Ethnically Diverse Toast (aka French toast made with Italian bread)

My lack of posts lately may hint in a fairly obvious way that I've been in a bit of a cooking rut for a week or so. I just haven't felt inspired, I guess. But luckily that all ended last night, when I journeyed into the land of pasta making and whipped up (cough, cough) a batch of homemade spinach gnocchi. Yeah, you heard that right. ;) But more on that in my next post, because this morning I made something you'd think really shouldn't be veganizable, since the original relies almost solely on animal products. Obviously I'm talking about French toast!

It was with a certain amount of, well, apprehension that I tried the recipe for "Fronch" Toast from VWAV. Isa says that chickpea flour possesses the magical ability to transform the egg- and milk-free version into one that tastes amazingly close to the real thing. Well, truth be told, I don't really care for the taste of chickpea flour. I learned this the hard way after I made a batch of pudla (Chinese scallion "pancakes" made with chickpea flour) based on this recipe. But since I was halving the VWaV recipe (I'm only cooking for one, here!) and it therefore only needed 1/8ish cup of chickpea flour, I figured I'd give it a try. Oh, and please excuse the questionable quality/composition of this photograph - my camera was having focusing issues, and this was not an exceedingly aesthetically pleasant food. It's rather... beige.



So - the result? Tasty, and surprisingly like "real" French toast (why does she call it "Fronch" Toast, anyway?), but not indistinguishable from the original. I added some cinnamon into the mix, because I don't have any maple syrup for a topping and wanted to sweeten it up. Unfortunately, I could taste the chickpea flour. That was a little disappointing, although I think I might've used too much flour, since I was just eyeballing it. Next time, I'll definitely be stingy with the chickpea flour. I'll also use slightly stale bread (mine was leftover Italian bread from the night before) and let it soak in the mixture for a longer period of time.

Oh, and that topping on my French toast? That, my friends, is a yummy, sweet, apple topping based on something my dad used to make when he'd cook up a big batch of pancakes for my family on the weekends. It's pretty simple - first, you pour about 1/4 or 1/3 cup of applesauce into a small pot and heat it up on the stove. While that's getting nice and bubbly, chop up an apple into small cubes and add it to the pot. Since I use unsweetened applesauce, I like to add a sizable sprinkle of cinnamon and a little sugar, but you can definitely leave the sugar out. If you have maple syrup, that works nicely too; Dad liked to use it. I bet you could give it a nice apple pie type flavor by adding nutmeg, allspice, etc. Anyway, once it's bubbly and the apples are nice and soft, just spoon it right over your French toast or pancakes and enjoy! I sure did. :)