vegan sorbet at Picco

Last week I started a new job: I am an English instructor at a college here in Boston. I'd been applying for positions like this for a while now, and finally got this job, which is EXACTLY what I wanted. I love my colleagues, I love the school and its mission, I love the students I met during our orientation sessions--I am so happy to be starting this job! It makes doing VeganMofo kind of tricky, since it takes a lot of my time, but I'm hoping I'll be able to keep it up.

Anyway, as you may remember from my Vegan Eating in Boston post a couple years ago (which, I now notice, has since gone out of date--a few of those restaurants have closed! I'll update it again sometime soon), Picco is a a surprisingly vegan-friendly restaurant, and is home to some of my favorite ice cream since going vegan: their dark chocolate sorbet. It's so rich it tastes like ice cream, not sorbet. And the place is right around the corner from my new job! So when I received the job offer, to celebrate, I just walked around the corner, plunked down in a booth, and bought myself two scoops of sorbet: dark chocolate and strawberry.

Celebratory ice cream is the best kind of ice cream!

Today is my first day of teaching classes. Wish me luck!

spring 2013 project: my back yard

(AKA, DIY yard terracing! Whoo!)

One of the reasons I wanted to move out to Waltham, our city/suburb, was that I wanted to be able to have a house and outdoor space of our own. I wanted a garden and a yard where our future kids could play. We couldn't get that in the middle of Cambridge or Boston. The lot we ended up with is relatively small, but the front is big enough for some flower beds, and the back yard had a small green space and the edge of a rocky hill. It looked spacious enough when we had first seen our place in late winter, but when the back yard started to fill in with weeds and poison ivy come spring, I realized we actually had very little useable outdoor space.

(You can see larger versions of these picture by clicking on them.)

That lush green jungle is primarily just rocks, broken glass, a large dead tree, and poison ivy. Definitely not useable.

We paid landscapers to remove the worst of the brush last fall; I had gotten a bad case of poison ivy last summer (I used to be immune! but no longer) and didn't want to mess with it again. We were then hoping to have the landscapers terrace the backyard a little, but when we got the estimate for the work, it was about $10,000. We could definitely not afford that! I decided to try working on it myself. (After paying a professional to take down the dead tree. I knew I couldn't do that myself.)

I had no idea what I was doing. I have never landscaped or done anything close to it. Mowing our lawn last summer was the first time I'd ever mowed. The only "garden" I've ever grown was the pots of herbs I grew on the fire escape of our last place. But I am not one to let inexperience stop me! Have you ever heard the silly kids' joke, "How do you make a statue of an elephant?" The answer is "Take a block of stone and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant." This was the approach I decided to take with the backyard. I would chip away everything that didn't look like "my" back yard.

I got started in late March/early April, after the snow had melted but before anything could grow. I wasn't sure what I would do yet, but I knew that the first step was to clear away all of the leaves, sticks, and branches so I could get an idea of the land I had to work with.

Partially cleared. Unfortunately I didn't take many "before" pictures. This was the worst part of the project. There were decades' worth of leaves to rake away, wrapped around decades' worth of rotting branches and garbage. More than half of the yard was covered in winter creeper, an annoying, invasive vine that kept getting caught in the rake and making my job even harder. I had to pull out all the vines and runners and roots, some of which turned out to be poison ivy roots. I couldn't tell at the time because it was too early for the poison ivy to grow leaves, so it blended in with the winter creeper runners. After my first rash of this season cropped up, I started wearing long sleeves, arm warmers, and my work gloves, and washing myself and all of my clothing obsessively after each time outside. There was also a huge amount of broken glass throughout the yard, which I removed shard by shard.

While I did find a couple 3-4 hour chunks of time on weekends, the vast majority of this work was done between when I got home from work and when the sun set, which was about an hour a day in April. And because of social life stuff, I couldn't be home before dark every day. So it took me the whole month to clear the back yard, one hour at a time.

