It snowed!

It snowed, so we made soup! I was delicious and chock full of garlic, onions, kale, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, black beans, garbanzos, broccolli, and cauliflower. It was seasoned with fresh rosemary, sage, and a bay leaf.
So...it didn't snow much but it was cold!

Last week I made pasta with a creamy tomato sauce and garlic bread

Oh no, she's gone political

Don't worry I'm not turning this blog into a soap box, politically themed venting is what my friends are for. I just wanted to share a picture that I found on cnn.com during the third presidential debate.

I was amused because I thought Cindy McCain looked like an orange Stepford Wife combined with a Frankenstein-style zombie (Oooh, Halloweeny). But, to be fair and balanced (ha ha Fox news) its not a very flattering picture for anyone.

Also, check out Michael Pollan's recent piece in the Food Issue of the New York Times, Farmer in Chief. It is a letter to the next president. There was also a recent interview on NPR about the piece. I only caught a bit of it but you can find it on their website.

Phew, two posts in one day. I probably won't post again for a month, just kidding.

nature is pretty

So.....I haven't posted in a while....quite a while. Still, I have been eating. I tried some of Turtle Mountain's coconut milk based yogurt. I had the vanilla flavor which was pretty tasty but maybe a tad on the sweet side, but that is normally the case with vanilla yogurt. The texture was really creamy. There was no need for stirring to get rid of lumps like in many soy based yogurts, these was also a pleasant absence of "soy-y" aftertaste. I have the passion fruit mango flavor in the fridge for a later date.

A couple weekends ago I went camping with some friends and it was awesome! The leaves were changing and the air was crisp. Looking at these pictures makes me want to go back right now.
I love living in the mountains, especially this time of year.
Now to the cooking. I made the pumpkin baked ziti with carmelized onions and sage bread crumbs from the Veganomicon (probably not the exact name, but I left the book at my parent's house). It was really good comfort food, and very seasonally appropriate which is a plus. Isa's cashew ricotta is amazing stuff.Obviously, I haven't been living off of this pasta dish (despite the temptation) but everything else that I have eaten has just been thrown together at the last minute. I kept forgetting to take pictures and the few times I remembered the food was just way too ugly to record photographically.

My camera died

I don't have any new pictures, but I did get to try some Purely Decadent coconut milk ice cream (coconut flavor). It was really creamy and white and delicious. By far the best vegan frozen confection I have ever experienced. I love that it is sweetened with agave nectar. I can't wait to try the vanilla flavor. I still, miraculously, have some coconut goodness left...and I have a plan for it, stay tuned.


We made some green curry baked tofu today and spaghetti with garlic bread, nothing too exciting and no pictures so....random old pics instead.
An adorable tiny pumpkin that was a present from a friend a couple years ago. That was my dorm room window and umbrella plant.

Oh yeah! My running mojo is back. I think my time off allowed the Pose method to sink into my brain. I was running faster than usual with less effort.

40 Minutes, easy

avg HR 162

max HR 176

I've been a bad blogger

I accidentally took the weekend off from blogging, but now I have returned and I think my pictures are getting better. My running has been going well. I'm going to go back to my official training plan tomorrow. I'm trying to learn the Pose Method of running. Now, to the food!
Brown rice with seasame ginger/ponzu/apple cider vinegar sauce on eggplant, onion, garlic, and green pepper.
Asian style baked tofu (tamari, mirin, rice wine vinegar, chiles, and nori strips)
The baked tofu on ezekiel bread with avocado.
Spicy ginger tofu with kale and an avocado tempeh melt with sweet potato fries (and a magic hat number 9) from the Usual Suspects. Those are my friends torso's.
My bf holding a delicious frozen concoction of mimicreme, vanilla extract, soymilk, and frozen berries blended together. It was awesome, and yes we ate that whole bowl.
This cake was my second attempt at baking without a recipe and it turn out really well. It is a simple white vanilla cake with a maple cinnamon swirl on top.

aaaaaaaand a green smoothie...that is purple

busy day

Breakfast and lunch:

The lunch was eaten illegally in a library study room which made it even more delicious. mmmm...leftover goodness
Dinner was not extremely photogenic. Actually that's probably not the case. It is just my lack of photography skills that make it appear less than photogenic. Just in case you were wondering, the weird glop in the bowl is soba noodles, onion, garlic, and eggplant in a spicy miso broth. It was good. The soba noodles aren't the mugwort kind 'cause my boy has some sense and made us use up the already open packet. I didn't even pout about not having greenish tinted noodles.

back to learning about amino acids

These wings are hawt

Breakfast consisted of a green smoothie, as usual. The base was one of those coconut waters that I picked up yesterday (orange peel and passion fruit infused...exotique, non?) mixed with some water. There were also two bananas, a couple handfuls of spinach, a romaine heart (still beating), three teaspoons of ground flax seeds, and frozen blue berries and raspberries. This made too much smoothie, we ended up with almost two pint glasses each.

