Summer Randomness

The builder.

The designer.

The Central Market haul. Is it a haul when it's three things? We were really there so Tony could buy beer. I just picked out a few goodies.  I'd never seen this Villa de Patos maguey water.  Maguey sap is said to be rich in prebiotic fiber while other kinds of sweeteners don't really contain fiber. Anyway, the drink was okay, but really too sweet for my taste. I also grabbed some vegan chicken broth powder and matcha powder. Gotta have my frozen matcha latte's this summer. 

I baked some almond-raisin-coconut granola for Tony to take to work since he does not have time to eat breakfast at home. I also made some coconut bacon. They both bake at 325, so I just popped them in the oven together.

I managed not to burn my coconut bacon this time, yay! BLT's for dinner, best sandwich ever invented.

So. Much. Rain.

The deluge continues! It's been weeks now. I feel terrible for those affected by flooding. We've been lucky in our neighborhood. Aside from a few tree branches down, we've had no damage and our power has stayed on. 

Olivia loves to put on her boots and splash around in the puddles until she is soaked.

I warned her that her rain boots are not waterproof and her feet will get wet if she jumps into standing water. But in her mind, getting all wet and muddy just means that she gets to take a bath. So, win-win.

For dinner I wanted something warm and comforting, and I'd also been craving Indian food. I made the Coconut Cauliflower Chana from Get It Ripe and it hit the spot. That's good, because it made a ton! I served it over rice but I will serve the leftovers with naan bread to change things up. The coconut makes it so different and delicious! I guess that's a South Indian thing. So good.

After Olivia was warm and dry, she helped me frost some cupcakes. I made lavender-rose cupcakes by steeping lavender buds in some almond milk, which I then used in the batter, and adding rosewater to the buttercream frosting. The basic vanilla cupcake recipe is from Vegan Cupcakes Take over the World. I swirled together pink and purple frosting to represent the rose and lavender.

How is the weather where you live?

Easter 2015

Happy Easter! We are all about the candy on Easter. I don't even try to make the kids ration it, like on Halloween. Our neighborhood had its own egg hunt and Jackson and Olivia showed up hungry.

Go!

Post-candy silliness!

For our Easter lunch with my parents, I made a couple of my favorite salads, Cilantro Lime Chickpea Salad and Lemony Wheat Berries with Roasted Brussels Sprouts. I also made plenty of roasted asparagus because the kids and I all adore it and I feel like you need asparagus at any spring feast.

In addition to the ham, deviled eggs, and baked beans for the omnis, Tony made two kinds of vegan potato salad. One had horseradish and dill, and the other had mustard and pickles. Both were awesome. He makes great potato salad.

I'm getting away from the idea of needing to have a "meat substitute" as the core of my holiday meals. I could make a Tofurkey but I will be the only one eating it, and I'm not that into faux meats anyway. I was perfectly satisfied with my meal even though I didn't prepare any seitan, tempeh, or tofu, and I got plenty of protein from the chickpeas and wheatberries.

For dessert, I made the coconut cream pie from Vegan Pie in the Sky. I attempted to make Rad Whip, the PPK version of homemade vegan whipped cream, but I had some issues with it. It never did get super creamy or fluffy, as you can see. I may not have blended my cashews long enough. I don't have a Vitamix so it is hard to get the graininess to completely go away. I also used flax milk instead of almond milk, which may not have been as creamy. I will definitely give it another shot!

I think the pie ended up looking fine, and it tasted great. I especially loved the crust made with vegan nilla wafers.

After lunch, the kids wiled away a rainy afternoon with their new bubble blasters, gifts from my parents.

Hope you had a fun Easter!

All Clean

Started off the day with oats, topped with Brazil nuts, peanut butter, and cacao nibs. I also stirred in a teaspoon of maca powder.

While Jackson was at school, Olivia helped me give the house a thorough cleaning. Drying the floors after I mop is her specialty.

Then we made a treat -- cocoa-coconut balls. I followed Laura's recipe, but substituted cocoa powder for half of the maca powder. I ate a couple for lunch along with pita chips, carrot sticks and hummus.