All cleared. Now that I had an idea of the shape of things, I could sort of envision how best to make it useable space. I imagined two distinct levels: one larger, even one on the bottom, where someday I'd have a garden, a seating area, and a bird bath. The other, upper level would be smaller, left sort of wild, with trees and eventually flowers. I would make a path between the two terraced levels.

I didn't know how exactly that would work, but I liked the idea. Online searches for the best way to level one's land mostly gave me answers like "rent a tractor" or "hire a landscaper," so I was on my own. I did find that for small leveling jobs, people used what a bunch of sites called a "grub hoe" and a dirt rake. I could have gone to the hardware store for these, but first I went to my dad. He had an extra dirt rake (this is the best part about being from a really rural area: of course my dad had an extra dirt rake) and while he only had one grub hoe, he gave it to me because he "never wants to have a reason to use it again." (This did not bode well for how laborious the work ahead of me would be.)

What I call a grub hoe, on the left, is also called a grubbing hoe or hoe axe. It has a hoe on one end and an axe head on the other. You use it to hack at the ground to dig and loosen up the dirt you want to move. It belonged to my grandfather, who was a farmer. It was really exciting and sort of sappily symbolic to me that I would use the same tool he used on the land where I grew up to improve my own home and land. The dirt rake, on the right, is what you use to move the loosened dirt around. These were my buddies for weeks of work and remain my favorite yard work tools.

Again, I could only put in about an hour a day of work, and even then only a few days a week, but I hacked at and raked the ground, pulling out winter creeper, poison ivy, and locust tree shoots as I found them. (I am proud to say that I seem to have eliminated the first two, but those darn locusts are still my enemy.)

The finished version! At least, as finished as it's going to get this year. I sprinkled some grass seed around just to have something growing out there, and other plants have sprouted up. I also planted a garden! A real one! That wild rabbits love! The bottom area is mostly leveled and larger, with plenty of space for our garden (which will hopefully be twice as big next year). Someday we'll put a bird bath and a seating area back there, too. The top area isn't quite as leveled as I had hoped it would be, but there are so many roots from our trees and the trees on our neighbors' property that it was really difficult to move the earth around. It is flatter now though, so it's easier to walk on, and I made a little path between the layers on the right side.

It's getting overgrown, but I just can't spend much more time on it this year.  It's still a work in progress, but I'm so happy with how far it's come!

anniversary beignets

One year ago today, I married the love of my life!

You can check the archives for information about our wedding (I wrote a few how-to type posts in January); I won't go on forever. But we had a wonderful wedding and have continued to have a wonderful first year of matrimony!

If you remember, we went to New Orleans for our honeymoon. I loved it there, and we found it very easy to be vegan. but walking past all the cafes that advertised fresh-cooked beignets--Café du Monde in particular, which is famous for its beignets-left me feeling a little sorry for myself. I knew I would love beignets: they are a cross between doughnuts and fried dough,  Almost as soon as we got home, I started looking for a recipe version to veganize. I am happy to present to you my findings: delicious vegan beignets, perfect to serve to your loved ones (or just to your face, that's totally acceptable as well).

Beignets are deep-fried sweet bread, so obviously they're a sometimes food in terms of health, but also because they are a bit labor-intensive. However, I assure you that they are ENTIRELY worth the effort. This recipe makes about two dozen, but you can easily double or triple it. They're best fresh, but if you don't get to them right away, store in an air tight container and heat in a toaster oven or oven just until warmed through, and they'll be just as tasty as when you first made them.

Vegan Beignets (adapted from Paula Deen's recipe)

1/2 Cup water
2.5 Tbsp sugar
3/4 tsp yeast
2 tsp flaxmeal
2 Tbsp water
1/4 tsp salt
1/3 Cup nondairy milk of your choice
2 1/3 Cups flour
1 1/3 Tbsp shortening at room temperature (I use Spectrum)
oil (for deep frying)
~1 Cup powdered sugar

Stir together the first three ingredients (water, yeast, sugar) and let sit for a little while (~5 minutes) to proof. (Ideally, that's the amount of time it takes to foam slightly.)

