kale Archives - abracapocus

A bittersweet post

Recently I had to replace the hard drive in my MacBook Air. After I’d already decided I was doing Vegan Mofo. I caught the early signs of a failing hard drive, so nothing catastrophic happened, everything was backed up, and thanks to the cloud it was pretty easy to get up and running again.

My iPhoto library is kind of a bloated mess, so I’m probably going to end up manually choosing photos to import. That’s going to be time consuming, so I’m not going to deal with that right now. Instead, I just imported all the photos from my phone. Any past photos I want to use for blogging are on there anyway. If not, I know where to find them.

As I’m going through the photos I’d just imported from my phone, right early on in the first few is a set from Dough‘s holiday party the first year we were open, 2012. Ria Pell kindly hosted it at her second restaurant Sauced, just down the street from us. It was a more upscale place than her signature Ria’s Bluebird, but totally cozy even in its coolness. We’d actually looked at that spot for Dough, but decided it was going to take more work than we could handle. But she made it beautiful and brought out its best features.

Sadly, just a few months after our party, Ria passed away. Ria’s Bluebird lives on, but there will never be a replacement for Ria.

Sharing this special holiday meal she created for us seems like a perfect way to kick off Vegan Mofo. Oh, and keep in mind, she was not vegan, her restaurants were not, but she always took care of us well.

holiday menu at Sauced

The arugula kiwi salad:

Beans & Greens

Spaghetti squash in mushroom sauce

Eggplant Napoleon

Tempeh bacon, spinach & mashed potatoes

My blurry plate, one of them. I must have missed getting a picture of the brussels sprouts, but here they are!

Spiced soy ice milk with candied hazelnuts

Cardamom apple tart tatin

Yes, everything was amazing as it looks. And now I’m hungry.

Black Pepper Steak and Noodles

Why is it when I don’t have time to blog, I get a bunch of folks wanting to send me products to try? No worries, I’ll eventually get to talk about the goodies. This time VegeUSA offered to send me coupons for free product. I got excited cruising their website. I’ve had a few of their products, but they have a ton I haven’t tried. Sadly, when I got to the store, they only carried two I’d already had. So I decided to get a little experimental with one of them, the Vegan Black Pepper Steaks.

So, I took a partial bag of Trader Joe’s stir fry veggies, fried them up with some onion and then added the black pepper steaks and their juice. Then I added maybe a 1/4 cup of stock to make the sauce thinner. Then I mixed it up with some cooked rice noodles.

It was pretty good, but I think the sauce was diluted too much. Here’s what I should have done. Dress the cooked noodles with a little sesame oil and soy sauce, stir fry the veggies as I did and cook the pepper steaks separately according to package directions. Then mixed the veggies and noodles and put the pepper steaks on top rather than trying to make the sauce cover everything. Oh, look, I’m eating kale again.

The steak has a really nice texture. The sauce is asian-inspired, so you’ll want to keep that in mind when using this in a meal. The next product I try will be the Citrus Spareribs.

The laziest Mac & Cheeze

With all the Daiya hype over the last couple of years, poor Teese has kind of been pushed to the side a bit. Now that Cosmo’s Vegan Shoppe is closed and Sevananda doesn’t carry it, I don’t think you can even get it in town. But recently I filled in a survey they tweeted about and was chosen to receive Teese as a thank you: the Creamy Cheddar Vegan Sauce, Mozzarella and Cheddar.

The first thing I did was make Mac & Cheeze for a potluck. Boil up pasta, toss with a tube of Teese Cheddar Cheese Sauce, sprinkle top with bread crumbs, vegan parmesan and a little paprika, and bake until less crispy than pictured here. Normally I might mix something else in there like broccoli, but this is lazy mac & cheeze so no veggies, just straight up.

Here it is hanging out with kale salad, spinach salad, tots and I think that’s a chik patty on that bun. It was a tad dry so I either overcooked it or should have used 12oz. of pasta rather than the full pound.

Just a tad though. Still made awesome leftovers, here with a beer brat and kale salad.

Grilling out and gaga dance

gloATL had a weekend of performances set up at the Old Fourth Ward Skate Park and even though it wasn’t clear exactly what would be happening, we decided to check it out. But first, we grilled out over at Star & Simon’s. Or, we watched Simon grill and then enjoyed eating it.

Field Roast’s frankfurters are the best veggie dogs you can get.

Simon made a rack of Gutenfleischer’s ribs. Nom.

We brought leftover chili and Daiya to top the dogs. Star made a kale and kelp noodle salad. And we brought chips & ranch dip.

After dinner, we walked the still-in-progress Beltline to the skate park.

The dancers were in the skating bowls and also moving through the crowd. Skating continued during the performance and sometimes the skaters intricately worked their way through and around the dancers.

Apparently it was a style of dance called Gaga.

After watching and getting rained on a little bit we headed back. And had the Old Fashioned Chocolate Pudding Pie from Vegan Pie in the Sky with coconut ice cream.

ATL Vegan Drinks at Urban pL8

April’s ATL Vegan Drinks was at Urban pL8 and Kevin made it back in town just in time for us to bust it over there. Since we didn’t make a reservation, I didn’t want to steal slots at the allotted table, so we sat separately with the Gunns.

It’s Friday, let’s start of with a Manhattan.

They had a special menu for ATL Vegan Drinks and they also have a couple of vegan or veganizable items on their regular menu. I had the roasted beet sandwich because I like them and Kevin doesn’t so I don’t cook them much at home.

It was a very nice sandwich, but the real star was the Sunflower Seed Crusted Tofu on a squash purée. It totally needs to be on the regular menu.

We also got a side of kale and shared it. They also have kale chips.

Of course I saved room for dessert. This is what they call a paleo chocolate cake. I didn’t pay attention to what was in it but it seemed like dates, nut flour and coconut were involved. It was almost like a raw dessert. Keep that in mind if you ever see it on the menu. Just so you’re not expecting a regular cake. But don’t discount it. It was really good.