra chocolate with just enough water and soymilk powder to cover the bottom of the pan. In order to thicken it up a bit, Mark added some extra soymilk powder, evaporated cane juice, and cocoa powder. When we put the "ice cream" over the bananas, it was a slightly soft, but overall very nice consistency. However, once we added the chocolate sauce (and a couple of thawed strawberries) to the dishes, the ice cream started to melt rapidly. By the time I sat down to eat mine, it was basically ice cream soup with bananas. *grin* This didn't stop it from tasting good, though!