Left you hanging...

Sorry about that folks.  Sometimes dinner and a good tv show that we are currently obsessed with via netflix streaming win out over posting everything.  As for what was in this blender here:

Beets and a banana!  One time a while back I made brownies where I replaced the apple sauce with pureed steamed beets.  In this second attempt I tried using a recipe that called for banana and apple sauce.  While it turned out decent, this time it was not as good.

Pre-bake

Looks like brownies, right?

They were definitely better warm and would have been delicious along side some ice cream but I didn't try that.

Today I got started in my soon to be garden.  I purchased stuff to make starter soil and I bought seeds!  Too many I am sure, but I got excited.

I will try to post about my plans tomorrow if I have time.  Have a great rest of the weekend!

PS: I have been noticing that no matter how hard I try to get my spacing before and after pictures right, it just doesn't seem to work.  For now I am going to just let it post however it chooses to.  If anyone has any tips on how to fix this, please let me know.  Thanks!

CSA Box #3

Ok, so I've got 20 18 minutes until I have to check on my soup.  Let me show you CSA #3 and what I have been doing with it.

Celery
Carrots
Broccoli
Beets (with the darkest leaves I have ever seen!)
Lettuce

Spinach
Leeks
Strawberries
Blood Oranges
Fuji Apples
Mint

I should have paid more attention to my CSAs website because Saturday I went to Costco and purchased this:

Strawberries
Spinach
Cherry Tomatoes
Pasta

This alone is more spinach and strawberries than I thought was humanly possible to eat by myself since my boyfriend doesn't eat either, but then to get both in my CSA the next day?  That was poor planning on my part.

Luckily I have been eating a lot of plates that look like this:

 












And even more snacks consisting of just strawberries.  On the toast above and also in the picture yesterday is one of these:

Specifically the Roasted Red Pepper & Artichoke.  So far this has been delicious as a toast topping, mixed with hummus on pita bread and a sandwich and tomorrow I am testing it out in a salad.  The pasta salad above was my attempt at a no recipe pasta salad with frozen corn and peas and fresh red onion and red and green bell peppers.  The sauce I made out of mostly garlic and olive oil.  Sadly it turned out a little too garlicky and not quite so creamy but was definitely edible.

Monday night I steamed up some of the carrots and the broccoli and served them along with some mashed potatoes and pan fried tofu.

I dipped the tofu in ener-g first and then a mix of nutritional yeast, flour and spices and then quickly fried in peanut oil in my cast iron skillet.  It wasn't quite flavorful enough but the method was fabulous.

At the moment I am making a soup using the leeks, celery, spinach and some chard I bought.  I will post more when I have some pictures of the brilliant greenness.

As for the picture I posted last night?

...4 hours after my soup finished...I'll tell you tomorrow.

Goodnight!

I take too many pictures!

Everytime I sit down with the intention of blogging I run out of time/energy just from transferring my pictures, resizing and naming them all!  Promise my CSA #3 post is coming (cross your fingers for tomorrow).  Meanwhile, I will leave you with a couple of random pictures.

I tried Tofutti sour cream for the first time.  Man that stuff tastes unbelievably like sour cream.  I have been enjoying taco salad/bowls/plates/burritos so much lately!  Oh, and that is a TVP chili I made with some spanish style rice.

I have been eating a ton of these two red items lately.  I'll tell you why in my next post.

And this my friends I am dubbing "The Last Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe I'll Ever Need!".  Of course that wont stop me from experimenting with a new recipe either tomorrow or Friday.  That has something to do with my CSA as well though.  Until then, I leave you with one last picture of which you could never guess the ingredients of.  Try if you might.  Perhaps I will give you a cookie if you deduce correctly.

Sipz and Sweet & Sour "Chicken"

One of the few vegetarian restaurants that is extremely vegan friendly in San Diego is a place my boyfriend took me to shortly after I became vegan.  It is called Sipz and they serve Asian style bowls mostly but also make vegetarian sushi.  On our first trip there I was not so impressed as at that time I was really trying towards a more whole food, less fake "meat" way of eating and I didn't really want to go back.  Luckily for me my boyfriend liked the place so much that he talked me into giving them a second shot.  I think the first time I went I got a bowl with mushrooms instead of tofu or "chicken" and it was ok.  The second time we went I had a grilled vegetable salad that was delicious.  I also tried a bit of my boyfriend's sweet and sour "chicken".  At this point I had been a vegan for a number of months and had discovered what seitan was.  This was by far the best seitan I have ever tried.  The texture was unbelievable.  The next time we went we ordered an extra meal to take home with us to eat for leftovers.  I gave my mom a piece to try and she told me that the restaurant had tricked us and really served us chicken.  I explained that it was a vegetarian restaurant and no chicken to be found and she was blown away.  I am so infatuated with the texture of this chicken and am bound and determined to recreate it some day.  Here is my first attempt.

First I made seitan

I attempted two different recipes for seitan; one that was boiled and one that was baked.  They both turned out fabulous but this boiled version was so flavorful all on its own; I think because it was cooked with ginger.