Dinner was Thai Peanut Bowl with Tofu and Asparagus, from Robin Robertson's One-Dish Vegan. So good. I love asparagus; it's one of my fave veggies and this is the season for it. Will definitely make this again.

Pretty straightforward day. Feel like I ate pretty healthy.

Coconut Bacon

We had another "snow day" on Tuesday thanks to icy roads. .After sleeping in a bit, I started doing my usual cleaning. Jackson got upset that I was not including him. (Sorry, friend, you are not quite big enough to scrub toilets effectively. Please see me when you hit your teenage years. I will be happy to hand that chore off to you then!) So I set him to work doing the laundry. He is not quite tall enough to reach, so he grabbed his step stool and improvised.

Later, the ice melted enough for us to catch a dollar movie, "Walking with Dinosaurs." I'm glad the kids are starting to have the ability to sit still for entire movies. I love watching movies and there are so many I want to watch with them. For example, I never saw the Harry Potter movies when they came out, because I said I would wait to watch them with my kids. (The giant pop was shared among all three of us. I like how it's almost as big as Olivia's entire head and torso.)

For dinner, I tried something new...coconut bacon! It's so easy and only takes 20 minutes. You really do have to keep an eye on it in the oven to avoid burning, though, since the coconut flakes are so delicate.

Tony confirmed that it really does taste and feel bacon-y.  We had BLT's with rye/pumpernickel swirl bread, Veganaise and, of course, LT. My favorite sandwich.

Seitan Saltado and Coconut Tres Leches Cake

My tummy is sooooooo happy right now. And full. Full of delicious, delicious seitan. For dinner, I made two recipes from Viva Vegan. The entree was Seitan Saltado.

For dessert, if you couldn't guess from the oh-so-creative title of this post, we had Coconut Tres Leches Cake.

These things took some preparation, as many dishes from this cookbook do. When I first got the book several months ago, I decided to go all out and make a feast: empanadas, enchiladas, side dishes, salsas, and the tres leches cake.

It all tasted good, from what I remember, but I didn't read the recipes carefully beforehand. So I'd get a to a point in a recipe where it would say, "Next, add the cold broth." I was like "What cold broth? I don't have any cold broth. Now I have to make broth and wait 30 minutes while it cools?" When I was finally done cooking, I was exhausted! And it kinda put me off the book for awhile.

Still, on our last trip to Mexican Radio in Hudson, Tony had a dish called Carne Asada Fries. It was shredded seasoned beef and salsa on a bed of french fries. He liked it, and I sorta wished I'd ordered their vegan version of it. Then I thought, "I bet I can make it at home. Wait, haven't I actually seen a recipe for something like that, somewhere?"

I got out Viva Vegan, and there it was. And today it was time to give it a shot. I had already made some white steamed seitan loaves on my productive Sunday in the kitchen. While the seitan thawed, I made the french fries and the rice that serve as the base layers. Yes, fries AND rice -- carb fiends take note! Then I shredded the seitan and let it marinate for a couple hours.

At dinner time, all I had to do was stir-fry the seitan with some onions and tomatoes. It was freaking awesome, I don't know what else to say.

And then, the tres leches! I baked the cake the night before, to give the sauce time to soak in. I didn't have any rum, so I used Kahlua in the sauce. Tasted fine to me, ha! Today, I just needed to prepare the "whipped cream" topping. It went more smoothly than the first time I made it (I burned the agar and had to start over), but you still need to have good timing. Have your milk/arrowroot mixture ready when you start to heat up the agar flakes and water. It heats and thickens REALLY fast and you'll want to quickly stir it all together and get it off the heat. Oh, and the book says to blend the tofu and coconut cream in a food processor, but it's such a small amount. If you have a regular food processor with a large bowl, like I do, it's not gonna work. I used a hand mixer, and didn't have any issues with graininess.

Austin, Texas, where I lived for three years, is like the capital of tres leches cakes. Every Tex-Mex restaurant in town serves them, every grocery store sells them. I sampled them all in my leche-consuming days. And this baby is as good as any of them. I predict it will be gone very, very soon.

Now I'm already looking through Viva Vegan trying to decide what to make next. Have you ever bought a cookbook that you had a less-than-awesome experience with, or found too complicated, only to return to it later and be glad you did?