Special Cheesecake Recipe

As most of you know, I am deathly allergic to milk. Not just lactose-intolerant, which by the way, is so not the same thing!

Basic science lesson: Lactose is a sugar. Casein is a protein. Both are digested and broken down very differently in the human body. I am allergic to the casein protein in cow’s milk. I have been my entire life, I show no signs of out-growing it, and it has actually gotten worse as I’ve gotten older so I am very careful about what I eat.

That being said, I usually end up customizing a lot of recipes and making substitutions so that I can make things Jen-safe. I’m actually really surprised that with the rising number of allergies and veganism that the Food Network doesn’t have a vegan based cooking show yet. While I am not a vegan or even a vegetarian for that matter, when I want some treats or goodies, I always know that the vegan ones are safe for me to eat.

That being said, many many moons ago, a Jewish friend of mine brought in a cheesecake to work that she referred to as “Parve” and she assured me it was dairy free and I could eat it. Now, never having had cheesecake before, I didn’t know what to expect, but I liked it and asked her for the recipe. I don’t know where she got her recipe from, but the only modification that I made was to add vegan chocolate chips to it. Because, let’s face it, everything is better with chocolate.

Cheesecake Ingedients:

16 oz. “Better than Cream Cheese” (made by Tofutti and sold in 8 oz containers)

- You can find this in the cream cheese section. Most Market Districts carry the brand, as well as Whole Foods.

3/4 C granulated sugar

1 Tablespoon flour (I use cake flour)

1/4 teaspoon grated lemon rind

1/4 teaspoon grated orange rind

- You can cheat if you want and buy dried rinds in the spice aisle

1 egg yolk

2 large eggs

1 Tablespoon of dairy free whip cream, or cool whip

- I even omit this sometimes if I don’t have any and it doesn’t seem to make a difference.

As far as the crust in concerned, I cheat again and just buy a Pillsbury ready-made graham cracker crust. I do recommend getting the larger size “2 extra servings!” because everything just fits better.

If you are suzy homemaker, feel free to make your own graham cracker crust.

Preheat oven to 475 F

Beat the cream cheese until fluffy. (I actually do this by hand with a wooden spoon. No need to dirty a mixer) Add sugar and flour and beat until smooth.

Mix in grated rinds. Add egg yolk, mix well. Add whole eggs and mix in one at a time. Add cool whip and fold in briefly.

This is where I add in the vegan chocolate chips. You can make a plain cheesecake or add in any other mix-ins that you see fit.

Pour into pie crust. I set the pie crust pan on a larger cookie sheet in case there is any spill over in the oven. Bake at 475 F for 10 minutes.

After 10 minutes, reduce the oven temperture to 200 F and bake another 30 minutes. Do not open the oven door.

After 30 minutes, turn off the oven and crack the oven door slightly. Allow the cheesecake to cool to room temperature and then refrigerate.

It’s best to make this the day before you need it, because the cheesecake tastes much better after it’s been in the fridge overnight. If you are in a huge hurry and have to make it same day, you can always freeze it for a few hours before serving.

This recipe can be easily modified to be completely vegan or even gluten free, but I like it just the way it is! I also tend to top it with fruit in the summer time.

You *should* get at least 8 servings from this, but that of course depends on how generously you portion it out. I recommend not telling people it’s dairy free. The “dairy-free” connotation oftens scares people away, but I’ve had numerous people tell me that they really enjoy this recipe and it’s actually a lot lighter than a real cheesecake so you won’t feel as full afterwards.

 

SAVE THE BUNNIES!!!!

Isn’t that one of the most adorable bunnies you have ever seen? Of course he’s not nearly as adorable as Harvey, but perhaps I’m a bit biased.

The bunnies of Western PA need your help! Bunnies are a special kind of pet to have and unfortunately, not everyone does enough proper research before bringing home a bunny and a lot of them get taken to area shelters, or even worse, let loose in the wild when they are no longer wanted as pets.

Domesticated rabbits can’t survive in the wild. I’ll never understand how people can be so cruel and uneducated about an animal that they supposedly once wanted.

There is a Rabbit Party tomorrow for the Pittsburgh House Rabbit Club at the Western PA Humane Society . Here are the party details:

WHO: Pittsburgh House Rabbit Club

WHAT: Annual Rabbit Party

WHEN: Saturday, August 4th from 2-4 PM

WHERE: Western PA Humane Society, 1101 Western Ave, North Side

WHY: Because bunnies are cute! Seriously, there are at least 21 babies that need either foster or forever homes, not to mention the other rabbits that are available for adoption.

There will be rabbit experts there to answer all your questions and if you’ve never considered having a rabbit as a pet, this would be a good time to check it out.

Here are some of the things that will be going on:

— SHOW OFF your splendid bunny to a roomful of “rabbit people.”

— BUY organic food and rabbit-safe toys, treats, litter and other supplies from Animal Nature. www.animalnature.net

— ASK the rabbit experts your questions.

— WATCH a rabbit volunteer trim your bunny’s nails – no muss, no fuss, no drama!

— FIND OUT all about fostering and volunteering at the shelters.

