Visit Home Part Deux

It was Hsauce's turn to visit his family (I visited mine at the end of last month. We would have loved taking these two trips together this summer but couldn't due to life stuff, money, yadda yadda yadda...)

Hsauce was there to visit and celebrate the opening of his parents' store, Words and Pictures, which sells out of print and collectible books among other things. If you're every in Langley, WA, check it out!

He also hiked.

...and of course cooked:
Those are green beans with peanut ginger dressing (we've actually made this a couple of times now for friends and it is really, really good) and Hsauce's own signature Pad Thai dish.

And guess what else he did?!? He went to Mighty-O Donuts in Seattle!!

But you know, he was sweet enough to bring me home some....these were gone pretty soon after he got back home. Yes, they were damn good.

While Hsauce was gone I made (along with some boring meals not worth mentioning), what I'm going to call 5-minute Vietnamese Pho. I used veggie broth, Chinese 5 spice, slivers of fresh Thai hot chili peppers and some squirts of lime juice to make the broth. Then I just piled it on some rice noodles and whatever veggies I had in the fridge. I didn't have beansprouts so I used some shredded lettuce for a crunch effect. It was good.

And I also tried out this recipe for mac and cheese (originally from PPK, I think). I'm always on the hunt for the best mac and cheese and I think I've found it! I didn't follow the recipe exactly, adding more margarine (Earth Balance!) when I thought it needed it or more or less of other things and it came out just delicious!

Straight from the oven...

On my plate with a side of broccoli. Oh yeah, I also added peas to the mac and cheese.

I think this is my favorite mac and cheese recipe. I made it again for Hsauce when he got back from his trip and yup, still tasty. I like covering it when it's the oven to help prevent the top from getting too dry. This way, it all stays ooey-gooey and cheesey! Keeps well in the fridge for a couple of days and reheats well.

And yay, new sewing machine!

Luv'n it Live in Atlanta

Heck yeah! We finally got a chance to go to Lov'n It Live- a raw vegan restaurant here in Atlanta.

We started with the Nori roll appetizers. From their menu description "Nutmeat, tomato, avocado and lettuce wrapped in Nori seaweed sheets". For one order you get 2 of these! They were absolutely delicious. Their nutmeat was so full of flavor and just really good!



For my entree, I ordered the Tostado. From their menu description "Crisp flax shell layered with local field greens, Luv'n It Live's delectable tomato sauce, pine nut cheese, chopped tomatoes, avocados, black olives, and sage patty crumbles. This is our most popular dish!"

I see why it's their most popular dish. Words can not describe just how delectable this was! Every mouth was a burst full of flavor. The sage patty crumbles had these little fennel seeds and they were just yum!

Here is a part of the flax shell layer underneath all that goodness.

Hsauce ordered the Sage burger. From the menu "The overall character of this dish is robust, yet the individual flavor of sage is light and straightforward. This burger can be served either on a bed of lettuce or in between 2 pieces of Luv'n It Live's infamous flax bread. Oh and don't forget to ask about our house cheese!".

I had a taste of this as well and it was awesome too! It had many similar tastes to my dish since it used the same sage patty, house pine nut cheese, and tomato sauce. In retrospect, we should have ordered slightly different dishes to get more variety in tastes, but hey next time!

For dessert, we stopped at the Seven,

Yeah, it tasted as good as it looks. There is a big chunk of it missing in the picture because I could not wait until after my pic to try it.

Tomato Salad

This is very tasty and very easy to make. We gobbled it up with some french bread and also added some Follow Your Heart mozzarella cubes for fun. It's very much like bruschetta...a great cold salad for the summer.

Visit Home

I just got back from a visit home with the family in NC. Vegan eats were limited, so I mostly made my own food (mostly simple things like spaghetti and cold salads).

The couple of times we ate out I had vegan sushi,

and salad from Souper Salad. I have never gone to a Souper Salad since becoming vegan, but their vegan items are clearly marked which was nice. This pic shows my second plate from there (it's buffet style) and includes some of their antipasto cold salads like marinated mushrooms, vegan coleslaw with raisins, a cucumber-tomato salad, and vegan cornbread! I would consider going there again b/c they had a nice variety of salad goods for a good price for all you can eat. I need to find out which dressings are vegan though, b/c those were not clearly marked. I ended up using oil and vinegar on my first plate of salad. They also have a lot of non-vegan stuff too, unfortunately. It was depressing to see people eating there have these beautiful plates of vegetables and greens only to smother the whole thing in buttermilk dressing and ham pieces. ::sigh::

Also, a big reason for this trip was my new nephew! The blanket he is in was my first biggish vegan knitting project.

