VeganMoFo Mac & Cheese Monday

Happy VeganMoFo! This year, at Vida Vegan Con, there was a wonderful VeganMoFo workshop run by Kittee, Amey, and Mo. We got a ton of great tips and decided on some daily themes for this year’s VeganMoFo. The themes are:

Mac-and-Cheese Monday – Eat mac and cheese. On Monday. (who needs another excuse?)

TV Tuesday – Eat and Watch, cook a meal featured in your favourite movie or TV show.

Work With it Wednesday – Work with a food you don’t like

Thankful Thursday – Giving to others and focusing on the positive

Freaky Friday – Trade with a fellow blogger for the day.

Retro Saturday – Veganise your favourite retro dishes

Sleepy Sundays – Your favourite breakfast or brunch dishes

I won’t be using all the themes daily, but I do want to try to use all of them at least once this month. Because I’m working during MoFo this year, I’m also not sure if I’ll be able to post daily, but I’m definitely going to shoot for 3x a week.

A list of all the themes from the workshop can be found on this VeganMoFo post. For the blogroll, weekend challenges, daily round-ups, and giveaways, stay tuned to the VeganMoFo homepage. If you’re totally overwhelmed by the number of bloggers, and want to randomly stumble upon some new blogs, try Random MoFo. Happy MoFo-ing, everyone! I can’t wait to see what everyone has cooked up this month!

 

This year, I’m working with bread. Until pretty recently, bread was something that I was totally intimidated by, and there are still some breads out there that I haven’t tackled, so I thought I’d take this month to give them a shot. Besides, who doesn’t want their house to smell like fresh baked bread all month?

 

Over the last week, I’ve been working on my very first, from-scratch, sourdough starter. I’m happy to say, I’ve got a healthy, growing starter in my fridge. Today, I made two loaves of rustic, relatively quick, sourdough bread. Because it was such a fast bread, it isn’t as sour as the traditional sourdough I grew up eating, but, it is a fantastic recipe.

 

I have heard from many people that one of the best resources for all things bread is King Arthur Flour – not only are there some amazing tips on their community, but, they’ve got live chat AND a baking hotline. So, I obsessed over their recipes and tips for the last month before making their “Start Your Own Sourdough Starter” recipe. I was successful (hooray!). 

Just Fed Sourdough Starter

Today was my first day off since making my starter, so I tackled King Arthur Flour’s Rustic Sourdough. It was so easy. In only 4 hours, I went from this:

The dough, mid-rise

To this:

Rustic Sourdough Bread Loaves

This bread is going to be perfect for everything from toast, to sandwiches, to panzanella. Tonight, it was perfect for mac and cheese topping.

For the Sourdough Mac:

1 recipe Dreena Burton’s Vegveeta Cheese Sauce

8oz noodles – I used pipe regate, it’s my favourite for mac & cheese

Mix them up, and top with torn up bits of sliced sourdough. Bake at 350* for 20 minutes, or until your bread starts getting nice and browned.

Sourdough Mac

Tonight was the first time I ever made Dreena’s Vegveeta dip. It’s awesome. I tasted it raw, before putting it in the saucepan, and again before putting it in the oven, and both times, I thought the tahini was a little strong, but, mixed with the noodles and the sourdough, it was perfect. I think it’s my new favourite mac & cheese sauce.