I'm slowly being murdered by the piece-bag and the flask

[venta]

Yesterday, I was trying to make my bait out of things I found in the fridge. In the fridge I'd found tortillas, cream cheese and salad. Hey, that's cream cheese and salad wraps!

For not-very-interesting reasons, it was dairy-free cream cheese, ie Pure soya "soft and creamy" spread. It looks like cream cheese. It spreads like cream cheese. It tastes, unsurprisingly, absolutely nothing like cream cheese. In fact, it isn't very nice.

It's not fair to say it's nasty, it's just very unlike cream cheese, and very sweet, and it made my sarnies really bloody odd. Possibly it would be OK in a cheesecake sort of context. But not in a sandwich.

Today, facing the same problem, I decided to add Marmite to the mix to see if that helped. Yes, I know some of you will say that that will never help. I like Marmite. Get over it :)

Tastewise, it did help; I couldn't really taste the uncream uncheese. But... at the bottom of my baitbox I found a strange soy-sauce-like substance which was basically runny Marmite. I regularly put Marmite in sarnies, and this does not normally happen. Probably tortillas are insufficiently absorbent and, in the five or so hours between manufacture and consumption, some of it slid off.

The only other explanation is that the Marmite was trying to get away from the vegan cream cheese. Can't really blame it.

If anyone's got any ideas for using up Pure's finest, let's hear 'em.

Irrelevantly, thank you to everyone who had artichoke suggestions the other day. Unfortunately when I got home I discovered that the artichokes, despite having been out the ground only a few days, had gone very squashy, and were grey and fluffy at the edges. I elected not to eat them, so can't answer the are-the-skins-edible question I'd been tasked to investigate.

Comments

[huskyteer.livejournal.com]

Add icing-sugar and you have the topping for carrot cake...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yup, that might work. I definitely think it wants to hang out at the cakey end of the spectrum.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Actually, pure cream cheese is one of the few fake cheeses that I find bearable enough to have bought more than once. But it doesn't really taste like philadelphia.

I dollop it on pizza bases as an extra topping. (Note: dollop, not spread)

[venta.livejournal.com]

That seems weird to me, because it's sweet... but I guess some people put marscapone on pizza, so it's certainly no worse than that.

I was impressed at the impression it did of cream cheese consistency-wise, I admit.

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

I should also warn you that for many practical purposes, I lack the distinction between sweet and savoury food, so you may not wish to follow anything I suggest.

It's not that I *can't* tell when something is sweet and something is savoury, it's that I don't find the distinction that important when combining flavours* - I like fusions of flavours. I cite sweet and sour sauce and sweet chilli dipping sauce as being a good examples of why this is completely sane and not at all odd.

*This does mean that it's actually quite hard to find combinations of nice foods that I dislike. People *have* tried.

Of course, even *I* found mushroom sauce made with rice milk to be a little bit odd, though not actively nasty, so I would disrecommend that ;-).

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oddly, mushroom sauce made with rice milk doesn't sound in the least weird to me (though I concede I haven't tried it, so am willing to accept your judgement that it doesn't work well).

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

Rice milk is *really* sweet when cooked. It's pretty sweet when it's not cooked too. It makes for good milk puddings, though you can leave out the sugar.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I have started using Quark, which is dairy but also weird. It hides in clumps in lasagne, even when spread out properly to start with. On a pizza it stayed in a quivering lump, defying heat. It apparently makes good cheesecake, though.

I'm impressed that any food stuff managed to scare Marmite, although given the dairy-free stuff my mum eats I'm not sure all of it can be described as food. Perhaps Pure cream cheese is in that category.

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

Dollops of quark are also good in frittatas (although not for vegans, obv.)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Blimey, I haven't had Quark in years. I didn't know you could still get it.

I loved it when I was little - my godmother who believes that everything German is good (and, conversely, everything good is German) used to buy it from the German deli near where she lived.

the Marmite was trying to get away from the vegan cream cheese

[stegzy.livejournal.com]

Of course it was. It has more sense.

Re: the Marmite was trying to get away from the vegan cream cheese

[stegzy.livejournal.com]

The cheese that is....

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

That sort of vegan muck should be thrown outside for the birds - and even they won't touch it!

Ugh, your post is the stuff of horror to me, I can't bear the taste of meat and dairy substitutes, and whenever I've been forced to eat such things, I've been in stomach hurting agony for hours afterwards. UGH!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'd never usually buy cheese-substitute, but in this case I was really struggling to work out what very dairy-allergic people put on bagels. Apparently I can't quite encompass the idea of a bagel without cream cheese.

Said dairy-allergic people very sensibly ignored the stuff on the grounds it looked suspicious. I don't actually know what they did put on the bagels, though.

[grumblesmurf.livejournal.com]

Salmon?

Bacon?

Not a lot of milk in either of those...

[venta.livejournal.com]

You can't put salmon on a bagel without putting cream cheese on first. Fact.

I'm not sure about the bacon idea. 'Snot as good as smoked salmon and cream cheese. And probably no good in the specific instance I was talking about, as I was trying to juggle requirements of vegetarians, dairy-allergies, Jews... so adding bacon in would have raised as many issues as it sovled :)

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

Salmon, lemon juice, black pepper. The approved dairy intolerant version of the traditional smoked salmon cream cheese combo. Possibly not quite as nice, but if you're stuck with dairy intolerance, best alternative.

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

Arf! Dairy-allergic bod is very sensible - but then they've probably been burned with such horrors before.

How about pickle? Beef and mustard? Picallily? I'd have grabbed a luxury relish or fancy chutney to make up for the lack of dairy - but would probably have scoffed it all myself!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Those sound like lovely lunch-bagels or afternoon-snack bagels, but for some reason my brain will only admit the existence of smoked-salmon-and-cream-cheese bagels at breakfast time. I don't know why, because I'm not usually militant about such things and have eaten most improbable breakfasts at times.

Also, I was trying to draw a best-fit line through a variety of eating issues, and didn't feel I could cater specifically for every one!

Dairy-allergic bods aren't that sensible, they both eat soya yoghurt which is grim!

[beckyc.livejournal.com]

they both eat soya yoghurt which is grim!

I quite like soya yoghurt actually (vanilla was my fave), though it does have a tendency to do the icky separating thing that quite a few real yoghurts do. But give it a good mix and add something chunky to it and you won't be able to tell :-).

Soya ice cream is nice too.

Now that I come to think of it, I reckon if you put enough sugar and fat into things then they taste good no matter what. Or, for savoury food, enough fat and MSG (or salt for them as likes that). I've not really properly tried MSG with sweet food, but I'm guessing it's *not* a combination that I'd want to give to anyone I valued as a friend.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Thickening agent for milkshakes?

[Disclaimer: I have not tried this. May ruin milkshake!]

[venta.livejournal.com]

Er... I don't feel like this would work, but surely I should try it in the Interests of Science!

[secretrebel.livejournal.com]

Creamy pasta sauce? Carbonara-like?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yup, that could work.

I have a(n unfounded) belief that the stuff won't melt, and will just sit in a pan and glare at me, but I should test it.

[cuthbertcross.livejournal.com]

Yep, I'm thinking tomato puree/tinned tomatoes for a sort of tomato and marscapone effect.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Do they have to be food ideas? It might work well for touching in holes in plasterwork, for example. Or liming birds.