You're such a teese!

We went to the ice cream social that Cosmo's Vegan Shoppe had last Saturday. Unfortunately, we forgot the camera so we didn't get any pics :-(, but we did buy some Teese for the first time! We've been testing it out this week on fajitas, pasta and sandwiches, but I must say that it was the best with our flat bread pizza!

This is our barbecue "chicken" pizza. It's got Morningstar chicken strips (which I totally didn't realize were vegan but it says "vegan" right on the package!), fresh pineapple chunks, green bell pepper, cilantro, red onions, mushrooms, a hybrid sauce of tomato sauce and barbecue sauce, and of course some Teese on it.

Teese melts pretty well and it really does taste amazing. I think we'd buy it again for special times but it is a bit pricey.

The dough is a simple flat bread recipe derived from this recipe. It's basically the same, but I'll write it out anyways:

3 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/2 cup softened Earth Balance
1/2 cup warm water
1tsp of garlic and onion powder

I chucked all the ingredients (except the water) into my bread machine and put it on the "dough" setting. When the Earth Balance was incorporated I added the water slowly until the dough was moist and clumping. I then took it out, kneaded it and split it into 2 lumps. I covered the lumps with plastic wrap and stuck it in the fridge. After 30 minutes, we rolled it out (1/8 thick) and grilled it using olive oil on each side of the bread before it hit the grill. The original recipe says about 4 minutes on each side and that seemed about right. It should have pretty brown/black grill marks.

The flat bread works well also with just regular tofu ricotta cheese, sauteed onions and mushrooms, basil and thin slices of tofu hot dogs. Here, I was trying to mimic the original recipe.

Oh, and since we had leftover pineapple and the grill pan out we had grilled pineapple with vanilla soy ice cream for dessert. I drizzled mine with a syrup of agave mixed with a touch of pure vanilla extract.

Ethiopian Food

I have been craving Ethiopian food for a reeeally long time so after reading a recent review in some foodie newspaper thingie, we headed out to Queen Sheba last night. The last time either of us had Ethiopian food was probably more than 2 years ago back when we lived in Boulder. 2 years!!! So we were pretty much drooling all over ourselves when this arrived at our table (excuse the crappy phone pics).

We ordered the veggie combo and the mushroom tibs and of course about 2/3 of the way in, we were struggling to finish because it was so filling. I have a theory that injera expands inside your stomach once eaten (btw, I'm totally gonna try and make that recipe for injera).

But we did clean the plate and ate up most of the injera that had soaked up all the lovely goodness of our food. Everything was delicious. I think next time we'll skip the mushroom tibs though and get more of the veggie mush goodies. See how blissed out Hsauce is over the tasty food....yum!

Although I did enjoy dinner, I have to say that Ras Kassa's in Boulder is still my favorite. We will probably go again to Queen Sheba but I'd like to explore other Ethiopian restaurants too. We will, however, most definitely go back to that area of town to check out the all vegetarian Indian restaurant (Chat Patti) that was right beside it!

Chinese take-out in my kitchen

Our first attempt at vegan spring rolls! We roughly followed this recipe for veggie dumplings. Of course, instead of putting our filling in wonton wrappers we used spring roll wrappers.

We dipped them in our good ol' standby sweet chili sauce from the Asian market. Here you can see the filling which just looks like beige stuff but it's really shitake, napa cappage and tofu.

In hindsight, I wished we had added some clear bean thread noodles and carrots to the filling b/c I felt they were missing these things (next time!).

Also, we had a few spring rolls bust open while deep frying them and this was probably due to a couple of things:
(1) we simply used oil to seal the wrapper before frying (if anybody has a better way to seal them pre-fry, we'd love to know!) and
(2) we don't have a deep fryer so the oil may not have been hot enough.

They were still yummy and good for our first go at spring rolls though!

We had them with Szechuan style green beans (and jasmine rice). I didn't follow a recipe for this. I kinda just tossed the green beans in a wok with some minced ginger and garlic, hoison sauce, soy sauce, red chili peppers (dried), and some rice wine vinegar. Spi-cey!