Birthday Weekend!

I celebrated my birthday this past weekend. It was a nice weekend of festivities. Matt always tries so hard to make every birthday the perfect one. We both put so much pressure on ourselves when it comes to the other's birthday, that it can be quite stressful. As we discussed this last weekend, we decided to perhaps take it down a notch for future birthdays or just be happy with a nice dinner together. Not that we aren't happy with a wonderful evening spent together, we just tend to try to always top the past birthday. Last year Matt found a way to ship me vegan doughnuts from Pennsylvania. We also celebrated with local friends with a party in the park, and celebrated with some good friends who are an hour away at there home, as well as surprising me with a weekend visit from a good friend who lives far away. So all that is obviously pretty hard to top -- hence the stress.

Anyway this years birthday was wonderful as well. First off I made my own birthday dinner, and had some dear friends over to share it with us. I made Black Bean and Corn Empanadas with a spicy tomato sauce. Here is the recipe I used for the dough and the sauce. For the sauce I didn't have any sesame oil, so I just omitted that from the recipe and it worked out fine. This sauce was also really spicy, so if really spicy isn't your thing, use less hot sauce. I highly recommend using Sriracha brand hot sauce. I love the stuff! For the black bean and corn filling, I used this recipe. The recipe calls for bananas, but I just used frozen corn instead. I also added salt to the mix.

For dessert, I made Vanilla-Coconut Flan from Viva Vegan! by Terry Hope Romero. This is some amazing flan! I actually don't think I have had traditional flan before, but this was amazing and has me daydreaming of creamy sugary goodness. First I made a carmel sauce and then coated the dishes I used with the carmel.

The flan was made of a mixture of canned coconut milk and almond milk thickened with Agar flakes. The recipe says that agar powder works out better as it will fully dissolve as opposed to the flakes which leave a few chewy spots in the flan. I did notice some of the chewy bits, but it was not to distracting. Lots of vanilla and coconut extract really made this flan. I am sorry I don't have any pictures of the flan out of it's molds. I had the flan setting in the fridge up until it was time to eat it, so we resorted to eating it from the dishes. If you get your hands on this cookbook, you must make this Flan.

Matt also threw me a little get together with friends at our home. I was very proud that matt made this apple crumble for me and gloated about him all night for it. I am the dessert maker in our house, so when Matt makes something sweet, it is really special. He also made me cherry pie ice cream for my birthday, which awards him a bunch of gold stars in my mind. This may not be the prettiest apple crumble, but it was very very tasty.

We also headed to Columbus for the weekend to celebrate some more. Friday we spent a nice day shopping and galavanting around the city. Well there wasn't as much galavanting as I would have liked as the weather was scorching hot. We did some shopping at my favorite store Anthropologie. I scored this gorgeous skirt on the sale racks.

I just adore the little details of this skirt. The buttons, the pleats, and the lovely underskirt.

We also went to this adorable sewing shop Sew to Speak, where I picked up these three fabrics. I am in love with that chair print. I'm not sure what I'm going to make yet, but I am contemplating a purse out of either the purple or teal blue fabric. I would like to make a skirt out of the center piece. I am still a beginner at sewing, but hope to someday be good enough at it to be able to make clothing. I think a skirt is a good place to start. My friend Aubrey told me about this shop, and I hope to visit again the next time I am in Columbus.

We also ate some great Indian food and a raw blueberry cheesecake from Pattycake Bakery. Delicious!

Baking Binge

A baking binge is something I know all to well, and love just a bit to much. To me a baking binge is when in the course of 4 days or more, I can't help but pull out my mixing bowls and whip up something amazing each day. It can get quite addicting - the fun of stirring together the ingredients, and the anticipation of the taste of something delightfully sweet. Here is an example in pictures. This all happened about a month ago.

Sunday: Chocolate Cream Cheese Cupcakes from the cookbook The Joy of Vegan Baking.

These cupcakes were great and simple. Just a basic chocolate cake recipe and a cream cheese frosting that was tucked inside the cupcake. Next time you make cupcakes, let them cool all the way, take a knife and cut out a hole in the center (not the whole way thru), and dollop some frosting inside. Top it off with the piece that was cut out. It makes for an amazing frosting to cupcake ratio if the hole is deep enough and wide enough. Frosting with every bite is always acceptable!

Monday: Chocolate Chip Scones from the same delightful cookbook as above.

