A day in the life of a vegan

I Have Blog ADD

2008-10-27T19:50:00.005-04:00

Hello friends!

I must have blogging ADD or something, because I've created (another) new blog!

I wanted a blog that incorporated living the good life (fun!) with food, frugality, and fashion (awesome vintage-ness, etc.) among other things. Would you care to take a look and leave a comment? Originally it was going to be only about frugality, hence the name - Cheap Thrills!

In other news, I've moved away from home and I now work for a rad vegan home meal delivery service/chocolate company!

I leave you now with a prerequisite food picture:

Coconut + Berry + Chocolate Chip Bread Pudding.
Loosely based off a recipe in Vegan Planet.
Loosely being the operative word.

I'm really into individual servings right now (although I actually made this in September), it's so nice for everyone to have their own little dish, you know?

Anyhoo, hope to see you at cheap thrills!

A Big Hello From Me + New Blog!

2007-12-15T17:35:00.000-05:00

Hey everyone! I know I've been MIA for a while, but I'm back with a new blog. I've moved from blogspot to wordpress, so go check out my new blog!

Yes, I'm Still Alive. Really.

2007-01-06T20:21:00.000-05:00

So yeah, I haven't died or anything (although I did have a cold about a month ago). The past 4 months (has it really been that long since I've blogged?) have been super hectic because I was in a theater class and we were putting on a show, so that meant lots o' rehearsals. Plus, I'm working at the cafe full time now doing prep work, washing dishes, running to the bank, delivering to-go meals within walking distance, running around like a mad woman, and tidying up after we close. On top of that there have been guitar lessons, flamenco lessons, independent movies, contra and swing dances, music performances to see, etc. It was actually a little too much for me, and while I was still cooking, I just couldn't find the time or muster up the energy to blog. I made a kick-arse New Year's Eve meal, but sadly the lighting was horrible when I took the pictures, so I would be too ashamed to post them. The dessert did include an awesome tapioca pudding though. Mmm Hmm, vegan tapioca pudding. Who would'a thunk it? (I believe it was from The Millenium Cookbook, I'll have to double check if you really want to know.) Anyhoo, I hope you all had Happy Holidays!

Here's a catch-up of what's going on in my life:

* My aforementioned full-time job

* My guitar teacher's letting me record a CD at his studio, and I'm super excited about it!
Here are the song's I'm going to be recording (singing on most and playing the guitar on all):
1) The House Of The Rising Sun (rock/blues)
2) Texas Flood (blues)
3) Dust My Broom (slide guitar/blues)
4) A fusion combination we came up with (a morph of different fusion pieces)
5) A country picking piece
6) A country blues piece
7) Blowin' Down This Old Dusty Road (a Woody Guthrie folk song)
8) Blue Bossa (jazz)

*My mom left her job with a Hospice program and found another job

*Susan got a job working at a bank (she's starting out as a teller, but they told her since she has an MBA she'll move up rather quickly)

*Rachel's still working at the health food store, and yes, she's still bringing home veggies and other random stuff

*Dad's working in NYC and coming home on weekends, as he has been for a while

Life is content (except for those moments when we all want to kill each other).

What's new with everyone else?

Food P0rn Catch-up

2006-09-26T21:08:00.000-04:00

I miss blogging and reading everyone else's blogs. How are things going with you all? I'm having a blast at work, and I don't mind doing schoolwork either. I've been making food, but I don't get time to blog about it, so I have a build up of food pictures. Enjoy them!

The lighting was bad for this one, so it's a little blurry, but it's a salad of romaine lettuce, tomatoes*, and Sharp Classic Vinaigrette with a Bite (from The Passionate Vegetarian). I subbed hemp oil for the extra virgin olive oil it called, but Rachel and I didn't like it as much as we have in the past. Also, this was the first time I made it in the food processer (as opposed to the blender), and it was much thinner than all the other times I've made it. I still liked it a lot though, it was just different.

This picture is blurry because of bad lighting as well. It was Artichoke and Lima Bean Ragout in Lemon-Garlic Sauce, served over artichoke penne pasta*. It's from The Passionate Vegetarian. I loved this dish, but everyone else seemed to think it was too sour. I guess you can't win them all!

This is baby romaine lettuce*, golden tomatoes*, and Cumin-Lime Dressing from Ecological Cooking.

This is my version of The Zen Platter, a combination platter found at a vegetarian restaurant semi-close by me. It has steamed kale*, carrots, zucchini*, and summer squash*; arame, pink beans simmered with golden tomatoes* and parsley*; tofu* marinated in soy sauce, garlic powder, ground ginger, lemon juice and sesame oil and then baked; millet, and finally tahini sauce to pour over everything and anything. This meal was very satisfying.

West Indian Rundown from you guessed it, The Passionate Vegetarian. It's a Jamaican Curry, and it's yummy. It was actually a wee bit too spicy for me, but it was still yummy. It had oil, onion, garlic*, scallions*, curry powder, coconut milk, vegetable stock (homemade from vegetables brought home by Rachel), seitan*, carrots, potatoes, acorn squash*, allspice, thyme, half a habenero chile, and tomatoes, and I served it over brown basmati rice. Everyone really liked it.

Sliced Brisket of Seitan, Jewish-Style, (from The Passionate Vegetarian) right in time to celebrate Rosh Hashanah (even though I'm not Jewish). Oh my goodness, I don't even know how to start describing this! I made this about 2 years ago, but this time it was much better. (Maybe because I had all the right ingredients and didn't have to make any substitutions? Just a thought.) I also used the variation listed, adding steamed potatoes* and cabbage to make it a one dish meal. Even my dad liked it!

This is Horseradish Tofu Sour Cream (part of the brisket recipe). No one except for me ate any though. Boo.

Here's the brisket plated and ready to be eaten. Just thinking about it makes me salivate.

I love making homemade bread. This is Sweet and Sour Swedish-Style Rye-Buckwheat Bread from The Passionate Vegetarian. I had a little trouble with the dough being too sticky, but I worked things out by adding a cup more flour than the recipe called for. It made two loaves, but I demolished the one not shown in the picture by trying to take it out of the loaf pan too soon. Anyhoo, I made this 100% whole grain by using whole wheat pastry flour when it called for unbleached white flour. The flours used were: rye flour*, ww pastry flour, ww flour, and soy flour. It also had caraway seeds, orange rind, and buckwheat groats, besides other things. I've been eating a huge amount of this bread; it's heavenly when spread with Earth Balance.

So since no one ate any of the horseradish tofu sour cream, I thought I would make an Eastern European sort of meal and use the sour cream up. Well, things didn't exactly work out as planned. I made Beet-Root Soup and planned on putting the sour cream on top. I'm the only one who ate the soup though, since Rachel wasn't home. Everyone else was eating a certain food group that will not be named (hint: it rhymes with eat). I enjoyed it thoroughly, although I have an enormous amount of soup leftover. It will be going in the freezer tomorrow, so I can just defrost it and eat in on a busy night. On the side of the soup is the aforementioned bread spread with Earth Balance, and some slices of pickles*.

These are the lovely Carrot-Raisin Muffins from Vegan With A Vengeance. I used spelt flour and turbinado sugar, and they came out so light and fluffy you never would have guessed it was spelt flour. I'll be making these again soon.

Pepper Steak. The peppers and seitan were free, as was the steamed broccoli shown on the side. The recipe for pepper steak is really easy to make, and it's so tasty. It's actually one of my favorite meals.

Okay, you may be asking yourself two things.
1. Why is Veronica using The Passionate Vegetarian so much?
2. Geez, why is Veronica eating so much seitan? I bet she's going to develop a wheat intolerance or something.

There are plausible explanations for everything. The answer to # 1 is that I'm trying to go through my cookbooks so that I can remember what I have. Whilst I was going through my cookbooks, I happened upon my beloved The Passionate Vegetarian. It's one of my favorite cookbooks, and for a good reason. This book is huge, and it's jam-packed with awesome, flavorful recipes. Anyway, I haven't been using it as much, but when I looked at it, I saw a ton of recipes I hadn't made yet, so I marked them and I'm trying to work my way through them.
As for # 2, I hit the jackpot (so to speak) last week! Rachel works at a health food store, so she brings home a lot of produce and other foods, but we also go to another health food store, and they give us free food as well. So last week, I got home from work and was told by mom that the other health food story (not the one Rachel works at), gave us some tofu and seitan. I was not expecting to see 2 lbs. of seitan and 4 lbs. of tofu. Imagine my delight! How glorious free food is. So yeah, we ate a lot of seitan recently, but hopefully not enough that we become gluten intolerant. :)

So there you go, the answers to your questions.

Lots of pictures, some food some not

2006-09-17T20:40:00.000-04:00

It's been a while, hasn't it? My blogging will most likely be sporadic for a while, between work and schoolwork I don't know if I can fit it in. I'm going to be working Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays, unless they call me and need me to come in. I had thought I was going to be bussing, but they hired a busser, so I'm doing dishes and prep work. Anyhoo, over the weekend I made Susan a belated graduation dinner, because she recently finished up her MBA. We had:

50's Style Onion Dip Redux and Crunchy Toast.......

Roasted Red Pepper Soup (without the cilantro jalapeno swirl that is an optional part of the recipe-Susan hates Cilantro)....

Outrageously Good Pan Crisped Millet Vegetable Cakes over steamed kale with Mushroom Sauce Veronese over top, also shown is mashed butternut squash. In the cakes were millet, beets, carrots*, garlic*, and other stuff. You can't really tell in the picture, but I made them heart shaped. (I didn't crisp the cakes in a pan, instead I broiled them.) All the recipes were from The Passionate Vegetarian except......

Chocolate Clementine Cake!!!!!! I used the recipe for Raspberry Blackout Cake from Vegan With A Vengeance, using the applesauce conversion in the book to make it lower in fat. I also subbed this super fancy, super expensive clementine marmalade in place of the raspberry jam, and I used all whole wheat pastry flour. It was so out of this world, and rich, and my dad was like, "This cake is vegan?". Haha.

This is a Chickpea-Arame Salad Sammich (from Vegan With A Vengeance). It's supposed to be a Chickpea-Hijiki Salad Sammich, but I couldn't find any hijiki. On the side are some steamed green beans. This was so delicious! We all loved it so much I made it twice this week.

Rachel brought this home from work the other day. It's a shopping list. Isn't it awesome?

This is a bad picture, but it's the Alfreda sauce from Vegan With A Vengeance served over whole wheat mini shells, steamed broccoli*, sauteed mushrooms*, and roasted red peppers.

Let's see. This was something we had last week: breakfast for dinner. VWaV tofu scramble with salsa, avocado*, and black beans added in; VWaV tempeh sausage crumbles over roasted potatoes*, carrots*, and onions; sprouted grain bread with Earth Balance and Grape Jelly*, and grapes. Mmm, I love having breakfast food for dinner.

This was our table setting when we had our breakfast for dinner.

OMG, aren't the butlers the cutest things ever? (They're jam spreaders.)

Mmm, coffee with agave nectar and almond milk.

Soy Delicious Purely Decadent Cherry Nirvana ice cream with fresh pineapple* and chocolate syrup. I didn't really like the cherry nirvana one plain, but it was awesome with the other stuff. My favorite flavor (of the ones I've tried) is the Mint Chocolate Chip kind. So yum.

This was sprouted grain pasta with Pumpkin Seed Avocado* spread (from How It All Vegan-it uses sunflower seeds, but I switched it up a little). On the side is sauteed baby arugala* with cherry tomatoes* and parsley, and also some honeydew. The honeydew was fermented, so I actually didn't eat it.

This was Papadini Lentil Rotini, tomato sauce made from sauteed carrots*, mushrooms*, yellow bell peppers*, onions, celery*, garlic*, and sausage crumbles from Vegan Vittles. Sprinkeled over the top is Tasty Topping from Ecological Cooking. I love the bowls we were eating out of!

Finally, on Friday Rachel brought home 3 big bags of beauty products. We still haven't had a chance to go through them yet, they're sitting in our hallway waiting to be sorted.

That's all.

My Visit To The Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary!

2006-09-10T20:23:00.000-04:00

Okay. Before you look at the picures, I just want to tell you that I took a lot more pictures than this, but the digital camera we have is bizarre and so some of the pictures have disappeared from the camera. I have no idea where they went, but this isn't the first time that this has happened. A while ago (right when I started my blog, I believe) I took photos of one of our dinners, and they disappeared before I could scan them into the computer. About 2 months later, I accidentally dropped the camera and the batteries came out, and when I put them back in, the picures that had vanished were on there like nothing had happened. So that's what I'm hoping will happen with these new lost ones. Anyway, I had a nice time at the opening! The Woodstock crowd is kind of weird (this isn't anything I just learned, I've been to Woodstock many times) and we don't really fit in with the Woodstockians, but other than that it was fun. I had a good time with the animals:

The sheep seemed to be scared of people, so they kept skittering away. I did manage to take this photo before this one ran away. I really like this picture!

The goats were so cute! Some of them were kind of skitterish, but I got to pet a few of them.

Just a random picture

This goat was a ham for the camera! It knew I was taking a picture so it turned it's head for a side profile.

A cute black goat eating

Aww, adorable!

Here's a picture of me with one of the goats

Hmm

Hee hee, isn't this one too cute?

Me again!

I think this is the goat that's a ham for the camera

I didn't realize that their necks were so flexible

Some turkeys. After I took this picture they had a little fight. Some little boy (I think his parents run the sanctuary?) had to come and stop it.

Aww, this goats name was Olivia. (I have no idea whose legs those are.) She thinks she's a cow because when she first got there she was friends with a calf. After the calf got older they had to separate them, but she doesn't go near the other goats because as I said, she thinks she's a cow.

Cute little piggies! (I went into their area to pet them, but those pictures are MIA.)

This is Olivia again

A lone rooster

This is where there should have been more pictures.

I got food there! They had a grill going, so they were selling grilled tofurky sausages. I got a Beer Brat on a bun (the one thing that was kind of weird was that the buns may or may not have been vegan, but I ate it anyway), and on the side I got a black bean and avocado salad and some vegetable skewers. The food was quite good! Mom also bought some chipotle potato salad, and that was yummy as well. For dessert, they had two different kinds of cakes (one chocolate and one vanilla) as well as some cupcakes (insert lost pictures here). They looked really good, so mom and I got chocolate cake and Rachel got a cupcake (Rachel and I shared our desserts). Lets just say they looked a lot better than they tasted. Since I started eating whole, unrefined foods, I can't handle too much processed food, and so the cake didn't taste good at all (it tasted like a cake mix). Rachel and I felt lethargic the whole evening.

The dessert was basically the only negative thing about the whole event. Mom bought me a copy of Meat Market by Eric Markus, and I got two free issues of Satya magazine, plus a free Satya pin. Oh, I almost forgot! Arm Of The Sea Theater was there with their puppets. I got pictures of them but guess where they are? I also got a Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary hoody that's really, really nice, plus a pin from Arm Of The Sea.

I guess that just about sums up my visit.

Today's lunch and dinner

2006-09-08T19:02:00.000-04:00

As the title says, here's today's lunch and dinner:

Lunch: Guacamole Grillers from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook. All it has in it is avocado*, nutritional yeast, garlic powder*, and umeboshi vinegar. It was served on sourdough spelt bread*. On the side is cucumber wedges*, tomato wedges*, orange wedges*, grapefruit wedges*, and a strawberry spritzer (in the glass, obviously). The problem with getting free food is sometimes it's a little weird. The textures were a little off on the tomatoes and cucumbers as well as the oranges, and I had to cut a whole lot of mold off the bread, but at the end of the day I'm just glad to have food.

Dinner: Romaine lettuce*, yellow/orange cherry tomatoes*, grated carrot, sliced cucumber*, chickpeas, nutritional yeast, kalamata olives, and Caesar salad dressing from La Dolce Vegan. Yum!

I'm going to see a concert tonight, and tomorrow I'm going to (drumroll please)...........

The Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary's Grand Opening!!! Yeah! I'm psyched. If your want more info about them, here's their home page.

Have a good weekend everybody!

A yummy tempeh meal

2006-09-07T20:58:00.000-04:00

I forgot how much I love tempeh! I haven't had marinated tempeh in a while (however, I've had tempeh bacon, but that's not as satisfying as marinated tempeh). I was planning on making 5-spice marinated tempeh tonight, but they don't sell 5-spice powder where Rachel works, so I had to make a different kind. Pooh. Here's what we had for dinner tonight:

Mostly freegan: Baked butternut squash* with a wedge of lime* to make it look fancy shmancy, sauteed kale* with garlic*, tempeh marinated in tamari, brown rice vinegar, minced ginger*, minced garlic*, apricot marmalade, ground coriander, and black pepper, and then wasabi smashed purple potatoes* with scallions*. So almost everything was free (the asterisks are what Rachel brought home), and one (of the two) tempeh packages was super cheap at 80 cents (including Rachel's 20% discount), reduced because it was expiring soon. The tempeh was the best part of the meal; I didn't put enough wasabi in the potatoes, the butternut squash was old so it wasn't very sweet, and the garlic in the kale was very pungent because I got kind of side tracked when I was making it and I wasn't thinking so I put in the garlic after the kale was done and didn't cook the garlic. Garlic breath anyone?

This is a kind of crummy picture but it's a picture of Pomegranate sorbet found in the Millenium Cookbook. All it calls for is pomegranate juice and maple syrup. It was so delicious! We like to make fun of Susan because she has what we call an over-developed sour taste bud (a long time ago Rachel and I used to get sour patch kids, and once we gave one to Susan and her eye started twitching, haha). Anyway, she thought the sorbet was too sour, so she couldn't eat all of hers. More for us is what I say.

This was the first thing I made out of the Millenium cookbook, and I hadn't really taken a good look at it until today. My goodness, the recipes are exquisite! I can't wait to make more stuff from this book.

P.S. Dilip, if you're reading this, I can't comment on your blog now that I've switched over to Beta and you don't allow anonymous comments, but I think your top 5 is fabulous!

Attack of the food pictures!

2006-09-06T20:50:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure if it's because I'm switched over to Blogger Beta or not, but I uploaded 17 pictures for this post! Woo hoo!

These are all food pictures of what we've been eating over the past few weeks:

Rachel made these pancakes; they're the Apple Pie Pancakes found in La Dolce Vegan. They were just okay because 1) I have a love-hate relationship with raisins, and right now I can't stand them. These had a little too many raisins for me, and 2) they were too salty because of the Earth Balance Rachel used for oiling the frying pan. We agreed that whoever makes them next time should cut down the amount of raisins and also cut down on the amount of salt in the recipe (if Earth Balance is the grease of choice).

This is a completely freegan sandwhich: Organic sourdough bread*, peanut butter*, and an organic tomato*. I had heard of this sandwhich combination before, so I wanted to try it. It was just alright, nothing to write home about though.

Yum, this was so good! Starting from the top right and moving clockwise we have: sauteed kale* with garlic*; mac and cheeze casserole, steamed cauliflower*, and sliced garden tomatoes from our neighbor. The mac and cheeze casserole I made up. It had Tinkyada brown rice elbows, homemade faux ham (made from seitan), frozen peas, Wolffie's Nutritional Yeast "Cheese" Sauce from La Dolce Vegan, and then I topped it with (homemade) breadcrumbs that had garlic* and minced parsley* mixed in. Then it was baked for about 30 min. till the breadcrumbs were crispy. Delicious!

These were Jelly dot spice cookies. They were divine! I had some trouble with the cookie dough though, so if you make it just be prepared you might have to make some minor adjustments.

Short grain brown rice, canned adzuki beans*, grated carrot, sauteed kale* and garlic*, soy sauce, and lemon juice.

This is Amma's Stove-top Bread Masala Pudding from The Passionate Vegetarian. Very simple and very good.

This is original foolproof flaky pie dough from Great Good Desserts Naturally. It called for ww pastry flour and unrefined white flour, but I used all ww pastry flour and it came out heavenly. I used to hate the crusts on pies, but my tastes have changed and I love them now. This was so good I'm tempted to make another one and eat it plain.

I filled it with peaches that were simmered on the stove till they softened, then pureed in the blender, then simmered again to thicken.

Unfortunately, it didn't thicken. This is what a slice looked like after it was baked and chilled. This was just an experiment, so next time I'll add some kind of thickener to it.

I had a wee bit of dough leftover after I rolled it out, so I shaped a peach out of it. I think it looks more like an apple.

Okey dokey. In the bowl we have Carrot Bisque from Vegan With A Vengeance. The bisque was the first thing I made out of the cookbook, and it was nummy. On the side is falafel (from a Moosewood cookbook) stuffed into a sprouted grain pita with steamed swiss chard*, tomatoes from our neighbor, and tahini sauce. I used organic bottled lemon juice for the tahini sauce, but it had a really weird aftertaste, so it kind of ruined it. (I thought since it was a higher quality product it would be better, but I won't ever buy it again). Also shown is some more steamed swiss chard and tomato, since you can't really stuff to much into pitas or they'll break.

Canteloup sorbet. All it had in it was canteloupe*, agave nectar, and lime rind and juice. Very delicious.

Rachel brought home the eggplants (aren't they beautiful?) and the cilantro. What are all these ingredients for?

Masala Stuffed Eggplant from The Passionate Vegetarian. Oh, how I love Indian food.

Curried Split Pea Soup from Vegan With A Vengeance. I forgot how much I loved split peas! I don't use them nearly enough.

A modified version of Abruzzi Celery Soup. I was going to use tempeh bacon, but I didn't have time to make any so I decided to add a can of white beans to the soup for protein. I basically followed the recipe- I even used white rice! (I'm trying to clean out foods from our pantry and we still have a lot of parboiled rice, so I figured what the heck, once in a while it won't kill you.) It was really good.

Last but certainly not least:

Homemade pizza! I made pizza dough (100% whole wheat) in the food processor. It was so simple to make! The toppings were organic tomato paste, pesto, tomatoes*, Buffalo Mostarella cheese from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook, and sliced black olives. It was so good, and very satisfying that indeed, I had made pizza completly from scratch.

Blogger Beta......................

2006-09-05T10:01:00.000-04:00

Rocks!!

Yes, I was uploaded to Blogger Beta. It's so much nicer and also much easier to organize. I am loving it! I'm making some changes to my blog (as everyone seems to be doing these days), and right now it's a work in progress. I still am adding on some lists and such, but what do you think so far? I'm very interested in your feedback!

*Edit* Apparently Blogger Beta still has some kinks that they're trying to work out. Darn. It won't let me add html/javascript, it keeps saying "we're sorry but we cannot complete your request" or something like that. Hmmph. Maybe if I keep trying I can add what I want.

Just bear with me!

My top 5 foods

2006-09-03T12:17:00.000-04:00

I was tagged by Jennifer C. over at Muddling Towards Frugality for a meme that's going around (it started over at The Traveler's Lunchbox- you can see the original post here). You have to pick 5 things you think everyone should eat before they die, so I thought for a long time about what my top 5 foods would be, and here's what I came up with:

(In no particular order)

1. Pesto-There is nothing as wonderful as the scent of fresh basil, and when you combine basil with garlic and nuts (my personal favorite is walnuts) and oil you wind up with quite a bit of heaven on earth. My favorite recipe for pesto can be found here. (When I make it, I substitute hemp oil for the olive oil, and instead of processing the garlic and oil first I just buzz everything together.)

2. Garlic-Maybe this is my Italian ancestry, but I think even if I wasn't part Italian I would love garlic. Anyway you eat garlic, it is delicious (I'm curious, am I the only person to eat roasted garlic plain?). I'm lucky because each year there's a garlic festival a few towns over from me, and there's always loads and loads of different varieties of garlic to smell and buy. Okay, I lied. When I said anyway you eat garlic it's delicious, I was not including the garlic ice cream they sell at the garlic festival.

3. Fruit sorbet, preferably grapefruit-There is nothing more refreshing on a hot summer day than eating some fruit sorbet. Don't you agree? During the summer I enjoy eating Jane's sorbets.

4. Fresh from the garden, big, juicy tomatoes. I have a very hard time eating under-ripe tomatoes. That's right, only the biggest, juiciest, look-at-me-I've-never-been-refridgerated summer tomato will do for me.

5. Peanut Sauce- Peanut butter, garlic, ginger, soy sauce, maybe a few other ingredients, that's what it's all about. Peanut sauce can make anything taste better (well, maybe not everything, but you know what I mean). I adore it over noodles or over broccoli or over rice.

I'll have you know that it was very hard for me to come to my decision. Runners-up included cornbread, focaccia, and freshly baked apple pie, among other things. However, I did make up my mind, and that's what matters. Now I pass on the agonizing to 5 other bloggers:

1. Spice Island Vegan
2. Rae over at Bunnyfoot
3. Dilip over at Dinner with Dilip
4. Brokevegan
5. Vegan Cyclist

I'm very curious to see what's on their lists.

