Days Off Are For Cooking Food!

Today was great! Mr. Crow and i had the day off together! We kicked off our extravaganza of unity by watching the latest episode of Dr. Who and marinating tofu. Thrilling, I know. For breakfast we made the Tofu Benny (or as Mr. Crow calls it “n’eggs Benedict”)from Vegan Brunch. I changed it up a little by adding Yves Veggie Ham and Sautéed spinach. I just used about a cup of frozen spinach for two servings and tossed in a little of the tofu marinade for flavor. Check out this sweet picture Mr. Crow took:

The only thing I didn’t care for was, for lack of a better word, the snotty-ness of the “hollandaise” sauce. It’s possible that I added too much arrowroot powder in the process of halving the recipe but i don't think so. Look for an update on my own version of this sauce in the future!

After doing some grocery shopping for the upcoming week, Mr. Crow ran me a bubble bath and baked me these cookies!

THEY’RE HUGE!

THEY’RE DELICIOUS!

THEY’RE (MOSTLY) MINE!

WOOT!

This brings us to dinnertime. We dropped off our recycling, bought some original flavored Sunchips, and calculated the amount of money we’d need to save each month to buy a house by the time I turn 30. Meanwhile, dinner pretty much made itself. We threw some Zataran’s Dirty Rice into the rice cooker, reheated the left-over haricots verts with some crushed garlic, salt, and pepper in some olive oil, and microwaved our first taste of Gardein. Although I didn’t love it, I definitely would eat it again. For a quick protein thingy to toss into a meal, it was decent and that’s all we were looking for. Take a look:

Check out the amazing steam that Mr. Crow captured “on film”. Looks pretty good, huh? He’s my official photographer, now, in case you were wondering.

In other news, since I’ve been out of school my eyes have been craving the sensation of zipping across a field of black and white. Add this to the information that I may have found my “calling” and you have the perfect book-worm storm! My method is as follows:

Step one: visit Amazon and find a book on the subject I want — in this case, urban gardening – and find the books that people were interested in that book looked at.

Step two: type in all those book titles into the library search thing.

Step three: request all those book from the library

Step four: read them

It’s not an exact science, you know, but it works for me. I’ve got five or so books in my cue right now but I’ve only got two books in my possession at the moment: Gardens not Lawns and Fresh Foods From Small Places.

I also got Vegan Soul Kitchen after I saw it mentioned on the blog Vegan Dad. Pictures and comments are, of course, to follow.

Of course, on any trip to the library, like grocery shopping, you end up with a couple things that weren’t on your list. This Week’s extras include Water for Elephants and Bottomless Belly Button.

Just a Note Since It Has Been a While

Well, With Mr. Crow's schedule change things have been a little different in our little nest. Breakfast is our meal together lately and I've been living out of my most recent cook book acquisition: Vegan Brunch by my most beloved Isa Chandra Moskowitz. So far, I've made the following:

-blueberry muffins
-Added frozen peach chunks and powdered ginger to her scone recipe
-chocolate beer waffles
-added orange peppers, carrots and spinach to her basic breakfast scramble recipe

. . .oh, and I used her marinade for tempeh bacon to season some homemade seitan cubes which, I can only assume, tasted like ham? honestly, though, I haven't eaten ham in over 12 years so it's not like I would know. Regardless, after previously using Isa's recipe for seitan, I cut one hunk of seitan into cubes and browned it in a frying pan. I then mixed up about a third of a recipe of the bacon marinade and tossed it over the seitan until it was absorbed. I literally said, out loud, "I am enchanted by this flavor". Oh yes I did.

Originally, I was going to type out all these recipes to share them, but i realized that I'm not doing the authors of these books any favors by distributing their hard work for free online so, if i can find a link, I'll post it but otherwise you're on your own to buy the book or get it from the library. Speaking of the library, I'm getting 3 cookbooks from there very soon: Vegan Lunchbox, Vegan Yum Yum, and Nonna's Kitchen. I've been stalking Vegan Lunchbox and Vegan Yum Yum online for what feels like forever and I'm so happy to see that their hard work is paying off!

Um, so now I think it's time to mention what you may have already noticed. I am inching towards veganism. . . Really, the only reason I'm "inching" is because I still have vegetarian Monteray jack cheese in my fridge that I can't un-buy and I don't want to waste. I went down a slippery ethical slope of, "If I don't support the beef industry practices how can I buy milk that results in cows that get turned into burgers? How can I eat eggs if male chicks go into garbage bags? Now that is not to say that Holistic Acres (a local farm where our eggs came from) engages in these practices, but it's much easier to simply draw a line than eat eggs only sometimes from some places and have to explain that to people I know. Someday, when I fulfill my dream of having chickens of my own I'll eat eggs again but, until that day, not so much. Really, those who have known me for a while know that this is a return to normalcy and one that I'm quite thankful for. I feel happier, lighter, and more relaxed since the change.

Wow, this "note" seems more like a letter. I'm now going to whet you appetite by mentioning that very soon there will be a vegan conversion of an amazing cake that you won't want to miss!