Category: photo

Pasta in cheezy sauce

Dinner in a flash seems to be a recurring theme around here. If it’s not so flashy that I’m having someone else cook it, it’s often something that takes little fiddling. Bonus if it’s something that I can keep around for a quick meal without worrying about it going bad.

Enter the easy vegan cheese sauce mix. Your Vegan Mom posted the recipe a while back and ever since I first whipped it up I try to keep some around. I always keep frozen peas and pasta of some sort in the house. And I always have soy milk. So half a cup of the mix, plus one cup of milk equals sauce. If you’re feeling fancy, add soy curls, tofu, chopped up seitan log, whatever. Here instead of the peas, we had spinach on the side and I tossed in some tofu leftovers I had. Really you can just dump whatever you like in it. I only wish I had a vitamix to get the mix more powdery. I think the sauce would come out smoother.

Dinner and a show, eh

Sunday night we went to see Thievery Corporation with some friends. Beforehand, we grabbed dinner at R. Thomas Deluxe Grill. R. Thomas is one of those places where just about everyone can be satisfied. They have some meaty stuff, vegetarian, vegan, raw. They usually have a vegan desert too. While I do feel kind of bad for the birdies in cages outside, it’s a good place to go with mixed company.

They have several bowls that can be vegan. I got the Lucky Green Tea Bowl. Except they were out of bowls, so it’s on a platter. Doesn’t matter, it ate up fine. Tofu and veg stir fry in a miso green tea sauce on top of quinoa with pickled cabbage (I think) and a pile of greens. Half satisfied me and I ate the other half for lunch the next day.

Beth was sitting across from me and got one of the raw dinners, #2 I think. I enjoy getting them from time to time.

Thievery Corporation was really good. Ton of people on stage. At least 5 vocalists. Three encores. You can kind of see in the picture how packed the stage was with stuff. One of the last songs of the night they had a bunch of girls from the audience come up and dance on stage. There was one that looked kind of like Kate Gosselin and was doing the most awkward booty dance I’ve ever seen. She was also apparently dry-humping the sitar player. I’m sorry I missed that. Or not.

View from the old folks seats in the top balcony
View from the old folks seats in the top balcony

Burrito in a bowl

One of my lunches this weekend was a burrito bowl from Willy’s Mexicana Grill. There are a bunch of these all over metro Atlanta. We don’t go here often, but it’s cheap, filling, and fairly healthy food. Plus they have a nice tofu. I skip the salsa they have behind the counter and use the ones they have on the salsa bar. They have more flavor.

Sushi Sushi!

Look, we’re eating out again! I do miss cooking but there’s just been too much other stuff going on lately. That’ll get worse before it gets better. And then I’ll be doing more cooking than ever before. I’m sure I’ll bitch about that too.

Kevin and I hadn’t been to RuSan’s for sushi in a while. Sure, I know that if you’re a fish-eating sushi snob, RuSan’s isn’t all that great. But as a vegan, it’s fantastic! I love ordering lots of different small things and putting together a meal that fits your tastes and appetite.

I started off with potato yakitori.

And then had three different sushi rolls:

I don’t think I’d had the Kaiware Daikon (radish sprout)  Maki before. Tasted very cleansing. I can see getting it every once in a while.

Tempura Spinach Maki. See, you can justify eating something fried when it’s spinach, right? Right?

I get the Avocado Maki almost every time.

Others that are in my rotation: teriyaki zucchini maki, tempura tofu maki, tempura banana maki, inari nigiri, and some others I am forgetting. See, lots of vegan options!

Creole Hoppin’ Jean

Holy crap, I cooked again! Some one give me a prize, quick!

Lately I’ve been trying to clean out my freezer a bit, probably just so I can fill it up again. Possibly with larger bottles of vodka. There’s a bag of frozen black-eyed peas in there that’s been languishing for a while. So when thinking about what I could do with them, I picked up my copy of Vegan Soul Kitchen knowing it had some options.

Creole Hoppin’ Jean it is! Or was. It had a long list of spices that sounded tasty and I already had brown rice hanging about. Instead of the usual onions in hoppin’ john recipes, this one called for shallots. Changes, of course I made some. Since I used frozen black-eyed peas instead of dried, I skipped the soaking step. I didn’t soak the rice either. It seemed unnecessary since it was going to simmer for 50 minutes. And it all worked out just fine. More than fine, tasty! The rice broke up in cooking. Seems like it would do that even more if it had been soaked. Not that that was a problem at all. For greenery, I just tossed some green beans on the side. There are a few extra steps than regular hoppin’ john, but the results are worth it if you are a fan of the spicy.

Those nice people from POM Wonderful have sent me two new flavors of their juice to try, Pomegranate Nectarine and Pomegranate Kiwi. I need to crack those open soon and let you know what I think.