Recent Foods

This weekend (and today) were a weekend of cooking and baking. Which seems to be the norm since I have become vegan. So, I'm going to show off. Hope you forgive me. Also, I think I need to get over my carb fetish. What's that? you're surprised I have a carb fetish? You shouldn't be. I love carbs far too much for my own good. Eat them too much.

But anyways.
Saturday
On Saturday, i got home from from the Sessions Committee for New England Yearly Meeting (the group that organizes New England Quaker's business/social annual gathering held in august... www.neym.org) to which I was nominated back at the very beginning of the year at Young Adult Friends midwinter. I went with two other YAFs and met two more there. It was nice to see them so shortly after having seen them earlier this month. There was a lot accomplished at this meeting and needless to say, I am stoked for yearly. Except for maybe the food. I might be eating cereal and salad with no dressing all week. We'll see..

But this entry is about food. So, onwards, my friends.

The first thing I made was a gluten-free vegan cornbread slightly adapted from glutenfreegirl.com's recipe for cornbread. It came out absolutely delicious. Tasted exactly like any cornbread I'd ever had. Or almost, at least. It was slightly slightly heavier.

Yes, it is next to a very heavily glutenized loaf of bread. As no one in my family actually NEEDS to eat gluten free, this isn't an issue at the moment. We do love our wheat flour. Everyone agreed that this cornbread hit the spot, however.

I also made the Vegan Girl's Guide to Life Twice baked Chipotle sweet potatoes. The skins fell apart, probably because I didn't follow the instructions precisely when it came to removing the flesh to mix in the chipotle seasoning.. So they look a bit funky, especially the foil 'skin.' Sorry for it being sideways. I'm feeling too lazy to go back and fix that in iPhoto and it won't let me here. As you can see, we still have a vestige of christmas hanging around.

Onwards. After this, I made vegan banana bread in preparation for Sunday morning (I have no pictures of the loaf, whole). What's that you say? What did I make for sunday morning? Well, onwards, I shall show you!

Sunday


I woke up Sunday morning with not a hankering in the world for Banana Bread French Toast. Funny, since I'm usually all over hot baked goods for breakfast. Not this morning, no sirree. So I went to go snowshoeing instead for an hour and came back, took a shower and finally convinced myself that I should just make the damn french toast. After all, I'd already made the banana bread. What could hurt? I could always give it away to someone..somehow.

So I made it. Dude. DUDE. I think my life is changed. I can't believe i didn't feel like eating french toast for breakfast. I must have been crazy. Look how crazy delicious this is:

Yeah. I know. This recipe is easily found in Vegan Girl's Guide to life. I changed nothing. 

I knew I was heading for a pizza party later that day, so I made pizza to bring with me! I was going to make the same thing as I'd made way earlier this month, pizza with sweet potatoes, caramelized onions and spinach. Last minute, I decided what the hey, I'll substitute mustard greens for spinach even though I've never had them. 

Still not sure that was a good decision, but it is one of the healthiest pizzas I've ever seen:

(Yes, the mustard greens are under the sweet potatoes and onions) Also, there's red sauce under there. Very very onion-y red sauce. I killed the onions yesterday, having forgotten to get more on Friday. Whoops.

I also made my lunch for the week, Kale and Chickpea Tagine with Quinoa. Only without the quinoa because we apparently left it in New Hampshire over Christmas. Whoops. So I'm eating it with plain white rice. Forgive me for not taking a picture of the rice. You've all seen it before. Also, I forgot to take a picture of it while it was hot, so this is post-refrigerator, wilted look.

Monday


Only one thing I made today, from the wonder that is theppk.com Their orange-cranberry muffins have been staring at me for a while now, so I finally made them, the applesauce replacement for oil followed. I also did not have fresh cranberries, so I used the dried ones I've had sitting around for a while. I left out the zest because we didn't have any oranges and because I don't like zest (could have used clementine zest).

Yum. This weekend was full of yum.

Randomness

I'm still working on that vest. Went to a retreat last weekend and actually got to a pretty sweet place in the vest, which I am very happy with. But it seems to be moving slowly, especially given that I haven't worked on it since.

I made sourdough bread again yesterday. Left the starter out overnight to proof it, made the dough in the morning, let it rise for FOUR hours, punched it down, shaped it into a loaf and shoved it in the warmed oven to rise again for two hours. Finally baked it. Still heavy and dense, but not as bad as my first try (the second has been the best so far). Time needed: ~18 hours.

I'm writing again! After National Novel Writing Month, I burnt myself out for a month-which is not too unusual for me. It happened last year and frankly, I'm not surprised it happened this year. I'm currently only writing Fanfiction (fiction based on already created piece of work...in case you didn't know. Which I'm positive you do. Just covering the bases) out of the Firefly world (a tv show starring Nathan Fillion, Alan Tudyk, Summer Glau etc that was cancelled far too early in 2002 by Fox and then made a movie in 2005...again in case you don't know, which I'm sure you do). Hopefully, I'll get around to my nano piece as it's kind of whining at me, wanting me to finish it. Surprisingly, I don't think it's crap. Not in the sense that I think the first nanonovel I wrote was crap. It's something I can work with. Like putty sitting there unformed, but the majority of what it needs is already waiting to be formed into a piece of beauty.

I made vegan chocolate chip cookies. They never browned, which was incredibly disappointing. And then they didn't taste very good. But a funny thing happened. The next day, they tasted better. And the day after that, even better. I think the process of going stale actually made the texture/taste of these things better. Which is completely contradictory to anything I've ever heard...

Being Vegan is kind of awesome. My body feels way better, I'm more alert to the world. Last night, I made a dish from theppk.com called Cashew Vegetable Korma.  I halved the recipe, since I wasn't cooking for 16 people and I still have two yogurt containers full of leftover. But it was delicious and I will probably have it for lunch all week.