still alive - be thankful!

I know other bloggers have gone far longer than a week without a post, but I am not normally among them so it feels like forever.  I hope you'll excuse my absence, considering how busy I've been preparing for Thanksgiving and Black Friday - or I should say it like this:

1. the first Thanksgiving (or holiday at all) that I've hosted in my own home!
2. the first Black Friday I've worked retail in fifteen years.

Fortunately, both went off pretty well, yet both were fairly stressful in the days leading up to them.  Additionally, I just haven't felt like I had anything interesting to say.  I realized recently that one of the reasons I've found blogging to be so much fun and so fulfilling in the first two years of this little blog was because I was still learning how to cook new and interesting things, so I was always trying to make something I hadn't made yet so I could come up with a unique post.  Over the last several months, I've found myself perfectly happy to repeat "favorites" from the last few years, and although I only rotate recipes every few months, I still didn't have anything interesting to say about making "this" dish again.

Here is a quick recap of my Celebrate Vegan mini-menu:

The two pasta dishes (Pasta with Shallots and Chard and Pasta with Red Peppers and Basil) were just like I remembered them - relatively easy with a ton of flavor.  Neither of them made as much as I thought I remembered, but believe me, with Thanksgiving coming up, there was no place in our fridge for leftovers anyway.

I made one new recipe from the book I wasn't able to make before because it needed tweaking for Mister's intestinal safety, the Jambalaya and it was quite tasty and fake-meat-alicious!

So let's switch gears.

There's a lovely song by Josh Groban (which you can hear a beautiful cover of here) with the following lyrics:

Some days we forget to look around us.

Some days we can't see the joy that surrounds us.

So caught up inside ourselves, we take when we should give,

So for tonight, we pray for what we know can be,

And on this day we hope for what we still can't see.  

It's up to us to be the change,

And even though we all can still do more...

There's so much to be thankful for.

I'm thankful for a great many things, not the least of which being how well my first Thanksgiving as the cook and hostess turned out!  Here was our menu:

When my parents arrived, we set out mixed olives, veggie crudites with Muhammara (from Celebrate Vegan) and store-bought dill dip (thanks, Mister), and Spanakopita (from The Accidental Vegan).  The main course was a Torfurky Roast which Mister has wanted since his first non-meat-eating Thanksgiving and I was thrilled to be able to give it to him.  Alongside the Tofurky was mashed potatoes, roasted broccoli, and my mom's becoming-famous salad, then dessert was Apple Pie with Vanilla "ice cream" by So Delicious.  Dad brought two delightful bottles of my favorite wines - Apothic Red and the 2009 vintage of Georges deBoeuf Beaujolais-Villages, as well as a four-pack of mini-champagnes "for after work."

Oh?  You wanted a picture parade?  Okay!

I began my preparations on Monday or Tuesday night, starting with the Muhammara dip since it would taste the best after sitting in the fridge for a few days.  I figured it was best to make it the same night we had Pasta with Shallots and Chard since my home already stank of an onion sibling (and since I already had the book out).  After simmering three chopped red peppers with a chopped onion and sliced garlic for an hour, I dry-toasted some walnuts,

And then placed everything in the blending machine...

and pureed it until it was mostly smooth and homogenously orange.

After it cooled a little, I scooped it into a "tupperware" and stuck it in the fridge, to be forgotten until Thursday.

Wednesday night, I intended to make the spanakopita because I've found that it sticks together better if it's made the night before it's eaten.  So I chopped up a shallot to substitute for the revolting onion in the recipe and sauteed the onion and spinach while the lentils cooked.

Added the brown lentils (I'm not actually sure why, either)

and then a big heap of crumbled feta tofu,

and stirred it all together.

This is where it gets fun.  By the time I started making this, I'd only worked one eight-hour day at work (the others went long in preparation for Black Friday) and after that 8-hour day (of being one half of the sales force, since one person got sent home with an eye infection) I had a 2.5 hour hair appointment (oh, how I missed you, Candi KaBoom!), so I really wasn't on my most... "with it" behavior.

