Recently I had to replace the hard drive in my MacBook Air. After I’d already decided I was doing Vegan Mofo. I caught the early signs of a failing hard drive, so nothing catastrophic happened, everything was backed up, and thanks to the cloud it was pretty easy to get up and running again.
My iPhoto library is kind of a bloated mess, so I’m probably going to end up manually choosing photos to import. That’s going to be time consuming, so I’m not going to deal with that right now. Instead, I just imported all the photos from my phone. Any past photos I want to use for blogging are on there anyway. If not, I know where to find them.
As I’m going through the photos I’d just imported from my phone, right early on in the first few is a set from Dough‘s holiday party the first year we were open, 2012. Ria Pell kindly hosted it at her second restaurant Sauced, just down the street from us. It was a more upscale place than her signature Ria’s Bluebird, but totally cozy even in its coolness. We’d actually looked at that spot for Dough, but decided it was going to take more work than we could handle. But she made it beautiful and brought out its best features.
Sadly, just a few months after our party, Ria passed away. Ria’s Bluebird lives on, but there will never be a replacement for Ria.
Sharing this special holiday meal she created for us seems like a perfect way to kick off Vegan Mofo. Oh, and keep in mind, she was not vegan, her restaurants were not, but she always took care of us well.
The arugula kiwi salad:
Beans & Greens
Spaghetti squash in mushroom sauce
Eggplant Napoleon
Tempeh bacon, spinach & mashed potatoes
My blurry plate, one of them. I must have missed getting a picture of the brussels sprouts, but here they are!
Spiced soy ice milk with candied hazelnuts
Cardamom apple tart tatin
Yes, everything was amazing as it looks. And now I’m hungry.
