Riblet Sliders

Since I planned to roast a sweet potato for Thursday night's dinner (which for some reason always takes 1 1/2 hours), we weren't going to be eating until very late.  Needing something a lot sooner, Josh and I ran out to the grocery store and grabbed French bread and artichoke spread for this quick and easy appetizer.  We ended up serving the same thing to his Dad when he came to visit Saturday - so simple, yet you look like a classy host! 

 

Eventually the sweet potato got soft enough to mash, and I put together dinner - riblet sliders with caramelized onion sweet potatoes on the side.  After I bought all those slider rolls a while back, they've been sitting in my freezer while I brainstormed what to do with them.  Without a lot of great ideas, I finally decided on using MorningStar Farms riblets.  I also caramelized onions and mixed them in with mashed sweet potatoes and a little salt and pepper for an easy (if not quick) dinner. 

 

Four slider rolls down ... eight to go!

Work Lunch Out

Last week I found myself without a lot in the house to eat for lunch at work, and also without any goodies stashed in the cupboards to make an insta-lunch (soup, noodle bowls, etc.).  So after one very underwhelming peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I decided to treat myself to a take-out lunch the other two days I headed into work in Annapolis. 

 

For the first, I got the vegetarian lunch special at a local sushi place called Nano.  The great thing about Nano is that they are so quick, all you have to do is call in your order and by the time you've walked over there it's ready for pickup.  The lunch special comes with one cucumber and one avocado roll, plus two sweet tofu skins wrapped around rice - anyone know what those are? 

 

The next day I headed out to an old favorite, Potato Valley.  I've been hesitant to go to PV since becoming vegan since the last time I went and ended up with a very tasty but convoluted order.  This time I ordered the South of the Valley, which comes with beans, corn, lime, mango, peppers, and garlic butter, served with greens and roasted onions.  I meant to order it sans garlic butter but forgot ... whomp whomp.  I'll have to remember that next time, because otherwise it's a really tasty and filling vegan lunch.  Luckily I did manage to add avocado to my order - a delicious essential. 

 

I almost always bring my lunch to work, so I don't get a lot of chances to explore the local Annapolis offerings.  This was a nice opportunity to branch out a bit and also remind myself of what there is around just in time for session starting in January - aka, no time to cook, so lots of meals out! 

Third Birthday Dinner and Founding Farmers

I don't have any pictures from my third birthday dinner last weekend, because it was at my boyfriend's parents' house and I always feel odd taking pictures of food when it's a nice family gathering like that.  So you will have to settle for description ...  Dinner was a tasty vegan bean soup with warm bread - the perfect fall meal!  For dessert, Josh's mom made a beautiful looking apple tart, but unfortunately she used butter in the crust ... which lead to a horrible awkward discussion about my tendency to allow for "exceptions" to my vegan eating.  I realized I make too many allowances, which just leads to confusion for people, and I need to stop. 

 

First, I made an exception for blackberry ice cream.  Which lead to a second exception when blackberry ice cream was made twice in one summer.  Then Josh's mom made an apple pie a while back and said she couldn't get shortening to work for the crust, so she used butter instead.  I said it was fine and I would eat the pie anyway.  So through no fault of hers, Josh's mom assumed butter crust would always be an okay exception for me.  I probably didn't handle things very well, because in hind sight I should probably have made just one more exception for my birthday dinner and eaten the tart.  Especially because when I didn't Josh's mom brought out some cookies that she had checked the ingredients on and was "sure" they were vegan.  I knew they weren't.  But because I already felt horrible and awkward at that point I ate them anyway.  So I still ended up with a non-vegan dessert, but not the one Josh's mom had worked so hard on.  Not the best end to the dinner, or my birthday weekend.  But I guess two out of three great birthday dinners isn't bad. 

 

Monday night for dinner Josh and I met friends for dinner at Founding Farmers, which ended up being our second dinner there in less than a week.  We'd met a friend for dinner there the previous week, but didn't come out of that with a photo of my delicious veggie meatloaf and mashed potatoes.  FF doesn't have a lot in the way of vegan options - in fact, their regular menu has exactly one vegan item: an appetizer of mixed nuts - but they do have vegan specials, which are helpfully labeled as vegan so you don't have to worry about hidden ingredients. 

