Long time since I posted...

...so the urging to win this give-away is a good enough reason to start up again.

I saw a tweet about winning a TofuXpress, which I've wanted since I heard about their existence, and along the way I found a new blog to check out every day (http://ieattrees.com/).

Anyway, there's been a few changes to my life in general, but consumption to be more specific.

I've had the pleasure/blessing of meeting a wonderful lady (http://balance-body.blogspot.com/) who is teaching me the way of the Raw Food life.

I've been experiencing some awesome (and I do not use that word lightly) new dishes that I hope to be blogging about soon.

And that is the key word...SOON!

Thyme-Scented Wild Mushroom Bisque

From Robin Robertson's Vegan Planet.

Happy Valentine's Day

Credit

Vegan Italiano cooking

I am a cookbook addict (self-diagnosed).

I can spend hours in the cookbook section of the book store. I am afriad to actually count how many are on our counter, but it's getting to the point where I need to start thinking about increasing my storage capacity.

The problem is that despite all of these cookbooks in my arsenal I always seem to find a recipe online somewhere that I want to try. This doesn't seem like a problem but when my wife doesn't see a return on our investment she starts to question my purchasing decisions.

This problem was averted this past week and my wife spent the good part of the past week scanning a couple cookbooks. One of them was Donna Klein's Vegan Italiano.

She found 5 great looking recipes and instructed me that "we will be making these". Well it wasn't quite like that but she did offer some encouragement in this direction.

Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we we only able to make 3 of the dishes. We originally made them Saturday night but they turned out so well that we made them again Sunday night!

The neat thing about this book is that the author states that "...this is an authentic Italian cookbook, no tofu or other food substitutes are required...". I was impressed not because I have an aversion to these substitutes (which I definitely don't) but this means that:

- I most likely have all of the ingredients required by a majority of the recipes
- I won't have to make a special trip in to the city (we live in the "boonies" now) in the event I don't have an ingredient (I can go to the "regular" grocery store)
- my family & friends could easily eat these meals and not be freaked out by "that weird Vegan food"

The biggest thing is...it's Italian food! Pasta, sauces, spices, herbs...how can you go wrong!

I'm glad my wife urged us to break into this treasure trove this weekend and we can't wait to try out more of the recipes.

I took a couple of snap shots of the finished products for your viewing pleasure.

Here is the Marianted Olives and Cherry Tomato & Roasted Red Pepper Bruschetta:

Here is the Spinach & Eggplant Lasana:

I’ve UnFriended Myself

I’ve left Facebook…for the time being.

I guess I just didn’t fit in with my circle of Facebook Friends. It seems like I didn’t have anything to offer.

Everyday I would see peoples’ recent kill numbers in Mafia Wars or that someone found a lonely sheep on Farmville. Just the scores that some people were racking up on that week’s video games were discouraging enough.

I just didn’t fit it. Did I want to fit in?

I joined Facebook to connect with people…family, friends, old classmates…the usual. I would get excited when someone I knew long ago would “Friend” me. I would write back to them trying to get caught up, etc but never hear back from them. I certainly would see their results in the latest Facebook poll, what celebrity they “are” or their progress in the aforementioned games.

Even when I posted something (a picture of a dish I just made, or a funny snapshot) I typically would get sarcastic replies…for that I could always count on.

I did meet quite a few people though. Fortunately, I can still follow their updates over on the Twitter.

I guess I kind of see Facebook as high school and Twitter as college. Not in the intellectual sense, but in high school you’re pretty much stuck with what you have (almost like family) but at college the chances of you finding someone or a group of people with like ideas rose dramatically (by no means am I insinuating that the content on Twitter is any more in-depth than Facebook).

There will come a day when I return to Facebook as that is the best way to stay easily connected with some people, but it will be at a much more manageable level.

At the very least this will free up some time to post here more often. Hopefully I can increase the quality and quantity of what I dispense here.

Hopefully…

Win a copy of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World

Check out this site to enter to win a copy of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero.

Hmmm, on second thought…

I was approached by a coworker today about bringing a dish in for our holiday luncheon. I could either do this or donate a dollar amount. I immediately realized this was an excellent opportunity to expose more of my circle of friends to vegan food!

One dish that I can eat over and over is ‘Creamy Macaroni and Cashew Cheese’ from Colleen Patrick-Goudreau’s ‘The Vegan Table’.

A friend of mine (who I have made this dish for before and thoroughly enjoyed it) overheard me offer this dish up and commented, “Well, you can’t really call it cheese” in a halfway joking manner.

I then started to quasi-defend it (only because we have this type of good-natured, sarcastic relationship) and replied with this :

“Well, the ‘cheese’ that is referred to in ‘Macaroni & Cheese’ is typically from a cow, but we don’t call it ‘Macaroni & Cow Cheese’ or ‘Macaroni & Dairy Cheese’, so the cheese can be looked at as a general term. Cheese is a product of milk, and we can get milk from a variety of sources…nuts being one of them (NOTE: Please forgive me if I am not completely 100% precise, but I figured I was close enough for the sake of the discussion). So I guess you could say that I am bringing ‘Macaroni & Nut Cheese’ to be more precise.”

No sooner than did these words come out of my mouth, that I realized just how this sounded.

Now, I know that some people can be turned off by their perception of vegan food, but I don’t have to help at all by offering them some of my “nut cheese”.

P.S. Colleen, I am sorry to have dragged your good name into this sophmoric story.