A Vegan Strawberry Birthday Pie for Ellen!

Ellen had a birthday! Happy birthday Ellen! I’m glad you were a fetus!

She asked for strawberry rhubarb pie which didn’t work out because I apparently missed rhubarb season (and my chance to make rhubarb crumble – argh!) but there’s still strawberries all over the place so there was a quick change in plans. I made strawberry pie!

For pie crust I used the recipe over at Almost Vegan. It was really flaky and good. When making pies in the future I’m going to recycle this recipe. However! I am no good at making pie with, like, a lid, so I ended up just taking what I had left and crumbling it over the top. That worked out fine. If I wanted to get fancy I could have made a lattice I guess, but know who makes lattices? Show-offs.

The filling is a modification of this recipe which you’ll see if you follow the link isn’t actually vegan if you’re a non-honey eating vegan. I’ve known some people who call themselves vegan and eat honey and that’s okay by me. But that’s not what we were doing and also we didn’t have rhubarb so this is what I did.

Ingredients!

1 pie shell

6 cups strawberries – you can slice them thin or thick or whatever. I just quartered them and that worked out great.

1 cup maple syrup

6 tablespoons arrowroot

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

2 tablespoons flour

Directions!

So put all your strawberries into a colander and rinse them off. Once that’s done, put the colander over a big bowl. Pour the maple syrup over top of it and let it run into the bowl. Let it drain for a few minutes. If you’re using pure maple syrup that won’t take very long.

Take about half of that maple syrup and put it in a saucepan with the arrowroot. Heat it up on medium heat until it gets bubbly. Stir it up good and regular. It probably won’t thicken. That’s okay. It’ll do that later.

Preheat your oven to about 350 at this point. Mix your syrup and your strawberries together with the cinnamon and flour and toss it around with a spoon until its all even. Then pour it into the crust. Put on your lid or lattice or crumbles or whatever the Hell you decide to do.

Bake it for an hour. Pull it out, let it cool, then stick it in the fridge for a few hours to set. At this point it should be perfect.

Then eat it with a cute girl (or boy I guess) and a scoop of soy ice cream and watch a really bad Troma movie. The end!

-Bret

Dexcon Journey Foods!

Me and Ellen went to Dexcon together and hung out with all sorts of fun geeks and played games. Also, we ate food. We ate food while we were driving and we ate food while we were there, and Ellen was smart and brought some food to eat with her but I am not smart and I am also really good at making excuses for why I should eat out or order delivery.

Just to start things off, we stopped at Waffle House in Scranton. Ellen ate a waffle. I think it had pecans in it!

So I got to taste some of it and I’m pretty sure that the Waffle House makes their waffles out of ground-up ice cream cones. It was really good and really sweet, especially compared to the waffles I make myself which are basically flour and soymilk.

Ellen’s Notes: Yeah! This was a good waffle, but really different from the ones I’m used to. It was thin and sweet and even the pecans tasted like they had sugar on them. The sweetness confused me because it seems like you’re meant to order a waffle and eggs and a side of the various kinds of meats that they offer all together, but it just tasted like dessert. But I like sugar a whole bunch and they had good coffee and cute mugs! See above!

I wasn’t in the mood for waffles, though, so my options were meat… meat… meat… and HOLY FUCK LOOK AT THOSE HASBHROWNS!!!

So much like a pizza, Waffle House hashbrowns come with a variety of toppings. I basically picked every veggie on the menu and ended up with onions and tomatoes and jalapeñoes and I need to make all my hashbrowns this way forever. Is hashbrowns one word or two? Anyway, I ordered a double order of hashbrowns because I was hungry and I figured a single would be a side order. I doubted Waffle House, and it sealed my fate. There was so much hashbrown. So much.

Oh and the food was wicked cheap! And waitresses were nice and there one was an old lady with a nose piercing.

So when we got to Dexcon, I went out to eat with some of my favorite friends and they took me and Ellen to Bien Hoa which was this nice little Vietnamese place. I’ve never had Vietnamese before. It was good!

That was the steamed tofu rolls after i’d given them a good working over with sriracha. I thought it was interesting that even though they were steamed rolls, it was all divided into pieces. Maybe were supposed to wrap it up using the big noodly things. I don’t know.

Ellen’s Notes: Oh jeepers, maybe that’s what we were supposed to do. That never crossed my mind. It was a strange dish, but all the pieces make sense if you were to wrap them up instead of just tearing everything apart with chopsticks.

This was the noodly tofu thing we got that I don’t remember the name of. Maybe Ellen will. They both were really good and on top of that I got to hang out with a bunch of people that I like the most. It was nice.

Ellen says: I don’t remember the name of this either, but it was tasty. I like sharing food with Bret and it was pretty super getting to sit around with the people that he likes the most because he has good taste in people.

Then me and Ellen ordered in for ourselves one night. We had baaad luck with takeout orders getting delivered on time but they were always delicious. I’m sure you’ve seen Chinese take-out before, but veggie dumplings? They were the yummiest of yum.

Okay, I think Ellen’s going to write now because I’m done writing!

-Bret

Ellen: Veggie dumplings are super good, and I probably could have made a meal just out of those, but there was an order minimum to get it delivered. It’s made me think that I need to make my own dumplings.

Even if we hadn’t eaten a bunch of really good food, Dexcon would have been a super fun time. The foods just made it even nicer.