Goodbye all!

Cookie Swap

2006-09-01T19:41:00.000-04:00

I am taking part in a cookie swap over at . Nikki over at I Love Heeze was paired up with me, and she sent me the most amazing cookies. They're called Mathildes, and they're so delicious. Here are some pictures:

It was a long, busy day at work and I was so happy to come home to the cookies. Here they are packaged up. I loved how they were packaged up, they came wrapped in a Trader Joe's bag! How cool is that?

The money shot! She put little stickers on each side of the containers, and I wanted to take pictures of each one of them but my camera batteries were too low.

Oh wait, this would be the money shot.

Rachel's hand going "me want cookie".

These were my cookies I sent her. The lighting wasn't very good when I took the picture, so they're very blurry. They're Gold Chip Cookies, and they're from The Healthiest Diet In The World.

Here is the recipe for Mathildes:

Dry ingredients
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

Wet ingredients
1 cup orange marmalade
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 banana (pureed)
1 tsp vanilla

1 cup vegan chocolate chips

Sift together dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients in separate bowl and mix well with dry. Add chocolate chips and mix until well incorporated. Drop by teaspoon on cookie sheet at least 1" apart. Bake at 350 for 8-10 minutes or until brown.

Now here's the recipe for Gold Chip Cookies

1 1/2 cups oats
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup chopped almonds, hazelnuts, or filberts (I can't eat nuts because of my braces, so I use the same amount of ground flaxseeds)
3/4 cup chocolate or carob chips (I sent Nikki carob)
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce
2 tbsp canola oil
1 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
In a blender or food processor, grind the oats to a coarse flour. In a large bowl, combine the oat flour, whole wheat flour, salt, and baking soda. Mix well. Add the nuts and chips and mix again. In a separate bowl, whisk together the maple syrup, applesauce, oil, and vanilla extracat. Stir the wet ingredients into the dry, mixing until thoroughly moistened.
Drop the dough by the tablespoonful onto oiled baking sheets, leaving about 1 inch between cookies. Flatten gently with your hands or the prongs of a fork (I usually wet my hand and roll them into balls, then flatten them between my two palms). Bake 15 to 20 minutes, until the cookies are lightly browned on the bottom. Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Have a good holiday weekend everybody!

My cookbook list: a work in progress

2006-08-31T19:45:00.000-04:00

As I've said before, I have a ton of cookbooks. It's kind of sad, but one of my favorite past times is reading cookbooks. I know other bloggers read cookbooks too, so that makes me feel a lot better. Anyway, some of the cookbooks I own are definitely not vegan or even vegetarian, but I like modifying the recipes to be vegan (I'm always up for a challenge!). I'm not going to list the unvegan ones, because if I did this list would be about 50 pages, but I am going to list the vegetarian and/or vegan cookbooks that I own (although I'm not going to go into descriptions). If you own any of the ones on my list, I'm curious about your opinions. I know that the books by Sarah Kramer, either by herself or with Tanya Bernard, have very mixed reviews, but of course I'm talking about all of the books on my list. Please note that this is a work in progress, so I'll be adding others on to it as I A) get more or B) find them (because as you cookbook junkies know having a lot of cookbooks is not so orderly. Or wait, is that just me?). Also, the ones with the asterisk next to them are ones I own but haven't yet used. Since this is already a long list, I don't want to make it longer by adding descriptions, so I'll do individual posts about each book in the future.

My list:

*American Macrobiotic Cuisine by Meredith McCarty

*A Vegan Taste Of North Africa by Linda Majzlik

Cooking With The Right Side Of The Brain by Vicki Rae Chelf

Ecological Cooking by Joanne Stepaniak and Kathy Hecker

*Everyday Vegan by Jeani-Rose Atchison

*Dairy-Free and Delicious with Brenda Davis, Bryanna Clark Grogan, and Joanne Stepaniak

*Fast Vegetarian Feasts by Martha Rose Shulman

Flavors Of The Southwest by Robert Oser

*Flax The Super Food! by Barb Bloomfield, Judy Brown, and Siegfried Gursche

*Fresh From A Vegetarian Kitchen by Meredith McCarty

*From The Tables Of Lebanon by Dalal A. Holmin and Maher A. Abbas

Good Time Eatin' In Cajun Country by Donna Simon

Great Good Desserts Naturally by Fran Costigan

*Hemp Nut Cookbook by Richard Rose and Brigitte Mars

How It All Vegan by Tanya Barnard and Sarah Kramer

La Dolce Vegan by Sarah Kramer

*Lenore's Natural Cuisine by Lenore Baum

Lorna Sass' Complete Vegetarian Kitchen (by uh, let's see, Lorna Sass)

*Lorna Sass' Short-Cut Vegetarian (ditto)

*Made with Love (stories, recipes, and crafts from Greatful Dead Fans) by Elizabeth Peace Zipern

*Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian (who could that be by? Oh yes, Madhur Jaffrey!)

Meatless Burgers by Louise Hagler

*Miso Cookery by Louise Hagler

Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen

*Of These Ye May Freely Eat by JoAnn Rachor

Passionate Vegetarian by Crescent Dragonwagon

*Raising Vegetarian Children (not a cookbook, but there are recipes in it) by Joanne Stepaniak and Vesanto Melina

*Sea Vegetable Celebration by Shep Erhart and Leslie Cerier

*Sicilian Vegetarian Cooking by John Penza

*Simple Treats by Ellen Abraham

Steven Raichlen's High-Flavor Low-Fat Vegetarian Cooking (By Steven Raichlen)

*Sublime Soups by Lenore Baum

*The Accidental Vegan by Devra Gartenstein

*The Artful Vegan (from the Millenium restaraurant) by Eric Tucker, Bruce Enloe, and Amy Pearce

*The Complete Italian Vegetarian Cookbook By Jack Bishop

The Convenient Vegetarian By Virginia Messina and Kate Shumann

The Deaf Smith Country Cookbook by Marjorie Winn Ford, Susan Hillyard, and Mary Faulk Koock

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen

*The Everyday Vegan by Dreena Burton

The Garden Of Vegan by Tanya Barnard and Sarah Kramer

The Healthiest Diet In The World by Nikki and David Goldbeck (not all recipes, there is some nutritional info in it)

*The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen by Donna Klein

*The Millennium Cookbook by Eric Tucker, John Westerdahl, and Sascha Weiss

*The Real Food Daily Cookbook by Ann Gentry

*The Teen's Vegetarian Cookbook by Judy Krizmanic

The Ultimate Uncheese Book by Joanne Stepaniak

The Vegan Kitchen by Freya Dinshah

*The Vegetarian Lunchbasket by Linda Haynes

*The Voluptous Vegan by Myra Kornfeld and George Minot

Vegan Deli by Joanne Stepaniak

Vegan Planet by Robin Robertson

Vegan Vittles by Joanne Stepaniak

Vegan With A Vengeance by Isa Charndra Moskowitz

Vice Cream by Jeff Rogers

Vive Le Vegan! by Dreena Burton

Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison

Vegetarian Planet by Didi Emmons

3 Bowls (vegetarian recipes from an American Zen buddhist monk) by Seppo Ed Farrey with Myochi Nancy O'Hara

*366 Healthful Ways to Cook Tofu by Robin Robertson

Fin.

Wow, typing that list up let me see how many cookbooks I haven't used. If you'll excuse me, I think I'll go read them.

Vegnic Food Pictures!!!

2006-08-28T19:14:00.000-04:00

I dedicate this post entirely to food porn from the vegnic:

In the round container is some kind of salad thingy (I didn't care for it), and behind it is potato salad. I'm not sure what's on the far right.

Another take on potato salad (there was lots of potato salads there)

This was really good. It was beans, avocado, tomato, and sour cream (possibly more stuff but I don't really know).

Mmm, this was really good! It was some kind of Caesar salad with lots of avocado in it.

My contribution to the vegnic: pesto pasta and carrot salad with cumin. To the right of the carrots is some kind of "tuna" salad (not mine).

Oh my lord, vegan donuts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The recipe is from Randomgirl.com. Soooo good. There was I think three different kinds: mocha buttercream, jelly filled, and regular creme filled. I will be dreaming of these for a long, long time.

My first taste of vegan cupcakes. I don't know what kind these were because I didn't have any of them. Instead.......

I had two of these. I forget what kind they were though. So good.

More cupcakes

More cupcakes and some awesome peanut butter chocolate chip cookies.

All right, I lied. This isn't all about the vegnic. Today Rachel brought home a big load of expired food, so we are now the proud owners of 10 hazelnut milks, 15 grape jellies, and more stuff. I am very excited about the grape jelly! I'm thinking peanut butter and jelly muffins, jelly tarts, popovers with jelly, etc. Also, I was off from work today, and I'll be off tomorrow and Wednesday as well. I'm planning on giving our house a fall cleaning, since I like to clean. I am rambling so I'll say goodnight!

Oops

2006-08-27T22:21:00.000-04:00

Well, I just typed up a whole big post complete with food from the vegnic, but somehow I managed to delete it and now I'm too tired to start all over again, so you'll have to wait till tomorrow. Believe me though, it will all be worth it! I will show you some pictures I took in Prospect Park (where the vegnic was held). It was gorgeous!

Rachel took this one of me. I'm wearing my dad's hat, and as you can see it's way too big for me, but I really like this picture.

That's all for now!

My hectic schedule and then fun!

2006-08-26T20:15:00.000-04:00

I know my blogging has been a bit sporadic lately, but that's also how my schedule has been. I started work this week, and while I love it (and am doing fairly well money wise), I do need to adjust my schedule and find time for my priorities, which I'm working on doing. As an example, I give you my schedule for this week:

Monday: Work, then home. Thankfully a quite day with nothing on the agenda.

Tuesday: Work, then I had a flamenco lesson. Then after I got home, we saw our new neighbor pushing his 1 year old girl in a stroller, so we stopped and chatted for a while. Then I put groceries away.

Wednesday: Work, then a doctors appointment, then a guitar lesson, than we went to see Thumbsucker. I've been wanting to see Thumbsucker for a while, but I was disappointed with it. I didn't think it was put together very well, and it wasn't as funny as the coming attractions made it seem.

Thursday: Work, then a little later mom and I went down to see an open mike night at a music in the park series. I have to say, it was torture listening to some of the people. Ugh, I can't even think about it. I don't mean to be all snobby, but almost everybody (including the band that was hosting it) was horrible and off pitch and just bad. We're talking really, really bad. I don't think it's normal to cringe when people sing. Do you? We stayed for the whole thing, because we kept hoping someone good would go on, and finally the last group to go up was soooo good! They're going to be performing at a local restaurant/cafe soon, so maybe we'll go see them there.

Friday: Work, then I came home and made food for......................................................

................................... Saturday: Brooklyn Vegnic! Isa and some others from the Post Punk Kitchen Forums (I'm on the boards, are you?) got together and we had ourselves a little vegnic! (Picnic with all vegan food). It was really fun meeting people from the boards, plus everybody there got to see a sneak peak of the new cupcake cookbook! Have you pre-ordered it yet? Well, I was going to show pictures but blogger doesn't seem to be uploading any at this time. I'll get back to you on that.

In other exciting news, I'm going to save my money I earn and split the cost of a Fender guitar with mom! I can't wait! I'm also going to be getting a laptop soon, so then I can blog whenever, wherever. Anyway, I guess that's all for now.

I'm back, complete with food pictures

2006-08-21T19:45:00.000-04:00

Ugh, on Friday morning I woke up with a sore throat and a really croupy cough and a runny nose, so I couldn't go in to work. Basically I just drank lots of Throat Coat, Echinacea, and Breath Easy tea and rested on Friday, although I did get a chance to clean up the bathroom a little bit. Yeah, I'm kind of weird, I like to clean. I was really bummed though, because I couldn't go see a theater performance I really wanted to see. On Saturday my sore throat was gone, but my voice had that annoying stuffed up sound that drives me insane, and I had a couple of pretty yucky coughing fits. I did feel well enough to go see a performance with Dar Williams and Katie Curtis, and I'm glad I went because I really loved both of them. Though perhaps Katie Curtis just a wee bit more. It was really icky weather though, quite rainy and damp, and the performance was in a tent! Certain parts of the tent were really muddy, but luckily we weren't in that part. On Saturday afternoon, I didn't really want to cook, so Rachel made something!

Rachel made: ramen noodles* simmered in homemade vegetable broth powder (from in upcoming cookbook review) with baby spinach*, scallions*, and some powdered ginger (she wanted to put fresh ginger in it, but we didn't have any). Isn't the garnish of little carrots so cute? Yummy, just the right thing for a sick person.

This was a quick meal that I threw together: long grain brown rice, Amy's spicy chili*, baby spinach*, and Follow Your Heart Monterey Jack Cheese that actually melted!!! (It's very pricey, so it's just going to be a once in a while treat.)

Cranberry* Pumpkin Muffins. Since I'm trying to clean our pantry up a bit, I'm trying to use stuff up, so these have canned pumpkin in them. They were an experiment, but they aren't that good. Of course, if you spread almond butter on them, they taste better, but doesn't everything taste better with almond butter?

Easy French Bread from La Dolce Vegan. I love making bread! I omitted the seeds the recipe called for, because I was using the bread in another recipe. What is it, you may ask? Well, you'll just have to see!

Faux Ham: I used the flavoring found in La Dolce Vegan, but for the actual seitan recipe I used the recipe found in Good Time Eatin' In Cajun Country. It was good, but I may have messed the amounts up, because it was really salty due to the tamari in it.

Pizza frittata (sauteed onion*, pepper*, and potato*, white beans, tofu, fresh tomato*, whole wheat flour, nutritional yeast, arrowroot, dried basil, black pepper, and tumeric). After the frittata was done I shredded the last of the FYH Monterey Jack cheese on top and broiled it for a few minutes. Deliciousness!

That is all.

I really don't have a title for this post

2006-08-17T21:20:00.000-04:00

Last night I went to see 9 Lives and I got home just in time to watch Project Runway. I don't watch TV but I make an exception for Project Runway. I love fashion, and it's really entertaining to watch. Does anyone else watch it?
So anyway, I was planning on blogging after the movie but we met some friends and we were talking for a while, so I didn't get a chance to blog. You don't really want my ramblings though, do you? Onto the food:

This was based on the recipe for Salsa Scramble found in La Dolce Vegan. I switched it up a little because I didn't have the avocado it called for. It consisted of: red onions*, extra-virgin olive oil, tofu, salsa, cilantro*, tumeric, Follow Your Heart Monterey Jack Cheese, black beans, and nutritional yeast. I just took a picture of it by itself, but I had it with OJ and brown rice. Yum! It was my first time trying FYH cheese, but it got mixed in with everything so I don't really know how it is yet.

This was last night's dinner: Bean Burritos from Lorna Sass' Complete Vegetarian Kitchen. I love this book so much! Everything I've had from it has been amazing so far, and this was no exception. Dee-licious! On the side we had steamed broccoli*, steamed baby carrots*, and some frozen organic corn.

Now for the last picture:

From left to right: Rachel, our friend Esther who just went back to college in California, and me!

This picture was taken the night before Esther left, after we had a little adventure. We live right next door to Esther and her mom Debbie, so Rachel was over at their house talking to them. After a while she came home and told Susan and I that we had a serious situation. Debbie's declawed housecat Taz had escaped. We all ran outside and we were calling her name, but we couldn't find her. Debbie's flashlight was dying, so I ran back to our house to grab one of our flashlights. While we were outside looking for her, I got like five mosquito bites, including one right on my forehead. It was all itchy and it kind of hurt. Grr. Anyhoo, we kept calling her name, and finally Rachel and Esther heard something moving in a bush and Debbie had to climb through all this greenery to get her. So in the end we managed to get her back inside alright, with only a few scrapes, scratches, bruises, and bites. It's a good thing we got her inside when we did, because a little while later two neighborhood cats were growling and hissing at each other and maybe even fighting.

That's all for now!

Birdies!

2006-08-15T20:32:00.000-04:00

Today for dinner we just had leftovers from yesterday.

Leftovers=Pepper-Flecked Potato-Lentil Medley.

Our neighbors planted a big garden this year and it seems to attract loads of birds, so last week when I was eating my dinner outside I took a few pictures of the little birdies.

On our lawn.........

On our cheap plastic chairs...........

From another angle............

On the wire.................

And that was my humble blog offering for the day.

Food, Glorious Food!

2006-08-14T20:06:00.000-04:00

I know my posts have been a bit lacking in the food department lately, so now I shall bombard you with food pictures. First though, two more movies I've seen lately: V for Vendetta, which I really liked, and The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, which I loved. (And for the vegans who read my blog, our very own Woody Harrelson was in it!)

All right, now onto the food!

I made this a while ago, and I was going through my pictures file and realized I hadn't posted about it yet. It was quinoa with scallions*, tomatoes*, corn, and cilantro vinagrette over shredded lettuce, and instant black beans. Simple, but clean and nourishing.

Quinoa Almond Muffins. The recipe is here, you have to scroll down, it's the second recipe. I tasted a sample at the co-op a while ago, and I knew it was love at first bite. These muffins are gluten free, but they hold together wonderfully due to the arrowroot. The only change I made was I added dried tart cherries instead of frozen ones.

Cajun Tempeh Burgers with sweet potato fries. This meal was something I through together a while ago when I had some tempeh* I needed to use up (and also some sweet potatoes*). It was just okay, and I didn't measure anything so there's no recipe. It was served on sprouted grain bread with veganaise, tomato, lettuce, and ketchup.

Red Beans and Chicos from Lorna Sass' Complete Vegetarian Kitchen, served as per suggestion in corn tortillas slathered with mustard. (Also starring steamed broccoli and baby carrots.) This was definitely not my favorite recipe, but I think that's my fault because the corn tortillas I served it on were kind of freezer burnt so they had a weird taste.

Orange Marmalade Muffins from Lorna Sass' Complete Vegetarian Kitchen. These were scrumptious! I loved the taste of them!

Yes, my friends, vegan cheez-its are possible. I used this recipe, using all whole wheat pastry flour. I don't think I rolled the dough out thin enough, because they weren't crispy, but the flavor was still amazing. Yummy!

Pesto Pasta Salad with white beans and tomatoes. I should have left the tomatoes out because they ruined the salad, but I was trying to get rid of them before they went bad.

Pepper-Flecked Potato-Lentil Medley, again from Lorna Sass' Complete Vegetarian Kitchen. The recipe called for some kind of quick cooking greens, but the swiss chard Rachel brought home today was beyond using, so instead I used frozen asparagus*.

All right, so this isn't food porn, but aren't my nails fabulous? My friend Laura painted them, but at work today they got all chipped, so after I finish this post I'm taking the polish off.

That's all for now!

More Pictures!

2006-08-12T20:29:00.000-04:00

Alright, here are some more pictures for your entertainment!

Me, Rachel, and our friend Esther on my 6th Birthday

Me in Long Island at my family's house, right when my mom was getting ready to sell her share to her brother. That is one creepy looking doll, is it not?

Hmm, not quite sure what I'm doing in this picture.

Rachel and I (wearing my favorite shirt again!) at my parent's antique store.

A random dance picture. Haha, look at my droopy hand! Now that I look at this picture, my whole body looks kind of droopy. I think I was sick that year. Notice my friend Kirsten behind me.

And last but not least............

Me eating my foot (not vegan, lol). You can see my grandmother's head on the left. Uh, just ignore the cold cuts and fresh mozzarella from Arthur Avenue (in NYC). My grandpa must have come up from the Big Apple that day (each time he came up he would always bring food from Arthur Avenue with him).

That's all the pictures I found, but mayhaps I'll find more.

I'm working on a cookbook review right now, so bare with me whilst I try recipes.

Tomorrow I won't get a chance to blog, as I'm going to a good-bye party for Esther. (She's going back to school in California.)

That's all for now!

Me as a kiddo

2006-08-10T18:25:00.000-04:00

Yes, this post is the much promised little kiddie pictures of me. I'll be posting a few more pics, since blogger seems to have a limit as to how many photos can be on a post. Enjoy!

Karate Kid! This is me on my first day of karate. It was taken on August 5th, 1996, when I was 6.

This was my first dance recital. Somewhere I have a video of 4 year old me onstage telling all the kids in my class what to do, because I was the only one who knew the dance. I remember that it was some kind of flower dance.

Aw, this was my favorite outfit for a while. Those pants were my first pair of bell bottoms, before they came back into style. I searched high and low for a pair of bell bottoms, and Rachel finally found me a pair at a second-hand shop for like, 50 cents!

Man, I was one stylish kid! I always loved (and still love) fashion, and I would refuse to wear the outfits mom picked out for me, choosing to style my own outfits. This is Easter '96.

This is my neighbor Kai holding little itty bitty baby me.

Ballet! Wow, I have long legs. I love how my tights are dirty at the feet. :O

This is a picture of my grandma and me, taken at my great aunt's house. Uh, this said great aunt once tried to kill us (not really, it was an honest mistake-I think) by serving us under-cooked pork. Yet another reason to go veg, no worrying about under cooked pork. Again, if I do say so myself, I look so stylish!

Just a random picture of lil' ol' me, wearing a shirt I made.

Me and my friend Kirsten.

Tippity Tap!

What I've been up to lately

2006-08-07T19:38:00.000-04:00

So what have I been up to?

I've seen two more movies: The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, and Art School Confidential. The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till was really sad, but I felt I needed to see it. Since I wasn't alive during that era, I can't say I really know what people went through. I've read about it, of course, but I had no idea how bad the south was during that period. I have to say, Mamie Till-Mobley was quite a lady, and she's now one of my heroes. Moving on to Art School Confidential... Well, I have to say I didn't like this movie. I was really looking forward to seeing it, but it was just dumb. Some parts of it were funny, but for the most part it was just blah. That's all I have to say about that.

On Saturday I decided to make some cookies, because the weather was perfect, not too hot and not too cold. I made the recipe for Oatmeal Raisin Cookies found in Lorna Sass' Complete Vegetarian Cooking, except I didn't have enough raisins so I followed the variation and added some carob chips. They turned out superb!

On Saturday evening we went up to the Catskill Mountain Foundation to see a cello performance. (The cello player was Paul Tobias.) Since Susan's boss Pam is lactose intolerant, I thought I'd bring some of the cookies up for Susan and Pam to share. Well, it was kind of busy, so Susan didn't even tell Pam that there was cookies (perhaps subconsciously she didn't really wasnt Pam to know? Susan's a little possesive of her sweets, as some of you might already know). After the concert, Susan was just going to give Pam two cookies, but we said she should give her the whole bag (about 8). Pam was ecstatic; she kept saying oh, they're vegan, they're vegan! Haha, the piano player who was accompanying the cellist said, oh, they're vegan, that's good. (Between you and me I don't think he knew what vegan meant.)

Anyhoo, on Sunday we went to Woodstock to see a performance that's part of the Maverick Concerts series. We saw the St. Lawrence String Quartet. On the way home we stopped at New World Home Cooking. (I brought the camera, but it was too dark to take a decent picture.) In the past, they have been very vegetarian and vegan friendly, but I have to say, I was quite disappointed with my meal. They always start out by giving each table (vegan) white bean dip and bread, but they seemed to have cut down on the amount of bean dip they gave out, and so we had to ask for more. I decided to get the prix fixe special they had. I started out with a bowl of miso soup (I made sure it was a vegan first), and I must say it was quite delicious. But then I had my entree of brown rice, black beans, and vegetables of the day, and I was really, really disappointed. First off, they cut down on the amount of rice and beans they give you, so it wasn't that much food at all, and secondly, the vegetables were not seasoned at all. Well, except for one of the veggies, but that's coming up in a little while. The kale was just steamed, which is fine, but that's never how it came in the past. It always came sauteed with onions and garlic and seasoned perfectly. The grilled squash didn't have any flavor on it either, it was just grilled. And the only other vegetable on my plate that I could (desired to) eat was grilled scallions, which were very stringy and difficult to eat. Also, I was asking if the bean dip and soup was vegan, so I figured the waitress knew I was a vegan, but the only seasoned vegetable on my plate was mashed sweet potatoes that contained butter. (I know that because I have his cookbook and the recipe's in it.) I do admit that's my fault though. (I just scooped it onto Rachel and Susan's plates.) For dessert I had Jane's lime sorbet. It was served in a fancy glass, and was delicous, but, come on, you can never go wrong with sorbet. Also, to add to the semi-annoyance, our waitress was really annoying and every 5 minutes she kept coming over and asking if we wanted anything else.
Please don't think I'm nit-picking, all of us are very displeased with Ric Orlando (the owner), starting from about this time last year when his food quality started going down. It's really sad for me because New World was just about the only place I could go eat at and be really confident that I was getting a vegan meal.

I guess I'll have to open a restaurant (just kidding).

