holiday meal!

Happy holidays to people who celebrate them this time of year!

I have been working on a wedding food post for a long time, and I prooooomise I'll do it before the end of the month, but at today's awesome Christmas dinner at my mother-in-law's (hi Tanis!), I promised a couple people I'd post links to the sweets I made to go with our meal. So Miki and Sarge, this is for you!

A big surprise hit today was the sugared cranberries. I used this recipe at 101 Cookbooks. It's very simple, though it requires a lot of sitting time.

Tart cranberries get a sparkly sugar coating. I had never heard of this before, but apparently this recipe is a holiday tradition for some people... I might make it one of mine now. They goes well with crackers and cheese/dip/pate for appetizers as well as a side during the main meal, and are a good compliment to dessert. So basically you can eat them at any time. Plus they look so pretty and wintery!

Unfortunately, as delicious as the dessert I made was, it wasn't very photogenic. It's Martha Stewart's Frozen Chocolate Peanut Butter and Banana Loaf.

Very rich, and verrrrry delicious. Texture-wise, it's along the lines of a frozen mousse. I replaced the whipped cream in the recipe with the cashew-and-coconut-based Rad Whip from the PPK, and it worked out great.

There were other awesome vegan elements to the meal, but for the sake of this entry not taking me forever, I'll just leave you with some pictures. (Thanks to the husband for taking them, since I was busy talking. As usual.)

My carrot salad (so much tastier than the lighting in the picture suggests!):

The husband's white bean, carrot, and caramelized onion puree:

My mother-in-law's excellent mustardy shallots and green beans:

My sister-in-law's raw beet and parsley pesto terrine (with her apple-cranberry sauce, which went with sweet potato latkes, of which we didn't get a picture)...

...and her appetizer: nut pate.

I'm still full.

ALSO, before I'm done bragging about my great meal, I also want to brag about the awesome gifts my husband and in-laws got me:

I WILL BE SPENDING 2012 IN THE KITCHEN, THANK YOU.

welcome to summer

I've been trying my best not to feel guilty about ignoring my blog, since I've been enjoying summer to the fullest. It's been a really busy summer so far! The boyfriend and I got engaged (so now he's the fiance!), for one, but also I've been to the beach, to an amusement park (more on that in my next entry), to upstate NY, to outdoor movie nights, to friends' pools, and in general just away from the kitchen. It's been so absurdly hot lately that I haven't been tempted to try too many new things when it comes to cooking, so today I'll be featuring other people's recipes.

The second-best thing about this summer (after the engagement, which has really got to be number one) is that I signed up for a CSA share through Red Fire Farm, a local, organic farm! A co-worker and I split one share. The boyfriend and I could probably eat an entire share's worth, but it's done by delivery to my office, which means the farm picks out what to put in my share--which means we get plenty of nightshades. So my coworker and I have an agreement that she will always take all the nightshades. (This works great for her as well as for me, because who would turn down fresh, local, organic tomatoes if they weren't allergic?!) In addition to the half vegetable share, I signed up for a flower share! So I get a pretty bouquet of flowers every week.

Week 1 had some sweet basil flowers in it; it smelled wonderful.

I love flowers, but it can be tough to keep fresh flowers around if you strive for ethical, environmentally friendly living. Many flowers available at flower shops are imported from places where workers are exploited, so they're not the most ethical way to decorate your home. (1800Flowers, by the way, often offers at least 1 or 2 fair-trade bouquets on their website.) Even if they're fair trade, though, they've come a long way to get to your vase. And even if you get domestic flowers, because flowers aren't food crops, there are no regulations on the spraying of pesticides or herbicides, which directly affect our environment (and possibly our health). But flowers are really pretty, and if you ask me there are few things as nice as having fresh cut flowers to decorate your home.

Week 2 -- Sunflowers!

SO finding out that the farm that does my CSA shares offered organic flower shares was the awesome!

 

Not that I'll ever turn down flowers of any type, but it's nice to be able to have fresh cut flowers in my home without any slight nagging guilt.

Check out the bright red stems on the red flowers! And what are those weird tall green flowers? They look like sea creatures.

Like I said above, I've been spending less time in the kitchen lately. I cook as much as ever before, but I am not in the mood for puttering around or innovating--I want to make recipes that I know will work the first time around. So I've been making recipes from blogs I trust.

This AMAZING chocolate tart came from Hot Polka Dot. It's not originally a vegan recipe, but I veganized it by using Earth Balance in place of the butter, flaxmeal mixed with water for the egg, and Mimicreme for the cream. I'm thinking it would also be REALLY tasty with coconut milk in place of the cream and coconut oil in place of the butter. Also, she used cherries, but the fiance (!) is allergic to cherries, so I went with strawberries. I cannot say enough about how delicious this recipe is.

Next up, homemade almond milk! I take my directions from Bonzai Aphrodite. I've used it several times for making homemade almond yogurt, but I always have to drink a little bit of it first, since it's so tasty and creamy.

Look how creamy and milky! Yum almonds.

