Vegan Cooking Class Menu – Vegan MOFO 2013

So this happened tonight:

I thought I’d break up all the yummy recipes every so often with some other informational tidbit relating to my vegan life. Since I taught a cooking class tonight, I thought I’d share the menu for it. It was a whirlwind of activity, so unfortunately I didn’t get any actual photos from the class, but I think your imaginations will suffice 🙂 .

Since temperatures here are still getting to nearly 100 every afternoon, I planned a meal for tonight where nothing would be heated. It wasn’t completely raw, as there were some cooked foods involved, but nothing was cooked at the time that we used it tonight.

All of the participants enjoyed:

• Creamy pea soup with fresh chives: a cashew cream base, blended with sweet peas, seasoned only with salt and pepper, topped with fresh chives.

• Kale salad with tahini dressing: I spoke about how to massage kale, and that got a lot of interest. Our salad included kale, red onion, carrot, red cabbage, cucumber, and yellow pepper. It was absolutely beautiful, and had a delicious tahini dressing to go with it.

• Fresh tomato “flowers” stuffed with tempeh salad: no, these weren’t the flowers from the tomato plant, I cut the tomatoes into a flower design (basically I cut them into wedges but didn’t cut all the way through the bottom so they could be opened up like flowers). And in the middle of the flower, I added a couple of scoops of tempeh salad. Of everything served tonight, the tempeh salad was the biggest hit.  Recipe for that coming soon!

• And dessert was chia rice pudding (based on this one), made with vanilla almond milk, and topped with fresh figs. I just love fresh figs!

The class was really fun, it was a great, interesting group, and I had a wonderful time talking with them. My next class is next week, so I’m looking forward to designing a new menu for the next group!

All set up and ready to go (notice the Vitamix in the place of honor in the corner) ….