In a large bowl, mix together the flaxmeal, water, salt, and nondairy milk until everything's all well combined. Mix in the yeast mixture, then add half the flour and stir to make a wet dough. Add the shortening, and stir to make sure it's all mixed in before adding the rest of the flour.

Knead the dough for at least 5 minutes, until it is consistent throughout and you're tired of kneading. If it starts sticking to everything while kneading, sprinkle on a little flour to stop it. Shape it into a ball, then it put it in a lightly-oiled bowl. Cover with a paper towel, let rise for two hours or until doubled in size.

After it's doubled in size, heat up your oil for deep-frying! If you have a thermometer, you want to get the oil up to 350 degrees. If you don't have a thermometer, heat it up, then toss in tiny scraps of dough to test: you want it hot enough that dough pieces bubble like crazy right away. This is also a good time to line a cookie sheet with paper towels, because you're going to need it later and things move quickly from here.

Now, roll out your dough into a big circle, no more than half an inch thick. If you're like me and have lots of trouble with rolling pins, you can also just squish the dough into place. Use a knife to cut it into little squares, about a square inch and half. When your oil is hot enough, drop in the dough squares, piece by piece, until your pot is full but not overcrowded. You want enough room in there that they don't have to touch while cooking. They should start turning golden brown after only a minute or so; you want to flip them around every 10 seconds or so to get them evenly fried. Once they're a beautiful golden brown color, fish them out with a slotted spoon and plop them on your paper-towel-lined cookie sheet.

Repeat in batches as necessary until they're all done, then sift powdered sugar over top of all of them. Serve immediately, because they're so so so delicious warm, with a side of jam for people to dip them into or spoon onto them.

Enjoy the beignets! And here's to many more years of being happily married vegans ^_^

our vegan honeymoon in New Orleans!

My month of wedding posts is over, but I've got one more wedding-related post for you: our honeymoon in New Orleans! I've wanted to visit NOLA since I was 13 or 14, and while the husband has been there a couple times and enjoyed it, we wanted to go together! We had a really lovely five-day trip over Halloween weekend, and I'm sharing it with you... just in time for mardi gras!

We stayed at a hotel with a classy little balcony from which we could see Bourbon street.

We got a suite with a little kitchenette, so we brought and bought breakfasty food and had all of our breakfasts in our room--mostly on our balcony.

During the day, we ventured around the French Quarter and beyond to see the sights--the botanical gardens, the museums, the cemeteries, etc. At night we checked out live music and the city's active night life.

I even convinced Kevin to go on a ghost tour with me! It was fun and cheesy and not at all ghosty, but I learned a bit about New Orleans's history.

But everyone knows that New Orleans is full of things to do. What you may not know is that it's pretty easy to get good vegan food there, especially if you know where to look! I had done a lot of research beforehand; I'd been nervous that even if we found vegan stuff, I wouldn't be able to eat it (cajun vegetables and spices are almost entirely nightshades). But no! We ate really well in New Orleans. Let me show you!

First, if you want to get food for your hotel room or to carry around with you, GO TO THE NEW ORLEANS FOOD CO-OP. It had just opened when we went, and the husband and I couldn't believe how big and full it was, with all the vegan staples we could think of. The workers were friendly and lovely (as were all the people we met in NOLA, actually), and they told us it was the only co-op in Louisianna! Go there, support them, get awesome food. While there, we stocked up on breakfast foods and hotel room snacks.

Another necessity for breakfast: coffee! We mostly had some in our room, but we also had some good coffee out:

La Boucherie is more vegan-friendly than the name suggsts. They had soymilk for the drinks!

We had a really great lunch at Cafe Carmo. Almost everything on their menu can be made vegan--they have daiya and some vegan "meats." They also have vegan baked goods!

I got a "plain" banquette bread with daiya and a Carmo salad. (I had it without veggie ham, since some fake meats have nightshades). The husband ordered the Vegan Rico--under the greens is vegan pulled pork and melty daiya over a grilled plantain patty. Both of our orders were deeelicious.

