Chickpea Cutlets, Baked Potato Bar, Pretzel Sticks with Dulce de Coco

Dinner 1/31 by Amy and Juan



• Chickpea Cutlets

• Baked Potato Bar

• Pretzel Sticks with Dulce de Coco

Chickpea Cutlets from Isa and Terry's Veganomicon are a great variation on seitan and a nice way to cut the amount of pure gluten goes into my system. Kind of like how you can make brownies with prune puree or something. :) Anyway, last time I made the Chickpea Cutlets, we fried them, so this time I thought it would be fun to bake them. I liked the texture of them a bit more this time (and it uses *much* less oil, so I'll probably keep making them this way.

Baked potato bar is one of my favorite ways to eat potatoes. Tonight's toppings included nutritional yeast cheez sauce (The New Farm Vegetarian Cookbook, hickory bits (Vegan Vittles, tofu sour cream (Garden of Vegan) and our own canned salsa made from our garden's bounty this past summer.

The most exciting part of this meal was the Dulce de Coco. Juan is from Argentina and loves dulce de leche. It's something that I've been trying to find a good vegan version of, but it's MILK. Condensed, sweetened milk and nothing more. So, it's been a bit of a challenge and I'd kind of given up. Then, by a random series of events, I ended up with a copy of Bon Appétit from December 2007. In it is a recipe for Coconut Dulce de Leche and lo and behold, it's vegan! I just had to try it. The end result wasn't exactly like dulce de leche, but it was a wonderful coconutty caramel-like sauce. We served it with some pretzels from the local general store.