I realized after all the work of assembling the spanakopita, including gluing sheets of phyllo together with olive oil while listening to the darkly angelic voice of Amy Lee through my earbuds, that I had missed one step of the two-step process required to preheat my ancient oven.  So, finding (at 2am) that my oven was still cold after it was "preheating" for 30 minutes, I covered the spanakopita with plastic, put it in the fridge and went to bed.

It came out just fine when I baked it the next morning.

Then came the piece de resistance.

Mister's long-awaited Tofurky Roast, complete with wild rice stuffing.

I put it in a little Corningware casserole dish and surrounded it with quartered potatoes and carrots, then poured half of the sage marinade over it and stuck that puppy in the oven.

It's not a real puppy, by the way.

appetizers - from the top: Muhammara, Dill dip, olives

more apps: Spanakopita, crudites

The Torfurky, all basted and roasted and ready to eat!

Sides: mashterpaters, roasted broccoli, and the canned
cranberry "sauce" Mister insisted we needed

I realized in a panic a few days before Thanksgiving (and a few days after I constructed the menu) that I had completely neglected to get/make gravy.  In an incredible (and incredibly fortunate) coincidence, my dear Mama Pea posted this recipe to save my butt.  It was good and easy to make in a pinch, but a little too thick to become a regular occurrence in our home, so next year we'll think ahead and find something a little more pourable.

Next year?

That's right!  It seems my parents enjoyed themselves enough to consider sharing the holidays - with any luck, that means I will always host Thanksgiving and they can have Christmas :)  In any case, thanks to my hard-working dishwasher and helpful husband, it didn't take all that long to clean up after dinner, allowing me to get to bed by nine(ish) since I had to be up at 3am to go to work.

In case you were wondering, Philadelphia is incredibly quiet and peaceful (and dark) at 5am.

pea kitty

So, there's this blog I follow - Peas and Thank You - in which the blogger/mother/cookbook author occasionally makes a snarky remark about the family cat.  Apparently, she and the cat haven't gotten along very well since she started making babies and it makes for some charming off-handed remarks along the way.  Since the theme is peas, she's Mama Pea, married to Pea Daddy, and the cat is Pea Kitty.

Angst is trying to usurp Pea Kitty's throne.

I don't think he actually wants to move to the Pacific Northwest and live with a family he doesn't know which includes two darling children to torment his anti-social little butt, however, he did earn the name from Mister during dinner tonight.

Tonight we had Spicy Vegetable Ragout from Quick Vegetarian Pleasures.  I completely failed to get a picture of it because it was pretty busy at work, I was hungry, and I just wasn't thinking about how fun it would be to snap a photo of my food to share with the world.  Honestly, my brain had already left dinner and fast forwarded to the imaginary E.L.F. cosmetics shopping spree I've decided to try, inspired by my all-day make-up tutorial marathon yesterday.

You don't need pictures, though, to hear about the best part of this dinner.  It was Angst discovering he loves peas.  Seriously.  Possibly more than chickpeas and maybe even spinach.  He came over to bother Mister when I set down dinner.  Like normal, Mister selected something from his bowl to convince the kitty he didn't want to share are dinner.  Also like normal, Angst loved what Mister shared and wanted more...and more... and more.  Pea after pea dropped to the floor and was scooped into his mouth after many squeaks and sad eyes at Mister.  We couldn't believe how crazy he was being, so we just kept giving him peas.  He probably ate 10 before we said, "sorry, no more" and showed the pouting kitty our empty bowls.

Peas.

I never would have guessed.  Mama Pea?  You need another cat?

a tribute to a supermom

I'm getting old.  I don't mean that the way I usually do, when I'm looking at my gray hair in a mirror and having an existential crisis about wasting my life.  My body is getting old.  Unlike birthdays and gray hairs, people don't feel the need to tiptoe around that one - with each day that passes, each holiday we celebrate, each wedding we attend, each baby that is born, there is someone there to remind me that if we want a baby, we need to get on it because my body has only a few more "safe" fertile years left in it.

Nice, huh?

