It's Squash Season! Not Squash, the sport for rich people in white polos, but Squash, the genre of autumnal vegetables! Behold! The season of pumpkin pie and butternut alfredo is upon us! We vegans especially love our pumpkins. This time of year you can't look at a vegan blog without seeing a recipe for acorn squash stuffing or at least a pumpkin cappuccino. It's a race to the finish to see who can find a way to successfully brush their teeth and shampoo their hair with pumpkin and make it look trendy. Anyways, I'm for it.

This little project left me with a goldmine of seeds to toast. It's a job to separate the pulp from the seeds, especially from all 4 squashes, but just look at this pile of toasty, salty, crunchy seeds!!

I of course, as any vegan worth their weight in pumpkins, have been carefully flipping back and forth through the pages of Isa Chandra Moskowitz's newest release, Isa Does It. It's a beautiful, hardcover, full-color book packed with recipes for practical meals that can be made any night of the week. The photography is really beautiful, and so when you make the recipe and plate it up all nice, you are like, "what the hell" because your plate looks like catfood compared to the photo. I try, nonetheless.

Pumpkin Pie Brownies from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, a recipe I've been eyeing for years. I have the strangest boyfriend. He hates pumpkin, you guys. Dealbreaker? 

Anyways, I always shuddered at the thought of having to eat a whole pan of brownies alone without anyone to help me eat them, but the timing was so right today. After blended I had exactly enough pumpkin left to make these. It was fate. I tricked him into eating one. He cried. Nancy.

Anyways, I will find a way to safely transport these to a place where they will be appreciated, work, perhaps.

Happy Squashing!

Ethiopian has become my favorite cuisine to eat over the last year or two. It's served differently than most other cuisines serve their food, almost family style, but literally, you all share one plate. Instead of forks and knives, you use sourdough crepes to pick up the food and eat it. And damn, are those crepes good. Since the arrival of Vegan Eats World by Terry Hope Romero, I've been wanting to make Ethiopian food at home more, and since her book includes a slew of recipes from the spice blend to the crepes, I went to town. Or stayed in my kitchen. You get the idea.

The spice blend, berbere, is really fun to make, especially if you're easily amused by making spice blends. I don't normally make such blends, but it is pretty fun to make, and not difficult at all. Also, all the recipes call for a spiced oil, called nitter kibbe, which is made in a large batch ahead of time along with the spice blend. It's great and buttery and full of yellow turmeric which at any moment may strike down upon your counter and turn it neon yellow. For a while. Good thing yellow is my favorite color.

Traditionally, they make these huge (I mean really huge) crepes and serve them on a (really) huge platter with piles of stews or dishes on top of the crepe. Since, I don't have a way to produce such large and beautiful crepes, I made smaller ones and served them on individual plates. Also, crepes are kind of a bitch to make. I'm not very good at making them. I found the smaller pan I tried, the more success I had. But I still didn't have boatloads of successful crepes. I did however have some. And with those, I shoveled delicious Ethiopian food into my mouth. Purpose served.

When I get Ethiopian food at a restaurant, I always get the vegetarian sampler, because I could never imagine getting to eat only one of these dishes per visit. The more variation, the better. When you're making it at home, it results in cooking like five dinners worth of food in preparation for one dinner. So basically, it was a ton of work. But it was totally worth it, and I will totally do it again :) 

I made this big spread for my friends, who seemed pleased by the authenticity of the dishes.  I think it's all about the spice blend. That's what gives it that perfect restaurant-quality. From the left to right, I made ingudai tibbs, which are portabello mushrooms in berbere sauce, but'echa, which is chickpea shallot and jalapeño eggy crumbles, Seitan tibbs, which is seitan in berbere sauce, yemisir wat, a spicy berbere lentil stew, and potatoes and green beans in berbere sauce. My favs were mushrooms and the egg-like chickpea crumbles, though all were good.

For dessert, I made the Ethiopian Chocolate Flourless Torte, the last recipe in the book. It's silken tofu-based, with a little berbere spice. I made this during testing, but used cayenne for mexican chocolate cake, my fav. This worked just as well. I could taste just a hint of spice. I suppose that's how it outta be. I'm always tempted to put way too much cayenne or spice thinking I won't taste it otherwise and they turn out ungodly spicy. These tasted kind of brownie-like, which is good. Everybody like brownies, right?

Overall, I had a great time cooking, a great time eating, and a great time hanging with my friends and feeding them delicious food! I'll raise a spicy brownie to many more dinners like this one :)

I cook every day of my life. Most days I do this because I live in a world that doesn't always support my diet. But truth be told, I'd cook even if I wasn't on a strict diet, or had no dietary restrictions at all. I do it because I feel weird if I haven't cooked yet today. If I have a full day off, I spend a lot of it in the kitchen, because that's where I like to spend my days off. I really love cooking. No really, once I said to my mom, "I bet it would be fun to make your own tortellini" while we were out grocery shopping together as she reached for a frozen package of tortellini. She obviously looked at me like I had just gotten a tattoo of Glenn Danzig on my face. Anyways, the point I'm somehow trying to surface is that nobody ever cooks for me. Not that I ask them to, or that I don't go out to dinner with friends, but I can count on one hand the number of times someone has prepared something in their kitchen especially for me that I wasn't paying them for. And I have the most fond an appreciative memories of those times. 

So I went to dinner a couple weeks ago at my friends Naomi and Greg's house and they cooked for me! They made a kickass salad with garlicky croutons and tomatoes and avocados, and you know you have me at avocado, and a Jamaican stew with seitan! It was obviously delicious and I loved every bite. I made a dessert to bring along, and then realized there was no way Alex was eating a pie with 2 of his least favorite ingredients in the title of it. So I made some brownies too. 

Chocolate fudgy brownies with mini chips inside. I topped it with ganache and a sprinkle of mini chips for maximum chocolate-chip impact. Success. They were well received by both coconut and non-coconut-eating parties.

This is my pie. It's beautiful, I know. It's out of Vegan Pie In The Sky and it's called Coconut Lime Cream Pie. It needs no further explanation.

Okay, I know it's gorgeous, but believe it or not, it looks even better in non-phone pic format, which at this time I am unable to achieve.  I also made a Patstichio from Terry's book, an Appleberry pie from my pie book, and a gazillion cupcakes. Basically, I've been breakin' necks and cashin' checks, and by that I mean baking a lot. Pretty cool, huh..