Hey, don’t miss this year’s holiday bake off at Cosmo’s Vegan Shoppe! You all should totally enter so there’s more for us to eat when we show up fresh from vacation. Oh yeah, we’ll be out of town and unable to enter, so that’s two more chances for YOU to win! I’m actually looking forward to gobbling up other people’s yummies rather than stressing over my own this year. So bust out your mixing bowl, okay?
Posts published during November, 2008
After voting last Friday, I went off in search of a Goodwill that turned out to no longer be there. That seems to happen all the time with Goodwill around here. It wasn’t a total waste of time though because across the street from where it should have been was this:

What? Why has this been kept from me? I know it’s ITP OTP, but still, a vegan Jamaican restaurant! So of course I went in. The guy said everything is vegan. VEGAN. Woohoo! So I bought a callaloo pie and a tofu pie and went off to meet Kevin. Well, I ate half of each cause I was starving. Then I met Kevin at Cosmo’s and he had pie, and Ken & Leigh had pie. I think everyone agreed they were mighty tasty. So later we grabbed up Matt and went back there for dinner. Kevin got the vegetarian steak:

And I got the vegetarian ground beef. They were out of the chicken which seems pretty popular becvause everyone that walked in asked for it.
The dinners come with rice & peas and then you get a choice of salad or veggies. I know it looks remarkably brown, and blurry, but it was really tasty. The steak and ground beef had distinctively different flavors so it isn’t just the same exact stuff in another shape.
I wish this place was in closer to home but I could make it sort of be on the way to Dekalb Farmer’s Market. They also have a bunch of juices if you’re into that. The guy let us sample one and it was pretty good. While you can eat there, it is really designed more as a take out place. So don’t expect tablecloths and, uh, silverware.
Vegetarian Paradise
6125 Covington Hwy.
Lithonia, GA 30035
(678) 518-8649
Friday night we had a nice date night that started with Cafe Sunflower and then was followed by the symphony. We started with pear in a wine sauce with endive. No picture because I forgot. It was refreshing though. I had the ravioli with butternut squash (I think) and tofu ricotta. They’ve switched from using regular ricotta which rocks!

And Kevin got the lemon chicken.

Oh, and we split a piece of strawberry cake. But I was too interested in tearing into it to take a picture.
I’ve had pretty consistently good food at Cafe Sunflower over the years. My only complaint has been trying to find the hidden non-vegan items. But the server this night asked us right off if we were vegan and then gave us the whole rundown of the menu and what we could and couldn’t get or substitutions that could be made. Other vegetarian restaurants should take note if they’d like to gain the trust of vegans.
I thought yesterday morning was cold. Especially when Grover escaped as I was letting when I let Tak out for her first pee. Chasing him around the yard for ten minutes all bleary eyed at 5:30am was not much fun. He runs, he meows, he runs some more. I think he finally let me catch him when he realized he was cold. It’s a good think he’s a handsome cat. See?

I'm too sexy for my fur, too sexy for my fur...
On to food. If you haven’t made the Cholent from Veganomicon, this is the perfect time for it. After chasing Mr. Short Bus cat around the yard, I swear I would have eaten this for breakfast if I’d had any left. So warming and satisfying. The tvp chunks have the perfect chew to them. It’s like the stew my mom made growing up without all the death. Hell, next time I might even make it with biscuits on top like she did if I don’t make it into a pot pie form.

Or, how to use up that half a package of veggie chorizo languishing in your freezer. I’ve been really happy with veggie omelet, quiches, etc. that I’ve tried in the past. So when I saw Alicia’s recipe, Papa Chorizo Frittata, I immediately marked it for future use. Tofu, potatoes, chorizo, roasted red peppers….what’s not to like? Plus, it’s gorgeous!

It was missing something green, and since I like to be a bit balanced, I picked up some callaloo at the market this weekend since they actually had it. If you haven’t tried this green, do. It’s really tasty. I ended up using a jamaican recipe as a vague guideline, but deviated quite a bit, so I’ll go ahead and tell you what I did.
Cover the sun-dried tomatoes with the boiling water. Set aside. Add oil to a large deep-sided skilled heated on med-high heat. Add onion. Cook stirring occasionally until softened. Add garlic. Cook a minute more. Add tomatoes and their water and thyme. Stir. Add callaloo and cover pan. After a couple of minutes, callaloo should be wilted. Stir and replace cover. Cook a few more minutes until callaloo is tender but still bright green. Salt to taste. |

Okay, so I still have a serious backlog of VeganMofo posts to read. But I have made it through a bunch of posts and marked a ton for future fixin’. One of those was Corndog Bread. Oh hell yeah! I knew I’d have to get on that pretty soon. And soon was a few days ago. There’s really nothing to it. I just cooked 4 veggie dogs on the George Foreman, sliced them and tossed them in a standard cornbread recipe. I think I used the one in Veganomicon. Next time, I think I’ll try it with seitan sausages for a more grown-up flavor. But I bet kids would go nuts over this. And what better to go with it than roasted sweet potatoes and a big pile o’ collards!

A while back I picked up a package of May Wah fake tuna and tossed it in my freezer. I had to wait until Kevin went out of town to use it because I knew he’d hate it.