On a more positive note, we went to the co-op today! Besides other things I got cute little purple potatoes, cherry nirvana soy delicious, mint chocolate chip soy delicious, and a huge bunch of basil (you know what that means!), as part of my bounty. For dinner tonight I had a hummus sandwich we bought there:

Yum, I love the hummus they make, it's so good.

Dessert: some kind of melon Rachel brought home, a nectarine, some grapes*, and organic blueberries from the co-op.

Uh-oh, someone (mom) was eating outside on the porch and dropped some food. I know the photo's kind of blurry, but there's a lot of ants and also a lone fly crawling about the food. I guess mom was just doing her part to help feed them. :)

P.S. coming soon..... Pictures I found from my younger years. If I do say so myself, I was quite adorable, but you'll just have to wait and decide for yourself.

Pesto is the Besto

2006-08-03T07:54:00.000-04:00

I know, I know, my title is corny, but isn't pesto really the besto?

Pesto with 8 whole grain penne pasta, steamed greenbeans*, and leaf lettuce* with olives and caesar dressing from La Dolce Vegan. So good!

For the pesto, I used this recipe, using hemp oil in place of the olive oil. The basil was bought at my town's farmers and artisans market. I should probably just be glad my town has a farmers market, but it's really lame. Every year I go down thinking it will get better, but it never is. There are only two places selling produce! The rest of the people are selling meat, cheese, arts and crafts, jewelry or baked goods. It's kind of annoying because the arts and crafts and jewelry aren't that good. Anway, I went down last Saturday, and it was kind of depressing, just looking around at everything. We only went to see the band that was playing, so I have a feeling we won't be going down again.

Moving on.......
The pasta is so cool! It has whole wheat, whole grain rye, whole grain buckwheat, whole grain kamut, whole grain spelt, whole grain millet, whole grain barley, and whole grain brown rice. The brand is Racconto if anybody is wondering. It's supposed to take 9 minutes to cook, but it took me a little longer (maybe 12 minutes), but that's my only complaint.

That's all!

Random Thoughts + Pictures + Links

2006-08-01T19:30:00.000-04:00

In case anyone was wondering, Rachel is still working at the health food store. In fact, today was her one year anniversary working for the store. Go Rachel! I'm just not blogging about what she brings home, although I'm still using the produce and other foods she brings home.As an example of a normal meal I bring you my breakfast and dinner. Today for breakfast I had scrambled tofu made from onions, extra virgin olive oil, organic extra firm tofu*, nooch (nutritional yeast), organic garlic*, shoyu, mustard, spices and seasoning, and organic baby spinach*. To go with the tofu scramble, there was organic sourdough toast* drizzled with hemp oil, OJ, and organic grapes*, organic cherries*, and an organic plum* (the organic plum* tasted funny (read: was rotten) so I wound up not eating it. My dinner was a hummus wrap and a side salad of mixed herb salad*. The hummus wrap was made out of: a whole wheat tortilla, organic lemon hummus*, organic avocado*, organic cucumber*, organic green leaf lettuce*, and organic red onion*. So you see, we're spending less and less money on food as the weeks go on. I did take pictures, but the camera is being dumb and the pictures didn't show up on the disk. (I swear I took them.)

Here are some examples of what we've been eating lately:

Remember that I got tomatillos at Honest Weight? Well I made this sauce (scroll down to the bottom for the recipe, or just read about tomatillos till you get to it), which was quite yummy, and spooned it on top of shredded lettuce*, grated carrots, cilantro*, scallions*, black olives, seitan, black beans, and brown rice. The whole concoction was really good, but as I've written about before, I tend to get a little carried away at times, adding this and that until I have one huge mish-mosh of food, and then we can't eat it all and it goes to waste. (In this case not that much went to waste.)

Here it is dished up in a shallow bowl

This, my friends, is what organic corn looks like (I know it's kind of blurry, but I really wanted to put this pic up)

Last Friday Rachel brought home lots of fresh fruit (honeydew, canteloupe, strawberries, etc.). I was just browsing recipes over at the Cat-Tea Corner, and I stumbled upon a recipe for Chilled Strawberry Melon Soup. So perfect, because I had all the fruit it called for and I had an open bottle of apple juice in the fridge, and I knew if I opened pineapple juice my dad would have some, because he likes pineapple juice. The garnish was mint provided from our very overgrown garden, which leads me to the next picture:

Wow, look at all the coneflowers (echinachea)! It's sad that we're all too busy to have taken care of our garden this year, but that's the way life goes I guess.

Pattypan squash. Aren't they gorgeous, especially on the cool plate?

For the next two weeks, during the mornings I'm helping my flamenco teacher with a program called Sprouts. (The link is old, but that's the best I could find.) It's alright helping out, but I do have some stories about it.
After Sprouts is over, I start my job, so my summer is basically over. *sigh* Wow, I start my job in 13 days.

If you would like to see me dancing flamenco, follow this link and scroll down until you see SBC 2004 Dance Presentation. I'm number 15 on the program; the dance is fandangos. I have pictures somewhere, but I couldn't find them.

I suppose that's it, goodbye all!

Another Cookbook Review!

2006-07-30T12:46:00.000-04:00

Lorna Sass' Complete Vegetarian Kitchen

My mom got this book for me about a month ago, and I have to say it's my new favorite! All of the recipes I've tried I've enjoyed very much. Lorna Sass uses a pressure cooker for a lot of the recipes, so most of the recipes are quite quick to make, especially the bean ones. If you don't have a pressure cooker, don't be sad, she also gives directions for standard stovetop. I haven't tried any of the soup recipes, but they all sound really good and I'm getting all excited for autumn when I can make soups every day and not pass out from heat stroke. Curried Yellow Split-Pea Soup with Squash and Raisins anyone? How about Autumn Gold Carrot-Yam Soup or Squash-Aduki-Corn Chowder? These are just some of the recipes in the soup chapter. Moving on......
Her chapter on grains is really cool, and I've got my eye on a lot of the recipes. There are recipes for amaranth, barley, buckwheat, polenta (made in the pressure cooker, can you imagine?), Job's tears, etc. as well as for grain salads. A separate chapter is devoted to rice and risotto, with recipes galore! There's also a chapter just for pasta.
Now on to the bean chapter, where beans rule. I like this chapter because there's a wide variety of recipes, and the ones I tried all had perfect seasonings. There's even a black soybean recipe!
I haven't made anything from the tofu and tempeh chapter yet, but doesn't Deli-Style Tempeh with Saurkraut sound really good?
Also in the book are chapters for vegetable (land and sea); salads, slaws, and sprouts; dressings and sauces; dips and spreads; quick breads, biscuits, muffins, and scones; and desserts. There's also a recipe for making your own tomato paste, isn't that awesome?

I really like the fact that she uses different kinds of flours (millet, barley, brown rice) and that there's no refined sugar in the book, instead she uses maple syrup, barley malt syrup, fruit juices, and fruits (e.g. dates). Also, the title says vegetarian, but all of the recipes are vegan.

Now for some pictures:

Whole Wheat Couscous with Lentils, served with steamed zucchini

Hummus-This is a really good hummus recipe

Creole Brown Rice Casserole, Pat's Spicy Black-Eyed Peas, and (not a recipe from the book) a salad of baby spinach*, cherry tomatoes*, and cilantro vinaigrette

Beans and Not Dogs over Reliably Fluffy Millet, served with some sauteed kale (not from the book)

Quick Chickpea Curry over basmati rice

Carrot Cake with Coconut Icing- so delicious! And want to know something weird? The coconut icing tasted like cream cheese! I thought it was just my taste buds, but mom thought so too.

Here's a piece just waiting to be eaten. For the record, carrot cake has always been my favorite kind of cake.

I also made Hijiki Brown Rice Casserole (substituting arame because I didn't have hijiki), adding seitan like it says in the variation of the recipe, but we ate over at our neighbors that day and I forgot the camera.

Some of the recipes I've got my eye on: Polenta Plus, Lemon-Scented Millet with Kale, Coconut Rice with Lemongrass, White Beans with Parsley Pesto, Aduki Watercress Salad with Horseradish Dressing, Carrots with Olives and Twenty Cloves of Garlic, Roasted Shallot Cream, Sunny Lentil Spread, Chive-Flecked Barley Muffins, and Devil's Food Carob Cake. Actually, I've got my eye on the whole book, but I can't list everything here.

Well, that just about sums up my review. I would highly recommend this book to anyone.

Cookbook Review!

2006-07-29T16:44:00.000-04:00

La Dolce Vegan by Sarah Kramer

Well, in my opinion this book is both good and bad. The good: the recipes are easy and fast. There are different kinds of food tips in the beginning. There's 45 things you can do with salt. There's a DIY chapter in the back, and while I haven't actually made anything yet, I'm planning on it. Sarah Kramer's a doll and I enjoy this book even if there are some flaws in it, which we turn to now. The bad: some of the recipes need tweaking. Some of the recipes call for copious amounts of oil. Some of the recipes aren't the healthiest in the world. Still, I think the good outweighs the bad, and I do like this book. Also, don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good recipes in this book. Here are some things I've made (both good and bad):

Kalamata & Sun-Dried Tomato Soda Bread-no tweaking needed for this recipe. It was so good!

Gillian's Lentil Dip-This wasn't that good. Granted, I didn't use all the oil it called for. No matter what people may say, 5 tbsp of oil for 2 cups of dip is a lot (I used 2 tbsp). It calls for 1/4 cup of lemon juice, but this dip was overpowered by tartness (and I happen to like lemony tartness). I don't think I'll make this recipe again.

Caesar Salad Dressing over romaine lettuce* and tomatoes* Remember, this (*) stands for food Rachel brought home for free from the health food store. If you're afraid to buy this book, at least get it for this dressing. This is by far the closest thing to Caesar you'll ever find (and it doesn't even have soy in it!). The base is almonds (it calls for blanched almonds, but I didn't bother blanching them and it turned out fine.)

Wolffie's BLT Brunch Casserole-very delicious!

Curry Fennel Cauliflower Bake-Yum! I doubled the recipe, which has cauliflower*, tofu*, garlic*, and cilantro* among other ingredients. I'm going to eat this over brown basmati rice for dinner tonight.

Cheryl's Faux Cheese-one of the better homade faux cheeses I've made, though I've only made a few, so what do I know. That said, it still doesn't melt. Boo Hoo.

Eeny Meeny Chili Beany on Toast-very good.

Faux Fish-While I like the recipe for seitan found in Good Time Eatin' In The Cajun Country better, I really like the fact that there are different broth options for the seitan in La Dolce Vegan. What I'm actually going to do is make my favored seitan recipe, but use the broth ingredients in this book.

Stephanie's Sugarless Power Muffins-these use stevia in place of sugar. I don't know how I feel about these, all I know is they tasted better with almond butter spread on them. These were also wheat-free, so they were a bit crumbly, but not as bad as I would have thought.

The next two pictures have a story behind them. As you might know, Susan is interning at the Catskill Mountain Foundation. Well, her boss Pam is lactose intolerant, and when Susan first got there she told Pam that I was A) a vegan and B) a good cook, and that someday she would bring vegan cookies I made in. Well, about a month went by, and from what I'm told Pam kept asking when Susan was bringing sweets in. So off I went in search of some sweet treats that weren't too labor intensive. Here they are:

Hal's Maple Chocolate Flax Brownies-super-dee-duper good!

Wolffie's Peanut Butter Cookies-really good, but this recipe needed tweaking. I needed to add more flour than it called for in order for the dough to be rolled into balls. Also, for some of them you can see criss-cross patterns, but after about 6 criss-crosses the fork just stuck to the cookie dough and left me frustrated, hot (yeah, I was baking on a hot early July afternoon), and annoyed. I gave up and left the rest un- criss-crossed.

The verdict for the sweet treats: everyone in the programming department (where Susan works) went crazy over them! It was a big success, and Pam was so touched she wrote me a note on a cute little cow card. Wasn't that so sweet of her? That reminds me I want to make some more stuff for her.

Anyway, my overall verdict for the book is that the good outweighs the bad. Now it's up to you to decide.

Coming Soon......

2006-07-28T20:35:00.000-04:00

Very soon in the near future, you can expect two cookbook reviews. Woot!

Oh Honest Weight, How I love Thee

2006-07-25T19:50:00.000-04:00

I love Honest Weight! Sadly, we aren't members. I want to be, but it's too hard for my mom to drive me to Albany to work (volunteer) the required hours. (Albany is about 45 minutes away.) Anyway, we went today and got loads of stuff. Each time we go, I never know what to expect because they always have new stuff. A sampling of stuff I got:
*kuzu (Japanese Arrowroot)
*lots of arame-I love the stuff
*blue cornmeal
*dried chestnuts
*not just chocolate but dark chocolate chips
*lemon extract
*hemp seed nut butter
*corn spaghetti
*Dessert Essence flouride free toothpaste (wintergreen!)
*2 pints of tomatillos
*pattypan squash

Much much more was bought, that's just the basic idea. I know some people have Trader Joe's and Whole Foods and coops near them, so it might not be that big of a deal, but I just get so excited and inspired when there's loads of healthy stuff around. I've only dreamed about meeting pattypan squash, so I'm very excited to use them (I'm thinking I'll stuff them. Any other suggestions?)

I also got lunch at Honest Weight: a hummus and vegetable sandwhich and split pea soup. Very tasty, and I appreciate that they have a lot of vegan stuff in their deli. As I was getting my soup they were bringing out orange ginger seitan and brown rice. It smelled so good.

Okay, I'm rambling on.....

In other news, I'm working again tomorrow. The dishwasher couldn't come in, so off I go in her place.

Here's another picture of the baked apple biscuit topped cobbler, this time a la mode. The a la mode part was fruit sweetened soy delicious. When we had it yesterday over the cobbler, Rachel and I both thought it tasted a little chalky, but I had some today by itself and it seemed fine, so my overall verdict is it's yummers. :)

Adios, amigos!

Itchy business

2006-07-23T20:41:00.000-04:00

Yesterday we went to a party that some friends were having. They have a gorgeous piece of property; I'm not kidding when I say their driveway is a few miles long. Anyhoo, within 2 minutes of getting out of the car, a mosquito freaking bit me. After another 2 minutes another mosquito bit me. Over the course of the evening, my bites accumulated to 12. I have about 6 on one arm, and it looks like I have chicken pox or scabies. Not fun at all. Now they really itch. Boo hoo.

On a positive note, they have a couple of dogs, including a really cute female dog, Sheila. I didn't think to bring my digital camera, but the instant we got there and Sheila came running out I knew I had made a mistake. I took some pictures on a disposable camera, but it's not the same. Still, if they came out good I'll post them after they're developed.

*itch* Bye! *itch*

Apple Cobbler!

2006-07-23T20:23:00.000-04:00

The other day Rachel brought home a big load of apples, so I couldn't help but make the recipe for Baked Apple Biscuit Topped Cobbler found in Great Good Desserts Naturally. Let me tell you, this was good. I made the recipe on Wednesday, and it was so delicious that I decided to make another one today. Today was the perfect day to have the oven on because this morning when I was making the cobbler it was quite chilly. It felt and smelled like fall!

All warm and puffy fresh from the oven......

.... Later in the day cooled and ready to eat

Remember what I said about the recipes using copious amounts of maple syrup? Well, good news! This recipe only had 1/4 cup for 6-8 servings. That's not a lot at all. We'll see about the rest of the recipes.

I have a confession to make. After the cobbler came out of the oven, I picked off all the cobbler part that had puffed over on to the side of the baking dish and ate it. :O For some reason, my dad didn't really like it (everyone else demolished it). He said it had too much cobbler part and not enough apples. Well, in my humble opinion the cobbler part is the best part! Maybe we can work some agreement out that he can eat the apple part and I'll take the cobbler part?

Movies Galore!

2006-07-23T17:03:00.000-04:00

Finally, I've compiled a list of movies I've seen recently. Enjoy my list, and go see them if you get a chance!

A few weeks ago when I went up to Hunter to stay with Susan, part of the festival was that they showed mountainfilm fest. If you follow my link to the film fest and click on the titles I've listed you can read about the different films. I've also provided individual links for the films when I could find them. They didn't play all of the films, just a sampling. The ones I saw were:

*A life among whales This one was quite disturbing. I found out that there are still whale poachers, just under a different name. They say it's for scientific research, therefore it's legal.

*Native Wind Powering America -Very short but very interesting. Here's a link to their website.

*Trout Grass This was the first one they played on the day that I went (it was held over two days), and I was so bored I was actually falling asleep. I was thinking about getting up and leaving, but one of the producers for the whole mountainfilm festival was in the audience so I decided against it, and I'm glad I did because I enjoyed everything else. It's safe to say that fly fishing is not my thing.

Hmm, this is weird. Some of the movies I saw aren't on the list. Oh well. The other ones I saw were:

*Ancient Marks The link I gave is for the book of the same name. The film was just photos from the book put to music. Not just any music, but music by Ravi Shankar's other daughter (not Norah Jones), Anoushka Shankar.

*The Lost People of Mountain Village-The producer dude who was in the audience was involved in making this film (I can't remember what he did) It was about a town in Colorado that had been deserted, and they were trying to figure out why. (Actually, it was a joke. The town was deserted because the super wealthy people who had second homes in the town were away during the off season.)

*Tears Of Wood-This was chilling. It started off with someone walking up fancy steps made of some kind of hardwood, then there was a good 10 or 15 minutes of footage from an Indonesian jungle, following a male orangutan. Then it showed natives cutting down a tree in the jungle; the tree the orangutan happened to be in. It ended with a shot of the hardwood steps.

*Bigger Than Rodeo-This was unbelievable. It basically teenage kids doing kayaking tricks. Totally unbelievable.

* Home Game-This was funny. It was about a guy trying to get to work. I couldn't find anything about it. :(

*Mini Cine Tupy-This was about a man and his quest to make a movie theater in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

*The Yunnan Great Rivers Expedition-Edward Norton was actually the narrator for this film because his brother was involved in the film (I forget if he was the director or something else). This film was really cool because it showed whitewater rafters exploring waters in southwest China, in an effort to boost tourism to the area and help the chinese government protect the area.

Other movies I've seen:

*An Inconvenient Truth-I don't really know what to say about this. It was a really good movie, and I appreciate what Al Gore is doing, but it was a bit melodramatic at times (the scenes with his family and him at his childhood home). I still think everyone should go see it if they haven't already.

*Grizzly Man This was a really good movie.

*Mountain Patrol: Kekexili This movie was based on a true story. It was disturbing at times but I felt it was something that needed to be seen, and I'm incredibly glad I saw it.

*A Sidewalk Astronomer Follow the link! This movie is so amazing. It's about John Dobson (my new hero), creator of the Dobsonian telescope. He's brilliant as well as funny! In the movie, someone asked him about his accent, and he said "I'm half English and half Irish; I'm warring with myself". So funny. :) The filmmaker was there in person, and after the movie he set up a Dobsonian telescope across the street and everyone got a chance to look through it. Another cool thing is that the movie theater we went to is probably going to bring it back and they're going to try to get John Dobson to come! Awesome, no?

*Brothers Another thought provoking movie.

Ah yes, I see only the happiest movies. I'm just kidding, I love seeing all the movies I do. I can't even sit through mainstream movies anymore, they just make me antsy and leave me feeling like I've wasted my time. For instance, take The Pirates of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. I saw it today, and while I'm not sorry I went, I can't say I liked it.

I love independent movies. Cheers!

My Awesome Job

2006-07-18T08:25:00.000-04:00

As you all might know, I was working for three days last week at a cafe, filling in while the dishwasher was on vacation. She actually decided to stay on vacation longer, so now I'm working till Thursday. I love my job! I know being a dishwasher doesn't sound too fun, but the people I work with are awesome. Also, it's not that bad because they have a heavy duty restaurant style dishwasher, so I just rinse the dishes off, pop them in the dishwasher, and then when they're done, I put them away. There are a few baking sheets that are too large to fit in the dishwasher so I wash them by hand, but it's all good. They normally have vegan soups, so that's really cool. That's what I've been eating down there, but there's also other vegan food. Yesterday their soup of the day was chilled carrot ginger, especially welcome and delicious on a sweltering day like yesterday. They have some kind of platter (I forget the name of it) that has baba ganoush, hummus, stuffed grape leaves, and some other stuff that I'm forgetting on it. Cool, huh? Another cool thing is it's only an 8 minute walk from my house to the cafe , give or take a few cars driving by and not letting me, a pedestrian, cross the street. I'll have you know that's illegal in my town. They've had this law (that drivers must yield to pedestrians) in effect for about 4 years now, but nobody ever follows the law. Every year the police say they're going to crack down on this law, but in fact, the problem seems to be getting worse (maybe because of the summer?). A few days ago there was a steady stream of cars for about 3 minutes, and nobody let me cross the street. Hmmph.

Anyway, when my friend leaves to go back to school in California, I'm going to be taking over her job as bus-girl.

That's all!

Another Cookbook Review!

2006-07-17T08:41:00.000-04:00

Just in case you can't read the title in the picture, this cookbook review is for Good Time Eatin' In Cajun Country by Donna Simon. I happen to love Cajun food, so I was very excited when I stumbled across this book. In this book there are sections for breakfast, salads and salad dressings, soups and sandwhiches, main dishes, side dishes and sauces, breads, and desserts. Even though the recipes say vegetarian, they are all vegan with the exception of honey in a some recipes (when I make those recipes, I'll substitute agave or maple syrup). I really like this book because all of the recipes I've tried so far were quite easy to make, but they all tasted great. The only setback for some people might be that most (not all, but most) of the recipes make 6-8 servings, although I'm sure you could cut them in half.

Shown here are: Hush Puppies-baked, not fried (bottom left), Collard Greens (top right), and Broussard Black-Eyed Peas. Also shown in the picture are salad and steamed sweet potatoes (not from the book, although there is a recipe for sweet potatoes in it).

This was our 4th of July meal. It was the Barbeque Gluten recipe over a sprouted grain bun and the Mustard or Collard Greens recipe (I used kale instead, and it was delicious!). I called it Barbeque seitan because gluten doesn't sound too appetizing, does it?

This photo shows Lafayette Lima Beans, Mustard or Collard Greens (again, using kale, again, delicious!), and the cornbread recipe. Also shown are simple steamed carrots (not in the book).

Just to give you a sample of what's in the book, here are some of the recipe names: Southern Homefries, Breaded Tofu, Biscuits and Cream Gravy, Saucisse (sausage-it's made from chickpeas, besides other things), Corn Chowder, Gumbo Des Herbes, MaMa's Cole Slaw, French Potato Salad, Jumbalaya, Red Beans and Rice, Scalloped Eggplant, Macaroni and Cheese, Yeast Cheese Sauce, Pecan Mushroom Sauce, Bread Pudding, and Coconut Cake.

Yum!

Cookbook Review!

2006-07-16T19:08:00.000-04:00

This cookbook review is of Great Good Desserts Naturally by Fran Costigan. I really like this book, but there is one thing about it that throws me off. What I'm talking about is the fact that while the recipes are free from refined sugar, most recipes replace the refined sugar with a ton of maple syrup. Maple syrup is quite expensive, so that might scare some people off. For Easter this year, I made the recipe for The Versatile Vanilla Cake found on pg. 70, using an egg shaped muffin-type tin, and it was actually too sweet for me. I learned my lesson, and I've been cutting back slightly on the amount of sweeteners used in Fran's recipes. Besides the maple syrup thing, I have no complaints, it's all been delicious. So far, I've made:
*The Very Versatile Vanilla Cake
*Boston Creme Pie
* Ultimate Chocolate Sauce (for the Boston Creme Pie. We ate a few spoonfuls and still had plenty to frost the pie, it's so freaking good)
* Blueberry Slump (this a good summer dessert because it cooks on the stove)
*Good Gourmet Gorp (Susan loves this! In case no one know, the gorp stand for good old raisins and peanuts)
* Carob Fudge Brownies. I did make some changes to the brownies . I don't have anything against carob, in fact I like it quite a lot, but I didn't have any carob powder, so I subbed cocoa powder in place of carob. I cut back on the amount of maple syrup, adding more soymilk in place of it, and since it called for slivered almonds but because of my braces I can't eat crunchy food, I used ground almonds instead. Oh, one more thing I had to do was cut back on the vanilla extract because I ran out of good vanila extract and had to use some that a friend made/gave to us. I'm not kidding when I say it smells like pure alcohol. Pure, pure alcohol.

Anyhoo, here are some pictures:

The easter egg muffins

The Blueberry Slump after it came off the stove......

...dished up and ready to eat

Boston Creme Pie (from the 4th of July)

Chocolate (carob) Fudge Brownies.

All the recipes in this book sound good, but I have my eye on a select few, mainly the Tropical Fruit Mousse, the Lovely Light Lemon Cake, the Chocolate Sherbet-Sorbet, and the Chocolate Glazed Strawberry Shortcakes. Susan, if you're reading this, try to control yourself. (In case you didn't know, Susan is a dessert fiend.)

