Butterscotch Bars

Last weekend Kevin and I had a secret mission in South Carolina. The internets told me that Food Lion has these magical vegan butterscotch chips. Okay, maybe more chemical-filled than magical, but it’s not every day you can get your hands on vegan butterscotch chips so I bought a few bags. Since the damn things hadn’t baked themselves up into anything tasty all week, I took matters into my own hands this evening and busted out these butterscotch bars. They came out nice and crisp at the edges and chewy in the center. Good stuff.

Local bar gives us a vegan night

In January, the Graveyard Tavern in East Atlanta started serving a vegan special on Thursday nights. So far it’s been a three course menu with an appetizer, salad or soup, a main dish and dessert. These are definitely different offerings than you’ll find at the veg restaurants around town so it’s a nice change. I’ll take you on a tour through crappy, dark iPhone photos. 

Ha, don’t judge this poor veggie stack by it’s pic.

This was basically pasta & veggie sausages in sauce. Good, but I can do at home.

Dessert was kind of like a smoothie. Nice, but lacking my favorite dessert ingredient, chocolate.

All in all, off to a good start! Our next visit, we were greeted with these lovely fried tofu nuggets. These were amazing! I think it was an asian sweet and sour sauce with it. BBQ sauce might have been better. But honestly, they were so good naked that it didn’t matter.

Main course was a shepherd’s pie. Again, good, but something I can make at home.

Now this is the kind of dessert I can get behind! I think it was a chocolate mousse in a sort of peanut buttery crunchy shell. Really good.

See, these are just getting better! Next visit:

The green and gold minestrone soup was slightly salty but otherwise excellent.

Beer bangers, mustard mashed potatoes and onion gravy. Again, good, but I can make.

And I’m not a huge fan of pumpkin pie. It’s okay, but again, lack chocolate. I think this particular meal was my least favorite. Again, it was still pretty good.

After a little break from vegan night, I got my favorite meal there so far! Collard green wontons with sweet chili sauce. I could eat a bowl full of these.

Gnocchi with cashew thyme pesto. Now THIS is what I’m talkin’ about! If you’ve ever made gnocchi you know why they’re appreciated so much more if someone else does all the work.

 

Dessert did lack chocolate. But the gnocchi was so rockin’ that I didn’t care. Brandied peach and almond cobbler:

So that wraps up the vegan nights I’ve tried so far. I know there was one more I forgot to take pics of. Oh well. If you’re looking to shake up your vegan routine, give it a try.

A new year

I just finished up banana pecan waffles and apple sausages Kevin made me for breakfast. Yummy! It tasted even better because I got to sit here and look at the internets while waffles magically formed and landed on a plate next to me. How cool is that?

Last night we joined up with Taylor and Beth and headed to get sushi at Sushi house Hayakawa. The owner is a former MF Sushi Bar chef. While they ate fishy bits, we had a bunch of yummy vegan rolls, edamame and seaweed salad. Our favorite was the pumpkin tempura roll, on the ends in the pic. Oh, the chef also gave us these marinated shiitake mushrooms that were amazing. Taylor and Beth ordered roasted gingko nuts so we got to try those. They’re hard to describe, but I could see myself busting open piles of them and chewing on the soft centers. I bet they can be had on Buford Highway. I’ll have to look. 

New Year’s Eve Jill & Tony came over and played Wii while I kept falling asleep. I blame the sake and the beer. Yeah, all one of each. Pfft, lightweight. Anyway, it was a nice mellow end to the year. And somehow, despite having my house broken into and watching my 401k dwindle, it was a really, really good year. And 2009 will be even better. We have plans…big plans. Mwahahahahaha!

Oh yeah, and today is this blog’s 8th birthday. Awww!

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.