A quinoa and tofu caesar salad is always a go-to for us. I have eaten this salad four thousand times. It is still good. My carnivorous friend asked me for my tofu recipe and I was shocked and my little vegan heart returned from stone to it's warm and beating state.


Every year I ask for chocolates from Lagusta's Luscious for valentines day and I finally got them!! I got the "box of hearts" which contains three types of caramels and 2 types of cream-filled hearts. The top row is my fave, which are chocolate caramels with some chocolate salt. Next row is a pear cream-filled heart, my favorite of the two hearts. Next row has violet caramels, more flowery than your average, then rosewater cream-filled hearts, a bit perfumey but it is Valentines day, after all, and the last row are cinnamon caramels which were great and literally exactly that. I ate them all. Within a week. They were for me, so...


For dinner, we opted not to go out, but stay in and cook. I made a "seitan au vin" with mushrooms, red wine and seitan, some gnocchi with rosemary and garlicky green beans. It was fancy. Observe:



We hadn't been to Champs in weeks (gasp) so last weekend we trecked out and got lucky because there was no wait. This breakfast burrito always takes me when I go. I think I'm going to order something new but nope. I get this almost always. If it's dinner time I get the awesome bowl and add guac. Sometimes I get mozzarella sticks. Don't judge.


Since Champs moved, we make a habit to stop by Dunwell Doughnuts on the way home. This time we were feeling particularly sugar-starved and got 3 each. My picks were berry french toast, Maple caramel pecan, and raspberry cheesecake. Alex got all the boring flavors. All six were eaten by the night's end.

 Here is my plate:

The asian market was completely amazing. I found almost everything I needed there. I left with a very long receipt with many many bottles of soy sauces, vinegars, bags of spices, varieties of asian greens, and noodles of many sorts. I probably had close to 30 items... maybe more. The most expensive item I bought (organic green jasmine tea-- best thing ever) cost only $3.50! A ballin' haul, if I've ever carried one. A word on ingredient scavenger hunting: It is the most exciting thing for me. When I have written down something I need for a recipe to snag if I ever came across it, and search high and low for it, but then finally spy it, I pounce. It reminds me of a young monk in training, sitting in the lotus position, waiting until the time is right to catch a fly in his hand (he of course, lets the fly go, to give a happy vegan ending to my story). It's a strange way to get high on life, I know, but nothing quite excites me as much as when I know my pantry is incomplete and I have finally found the missing piece to complete it. Weird? Some of you must understand me.


They look cute too.




Not the best shot of my Pad Kee Mao.



Here's a portion of my successful haul from the Indian market. My favorite part of these trips are getting home and laying out all your new finds and admiring them in a nice and large accomplished pile. Once I am back to health, I will surely hit up the closest middle eastern market and make beautiful beautiful things happen with my amazing finds. P.S. Get Vegan Eats World if you haven't already!

 Strawberry Rhubarb Muffins. Back to my roots, and the very dawn of my baking days. My mom used to make strawberry muffins in the summer after picking enough strawberries to fill the fridge, freezer, and stock-pile freezer in case of nuclear warfare. I once made these muffins for my co-workers back home, and they went crazy for them! I was then inundated with requests for more. My recipe, just like all good recipes, has been updated, given the switch-up, and been re-run the vegan remix on. The addition of rhubarb to this muffin is no mistake. Soy yogurt brings it in for the home run.

Have I mentioned that I am testing recipes for Terry Hope Romero's new international-themed cookbook? Well I sure am. I've tested 20 recipes so far and feel like I've both run a marathon, or cookathon rather, and took a jet to vietnam. I plan to make at least 10 more of her recipes, because then I get a free book. Score.
 Ban Xeo
This is a rice flour crepe with spices and spinach, mushroom and tofu filling.  Apparently it is rather popular in Vietnam. I've never had real Vietnamese food, because I was assured that everything has fish sauce in it. Who knew?

 This is the mock fish sauce I was just telling you about. It's working title is Mock Nuoc Cham sauce. It called for a whole red chile, but I still can't taste the heat. Yup, too punk for red chiles.. I need like three.



Pickles!!
Come on, you've really ever met a person who didn't like pickles? I don't believe you. This was my first pickle-making experience and my life is now re-purposed. I told her that she should write a cookbook about pickles. Maybe how to make fancy pickles out of weird things, and all different ideas on what to put pickles on. There could be a relish-chapter? These pictured are daikon radish and carrot pickled with star anise and green chiles, though the chiles don't really retain their heat after soaking. I left the seeds in hoping they would. Made a killer bahn mi breakfast scramble that I forgot to take a picture of before devouring.

