Kitchen Fail... or not?

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Every once in a while, it's normal to have a kitchen fail, whether it's burnt cookies, overly dry fish, or rubbery mash potatoes... but what if you turned those failures into successes? Last night, my growing love for sprouted beans and legumes had me trying the lentil socca I knew was on my to-do list after last week's culinary orgasm.

Like I did with the sprouted socca, I diligently made my own flour, sprouting, soaking, and dehydrating my lentils until I had the amounts I needed follow the recipe... except... a gooey non-flippable mess happened instead of socca. It resulted in something that did in fact look more like rubbery green mash potatoes than anything even remotely pancake-esque. Hrm.

What to do with a few giant globs of lentil paste? Why, faux meatballs of course!


Refusing to admit failure, I took the paste and rolled a tablespoon or two of it into balls, quickly fried them again for another couple minutes, and served them over a massaged kale salad. The result was fantastic, and better than I could have ever expected from the mess! In fact, I think I may always make this recipe in ball form rather than as socca. I'm thinking they would be fantastic over raw zucchini pasta with marinara... again, the possibilities are endless! I'm actually really glad I messed up the original recipe because I really loved these in the end!

The other culinary success of the evening (though this one was on purpose) was a chocolate cheesecake I'd had in mind for the longest time:


I used a sweetened almond pulp crust as a base, a raw chocolate avocado mousse as the first layer, a sweetened version of Meredith's fermented nut cheese recipe as the second layer, and topped it with cacao nibs and vegan chocolate chips. Mmmmmm. And because good things always come in 3s, here's a picture of my kitty giving me a hug while I'm studying on the couch:

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