13 Monaghan had a tasty Baked Tofu and Herb sandwich that was nightshade free without the tomato.

I was so hungry I ate half before remembering to take a picture. They have more options if you can have nightshades--including Tachos--TATER TOT NACHOS (vegan without the cheese and sour cream). Seriously, people, if you are able to eat nightshades, can you go order this and report back to me on how AWESOME it must be?

Out near the New Orleans Food Co-op, there's a vegan Korean pop-up restaurant called The Wandering Buddha.

They operate out of the back of a bar (the Hi Ho Lounge), and you can either sit in the bar or on their patio out back.

Though all vegan, the menu isn't too flexible for nightshade-free people--the staff was a little apologetic about only having one option for me for an appetizer, and one option for me for an entree--but I was happy with what they gave me. My appetizer was gimbap (sushi), and Kevin ordered dumplings.

My entree was japchae--noodles with a sweet peanutty sauce. It looked boring when it arrived at the table, but it was flavorful and awesome. The husband got an AMAZING-looking braised tofu dish.

Because it was our honeymoon, we wanted to go out for one big, fancy, expensive dinner, so we went to Restaurant August. I'd read a yelp review that said they were able to accommodate vegans upon request. They were really attentive and great about my allergies. They modified their farmers' market tasting menu to be all vegan, and made us a delicious meal.

This bread looks like normal bread, but is some of the TASTIEST HOMEMADE BREAD I have ever had. Sorry the light is really dim in these pictures; blame it on fancy dinner mood lighting!

Our amuse-bouche was a pickled radish over... some other vegetable, with microgreens and a cilantro pesto.

Our first course: a nice salad for Kevin (in the back) with a spicy vinaigrette, and for me, a delicious sweet chilled pear consomme, with pomegranate seeds, walnuts, saffron, and edible flowers.

This picture is terrible, but our entrees were AWESOME: Kevin got spicy broccoli with fire roasted peppers, and I had fried brussel sprouts with a pecan pesto. I like brussel sprouts okay, but these were the best brussel sprouts I've ever had, hands down. They were garlicky and fried till they were crispy but not heavy.

Dessert was a fruit plate, with mango sorbet and coconut milk tapioca. And a chocolate "congratulations!" Awww.

What do you call dessert after dessert? They also gave us complimentary champagne and these little raspberry-and-coconut jelly squares. So nice!

As delicious as our meal at Restaurant August was, you may notice it was almost all vegetables. In a few hours, we were hungry again.

So we went to Bennachin for some snacks:

Plantains and black-eyed pea fritters! Nightshade free as long as you ask for the sauce on the side. While we were there for just a snack at that time, we'd gone there earlier in our visit for a really good dinner. Bennachin serves West African food, and all their vegetarian dishes are also vegan. I could get nightshade-free versions of two of the entrees on the menu. Going without spiciness made the food a little plain, but their rolls were so good it didn't matter. Also, they have a really great ginger juice drink, and a hibiscus iced tea. But the fritters were the star for me.

The husband thought it was kind of funny that we didn't eat any "traditional" New Orleans cuisine. As I said above, nothing cajun is nightshade-allergy friendly, so I wasn't looking for any, but those of you without nightshade allergies will be happy to know there are vegan po'boys and gumbos in the city. Another thing I didn't mention is Lola's. We wanted to go, but they aren't open for lunch and we were only out in that area during the day. People on the PPK forum said that their almond/garlic soup, their paella, and their aioli are vegan. We'll have to go next time. And there will be a next time! I had such a blast, I can't wait to go back!

(Even our layover in Miami was pretty good--the airport had a sushi place!)

how to dye a wedding dress

I really loved my wedding dress. It was pretty, it was simple, and it was formal enough to match the husband's tux without being a giant terrifying pile of icing. Getting it was incredibly simple: I'd looked at it for weeks online before my mother and I had a chance to get to a David's Bridal. We sat down with the saleslady there, and she asked "What kind of dress are you looking for?"