As I approach my mid-thirties, with only a soon-to-be 11-year-old cat to call my baby, I am reminded of all the things Mister and I have said over the years, regarding procreation and why we really have no interest in it.  For most of our time together, Mister has traveled extensively for work.  Babies would interfere with that in multiple ways - I didn't want to explain why Daddy was away so much and I didn't want to resent my offspring for preventing me from going with him.  That is a tangible example of the underlying theme of Mister's and my decision to remain childless - we are just too selfish.  Neither of us has come to a point in our lives where we can see children fitting in - rather, for us and our lives, children would be an interference of sorts.

Before you decide I am the worst human being ever and take my uterus away, hear me out.  I have a very high opinion of mothers, which is the primary reason I am not one.  I think mothers (generally) are the most selfless, loving, patient, amazing humans on the planet.  From the moment of conception, a mother gives and continues giving until she finally takes her last breath.  A mother cares about your hurt no matter how mean you were to her in the midst of it.  A mother works solely so her children can have what they want, since their needs are more than met; or, a mother stops working so her children can benefit from her attention and love as they grow.  A mother is always thinking of what is best for her children (okay, maybe not always, but it sure seems like it sometimes) and doing whatever it takes to show her love to them.

I admire those qualities.  I think if I needed to, I could cultivate them because I can feel them lying dormant inside me.  I just have no desire right now to be that person.

Believe it or not, although I do love my mother with all my heart, she was not the inspiration for all that mushy.  Believe it or not, that was all to build up to this ridiculous idea I had: to cook a whole night of recipes from Mama Pea.  I admire the way she raises her children and if you read her blog for just one week, you will be as hopelessly hooked as I am.  Lucky for you, she just revamped her recipeas page so all of her awesome is easier to find.  You want easier?  She has a book coming out soon - you can (and should) pre-order it on Amazon.

Anyway, for my first trick (AKA Dinner), I made her Meatless Meatloaf.  This was actually on last week's menu, but I chickened out last week.  I made it tonight by sheer force of will and at this point, morbid curiosity.  Now, I'm kicking myself for ever having doubted Mama Pea - I've been reading her blog long enough to know better.

It's really not very attractive...but then again, neither is "real" meatloaf.  What matters is the extraordinary taste.  No offense, Mom (I love you!), but this loaf of mystery meat was far more flavorful than the gray loaf of ground beef we ate in my childhood.  Of course, I'm inclined to think chickpeas taste better than cows, but I know my mother and I differ there.

To go along with the theme, I sauteed some Yukon Gold potatoes in a mixture of olive oil, vegetable broth, garlic, and Mediterranean seasoning from California.  They were good, but were far overshadowed, flavor-wise, by the 'meatloaf.'

Turns out, though, that together, they complemented each other - the intense flavors of the loaf enhancing the potatoes while they calmed the seasonings in the loaf.  I think Mister might have preferred that both components of dinner not be smushy, but he seemed to like it nonetheless and thanked me for making "funny dinner."

For my next trick, I decided to make this amazing recipe for Apple Spice Coffee Cake that Mama Pea just posted over the weekend.

It looked amazing going into the oven, although I made a huge mess of everything putting it together!  There are a lot of ingredients, possibly more than I had bargained for, so it took me quite a bit longer than I had anticipated.  If I realized how inefficient I was in my kitchen (after all, I am still getting used to it), I would have started at least a half hour earlier than I did.

Nevertheless, it was fun putting it all together - I rarely make things that have a crumb/streusel topping because it's such a pain in the you-know-what.  My "small" bowl was way too small, so I had to upgrade before smushing in the Earth Balance, and my fork was frustrating me - I had run out of patience at this point, so I just rubbed it all together with my fingers.  This is not the best idea when you have long fingernails.  So, after I had coaxed the last bits of topping from under my rings and fingernails into the sink, I finally got this sucker in the oven.

One of the reasons I love making spice cakes or cookies is because they start smelling good when you are mixing everything together and the aroma only gets better throughout the assembling and cooking process.  Most of the time, by the time I get to remove my treasure from the oven, I'm almost literally drooling.  There's also something about the scent that fills my kitchen while baking these delights that is just so patently "homey."