Upon closing this review, I leave all you peanut butter cup loving vegans on a happy note: there's a recipe (albeit tricky sounding) for Peanut Butter and Chocolate Candy Cups.

Cheers!

I'm still alive, believe it or not

2006-07-15T20:48:00.000-04:00

Yes, I'm still alive, just busy as a bee. I don't have time for a real post right now, but here's some stuff I'll be posting about very soon:

* A list of movies I've seen in the past couple of weeks ( I've seen a lot, so be prepared)
* A cookbook review!
* How my three days working went
* Yay! Another cookbook review!

A quick and easy meal

2006-07-11T20:43:00.000-04:00

It was quite hot today, so I just sort of lazed about (well, I had a guitar lesson, but besides that, I lazed about). I didn't really feel like making a whole big deal of dinner, so I just used some stuff that was in the pantry and freezer, thus furthering along my goal of cleaning out the pantry and freezer. Dinner consisted of Eden vegetable alphabets , frozen lima beans, Imagine creamy tomato soup*, Lightlife defrosted jumbo smart dogs*, and leftover braised kale. It was suprisingly good, quite good actually. :)

In other exciting new, I've got myself a little job for three days (Wed, Thur, Fri). I'm going to be a dishwasher at one of the restaurants on the main street of my town (it's about a 7 minute walk from my house). My neighbor is a bus girl there right now, but when she goes back to college in California I might be taking over her job. One of the chef/owners is a vegetarian, and sometimes, only sometimes, they have vegan food (as far as I'm told, I myself haven't eaten there). Isn't that cool?

I've seen quite a few movies in the past week, but I'm going to be doing a special post about all of them so I won't say the names of them here.

Wish me luck tomorrow....

Also, I'm going to the movies again tomorrow night, so I might not be able to blog.

Bye!

It's Finally Here! My First Cookbook Review

2006-07-10T16:50:00.000-04:00

Yes, the much promised cookbook review is finally here my friends. First, some pictures. (I know I have more somewhere but they seem to have disappeared. Hmmphh.)

This is what my copy looks like. Of course, if you buy it brand new, it will look brand new, but what's the fun in that? By the way, I did not pay for my copy, our friend Camille gave it to me (Brand new, the damage was of my doing).

This is the Cilantro Vinaigrette. Yummy, but obviously not for cilantro haters (I'll have you know Susan does not like this dressing).

The Very Best Tofu Cakes (In this case, The Very Best Tofu Cake)

Eternal Soup. This recipe is made in a crockpot with dehydrated beans, stock, whatever vegetables you have on hand, whatever tomato product you have on hand, and water to cover. Alas, when I made it, I used hot salsa as the tomato product, and it was a wee bit too spicy for me.

The last but certainly not least picture is my beloved Old-Fashioned, All-Day, Baked Beans, Boston (Mountain)-Style, with a big chunk of Steamed Brown Boston Mountains Bread.

All right, now that the pictures have been looked at, a little about the book.

This was my first vegetarian cookbook, and I can remember how excited I was while I looked over it for the first time. I mean, this is a big, big book containing over 1,000 recipes, and the names of the recipes are enough to get any foodie excited. Some examples are: Morocc'n'roll Oven-Roasted Carrot Spread, Roasted Carrot Spread with Fresh Ginger and Curry (sooo amazing!), Oven-Roasted Shiitake Mushrooms with Garlic and Coarse Salt, Four-Star Fresh Basil-Lemon Dressing with Tofu-Tomato Cream (one of my fave dressings), Beet and Orange Salad with Rainforest Vinaigrette, Roasted Red Pepper Soup with a Cilantro-Jalapeno Swirl, Gingered Curry of Carrot Soup with Bell Peppers, Wendy's Pumpkin Apple Soup with Curry and Coconut Milk, Peppery Pedregon Potato-Celery Root Soup, Lunar Gazpacho, Posole-Bean Soup Stew with New World Vegetables, Deep December Ragout of Seitan, Shiitakes, and Winter Vegetables, Gingered East-West Three-Bean and Vegetable Stew, Curried Lentil-Potato Cobbler with Pumpkin and Tomatoes and Filo Top Crust, Spinach and Wheat Berry Tofu Quiche in a Hashed Brown Potato Crust, Vegan-French Style Gratin of Butternut Squash, Jamaican Curried Vegetable Patties in Tortilla Wraps, Red Bell Peppers Stuffed with Green Chile, Corn, and Hominy, Tomatoes Stuffed with Cornbread Dressing and Gravy, Southwestern Succotash with Barley and Green Chilies, Full Moon Pumpkin Pilaf with Toasted Millet, Incan Quinoa-Corn-Potato Ri-sort-of, Casserole of Slow-Cooked Calypso Beans with Orange and Onion, Comforting Corn Chowder with Green Soybeans and Potatoes, Double-Tempeh Stir-Fry with Yam, Apples, and Honey (or agave) Mustard, Tempeh au Poivre, Broccoli, Potatoes, and Tofu in Golden Peanut-Miso Velvet, Greek-Style Green Beans, Brown Sugar-Glazed Beets with Fresh Kumquats, Essence of Greens Tart with Fresh Herbs, Ned's Frizzled Shiitakes, Deviled Summer Squash Casserole, Herb-Frizzled Cherry Tomatoes, Parsnip-Barley Burgers, Dragon Salt, Bread Herbs for Dipping, Basic Fresh Summer Salsa, Pico de Gallo-Style, and loads more.

Ahem. Uh, I may have gotten a bit carried away, but the point I'm trying to make is this cookbook is amazing. The flavors are there, the visual appeal is there, and the names are there. There's a whole chapter devoted to quick fixes for when there's not a lot of time, and there's also a dessert chapter involving fruit on it's own as well as cakes and such.

Just so everyone knows, there's not a recipe in the book (that I've made so far, I still have quite a few recipes left to make) that hasn't been delicious. This book is not vegan, but there are vegan options for many recipes, and most of the recipes are vegan by default anyway.

Here's Crescent Dragonwagon's website if you want to learn more about her.

Now go out and buy this book!

Bye! (for a few days at least)

2006-07-07T16:30:00.000-04:00

Well, I know I said my next post would be a cookbook review, but I couldn't get my act together in time and now I'll be away till Sunday night. I'm going to be staying with Susan at her apartment in Hunter again, because the Catskill Mountain Foundation is having their Mountain Culture Festival this weekend and I'm volunteering at it. I get to stay inside, away from the sun, thank god! (I burn extremely easily.) Blue eyes, brown hair, and pale skin + too much sun= disaster waiting to happen.

Anyway, I made some food to bring up, but there will also be food vendors, and I'm hoping that there will be something I can eat, because I saw the list of vendors and there's going to be a salad hut, a falafel place, an Indian food vendor, and the farm market will be serving veggie burgers. If all else fails I can eat some fruit sorbet! :O

To bring, I made a frittata, which I just made up as I went along. It's made from navy beans, arrowroot, nutritional yeast, s&p, dried basil, tumeric, ham flavored seitan, and steamed broccoli and topped with a faux cheese sauce. In case you're wondering why it's all so vague (the ham flavored seitan, the faux cheese sauce), it's because I'm planning on doing cookbook reviews of all the cookbooks I use, and I don't want to give anything away yet. I promise I'm going to start the reviews soon.

I also made some black-eyed pea/rice burgers and some braised greens and steamed turnips. I just made the burger recipe up in my head and haven't tasted it yet, but if it's good I'll post it on my recipe blog.

I guess that's all, I better get ready to leave!

Happy 4th of July!

2006-07-05T09:55:00.000-04:00

I hope everyone had a happy 4th of July. Mine was quite nice, thank you. :)
Before I post pictures of food, I bring you a link to get you back into the celebrating mood.

Here we have barbequed seitan in a sprouted grain hot dog bun, southern greens, and a mixture of carrots, frozen corn, and frozen green beans (I'm trying to clean the freezer out). But that's not what you all want to see, you want cake! Specifically.......

Boston Creme Pie!

A look at the filling......

look again before it disappears!

It sliced perfectly, no sticking to the knife or anything.

Also, check out this link for the Granny Peace Brigade. I heard about them a few months ago when they were staging their Times Square protest, and I read about them again in the newspaper a few days ago. They were going to be joining Cindy Sheehan in Washington, DC for a 4th of July protest/fast. They are truly an inspiration.

That's all for now!

Stay tuned, my next post is going to be a cookbook review!

You gotta love the Rosendale Cafe

2006-07-02T17:13:00.001-04:00

Yesterday night we went to the Rosendale Cafe (see my opinion of the cafe here) to see The Hunger Mountain Boys. We love them! They are awesome! If they're ever in anyone's area go see them. :)

Anyway, back to the cafe. So we got there and went in (I decided to eat there even though they're liars, I just knew not to order certain things on the menu that aren't vegan even though they say they are). After we were seated, one of the waiters came over and asked if we were staying for the show. We told him we were and he took the money for the cover charge. Dad ordered a spring roll appetizer, then we ordered our entrees. I ordered the zen platter, which consisted of brown rice, black beans, steamed tofu, steamed carrots, steamed zucchini and summer squash, seaweed (arame, I think), and my choice of tahini or tamari dressing (it was kind of overpriced at 12.95, if you ask me). Anyway, about five minutes after we ordered, another waitress came and asked if we were ready to order. After we told her we already had ordered and she had left our table, a waiter came over and asked if we were staying for the show. We told him we already payed the cover. What the heck? Then they brought our salads before they brought the appetizer. Okay. Then, after I had told the waitress that I wanted tahini dressing for my entree, she came back and asked me what kind of dressing I wanted. After they brought our entrees out, we asked if we could please have some bread because we hadn't gotten any yet (it's supposed to come with the meal). During intermission, one of the waitresses came up to dad and said she was sorry but she forgot what we had ordered (she was getting the bill ready). After Rachel told her what entrees we had she left, but when dad got the bill it was only for the three entrees (not the appetizer or the beer dad had or the coffee dad had). So dad went up to the register to tell them they had undercharged us and to straighten the bill out. Do you want to know what they said? They said oh, we were wondering who's bill that was. :O
Also, when we got there, they had their regular menu and their specials menu. About two hours later, they had wittled down the whole menu to one piece of paper. Yes, one piece of paper. Not the regular menu and a piece of paper for the specials, but one menu for everything.
They also ran out of glass cups so they were giving people paper and plastic ones. I've noticed they always seem to run out of things, last time being napkins.
*Sigh* you gotta love the Rosendale Cafe.

Oriental Vegetable Salad Oh My!

2006-06-30T10:32:00.000-04:00

I have a bad habit of making up a recipe to use up all the produce in the fridge.
Why is that bad, you may ask? Well, because I make enormous amounts of food at a time, and there's no way we can possibly eat all of it before it goes bad. Case in point: this Oriental vegetable salad.

I threw in some wilted baby bok choy*, steamed mushrooms, pea shoots*, snow peas*, baby turnips*, beets*, and carrots and dressed it with Oriental dressing, and it made enough to feed a small army. Oh well, what are you going to do?

In other new, go check out my other blog, there are a couple of pesto recipes up.

I made some sweet treats for Susan to take up to her internship (her boss is lactose intolerant), but I can't post pictures because I'm saving them for when I post about the cookbook I used. I can tell you they were really yummy though.

That's all for now.

Mexican/Spanish Dinner

2006-06-27T19:16:00.000-04:00

Yesterday our neighbors were having a pizza party at their house, so we were over there for a while and I didn't get a chance to blog. Our neighbors are like family, and they understand my veganism, but even still, it's always uncomfortable going over to someone's house and not eating while everyone else is. I suppose I could have brought food over, but that would have been akward too. What does everyone else do in these situations?

I've decided to write about the cookbooks I have one by one, maybe posting pictures of some of the recipes to go along with with my reviews. Have patience while I gather my books, the reviews will be coming soon!

Today's dinner:

Enchilada Casserole (recipe here)

Spanish Millet (from The Passionate Vegetarian-this cookbook will be my first review)

Plated, with broccoli and shredded lettuce

We love the enchilada casserole, and the Spanish millet is always a favorite. This meal was yummy!

I'm not sure what Rachel brought home today, as I haven't put it away yet, but I saw some celery, mint, and parsley (there's lots more, I'm just not sure what).

On a parting note, I leave you with a picture of two kittens (from a litter of five). I'm almost certain things will work out and I'll be able to bring one home. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Open Sesame

2006-06-24T20:03:00.000-04:00

I forgot to post about how the sugarless power muffins (from La Dolce Vegan) that I made the other day came out, so I'm doing it now. They weren't as crumbly as I thought they would be, but they were still a little bit crumbly. As far as the taste goes, they didn't have a weird oops-I-put-too-much-stevia-in-them taste, but they were just so so plain. After I spread (as best I could) almond butter on them, they tasted much better. Overall, they were good enough that I would make them again.

I suppose you could say I was on a sesame kick yesterday, because......

1. Yesterday's dinner consisted of cold sesame noodles. I took a recipe for peanut sauce and used tahini instead. For the noodle part I used whole wheat spaghetti that Rachel brought home a few days ago (the bag was busted or something), then I mixed it with the noodles and added leftover sauteed shredded carrots. Sprinkled on top are black sesame seeds.

2. I made gomashio. Sesame seeds and salt = goodness! How I love gomashio.

I didn't think the noodles were very flavorful, so I sprinkled them with the gomashio. Everything tastes better with gomashio, don't you think?

3. The adzuki bean hummus I made had tahini in it. You can find the recipe on my other blog.
Served up with carrot sticks, snow peas*, red pepper strips*, broccoli*, yellow pepper strips*, and celery sticks*. My mom also ate it with rice crackers Rachel brought home. Yum!

Yesterday night we went to TSL to see a movie called Getting Out (*note* I couldn't find a link for the movie). It was about prisoners at Sing Sing taking part in a theater program. One of the ex-prisoners was speaking afterwards and he read one of his poems. Here is a little blip about him. The movie was really touching; if anyone ever gets to see it I think they would really enjoy it.

This afternoon we had the pleasure of going to see a young violinist, Augustin Hadelich, performing pieces from Beethoven, Debussy, Paginini, and others for free!

My family is really lucky in that we get to see so many great performances, and that we've always been surrounded by the arts. I live in the Hudson Valley, and the arts are really alive here. In fact, I live only a few minutes from Thomas Cole's home, Cedar Grove, and across the river is Frederic Church's home, Olana. My parents used to own an antique store, so I grew up surrounded by artsy people (some real, others so phony it's not even funny). Bard College is about 40 minutes away, and we used to go to a lot of performances there. We still go, just not as much as we used to. Mikhail Baryshnikov is going to be dancing there in a few days! (We aren't going, I just thought that was exciting.)

I guess that's enough rambling for today, see ya!

A lesson in freeganism

2006-06-22T20:20:00.000-04:00

Here is a quick lesson in freeganism:
1. Have your sister work at a health food store and bring home all the food they would throw away
2. If you are so inclined, instead of your sister working at a health food store, you can get a job at one
3. If neither of these are an option, resort to dumpster diving (ain't nothing wrong with that, you can get a lot of good stuff in dumpsters)

Now sit down, have a cup of coffee that was hopefully rescued from the coffee hut down the street, and enjoy reading this blog, which today is dedicated to freeganism.

First off, we have yesterday's dinner. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of it, so you'll just have to imagine it. Our friend came over yesterday and after we ate (more on the grub in a minute), we watched a movie called The Day The Earth Stood Still. It was hilarious! The only problem with that is it wasn't supposed to be funny. It dragged on and on and nothing really happened, and the end was not what we were expecting. Anyway, I don't want to give anything away in case anyone ever watches it.

The grub: This was a special kick off the first day of summer dinner. Remember when you see this (*), it means Rachel took it home.

I took a picture of the table (Rachel set it), but then I forgot about the food.
We had eggplant cakes (from The Passionate Vegetarian; besides other ingredients there's tvp* in them) with sprouted hamburger buns, red onion*, spinach*, tomato*, and ketchup*; frozen tater tots; frozen corn; cucumber wedges*; sauteed shredded carrots and baby arugala* drizzled with balsamic-flax dressing; and iced tea*. For dessert we had watermelon*, and sorbet*. Naturally I didn't eat any, but there was also free non-vegan cookies from my mom's friend who owns a bakery. The sorbet had a little dent in the container, which is why we got it. Everyone really loved the eggplant cakes. My mom and sister both thought they were the best vegan burgers I've made yet, so I'd say they were a success.

Today's dinner: wild rice pilaf (wild rice*; parsley*, oregano*, rosemary*, scallions*, chives*; and dried cranberries); tomato walnut-crusted fried "chicken" (from La Dolce Vegan); frozen (defrosted) steamed kale* drizzled with agave-balsamic vinaigrette (using agave R brought home); frozen corn; and sauteed shredded carrots.

Last but not least is veggie dip. I used a dip recipe but added more vegetables. I haven't had any yet but my mom really liked it. In it there's frozen (defrosted) spinach, onion, garlic, canola mayo*, carrot, cucumber*, celery*, green pepper*, cumin, and salt and pepper.

The Daily Roundup Of Food Rachel Brought Home:
banana's, celery, snow peas, red pepper & orange peppers, cucumber, scallions, ayellow onion, collards, plums, a head of frisee, and broccoli. She also brought home a package of silken tofu that expired, and( not vegan per se, just trying to make a point here), pecan cranberry crunch granola, yogurt covered cranberries, sesame peanut crunchies, coconut water-blech (sorry if anybody likes this coconut water, but we all find it nasty), gluten free double chocolate sandwhich cookies, goji berries, Amy's organic chili (vegan), crystallized ginger, a three-pack of apple juice, and 40 packs of hair dye. As soon as I muster up the courage my hair will be red.

Anyhoo, that was a lesson in freeganism.

I'm trying to use up food in the freezer and in the pantry, so I'm going to be planning meals around what we have to use up.

Bye!

A new recipe plus more random stuff

2006-06-20T20:23:00.000-04:00

Hmm, blogger isn't letting me upload pictures right now, which is weird because I just uploaded a picture for my other blog, but we all know that blogger works in mysterious ways. How many times did I just say blog/blogger?

A new recipe is up on my other blog, so go check it out.

Here is a link to the recipe for golden "chicken" nuggets. I used regular rolled oats, and they turned out fine. The only problem with this recipe is with leftovers. They become really dry and crumbly if refrigerated, so I would say eat them fresh, or crumble them into a salad.

Okay, I got the pictures uploaded.

The new recipe on my recipe blog, Creamed Mushrooms* and Spinach* with Quinoa*. In it there's shallots that Rachel brought home. She brought the (prepackaged) quinoa home as a sample from a natural foods company.

I buy the majority of our food (what Rachel doesn't bring home) in bulk, but the price comparison between buying in bulk and buying small prepackaged foods (for example, quinoa) always amazes me. What amazes me even more is when people have access to bulk foods but buy the prepackaged stuff instead.

Anyhoo, We had this for dinner tonight along with.....

Seared frisee* with balsamic-flax dressing from one of Dreena Burton's books, I can't remember which one and I'm too lazy to go look.

Sugarless power muffins from La Dolce Vegan. I haven't tried them yet, but I'll let y'all know the verdict as soon as I do. I'm thinking they might be a little crumbly because there's no wheat in them.

A picture of a creek near Susan's apartment, taken when I was staying with her but forgotten about until today.

*edited* I know why I forgot about them, because I didn't have the camera. Duh!

Another picture.

The Daily Roundup Of Food Rachel Brought Home, relayed to me by Rachel, who has been kind enough to give me a break from sorting through and putting all the produce away:
broccoli, kale, chard, collards, sweet peas, baby spinach, bananas, celery, flat and curly parsley, rotten cilantro, tomatoes, and red leaf lettuce.

Tomorrow I'm not sure if I'll get a chance to blog, because our friend is coming over to watch a movie.

Bye!

Grilled Cheese?

2006-06-19T20:32:00.000-04:00

Tonight's dinner was simply some grilled cheese, so we could use up the block uncheese. Well, as grilled cheesy as it could get, as the uncheese doesn't melt too well. I saw on a livejournal vegan cooking community that someone had made three different kinds of block uncheeses, two chedderish ones and the mozzarella one, all from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook. She said the mozzarella one (which, incidently, does not contain agar) melted the best, so maybe I'll make that next. Maybe not, I'm not making any promises. Rachel made some Celestial Seasonings iced tea mix* thingy. All it was was tea bags that you poured cold water over, let sit for a few minutes, then added ice to. It was really good.

Tomorrow I should have the camera back, and that means pictures! It was really hot today, but then there was a thunderstorm and it cooled off nicely, so I took advantage of the cooler weather and made some oatmeal bars, adjusting it as usual. This time I made it with mango juice, chopped apricots*, and coconut. I've also been cutting way back on the oil and replacing it with more juice, it turns out just as well.

The Daily Roundup Of Food Rachel Brought Home: frisee, kale, collards, prepackaged baby spinach, loose baby spinach, lettuce, leeks, shallots, scallions, flat and curly parsley, chives, broccoli, baby zucchini, a cucumber, strawberries, fresh pineapple, grapes, watermelon, thyme, and basil. In case you couldn't tell, there was no particular order in this roundup, I basically just went from memory.

That's all for now.

Hello, I'm back!

2006-06-18T19:35:00.000-04:00

Yes, I'm back. It's been quite a few days, I know, but I promise I'm back for a while. I went to stay with my sister Susan at her apartment. Right now she's finishing up grad school, and she's also working as an intern for the Catskill Mountain Foundation. Oh, she's also working three hours a week at the community college library. Anyway, I have been cooking, just not blogging about it. Alas, I left my camera at Susan's apartment, so there won't be any new pictures until Tuesday. :(
However, I do have some old pictures, so here they are:

Monterey Jack Block Uncheese (from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook).

Wolffie's BLT Brunch Casserole from La Dolce Vegan.

Starting at 12:00, there's ketchup* (the cap was broken, which is why Rachel brought it home.), golden "chicken" nuggets, steamed kale*, steamed broccoli*, steamed sweet potato*, and corn. This was for Susan to bring up to her apartment in Albany. The golden "chicken" nuggets are actually made from rolled oats, chickpeas, and spices. If anybody would like the recipe, I'll post the link.

Trio of hummuses. (Hummi?) On the left is parsley* hummus (based on the hot for hummus recipe from Vegan Planet), in the middle is walnut-flax hummus, and on the right is sun-dried tomato hummus.

Parsley* Pesto.

I cubed the block uncheese and mixed it with rice, tomato paste, steamed broccoli*, and kidney beans, and I brought the concoction up to Susan's apartment for dinner on Friday night. It was really good, except for the fact that the microwave in her apartment is in Japanese (Japanese people live downstairs from her) and is extremely powerful. We're talking 30 seconds on high and the food is ready to explode. What?

I also used it in a grilled uncheese sandwhich today, except I cut it too thick and it didn't melt. I wound up microwaving it till the uncheese melted. (The bread I used was bread Rachel brought home.)

For the parsley pesto, I mixed it with cooked quinoa for a quinoa pesto salad (one of my favorite ways of preparing quinoa) and had it with some Italian baked tofu Rachel brought home.

Besides the Italian flavor, she also brought home Caribbean baked tofu, so I made curried rice (brown rice, unsweetened coconut, peas, and curry powder), kidney beans, steamed broccoli, and broiled plantains to go with it.

On Wednesday we went to the coop and we got lunch there. They have a lunch special where if you buy a soup and a sandwich it comes to only 4.75! I got coconut vegetable soup and a tempeh reuben sandwhich. Super yum. While we were there, I bought (among other things) So Delicious chocolate soy ice cream, Hip Whip, and chocolate chips, because......

Rachel had a piano recital that evening, and it was for our party afterwards. Our friend Esther came along, and afterwards at our party we had our dessert (topped with sprinkles!) and watched a really cheesy movie, They Live. It was really really cheesy, but I still like it.

On Friday night Susan and I went to see The Promise. We've been wanting to see it for a while, but it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. It was also pretty violent. At the movie theater, they sell locally made ice cream and sorbet. I wrote to the ice cream company (Jane's ice cream, in case anyone was wondering) to see what the ingredients in their sorbets were, and they were vegan as far as I could tell! I got the two flavors they had, raspberry and lime. It was so good!

On Saturday I went to see a performance of songs from the sixties. (Comp ticket, thanks to Susan.)

That's about it, see you later!

Whew! A long post

2006-06-12T20:28:00.000-04:00

Yes, I'm back after my long hiatus. Sometimes it just gets too hectic to blog. I just want to say I do not live a boring life. LOL.

I've done so much stuff since I last blogged that I'm sure to forget something, but here goes:

*I went to MacHaydn Theater to see South Pacific. I loved it! I had seen the movie on TV and hadn't enjoyed it, but this was a really good production.