"Style number WG3313," I said.

Her jaw dropped. "You... know the number?"

So she went to find the dress, came back with the two sizes the store had in stock, and had me try one on. It fit absolutely perfectly, no alterations needed. And Bam! I had a wedding dress!

It was comfortable, pretty, and easy to dance in. Everything I wanted!

But after the wedding was over, the dress no longer had a purpose. I was a little bummed that I only got to wear this awesome dress for one day, so decided to DYE MY WEDDING DRESS. I was inspired by Sherry over at the Young House Love blog, who dyed her wedding dress an awesome gunmetal gray color. I was also aware of the fact that she'd wanted to dye it black; I was prepared before I even began for things not to turn out as I'd expected.

Here is the extent of my experience with dyeing prior to this: once, when I was Prop Master of a play in high school, I dyed a pair of white cotton gloves yellow. Which is to say, I have almost no experience dyeing things. I was originally planning to use Rit dye, just because that was the only brand I knew, but our local art store didn't carry it. I ended up going with iDye, which had the advantage of having colors for both natural and manmade fibers. (Rit is only for natural fibers.) The top layer of my dress is 52% polyester and 48% rayon. Almost all of the other layers were 100% polyester. Rit was probably not going to work. iDye recommends that for blended fabric, one should combine the normal dye with a complementary color of their "poly" dyes. I got Crimson and Red.

Let me point out right now that these are powders. As soon as I opened a packet, tiiiiny invisible particles of red dye disseminated throughout the bathroom, landing in weird places and not showing up until after our next couple showers, when the steam condensed into little tiny drops of PINK all over the surfaces of our bathroom, even the ones I had covered with a layer of catalogue pages for safety.

For polyester, you're supposed to boil the clothes in the dye for 30-60 minutes. My dress was much too big for even our largest stock pot, so instead I boiled loads of water over the stove and poured it into a storage container in our bath tub. I then added the dye, and THEN THE DRESS.

My dress is in there! Eek! Note the gloves (otherwise I'd've had blotchy red hands) and the paint stirrers: You're supposed to agitate (stir) the dress the whole time! I leaned over the bathtub and listened to an episode of This American Life. After 45 minutes, I couldn't take it anymore, so next came the final, and for me, the hardest step: rinsing the dress. You rinse the dress over and over in cold water until the water runs clear. This. Took. FOREVER. That dress held a lot of dye, let me tell you. Then I put the dress on the fire escape to dry.

While it dried I scrubbed and scrubbed the bathtub, because it had turned hideously pink.

But then, by dinner time, it was dry. AND LOOK:

The light looks dim in this one, but the color of the dress is very close to what it is in real life.

I love it! Mind you, I had expected a crimson/red dress, and this is sorta mauve with cherry red accents. And the dress was "Dry Clean Only," which all sources say not to dye... and definitely not to soak in boiling water. As a result, the heat shrunk the cloth on either side of the zipper, so the bodice shrunk by about about 1/2 an inch... which sounds negligible, except the dress had fit me PERFECTLY before. I had to wear it around the house for a couple hours breathing really deeply to stretch it back out. But it fits fine now, and above all, I think it looks great!

The color looks a little washed out from the flash in this one, but you can see the sash better. And if you look at the bottom right hem, you can see that the layer of crinoline turned cherry red!

Now I just need an occasion to wear a puffy pink dress.

simple mason jar centerpieces and decor

Centerpieces and table settings are things I never really thought about before planning our wedding. (Other things I'd never really thought about: wedding dresses, how kegs work, how far caterers will travel, how many weddings take place in Cooperstown in mid October, and maple syrup shots.) I mean, I know how to set tables and I have put vases of flowers, candles, or fruit bowls on a table to make it prettier. But I'd never before had to think about how to make tables for 70 people look not just pretty, but cohesive. The more I thought about it, the more I found wedding decorations as a whole to be quite daunting.

