Vegan MoFo is here!!!

It's that time of the year again! And this is my first time being a part of it -- very excited! =D

So I decided to open with an old favorite of mine. My grandma made these all the time when I was young and I loved them. Recently, I asked her how she used to make them, added a few (vegan, gluten-free) modifications, and -- voilà!

I took pictures of a few steps to make it easier. Hope it helps.

CHERRY POTATO DUMPLINGS

Amounts of ingredients are a little tricky, my grandma was the "eyeball it" type. So, I'll say 1lb potatoes to 1 - 1 1/2 cups flour, 1 egg (replacer), 10-ish cherries, some oil and some bread crumbs (about 2Tbsp each), and as much sugar as you want.

1) Cut up and cook potatoes as you would when making mashed potatoes, but only add a little salt to the water and no milk.


2)When they were soft enough to pierce with fork, I added a 1/2 Tbsp butter (I used Earth Balance sticks) and went to mashing.

3)Slowly, I added 1/2cup of potato flour, but you can add any flour you want. Next time, I think I'll try oat flour to make the finished product taste less potato-y. Then I added milled flax seed and water (in a 1:3 ration) as an egg substitute, and mixed it all up. Here's the way the dough looks after all that:


4)Start boiling a pot of water.

By the way, these are the ingredients I used:


5)Roll a tablespoon amount of dough into a ball with your hands. Then, take a pitted cherry (I used frozen, unsweetened ones) and stick it in the middle of the ball you just made. Close the hole by adding a bit more dough to cover the cherry and rolling it into a ball again with your hands.

6) Place the ball into a pot of boiling water. Don't crowd the pot with dumplings. Wait a couple minutes more after they've floated to the top and then transfer into a pan with hot olive oil and bread crumbs.

7)Roll the dumplings around the pan so they are covered with the oil/crumb mixture.


8)Place hot dumplings onto a plate and dust with sugar (I used date sugar)


[BEST PART!]9) Eat!


Sorry about the crappy pictures, but the lighting in my kitchen sucks. I'll try to fix that in the future.

Next up: polenta triangles and lentil soup. Oh, joy!