Tag: breakfast

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.

Boston Vegetarian Food Festival

It’s hard to believe that this time last week I was frantically putting out baked goods samples for a packed room full of people shuffling by our table. Aside from a couple of disasters like having a whole box of whoopie pies arrive destroyed and running out of food way too early, I think it went fairly well. Everything seemed to be well received. The cinnamon rolls & Teese bread were the first to go. Leigh has a great post about our adventures, so I’ll be lazy and point you over there. Kevin and I shared a room with Leigh & Ken and Josh Hooten. Normally I’d say I’m too old for those kinds of sleeping arrangements, but it worked out just fine. 

What I will do is give a run down of what I ate in Boston. Which wasn’t all that much with all the travel and stress. But we still managed a couple of restaurant visits.

Friday night we went to T.J. Scallywaggle’s. It’s a vegan pizza place. It has limited seating and probably does most business as take out. I had a chicken parmesan sub.

Kevin ordered the cheeseburger pizza.

We were starving, so any food was good food. I traded half my sub for a couple of pieces of Kevin’s pizza. I think my biggest complaint would be that the sauce wasn’t very flavorful. I like my pizza sauce to be a little bit spicy. More complex. I wish I could remember what the crust was like because that’s also a huge part of what makes a pizza good. But I was totally in scarf mode.

At the festival, after we ran out of stuff to sell and give away, Kevin ran off and got us a falafel wrap and some Teese nachos from the Chicago Soy Dairy guys. The falafel was pretty good, but no Ali Baba’s. The new Teese nacho sauce is pretty amazing. It seems to melt to the perfect texture. I think it wants some spicing up though. Still it gives you a great base to season the way you like.

Saturday night we all dragged our exhausted selves to My Thai for vegan Thai food goodness. We’d been drooling over a menu all day and were really excited at the concept of all those yummy Thai options. We we got there, Eric Prescott was working. We’d met him earlier at the show, and he ended up helping our table. It was kind of surreal. I think he probably doesn’t sleep with all that he has going on. We were also joined by Sarah Kramer and Jae Steele. We’d been hanging out with them a bit here and there throughout the weekend. Both of them are totally sweet.

We started with stuffed fried wontons. Yummy!

And then, my entree arrived, Mee Krob. It was HUGE. To be fair, about a third of the plate was greens. Still, I powered my way through most of it. There were so many wonderful flavors on my plate. The lemongrass beef had many layers of complexity. The rice paper stack I got was stuck together, so I gave up pretty quickly on making little rolls. Still, I enjoyed stacking my fork with various combinations of things from my plate so each bite was a little different.

We were disappointed that we wouldn’t be able to get a proper brunch because our flight left fairly early. We did get bagels with tofu spread. Of course, I can’t remember the name. I had the veggie tofu spread and thought it was pretty tasty.

Pancakes for Breakfast

Here’s another lazy post…I didn’t even cook these. Kevin made pancakes for breakfast Sunday morning. I think he said he used this recipe. We dressed them up with Earth Balance, pecans and maple syrup. The apple is just there to kind of pretend like this is healthy. They were really nice. Good fluff, not too thick, nice taste. A winner! I think Kevin is going to be in charge of pancake making from now on. Hey, it’s morning, where’s my breakfast??? 🙂

Oh, and also, I imported all the VeganMoFo feeds into my rss reader. Wow, that’s a lot of vegan food blogging. My productivity at work just took a major hit.

Raw, Half Raw, Not Raw

What’s there to do in Knoxville? Sit in the hotel and blog apparently. I kid. I’m heading out in a bit to walk a nature trail by the river, stomp around a victorian cemetery and eat lunch. But first, the blogging.

fettucini alfreda

First, the raw. This is Fettuccine Alfreda from Vegan World Fusion Cuisine. I could drink gallons of this sauce. I want to pour it on everything.

cheezy broccoli rice noodles

So I did. This is just rice noodles & broccoli with the cheezy sauce from above. Half raw.

currant scones

And, while I was at the gym Thursday, I watched Ina Garten mix up a batch of scones full of butter and cream. I needed to make something to bring with me to Knoxville, so when I got home I made…scones! These are the Classic Currant Scones from the Joy of Vegan Baking. Decidedly NOT RAW. And NOT HEALTHY. But, REALLY FREAKIN GOOD. I think watching Ina’s technique helped me make these perfect. Mostly I paid attention to how the Earth Balance was cut in making sure it was still in little bitty chunks rather than creamed thoroughly. It can be a little tricky since it softens faster than butter. Especially now that it’s all warm out, and in if you’re me and haven’t turned on the air conditioning yet.

San Francisco Re-cap

Good grief am I behind! I think I’d better just quickly recap the San Francisco trip and move on.

So, I left you all at Cha-Ya and promised Maggie Mudd porn. For the porn, you’ll just have to head over to my flickr account. I had a cup with lychee coconut and tarmack (peanut butter chocolate goodness). Yeah, that’s a strange combination, but I wanted them both and didn’t want a huge amount. That didn’t stop me from digging into Kevin’s waffle cone banana split. But he needed the help. It was HUGE.

Saturday morning, we went to Alcatraz. It’s about the only touristy thing I really enjoy doing in San Francisco. I mean, you get a boat ride, 2 even, views of the city, views of the bridges, views of Alcatraz. Stomping around Alcatraz with your little headset you get all edumacated. Plus there are some amazing photo opportunities.

While we were down that way, we had to check out the sea lions. They’re stinky but really cute! On several of the docks, the males were having wrestling matches. One would stake claim to his dock and challengers would fling themselves up on it and wrestle with him until one of them was pushed off. On other docks, sea lions were just sleeping away ignoring all the barking going on.

Next, lunch at Herbivore, Divisadero where we had a shwarma war. Kevin got the “chicken” shwarma and I got the regular one. I think it was kind of a draw. But I will say that the seitan they used in mine wasn’t very shwarma like. It was cut in strips instead of slices. And it wasn’t seasoned like I would season shwarma. Oh, and of course, there was dessert, chocolate cake.

After that, we went to Zeitgeist to meet my friend Lisa. I hadn’t seen her since ’98. So we had fun catching up and I got a little loopy on 2 margaritas. Oh, and while we were there, someone I used to work with at Kinko’s said “hey.” Wow. So he gave me the rundown on a few people we used to work with. Small world and all that.

Saturday night we went to see Goldfrapp at the Warfield. The sound guy needed to be fired, but even so, it was a good show. And Alison said she was sick but she still managed to belt out a pretty full show. Unlike Elizabeth Fraser back when I saw the Cocteau Twins a million years ago. But I’m not still bitter…

Sunday, we managed to sneak in a breakfast at Herbivore, Valencia, before we had to go to the airport. I had the tofu rancheros and Kevin got the french toast. And we shared it up like we do. Both were great, but I really liked the batter on the french toast. It was a lot thicker than I’ve had it come out for me. I need to play with that because it made it that much better. We got blueberry cornbread for the plane and Kevin also got a doughnut. But since one of the kitchen guys splattered me with ketchup, I got a doughnut too! The cornbread was sweet and almost more like cake. The doughnut was also cake-like rather than, whatever the other kind is called. Good though and a really unhealthy way to end the short vacation.