To borrow a phrase... oh. my. peas!

My pictures aren't as pretty as Mama Pea's, but I haven't taken any seminars on how to do anything more than point-and-shoot, and my camera is adequate, but nothing "special."  Regardless, I certainly hope my cake tastes as good as Mama Pea's because I can't imagine it getting much better!

The pain-in-the-butt streusel topping was absolutely worth every sliver of Earth Balance that got stuck beneath my nails, trapping with it some cinnamon and brown sugar and maybe a piece of oat for added comfort.  What was the most amazing thing, though, was the way the two textures came together.  The top was undeniably crunchy, almost crisp, but the cake itself was light and pillow-soft.

Speaking of pillows....

I'm really bad at going to sleep by a reasonable hour.

Good night, folks!

sleep is for the week

No, that was not an unintentional spelling error, it was a very poor pun.  I am ridiculously exhausted and for no good reason, other than being in a more or less constant state of sleep deprivation.  So, on Friday nights while the rest of the world is gallivanting around my neighborhood, I am struggling to keep my eyes open and form coherent sentences.  As such, I find that where I used to stay out until the bars closed, I'm old and tired and ready for bed before midnight as my body, aware that we've reached the end of the standard work week, tries to make up for the hours and hours of "lost" sleep I didn't get this week.

It's super cold in Philadelphia, which is a stunning way to welcome Springtime - I think it is actually below freezing right now and the heat keeps kicking on.  I decided, as I was leaving work and walking through rather blustery conditions, that there was nothing special enough about today/tonight/the recent past or foreseeable future to warrant a walk through the cold, windy night for the privilege of paying $25 for tofu.

Instead, I made a pit stop at Superfresh for black beans and fries and cooked up some bean burgers.  The excitement never ends.  One of the things I truly enjoy about my husband, however, is the bizarre and thoughtful conversations we have after dinner. Tonight we talked about clonal trees and Methuselah, a tree thought to be 4,800 years old; the oldest living non-clonal tree.  Last night we discussed the Hadron Particle Collider and how the Earth nearly imploded in 2008.  Which, of course, led to the most romantic thing said all night:

If the whole world has to implode, I hope I implode with you.

I know.  We're kind of like Romeo and Juliet.  I'm just waiting for our movie to come out.

Anyway, I have absolutely nothing interesting to say about our burgers, so I'll skip right to the menu.  I wanted to do something a little different this week.  I've actually wanted to do this for a while.  I did not use a single existing cookbook to construct my new menu - each of these recipes comes from a blog I've been following for a while, in one capacity or another.  You can link to all the blogs on the left side of the page and as I prepare each recipe, I will link back to the blog from which it came.

1. Seitan and Broccoli with Pantry BBQ Sauce from the Post Punk Kitchen, Isa's blog.

2. Pasta with Peppers and Sausage
3. Red, Gold, Black and Green Chili
4. Sicilian Market Pasta, all three from SusanV at the Fat Free Kitchen blog.

5. Meatless Meatloaf from Mama Pea at Peas and Thank You.  Mama Pea will have her first cookbook published this summer and I couldn't be happier for her.  You should pre-order the book - I'm planning to pick my copy up the moment it's out.

6. Wheatberry "Paella" with Chickpeas and Leeks, also from thePPK.com.  I'm pretty sure Isa can't write a recipe that doesn't include chickpeas...just an observation.  A fun story - apparently, she was posting about the same time I was poking around my bookmarks looking for fun food, because I went back to the PPK about a half hour after deciding on #1 and found this freshly posted recipe.  I feel kinda special about that.

7. Seitan with Prunes, a test recipe for the forthcoming UV2.  I think all the other testers are a little afraid of this recipe.  I'm not saying that I'm going into this without a little trepidation, but I will be the first person to test this recipe, despite it being posted about two months ago.  I'll admit, I'm a little worried about how Mister will feel about savory-braised prunes sharing a skillet with his seitan, but I'm willing to risk a fail dinner for the sake of testing this "scary" recipe.  You can count on a great and detailed post that night!  Unfortunately, I won't be able to share the recipe, but I'm sure I'll plug once again for you to buy the book when it comes out.