Naan
Everyone's favorite Indian flatbread. Unless you're favorite Indian flatbread is paratha. Or Roti. Anyways, it's my favorite, so that's why I made it. It was so late on a weeknight, and I was sooo full from dinner, but still I decided to make this, and couldn't stop ripping pieces off and eating them. It was so good, I would make this again for sure, next time I get a stew goin'. P.S this naan looks a lot like New Jersey (Naan Jersey?).


This is a Two-In-One recipe picture, of Jollof Tomato Rice, which is of West African origin, and I hadn't heard of it before I made it. It's baked rice with tomato paste and other things. It tastes awesome. Needed more heat, so I dumped a bunch of hot sauce in. It is pictured with the Seitan Corriander Cutlets, which also had great flavor. I ought to make more seitan. Viva Vegan has a bunch of good seitan recipes I need to try. I will try this recipe again as well.

Basic baked tofu
Teriyaki-tasting, chewy, appropriate for mostly all things. I used it in the Ban Xeo crepes today. I often put it in salads, burritos, stir-fries, soups, chilies, sandwiches, on top of pasta dishes, on rice, my boyfriend's head...

Terry's book seems like it's going to be great. I realized that it's so important to make comfort food accessible for vegans, otherwise, people aren't going to stick with the diet. It's always hardest when you're hungry and you're around family and food you grew up eating. I can't tell you how many times I've had people say to me, "I was so inspired by what you do and the food you make, so I started eating vegan, but then I visited my family from Texas, or my uncle paul from Sweden and my Aunt Lucia from   Hamburg or my Grandpa from Kalamazoo and they made me all this great meaty food, so I stopped." And I'm like... "Oh. Cool Story Bro." Just kidding, but that's just it. People don't want to miss out on great food. And that's why I think it's so great that Terry has made it her mission to veganize cultural favorites from around the world. That way when I show up at Wigelia with a pan of vegan pierogi and a bottle of Visnowka, I can have my cake and eat it too. And I can share it with my family and we can all continue a great tradition together. So I think it's a great idea for a cookbook. Get it, Girl!

I'd say I'm pretty open to trying new  cuisines, especially when they are vegetarian-friendly. Ethnic foods are usually more vegetarian-friendly than American cuisine, I have found. I love eating all different types of food, whether it's Japanese, Italian, Mediterranean, Thai, Mexican, Chinese, Ethiopian, African, Irish, French, German... But for some reason I never felt inclined to eat Indian food. It smells very strong, and that scared me away at first, and I also could never tell what was on a menu by reading it. I tried using curry powder before and to convince myself I liked it, but I would take one bite and just not take another...

Basically Indian food was like that really pretty and popular girl in your high school with expensive clothes and a nice car and nice hair who everyone knew and loved but who you never had a class with and were never formally introduced to, and so you created imaginary biases against her in your head because everyone made such a big deal about how awesome she was.

Well, upon working with mostly all Gujarati people now, I have finally been formally introduced! My co-workers always talk about this or that dish to one another, and I'll say "What's Naan?" or "What's Paneer?" And they'll all reminisce about the food their moms make for them, and it's clear that food is such an important part of their culture and that it brings people together and makes someone feel comforted or at home. Since most of my coworkers are vegetarian, it was easy for them to suggest I try Indian food sometime, since it doesn't really revolve around meat the way some cultures' cuisines (like American) do.

So while visiting a friend in Brooklyn recently, and searching for a good place nearby for dinner, he suggested Indian food. An Indian food-lover himself, he assured me I would like it and would definitely not be disappointed. So after much hesitation, I conceded and we went to Bombay Masala in Brooklyn. I opened the menu and had no clue what to order. I quickly enlisted the help of one of my co-workers via text. The text read something like "At Indian place for dinner. Need help with this menu asap!" My friend told me to order the chana masala and ask for some bread that the waiter had never heard of (he ended coming back with naan instead). I took one bite and expected to have to choke down the bitter taste that I remember curry having, but this taste didn't come. I waited, and waited... No bad taste! Rather,  a good taste! I couldn't believe it! I was eating Indian food and enjoying it at the same time! Success!

Basically, it was like the moment when you realized you could ride a bike. You tried and tried and fell off a hundred times, and swore you would never be able to do it.. until you realized you were doing it!
So following the ppk chana masala recipe, I was able to recreate this food milestone in my life. I showed this picture to my co-workers this morning and they told me it looked the way it's supposed to look. They questioned me about all of my ingredients, and I was able to give satisfactory answers about the way I prepared everything, so my attempt was deemed authentic!

Basically, I dribbled straight down the center, swooped in for the kill, and slam dunked. Check it out.