leftover love

no matter how hard i try, i get to a blogging lull in the summer. i am in the middle of getting ready to sell my home and move to a new one, so i am kind of busy. my decline in blogging largely has to do with running out of food porn photos. here's a sampling of the last few shots i have. i plan on filming a how-to on stuffed pancakes this week to post for the weekend. cross your fingers that i have time to pull it off!

above was a second experiment with kitchen sink tapas --this time done dessert style. simply heat your oven to 350 and stuff a muffin tin with wheat spring roll wrappers. you can get them at most asian groceries or buy them for an arm and a leg in the ethnic aisle at your local grocery store. fill the wraps with your favorite pie filling. i like to make mine from scratch and simple: strawberries, powdered sugar, and some lemon juice. for the apple one i made a mixture of apples, cinnamon, nutmeg, agave, and a dab of natural peanut butter. they were really good fresh, but not good cold or even reheated. keep that in mind if you make these for an event: the next day they will just have to get composted.
when it's been too hot to cook, i've found solace in the garden. i made these rainbow chard wraps with washed leaves of chard and used them to roll kroger's tuscan bean salad-(ours is vegan!) very nice, and dinner was ready in less than five minutes. yeah, you heard me right. five. minutes.
this was a pic from the butt end of winter, when i made the kale quinoa and white bean stew from appetite for reduction. what a heaping bowl of comforting goodness! can you see the dots of hot sauce? it's not really a meal for the summer. like most of isa's recipes, this one makes a ton and it freezes really well. that's great for summer menu planning--divvy up your meals, freeze them, and bust 'em on out to nuke when you don't want to cook.

be well, eat joyously, and for the love of leftovers, stay vegan!

lovely sausage failure

looks good enough, right? we have vegan sausage patties, with some mushroom gravy, and some swissy-cheez potatoes. was it good? the potatoes were fine, but lemme tell you-- friends don't let friends have failures like this. this was my gluten free sausage experiment from a while ago. the first night it was awesome, but this was heated leftovers. verdict? FAIL, FAIL, FAIL. i didn't write my measurements down-(boo!), i left the unused mix in the fridge causing the fennel seeds to permeate the mixture and it tasted like licorice flavored garbage.

have no fear, here's a post punk kitchen link that will ensure that you never have to go through what i did. there are all sorts of spice options for you to try. i don't know why i find out about these things the hard way.

hey readers: tell me about a kitchen disaster!

memorial day munchies!

not much time to talk. too busy! here are our eats from last weekend. above are buttermilk pancakes stuffed with strawberry rhubarb pie filling. i need to do a youtube tutorial for my stuffed pancake approach. i'm on it.
i picked some greens from the yard
the haul made some big ol' salads.
here we have a salad quartet that will make the taste buds sing: homemade baked beans, cole slaw w/a creamy basil dressing, potato salad, and tu-no salad.
i took it easy on the bbq and had the gardenburger ribz. i just didn't want to spend a hot day making seitan ribz. served it with some potato salad made with the aji sauce from viva vegan, cole slaw, and home made baked beans. i highly suggest making cole slaw with fresh basil. it was a gamble that worked out in my favor. the flavor of basil goes really well with the cool vegan mayo and shredded cabbage and carrots.

so, what did you eat for memorial day?

whuuuuuut?

if you look up wuuut in the urban dictionary, the definition doesn't even make sense. if i had any say in the matter, i'd make sure that the spelling included the letter h and twice as many u's because to me, whuuuuuut is sheer unfiltered disbelief drug out for about thirty seconds. say it: whuuuuuut?

whuuuuuut if i told y'all that i had the secret to really good tofu bacon? you'd probably say, "whuuuuuut?" yep.

press the tofu. no, i mean PRESS the hell out of it. press it until it is almost dry. marinade it in something really really smoky, salty, a bit sweet, and spicy. liquid smoke, sesame oil, ketchup, organic brown sugar, apple cider vinegar, louisiana hot sauce, bragg's. let it bathe in the glory.

once your tofu has been soakin' up that mixture, fry the heck out of it. save any residual marinade. fry the tofu real good n' crispy. i guess if i were putting the crispiness level in the urban dictionary, i'd say make sure it is crispaay, or hellacrispaay.

don't eat it. stick it in the fridge. say whuuuuuut?
you heard me, put it in fridge.

now sleep have dreams of noshing on cinnamon rolls at pattycake bakery with your BFF or something. dream of a vegan world where it rains nooch and morrissey is your paperboy.
okay, now wake up.

fry the bacon AGAIN. THIS IS THE KEY! make sure you fry it really crispy. of course isn't gonna be healthy, it's bacon. even though no pigs were harmed in the process, doesn't mean you dodge those glorious fat bits of flavor.


you're in love. absolutely, positively, and passionately in love with this bacon method. you realize that you probably shouldn't eat fried stuff more than once or twice a week, but you never think of vegan bacon the same way again, do you?

i had mine on salad, it was divine.

a great haul from my garden: baby turnip greens, swiss chard, baby kale, some mesclun mix, and some red peppers from the store. i covered it all with a vinaigrette made with balsamic, olive oil, and ms. dash's carribean seasoning.

so let's set the bacon aside and talk another whuuuuuut moment: in addition to being a human, being a mom, being a spouse, being a part-time garden center extraordinaire, getting our house ready for market, getting an offer on said house, then shopping for new home that my family can actually live in, i have been blogging.

whuuuuuut? get outta here! i've still been cooking, gardening, and entering contests. the hard work paid off........

I'M GOING TO VIDA VEGAN CON! I'm so excited I'm actually going to use appropriate capitalization in this paragraph. Wooooooooohoooooooooo! I can't friggin' believe it. I feel like Vince Vaughn in Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, right when he wins the championship for his team at Average Joe's.

there's so much to do and so little time to do it all. i don't know where to begin, but to give a big nutritional yeasty thanks to ALL OF YOU readers, my amazingly supportive spouse who encouraged me to keep going when i wanted to give up, to marti at tofu mom for the extra nudge i needed, and michele at vegtastic voyage. my eyes are getting all misty n' shit.
soooo, expand your vocabulary, make some tofu bacon, never give up on your dreams, and for the love of vegan blogging conferences, stay vegan!