With that thought, I'm going to give up on consciousness.

forget the rainbow - I'm eating the jewelry box

I think I enjoy looking at food as much as I like eating it. A well constructed salad or a nicely plated entree are just beautiful to behold, especially when you make a habit of "eating the rainbow."

On Sunday night, I made Colleen's Mother-In-Law's Crowd-Pleasing Pasta with Tomatoes and Artichokes. I actually expected it to make more than it did, based on the volume of the Pasta Jambalaya, but I think Colleen and her MIL have a better grasp of appropriate portions than Nava and her teenage boys.
It's kind of like a milder Pasta Puttanesca. There's nothing really remarkable about this dish, but I can see how it would please a crowd - it has a nice flavor and the artichokes lend a sweetness that balances the saltiness of the kalamata olives.

Last night, I made Roasted Asparagus Soup with Thyme, accompanied by the outstanding and positively glorious Fruited Spinach Salad.
The soup looks absolutely revolting - I'll give you that. Fortunately, you can only see about a third of the bowl. Even though the recipe called for four pounds of asparagus, and even though asparagus is in season now, making it much more affordable, I ended up getting only 3 lbs because I couldn't really deal with the idea of spending $10 on asparagus alone. Maybe I'm just being neurotic or pinching my pennies dry, but when you're talking about 10% of my weekly food budget on just one vegetable...

Anyway, ignore how it looks - it tastes so good! Fast forward to tonight - for the first time in recorded history, my husband chose to reheat the leftover soup rather than the leftover pasta for dinner. So, you know it had to be good. Personally, and I do believe I was somewhat alone in this, I was just as excited about the salad - it looks like jewels!
Although the "recipe" called for macadamia nuts, I found them to be even more cost-prohibitive than 4 lbs of asparagus, so I used hazelnuts and they were just fine. The gorgeous and surprisingly tasty dressing was a simple raspberry vinaigrette. It was just supposed to be 1 cup of raspberries blended with 1/2 cup seasoned rice wine vinegar, but since I didn't have seasoned rice vinegar, I used a mixture of 75% mirin and 25% rice vinegar. It was perfect.

I was planning to just heat up the leftover pasta and make salads for dinner tonight or convince Mister to go out somewhere with his brother and future sister-in-law, but Mister wasn't hungry or social, so I just made myself a mega-salad, spread some hummus on a slice of bread, and poured my last glass of Yellow Tail Riesling.
Ignore Mister's bike lock. Apparently, there wasn't a better place for him to put it than on the dining table. My mega-salad had mixed greens [hiding underneath] cucumbers, red bell pepper, sliced carrots, quartered kalamatas, and mandarin sections. I was going to sprinkle it with nuts and add a few cubes of smoked tofu, but I think I ran out of space, so I just wrote those ingredients into my new menu. Best segue ever?

1. Tuscan Vegetable Ragout accompanied by roasted asparagus. It's been ages since I've made this and it's always so good without being too innard-warming, so I figured it was a good Springtime dish. I added smoked tofu the last time I made it and plan to do so again.

2. Black-Bottom Pineapple Tofu with Cashew Coconut Rice - The innermost desire to eat this again actually fueled my choice of cookbooks to browse, so the only reason it isn't the first meal to appear on this list was because I got distracted and misdirected by the Tuscan Ragout. It will probably end up being Hazelnut Coconut Rice, though, because I'm really good at letting nuts go rancid (I just found a bag of sunflower seeds that "expired" in July 2009) and I'm trying to break myself of that habit.

3. Spicy Stirfry with Clementines, Asparagus, and Tofu - I'll probably just use the other jar of mandarin oranges I got when there was 2-for-1 sale at Superfresh, rather than peeling and sectioning the Clementines. Also, I am unaware of anywhere that you can buy only 3 and I don't want a whole bag this late in citrus season.