— MEET some fabulous rabbits and volunteers from Animal Friends, Animal Rescue League, Rabbit Wranglers & the W. Pa. Humane Society.

— SCHEDULE a future “bunny blind date.” During a blind date, your bunny is introduced to several shelter rabbits to find the best match.

— VOTE for the cutest, best-named and “Best In Show” bunny in attendance, all vying for fabulous prizes donated by

Harvey will not be in attendance, but many other bunnies will be. Even if you are unable to have a pet at this time, the Humane Society will gladly accept donations to help not only the bunnies, but all the other animals that pass through their doors.

I hope to see you there! 

Email Etiquette, Think Before you Send...

Like me, you probably use Outlook for your work email. Also, like most people in the world, you probably get ALOT of email on any given day. Some of it is junk, some important and some can probably be ignored until you get around to it.

There are certain things about receiving email to my work account that I really and truly despise.

Read Receipts: Really?!?! Do you REALLY need to know that I got your message? It’s email. Unless it gets bounced back to you, how about you just go ahead and assume I got it?? Also, if I sent you a message and am waiting for a response, the chances are pretty damn good that I’m going to read it. No need to send me a little box so I can click the “read” button.

It should come as no surprise that I routinely refuse to accept a read receipts and I ALWAYS hit the “ignore” button.

! : Ahhh, the little red exclamation point. This little innocous mark ellicits several responses from me. The most common being: Hmm, really? That’s not important at all, I’m not sure why YOU thought it was.

Sometimes I just laugh, sometimes I roll my eyes. Maybe, just maybe 0.0000012% of the emails that I receive that are tagged with a red ! actually are important. If that’s the case, I will add my own little red flag and deal with them as soon as I can.

My general philosophy in dealing with the little red ! is this: If your message isn’t as important as you think it is, I’m not going to respond in a timely fashion, and quite frankly, you should consider yourself damn lucky if I bother to respond at all.

The little red ! is definitely over-used and abused and as far as I’m concerned is just another little boy crying wolf.

Meeting Requests: I actually really like meeting requests. It should come as no surprise that I live by my calendar, so if I can click a single button to make an appointment appear, I’m all for that. I also send meeting requests quite frequently, because I can see when they get accepted and then I know that they show up on the other person’s calendar.

These are so much better than sending a million emails back and forth trying to organzie a conference call or work day.

Out of Office Reply: This is probably my most favorite feature ever, since it means I am off and I don’t have to deal with anything that comes in my inbox until I officially return to work. I am a 2 phone person and I am a strong believer in separating my personal time from my work time. I turn my Blackberry off at 5PM every day and when I turn it off on Friday, it doesn’t get turned on again until Monday morning. I don’t even take it on vacations with me. In my line of work, an immediate response to something is almost never required, so I don’t feel the least bit guilty about not being super connected to my work phone.

I will say this: if you have an out of office reply turned on, make sure it’s for the applicable dates and you have it set up to turn off automatically, or you turn it off as soon as you come back. Getting an email with an ‘out of office’ reply that is a month old just looks tacky.

Sarcasm Font: I SO wish this was a thing. Seriously. Someone should get on that.

I’ll bake you cookies.

What do you love/hate about business email?

I'm Ready for my Close up...

If you know me at all, or follow me on Twitter, then you recognize that cute little furball as Harvey, the most adorable bunny on the planet.

Harvey might be a bit spoiled, but he is such a good bunny most of the time that I don’t mind spoiling him one bit.

Harvey also doesn’t seem to mind that I usually always have a camera in his face or am encouraging him to do that “super cute thing he just did” again and again and again so I can get just the right picture of it.

It doesn’t seem to matter how many hundreds of photos that I take of him, I can never really seem to get what I would consider to be a perfect picture. It is very possible that in the near future I may bite the bullet and plunk down some serious change on a DSLR camera *just* to get better Harvey pictures. Yeah, he might be a little spoiled…

Anyway, my friend Michelle recently started her own photography business. She claims to specialize in children, but as you can see, she also does a pretty awesome job with bunnies. All pictures in this post were taken by Michelle and Harvey was quite cooperative for her.

Yes, I did in fact have a professional photo shoot for my bunny. Judge all you want, but it was worth it and I would probably do it again. Michelle did insist on taking some human shots as well. I had to warn her that I absolutely HATE having my picture taken. Not as much as I hate the color pink or being hugged, but willingly getting in front of a camera is definitely in my top 5 list of things I absolutely despise. Squirrels and stupid people round out the list.

 That is probably one of the only pics you’ll see of me on the internet. I rarely post my own image anywhere on the web and when anyone even looks at me while holding a camera, my favorite line is ” I DO NOT authorize the use of my image”. I do make exceptions here and there but they are few and far between.

The moral of the story is, if you want some awesome pictures taken of either humans or animals, then call Michelle and schedule a session with her.

In the meantime, here are some more adorable bunny pictures.

 

 

(Somewhat) Wordless Wednesday

We had an incident the other night. Everyone is fine, the alarm company responded extremely quickly.

Thankfully they didn’t send the fire trucks, because that would have been REALLY embarrassing.

The turkey bacon was the only casualty.