These are some of the best scones I have ever had. light and fluffy with just the right amount of sweetness. Sometimes I add a lot of cinnamon to the batter, and sometimes I just dust the tops with cinnamon sugar. These are especially good warm from the oven when the chocolate is still melty. Enjoy with a cup of coffee or Cafix (my choice of coffee substitutes).

Tuesday: Grape Pie - not pictured. I made this for a carry-in at work. It was sugar free, and kind of like thickened welches grape juice between a flaky crust. Definitely different, and not my favorite.

Wednesday: Gluten free Banana Bread from the cookbook Babycakes.

This banana bread has become a recurrence in my kitchen over the past few weeks. So good and sugar free too.
Here are some of the ingredients I used for the bread. Almond Breeze - my favorite almond milk, coconut oil, and Bob's Red Mill Gluten free All Purpose - which made for great results. The sweetener used was made from the sap of the coconut tree - amazing.

This bread is great warmed up in the oven an slathered with a bit of Earth balance Buttery Spread. Yum.

There you have it, a baking binge. I think I am due for another one in the not to distant future.

Vegan Frittata

I adore brunch. Perhaps it is my penchant for sleeping in that really draws me to the concept, or the possibilities of having a morning party. Whether we are cramming a handful of friends into our tiny apartment, or it's just the two of us spending a slow morning in the kitchen, brunch delights me.

This dish is a new brunch favorite of mine. I had read about chickpea flour based frittata mixes, and so began searching for the perfect recipe. Here is one that I adapted to my liking. This recipe is so versatile, so you can pretty much flavor it to your liking. For the one pictured below, I choose a blend of onions, garlic, mushrooms, spinach, rosemary, and thyme. I sauteed the onions, garlic, and mushrooms in a bit of water until soft, then threw in a few handfuls of spinach to wilt (you may need to add a little more water, so that the vegetables do not burn). Season this with salt, pepper, dried rosemary, and dried thyme.

Chickpea Frittata

3/4 cup of chickpea flour

1 cup of water

2 Tablespoons of oil (I used olive)

dash of salt

Mix ingredients together until smooth. Let the mixture set for a few hours or overnight. I mix this up the night before, cover, and place in the fridge so it is ready to go the next morning.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Pour into a greased pie plate (I used earth balance buttery spread). Stir in desired filling. Top with some salt and pepper.

Bake until golden brown and crispy around the edges. I forgot to time this, so I will guess that it takes about 30 minutes to bake, maybe more.

Cut into slices and enjoy. I served the frittata with an apple cinnamon coffee cake. I also think this dish would make a lovely light dinner or lunch served with a tossed salad.

Favorite Sandwich

Here it is, one of our favorite sandwiches. We love this sandwich in the summertime as well as in the wintertime as the ingredients are readily available throughout the seasons. Traditionally this is a pressed sandwich, but it tastes great eaten right away or left to meld and marinate. Also it can be eaten hot or cold. Matt loves this sandwich heated up in a George Foreman grill. I like it either way. Here are some pictures and the recipe. This is a sandwich adapted from Moby's book Teany.

Favorite Sandwich

1/2 -1 cup olives of choice (I used kalamata and garlic stuffed green olives)

2 tbls to 1/8 cup olive oil (depending on how much is needed for blending. If the olives are oil packed, you will probably need less oil)

1-2 garlic cloves or more depending on your taste (I omitted the garlic as I had garlic stuffed olives)

Blend these ingredients together to form a chunky paste or tapenade.

Take a French baguette and slice into sandwich sizes and in half. Spread the olive tapenade on one side, then top with thinly sliced onion, and sun-dried tomatoes (either oil packed or dry, if using dry tomatoes, soak them in a cup of water for 5 - 10 minutes to soften). Sprinkle on some salt and pepper to taste.

Slice up the roasted red pepper into strips and place on top of the tomatoes.

Top that with some fresh spinach and pour on a bit of balsamic vinegar if desired.

Top with the other half of the bread. You can either spread on some more tapenade on this half or spread a little olive oil over it. I love olives so I always opt for more olive spread. Now is the time to either eat the sandwich or press it. You can do this by wrapping the sandwich tightly in plastic wrap and leaving in the fridge for a few hours or even overnight. The thick crustiness of the bread discourages the sandwich from getting to soggy when left this long. Since I generally do not have plastic wrap in the house, I've set the sandwiches on a plate and rigged up a press by topping them with an upside down plate and placing heavy books on top, and letting that sit for a couple hours so the flavors can meld more.