*I had an orthodontist appointment, the last time seeing my orthodontist. No, my braces aren't off yet; my orthodontist's wife is sick, so he's closing his practice. I have to go to another orthodontist that we don't really like, but what can you do?

*I went (along with my family) to a farewell party for a dear friend, Hannah, who is dying. Her daughter moved her to be with her family for the last couple of weeks.

Hannah about two years ago. Behind her is a painting she bought in Paris. I forget who the artist is but I know it's by someone well known.

The painting close up.

*We went to the Catskill Mountain Foundation to see Candida, a play by George Bernard Shaw. It was super great, very high quality.

*Mom and I went to Kaatsbaan to see The Carlota Santana Spanish Dance Company. My flamenco teacher was there with her children. Her youngest daughter is so cute!

*We went to see Kinky Boots. This movie was really good. It was so hilarious at the end that everyone in the theater was roaring with laughter.

Whew! I think that just about sums it up.

I actually did get a chance to make some stuff, I just didn't take pictures of all of it. Here are some pictures though:

Falafel burgers (from Vegetarian Planet). In the burgers there was sauteed onion, carrot, and garlic; chickpeas, parsley*, tahini, cumin, chickpea flour, baking soda (not quite sure why it was called for), and lemon. I served it up on toasted Ezekial hamburger buns spread with Dijon mustard. The funny looking stuff on the burgers is romaine lettuce*, and on the side there's steamed Swiss chard*, cauliflower*, and broccoli*.

A while ago Rachel brought home two cans of Jyoti natural foods madras sambar (if you click on the link and scroll down a little, you should see what I'm talking about.) I decided to use a recipe on the label for vegetable soup with lentils. I changed it a little, but it consisted of onions, tomatoes*, celery*, kale*, cabbage*, carrots, sweet potatoes, zucchini*, garlic, ginger, olive oil, and the madras sambar cans*. It was so good! It made a lot so there's lots of leftovers.
I don't think I've mentioned it before, but Indian cuisine might just be my favorite cuisine! I adore the flavoring, and I want to start making more Indian food.
Anyway.......

here's a picture of shredded lettuce* with creamy curry dressing, alongside a glass of soymilk.

The vegetable soup with lentils, served over long grain brown rice. I was going to garnish the bowl with minced cilantro, but I thought it would ruin the flavor of the soup.

The Daily Roundup Of Food Rachel Brought Home: wilted chard (it had to be dumped), scallions, rappini, baby bok choy, field greens, lettuce, broccoli, a zucchini, flat and curly parsley, mushrooms, thyme, tomatoes, a rotten pear, a rotten papaya, strawberries, a motherload of bananas, and baked tofu in Italian and Caribbean flavors.

I've also been spending some time over at veggin' out, a forum for female veg bloggers that Harmonia started.
It's super-dee-duper cool. Check it out!

Tomorrow I'm planning on cooking something, but we're going to the movies so I might not get a chance to blog.

Bye!

Our Spaghetti Meal

2006-06-06T19:46:00.000-04:00

Tonight for dinner we had Food For Life Ezekial spaghetti tossed with sunflower seed avocado spread (from How It All Vegan) and chopped tomatoes. On the side we had shredded romaine lettuce* topped with sauteed Hungarian frying peppers*, onions, mushrooms*, and zucchini*. I also had tasty topping (a parmesan cheese substitute from Ecological Cooking) on the table, in case anyone wanted to add some. The spread was really good over the spaghetti!

A picture of dinner.

On Sunday I opened a bottle of apple cider to use in the oatmeal bars, so I wanted to use it up before it became hard apple cider. :O
I made another batch of oatmeal bars, and whipped up a new recipe, Buckwheat Apple Muffins. The recipe is yummers and can be found on my recipe blog. I've also been enjoying apple cider mixed with plain unsweetened soymilk. It tastes like applesauce mixed with heavy cream, which is something I used to enjoy.

Buckwheat Apple Muffins. In case you're wondering why there's only eleven in the picture (as opposed to twelve), I had them by the kitchen sink and the muffin tin flipped over, causing one to fall into the soapy sink.

The Daily Roundup Of Food Rachel Brought Home: kale, collards, swiss chard, celery, parsley, cilantro, leafy lettuce, prepackaged romaine lettuce, mushrooms, zucchini, broccoli, tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries, raspberries, and a perfectly fine watermelon that would have cost 8 dollars! I'm not sure why they were getting rid of the watermelon, but I am certainly not complaining.

That's all.

Herbed beans 'n' greens

2006-06-05T23:18:00.000-04:00

For dinner today we had herbed beans 'n' greens over barley, baked beets (some of which Rachel brought home, some of which I bought), and a big salad made from shredded lettuce*, leftover steamed green beans*, grated carrot, cucumber* (well, I can't eat the cucumber, so I left that off my plate) and tomato*, nutritional yeast, and peppery house dressing. I liked the beans 'n' greens, but Rachel didn't (because of the dill in it).

The salad.

Herbed beans 'n' greens over barley, along with some baked beets.

I've been forgetting to do this, but here's The Daily Roundup Of Food Rachel Brought Home: 12 lbs. of bananas (this is not a joke). I froze some for smoothies, and we gave a few away to our neighbor, but I'm going to have to make banana bread. Besides the enormous amount of bananas, she brought home some swiss chard, collard greens, tomatoes, a small head of cauliflower, cucumbers, lettuce, a papaya, some peaches (yum!), a nectarine, and some fresh thyme.
On Mondays, her job (as assistant manager) is to go through the shelves and get rid of the expired foods, so naturally we get them! She brought home some taco filling (it's vegan), so I might make something with it soon.

Anyway, that's all.

A long post with lots of pictures, plus a new recipe!

2006-06-04T20:46:00.000-04:00

So I did get to take a picture of the watermelon gazpacho and the black bean hummus after all.

(Freedom, you were asking about gazpacho, so here's a link. It was the best thing I could find, and I love how you can hear the pronunciation. Hehe.)

Watermelon Gazpacho from Vegetarian Planet (not to be confused with Vegan Planet).

Black Bean Hummus (Harmonia, it's from The Vegan Deli cookbook.) Yum!

Now are some pictures from yesterday's dinner. Uh, some of the pictures are embarrassingly blurry, but that's because of the dark, dreary, rainy weather we've been having. Bad weather=dark lighting=blurry pictures. We had:
* Oven-roasted asparagus with celtic sea salt
* Braised celery* with tomatoes* and herbamare
* Sauteed mushrooms with basil*, parsley*, and thyme*
* Whole wheat french baguette from The Garden Of Vegan

(I also made a clean-out-the-fridge white bean and vegetable soup, but I was too full to eat any of that.)

*For dessert, I decided to make baked pears. I was just winging it, but they turned out really, really good. All I did was core the pears*, put them in these awesome apple bakers we got at a thrift shop (The Second Show) a while ago, add about a tbsp of raisins per person, then whisk some cocoa powder (not just any cocoa powder, but Scharffen Berger cocoa powder) with some apple cider and poured it over the pears. I then baked it for about 40 minutes. They were a big success with everyone!

The baguette (actually, two).

The blurry roasted asparagus pic.

The even more blurry braised celery.

If you can believe it, the mushrooms were the blurriest, so I'm not even going to post the picture.

A blurry picture of the roasted pears.

Today I made:

Barley Bars with raisins and flax seed meal. (I used my beloved oatmeal bars recipe, but used barley flakes in place of rolled oats. I also cut back on the oil, using more apple cider instead.)

Oatmeal Pudding. (My very own creation, check out the recipe here.)

Sunflower Seed Avocado Spread from How It All Vegan.
Rachel brought home some avocados the other day, so I wanted to use some of them up, and I remembered a while ago I made this and we all really liked it. I think it would be really good over pasta, so we might be having this as a meal sometime this week.

Last but definitely not least was our dinner tonight. It was super excellent!
I made Faux Fish (seitan), then rolled it in Shook 'n' Cook Breading and served it up with some Sweet Potato* Fries, all Courtesy of La Dolce Vegan. To go with the fish we had store bought vegan tartar sauce, and we also had steamed green beans and sauteed collards with garlic, onion, and lemon juice.

The Faux Fish.

Our complete meal for tonight's dinner. (Note the fishy plates!)

A reminder to everyone, whenever you see this (*) after an item of food, it means Rachel brought it home from the health food store for free.

I guess that's all. :)

Watermelon Gazpacho, Black Bean Hummus, and Tortilla Flats

2006-06-01T20:25:00.000-04:00

I need to make this quick because it's thunderstorming right now so I have to turn the computer off soon, but for dinner tonight we had watermelon gazpacho (our favorite gazpacho in the whole wide world, this is from Vegetarian Planet), black bean hummus (from The Vegan Deli), and tortilla flats (from The Passionate Vegetarian).

I don't want to type the recipe for watermelon gazpacho out, because that would be copyright infringment, but the ingredients are: seedless watermelon, stale bread*, green pepper*, red pepper*, onion, garlic, cucumber*, parsley*, red wine vinegar, olive oil, salt, black pepper, and cayenne pepper.

The black bean hummus is so good! Have I mentioned we're hummus fiends?

The tortilla flats are made from whole wheat tortillas brushed with oil then sprinkled with a mixture of chili powder and salt. Sadly, I have never tasted these because they're too crispy for me to eat with my braces on. (Everybody else loves them.) Someday soon.....

My flamenco teacher's birthday was on Saturday, so as a present to her I made this meal and packaged it up for her. I hope she liked it. :)

Rachel went with some friends to see the The Squirrel Nut Zippers at a free concert, so she wasn't home for dinner and we ate all the black bean hummus up (keep in mind I gave some to my flamenco teacher and I also gave some to another friend), so now I have to make more tomorrow. Not that that's a problem now that me and my food processor are best buds.

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures, because it's been rainy all day, so I couldn't take any. If it's sunny tomorrow I'm going to take pictures of it all.

Bye!

2006-05-31T19:34:00.000-04:00

It's been quite hectic since I last blogged, but I'll try to remember what I did and blog about it.

On Friday night I saw a movie called Why We Fight.

On Saturday, Rachel had to work, so we dropped her off and then went galavanting around to flea markets and garage sales. I found an awesome bread box. I'm not going to put bread in it (it's a little dirty), but I think I'm going to put jewelry or something else in it. I also found a set of yellow fiesta dishes, consisting of eight yellow plates, four bowls, and four cups. In the evening we went to see Rachel's piano teacher give a concert with a violinist. Susan is interning at the Catskill Mountain Foundation, so she has an apartment up there for when she works. We brought her home with us on Saturday night.

On Sunday, I finally used my food processor! I can't believe I waited so long to use it! It works so well, I just love it so much. First I made bread crumbs with it, using stale bread Rachel brought home. Then I made a carrot slaw with it, followed by the Hot For Hummus recipe from Vegan Planet. It calls for harissa, but I didn't have any, so I left it out. This hummus was a big hit. I made up a batch, and then I thought, hmm, I better make another batch, because we're all hummus fiends (well, except for my dad) . I'm glad I made more, because we ate a whole batch up right away. :O After the hummus, I made a batch of pesto using this recipe. The only thing I changed was I substituted sunflower seeds for the walnuts, because I didn't have any walnuts and I'm trying to use my sunflower seeds up. On Sunday night, we went to see The Notorious Betty Page. I liked it, but I was a little disappointed because It was basically Gretchen Mol (Betty) dancing and posing.

On Monday, I made Boston Baked Beans and Steamed Boston Brown Bread, both from The Passionate Vegetarian. I've always loved baked beans, and this recipe is my favorite so far. The steamed bread is really cool (and easy) to make. It's just what it sounds like, bread steamed in a pot. I make it in (empty) bean cans.

Yesterday night I had a guitar lesson, which always consists of an hour of my mom and me talking to my teacher and his wife, my hour long lesson, and then more talking. My teacher and his wife have several cats, and one of them had a litter of kittens about a month ago. I only saw one kitten (a black one) yesterday, but it was so tiny and cute. I'm trying to convince my mom to let us adopt one, but so far it isn't working.

Anyway, here are some pictures:

My awsome bread box. I couldn't resist putting my way cool sunglasses in the picture.

The yellow Fiesta bowls. (I didn't want to break the table by putting the cups and plates on it)

The hummus. Yum!

The carrot slaw. All that was in it was grated carrots (using my food processor to grate the carrot!), minced parsley, and Peppery House Dressing from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook (I used flax oil in place of the olive oil it called for).

Boston Baked Beans and a big chunk of Steamed Brown Bread.

Gee Whiz Spread (made in the food processor).

Last but not least (well, picture wise it's least, but that's because it was raining out so I had to take the picture inside, where the lighting is bad) we have quinoa with the aforementioned pesto, saucy pepper sauce (using red and yellow peppers Rachel brought home), and Sofcheez crumbles (supposed to be like goat cheese crumbles) from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook. This was really good, and it reminded me of torta, which is goat cheese, pesto, and roasted red pepper puree layered together.

That's all.

Coconut-Vegetable Stew

2006-05-26T18:00:00.000-04:00

All right, here's a picture of the Coconut-Vegetable Stew I made yesterday, consisting of coconut milk, portabello mushrooms*, red cabbage, yellow and orange bell peppers*, red onion, eggplant*, broccoli*, jalapeno peppers, ginger, garlic, lemongrass, canned baby corn, baby spinach*, plum tomatoes*, and cilantro*. It's pictured over basmati rice. I was planning on drizzling the top with lemongrass oil, but I opened the the oil and it smelled rancid. I just opened it today though, so I don't know.

My new recipe blog URL, creamy vegetable chowder, and a few other ramblings

2006-05-25T22:18:00.000-04:00

Alright, so it's not a big deal, but when I was creating my new recipe blog, I didn't really think about it and so I created a new password and everything. Then I realized (or, more accurately, susan told me) that I didn't have to do all that. I would have figured it out eventually! Anyway, the moral of this ramble is to tell everyone the little problem has been fixed. You can see my new blog (yay! now I have two under my profile) at this URL: www.primaryconsumercreations.blogspot.com. How many times can I promote my blog?...........

Yesterday we went to the coop I love very much, and I found an awesome sprouting bag made out of hemp and flax. Maybe this will help me get started, since I've been a little hesitant to. I don't know why, I guess I'm just scared. I've also been scared to use the food processor I got for my birthday last year, but I swear I'm going to use it soon (maybe even this weekend). For now I've been using my trusty old blender. :)

Today I decided to make what started out in my mind as creamy rutabaga soup. I was going to use rutabaga*, celery*, onions, garlic, leeks*, and soymilk, along with some seasonings. Well, I decided to clean out the fridge, since it was getting way too filled up, so I made a creamy vegetable chowder. It was one of those soups where no measurements were involved, just a little bit of this and that. It turned out a little something like this:

In it, there's rutabaga*, leeks*, celery*, carrots, canned corn, soymilk, dried basil, and salt and pepper.
After I made it, I thought, darn, I should have added yellow and red bell peppers and broccoli. But I was going in a different direction to begin with, so it was okay. The picture would have looked better with some minced parsley* at the top, but the soup was still really yummy.

To go with it, I made braised kale* and collards*, and a country wild rice blend* to be eaten with pinto beans and leftover Balsamic-Flax Dressing.
I made it mid-morning, and then had to dash out of the house to head for a nice little drive to Mac-Haydn Theatre to see Forever Plaid, which was really funny.

Tomorrow is going to be busy, so I made dinner for tomorrow tonight. Are you following me? I'll describe it now, and tomorrow there should be a short post with a picture. It was a coconut-vegetable stew that has been in my head for a while, ever since I got canned baby corn (from the health food store that gives us free food. No, not the one Rachel works at, the other one). It consists of coconut milk, portabello mushrooms*, red cabbage, yellow and orange bell peppers*, red onion, eggplant*, jalapeno peppers, ginger, garlic, lemongrass, canned baby corn, baby spinach*, plum tomatoes*, and cilantro*. I plan on serving it over basmati rice, drizzled with lemongrass oil.

Mom went to The Second Show ( a thrift shop) today. At the end of every month, they have a half-price sale, where everything is half-price (duh!). She got a lot of cool stuff, but it's late, I'm tired, and I don't remember half the things she bought, I just know they were super cool!

One more thing, and then I'll go. I told raising_kahne that I would give her online recipe sites that I like, so I'm planning on doing a post just on them. Expect it in the near future.

Good night, and good luck. :P

Sunflower-lentil pie, muffins, and adorable radishes

2006-05-23T20:48:00.000-04:00

Dinner was so awesome! As you might know, my books I ordered from Amazon came on Thursday, so I decided to use a recipe from one of them (Vive Le Vegan) tonight. Here's what we had:

Sunflower-Lentil Pie over shredded lettuce*, drizzled with Balsamic-Flax Dressing (both from Vive Le Vegan).
On the side is a quinoa pilaf and steamed baby arugala*. In the quinoa pilaf, there is quinoa (duh!), grated carrot, grated summer squash*, and minced lemon thyme*. I forgot to mention in yesterday's post that Rachel brought lemon thyme home. As I was mincing the lemon thyme for the pilaf, I thought to myself, this smells familiar, but I couldn't place the scent. Then as I was eating the pilaf, I placed it. All right, this is kind of bizarre, but it reminded me of a cereal, fruity punch, that I used to eat as a kid. I have no clue why, but that's what it reminded me of.

Wheat Germ Muffins

I started a recipe blog today, visit it and see my Wheat Germ Muffin recipe here. Let me know what you think!

The Daily Roundup Of Food Rachel Brought Home:
mache blend, mixed baby greens, baby spinach salad,
plain thyme, strawberries, orange and red bell peppers, broccoli, mint that had already died, romaine and butterhead lettuce, collard greens, kale, swiss chard, rutabagas, a tomato, grape tomatoes, yellow squash,
cucumbers, a moldy lemon, loads and loads of bananas, peaches and nectarines, canteloupe, field greens
and these radishes. Aren't they so adorable?

Okay, I have to go now. Bye!

2006-05-23T07:53:00.000-04:00

Here's the picture I tried to upload yesterday:

The chedda fondue with potatoes*, cauliflower*, broccoli*, tomato*,
mushroom*, and tofu dogs*. Wow, the whole meal was from foods Rachel brought home!

Susan started her internship today, so I made breakfast for her to start her day off right.

It was tofu scramble with carrots and scallions*, mashed potatoes* (using leftover potatoes from yesterday)
with parsley*, tomato slices*, and strawberries*.
I say again, there was a lot of stuff in this meal that Rachel brought home.

Anyway, that's it for now. I should be posting again later. Bye!

2006-05-22T20:09:00.000-04:00

Today was the last day of the after school program I was helping my flamenco teacher with. I wasn't expecting it, but I was pleasantly suprised when I found out there was money for me. :)

For dinner tonight, we had Chedda Fondue from The Ultimate Uncheese Book with steamed broccoli and cauliflower florets, steamed carrot chunks, baked mushrooms, boiled potatoes, and baked tofu dogs. I tried to upload a picture but it wouldn't work, so I'll just have to upload it tomorrow. It was really good!

The Daily Roundup Of Food Rachel Brought Home Today:
Prepackaged baby lettuce, parsley, cilantro, scallions, romaine lettuce, a papaya, some red and yellow peppers, mini red and yellow peppers, a tomato, swiss chard, kale, and collard greens.

Alright, see ya!

Sunday's cooking

2006-05-21T21:41:00.000-04:00

Another day spent in the kitchen. Today I decided to use up the fruit Rachel brought home last week, so I made some stewed pears and an apple crisp. Here's a (blurry) picture of the apple crisp.

This photo is of the apple crisp plain, but we actually had it in a bowl
with some vanilla almond milk poured over it. For the crisp part, I used the recipe for the
Wildflower Apple Crisp from Cooking On The Right Side of The Brain. (I highly recommend this book, it's one of my favorites.)
It consists of rolled oats, whole wheat pastry flour, vegetable oil, and barley malt or maple syrup (I use the maple).
I used barley flakes in place of the rolled oats, because we have hardly any oats left.

I don't have a picture of the stewed pears, but I think everyone can imagine what they look like, lol.

I steamed some swiss chard to have for dinner sometime this week, and I also steamed some vegetables for tomorrow's dinner. What are we having? It's a suprise, so come back and see.

Here's what we had for dinner tonight:

At the top is smoky black-eyed peas over blue cornbread,
then some tomato slices, steamed kale with the Golden Gravy
from Vegan Vittles, and some baked butternut squash. Dee-licious!

For the smoky black-eyed peas, I took cooked black-eyed peas and simmered them
in a smoky onion-garlic marinade (this recipe is from The Passionate Vegetarian, another one of my favorite cookbooks) for a couple of hours.

The blue cornbread was an adaptation of another cornbread recipe. It tasted good with the black-eyed peas, but I don't know how good it would have tasted plain, so I'm not going to post the recipe.

I also made Adzuki-Miso Spread and an Oriental Dressing, both for tomorrow's lunch, and both from Cooking On The Right Side of The Brain.

I guess that's it. Come back tomorrow night to see what I made!

2006-05-20T17:05:00.000-04:00

All right, I'm back. Hopefully there won't be as big of a gap between my posts again. It's been kind of crazy this week, but it should calm down now.

On Wednesday, we went to our local high school for a lecture series about The Da Vinci Code. I thought it would be a good idea to read the book before the series, so I spent the whole day reading the book from front to back!

On Thursday I had a flamenco lesson at my teacher's house. Her husband built her a studio where she can teach her students, and it's really nice. We got back kind of late and had some cauliflower potato soup with nutmeg (from La Dolce Vegan), a salad with nutritional yeast and tomato dressing, and some wheatless onion quick bread. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the onion bread before it was gobbled up. Also, on Thursday, some books I ordered on Amazon came, so I was busy looking at them. It's kind of embarrasing how many books I got, so I'm not going to list them.

Yesterday, I had an orthodontist appointment, and after that I came home, had dinner, and then I went to my guitar teacher Rhett Tyler's house, where he was having a jam session in his recording studio.

Today Rachel and me went to see The Da Vinci Code. I didn't really like like it, which is too bad, because I really enjoyed the book. We're also leaving for TSL in a little while to go see Isn't This a Time! A Tribute to Harold Leventhal.

This is Brazilian Black Bean Soup (from The Moosewood Cookbook) dolloped with
homemade tofu sour cream.

This is Cauliflower Potato Soup with Nutmeg (from La Dolce Vegan).

Spanish Style Millet (from The Passionate Vegetarian).

Lemon Pie with Strawberry Topping. This was just lemon curd in a graham cracker crust Rachel brought home, and the topping was made out of strawberries and all fruit raspberry preserves.

All right, I have to go. Bye!

Eggplant Parmesan

2006-05-16T20:10:00.000-04:00

Today we had Parmesan-Style Eggplant from Vegan Planet (I made a few adjustments) over vegetable spirals*, and salad* with cherry tomatoes*, nutritional yeast, and Lemon-Shoyu Dressing.

The eggplant was kind of tough, so the dish wasn't as pleasant as it should have been. But who am I to complain, at least I have food.

Anyway, I loosely followed the recipe for for the eggplant parmesan. I left out the meat substitute, and I didn't make tomato sauce like the recipe said to; instead I used some organic tomato sauce Rachel brought home a while back. I added some portabello mushrooms*, parsley*, and zucchini* to the simmering tomato sauce, then layered the tomato sauce, roasted eggplant*, and Tasty Topping (from Ecological Cooking, my favorite substitution for parmesan cheese). I'm not sure why the eggplant came out tough, because I had a lid on the casserole dish I baked it in, so that it would steam.
Okay, moving on. A while back Rachel brought home about 5 pounds! of vegetable spirals, so I'm trying to use some of them up, hence us having some for dinner today. :)

Tomorrow I'm not sure if I'll get a chance to blog, because we're going to the local high school for a lecture series. Today I made the Cauliflower Potato Soup with Nutmeg from La Dolce Vegan, so it can sit till tomorrow (since soup always tastes better on the second day anyway). I'm planning on making some kind of quick bread to go with it, so stay tuned!

The Daily Roundup Of Food Rachel Brought Home Today:
kale, swiss chard, lettuce, leeks, cilantro, broccoli, green cabbage, limes, and baby carrots.

That's all, bye!

2006-05-15T20:35:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry I haven't blogged in a while, it's been quite hectic. On Friday we went to see my guitar teacher Rhett Tyler. We ate the leftover lasagna with a big salad. I only had to freeze 4 pieces!
On Saturday I had a flamenco lesson, and we thought about going to see a group of gamelan players at Bard College, but it was cold and rainy and we didn't feel like going out. We've seen them plenty of times before though, so it was alright with everyone. Besides, sometimes you just have to stay home.
On Sunday (hope everyone had a good mother's day, by the way) we went to Upstate Films to see not one, but two movies. We went to see Water, which is now one of my favorite movies of all time, and Brick, which was awesome.