Does anyone know if adding flax seed to a smoothie decreases the absorbtion of the other vitamins/minerals/antioxidants? I read somewhere that if you take omegas in pill form that you should take it at a different time than other supplements, but ground flax seed might be different.

Lunch was too embarrasing to record photographically. We had some leftover green beans with ketchup, potato chips, cookies, and some nasty frozen potato knishes that were probably past their prime. We ended up giving them to the dog who found them agreable enough, but he has tried to eat cat shit a couple times so I wouldn't put much stock in his endorsement.

Dinner was delish. We had tempeh "wings" slathered and baked using the convection microwave in Vegan Dad's Sweet Sticky Wingz Sauce with a little faux chicken broth powder added. If I don't branch out to some other sources of inspirations I'll have to rename my blog "a homage to vegan dad". Also we had some couscous with random spices, and veggies with ponzu (awesome stuff). I did exercise my creative juices a bit and made up a vegan ranch sauce. My boyfriend said the taste was a bit on the "nooch-y" side, but I thought it was pretty good. I added cucumber to add to the cooling effect (a ton of hot sauce on the wings) just like the yogurt sauce in indian cuisine (riata).

Ranch Riata

1 cup veganaise

splash of unsweetened soymilk

small splash of apple cider vinegar

1/2 tsp agave nectar

1/4 to 1/2 of a peeled cucumber, grated

a big pinch of nutritional yeast (da noooch)

a little bit of garlic and onion powders

a lot of Spike

salt and pepper to taste

now it might be time to stop procrastinating and get some homework done...or watch more 30 rock on hulu

Groceries and Country Dinner

Beginning of the week means grocery run! This time we went to the local discount grocer and walked out with a ton of food for only $65.

Some findings were more exciting than others. The coolest finds are the items below. I'll list them from left to right: Ponzu (I've never used it before), Zico coconut water, Nayonaise (for less than $1.50), an Aloo Chole spice mix, "not-beef" boullion cubes, vanilla soy yogurt, really pretty eggplants, Bac'uns (another first...I don't know if I will like them), Spike seasoning, vegan worchestershire sauce, and tamari. In front there is a rice milk crisp bar and mugwort leaf soba noodles. I don't even know what mugwort is, but they have a slight green tinge. I'm also excited a frozen vegan pumpkin pie (only 3 bucks!) and MimiCreme (99 cents).

For dinner we had some green beans that we canned over the summer with some new potatoes, onion, garlic, EB, and pepper. We also sliced up and salted a tomato and formed some of Vegan Dad's beef seitan into "cube steaks"
It was really tasty, but the meatiness was almost disconcerting (not that I really remember the taste/texture of meat). I don't make seitan very often because I find that the gluten sits rather heavily in my stomach, but Vegan Dad's recipes are always worth it (and much less "gluten-y" than other recipes).

Well I didn't break 29 minutes yesterday morning during the 5k. My time was around 30:30 which is thirty seconds faster than my last 5k time. I got a horrible stitch only half a mile into the race and my legs were really tired. I think I have been training too hard lately because my past three runs have been really hard and I have taken a long time to get warmed up. My plan was to run for an hour and 20 minutes today, but I think I'm going to take an extra rest day instead. I'm not too disappointed though.

On a happier note, I'm stuffed! We just had a big family meal and that always means delicious Sri Lankan food, almost all of which is vegan. I don't really have specific recipes for these dishes, but "feel" cooking is more fun anyway. I can provide more specific recipes if desired.

This is a non traditional Sri Lankan dish that is just zucchini cut into matchsticks and stir fried in a hot wok with peanut oil. Once it starts to soften, salt and Sri Lankan chili powder (spicy!) is sprinkled on top.
This is my favorite potato dish. It is cubed potatoes stirfried with tumeric, onions, ginger, and lots of garlic until the potatoes that are almost cooked and then the dish is baked until the potatoes are all the way cooked and then it is topped cilantro.

This is dahl. It is mostly just lentils and onions and spices. also topped with cilantro.

This is basmati rice that has been fried with nuts (mostly cashews) and whole spices. There was also regular white, steamed rice.
Now for the condiments:
This is raw red onions with chopped green chiles covered with lime juice and salt. The onions get nice and softened from the salt and lime, no cooking required.
This is seeni sambal. It requires a many many onions to be chopped (always delegated to my grandfather, lucky guy). It is just onions that are stir fried with lots of spices. Traditionally it contains fish powder but this version is 100% fish free and better for it.
Mango chutney...'nuff said.
Now it is time for me to lapse into a food coma

First Blog's First Birthday

Well, this is my first attempt at blogging and we're not even close to blog literate yet. There will be two people posting on this blog.
We're visiting my parents this weekend so we get to use an actual stove! We're having black beans and rice for dinner with tiramisu for dessert. I'm kind of carbo loading since I'm running a 5k in the morning, but i doubt my performance will be affected positively by the extra carbs. I'll be happy to break 29 minutes. We'll see how it goes.

p.s. I do know how to spell walrus