Gettin' Figgy Wit It

My best friend Kate is married to a chef and it is such a treat to visit them and have a meal prepared for us. The best part is that, although they both eat meat, Brandon is very open-minded in the kitchen. When I visited them and their new baby last month, Brandon even said that he is excited to cook vegan for me because it's a fun challenge. What a fantastic attitude!

For lunch that day, Brandon put together a spring mix salad with carrots & jicama with fresh oregano balsamic vinaigrette dressing, and sauteed brown sugared-butternut squash with fresh fig sauce. This was my first time eating figs, so I was very excited to try this.

This was fantastic! I loved the cooling salad paired with the warm butternut squash and fig sauce. Salads are great and all, but the squash and fig sauce totally stole the spotlight.

Brandon even gave me the recipe to share with you folks!
Fresh Fig Sauce

1 C Vegetable Broth
2 C Water
1/4 t Salt
12 Fresh Figs, Stemmed and Chopped (I used Mission Figs)
3 T Balsamic Vinegar
1/2 t Fresh Ground Pepper

1. Add Broth, Water, Salt and Figs. Reduce heat to low, cover, and
simmer about 20 minutes.
2. Stir in the Vinegar and Pepper. Increase heat to med-high and cook,
stirring occasionally, until the sauce has thickened slightly, 5-7
minutes.
3. Mash or Blend to desired consistency or serve as is. (I used a Potato Masher)

This recipe is from the Mayo Clinic Williams-Sonoma Cookbook

A week later, after checking out the cool modern art exhibit at the Tampa Museum of Art, I found myself eating more figs, at the museum's SONO Cafe.

This time it was in the form of their Mixed Melon Salad.

Zesty arugula atop chunks of melon and marinated figs, dressed in a black pepper vinaigrette. A very light but flavorful little salad. I was pleased to see a couple of vegan options on SONO's menu, including a couple of sorbets offered alongside their gelato.

What's your favorite fig dish?

Dinner and a Movie

A few weeks ago, Amber and I had a pretty chill evening that still included some Kitchen Time. We had a little dinner-and-a-movie night. Amber makes some pretty rockin' oat-and-black-bean burgers, so she whipped those up while I prepped a batch of kale chips. [Note: Every person whom I have introduced to kale chips, veg*n or omnivore, loves them. It's a fun way to get some greens in your diet.]

Preppin' the burgers

Snackin' on some greens while the patties fry up and the potato crowns bake

Here's my plate (no bread for me, thanks)

While we dined on diner-style fare, we watched this super-cute little movie, Flakes, featuring the always-adorable Zooey Deschanel.

Yeah, the trailer may not be very enticing, but trust me, it's a cute little flick. I mean, it's a CEREAL shop. In NEW ORLEANS. And there's a lot of talk about Airstreams, which is SO up my alley/out of my dreams. If you LOVED Empire Records, you'll at least LIKE Flakes. And it's available instantly on Netflix!

My favorite lines from the movie:
Neal: So what do you want to do tonight?
Miss Katz: Hold hands.

Yeah, I'm a total sap, in case you didn't know.

We paused the movie to make some cookies and cream-style shakes in the Magic Bullet, but there are no pictures, because I was briefly in heaven.

PS. Speaking of vegan dinners and movies, check out my new friend PJ's blog, which is ALL ABOUT vegan dinners inspired by movies! It's called Vegan Cine Grub.

Recent Eats: Ladies Nights

Before a night of baking with some of my favorite vegan gal pals in mid-March, Amber fueled us with some comfort food. First, bruschetta

and spinach dip

followed by mac & cheese (VegNews recipe)

And then we got our bake on, starting with rainbow cupcakes.

followed by cream cheese brownies (from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, of course).

Unfortunately, the colors in our rainbow cupcakes came out quite muted, but that didn't effect the taste.

Not long after this night, we reunited again for another bake-a-thon. We kicked the night off with some improv nachos, using what was on hand. We made a cashew-and-nooch-based cheese sauce, then globbed on some vegetarian refried beans, some chopped green pepper, and scattered some diced Follow Your Heart on top. (No, those aren't carrots you see!)

Oh man. Good stuff! Next up, we got to business on making oatmeal cream pies AND whoopie pies. The latter that I couldn't help but refer to as Whoopi(e) Goldberg Pies, which led me randomly shout, "I ain't no DAMN secretary!"

I'm not sure if anyone else caught that reference, though.

First, make the cookie outsides.

Next: slather on your best schmear between two cookies, press lightly, unhinge jaw, and enjoy.

These were cookie "pies" of epic proportions and tastes, and creating them was no small feat. It takes a certain level of vegan badassery, I think. (But we haven't quite reached the level of making our own vegan cinnamon rolls. Yet.)

Irish-ish Eats

The night before St. Patrick's Day, a friend and I got together to make some festive foods for the occasion. On the menu: Irish soda bread, green salad with homemade green goddess dressing, and potato-leek soup.

For the Irish soda bread, we followed the recipe in The Joy of Vegan Baking, but split it in half, using regular flour for one mini loaf and Bob's Red Mill's All-Purpose Gluten-Free Flour for the other. Neither of us had ever used this gluten-free flour before, so we weren't entirely sure what to expect.

Immediately upon opening the bag, A remarked that it smelled like hay. I sniffed and confirmed this statement. With trepidation, we mixed our separate batches and plopped the batters into the mini pans and cut our Xes on top.