Enter my new BFF, THE HUMBLE MASON JAR. (The cage thing in the middle is for cards. We had a no-gifts wedding, but my sister got us this because she said we'd get cards anyway. She was right!) Ball mason jars are inexpensive, made in the USA, and available at all hardware (and probably most grocery) stores. They're also perfect for reuse: they are all presently in my kitchen, full of food, right now.

I bought two colors of ribbon (they matched the invitations!) and tied them around the mouths of the mason jars, then put matching (I'm so [color] coordinated!) candles in each one. We had 24 jars all together.

I'm also pretty proud of my camera idea in that picture. While we had two photographers (a professional one, and our friend Michael from the Dazed and Infused blog), I wanted candids. I put a tag on my personal camera saying "Sarah's Camera/Please take lots of photos with this," set it by the "guestbook," and ended up with almost 300 pictures of my friends and family. They were all silly and fun candids--just what I wanted!

Our professionals also took pictures of people taking pictures with it--so meta.

Our table settings looked like this:

Simple, clean, and pretty. The plates were Leafware's palm leaf plates. Disposables, I know, but they're made from fallen palm leaves and are totally biodegradeable, so we still get some green points, right?

Our favors were small bottles of local maple syrup. The husband and I spent a couple hours tying little ribbons onto them.

By the end of the night, the candles burned out completely. Removing the wax so I could reuse the jars was easy: I put the jars in the freezer for about 30 minutes, and the wax tumbled right out. I think I read about that little trick on Martha Stewart's website? You will note the maple syrup bottles in this photo have been opened. That's because a few intrepid wedding guests decided to challenge each other to shots of maple syrup.

Other than a few pumpkins and hay bales outside the venue (thanks, Dad!), the mason jars were our only decorations, but they went far in giving the already pretty venue some extra warmth. (visually, not physically. We had a fireplace for that).

Putting them everywhere drew the place together visually and made it seem like we had a plan. And the plan was mason jars. (Well, and getting married.)

easy DIY wedding invites and time capsule guestbook

January is "sarah wants to write about her wedding" month! Last week I wrote about our awesome homemade vegan wedding food, and today I'll be showing you our homemade invitations and our time capsule guestbook!

Kevin (the husband) and I clean up pretty well (hee!), but we're pretty informal people. We got married on the porch (it was going to be the lawn, but it was really rainy) of a camp by the lake in my hometown, and had the reception inside right afterwards. With such an informal wedding, traditional wedding invitations, with their million inserts, envelopes within envelopes, and flowery language, didn't seem fitting. Since so much of our wedding was DIY, we opted to make our own invitations as well.

I began with a trip to Paper Source!

We were shooting for a guest list of 70-80 people, so we got enough materials to make 100 invitations, since 1.) we were sure there'd be a few mess-ups during the making, and 2.) we wanted extra invitations so we could invite more people as others said they couldn't make it.

We printed almost everything at home... except the RSVP cards. Our printer HATED the dark green cardstock we were hoping to use for them and spat it out all wrinkled and streaky, so we had to go with a beige-color at FedEx/Kinko's last minute. But that was pretty cheap, and we had to go there anyway to do all our cutting. (I would've just used scissors, but Kevin pointed out that I can't cut straight lines, and I think he had fun using the paper cutter there anyway.) Home to stamp everything, and voila!

Invitations! It's hard to tell in this light, but the birch trees on the invite are stamped in a metallic copper ink. I think it's so pretty!

And here's the inside of the invite. (Our wedding was at a private location, so I blurred out the name/s.)

One advantage to DIY invitations is certainly that you'll save money. The whole endeavor, even including our printing mishap that led us to FedEx/Kinko's, cost less than $120. But I would do the same thing even if it weren't more cost effective. We had a lot of fun putting together our invitations, and we were really happy with the way they looked. These weren't just store-ordered invites where we plugged in our names and dates. Making our own invitations really made them ours. They were as much "us" as the ceremony on the porch--pretty, simple, and informal.

AND I had enough leftover paper to do another project, the wedding DIY project I am still excited about: our TIME CAPSULE GUESTBOOK.

