Our Italian Feast

Not to brag, but I really outdid myself with tonight's dinner. We had:


In the big white bowl, there's lettuce (in case you couldn't tell).
On the platter there's parsley, cucumber, and roasted bell peppers. On one side there's large peppers that were cut into quarter's, and on the other side there's adorable mini peppers that I left whole. Very delicious and sweet.
In the little bowl, there's balsamic-maple dressing from How It All Vegan.

As I was planning the meal last night, I decided that I should make focaccia. I looked through my cookbooks, but I couldn't find a recipe that I wanted to make. (I saw one in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, but I didn't have any coarse salt, and it called for a pizza stone. One of our friends gave me a pizza stone, but I'm not quite ready to use it yet.) So I searched the web and came across this recipe. I changed it by using whole wheat pastry flour and added 1 tbsp red pepper flakes, and it was delicious. I'm really getting the hang of breadmaking now!
Here are a few pictures:


Spooning olive oil-herb mixture over the top.


Before baking..........


and after baking. The house smelled like a pizza parlor!


This is Seitan Pepperoni Casserole. I made a recipe of Seitan Pepperoni from Vegan Vittles,
and combined it with tomato sauce*, steamed broccoli*, mozzarella-style cheese sauce (from Ecological Cooking), and Tasty Topping (again from Ecological Cooking. It consists of sesame seeds, nutritional yeast, and seasonings.) This was sooooo good!


Here's a picture of the main course components: The casserole, focaccia, and braised broccoli raab.


These are Lemon-Almond Drop Cookies I made up for this week's vegan cookoff.
As soon as I get my recipe blog set up, I'll post the recipe. They were really good, nice and soft and chewy, not crisp. They tasted even better as......


Lemon-Almond Drop Cookie Sandwiches.
This was the aforementioned cookies spread with almond butter and all fruit raspberry preserves, and stuck together. Yummers!


Now it's time for The Daily Roundup of Food Rachel Brought Home. Today she brought home:
swiss chard, collards, kale, baby arugala, baby romaine, celery, granny smith apples, broccoli, grapes, peppers, mushrooms, and lettuce. She also brought home leeks, parsley, cilantro, and dairy milk, but we gave them away to friends.

Something hilarious happened today. Well, it was funny to me. My mom went to see a friend. (He's my guitar teacher as well.) Go check out his website, listen to music, and buy a CD here. They were chatting, and somehow started talking about this lady who used to give me guitar lessons. Or, tried to give me guitar lessons. She was horrible! Her voice would crack when she sang, she would be off pitch, and she wasn't good at the guitar at all. You get the picture. Well, to make a long story short, he just started teaching her! Can you believe it?

Okay, it was funny to me, but somehow it doesn't translate over into writing very well. I'm still laughing about it though. :)