4. Warm Chickpea Ragout with Swiss Chard, Carrots, and Harissa - I don't know if harissa can go bad, but I want to use up as much as I can before I find out the hard way that I tracked this stuff all over the southeastern corner of Philadelphia just to waste my money. As an added bonus, it tastes good!

5. Two-Broccoli Stirfry on Soba Noodles - I was reading through a couple of older posts and seeing this made me say "that was pretty good - I hope this week we break the two-week pattern of all the 'fresh' broccoli at WF rotting in its bin." If it's still not broccoli season, though, I have no issue using frozen broccoli - the WF Organic store brand is really good!

6. Penne with Broccoli and Creamy Tomato Sauce - I know I'm pushing my luck here with the broccoli situation, I just remembered how tasty this is and how it's even easier than it is tasty! Win-win, if you ask me, so let's just hope the broccoli is done being gross.

All six of this week's meals are taken from my ol' faithful Vegetarian Times Fast & Easy. It's a little tofu-heavy, but I managed to get two pasta dishes in there (even if one is soba) so Mister will be okay. I think he is warming to tofu more as I find more ways to make it palatable, both in taste and texture.

On a final note, click here for a thoroughly insightful and inspirational post from Mama Pea. It'll take only a few of your precious minutes to read and you'll be a better person. Besides, you've already wasted many precious minutes reading my babbling - you may as well redeem yourself.

zen: my kitchen's feng shui is broken

Let me start by saying that what prevents me from becoming a full-on hippie (besides the awful fashion statements I associate with them) is that I can not stand all the fruitiness. Thank heavens, the feng shui craze seems to have passed, but I have two things I would like to say about it now:

One: I think it's a big load of bullcrap.
Two: There might be a little sliver of truth hiding in all the froo-froo "good vibes, man" BS disguised as a bona fide Asian art form/philosophy.

Tonight's dinner was the Monk Bowl from The 30 Minute Vegan, with a little special sauce I'll go into later. First, I want to talk about the not-quite-zen experience that was my dinner preparation. In their happy-flowers-everywhere introduction to the recipe, Jennifer constructs this meal prep into a "symphony of multitasking." It was not a 30 minute meal (though it could be with practice) and it most certainly couldn't be called a symphony, unless you were possibly referring to the noisy banging-on-piano-strings crap that late-20th century "composers" wrote.

The cubing, marinating, chopping, roasting, and steaming part of the prep could almost have fit together like a perfectly disjointed Chopin Mazurka. The "symphony" fell apart, ironically, with the assembly of the Monk Bowls. The zen of the moment collapsed and my kitchen feng shui promptly imploded. I think zen requires a larger kitchen, or at the very least, more counter space. It's a sad day when I don't have room to do an assembly line kind of thing with a roasting pan, a pot of rice, and a bowl of steamed veggies.

Fortunately, fruity feng shui and the zen of meal preparation have nothing to do with taste - Mister and I were both thrilled with (both of) our Monk Bowls. You see in the picture tasty blocks of roasted tofu, marinated in tamari and peanut oil, 8 cups of steamed broccoli, carrots, and red bell pepper, on top of my renewed flame: Basmati rice. To top it all off? An even tastier (and much easier to assemble) surprise: a slightly altered version of Dreena Burton's Sesame Mustard Tahini Sauce.

I found the sauce when I was poking around on my new favorite blog: Peas and Thank You. There were some fun links under the recipe section (Peas and Carrots) and when I saw the Sesame Tahini dressing, I thought it would be interesting - it was amazing! And it still is, since the recipe made quite enough sauce for Mister and I to have two Monk Bowls each, generously "drizzled" with this intense dressing, and still have plenty left over for the, well, leftovers, and for at least a pair of salads. The only real difference between what is posted and what I did involved subbing peanut butter for the tahini, since I didn't have any on hand.

So far, we are two recipes into my new cookbook and our experience so far has been spectacular (if not increasingly sarcastic in terms of my caustic comments - which is really just an attempt to shield all of you from the sugar-and-spice-and-everything-nice overload I'm encountering on every page). Stay tuned for more fun adventures!