 

For Monday's dinner I ordered the veggie bacon burger, which came with a side of beet salad.  It wasn't a stellar burger - average burger patty that wouldn't hold its shape and relatively tasteless fake bacon - but the salad was actually really good.  Fortunately a good time with friends always outweighs average food. 

Birthday Dinner 2.0

Saturday morning Josh and I slept in pretty late, then headed out to Einstein Bros. Bagels for breakfast/lunch - not really extensive enough to warrant "brunch".  Thanks to the Internet, I quickly found out that the bagels are all vegan unless they have some obvious ingredient to the contrary - the asiago cheese bagel = not vegan.  And I got my bagel topped with peanut butter, rather than cream cheese.  It was actually a really yummy topping, and I think a lot better than fake cream cheese would have been. 

 

A little while later we decided to head to Whole Foods to try to find the ingredients to make a recipe in my new vegan cookbook, Great Chefs Cook Vegan.  Unfortunately, we couldn't find any of the tricky ingredients so we had to scrap that plan for now.  In it's place, we decided to raid the bakery for vegan goodies and came out with yummy cowvin cookies and carrot cake cupcakes. 

 

They were both good, but the cookies are probably the real winner of the two.  The cupcake frosting was allegedly "cream cheese", but it really just tasted like vanilla frosting.  Creamy, perhaps, but not "cream-cheesy".  I'm starting to think it's really just impossible to recreate that tangy flavor of cheese.  Maybe I'm destined to live a life without it. 

 

When we got home we snacked on our treats while drinking wine and playing Karaoke Revolution on the Xbox - one of Josh's birthday presents to me.  Super fun, though it gives you a hard dose of reality as to your singing ability!  Josh only wanted one cupcake because they weren't the "real deal", so I ended up eating cupcakes for the next few days to finish them off.  Not exactly a bad problem. 

 

Later Saturday night ... once we were pretty far gone from our wine ... we headed out to dinner at Pacci's Neapolitan Pizzeria.  We had spotted this place a couple blocks from our new apartment and had been meaning to try it for a while - and I'm so glad we finally did!  We both love Neapolitan pizza, and though this place isn't guild certified, it seems like the genuine article.  I ordered the marinara pizza, which normally comes sans cheese - so no awkward ordering!  It was simple but delicious, topped with marzano tomato sauce, garlic, oregano, and basil.  Plus it wasn't even that expensive.  Delicious, gourmet pizza, walking distance from our apartment, for not a lot of money?  Yes, that makes for a very happy birthday!

Birthday Dinner No. 1

Yay for birthdays!  And for awesome boyfriends who plan not just one birthday surprise, but tons of fun to make it a birthday-filled-weekend! 

 

Since my actual birthday was Friday, Josh took me out to dinner to celebrate.  We went to Great Sage, which is an entirely vegan, semi-swanky restaurant in Clarksville (a little far away, but worth it for a special occasion).  It's not exactly the best food, but it's pretty good, and the fact that I could order absolutely anything on the menu was a huge perk.  Naturally, I started with a cocktail - a ginger snap made with snap organic spirit, van gogh vanilla vodka, frangelico, cinnamon, and soy milk with a spiced sugar rim.  Yummo!

 

We decided to go all out with our ordering - split an appetizer, split two entrees, and then a dessert for each of us (with lots of shared bites).  We started with the artichoke dip.  Josh wasn't crazy about the fact that it was covered with Daiya (both because it tastes horrible and because he thought a restaurant should really make their own fake cheese), but I scraped it to my side and everything was mostly okay.

 

Our two entrees were pumpkin gnocchi - in sage cream with red peppers, peas, arugula, butternut squash and toasted pumpkin seeds - and Thai peanut curry - sweet potato, cabbage, peppers, tomatoes and carrots roasted and tossed with rice noodles and spicy peanut coconut cream. 