Regular flour loaf (Before)

gluten-free flour loaf (Before)


Regular flour loaf (After)

Gluten-free loaf (After)


The gluten-free loaf was DISGUSTING, and I think the GF flour is to blame. It smelled weird, and it tasted way too earthy: like grass and dirt and who knows what else. It's made with garbanzo, potato starch, tapioca, sorghum, and fava bean flours. This blend of flours is not a good fit for such a simple recipe, and I'm hesitant to use it in sweeter baked goods (cakes or cookies) because I feel that the earthy flavor will overpower it. I don't plan on using this flour in the future.

I tasted the regular loaf, and it was okay. Nothing spectacular, but that's kind of what Irish soda bread is all about. A didn't like it at all, though.

Moving on to the salad -- we used this FatFree Vegan Kitchen recipe for the dressing. (This dressing is not actually fat free, but it's much lower in fat and calories than the Annie's version.) This was a breeze to make. We upped the garlic content a bit, so that plus the green onion made for quite a tangy dressing. (Personally, I feel that two whole green onions was too much for my tastes, but I have issues with onions to begin with.)

Salads were a success! On to the soup!

We followed another Colleen recipe for the potato-leek soup, this one coming from The Vegan Table (which is an absolutely GORGEOUS cookbook). This is only my second time (knowingly) eating leeks, so I was pretty excited to cook with them. (Yes, they are related to onions, but they're quite mild and don't bother me.) We pureed most of the soup, which made it velvety smooth. A had some Follow Your Heart cheddar and some Bac-Uns on hand for toppings, which I tried, but really, the soup is just perfect as is.


So there you have it: one failure overshadowed by two successes! Sounds like good luck to me.

Recent Eats

It's been awhile since I've done a recent eats post, and it's honestly because I've been too busy to cook and there just wasn't much to share. I'm only somewhat ashamed to admit that for many days in the last few weeks, I would just eat Larabars or mixed nuts throughout the day. But whatever -- I'm an imperfect person and Larabars are awesome.

Speaking of Larabar, they sent me some of their new Blueberry Muffin bars to sample. They sent them to my old Missouri address, so it took a little while to get to me. They are seriously delicious, though. Definitely in my top 5 Larabar flavors now.




Another Larabar flavor that could very easily rank as #1 for me is the peanut butter chocolate chip.

A bit too decadent for breakfast (most days), but the PERFECT dessert.


Those of you who are fans on Facebook may recall a couple of weeks ago when I mentioned cooking up some tri-colored quinoa. I was pretty excited: I had had white and red quinoa before, but never black, and never all three at once. I cooked it up with unsalted vegetable broth (my favorite way to cook grains) and it was delicious!

I whipped together a quick meal to go with the quinoa, adding in roasted broccoli and peppers and baked Gardein chik'n strips (I typically shy away from mock meats, but I had a coupon for a Gardein product, and these are actually pretty good!).


I was also on a Van's "Free" waffle kick for awhile (wheat- and gluten-free). At first, I ate them with Whole Soy yogurt and real maple syrup (seriously, if you're still using the crap with high fructose corn syrup, you're missing out).

The "flax" variety is quite crumbly.

See what I mean?


Last week I had a phenomenal salad at the Mellow Mushroom. (Unfortunately, their gluten-free crust isn't vegan, so no pizza for me.) This was their smaller-sized portion of the field salad, and I added their TOTALLY AWESOME TEMPEH and roasted red peppers.


A little more recently, I made something along the lines of the Polenta Stuffing from Appetite for Reduction by my vegan hero, Isa Moskowitz. I made some substitutions here and there (carrots instead of celery, used sun-dried tomato polenta, added kidney beans, served it with brown rice cous cous), and it was quite successful. I freakin' loved it.


And that's pretty much it. Pitiful, eh? And I still have a stack of cookbooks from the library, and I flip through them, usually at bedtime so I can fall asleep with visions of vegan sugarplums and other deliciousness dancing in my head, but I have yet to knuckle down and get my cook on. *sigh* One of these days.

Recent Eats

Here are shots of some of this past week's eats.

Last weekend, I went to a vegan potluck at Vida de Cafe, a raw vegan restaurant, on St. Pete Beach. Unfortunately, it was already dark when I arrived, so I didn't get to scope out the beach views for my first time in the area. There was a fairly small turn-out, this being at the tail end of the holidays, but there were still some good eats to be had.



I brought chocolate rice pudding for dessert and, what do you know?, I forgot to take pictures of it, JUST like last time! Well, from what I could tell, it was a crowd pleaser.

I made this curry brown rice (gluten free!) couscous for dinner one night, along with some roasted asparagus.


It could've used more curry flavor (I love curry!), but this was still a nice, simple mix.


I used the leftover curry couscous to make the Confetti Couscous Salad from the 21-Day Vegan Kickstart meal plan. I added leftover tofu and asparagus to mine.


I stopped at Evos in downtown Tampa one day, which is supposed to be "healthy fast food." I was not impressed. For starters, it isn't the best place to go if you're sensitive to wheat, as most of the menu is made up of sandwiches and wraps. This leaves salads... expensive salads (my least favorite). I was pressed for time, so I grabbed a Mediterranean salad (no chicken, no feta) and a small portion of their "air baked fries" (when in Rome...), and flew out the door. Upon digging in to my salad 15 minutes later, I discovered that extra (vegan) ingredients were missing, and the fries were cold (yet disturbingly similar to deep-fried fries, which was weird). Thus, I do not recommend Evos, no matter how desperate you are. However, the meat-eating colleague who was with me really enjoyed the vegan chili.

There was one other restaurant I tried out for the first time last week, but that's coming up in another entry.

What were the best eats of your week?