My brother's birthday was a bit of a quiet affair - he's observing a religious fast and could only have vegan food. Are vagetables shorthand for quiet? Lets say they are. I made the plov from Veggiestan which I though was super bland (it's really supposed to have lamb in it) but which mysteriously disappeared between the 6 of us. Some stuff from Moro East, I think, shallots in sherry and mushrooms with rosemary, and the most celebratory tomato salad I could muster. Meh. For dessert I made this chocolate cake which is brain numbingly simple to do, but unexepctedly delicious.
I'm actually developing a pretty solid repertoir of vegan desserts, in a way inventive sweets are more difficult to come up with, especially if you don't have any fruit lying around. I have one or two vegan cookbooks and they rely very heavily on delicious things like strawberries or disgusting things like soy cream. I've tried a few egg replacers over the years and they're all pretty grim prospects. I used to have another, terrible, blog for a while and did a taste test with batches of cupcakes and you could absolutely tell that some sinister, synthetic ingredient had been added to the batter - in some cases the cupcake would not cook all the way through, in some cases it would collapse in on itself or crumble away like an old weathered brick and they were all disgusting. There are also some homespun version of egg replacer (flax seeds, mashed banana etc.) but I've always found that fucking around with an existing recipe is not as good as making something that was specifically developed to be egg and dairy free.
A surprising source of thrifty, vegan recipes are WWII cookbooks, I have a few Marguerite Patten compilation books (it's where I got the idea for vegan lemon curd) and the recipes are mostly terrifying and fascinating in equal measure. Snoek.
A book that is kind of languishing at the bottom of my Wishlist is Ratio which aims to take the guesswork out of substituting ingredients, which makes total sense. The thinking is that once you know what proportion of fat to starch to sugar to use, any baked good can be endlessly adapted, the only downside is that it takes the responsibility for a dish's success or failure away from the recipe writer and onto me!
I made WWII carrot cookies using vegan margarine and honey cakes from Cretan Cooking using olive oil. It's interesting that while I've found the Russian brand of Orthodoxy to be focused on denying yourself the little pleasures, and treating the fast as a time of quiet reflection, Greek Orthodox work around limitations and have developed a range of recipes for cakes and pastries that fit the specifications (on another note, apparently octopus is not considered to be an animal and is fare game during fasts!).