Then I cut the seitan into bite sized pieces and coated them in ener g egg replacer and corn starch.

Then I fried up the pieces in a little oil.  Bonus love points if your boyfriend does the frying and endures the crackling hot oil for you.  <3

Then in my wok I stir fried some carrots, onions and bell peppers.

Meanwhile I made a sauce based on a recipe I don't recall now.  It was not the best sauce and I am now looking to find a better one.

This one consisted of rice vinegar, pineapple juice, ketchup, molasses, brown sugar and soy sauce.

Once the "chicken" was all fried, I added it to the wok along with the sauce and about half a can of pineapple chunks.

All in all it was very decent.  My boyfriend couldn't stop raving about it.  I definitely want to make some tweaks and try again but it's nice to know I have the process down pretty well.

This is the bowl from Sipz.  I don't know how they get such a red color.  Mmmm.  Did I mention that when my boyfriend and I went there on Thursday night we each got orders of this on top of our dinners to take home for leftovers?  Yeah, I really need to perfect this recipe or we might go broke.  Meanwhile, here is what I had for actual dinner when we went.

Caterpillar roll with yams and teriyaki mushrooms.  This thing was soo good and I am going to try to recreate it this week.  I am always surprised at how filling sushi is.  And how cute it can be.  This is one instance where it is perfectly ok to eat food with a face. 

CSA Box #2

What could be inside?  Precious wants to know too!

Omnomnomnom.  Farm fresh organic fruits and veggies!

This weeks box features:
Swiss Chard
3 Avocados
5 Navel Oranges
Carrots
Strawberries
Rosemary
Radishes
Red Leaf Lettuce
Butter Lettuce (I think)
Broccoli Leeks
3 Apples (I think Pink Lady)

So far I have used the broccoli and the rosemary to make this:

Baked tofu, marinated in lemon juice and mustard, rosemary garlic potatoes and steamed broccoli.  The tofu texture was awesome but the whole meal was a wee bit bland and the potatoes just did not come out right.  Whenever that happens I am so happy to have a fridge full of condiments.

Ketchup and mustard to the rescue! 


We also enjoyed some of the carrots and the rest of the broccoli steamed for dinner last night (my tummy was a wee bit upset and I overcompensated by eating almost a whole sleeve of saltines so I wasn't very hungry come dinner time).

The oranges are delicious and have a texture that reminds me a lot of a grapefruit but they are very sweet.

The avocados were a bit under ripe but luckily I had a couple left over from visiting my love's grammy's house (she has an avocado tree, grapefruit tree, a couple lemon trees, tangerine and orange trees.  <3)

The strawberries I sliced up and ate a few of and then used the rest to make this out of some failed biscotti and the chocolate I used to dip them.

I have a mountain of failed biscotti.  I made two recipes for my boyfriend's mom for her birthday.  The first one from the People's Co-op cookbook turned out great, the second one from the interwebs, not so great.  Of course the failed one made twice as much as the non failure.  And it just occurred to me that I took no pictures of the finished biscottis.  Next time I suppose!

Pancake Roll Ups

I totally slacked on uploading my pictures these last two weeks and managed to accumulate 116.  Granted I was trying to get some real pretty pictures for a printout I was doing, but still that's a daunting amount of pictures to go through.  This resulted in my procrastinating uploading them and thus missing out on the deadline for a contest that was hosted by Miss Chocolate Covered Katie.  Since I made them and took pictures though I might as well share.

The contest was to make pancake roll ups.  Check out Katies posts for some unbelievably yummy looking versions; especially these blueberry ones.   Being the odd duck that I am I wanted to do something different.  And different is definitely what I got.

First I made pancakes (I believe they were sweet potato pancakes but at this point who can remember details like that?)

Then I spread them with some of the Chocolate Spread from Love Street Living that I purchased at a discount with samples thanks again to Katie.  After that I rolled them with some odd fillings.

And sprinkled them with shredded coconut.  They may look beautiful, and they may have tasted alright, but they were nothing like I expected.

But what can you really expect when you stuff your pancakes with pineapple or even better, beets?

Definitely not a recipe for the history books in this one.  But a fun experience none the less.

That Kind Of Week

My poor blog has been so neglected!  It is really hard for me to have busy weeks and weekends and not overwhelm myself even with things I enjoy.  These last two weeks have been the kind where I get stressed about "having" to go to the comic shop and read the comics I enjoy...I need to learn to relax and chill out.  In honor of which I am finally sitting down at my computer, catching up on some blogs and enjoying some semi failed chocolate chip cashew babies that resemble the last ones pictured here.  In other words, a big blob of yumminess.

I had planned to write up a post about the "chicken" stir fry I made a couple of weeks ago, but now that I am here typing, I think I might go enjoy the fact that my boyfriend is home on a Friday night, eat some leftovers and watch the new episode of our newest find, Spartacus and leave the post for tomorrow.

Good night!