So that was my weekend. I did make some food on Saturday, and we've been eating off the leftovers for the past couple of day, but tomorrow will bring something new......

Here are the pictures of Saturday's meal:

A platter of vegetables and pita for dipping into.......

Spiced Hummus! Yum yum, how I love hummus!

Spiced Swiss Chard (swiss chard with cilantro, parsley, onions, garlic, paprika, and cumin)

to be served over long-grain brown rice

Carrot Salad with Cumin from the Vegan Deli cookbook.

Tonight we for dinner we had millet, chickpeas, leftover swiss chard, and leftover carrot salad with cumin, and I took a picture (though it wasn't outside, because it's still cold and rainy) but blogger is now acting up (even though I just uploaded the other pictures a few minutes ago. Arrgh!) and I can't upload it.

Today Rachel brought home:
Field greens, butterhead and romaine lettuce, prepackaged baby romaine and herb salad mix, kale, leeks, apples, grapes, strawberries, raspberries, cherry tomatoes, celery, parsley, scallions, chives, oranges, eggplant, zucchini, cucumbers, a tomato, a red pepper, broccoli, potatoes, killer grapefruits (they are bigger than two oranges combined!), limes, and papaya. She also brought home some graham cracker pie crusts. I really need to get moving on using them up, because I have about five down in the pantry that need to be used up as well (Rachel brought them home a few months ago).

I guess that's all. See you later!

Lasagna!

2006-05-11T21:20:00.000-04:00

So today I made a semi special breakfast that included the leftover potato and mushroom patties from last night's dinner. Here's a picture:

Tofu Scramble loosely based on the recipe from Vegan Vittles (grated carrot, scallions*, tofu*, etc.), potato and mushroom patties, tomato slices*, steamed biodynamic asparagus, mango acai juice*, and ketchup to go with the patties. Yummy!

Rachel keeps bringing bananas home. :(
Today she brought at least 20 more home, and I fear the never ending supply of bananas has started.
I made two more banana breads today, and I stuck them in the freezer. Tomorrow I have to make more.

I also made lasagna today, and it turned out very good. I decided not to cook the lasagna noodles, letting them cook in the oven. After I made the lasagna this morning (to let it sit for a while and soak up some tomato sauce), I got scared thinking it wouldn't work, but it seemed to, so all is well. Here are pictures of dinner:

Roasted yellow, green, and red peppers and roasted eggplant (all of the vegetables are from Rachel)

Salad made from butterhead lettuce*, cucumber*, the roasted peppers* and
eggplant*, and lemon-shoyu dressing.

The lasagna!

Plated, with a mixture of sauteed scallions*, halved cherry and grape tomatoes*,
and baby spinach* and baby romaine lettuce*.

In case anyone was wondering what was in the lasagna, it had:
whole wheat spinach lasagna noodles, the tomato sauce I made the other day, mashed white beans (with minced parsley*, basil*, and thyme*), sauteed mushrooms, Mozzarella-Style Cheeze Sauce (from Ecological Cooking),
and Tasty Topping (also from Ecological Cooking).

The Daily Roundup Of Food Rachel Brought Home:
swiss chard, kale, collards, lots of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, peaches, an apple, beets, bananas,
parsley, and leeks, grape tomatoes, lettuce, and baby spinach. (Just switching things up a little!)

That's all I have.
Bye!

An Exciting Wednesday

2006-05-10T21:25:00.000-04:00

Okay, so today was very exciting, in the sense that we got some cool free food from a health food store we go to (not the one Rachel works at); the stuff is kind of old though. This week, the owner gave us potato starch, tapioca pearls (this is the kind you make tapioca pudding with, right?), something that's labeled white rice cakes, except they aren't round like the kind of rice cake I think of, instead it's a weird kind of circular rectangle (yeah, that makes a lot of sense, lol). I'll just have to take a picture (outside, kai!) tomorrow, so you all can see. We also got some kind of vermicelli (it says green bean thread), and what I thought was canned bamboo shoots, but upon further investigation, found out was canned baby corn. Yay, the canned baby corn was so exciting! Sometime soon I'm going to make coconut-vegetable stew with it.

Alright, it's time for The Daily Roundup Of Food Rachel Brought Home Today:
swiss chard, kale, about 10 Odwalla juices (different flavors, one is an omega-3 berry one, some are pomegranate berrry, and some are blackberry), what seems like 50 pounds of potatoes (we are on potato overload, she just keeps bringing more home!), loads of tomatoes, celery hearts, strawberries, cilantro, basil, curly and flat leaf parsley, bananas (we are on banana overload too!), broccoli, leeks, red onion, a tub of tofu, and that may be it.

Okay, here's what we had for dinner tonight:

A salad made from lettuce*, cucumber*, cherry tomatoes*, baby carrots*, red onion*, and nutritional yeast (with lemon-shoyu dressing that's not on it yet).

Yummy potato and mushroom patties. I used this recipe, but I broiled them instead of frying.
I tasted one plain after it was done, and it was pretty good, but I felt like it needed a sauce, so I mixed together some canola mayonnaise (free from the health food store that gives us expired food), flax oil, braggs, lemon juice, and garlic powder. Mom and I liked it better with the dipping sauce, but Rachel liked it better plain.

This is Creamy Cauliflower Soup. I added dill to it, and it was Dillicious. Yes, that was very corny:)

I might add that there are some potato and mushroom patties left, and we're going to eat them in the morning along side some scrambled tofu and Odwalla juice. I should have some pictures..........

See you tomorrow!

A Busy Monday

2006-05-08T21:23:00.000-04:00

Today we went to Honest Weight Food Coop, I helped teach the flamenco class for elementary school students, and we went to see a really good old friend. I also made two more banana breads. :) A busy day, to say the least. Since I was out of the house for most of the day, I made the gazpacho we had for dinner today last night. Here is a picture (I was going to crop it, but something happened to our computer, and it threatened to crash, so, yeah, that's why it's not cropped). Darn, it's really blurry, but here it is:

Gazpacho made from canned tomatoes, onion, green pepper*, cucumber*, yellow squash*, parsley*, olive oil, and spices. On the side is some corn tortillas, black beans, and avocado*. A large portion of the meal was from food Rachel brought home!

The Daily Roundup Of Food Rachel Brought Home: mustard greens, kale, collards, avocado, green, red, and yellow peppers, parsley, potatoes, celery, lettuce, yellow squash, more bananas @#$%&! , peaches, strawberries, grapes, some stale baguette that will eventually be made into breadcrumbs, and possibly more stuff. Someone at my mom's office also left some biodynamic asparagus, so I'll probably use it tomorrow. That's all for now. :)

My Crazy Sunday

2006-05-07T22:30:00.000-04:00

Okay, I'm a nut. I went kind of crazy in the kitchen today, lol. But I like to cook on the weekends so there will be food prepared for the week. Today I made:

Oatmeal pudding (I made this up, and I'm still working on the recipe, but when it's done I'll post it).

This picture's a little blurry, but it's banana bread with flaxseed meal. It was really good!

Apricot oatmeal bars.

Tomato sauce with onions, eggplant*, yellow and green peppers*, carrots, celery*, parsley*, portabello mushrooms*, yellow squash*, and garlic powder (because I ran out of garlic!).

My lunch: shredded lettuce*, dark kidney beans*, long grain brown rice, tomato*, red onion*, nutritional yeast, and lemon-shoyu dressing.

Cocoa-Coconut Banana Bread.

I also made some Gee Whiz Spread from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook, and some gazpacho for tomorrow's dinner. Oh, and I made a banana almond milk mixture that will be made into vice cream tommorrow.

That was my crazy day cooking.

Our Friday Feast

2006-05-05T22:06:00.000-04:00

Tonight we went to see The Treble Choraliers, which is a local women's singing group, so that was very nice.
Our dinner was nice too. LOL.

Here's what we had for dinner tonight:

A potato knish that has potatoes*, and sauerkraut* in it, along with horseradish mustard and some sliced tomatoes. (See the recipe here)

Matzoh Ball and Vegetable Soup (see the matzoh ball recipe here.)
I just used the recipe for the matzoh balls and made a clean out the 'fridge vegetable soup. The soup was made out of leeks*, carrots, celery*, rutabaga*, broccoli*, portabello mushrooms*, button mushrooms, yellow squash*, kale*, parsley*, chives*, and dill. It was very good, and I loved the matzoh balls. Of course, I just love matzoh balls, and could eat them plain. Maybe next time I will. :)

I had to take a picture of these suckers, weighing in at around 1 1/2 lbs. each, which I used these for the knishes. My picture doesn't really do justice to show how big they are.

I apologize for the pictures, they are kind of far away. This is because I took them outside, standing over the dishes, and I didn't think to zoom in. Next time, I promise.

I wanted to make applesauce for dessert, but I didn't have time.

Anyway, here's The Daily Roundup Of Food Rachel Brought Home Today:
swiss chard, collards, kale, portabello mushrooms (not the ones I put in the soup, since I made the soup yesterday. That would have been to easy, using them all up), an eggplant, green peppers, yellow peppers, celery, more chives, scallions, parsley, cilantro, leeks, apples, peaches, an orange, more summer squash, and a small head of red cabbage.

Come back to see what I used everything in. I'm thinking of making a vegetable loaded tomato sauce, but we'll see.

Bye!

Banana Bread

2006-05-04T21:33:00.000-04:00

I know I've talked about my love-hate relationship with bananas before, but I hate them right now. I'm sick, sick, sick of them. As you might know, Rachel brought a whole bunch of them home yesterday, but she also brought another big bagful home today. Before she brought the bagful home today, I thought I was making progress using the bananas up. I made three banana breads today, and I was thinking I would freeze the rest of the bananas. But then she came home with the bagful, and I can't think about it anymore. I'll probably wind up making some kind of "Ice cream" with them. I have a few good recipes. Last summer, Rachel would bring home like, 80 bananas at a time, so I would have to go on banana bread baking binges. Once I think I made 6 different recipes in a day. We gave some of it away, but we also froze some. I use this recipe, and Susan loves it. I do change it however. When ever I make it plain, I use 8 bananas, 1/4 cup maple syrup, and 2 cups whole spelt flour. Sometimes I add other things, or substitute other ingredients. Everybody' s favorite is chocolate chip-coconut, but I've also done oatmeal-raisin banana bread, etc. Anyway, here are the pictures.

This is the banana bonanza bread recipe with salted roasted peanuts and raisins.

This is the basic recipe with a little bit of cocoa powder mixed in. (Rachel brought home the cocoa powder.)

This is the basic recipe. Don't mind the pieces taken out. :)

I made a vegetable soup to go with something we're having for tomorrow's dinner, but I can't tell you what it is because it's a suprise.

See ya!

Oh, if anybody has a good banana bread recipe, feel free to pass it on.

A Random Wednesday

2006-05-03T21:15:00.001-04:00

Nothing new or exciting here today, we just had leftovers. Also, I think I have a stomach bug. (I actually had it over the weekend, but my stomach was hurting me again today.)

Tomorrow morning Rachel and I have dentist appointments. Yay! (That was sarcastic.)
I don't mind going to the dentist, but the place where we go always overbooks, and we're lucky if we're ever seen. Okay, that was a bit of an exaggeration. Actually, once time our appointment was for 11:15, and we didn't get seen at all, because at 12:00 we still hadn't been seen yet, and we had another thing we had to do so we left. Oh, Rachel just reminded me to tell you all about one of the hygienists. Luckily I don't get her anymore because I have braces, but I used to have this one hygienist who would make my gums bleed! Ugh, I get shivers just thinking about it.

Alright, time for The Daily Roundup Of Food Rachel Brought Home. Today she brought home: kale, swiss chard, collards, a prepackaged lettuce container, about 60 bananas (I kid you not), parsley, celery, leeks, scallions, blueberries, raspberries, broccoli, red peppers, an eggplant, and some cilantro.

Another health food store that we go to gave us: two half rotten mangoes, some avocadoes, dairy yogurt (how I wish it would have been soy, because the flavors were raspberry, strawberry, blackberry, and lemon), and something else I'm forgetting.

Something seems to have happened to my archives, so I have to go look into that.

That's all for now. :)

Our Early Cinco De Mayo Feast

2006-05-02T21:11:00.000-04:00

I have lots of news.

I didn't get a chance to post yesterday, so this is a two-in-one post. Yesterday I helped my flamenco teacher teach an afterschool program, and then Rachel had an eye appointment, and then we went to the movies to see
Neil Young: Heart Of Gold. Here's a story for you all.
The afterschool program started last week, but this week there were two new kids in it. Here's a conversation that I had with a girl (I'm paraphrasing it a little):
girl: Do you know why I'm taking this class?
me: No, why?
girl: Well, Shakira is my favorite singer and dancer, that's why I wanted to take this class.
me: Oh, well, flamenco is a little different than how Shakira dances.
girl: I know.

She's eight, by the way.

Here's another story:
Rachel had two bags of produce to bring home yesterday, so when we picked her up I got a chance to look through it. Yesterday she brought home: lettuce, summer squash, cucumber, parsley, celery, mini peppers, green peppers, red peppers, avocadoes, swiss chard, kale, maybe some collards? (I can't remember), mangoes, beets, rutabagas, leeks, and scallions.
My mom remembered my flamenco teacher saying that she wanted to buy organic peppers once but they were so expensive and she didn't want to spend so much money on them, so we decided to hunt her house down (I've only been there once, and mom has never been there) to give her some peppers. We got to the road that leads to her house, but I couldn't remember the address. We had to make a U-turn, and as we were heading back, we saw her car on the road. We passed her by and waved, and her expression was so priceless as she realized it was us! Anyway, we gave her some of the produce.

Today is my dad's birthday! Happy Birthday dad, I love you! (He's working out of town right now)

One of our friends has a staph infection.

Moving on....

Here are some pictures of tonight's dinner (a pre Cinco De Mayo feast) :

Salad made from lettuce*, red bell peppers*, green pepper tops*, and avocado*-salsa dressing.

A green bell pepper* stuffed with canned chili beans*, corn tortillas, and canned tomatoes with chilies. On the side is some steamed summer squash, and mango almond milk (unsweetened original almond milk blended with mango, maple sugar, and cinnamon.

From a different angle.

If you look in the background of the first picture, you'll see a box and some bags. That's the stuff Rachel brought home today.

The Daily Roundup of Food Rachel Brought home:
parsley, a huge box of summer squash, swiss chard, kale, collards, bananas, a half pint of blueberries, some more avocadoes, cilantro, possibly some more stuff that I can't remember.

Alright, that's it for now.

Sunday food

2006-04-30T22:10:00.000-04:00

Yesterday we went to see Rachel's piano teacher give a performance. I was going to make hummus wraps for dinner but the hummus was spoiled. (Rachel brought it home.) So I just had a big main course salad with roasted peppers, steamed broccoli, grated carrot, chickpeas, and balsamic-maple dressing and leftover focaccia. I didn't have enough time to take a picture, but it looked really pretty. Yesterday morning I made more oatmeal bars, this time using strawberry nectar (Rachel brought it home), chopped dates, and pecans. I love coming up with combinations! Next time I think I'll use lemon nectar with dried blueberries and almonds.

Anyway, here's what we had for dinner today:

Steamed green beans, Carrot salad with cumin (from Vegan Deli), oven-roasted zucchini, and brown basmati rice with lentils and swiss chard. I'm so excited because this picture is the clearest one I've taken yet!

Today I made:

Spelt bread (it's so good). I think I'm getting the knack of baking breads because
I had some difficulty with the recipe but I went by feel and it turned out great.
Rachel and I both had carrot apple juice this morning, and with the leftover carrot pulp I decided to make
"tuna" salad for tomorrow's lunch. I got the idea of using carrot pulp from a raw foods cookbook, but I just made the salad up in my head as I went along. It has in it: carrot pulp, canola mayonnaise (we got it for free from another health food store we frequent), minced celery, minced onion, kelp granules, and black pepper. Darn, as I write this I'm remembering that I wanted to put parsley in it. Oh well. The salad will be eaten on the bread, of course.

To go on the side, I made:

Two-Bean Salad (again, I just made this up in my head).
It has steamed green beans, canned kidney beans (from Rachel), sliced shallot, and Lemon-Tamari Dressing.

That's all. :)

Our Italian Feast

2006-04-28T20:14:00.000-04:00

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. :)

I am a neglectful blogger

2006-04-27T20:18:00.000-04:00

I've been a neglectful blogger for the past couple of days. Please forgive me and come back. I do have a valid excuse, though, as I have been obsessed with the Post Punk Kitchen forums for a couple of days now. Here are the pictures I couldn't upload the other day.

Faux egg salad from How It All Vegan (with a few minor changes)

Curried Lentils and Rice stuffed in portabello mushrooms.

On Tuesday I made Whole Wheat English Muffin Bread from Ecological Cooking, and it was delicious. It was even more delicious with some Earth Balance melted on it. :)
I didn't get a picture of it though.
I also made a simple vegetable soup. When I say simple, I mean simple. (All it had in it was carrots,potatoes,leeks, and water.) It doesn't sound too appetizing, but it was good for my taste and that's all that matters.)

Here's tonight's dinner:

A big salad and a frittata.

The Salad (from The Passionate Vegetarian) ended up being way to pungent because there was a whole head of garlic in it, but not too much lettuce. I was going to use prepackaged lettuce that Rachel brought home but half of the containers were already rotten, even though they don't expire till tomorrow. So I could only use about half the lettuce I normally use when I make it. Rachel's taking the leftover salad for lunch tomorrow (mixed in with other loose leaf lettuce).

Moving on to the frittata:

This was adapted from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook.
I made it using white beans (in the recipe you can use tofu or white beans). In it there's potato*, green pepper*, broccoli*, and cherry tomatoes*, and then a blended mixture consisting of white beans, flour, onion and garlic powder, nutritional yeast, arrowroot, and water to help blend it. (I didn't think my blender was going to make it, because two or three times it just stopped. I do have a new blender though, I just haven't gotten around to reading the manual.)

Here it is plated and ready to go with half of an Ezekial English Muffin. I love the English Muffins. Has anybody else had them?

Just in case anyone forgot, this (*) means Rachel brought it home.

Which brings me to The Daily Roundup of Food Rachel Brought Home. Today she brought home:
Swiss chard, collards, (no kale!), red peppers, lettuce, two mushy apples, a papaya that is seriously warped, some leeks, and some broccoli. She brought stuff home all the others days that I didn't blog, but I forget what that was.

I going to be making Italianish food tomorrow, so come back to see what I made! As for me, I'm off to the PPK forum. :)

A weekend of cooking and my new favorite place to shop

2006-04-23T21:55:00.000-04:00

It's been a busy weekend cooking. ( I got a lot of cooking done.) First off, yesterday I steamed kale, broccoli, and swiss chard, made Southern Braised Collards, and made Banana Split-Tea Bread from Vegan Planet. Here are two pics of the banana bread:

The banana bread recipe called for dried cherries, chocolate chips, crushed pineapple, and peanuts.
Well, I didn't have any dried cherries. Dried cranberries would have been second to the cherries, but I didn't have any either, so I settled on raisins. All was well with the chocolate chips, but for the pineapple, this was a different story. I went down to our pantry to get a can of pineapple, went back upstairs, opened the can, and realized it was chunked pineapple. Down to the pantry I went, and to my horror, their was no crushed pineapple. (Okay, okay, so I'm overdramatizing it.) I just chopped the pineapple chunks and it was fine. As for the peanuts, I used pecans. I didn't eat any because braces+nuts=disaster. It also called for 3/4 cup sugar which seems like quite a lot, so I cut it down to 1/2 cup. I don't normally use sugar in my baking, but I have a lot I need to use up and nobody in my family (except for me) minds sugar.

We were planning on going up to Albany tomorrow to drop Susan off at her apartment and to go shopping at Honest Weight Food Coop, but this morning we decided it would be better if we went today, because tomorrow I'm helping my flamenco teacher with an after school program and it would be to much of a rush. It was our first time there, and ohmygod, I died and went to heaven! I haven't made up my mind about their produce department yet, but their bulk section is sooooo amazing. They have so much stuff in bulk! All of the other health food stores I've been to come nothing close to it. They have (you can go to their website and read about what they have, but I have to list it here because I'm so excited) all different kinds of flour (barley, quinoa, teff, amaranth, millet, etc.), so many different kinds of beans (I had looked for black soy beans and Anasazi beans all over and couldn't find them, so I gave up hope, but they had them!), so, so, so, many different kinds of bulk pasta (whole wheat spinach lasagna noodles, corn pasta, tricolor quinoa rotini, all the different kinds of pasta a person can dream of). They have seaweed, many different kinds of miso, oils and vinegars, different flavored extracts, molasses-all in bulk. I've never seen such a sight in my life! Anyway, I'm kind of ranting now, but I'm just so darn excited. This month the almond milk is ridiculously cheap (3/$5), so we bought 4 cases and we're going back on Friday to get more and to ogle the bulk section. :O

I'm getting off track, so I'll get back on track. Because I thought we were bringing Susan up tomorrow, I was counting on having all day today to cook some food for Susan to bring back , but since plans changed, I had to hurry up and cook it all in a smaller time period. Before I started cooking, I ate my breakfast. I know it sounds gross, but Lightlife Fakin' Bacon+peanut butter+toasted whole grain bread+a cold glass of ricemilk=deliciousness. All right, now the pics of food:

Rachel's breakfast. (I didn't make her breakfast, but it looked so good I had to include a picture.)
Gee Whiz Spread (I did make that a few days ago) from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook on
oat bread with tomato slices, sprinkled with garlic powder and broiled. With *gasp* a glass of cow's milk. ( I'm the only vegan in my family.) Oh well, it's better than seeing it go to waste (she brought it home from work).

This is a picture of oatmeal bars. Everyone (including my dad) loves these, so I make them quite often. Today I turned them into tropical oatmeal bars by using pineapple juice, dried mango as the fruit, and shredded unsweetened coconut in place of the sesame seeds.)

Hmmm. I not quite sure why, but blogger won't upload any other pictures of mine, so I'll just have to describe them and upload the pics at a later date. I made a curried lentils and rice recipe and stuffed it into a portabello mushroom, and I also made the recipe for the Faux Egg Salad from How It All Vegan. That reminds me, my Amazon order came the other day (or, at least half of it came.) I'm so excited about it! La Dolce Vegan, The Millenium Cookbook, The Voluptous Vegan, Vice Cream, and Vive Le Vegan all came. I'm almost embarresed about how many cookbooks were ordered. And by the way, my mom is paying for them. :)

I'm getting sleepy now, so I guess that's it.

Pride and Prejudice,Rice Noodle Salad, and My (Still) Achy Breaky Teeth

2006-04-21T22:05:00.000-04:00

We (my sisters and me) just finished watching the DVD of Pride and Prejudice. How I love that movie! My teeth (or actually, my gums) are still really sore from my orthodontist appointment yesterday, so I was a bit out of commision today. Yesterday I made a Rice Noodle Salad to enter into this competition, so that's what everybody except me had for dinner. Even if my mouth wasn't sore, I wouldn't have been able to eat it, because it had lots of raw (crunchy) veggies in it. Here's a picture and the recipe:

Rice Noodle Salad with Arame (please note that this makes a lot. Like, enough to bring to a potluck, so you may want to cut the recipe in half.)

Rice Noodle Salad:
3.5 oz dried shredded daikon
2.1 oz bag arame
14-16 oz rice noodles
4 large stalks broccoli, florets trimmed and stalks coarsely chopped
2 medium red peppers, cut into thin strips
3 medium carrots, cut into thin strips
1 large red onion, coarsely chopped
2 large portabello mushrooms, sliced
14 oz. can black soybeans, drained
8.5 oz can bamboo shoots, drained and sliced into strips

Dressing:
2 tbsp red miso
4 tbsp tahini
2 tbsp umeboshi plum vinegar
4 tbsp brown rice vinegar
1 tbsp powdered ginger
1 tbsp garlic granules
water as needed

scallions and black sesame seeds for garnish (optional)

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Put on a little more than what you'll need for the noodles because you're going to be using it for some other things. (See below.) While it's coming to a boil, you can chop up the vegetables. (Or you can chop the veggies before hand. Whatever your heart or time factor desires.)

Place the daikon in a bowl and ladle in enough boiling water to cover it. Let this soak for 30-60 minutes. while you prepare the rest of the salad.

Place the arame in a bowl (make sure it's big enough, arame expands quite a bit) and ladle in enough boiling water to cover it. Let this soak for about 15 minutes.

All right, now cook the rice noodles according to the package directions. About 3 minutes before the noodles are done, add the broccoli florets and stalks. When the noodles and broccoli are done, rinse them under cold water to cool them down and place them in a large bowl. Add the red peppers, carrots, and red onion.

