Down On the Farm (Part 2)

I'm back again with more photos from this weekend's vegan retreat at the Farm in Summertown, Tennessee. For more on the Farm, an intentional community of vegans, vegetarians, and environmentally-minded hippies, read yesterday's post. In a nutshell, I was invited to demo a few of the recipes from my upcoming Southern vegan cookbook, which is being published by the Book Publishing Company at the Farm.

But before I went on, I was able to watch lots of other demos by some of my vegan heroes. I blogged about Friday's opening night dinner last night, but tonight's post will focus on the activities between breakfast and lunch on Saturday.

Breakfast began at Douglas' house immediately after our 7 a.m. yoga session. We had deliciously-moist, berry-pecan muffins (which Douglas demonstrated), Soysage (made in Nashville), and the Farm's amazing plain soy yogurt (made onsite) with nuts, raisins, and raw granola (also demo'd by Douglas):

After breakfast, Douglas showed us how to make his AMAZING raw crackers, a recipe I will most definitely be recreating. Then we caravaned over to Tofu Queen Louise Hagler's house, where she demonstrated how to make Papadzules from the Yucatan Peninsula. Louise has been in Mexico for a while, helping another cook veganize Mexican recipes, and this was one of her experiments. Here's Louise showing us raw pepitas:

Here's Louise talking about tomatoes (I think):

And here's the finished product. Well, half of it. Since we'd be eating all day, we each got half of a corn tortilla filled with fried tofu and topped with a toasted pepita sauce, homemade tomato sauce, and habenero sauce. This was delicious. The pepita sauce gave it such a wonderful flavor:

Afterward, I just had to get Louise to sign an updated version of her fabulous Tofu Cookery:

Next, we headed to Barb Bloomfield's house (where Paul and I spent the night) for a vegan dessert demo. Barb showed us how to make these delicious vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies. They were so good, the cookies in this jar went fast!

Then, Barb took a healthy turn and demonstrated Raw Chocolate Tarts with Cashew Cream. She let us create our own tarts and pipe the chocolate-avocado and cashew cream onto them with pastry bags. Barb is the lady in green holding the pastry bag:

Here's my tart! Delicious!

Next, Barb's husband Neal talked about growing wheat grass. Then the only kid in the workshop got to grind the wheat grass so we could all do shots:

Finally, we retreated back to Douglas' for lunch. After breakfast, he showed us how to make tamales with masa, a vegan sausage-spiked tamale sauce, and fresh salsa. As you can see, I loaded mine with salsa:

There were a few more demos and a walk through the Farm post-lunch, but I had to skip those so I could prepare for my 2 p.m. cooking demo. Check back tomorrow for pics of my class and Chef Alan Roettinger's demo.