i have a serious brain disease. please bring me a cat.
How do you take a simple potato-kale soup to the next level? Toss some chorizo on top! Which is exactly what Terry Hope Romero does in the Potato-Kale Soup with Sizzling Chorizo recipe in Viva Vegan! It was so good I ate the whole batch over the course of a week for various meals. Instead of making chorizo, I just picked up some from Trader Joe’s. It worked great but I did use it more sparingly since it’s kind of oily.
Also, Kale is awesome. Cooked or raw.
If you get a pizza craving on Christmas Eve, you might just be shit out of luck. Pizza places around here closed early, and I don’t blame them. But back to that pizza craving. Throw your own pizza party! Which is what we did. We bought a bunch of dough balls and had people bring toppings. Then made up a bunch of pizzas.
First out, pepperoni!
How about spinach, sausage and onion?
And a … crap, I don’t remember what this was. Update! Kevin tells me this was the baked potato pizza.
The Mexican deep dish pizza.
And a cheezeburger pizza topped with onion rings. Epic, right?
Looks like I failed to get pictures of the baked potato pizza and the chili dog pizza. Dang it.
Viva Vegan! has been in my possession for a while, but I really haven’t made much out of it yet. So when planning the weekly shopping recently, I picked out two recipes to make. The Sweet and Spicy Seitan-Potato Empanadas was the first one. I’d already stocked the freezer with a couple of packages of vegan empanada wrappers so these went a little faster than if you had to make those too.
Kevin doesn’t like olives, so I left those out. Instead of making seitan, I just rehydrated some beefy TVP chunks. They worked beautifully. The more you cook, the more you get a feel for easy substitutions.
Just a little steamed broccoli on the side to round out the meal. This was lunch. The seams held up really well. Only a couple leaked.
This borrows from a recipe that goes way back to 1996, the early days of my vegetarianism. Sometimes there is a component of a recipe that would do well in another setting. Here, the blackened tempeh makes an awesome meal with raw kale salad and mashed potatoes & gravy. It would also be amazing on a sandwich. Maybe that’s how I’ll eat it next.
Who doesn’t have a few rolls of wrapping paper taking up space somewhere. You might have one of those nice boxes you can get for them, but it still takes up space you could use for something else. I saw this post on Lifehacker and thought it was a great idea. There is definitely wasted space in the tops of my closets. So I filled one with wrapping paper. After hitting the after Christmas sales to restock, we picked up some heavy duty picture hangers and twine. Today I hammered them up and now the paper rolls are off the closet floor. Awesome! Now I just need to clean up the rest of the mess…