Into the pot that you cooked the rice noodles in, place the portabello mushrooms and a little bit of water. Cover the pot and cook over medium heat for a few minutes. While these are cooking you can drain the black soybeans and drain and chop the bamboo shoots. When the mushrooms are done, add these and the black soybeans and bamboo shoots to the bowl. By now the arame and daikon should both be ready, so add them to the bowl as well. If there's any leftover soaking liquid, save this for the dressing.

To make the dressing:
In one of the bowls you soaked the daikon or arame in, whisk the miso and tahini together, then gradually add both the vinegars, whisking into a smooth paste. Add the ginger and garlic, and whisk again. Add as much water as needed (this can be soaking liquid) to make a consistency somewhere between thick and thin. Pour this over the noodle salad and toss to distribute everything evenly. Chill before serving. If you are using the scallions and sesame seeds, garnish right before serving. Enjoy!

My Achy Breaky Teeth and Other Random Stuff

2006-04-20T21:18:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm a little grumpy right now because my teeth and gums are really sore. ( I went to the orthodontist today.) He always tells me I can take Advil, but I don't like using medication if I don't have to, especially for piddly stuff like this. I have to wear rubber bands again (I was wearing them for a while, then got to stop, and now the're on again).

In other news, it's time for The Daily Roundup of Food Rachel Brought Home:

Yesterday she brought home some kale, parsley, and fingerling potatoes!

Today she brought home :
kale, swiss chard, collards, parsley, cilantro, bananas, a papaya, lettuce, a tomato, and two apples.

I'll probably make banana bread tomorrow, because Rachel brought a lot home this week, and another health food store we frequent (they give us expired food and old produce, too) gave us some rottenish bananas. Yes, Susan, it will have chocolate chips and coconut. Seriously, my sister Susan is a banana bread fiend. :) I have a love/hate relationship with bananas. When Rachel brings them home, I get sick of them, but when she doesn't bring them home for a long time, I feel like eating one. Weird, huh? Of course, I'm a little scarred from last summer when she would bring home 80 overripe bananas at a time and I would have to scramble to make banana bread. I think one day I made 6 batches of banana bread. Moving on.......

I'm trying a new recipe out for this contest! I'll post a picture tomorrow. If all goes well, meaning if my family thinks it tastes good (I can't eat it because it's crunchy), then I'm going to enter it in the contest. We'll see.

Right now my neighbor is in Los Angelos for her son's graduation from grad school (check out his awesome website here.) You may wonder why I'm telling you this, but I get to watch her cat Taz while she's gone. Taz is one sweet cat!

That's all for now.

Rachel's Birthday Bash

2006-04-19T06:31:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was Rachel's birthday, and man did I cook up a storm! Here are some pictures and descriptions:

The starters: The Salad (from The Passionate Vegetarian) and Tomatoes Provencales. The tomatoes are basically just broiled tomatoes and herbs. I used garlic powder, onion powder, oregano, and basil. I've made these before using pressed garlic, and I think it's better with the pressed garlic. (But it was still yummy!)

I decided to set up the main course buffet-style, so here is a view of all the food. Starting on the left, there's:
Oven-Roasted Carrot Fries tossed with Dragon Salt (see the note below).

In front of the Carrot Fries is some steamed rutabaga.

Then there's the burgers: Lentil Burgers from How It All Vegan, with pickle relish, ketchup, mustard, red onion, and some baby arugula on Ezekial English Muffins spread with Gee Whiz Spread.

In the green dish, there's steam-sauteed mushrooms topped with scallions (see the note below).

Last but not least (if you don't count more steamed rutabaga), there's Italianish Green Beans and Tomatoes (originally I was just going to serve steamed green beans, but Susan kept nagging me to do something special with them.) It consists of steamed green beans and cherry and grape tomatoes put in a skillet and tossed with olive oil spray, black pepper, minced fresh basil, and Tasty Topping.

Here is a picture of Rachel's plate. Notice the absence of 'shrooms on her plate. (She doesn't particularly like them.) What you see in the glass is a yummy Vanilla "Milkshake". All it is is some vanilla almond milk and Rice Dream.

Rachel didn't want something overly sweet for dessert because her boss and coworkers were having a little party and got her a cake. So I made Chocolate Chip-Coconut Oatmeal Cookies, and applesauce. The cookies were taken from Cooking on the Right Side of the Brain (which I looove) and were originally supposed to have raisins in them. Imagine my suprise went I went to the pantry and discovered that we were out of raisins! I had to think quick, what should I do? Naturally use chocolate chips and coconut! These cookies call for barley malt syrup (it was my first time using it, and I must admit it's quite sticky to work with), so the're free from refined sugar (as well as refined flour). (See my note below.)

Note:
*Dragon Salt is a salt-spice mixture that can be found in Crescent Dragonwagon's The Passionate Vegetarian.
*I'm going to get a new blog just for my recipes, so I'll put this on it once it's set up
*I'm going to post my recipe for the cookies on my recipe blog once I get it, so you'll just have to wait. :)

Most of the ingredients were brought home by Rachel, so I'm not even going to bother listing them. Which brings my to...........

The Daily Roundup of Food Rachel Brought Home. Yesterday she brought home:
kale, swiss chard, collard greens, lettuce (cute little butterhead lettuce, among other things), parsley, cilantro, leeks, and scallions. Yesterday morning before she left for work she told me she had reduced some Lightlife tempeh baconthe day before, so I told her to get me them all. At .80 a pack, how can you go wrong? She brought home 8, so expect to see some in the near future. If anybody uses them, do they freeze them? It doesn't say you can on it, but I don't see why you couldn't. I guess that's all for now.

Oh, wait. Tonight we're going to see L'enfant at Upstate Films. We're just having leftovers, so there won't be any pics.

Au Revoir! (Is that how you spell it?)

Macrobiotic Monday

2006-04-17T22:26:00.000-04:00

This is a picture of tonight's dinner. The theme was Macrobiotic Monday, so we had:

A Rice and Vegetable casserole consisting of short grain brown rice, roasted eggplant* (I know, this isn't included in a strict macrobiotic diet, but Rachel brought some home and I needed to use it up), steamed broccoli*, steamed carrots and daikon radish, and Miso Tahini Sauce from Ecological cooking. This was garnished with scallions*. Yummy!
(This is in the casserole dish in the picture.) You can't really see it too well, but it was layered and it looked really cool.

To the right of the casserole dish is some steamed kale*, and in front of the kale is some lemon and shoyu to go on it.

In the middle are some adzuki beans, and to the left are the scallions* for the casserole.

Simple, yet satisfying.

(Insert drumroll here) It's now time for the Daily Roundup of Food Rachel Brings Home. Today she brought home:
kale, swiss chard, broccoli, tomatoes, prepackaged baby greens, potatoes, avocadoes, parsley, cilantro, rutabagas, horseradish root (any suggestions on how to use this?), zucchini, and lettuce. The world is ending! Rachel didn't bring home any collards! LOL.

Speaking of Rachel, tomorrow is her birthday. Susan and I sent her like, 10 e-cards from Hallmark. We made a whole story up and it's hilarious! Hehe. Anyway, tomorrow I'm making a Birthday meal for her (I can't tell you what it is though, in case she reads this before tomorrow's dinner). It's going to be really cool though, so come back and see!

Our Easter Meal (and its side effects)

2006-04-15T21:46:00.000-04:00

Right now I'm feeling a little lethargic (because of our Easter meal), but here are some pictures:

Some of these pictures are a little blurry, but just hang in there for a few more months till I get a super-dee-duper camera for my birthday.

Here we have oven-roasted zucchini. Plain and simple but still yummy! Hehe, if you look to the right (on the fridge), you'll see a male magnet. It's a David (you know, the Michelangelo sculpture) magnet that you can dress in different outfits. I got this magnet as a birthday present a few years ago, and I get such a kick out of it! Moving on.......

This is blurry so you can't really see it, but it consists of steamed leeks, steamed brussels sprouts, and Cashew Bechamel Sauce from Cooking on the Right Side of the Brain. Delicious!

Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of our third appetizer. (It was green beans in lemon-shoyu dressing. )

Another unfortunate thing that happened was my picture of the salad we had for dinner came out too blurry to post. :(
It had in it:
Lettuce*, grated carrot, tomato, oven-crisped tempeh cubes, nutritional yeast, and Garlic Tarragon Dressing from vegparadise.

This is a millet pilaf based on an idea for millet found in The Passionate Vegetarian. In it there's millet (duh!), scallions, oranges, raisins, hazelnut oil, and orange and lemon juices.

Now we have a picture essay of dessert. I'm afraid this is where I may have overdone it, hence my being lethargic.
If anyone has read my post about Camille, this is the thing-a-mahjing (is that how you spell it? Oh well, it is now.)that I couldn't really explain. I guess it would just be called a mini cake(s) pan (the cakes come out egg shaped, though. Isn't that cool!!!) I did take a picture before I filled them with batter, but it got lost in the shuffle.

From another view.....

Cooling on a cooling rack. Don't they look like little Easter eggs? :) Can you spot the one that got a little demolished?

Blogger is AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It never uploads pictures like I want it to. I know I'm not the only one with these problems..... Anyhow, I wanted to upload a picture of strawberry ricemellow cream (Rachel brought it home as a sample from the company) because I spread this on the bottom of the egg shaped part of the cake. (On the base I put some unsweetened coconut colored with natural food coloring from Camille, and then some sliced strawberries.)

Another random pic.

The finished product!

Another angle. Can you spot my leg? (Rachel took this photo)

By the way, the cake recipe was the Very Versatile Vanilla Cake from Great Good Desserts.

That's all folks, and have a happy Easter (or Passover). :)

Our Italian Dinner

2006-04-14T07:32:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's dinner theme was Italian; here's what we had:

Salad (made from lettuce Rachel brought home), grated carrots, steamed broccoli*, oven-roasted portabello mushrooms, grape tomatoes*, nutritional yeast, and Garlic and Herb Dressing from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest (using scallions Rachel brought home). This (the salad) was absolutely delicious!
Please don't mind all the tea on the left, a while ago Rachel brought home 5 huge boxes of tea (no, not tea boxes, we're talking moving boxes here). After we distributed them to all of our friends, we still have sooo much it's not even funny. It doesn't look like a lot, but we have all the unopened tea stashed in our pantry and just keep the open tea on the left.

Here we have calzones stuffed with Sicilian Style Swiss Chard (sauteed swiss chard with onions, garlic, raisins, sun-dried tomatoes, and olives.) I didn't use olives, though, because they didn't look quite right. :O The calzone dough was a simple pizza dough recipe, and I just used whole wheat flour for the whole thing instead of half white and half wheat. It was awesome! This was only my second time working with yeast, but I'm going to use it a lot more. It's so easy to work with! I'm going to be making bread soon.....

This is Parmesan-Style Eggplant from Vegan Planet. We had this last week, but Rachel brought home some more eggplant and I wanted to use it up, so we had it again. It was much better this time, because I cooked it covered, as opposed to last week's cooking uncovered. (The eggplant was a little chewy last time, but this time it cooked more while baking so it was meltingly tender. I' m getting excited thinking about eggplant parm subs. Now I just have to make submarine rolls. )If you look in the background of the picture, you'll see a ziploc bag, (I don't know what it's doing there), some dishes we just got at The Second Show ( a thrift store) waiting to be washed, the aforementioned olives waiting to be dumped (what are you gonna do, right?), some Mrs. Meyers lemon dishwashing liquid, and the countertop screaming to be cleaned (I made a mess, I'm sorry). Mrs. Meyers isn't my favorite brand of dishwashing liquid. In fact, I don't really like the smell of it. Has anybody else tried it? If so,what do they think? My favorite brand (so far) is Earth Friendly Products Ultra Dishmate Natural Almond dishwashing liquid. (If you haven't yet gathered that we don't have a dishwasher, we don't.)

Last but not least is our beloved Cauliflower Parmesan. Delicious as always.
No, you are not losing it, I didn't bother taking a new picture, so I just used the one from last week.

It's time for the Daily Roundup of Food Rachel Brought home (I would have posted yesterday night like I was trying to do, but blogger wasn't working again. What's up with that?) Okay, this is weird and I need help! I just wanted bold lettering for the word again, but now I don't know how to get back to normal lettering. Huh! Now I'm confused, but it's back to normal, so whatever. Anyhoo, here's what Rachel brought home yesterday:
Swiss chard, kale, collards , (it never ends), cherry tomatoes, regular tomatoes, parsley, I'm going into memory lapse mode and can't remember what else, so just use your imaginations. Hehe. :)

Now I have to go make applesauce, bake a cake for tomorrow (we're having our Easter meal tomorrow because my mom's working on Sunday), get together an order for Amazon (yay! I'm getting more cookbooks!), plan our Easter meal, and do other random things.

I think that's all for now. Today is Good Friday, so there's only one meal. We have leftovers, so I won't be posting a picture of our meal today. But come back either tomorrow night or on Sunday to see our Easter meal pics.

So long!

2006-04-12T19:52:00.000-04:00

The digital camera's battery was running low, so I couldn't take a picture, but tonight we had Tofu and Peanut Sauce from Cooking on the Right Side of the Brain by Vicki Rae Chelf. I got this book at the Woodstock Library sale last year, and I really love this book (and highly recommend it). I would say only about half the recipes are vegan, but it has fast and easy recipes, lots of natural dessert recipes, and gives me loads of ideas. We had the sauce with buckwheat, steamed cabbage, salad with nutritional yeast and Peppery House Dressing, and for dessert I had stewed prunes. (Rachel doesn't like buckwheat so she had hers with rice. Except I burnt the rice. It's been a long day.)

The daily roundup of food Rachel brought home:
kale, swiss chard (when does it end?), broccoli (yay!), oranges and grapefruits, scallions, parsley, leeks, avocados, and limes.

Here's what I ate today:

carrot-apple juice
oatmeal with flax oil and gomashio
ricemilk

Spanish Millet (leftover from yesterday)
Tropical "Refried" Black Beans
corn tortillas
steamed kale with lemon juice
unsweetened vanilla almond milk

Tofu and Peanut Sauce over buckwheat
steamed cabbage
salad with nutritional yeast and Peppery House Dressing
stewed prunes
unsweetened vanilla almond milk

Tomorrow is Italian Night! I just don't know what I'm going to make yet, though I do have an idea.....

Stay Tuned!

Spam Mail No More!

2006-04-12T07:10:00.000-04:00

Oohhh, I can delete the spam!

Our Tropical Dinner

2006-04-12T06:34:00.000-04:00

All right, now I'm mad. I've officialy received my first spam comment, and I don't think I can delete it. As soon as I finish writing this post I have to see about word verification. In happier news, here is a picture of dinner (don't mind the food and junk in the background, I'm cleaning up our kitchen, and while it's almost done, there's still some stuff just lying around):

In the small bowl on the left, we have Glazed Plantains (this is a recipe from a book called The Healthiest Diet in the World, by Nikki and Dave Goldbeck), it consists of plantains, fruit sweetened orange marmalade, orange juice (freshly made using oranges Rachel brought home), and cayenne pepper. How we love glazed plantains!

Next we have a variation on Spanish Millet from The Passionate Vegetarian by Crescent Dragonwagon. My variation has: red and yellow peppers* (I was also going to use a jalapeno but I forgot), red onion*, garlic*, millet* (in case anyone was wondering why it's so dark, I cooked the millet in black bean cooking liquid), tomato paste, tabasco, and cilantro*.

And last but not least we have Tropical "Refried" Black Beans. This was very good if I do say so myself (I made it up). This had in it: black beans, papaya*, pineapple and lime juices, and ground ginger and cayenne.

Don't forget that this (*) means food Rachel brought home from work.

That reminds me, it's time for our daily roundup of food Rachel brought home. Yesterday she brought home:
swiss chard, kale, collards (what did I tell you about her bringing them home on a week to week basis?), cilantro, lettuce (yay, I was hoping she would bring home some lettuce!), some more sprouts, umm, what else? Oh yeah, some more apples, an orange and a grapefruit, two plums (one is not ripe yet, and the other is not ripe but is just weird), agghh, memory loss, I knew I should have written it down! Some other stuff that I just can't remember.

Alright, now that that's done, here's what I ate yesterday (Should I just get a blog for this?):

Some grapes* (from South Africa. It doesn't make me happy but as I've said before, I don't like wasting things.)
soy yogurt
oatmeal with flax oil and gomashio

grated carrot and chickpeas with nutritional yeast and Peppery House Dressing
Kale pita sandwiches (this is from Ecological cooking. It basically is just steamed kale tossed with garlic powder and lemon juice, then stuffed into a pita that has been spread with mustard.) Deelicious!
some more grapes
ricemilk

Our lovely dinner. To refresh your memory....
Glazed Plantains
Spanish Millet
Tropical "Refried" Black Beans
ricemilk

Tonight I'm thinking something Italian, but I haven't formulated a menu yet, so we'll see. (By the way, I'm part Italian, part Irish, Part Austrian, and Part Russian.)

See you all later!

The Pics are Here! Hooray!

2006-04-10T20:19:00.000-04:00

Here are the pictures! Yay!

The Creamy Vegetable Chowder....

Transformed into Vegetable Pot Pies

A side dish of Santa Fe Steamed Kale (with Tabasco)

Steamed Rutabaga

Sauteed Mushrooms, Garlic, and Parsley

In the produce department, today Rachel brought home: swiss chard, eggplant, red and yellow bell peppers, sprouts (the sprouts didn't smell very good, so I don't think we'll be eating them), scallions, kale, parsley, mesclun, baby arugula, papaya, and something thing else I know I'm forgetting. Oh, yeah, apples. Susan, if you're reading this, you know what that means! (My grad school sister, Susan, forgot to bring some applesauce that I made the other day back to her apartment and was bummed about missing out on it.) Rachel also brought home some Rapunzel espresso chocolate (or something like that, I didn't look to closely at it yet), some kind of Hemp powder/mix things that look really good, and some Larabars. (I've never had Larabars but I've read about them on other blogs.) Sadly, their just to chewy for my little metal mouth (read: braces). That reminds me that I have an ortho appointment next week. After my appointment I'll have to wear rubber bands again. My freedom will soon be gone. :(

Tomorrow we'll be having some kind of black bean/tropical dinner, so tune back in soon and see the pictures!

Delicious pot pies, but no pictures

2006-04-09T21:32:00.000-04:00

If anybody read my post from a few days ago, they will see that I made the recipe for Creamy Vegetable Chowder from The Ultimate Uncheese Book. Instead of using nondairy milk, this recipe calls for tahini. I happen to love tahini so this wasn't a problem for me, but the rest of my family didn't like it as much as other creamy soups (that call for nondairy milk) that I've made before. So, I made the soup on Wednesday, and today was Sunday (it's the evening now). Well, there was still a lot left, so I was trying to think of something to make with it. Voila, Creamy Vegetable Pot Pies were born. All I did was heat the soup up, put it in individual serving bowls, and pour a recipe of cornbread over the top. (Perfect to go with the leftover gravy from yesterday's breakfast.) Here are the pictures of before (soup) and after (pot pies).

AARGHH! Blogger is not working, I'll have to post the pictures tomorrow.

Well, anyway, it was a success. Absolutely delicious. To round out the meal we had rutabagas* (remember my post from a few days ago? I wasn't sure if Rachel had brought home turnips or rutabagas. They were definitely rutabagas, and they were definitely delicious. I was going to mash them with some Earth Balance and cinnamon, but they didn't need anything, so we ate them plain), some sauteed mushrooms, garlic*, and parsley*, and some Santa Fe Steamed Kale* from Flavors of The Southwest. The kale was a wee bit too chewy, so I have to cook it more tomorrow. For dessert we had warm applesauce left over from yesterday's breakfast. A wonderful meal, if I do say so myself. This is mom's week working, so we aren't going to the movies tomorrow. *Sob* Oh, well, you can't see all the independent movies in the world, I suppose. Tomorrow we're just going to have leftover pot pies for dinner (not that that's a bad thing). I guess that's all for now.

Our pancake breakfast, NAIS, and More food from Rachel

2006-04-08T13:09:00.000-04:00

I apologize in advance for how blurry these pictures are and understand if you never come back to my blog again. However, I'm hoping you do return. :) These are pictures of our pancake breakfast.

Rachel's table setting.

Golden Gravy from Vegan Vittles.

Applesauce (using up all the apples Rachel brought home) with cinnamon and vanilla.

Pancakes from Ecological Cooking.

"Sausages" from Flavors of The Southwest.

Remember how I said we found out that there was flash on the camera? Well, I tried taking a picture with it on but the picture came out, how shall we say this, rather blinding. So much for that....

Last week when we went to see Bread and Puppet Theatre, they did a short skit on something called the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). To read more about it, click here. They can say what they want about it being for animal health concerns, but I'm not so convinced. What does everyone else think? For more information about NAIS and how you can help stop it please click here.

Right now I have some white beans cooking for some more white bean and leek soup. (I'm making it and then freezing it.)

I'm going to try to make Susan V's Sugar-Free Coconut Chai Breakfast Cake. I've used stevia before, but I have never baked with it so wish me luck.

I'm also going to make some Santa Fe Steamed Kale (from Flavors of The Southwest).
Yesterday Rachel brought home more produce. That means: kale, swiss chard, and collard greens. These are the three vegetables that I know we'll always get from week to week. If anyone has recipes involving these three greens let me know, because I'm falling into a sauteed greens and garlic rut and I want to get out. Besides the aforementioned greens, she also brought home more parsley, some cilantro, scallions, leeks, etc. There's always something I forget. Besides all the produce, she brought home, literally, 15 qts. of dairy milk. All I can say is thank god for friends. :)

I'm off to go cook!

Rotten apples, musicals, and food

2006-04-07T09:41:00.000-04:00

When Rachel gives you rotten apples, what do you do? (As opposed to the when life gives you lemons-make lemonade question.) You make applesauce, of course. That's what I have to make later.

Tonight Rachel and I are going to the high school to see their musical. This year their doing The Wizard of Oz. One of our family friends is directing it (as she did for the musical last year), so that should be cool. I won't be making any food today because there's a lot of leftovers in the fridge. But tomorrow, I'll be making brunch. Mom, dad, and Susan are going to a maple festival and are going to eat at an all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast (decidedly unvegan). Rachel and I are going to enjoy our delicious cruelty free, healthy breakfast. I plan on serving some kind of pancake recipe (with maple syrup), homemade applesauce, "sausage patties", (homemade using the recipe from Flavors of The Southwest by Robert Oser, and maybe, just maybe, some gravy, along with some ricemilk and teechino. Yum!

Mom and Susan just left to volunteer at The Second Show, a thrift store in Hudson. Mom volunteers there once a month, and we go in there a lot. The Second Show is like a box of chocolates, you never know what your gonna get. We get a lot of houseware stuff there. In fact, that's where a lot of the plates and serving dishes in my pictures are from. (Along with garage sale buys.) We love The Second Show!

I guess I should go do some schoolwork. See y'all.

2006-04-06T20:13:00.000-04:00

Here are some pictures for your entertainment (in no particular order):

Tonight's Cauliflower Parmesan.

Here are the rice noodles. There is waaay more than this picture shows!

Tonight's roasted garlic spread or sauce.

Me drinking hot carob ricemilk.

Creamy Vegetable Chowder (from yesterday).

I had a bad dream today. In it, Rachel came home with two more bags of produce including kale, swiss chard, collard greens, bananas, a moldy orange, and lettuce. I was condemned to cooking in the kitchen for the rest of my life. Oh, wait. That wasn't a dream, that's reality. LOL!

In other worldly news, our camera went psycho today. I was deleting some pictures and must have pressed a button, because when I tried to take pictures of dinner it wouldn't stop (taking pictures, that is). Rachel fixed it though. She also found out we have flash! I guess we should have read the manual when we got it two years ago.
Maybe my pictures will be better now. Or maybe not. Moving on.....

For dinner today we had:
A salad made from lettuce that *gasp* Rachel didn't bring home. It wasn't organic. Call me spoiled, but it just didn't taste as good as organic lettuce does.

Cauliflower Parmesan from Ecological Cooking

oven roasted zucchini*

quinoa with Roasted Garlic and Chickpea Spread or Sauce (in this case, it was sauce)
I made this up, but it wound up tasting like a white bean and and sage dip from
Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. Actually, I thought it tasted like rotten herbs (that's what you get for trying to use up everything Rachel brings home), but nobody else thought so, so I guess that's what their eating tomorrow. Here's the recipe:

2 heads of garlic, separated into cloves (but not peeled)
1 15 oz. can of chickpeas, undrained
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
1 tbsp fresh thyme
2 tbsp fresh rosemary
1 tbsp raspberry balsamic vinegar
parsley for garnish

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Place the unpeeled cloves of garlic in a baking pan in a single layer, and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until soft and lightly colored. Remove from oven and let cool. When cool enough to handle, squeeze out the pulp into a blender container. Add the remaining ingredients (including chickpea liquid) and process until smooth. That's it.

