L'Shana tovah! Tonight is Rosh Hashana. Although I'm not "really" Jewish (we suspect that one of my great great grandfathers was) I still like to celebrate the holidays. Heck, I'll celebrate any holiday I can find. For the past several years I've been making Honey Cake for Rosh Hashana and I wanted to make one this year as well.
Honey comes from bees. Bees are critters. A dilemma presented itself. Strict vegans will not eat honey because it is an "animal" product. However, there are other, less strict vegans who DO eat honey.
I'm giving myself a dispensation to make a traditional Honey Cake because it's Rosh Hashana, and because I already had the honey. Seems rather wasteful to just throw it out, right? So. My "compromise" for cheating and making something with honey was to try a recipe for Vegan Cottage Cheese.
Another of my "traditional" Jewish holiday dishes is bleenies, a.k.a. Latkes or potato pancakes. Although many people eat their latkes with sour cream or applesauce, my family has always served bleenies with cottage cheese. I LOVE bleenies with cottage cheese. Could I eat bleenies with my family and not eat any cottage cheese? Was that a possibility, even with a "replacement" cottage cheese option?
The recipe for Vegan Cottage Cheese is incredibly easy.
16 oz firm silken tofu
1/4 c Vegan Mayo
1 tsp salt
1tsp garlic powder
Mash it all up and chill, baby. It's GOT to be cold or it really doesn't work.
When I tasted a fork-full right after I mixed it up (before chilling it) I thought it was gross. The taste of the Nayonaise was overpowering, but I decided to give it a fair shake and let the flavors blend and the whole mixture chill.
Well. I was most pleasantly surprised when I tried it with the bleenies. It was good. It actually tasted very like cottage cheese. My folks even tried it and were impressed by it. I don't know that I would want to eat a big plate of it - I was never that big a cottage cheese fan, but as an accompaniment, it does the job well. And it does LOOK like cottage cheese, so that helps.
The recipe I used for the Honey Cake was from this site www.zabars.com. It's "Poppa's Rosh Hashana Honey Cake" and it's delicious. Veganize it by replacing the eggs with, well, egg replacer, what else? It occurred to me after I made this that I could have veganized the whole thing by replacing the honey with agave. Not sure how that would have changed the texture and taste but it's probably a viable option.
The smell of the cake baking was absolutely amazing. It filled the house with the aroma of spices and sweetness. Definitely hard to resist. But the result was definitely a keeper. Very moist and perfectly spiced. My mom thought it was a touch too sweet, and there is quite a bit of sweetener (honey, sugar and brown sugar) in the recipe but I thought it was perfect.
So, for the record the daily food log:
Breakfast was Kashi "U" cereal with a peach and Almond milk
Lunch: Veggie burger on a toasted bagel and some leftover Wild Rice Salad
Dinner: Bleenies, Fresh Raw Tomato, Vegan Cottage Cheese, "Semi-Vegan" Honey Cake
Snax: Kettle Corn
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