 

They were both so-so - good enough that you don't want to stop eating, but not like you'd want to seek it out again.  In particular, I thought the sweet potato in the Thai curry was all wrong.  And I really like sweet potato ...

 

Fortunately all was made up for by dessert.  I ordered the white chocolate creme brulee - a French classic with a touch of white chocolate and vanilla bean. served with a sable cookie and soy whip.  It really tasted nothing like creme brulee (half of why I ordered it is because I wanted to know what they were going to do there), but it did taste like delicious melted ice cream, which wasn't a bad thing. 

 

Josh ordered the almond chocolate chip skillet cookie - a baked-to-order almond flour cookie chocked full of chocolate chips and served piping hot with a scoop of ice 'cream'.  He wasn't super thrilled with it (it's basically a super gooey chocolate chip cookie in a ramekin) but I thought it was really good, and the ice cream was a great touch. 

 

All in all, I really enjoyed our meal at Great Sage.  The food itself may have only been okay, but the company was definitely out of this world :)  Birthday day 1 - complete success!

Maple Apple Crisp for One

It's my birthday, and I can eat apple crisp if I want to. 

 

As I mentioned before, I was feeling pretty indulgent last week, so I found myself making lots of desserts and even turning to dessert for my meals.  Which is exactly what I did for lunch on my birthday Friday.  Rather than making a big dessert that Josh and I would end up eating servings of all week, I made this perfect little maple apple crisp for one.  It's so simple and delicious, I'll probably end up doing this all winter. 

 

To start, chop up one apple - a tarter apple is a great choice since so much sugar goes into this one.  Toss the apple with about a tablespoon of maple syrup and top with cinnamon to taste.  I prepared the crumble in a little single-serving pyrex, but a ramekin would work just as well. 

 

Prepare the crumble topping in a separate bowl - two tablespoons of softened Earth Balance, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/4 cup flour.  I just mush it all together with my fingers until I get the proper "crumble" texture.  Then spread over the top of the chopped apple. 

 

Then just bake at 350 for about 45 minutes, or until it is just as ooey-gooey as you would like and the crumble is brown.  Unfortunately, it will need to cool at least 10 minutes (or as long as you can stand to wait).  I ate mine plain straight out of the pyrex, but this would definitely be amazing topped with vanilla coconut ice cream - next time I have some on-hand!

Microwave Fluffernutter and the Results of the Birthday Pushup Challenge!

I guess since my birthday was coming, I used it as a bit of an excuse to be pretty indulgent all week.  I've also been pretty busy with work and other things, so it's an extra excuse to slack on the food choices.  For example ... Monday night when Josh announced he was going to make himself a PB&J for "dessert", I thought I might as well join along by making myself a fluffernutter.  After all, I had the vegan marshmallows from s'mores making anyway ...

 

I microwaved two marshmallows on a slice of toast until they got fantastically giant and puffy in the microwave (marshmallow monsters!).  The gooey marshmallows spread just like the fluff from the jar - maybe even better. 

 

And once I added on the peanut butter, it was a truly indulgent mess.  And really, it was way more dessert than I needed.  For future reference: an entire sandwich for dessert is a bad idea.  Half-sandwich next time! 

 

But fortunately I counterbalanced all the goodies by continuing to work hard at pushups all week to be ready for today!  My goal was to do 30 "real" pushups on my 30th birthday (today!).  Technically, the goal was to do 30 in a row, which I didn't manage to accomplish, but instead I did 18 pushups, 1 minute break, and another 12 pushups. 

 

I won't claim they were the most perfect, nose-to-ground pushups ever ... but they were up off my knees and with at least a significant bend in my elbow.  And though I couldn't do 30 straight, 18 at once is still a huge improvement from where I started.  And doing another 12 without much of a break isn't half bad either.  Plus I've definitely seen an improvement in the muscle definition in my arms since I started.  Which means the challenge doesn't end today.  I plan to keep going, trying to do as many pushups as possible (maybe not every night, but on a regular basis).  And if I keep going, maybe I'll do 31 straight next year!