Category: photo

Forgetful

I keep forgetting to take pictures of food. I’m cooking food, I’m eating food, just not taking many pictures of it. Mostly it doesn’t matter, but I’m kind of bummed I forgot to take a pic of the Mini Wellingtons from Vegan Lunch Box that I made for Xmas dinner. I used some of the laminated dough I had made before that was hanging out in the freezer. The odd thing is that in the past I’ve had a lot of trouble with the Earth Balance oozing out of the dough and essentially frying rather than baking whatever I was making. That didn’t happen at all this time. Huh. I wonder if that’s because I froze and thawed it. More experimentation is necessary. 🙂

For breakfast Xmas morning, Kevin made pancakes. We had them with some Match Meat Breakfast Sausage and purple potato hash browns.

I also made a bunch of cookies that I’ve been trying to distribute before they all go in my mouth. There were white chocolate macadamia nut cookies, chewy chocolate raspberry cookies from Veganomicon and gingerbread cookies. I’m dumb and only took a picture of the gingerbread cookies:

With the extra time off, I tried to make a few items to freeze. The recipe floating around for Apple Sage Sausage caught my eye, so one day I whipped those up. So far, we’ve eaten them for breakfast in a sort of hash form with more purple potatoes and a bit of red bell pepper. The colors are so pretty!

Because there weren’t enough sweets in the house with all those cookies hanging around, I decided to make Egg Nog Cupcakes. Well, Soy Nog Cupcakes. Other than REALLY wanting to stick to the pan, they came out great. Also, I left the booze out of the frosting and made up for it with more Soy Nog, although I don’t think it needed the extra liquid. I gave a bunch away at work so I wouldn’t eat them all.

Random Collection of Food

I don’t feel very writey right now, but here are a few food pics that have been piling up.

The Cajun Tofu from Yellow Rose Recipes has turned out to be a great quick week night dinner star. Once you have the spice mixture around, the rest can be made up of staples I keep around. This time we had it with some of the collards that are filling my freezer and some hash browns that cooked up quicker because I diced ’em smaller. Oh, and that’s a little bowl of home made apple sauce.

When I saw this fairly quick recipe for bread bowls, I knew I’d eventually be dumping come Cholent from Veganomicon into them. I was right! The dry milk powder was replaced with soy milk powder.

Trying to keep the healthy cruise diet going, I baked up some Asian tofu and ate it on a salad of raw kale and bok choy seasoned with sesame oil.

And finally, this Peanut Butter Quick Bread recipe looked interesting. I thought it would be even more interesting as Peanut Butter and Jelly Bread. So that’s what I did. The bread itself is not all that sweet like a lot of quick breads, so the jelly does not make it too sweet. I veganized by using a flax egg and soy milk as replacements. The recipe worked in both bread and muffin form.

Match Meat Chicken stuffed with spinach

We had a package of the Match Meat Chicken hanging out in the freezer so I decided to see if there was something I could make with it without having to go to the store. Match Meat Chicken stuffed with spinach was it! You’ll find the recipe here, but you can’t link directly to individual recipes, so just find it in the list and click. The only change I made was to season the meat with salt, pepper, oregano and a little garlic powder before dividing and filling. Oh yeah, I also browned them on the George Foreman grill before baking rather than pan frying. These were really easy and so good! They look like something you spent way more time on than you did. See how pretty it is?

The broccoli is just steamed broccoli, but the potatoes are a new product Cosmo’s is carrying, Instant Organic Mashed Potatoes by Edward & Sons. We tried the roasted garlic version. They were good and practically instant. If you aren’t into cooking, are in a hurry, or just need another quick component to your meal, these might be a good option for you. I’m probably too cheap to use them all that often though because I don’t mind making mashed potatoes.

A harsh homecoming

As glorious as it was to escape Atlanta for a nice warm vacation, it was definitely jolting to come back to the cold and/or nasty of this week. If you want to relax, turn your brain off, read a bunch of books, and be warm, I can highly recommend a caribbean cruise. I was in the sun with a book whenever possible. What I don’t like is that if you do an excursion, you really don’t get to experience the port. 

Okay, what you really want to know is what did I eat, right? Even though Royal Caribbean says on their website that they don’t cater to vegans, they really do. You will be able to fill yourself up just fine from the buffets. My typical breakfast was a big pile of fresh fruit, steamed rice and stir fried veggies, bagel with peanut butter, potatoes in various forms, some other whole grain bread with margarine (they had a brand, Bibo, that’s vegan), sometimes cereal, soy milk (just ask for it) and coffee. Lunch, I’d have a big ol’ salad along with whatever cooked vegetables were on the buffet. Sometimes Indian food. We at dinner in the dining room. Every night they had a pasta dish as a choice, so that was always an option. Also, on our cruise, they had an Indian dish every night that was usually vegan if you had them keep the raita. The first night was the hardest, but after that they started preparing special dishes for us. Every night we’d get a platter of roasted or grilled veggies along with the other dishes. Desserts were various fruit bowls. No, you won’t get any vegan cake. But while the omnis were gorging themselves every day on the extensive dessert bar and gaining an average of 8 pounds, I actually ate healthier than I do at home, ate tons of food, and lost weight.

Sadly they did attempt two things for us that were not good. In the past, apparently the pastry chef had whipped up some fruit wrapped in phyllo dough that was a nice dessert. We tried to explain that to them, but what they brought out was fruit wrapped in plain phyllo. Yep, no canola spray, no margarine, just plain. Er, no. 

The other thing they tried to do was make cornbread. Vegan cornbread is pretty easy to make, but apparently they had no idea how to approach it. So we got this little loaf that seemed to be made of corn flour, not corn meal. And I don’t know what they used for the fat and binder. It pretty much tasted like nothing and had an odd texture. But, they did try. And honestly, we didn’t need these extra items. There was plenty of food for us.

So what about eating in port? In San Juan, Puerto Rico, we met up with friends of Danielle that took us to Cafe El Punto. Their specialty is a half an avocado filled with beans with rice and fried plantains on the side. Yum! Please excuse the blurry pic.

In St. Thomas, we were diving so we didn’t get to eat lunch there. (We saw a sea turtle, a moray eel and an octopus! No sharks this time though.) But there’s a place you have to hit called Rootsie’s Ital. Matt and Danielle got to go and loved it. Rootsie apparently cooks everything in a clay pot and then brings it to the shop. I’m so jealous I didn’t get to eat his food. Check out a pic of him here. You’ll find his place on the main road behind the big shopping area just past the catholic church. 

We did an excursion in St. Maarten, so we didn’t eat there. Although they did serve sandwiches on the sailboat on our way back from snorkeling and enjoying the beach. Matt talked them into making us sandwiches with just lettuce and tomato. The bread was nice, so it actually wasn’t bad.

At Labadee, the ship caters the food so it was similar to what we have available on board, just much more limited. Oh yeah, there’s also a Johnny Rockets on board. But after eating all the lovely fruit and vegetables, the Streamliner was rather meh. I want someone to chop up fruit and veggies for me every day. I could totally live like that.

I almost forgot…we got to tour the ship’s galley! It is unbelievably huge. And, you’ll be happy to know, everything is separated. Meats and veggies and dairy are all kept in separate refrigerators. There are also separate cooking areas.

Anyway, it was really hard coming back. I never used to take tropical vacations, but they are starting to grow on me. 😉 A bunch more pics are in my flickr account. I’ll leave you with this sunset.

Date Night Food

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.