I got the idea from this Offbeat Bride guestbook alternatives post. They write about a Japanese product that lets guests write messages to put in a vial, then the couple burns a candle to seal the vial, then ten years later they burn the candle again to unseal it, and they can read the messages. I figured this would be an easy thing to DIY.

I cut up and stamped some of the paper left over from our invitations, and set them out with some nice pens next to an old mason jar. (We used mason jars as centerpieces, so this fit with our overall look.) I included a note next to it so guests would know what to do:

You can click to enlarge the image, but it says: "In lieu of a normal guestbook, we're collecting messages from our guests that we'll seal in the jar to be opened on our 10th anniversary. Please take a moment to record something (well-wishes, a memory, a message, a drawing, even just your name) to help Sarah and Kevin of 2021 remember that you were with us on our special day!"

People really seemed to enjoy writing messages, and I think this is a more fun alternative for me and Kevin... Because while I can't imagine us taking out and looking at a more traditional guestbook 10 years later, we're already excited to do that with this one.

The only catch: you have to have willpower. A bunch of people at the wedding said things like "you're not really going to wait 10 years, are you?" or "are you going to peek first?" No, you guys, that's the whole point! I don't want to open it until our 10th anniversary, it would spoil the fun! But if you can't trust yourself not to peek, you could seal it up with wax.

I am PSYCHED for October 2021.

you deserve a cookie

I make cookies almost every week. I don't like making them as much as I like making cakes and cupcakes, because I find scooping cookie-sized amounts onto baking sheets more tedious, and also I find that the line between underdone/perfect/slightly burned cookies is basically nonexistent; for me, it's mostly luck. But cookies are the best thing when you've got guests coming or a party to go to or officemates to make happy and you want to make a lot of something quickly. And they're tasty, of course. However I feel about making them, I very much like eating cookies. I don't photograph them much, though, as cookies tend not to be super photogenic. They're basically all little brown and/or beige disks; my cookie pictures all sort of resemble one another, and never convey the tasty cookie experience. That's why while I make them often, I seldom display them here.

I recently noticed that "You [I/We] deserve a cookie" is a thing. A meme, if you will. Lots of people say it, and I don't think we can name any one particular source. It's an interesting meme--it's not flashy, it doesn't appear accompanied by cats or videos or songs; it's just something people say. Unlike some internet humor, it's not poking fun--it's nice. It's universally understandable; no mystery, no wondering if something went over your head: you did a good job, you deserve a cookie.

Well, guys, today I deserve a cookie. Yesterday I sent in my final payment on my student loans. Less than a year out of grad school, I am done paying student loans!!! There is no number of exclamation points that can convey how happy I am about this. So I present you with some cookies.

First, the prettiest cookie picture I have ever taken (due entirely to the light, not to my photography or baking skills):

Ginger Molasses Cookies with Lemon Icing and Basic Peanut Butter Cookies. I am not sure where I got these recipes, as the picture was taken before I owned Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, but that cookbook has recipes for both kinds of cookie. Anyway, these particular molasses cookies were a not sweet enough; hence the icing.

Martha Stewart's Hazelnut Cookies. I found a recipe for hazelnut cookies on Martha Stewart's website. (I think. Sometimes I just find recipes online, make them once, then I don't love them and don't intend to make them again, I don't save the link.) They are shortbready, so the only veganizing that needed to be done was substituting earth balance for butter.

These too were not as sweet as I'd anticipated, so I covered them with chocolate, and they became "nutella cookies," which my coworkers gobbled up quickly.

A BETTER hazelnut cookie was the recipe I made out of Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I liked the sound of the Hazelnut Fudge Dreamies, but I'm lazy and didn't want to turn them into cookie sandwiches. (Nor, I think, did I have all the fudge ingredients on hand.) So instead I made them like normal cookies, then dipped them into melted chocolate.

I think they're cute this way! And less work.

I usually cut down frosting/ganache recipes in order to avoid having leftoves, but if you find yourself with some extra ganache, chilling then rolling it with various ingredients and shaping them into truffles always feels/looks impressive:

Left to right: Plain, orange zest, coconut, peanut butter, and coconut-orange truffles.

