I made this raw vegan banana cream pie with inspiration from MD Vegan on youtube.
MD Vegan made a cream pie using coconut cream and cashews as the cream pie base.  I was in the mood for banana and I remembered that in this recipe for vegan cheese cake Bakerita used freeze dried blueberries for intensity of flavor and texture preference.
I don't have a method to freeze dry bananas at home (no dry ice, no vacuum sealer, no deep freezer, not 4 weeks (or space) to make sticky bananas in the freezer attached to my fridge) so when I was at Trader Joe's I picked up some freeze dried bananas.  At home I blended them into powder.

I soaked the cashews for maximum creaminess, just for about 4 hours, before blending them with a can of Trader Joe's organic coconut cream.  I added the banana powder in at the end. At first just half a bag, then the whole bag.  

I took a page from Minimalist Baker and made my cream pies in a muffin tin that makes 6 jumbo muffins. I also did as they did and placed strips of parchment across the bottom of each cup for easy removal.  

 Here's a photo of the finished product

It garnered significant interest around the house

That's all for now!

"Wish Book" 2019

Amazon sent a paper catalogue to my house for gift shopping this holiday season.  I was delighted to see this anachronism in my mailbox during the first week of November.    A tactile shopping experience from the comfort of my own living room.  Just like 1996.

Dan asked if you can order things from it on the phone.
I said, "Well yeah, and there's a QR code on every page."  
"No", he said, "can you call on the phone?"
"Wow." I said as it really got to sinking in, "I guess you can just order from Alexa. That's what this is for, you can be unplugged and sitting around in your living room, and you can just order from this catalogue from Alexa!"
We don't have and don't want Alexa.  It's just too much.

Let's start with the front cover.  It features children running around with cardboard box costumes on.  And no Amazon merchandise to speak of.

Let's jump to the back page, instructions for making animal costumes out of "those cardboard boxes your gifts arrive in".

A few notable insides:

A Holiday wish list and mad libs.

A sticker page to "tag your favorite gifts"

And these notable gifts (what kids like these days):

An alien you can extract from the abdomen of another alien, and it is dripping in slime! I want to see Zillion's (consumer reports for kids) review of this.

A Melissa and Doug pizza oven - it comes with pieces to build pizzas, and cash.  So brazen, so obvious!  Would pizza even exist without capitalism?

And the most magical of all - Harry Potter's invisibility cloak.  "There must be a catch.  Oh! The catch is you need the app to become invisible.  What?!"

How did they even decide to send me this catalogue?

I'm on the line.  I really can't decide if I'd be happier being a part of the market research thing that created this beautiful atrocity, or if I'd be happier ripping it apart through critical discourse analysis in the fight through capitalism.

It's the critical time at the end of the semester so I'll stop there, but perhaps will come back with analysis over winter break. Enjoy!