Here's what I had today:
Amaranth-Bean Chili-Porridge from The Passionate Vegetarian
corn tortillas

brown rice with flax oil, Braggs, and nutritional yeast
a small bowl of Creamy Vegetable Chowder (from yesterday)
black beans
rice milk
a banana

dinner (see above)
warm carob milk

In case anyone in blogworld is wondering why I list what I eat, I do this because there are a lot of blogs showcasing what vegans eat for dinner, and there are even some showcasing lunch, but never a whole day's meals. That's where I come in. :)

Anyway, I'm off to search the blogosphere.

Confused?

2006-04-05T19:57:00.000-04:00

In case anybody is confused about the Tuesday post, it was actually Wednesday when I posted it. I started the draft late last night and saved it, so it was saved as Tuesday's blog.

2006-04-04T18:59:00.000-04:00

What a weird day so far! Today was shopping day, so we went to two different health food stores and a farm market/supermarket. (Yes, we go to health food stores other than the one my sister works in. Is that weird?) The funny thing is, we never shop in our town. We go to other towns like, 30 miles away. We sure get around. LOL. We sure get a lot of free stuff, too. (Here comes the subject of freegans again.) For those not in the know about freeganism, click here and here. So anyway, we went to the first health food store and the farm market/supermarket. (We only buy produce at the farm market and stay away from the supermarket part of the store.) Then off to the second health food store. Now, we've been going to the second health food store for quite a few years now. Besides Rachel bringing home food from work, we get all the expired or unsellable (is that even a word? It is now. Hehe.) food from health food store number two. We never know what to expect! About three or four months ago, we got a huge box of expired rice noodles. We kept some (in fact, there in our pantry waiting to be eaten) and gave a lot away. Well, guess what? Today we got another huge box! The expiration date says 3/11/03, but these things never go bad. Here's a picture of them.

Well, I thought I was going to post a picture but it won't upload. Maybe tomorrow?.....

In the past we've gotten vitamins/minerals, body products like hand cream and such, different kinds of flours, celery root juice that had expired the year before we got it (we never did muster up the courage to try it), apricot lavendar jam, dairy milk, dairy yogurt, soy yogurt, tofu, seitan, etc. Once their freezer even broke down and we got all the defrosted items, which we're still eating off of, thank you very much. So you pretty much get the idea of what we get, right? Well, what we got today (besides the rice noodles) pretty much takes the cake for the weirdest thing yet. Try to guess! Think Camille (to refresh your memory about Camille click here. Okay, I'll tell you. We got a crockpot! What the heck! In all the years of going and getting free stuff, we've only gotten free food or body care related things. Not that I'm complaining or anything, I'm as thrilled as can be. Now we have two crockpots that we didn't pay for. :O

Life is good.

Tonight we're going to Upstate Films again (yes, that's two night in a row. There's a lot of good movies out there!) to see The Beauty Academy of Kabul. We were going to go to the Bearsville Theater to see Tony Levin but decided against it.

I made a creamy vegetable chowder with carrots, cauliflower*, broccoli*, kale* and zucchini* today (from The Ultimate Uncheese Book), and I was going to post a picture, but as I said before, the pictures won't upload.

If anyone was wondering about my screen name, the description of a primary consumer is this: an organism that gets its energy from producers (plants). Also known as Herbivores, but I like primary consumer much better, don't you?

Here's what this primary consumer had so far today:
(breakfast was spaced out over a period of time because I made the soup this morning)

a banana (while I thought about what I wanted to eat)
brown rice with flax oil, braggs, and nutritional yeast (I know this doesn't sound very good but it was delicious)
ricemilk
almond butter from the jar :O

lots of faux chicken salad over lettuce and grated carrot
corn tortillas

another banana

some chocolate chips (yum!)

I ate lunch around 1:30 (I ate a lot) so I probably won't be hungry for dinner tonight.

Not the healthiest day today (this is coming from someone who is very interested in nutrition), but what are you gonna do? Those chocolate chips are very addicting!

AAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH! Rachel just got home with more produce. Here's what she brought home today:
kale, always so much kale, collard greens, swiss chard, potatoes, sprouts, turnips? (I can't tell if their turnips or rutabagas. I think their kind of old. LOL.) curly and flat leaf parsley, an apple (on top of the 4 lbs of apples she brought home yesterday. Poor little apple, it must have been so lonesome.), some bananas, and something else that I forget. *Sigh* I love getting all this free stuff, but sometimes it's just to overwhelming and I have little meltdowns. How would you like it if your brain got overloaded with things coming at you? Besides, sometimes there's so much of a backlog (of food) that we don't have any room in our two (yes, two) fridges. (In case your wondering about our fridge situation, we have a fridge in our house, and a fridge in the little apartment connected to our house.)

All this talk of produce reminds me that our rhubarb is coming up. Yay! I've never made anything with rhubarb, so if anyone has ideas or recipes let me know.

Peace,
The original primary consumer

2006-04-03T20:11:00.000-04:00

Here is a picture of tonight's dinner. We had :
Parmesan-Style Eggplant* (from Vegan Planet)

Kamut vegetable spirals tossed with Peppery House Dressing (from the Ultimate Uncheese book),nutritional yeast, and parsley*

Italian baked tofu* on a bed of lettuce*

and wine. (Just kidding. It's really seltzer. I swear it is.)

Remember that this (*) means food Rachel brought home. Speaking of free food, today she brought home (all organic):
kale, scallions, a head of cauliflower (woohoo!), some broccoli, potatoes, an avocado, lemons, zucchini, some flour, some stale bread (I guess I have to make breadcrumbs), Ryvita whole grain crispbread, and instant soup-in-a-cup.

Other than that excitement (Rachel bringing the food home, I mean), today was just another basic day. I did some schoolwork, worked out, played my guitar, etc.
Tomorrow we're going to see Thank You For Smoking at Upstate Films. We all love Upstate Films, and everybody except for my dad has a membership. Where else can you get nutritional yeast to put on your popcorn? Not that I can eat popcorn right now, with my braces and all. Someday.....

Tomorrow for dinner we're going to have Faux Chicken Salad from How it all Vegan. I'm going to add some dill and serve it over lettuce and grated carrots. Yum!

Rachel says that my pictures are a little blurry, but I think their okay. (She's comparing them to the Guinnah blog though. Sadly, I just can't compete. Hopefully (if all goes well) I should be getting a new camera for my birthday in July. (Along with a Vitamix. Yay!) That way, I can take crystal clear pictures on a good camera. (The one I'm using now is a digital camera bought cheaply at Shop Rite when they were running a sale. At least I have a camera, though. :)

I keep forgetting to blog what I eat for breakfast and lunch (besides posting dinner). Here's what I had today, in case anyone was wondering what a typical vegan eats each day. Haha. There's no such thing as a typical vegan, or even a typical carnivore, for that matter. Everyone is unique. Anyway:

an orange
stewed prunes
soy yogurt
oatmeal with flax oil

BBQ seitan
a spelt roll
sauteed kale and garlic with lemon juice
ricemilk

unsweetened chocolate almond milk

dinner (see top of page).

By the way, be sure to check out the sidelines. I'm adding new links and blogs that I read. Bye!

2006-04-02T21:46:00.000-04:00

Bread and Puppet was great yesterday. Some times their plays are a little too long, but yesterday's show was composed of little vignettes that were hilarious. They did one little scene that was very scary (it's about the government and agriculture). I'm not going to write about it now, but I promise to write about it soon.

This weekend I made:

A mostly veganized version of Uncle Sam's in the Black Cake from Death By Chocolate Cakes by Marcel Desaulniers. (I was trying to use up some white and dark chocolate that wasn't vegan.) I didn't have any cake, but everybody else did and really liked it. The white chocolate top was a little too runny and made a little mess dribbling over the side, but other than that, it was a success. The white chocolate was Ghiardelli, but the base of the cake had Scharffen Berger cocoa powder in it, and the middle layer of the cake (made from dark chocolate,soymilk,rolled oats, and dried cranberries) had Scharffen Berger dark chocolate in it. The first picture is of sliced cake on a plate. Originally I wanted to make this on April 15th, (for tax day), but I soon realized that was the day we would be having our Easter meal, complete with a nice springtime cake. Although for some people I know (hello, Susan) this wouldn't be a problem, I didn't want to overload everyone's system with two cakes. That, and the fact that my white chocolate ganache for truffles I was going to make didn't quite set up the way I had hoped, made me make the cake this weekend.

Leek and White Bean Soup. This is the middle picture, shown with some peasant sourdough bread spread with Earth Balance and some Bread Herbs for Dipping (from The Passionate Vegetarian).

BBQ Seitan. This is the last picture, shown with spelt rolls, sauteed kale and garlic with lemon juice, and ricemilk.

I also made some melty chedda cheeze from Dairy Free and Delicious, some Tasty Topping from Ecological Cooking, and premade dinner for tomorrow. (All I have to do is bake it.) What is it? You'll just have to come back and see!

Make sure you check out the sidebar everyone! I'm adding links that I love and blogs that I'm obsessed with. What can I say, blogs are addicting. :O

Bye!

Photo Time

2006-04-01T07:05:00.000-05:00

I have pictures for everybody! About time, right?

I tried to comment about what it is your looking at, but it got messed up and out of order so you'll just have to guess. :o

Today should be (cooking wise) a productive day. I'll tell more about it tomorrow.

Tonight I'm going to see Bread and Puppet at TSL.

I guess that's all for now.

2006-03-31T08:06:00.000-05:00

Tonight the whole family is going to The Rosendale Cafe to see The Crooked Jades. If you followed my link to the Rosendale Cafe you would probably say it sounds awesome, right? Well, wrong. Partially, at least. Let me explain. The music is always good, and the first time I went there the food was delicious. Of course, that could be because that was the first solid food I had eaten in a two days. (I had to have minor surgery on my gum for orthodontic purposes. Yikes!) Anyway, I had the seitan shepard's pie and my mom had the tofu stroganoff over brown rice. (They gave us fettucccine by mistake, but after they assured us it wouldn't be dumped, we sent it back in exchange for the rice.) At this point, maybe your thinking hmmm, I guess thing's can get mixed up? If you are thinking this, read on. Even if your not, read on! While this confusion is happening, the owner asks what we are getting. He then assures us that if something says it is vegan, (they put V's next to the food that is supposedly vegan) then it really is. Boy am I glad I didn't have anything with the soy cheese. Even though the items on the menu say vegan, the sliced bread, baguettes, and the fakin' bacon they use contain honey. Now, I know that some vegans eat honey, but the final straw is: the soy cheese contains casein, EVEN though it says V. AARGGGH, how aggravating is that? What I've decided to do is boycott the food and just go and listen to the music.

Here is a recipe for broccoli guacamole, based on the recipe for mockamole from The Passionate Vegetarian. I didn't have peas, so here's what happened:

4 cups steamed broccoli (plus one more cup a little further down)
2 ripe avocadoes
1 cup steamed broccoli
1/4 tsp sea salt
4 tbsp lime juice
1 tomato, chopped
1/2 a red onion, finely chopped

Place the 4 cups steamed broccoli and the avocadoes in a blender and process until smooth, adding only a small amount of water (if needed) to help blend. Transfer to a bowl and stir in the remaining ingredients. Please note that this makes quite a bit, so you may want to cut the recipe in half.

Here is the recipe for the Fusion Saute. (This is how I think I did it. I lost my little index card that I put together, but I have a good memory. Hehe.)

2 tbsp olive oil (preferably extra virgin)
2 red onions, finely chopped
2 cups chopped scallions
1/4 cup finely chopped ginger
8 oz. kumquats, sliced into thirds and deseeded
3 medium bunches cilantro, including some of the stems, coarsely chopped

Heat the olive oil in a heavy skillet, then add the red onions, scallions, and ginger. Saute for about 3 minutes, stirring often. Cover the skillet with a lid and saute, stirring ocassionally, for 5 minutes more. Uncover, add the kumquats and cilantro, then re-cover and saute, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes more.

To serve this like I did (it served six), cook a recipe of coconut basmati rice but subtitute more water for the apple juice. (The rice should go under the saute.) Also make a double batch of baked five-spice tofu from The Convenient Vegetarian, and steam some broccoli. This must be eaten listening to some fusion music (preferably Mahavishnu Orchestra).

2006-03-30T15:10:00.000-05:00

Yesterday the weather was so beautiful, and I saw the first butterfly of spring. It's hard to believe, but today was even nicer! I have decided today's the day to tell everybody the long story involved in how I came to accumulate hundreds of cookbooks. About two years ago, a family friend's mother died, so she decided to clean her gigantic house up. I'm not kidding about the gigantic house. Our friend has, I think, ten siblings that grew up in the house (along with her, her mother and her father). Over the years, after she moved back to care for her mother, she accumulated cookbooks, and arts & craft how-tos, and various other good stuff that she thought she would use. Well, she never used anything. (Do you see where this is going?) Anyway, after her mother died, she was getting rid of all the wonderful things that she had never used. She thought of us and the rest is history! We got loads and loads and loads and loads of stuff. After the third trip to her house and back, my dad started to get a little annoyed. Hehe. Most of the cookbooks were meat or meat containing ones, but I have them put away for now so at a later date I can go back and veganize the recipes. Not all of them were meat ones though. There were actually quite a few vegetarian ones. She had Indian (vegetarian) cookbooks, Polish cookbooks (she's polish), Creole cookbooks, Martha Stewart cookbooks, Jewish cookbooks, slow-cooker cookbooks (she gave us a crockpot!), Weight Watcher cookbooks, and so many more that I can't even remember. She also gave me (well, our whole family, but I started cooking for everybody) The Passionate Vegetarian by Crescent Dragonwagon and Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison. For more info on the last two books, click here and scroll down a bit. Besides the hundreds of cookbooks she gave to us, we also got (new or almost new) baking sheets, springform pans, the aforementioned slow-cooker, rolling pins, casserole dishes, muffin pans, bundt pans (mini-bundt pans too), dishes, there was even (I'll try my best to describe this) a mini-cake pan type thing that's in the shape of easter eggs. Hmmm, I'll just have to take a picture and post it IF I EVER FIGURE OUT HOW! I just know I'm forgetting some things. Besides all that, we also got Martha Stewart decorating kits for different holidays, as many different shaped cookie cutters as you can imagine, decorator's icing, sprinkles, candied flowers, so many things! Another thing that came our way was a bundle of Martha Stewart Living magazines.
She was EXTREMELY generous. Thank you very much, Camille.

That was the long story! Is everybody still with it? LOL.

In yesterday's blog I forgot two other cookbooks that I have. Here they are:

The Convenient Vegetarian by Virginia Messina and Kate Shumann
This is a good book. There's lots of quick, convenient recipes (hence the name of the book). We especially like the baked five-spice tofu. (In fact, that's what we had for dinner last night. Scroll down a little.)

Simple Treats by Ellen Abraham
A wheat-free and dairy-free (and egg-free) cookbook for desserts.
I haven't used this yet but it looks great! All the desserts are free of refined sugar.

For dinner yesterday, we had fusion saute (I made this up myself, so I'll post the recipe soon), baked five-spice tofu (from The Convenient Vegetarian), and coconut basmati rice. See here for the recipe. I used water in place of the apple juice.

Gotta go make tonight's dinner. (Miso soup with various veggies.)

2006-03-29T11:36:00.000-05:00

I was just here at Shmoo Blog and Jennifer was saying that she has an addiction to sugar. Well, I wish they didn't put evaporated cane juice (sugar) in the processed foods at the so called health food stores, but that's partly why I don't buy much in the line of those foods. In an earlier blog I wrote that I will eat processed food (e.g. veggie luncheon meat) if Rachel brings it home, but other than I try not to buy it. Basically if I want one hundred percent natural food, I just have to make it myself. Which brings me to my cookbook list. I promised to compile a list of cookbooks that I have. Or, at least use the most often. I have, literally, hundreds of cookbooks. This is a long story for another time. Anyhow, I'll give brief descriptions of as many as I can. This might have to be done in two blogs though, we'll see.

Here's the list (in no specific order. Well, the order I pulled them off the bookshelf):

Ecological Cooking by Joanne Stepaniak and Kathy Hecker
This was my first vegan cookbook, picked up at a secondhand shop. I highly recommend it. It looks like a smallish cookbook but it's actually loaded with recipes. I haven't even made half of the recipes in it yet! Of the ones I have made, they have all been great. Our favorite recipe is the cauliflower parmesan one. Yum!

The vegan classics How it all Vegan! and The Garden of Vegan by Tanya Barnard and Sarah Kramer
Love these! I don't think they need a description, they stand by themselves.

The Accidental Vegan by Devra Gartenstein
Unfortunately, the few dessert recipes in this book call for honey, so you have to make substitutions where substitutions are due.

Cooking with the Right Side of the Brain by Vicki Rae Chelf
This book rocks! Not all of the recipes are vegan, but a lot of them are and substitutions can be made. None of the recipes (including desserts) contain refined sugar. I highly recommend this.

The Vegan Kitchen by Freya Dinshah
Lots of creative recipes. There's a recipe for figgy pudding! Figgy pudding! Okaaay, moving on.

Great Good Desserts Naturally by Fran Costigan
An awesome book of healthy desserts free from refined sugar. There's even vegan baklava.......

The Natural Foods Sweet-Tooth Cookbook by Eunice Farmilant
Another awesome book of healthy desserts free from refined sugar. This one is mostly vegan but does call for eggs in a few of the recipes.

Flavors of the Southwest Vegetarian Style by Robert Oser
I just got this one but I'm really excited about it. Not completely (but mostly) vegan.

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest by Mollie Katzen
Hmmmm. Heavy on the dairy and eggs, but I like veganizing recipes. Don't let this discourage you from getting it, because it's very inspiring. We love the grape nut muffins. (Veganized, of course.)

The Moosewood Cookbook by Mollie Katzen
Basically the same review as The Enchanted Broccoli Forest (see above).

Vegan Deli by Joanne Stepaniak
I love this book! Everyone should run out and get a copy. One of our favorite recipes is the carrot salad with cumin, but there's so many good recipes it's hard to choose.

Vegan Planet by Robin Robertson
A very good vegan cookbook. I don't really make the dessert recipes though, because there's a lot of sugar in them.

Meatless Burgers by Louise Hagler
I just got this book and haven't made anything out of it yet, but it looks promising. All of the recipes are vegan, and there's even chapters on accompaniments, buns (right now I'm looking at the recipe for oatmeal-quinoa hemp seed buns), and side dishes.

Mideast & Mediterranean Cuisines by Rose Dosti
Definitelly not vegan, but there are some (accidentally?) vegan recipes. I'm going to try to veganize some of the recipes and as soon as I do I'll post them.

Flax The Super Food by Barb Bloomfield, Judy Brown, and Siegrfried Gursche
This is a recently purchased book, so I haven't had a chance to make anything from it yet. It looks like a keeper, though. Especially good for people wanting new and excitint ways to incorporate essential fatty acids into the diet.

Good Time Eatin' In Cajun Country by Donna Simon
Another new book that I can't wait to try! I'm looking at a recipe for Saucisse (read: vegan sausage) right now. yummmmy!

Vegetarian Planet by Didi Emmons
Kind of heavy on the cheese at times (the author worked in a cheese shop for a while), but there are some vegan recipes. If they aren't vegan, all it takes is a little creativity. The watermelon gazpacho recipe is deeee-licious. Get cooking!

High-Flavor Low-Fat Vegetarian Cooking by Steve Raichlen
Easily veganized, with some recipes being vegan already. The chickpea burgers are just fabulous. Sadly, a lot of the desserts would be hard to veganize, IMHO. Still, I would recommend this.

Passionate Vegetarian by Crescent Dragonwagon
For the longest time, this was my favorite book. I still love this book dearly, I just haven't made anything from it in a while. There's a fair share of vegan recipes in this book, and sometimes Crescent lists both vegan and vegetarian versions. This is a must, must, must, must, must read.

Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison
Just a look at the sauce and condiments section is worth buying this book. This book is at times heavy on dairy and cheese but there is a fair share of vegan recipes. Recently I made saffron (tofu) mayonnaise from this book, and turned it into a purple potato salad with saffron mayonnaise. Another time I made red chile sauce from this book and added black beans and posole. Spicy? Yes, but that's what tofu sour cream is for. LOL. I think everyone should own a copy of this book, if not to cook with, then at least for ideas.

The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook by Joanne Stepaniak
Joanne Stepaniak has outdone herself with this book. Run out right now and grab a copy! All the cheezy recipes in the world, plus a recipe for soy free mayonnaise (beannaise).

Vegan Vittles by Joanne Stepaniak
Very yummy, very easy, very vegan vittles!

Dairy-Free & Delicious by Brenda Davis, R.D., Bryanna Clark Grogan, and Joanne Stepaniak
A whole nutrition section, plus scrumtious recipes.

Sea Vegetable Celebration by Shep Erhart and Leslie Cerier
A good book for introducing sea vegetables (or just more ways to incorporate them) into your diet.

The Healthiest Diet in the World by Nikki and David Goldbeck
A big nutrition section and delicious recipes. Most of the recipes are vegan.

Sublime Soups By Lenore Baum
A lovely (and vegan) book about soups and quick breads.

Lenore's Natural Cuisine by Lenore Baum
Delicous recipes and a big dessert section with out any refined sugar.

Well, here we are at the end of our cookbook journey (all in one blog. Whew!). I hope you enjoyed it:) Now go out and buy them all. LOL.

2006-03-28T19:56:00.000-05:00

Today was beautiful! Spring is my favorite season and today was just perfect. It's something about the renewal of the earth after the dead of winter. That, and the seasonal food (e.g. asparagus) that makes me loooove spring. I had a guitar lesson today, and then just decided to procrastinate the rest of the day away:o) For din-din (a slightly lazy meal, I must say) we had:

carrot sticks, cucumber sticks*, sliced tomatoes*, red and yellow bell peppers*, lettuce* with Peppery House dressing (from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook),
Imagine creamy broccoli soup with steamed broccoli*, steamed yellow squash*, black pepper, and basil*,
ham and cheeze pita sandwiches (made from Lightlife ham slices*, Chick Cheeze from The Uncheese Cookbook, sprouts*, red onion*, and Ezekial pita)
and ricemilk

Unfortunately, because of my braces I can't have hard or crunchy foods so all the raw veggies (except for the lettuce and tomato) were out for me. No matter though, I had plenty of nutrients (all it takes is a little creativity and a juicer, people) in my meals. Here's what I had today:

carrot-apple*-ginger* juice (I guess this is a common juice recipe, but I got it from The Garden of Vegan)
soy yogurt
oatmeal with flax oil and gomashio

millet, sauteed swiss chard, nutritional yeast, tahini, and lemon juice (the nutritional yeast, tahini, and lemon juice make a kind of cheesy tasting sauce)
ricemilk

and then dinner.

I'm reading this through and by gosh, Rachel brings home loads of stuff!
Today she brought home collards, kale, tomatoes, scallions, chard, lettuce, potatoes, cilantro, and Bread Alone bread (except that it has white flour, so I won't eat it). There might have been more but it's hard to keep track. lol.
The food's not alway's bad, sometimes they just get new shipments and such, so we get it. Yay!

I've been thinking that I would compile a list of cookbooks that I have (and lord knows, I have a lot of cookbooks.) I'm getting more from Amazon too:o
I'll post my list soon, so stay tuned.

Today's March 28, so that mean's a new episode of House! That's what I'll be watching in a little while....

I don't watch that much TV, but right now I watch House (funny, but a little stupid at times), Veronica Mars ( the first season was good, now it's a little trashy), and Top Chef (so much drama, so little cooking). My family used to be addicted to Law & Order: SVU, but we've outgrown the addiction, thankfully.

I guess that's all for now. See you later, alligators.

2006-03-27T12:33:00.000-05:00

For dinner yesterday we had :
wilted salad* with chickpeas,
wild rice*,
baked golden beets,
braised leeks*, and
carob*-kumquat* torte

Well, we liked everything, but the beets weren't as sweet as I thought they would be, and the carob-kumquat torte didn't quite firm up. I used a ganache recipe and added kumquats*, but I guess the kumquats had to much liquid in them. No matter though, it still looked and tasted good. I did take pictures of everything but I still don't know how to post them. Today is just a normal day for me, no special activities or anything. I'm just doing some schoolwork, working out, playing my guitars, you get the drift. I just started reading Becoming Vegan so I'll probably read that later. I don't have to cook later because there's a lot of leftovers so there won't be any descriptions of the meal. That's all for now.

Oh, from now on, whenever this (*) appears, it means Rachel brought it home from the health food store. We practically live off her now:)

2006-03-25T12:27:00.000-05:00

I meant to say (in yesterday's blog) that this (*) signified food that Rachel brought home. I did tell you we were practically freegans! LOL.