So last week, I busted it out and made a Tuna Salad for sammiches. I put in the standard tuna salad things: onion, celery, veganaise and I also tossed in some shredded carrot to sneak in a little more veg. It seriously looks just like tuna. But isn’t as fishy and doesn’t totally have a flaky texture like tuna. It’s still wheat gluten like.

So here’s my bachelorette dinner: tuna salad sammich and the end of a bag of frozen spinach mixed with cauliflower and peas.

It’s hard to believe that this time last week I was frantically putting out baked goods samples for a packed room full of people shuffling by our table. Aside from a couple of disasters like having a whole box of whoopie pies arrive destroyed and running out of food way too early, I think it went fairly well. Everything seemed to be well received. The cinnamon rolls & Teese bread were the first to go. Leigh has a great post about our adventures, so I’ll be lazy and point you over there. Kevin and I shared a room with Leigh & Ken and Josh Hooten. Normally I’d say I’m too old for those kinds of sleeping arrangements, but it worked out just fine.
What I will do is give a run down of what I ate in Boston. Which wasn’t all that much with all the travel and stress. But we still managed a couple of restaurant visits.

Friday night we went to T.J. Scallywaggle’s. It’s a vegan pizza place. It has limited seating and probably does most business as take out. I had a chicken parmesan sub.

Kevin ordered the cheeseburger pizza.

We were starving, so any food was good food. I traded half my sub for a couple of pieces of Kevin’s pizza. I think my biggest complaint would be that the sauce wasn’t very flavorful. I like my pizza sauce to be a little bit spicy. More complex. I wish I could remember what the crust was like because that’s also a huge part of what makes a pizza good. But I was totally in scarf mode.
At the festival, after we ran out of stuff to sell and give away, Kevin ran off and got us a falafel wrap and some Teese nachos from the Chicago Soy Dairy guys. The falafel was pretty good, but no Ali Baba’s. The new Teese nacho sauce is pretty amazing. It seems to melt to the perfect texture. I think it wants some spicing up though. Still it gives you a great base to season the way you like.

Saturday night we all dragged our exhausted selves to My Thai for vegan Thai food goodness. We’d been drooling over a menu all day and were really excited at the concept of all those yummy Thai options. We we got there, Eric Prescott was working. We’d met him earlier at the show, and he ended up helping our table. It was kind of surreal. I think he probably doesn’t sleep with all that he has going on. We were also joined by Sarah Kramer and Jae Steele. We’d been hanging out with them a bit here and there throughout the weekend. Both of them are totally sweet.
We started with stuffed fried wontons. Yummy!

And then, my entree arrived, Mee Krob. It was HUGE. To be fair, about a third of the plate was greens. Still, I powered my way through most of it. There were so many wonderful flavors on my plate. The lemongrass beef had many layers of complexity. The rice paper stack I got was stuck together, so I gave up pretty quickly on making little rolls. Still, I enjoyed stacking my fork with various combinations of things from my plate so each bite was a little different.

We were disappointed that we wouldn’t be able to get a proper brunch because our flight left fairly early. We did get bagels with tofu spread. Of course, I can’t remember the name. I had the veggie tofu spread and thought it was pretty tasty.

Ashley organized another fun potluck at Candler Park the weekend before Halloween. I was working on stuff for the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival, so I made Kevin make the food. He made little individual open face pot pies. Yummy! Here it is in the center of my plate surrounded by tastes of a bunch of other yummy dishes.

My potluck plate
I really did try to take it easy and not over eat, but it’s so hard to do at these things! I mean, look at the dessert spread:

So, of course, I had to try and taste as much as possible of those as well. *blort*

assortment of vegan desserty goodness
And here’s a crappy picture of everyone where you can’t tell anything because it’s crappy. But seriously, there were a bunch of people at that table in the shadows where you can’t see anything because the pic is crappy.

Even though I had my camera stolen and essential didn’t post the last week while preparing for the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival, I still somehow managed to get in more than 20 VeganMofo posts. Go me!
Anyway, I have a couple of posts in me to catch up. This one will be the random assortment of food pics I took.
This was a quickie dinner thanks to the cheezy sauce I blogged about before.

Cheezy pasta & green beans with garlic bread
This lovely grill thali from Madras Chettinaad was a tasty break from baking for the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival. By the way, this is one of my go to restaurants for mixed veg/non-veg company.

Grill Thali
I had some pumpkin in the freezer that I’d roasted and some home made stock, so I thought a pumpkin soup would be a good way to use some of that up. I started with this recipe, veganized it and skipped the cream/honey part at the end altogether. Also, a lot of the comments complained about it being bland, so I added a teaspoon of cayenne, a tablespoon of cumin and used ground cloves instead of whole so I wouldn’t have to try and fish them out later. The whole teaspoon of cayenne made it pretty spicy, so go lighter or skip it if you’re not into that. Monday night we ate this with grilled teese sammiches, but I failed to take a pic. So here it is with the pj&j as I ate it tonight. If I wasn’t lazy, I’d type this up in a nice new recipe, but I am, so there.

Oh, there’s more coming. A whole pile of Boston pics and another fabulous vegan potluck.

