This weekend was spent cooking. We made Pate, used in Zuchini rollups, a "cheese" cake and walnut burgers.
Having gained quite a bit of experience in raw cooking, I was prepared for the worst and hoped for the best. I read each recipe carefully so I could plan. Cheesecake needed 20 hours of prep time, pate needed overnight soaking and then dehydrating, and the walnut burgers needed just a short soak and a short dehydrate.
First the cheesecake.
We went and bought a springform cake pan. This I think made things easier. I found the recipe online, http://www.rawguru.com/recipe36.html, which for some reason required a 10 hour waiting period. Having made "cheese" from nuts in the past, I thought that there would be some separation of the whey and the nut mixture, but there was nothing, except a waste of 10 hours. I am going to make this cheescake again without the wait.
Overall, the cheesecake came out quite well. It is not difficult to make, just very time consuming - but so is regular cooked cheesecake. The crust is very delicious and can be used as a base for many other things such as tarts.
My only issues with this recipe were:
1) the 10 hour wait time for the cheese
2) the directions for the topping, because it has water listed as one of the ingredients, but you never know when to use it and you don't know how long the strawberries are supposed to sit out for to produce the "strawberry liquid"
3) the whipped cream had an after taste that I didn't like, and it went bad quicker than the cheesecake.
Oh yeah, my cheesecake certainly did not look like the picture.
Second the Pate
Very simple to make. I got this from Nomi Shannon's book. Akom didn't like it raw. As it is in the recipe it has a very strong lemon flavor to it. Also as a warning, this makes A LOT of pate. However, this was very tasty in the zuchini roll up once it was dehydrated.
The recipe says to put on a layer of the pate on the zuchini strips and dehydrate for a few hours to make soft so you can roll them up. I didn't find a need for that step. I rolled them all up and held them together with a toothpick and stuck them in the dehydrator until it got to the consistency I wanted. Very tasty. Word of caution: once you take them out of the dehydrator, do not put them in the fridge right away. Place them on a plate for a few hours prior to putting them in the fridge, otherwise they get very wilty and moist and look unappealing to eat as leftovers directly from the fridge.
Finally, the walnut burgers.
This recipe came from
http://www.shazzie.com/raw/recipes/. These were a big hit. The pate itself, raw, is good. However, once they are dehydrated taste very much like a boca burger. These I will definitely make again, just in smaller quantities.
