Warmup Cooking Class: "3 a.m. Pasta with Tempeh"

Tonight was the first of six Thursday nights (we're actually off one Thursday, I think October 9th) for the vegan cooking class that I teach. I used to teach this class more often but now for the last few years "focus" on photography classes (pun intended!) more; the photography classes seem to always fill up early on (the next 6-week photography class starts in late October and is already full).

One reason I love to teach is that I get great students - and this class is certainly no exception! I often get one or two vegetarians in the class, but this class (of eight) seems to have several vegetarians and vegans.

This picture is the cooking of my students - today was mostly lecture, discussing some background about vegetarianism, and getting to know each other; working in two teams, they had about 45m to put together this dish named after what one can do to quickly put together a tasty and nutritious meal when a friend shows up to visit at 3 in the morning (this has happened to me a number of times!) It is a saute of tempeh, shiitake mushrooms, and onions, served over pasta (we used brown rice pasta today) with salad and bread/toast.

They did a great job putting together a tasty dinner possibly in record time. For this first class, I bring a variety of frozen desserts as we just don't have time to make dessert.

---

Dessert! I have great news about that. I have been predicting for some time that coconut milk will more commonly be available as a base for "ice cream" (I also predict that we will be seeing more hemp-based products - I can't wait to find a hemp cheese!). When my wife and I were in California back in May, we found in Bolinas' People's Store coop a fabulous coconut milk-based ice cream, Coconut Bliss. I sure wish we could get it here, as well.

I think it was just yesterday that a friend in Ohio mentioned that she saw not Coconut Bliss, but another coconut milk-based dessert, and a coconut milk-based yogurt. I found them both at the Whole Foods store in Chapel Hill, NC when I was shopping for class today!! Turtle Island has a tasty Purely Decadent brand of soy ice cream; soy sometimes bothers my stomach, but I can't resist occasionally treating myself to one of the Purely Decadent "ice cream"s.

They had a new line of non-soy coconut milk-based ice creams!! They had three flavors; I bought one with cookie dough - wow, it was great! All the students and I loved it - it is so creamy and rich. I think most if not all felt that it couldn't be distinguished from great ice cream.

I didn't buy it, but did see that Turtle Island also has coconut milk yogurts!! I can't wait to try them.