Another tasty recipes I got from the internet was a Breakfast Beer Bread recipe from La Vida Veggie. I bookmarked it back in November, and finally had a chance to make it. It was great!

Very healthy, very hearty, very simple to make.

Finally, I've written about making C'est La Vegan's Cashew Goat Cheese, but I want to reiterate how fantastic the recipe is. I made two logs of it for a PPK potluck I hosted last month, and it was a giant hit.

I served it with crackers, and with a fig-almond spread based on a recipe from the BBC for Fig and Almond Balls. I made a bunch of changes in the recipe--I swapped dates for apricots, I added a lot of water because my figs were dried out, we didn't have any brandy so I put in a couple dashes of orange bitters, and I didn't age it at all. But it was DELICIOUS. And great with the "cheese."

I'll try to update again this week, if I can sit at my computer long enough to type out more entries--it's hot! I want to be like our cats Molly and Fritz and sprawl on the floor in front of the fan:

They love this spot because they are right between two fans.

...or in the shade like Vascha.

Under the cabinet behind the couch.

It's always so funny to me when I come home from work and find these lazy kitties spread out all over the floor to cool off.

I hope you're all enjoying your summer so far!

give thanks! it's the last day of Vegan MoFo!

Goodbye, Vegan Month of Food!

I have posted for all 30 days of VeganMoFo! It was great, but I am so glad it's over; no more "Wait, did I post today?!" feelings of panic before I go to sleep, no more forced entries on days I don't feel like talking about food. But I'm definitely glad I did it, and I'll definitely do it next year.

I finally have Thanksgiving pictures to post, and with them, a note on Thanksgiving. I touched on my thoughts on the day a couple years ago, but I want to reiterate them. Thanksgiving is about celebrating the blessings in your life, appreciating what you're thankful for. I think that it's important to take time to recognize the good things in your life. If you do that every day, maybe you don't need Thanksgiving, but is it really so bad that the government has reserved a day for us to spend time over a meal with our loved ones? People who claim Thanksgiving is about genocide and racism are unfamiliar with the history of the holiday, and I suggest to them that they read about our nation's history and that of the holiday, even if only the Wikipedia pages. Thanksgiving was always a harvest celebration. A feast or festival where we, humans, give thanks for the bounty of the earth, of our ability to survive, to be sustained by our environment--both in terms of food, and in terms of support from the people around us.

I appreciate my family. In the past few years, so many of my family members have gone vegetarian and vegan that our meal was almost entirely vegan. There was some token meat, but only for one person! And it's not in any of the pictures. All of the things below are vegan!

I got the idea for this delicious Cashew Goat Cheese recipe from C'est La Vegan. My family was so impressed with how much it looked--and even tasted--like goat cheese! It takes a lot time to make, but it's pretty easy. And I kept worrying at every step that I was doing it wrong, but it came out perfect.

I rolled it in a mixture of normal black pepper and freshly-ground cubeb, pink, and green peppercorns, just for effect.

One family member thought it was actual goat cheese, and tried to warn us vegans away from it!

Appetizers eaten, we then had THE MEAL:

Clockwise, from the bottom left: mashed sweet potatoes, rolls, earth balance, brussel sprouts with garlic, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole (with miso instead of mushrooms, to make it cheesy. I totally recommend adding a couple Tbsps to YOUR next green bean casserole), corn, cranberry sauce, my mother's awesome stuffing, herbed gravy that came with the tofu turkey.

You will note the central part of the meal, the tofu turkey, is missing; we hadn't yet brought it to the table. My family's favorite, so-simple entree for holiday meals is Fresh Tofu Inc's Tofu Turkey:

The Tofu Turkey is lightly seasoned tofu, with a crispy skin. It's tasty, but not overpowering, and, unlike most other vegan holiday roasts, it isn't especially salty. We had two for 9 people, and had a bunch of leftovers, so it serves plenty. Plus it's cute! I tried to get a better picture of its little smile, but it was too blurry:

It comes with an herby, rice-flour-and-nutritional-yeast-based gravy.

We paced ourselves pretty well with eating, which is good, because there was PIE:

I'm cheating, actually--this is last year's pie, because I forgot to take a picture of this year's. But we had the same options this year! Pumpkin pie (from Bryanna Clark Grogan's recipe), and Maple-Pecan Pie (also from Bryanna Clark Grogan). This year, we ran out of pecans, so my mother tried it with half pecans and toasted walnuts. It was so delicious that she's planning to make it like that every time.

Finally, though this didn't make it into this year's Thanksgiving dinner, Sunchoke Salad with olive oil, scallions, and balsamic vinegar is a go-to dish for most of our holiday meals, and WAS present last Thanksgiving.

And with that, my friends, we have come to the end of VeganMoFo! I'm glad to be done with daily entries. I'll still try to post at least once a week. And next week, look for another food-from-literature post! I read Great Expectations this weekend. You can also look forward to some posts that aren't about food.

Thanks for reading this month, and for those of you who just started reading, I hope you stick around!