If you opt for a heated sandwich, at any point in the pressing process you can place the sandwich in a George Foreman and grill as desired.

Enjoy! These are great sandwiches to bring along on a picnic, or make ahead of time for lunch the next day.

Pancakes for dinner

Grab your favorite pancake recipe everyone and get mixing! This recipe is a work in progress, but feel free to try it. Pancakes for dinner is a guilty pleasure of mine, key word guilty. Having something so delightfully bread like and doused with maple syrup makes me feel like I am letting the health conscious side of me fall by the wayside. So the solution to my guilty feelings is this.

A crazy mound of kale, celery, apples, beets, and fresh ginger, that I promptly turned into a tall glass of spicy, purple, nutrition. Which I may add was definitely not the most pleasant glass of juice I have made, but also not the worst. It made me feel healthier none the less.

Now, onto more exciting things - carrot cake pancakes! I'm sure someone out there has tried this before, but not that I am aware of. It came to me as I was shoving vegetables into my juicer and racking my brain for a tasty way to add vegetables to pancakes --- of course, carrot cake. So I pulled out my old standby carrot cake recipe and started grating. I added grated carrot, cinnamon, allspice, and ground cloves to the mix.

Thinking of cream cheese frosting that is the tradition on carrot cakes, I blended some dairy free cream cheese with some maple syrup to make this delicious pancake topping. I did not have any vanilla extract in the house which would have enhanced the sauce a lot, but it was still pretty tasty. I need to work on this recipe again to get the perfect blend of spices, so hopefully soon I will have this recipe for you. In the mean time feel free to experiment yourself and let me know what you come up with.

Tomorrow I will have one of Matt and I's favorite sandwich recipes, so stay tuned.

Thai Coconut Curry

Last night I made curry for dinner. I've been wanting to start adding more fresh, raw meals to my weeks as I feel that I have gotten into a cooked food rut lately. Not that I don't love cooked food, I just know that foods in their raw state work well with the human body and would like to consume them more often. A while back I downloaded a recipe booklet from Jonsi and Alex's website. The Thai Coconut Curry recipe looked really amazing, so I decided that it was time to make it.

Blending water with dried coconut was the first step. I found that the sauce ended up being a bit to watery, so next time I would add less water then the recipe calls for. It could be that my blender just was not strong enough to incorporate more of the coconut. Anyway, the coconut kind of solidifies on the top, with a coconut oil like resemblance.

Then you strain the coconut out and add the rest of the ingredients to the blender, along with the coconut water. Much to my dismay, I was out of both turmeric and curry powder, so my curry does not have that lovely yellow hue. I added garam masala to the sauce instead.

I poured the sauce over a mound of zucchini, cucumber, red pepper, and tomato, all cut into thin noodle like slices. I used a vegetable peeler to make "noodles" out of the zucchini and cucumber. Someday I would love to own a spiralizer, so that my vegetable noodles can look more like noodles.

The curry turned out to be really good. The flavor of the sauce was delicious, and it mixed well with the vegetable noodles. I definitely would make this dish again. Check out the rest of Jonsi and Alex's recipes linked above and download the recipe booklet. My kitchen experience was also greatly enhanced by listening to Jonsi's new album go. Here is a little taste!

Fourth of July Brunch

French toast brunch this morning! I used Lauren Ulm’s Stuffed Banana Berry French Toast recipe, from her amazing cookbook Vegan Yum Yum.

I used a bare-bones version (not stuffed with bananas and berries), using only the batter along with the sourdough bread from our local co-op. This basic recipe turned out great. In the past I have had a lot of trouble getting vegan French toast right.

I can remember only one other recipe that my husband and I were satisfied with, besides this one. Thanks Lauren!

First Post

It’s July 4^th, Happy Holiday everyone! Independence day to me isn’t all about cookouts and fire works but alternatively about spending a slow, day relaxing: sleeping in, a brunch of French toast and strawberries, BBC television, and cuddling with my husband. It is also about starting this blog. I’ve wanted to start a blog for a long time, but have not had the courage until now. Only yesterday did I come up with a name. Oh the stress involved in starting a new venture!

So welcome! I hope you enjoy taking a part in what I create in the kitchen, and all the other things I create in general. Life is imperfect and very frustrating at times, and often I fail in the homemaking department. So here is the title I came up with, White Tablecloths and Dirty Dishes. Here are my white tablecloth moments, don’t mind the mess.