Also chocolaty: These are chocolate-chocolate chip cookies! The recipe is possibly from the Veganomicon but sans walnuts, I dunno.

They're blurry because I REALLY wanted to show you the ones on the left; I used up all my baking sheets while I was making these, so I put a few of the cookies into a little shell cake mold I have. They were so cute! But blurry.

Back to Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I've already admitted my predilection for citrusy baked goods, so it's probably not surprising that I loved the Citrus Glitters!

I added a little turmeric to the sugar I rolled it in, for extra lemony color.

If you don't own Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, I strongly recommend it. I find that veganizing non-vegan cookie recipes can be really tricky, and requires a lot of troubleshooting. The cookies in this book range from basic, which you can adapt to fit your own cookie needs, to complex and cool. And there are some great veganizations of cookies you probably missed since going vegan. (Like the Girl Scouts' Caramel Delites! [Samoas for you non upstate-NYers]) Like I said, I don't tend to take pictures of cookies, but I've made a lot from this cookbook. Here's a list of what I made and what I thought. You can find most of these recipes transcribed from the book on other people's blogs just by searching, but I'm too busy celebrating my newfound financial freedom to dig them all up myself.

• Chocolate Fudgy Oatmeal Cookies-These taste amazing and are the easiest and quickest recipe I've tried from the book.
• Chocolaty Crinkle Cookies-These are my fallback cookies for when I'm baking for other people. Everyone loves them, and they take a lot less work than they look/taste. The dough is a lot more like a batter at first; I find that I have to chill it, in the fridge for 30mins or more, or in the freezer for 10-15, to make it a good texture for rolling.
• City Girl Snickerdoodles-Uses a lot of margarine. Taste amazing.
• Tahini Lime Cookies-An interesting tasting cookie. They have a complex flavor that is hard to identify if you don't already know what kind of cookie they are. They make you seem like a foodie.
• Peanut Butter Oatmeal Cookies, Peanut Butter Crisscrosses, Peanut Butter Agave Cookies, Peanut Butter Blondies-I'm grouping all the peanut butter cookies together, because I'm not a huge peanut butter cookie fan and I am therefore not the best judge of them. But I made them all, mostly for other people. All kinds were well received! The blondies were really dense, almost more like peanut butter fudge, but a little drier. I love that the cookbook has an option for agave-based peanut butter cookies, since they are hard to adapt on your own.
• Citrus Glitters-Picture above. Simple and sweet!
• Rocky Roads-When I had stale vegan marshmallows in my fridge, I chopped them up to use in this recipe in place of white chocolate chips. I've made this recipe quite a few times, but I have very little self control and ended up eating a lot more cookies than necessary, so we are on a break.
• Sweet Wine Biscuits with Sesame-Another foodie cookie. I wrote about them here.
• Chocolate Chip Cream Cheese Brownies-I dropped the pan when I was taking these out of the oven, so they never set right, but they still tasted great.
• Pumpkin Pie Brownies-Tasty, and so cool-looking! I wrote about them in this entry.
• Big Fat Crispy Rice Squares-Rice crispy treats, but without the need for marshmallows. I wrote about them here.
• Peanut Butter Chocolate Pillows-These were tasty and it was cool to have a cookie with a surprise inside, but I didn’t think they were quite worth the work.
• Lazy Samoas-THE REASON TO BUY THIS BOOK. I missed Caramel Delites/Samoas SO MUCH, and though these are quite a few steps, the taste is spot-on and so amazingly good. I made them into heart shapes for Valentine's day for the boyfriend last year, and I think I managed to eat more of them than he did. (Oops.)
• Hazelnut Fudge Dreamies-I wrote about these above. Tasty and can be made simpler if you're lazy.
• No-Bake Pecan Chocolates-Really decadent, really delicious.
• Cookie Dough Scoops-I dipped these in chocolate after I made them. Best. Idea. Ever.