Pineapple-Seitan-Quinoa Stirfry

This is a Veganomicon recipe, altered only in that I added homemade seitan from the batch I made last weekend.

The quinoa was cooked in a 50/50 mixture of pineapple juice and water and I worried that it would be too sweet, but it wasn't at all. I should know by now to always trust Isa's recipes.

Ethiopian Food & Pine Mouth

I haven't cooked for the last couple of days because I have discovered Ethiopian food. My book club read Cutting for Stone this month, which is set in Ethiopia, so we used that as an excuse to meet at Abyssinia, a local Ethiopian restaurant, on Tuesday night. (The website is pretty hilarious.) I'd never eaten Ethiopian food before, but I immediately knew it was right up my alley. They bring your food out on top of a thin, spongy bread called injera, and you use the injera to scoop up the food - no utensils! I took a picture but it's sort of crappy.

That's the vegetarian sampler. I couldn't stop thinking about it all the next day, so I made Ben go there with me last night, too. I thought afterward that maybe I'd had my fill for a while, but right now as I'm typing this out I'm sort of craving it again. It is DELICIOUS. Mom, I will make you go there the next time you're in town. For an adventure!

Here's another weird thing: A few weeks ago, I noticed that every time I ate or drank something, I had a weird metallic taste in the back of my mouth. I mentioned it to a friend who is a nurse, and she asked if I was maybe taking too much iron. I do take an iron supplement most days, so I stopped that and the taste went away after a couple of days. Then, a couple of weeks later, I randomly found out about pine mouth. Apparently, eating pine nuts causes that exact kind of thing in some people! 36 to 48 hours after eating pine nuts, a metallic taste shows up. I thought I might have eaten some pine nuts around that time but I couldn't remember for sure.

Then on Tuesday morning, I noticed it again. And what did I eat on Sunday night? Enchiladas with pine nut cream. MY MIND IS BLOWN. Ben hasn't noticed it at all, though, and he's eaten some too, but I'm still getting that taste in my mouth today. It's a real bummer. I guess I have to quit eating pine nuts.

Smokey Tempeh & Kale with Tahini Sauce

I made a light dinner tonight because, frankly, we have been eating a lot of chocolate chip cookies around here. This is my favorite tempeh plus sauteed kale with a delicious tahini-garlic-parsley sauce.

I have lots of the sauce left and am going to use it on quinoa & zucchini for tomorrow's lunch.

Potato & Seitan Enchiladas

I spent a loooong time cooking today. I made the seitan from scratch, as well as the tomatillo (green) sauce and pine nut crema for the topping. These don't look like much, but they were really good.

I used corn tortillas, which immediately fell apart when I tried to transfer them to the plates. We prefer flour, anyway, so I will be going back to those next time.

In other news, Papaya is getting more and more attached to us lately, it seems. She follows us from room to room more than Banana does and she LOVES the new countertops. She always hangs out in the kitchen now to supervise my cooking.

Vietnamese Noodle Salad

This turned out to be a pretty huge lunch. It is Vietnamese rice noodles, cucumber, string beans, mixed lettuces, and red onion topped with tofu I marinated and briefly seared on the stovetop. The dressing was really spicy, even with me leaving out some of the hot sauce. I'm such a wimp!

Return to Vegetables: Pizza!

I stopped on the way home from work and got a bunch of stuff for pizza.

Delicious ingredients! I made pesto and tofu basil ricotta and Ben, as always made the crust.

Pasta Marinara with "Meat"balls and Eggplant

We're really scraping the bottom of the barrel here with stuff from the cabinets and freezer. I made a red sauce out of a can of whole tomatoes and a small can of tomato sauce (plus garlic and spices), and served it over pasta with Trader Joe's Meatless Meatballs and the remnants of a box of eggplant cutlets that had been in the freezer forever. The eggplant cutlets weren't vegan (a little dairy in there) but I didn't want to just throw them out. Last hurrah for TJ's eggplant cutlets!

This was a surprisingly good dinner but I miss green vegetables! Looking forward to a weekend of shopping and cooking.

Day 2 of No Groceries Week, plus Zucchini Bread

This picture is making me laugh with its monochromisity (yeah, I don't think that's a real word, either).

Normally I would put black beans in a tomato/couscous salad like that but I didn't have any, so I used a mixture of white beans and black eyed peas from the freezer. I'm a BIG fan of my new idea of cooking up beans and freezing them - there is nothing grosser to me than the juice in a can of beans. So I'm going to try to keep a variety of frozen beans on hand from now on. It only took a minute to thaw them in the microwave. Anyway, I also mixed in some chopped tomato, shallot, and chives from our plant on the back porch, and seasoned it with lime juice, cumin, and salt & pepper.

The sandwiches are Soy Delight fake chicken salad, with some chopped celery and dried cranberries. We cannot get enough of this fake chicken salad. So delicious.

I also made zucchini bread last night, using my mom's recipe. I used this stuff instead of eggs:

and it tasted just like normal! I'd done this once before and I remember thinking it was a bit weird, but I also replaced half the oil that time with applesauce. This time I made it full fat and it was fine. Caloriffic, but tastier.

Zucchini bits!

Miscellaneous Indian Food

Because I was gone until last night, I wasn't able to make my weekly trip to the store on Sunday morning. So this is going to be a Challenge Week, where I try to make it until the following weekend without shopping for groceries. We have plenty of food in the house, really. Last night I made chili (no pictures), which we'll be able to eat for lunches for a few days, and tonight I made an Indian dinner using some tofu I had in the fridge and a couple of pantry items that have been sitting there for a few months.

I simmered the tofu in the curry sauce with half a chopped onion, and served it over basmati rice with the punjab eggplant on the side. I'd never had that eggplant stuff before but it was very tasty.

We also had some samosa from the box I got at the Indian market, with mint chutney on the side.

New Orleans (Non-Food)

We did other things besides eating in New Orleans!

Friday we did a cemetery tour. It was hot! We had a really great tour guide, though. At the end of the tour he dropped us off with this weird, incoherent voodoo lady. We sat around listening to her talk for about 10 minutes and then escaped as soon as we saw an opening.

We took a riverboat cruise on the Mississippi Friday night.

View of the city from the boat:

On Saturday we did a swamp tour. We did see one alligator, but apparently it's still too early in the season for them to be out in force. The swamp was beautiful, but creepy in spots.






Random shot of Bourbon Street:

We didn't spend too much time in the French Quarter at night. Hillary is 7 months pregnant and my mom and I didn't particularly feel like getting super drunk with a bunch of sweaty idiots. But we did at least walk through a few blocks on Saturday night.

We spent Sunday afternoon at Oak Alley Plantation, about an hour outside New Orleans (assuming the bridge over the Mississippi River is not unexpectedly closed and then you run into insane parade traffic on the way home). Despite our travel issues, it was definitely worth the drive.

Our last night, we sat on the rooftop of our hotel and drank wine. A perfect end to a great trip!

The Food of New Orleans

I failed at being vegan in New Orleans. I stayed vegetarian, but there were many places where vegan would have been plain lettuce, and that's no fun. So I did my best. We ate some really, really good food!

This was the first meal after we arrived, and it did happen to be vegan - a veggie pita sandwich that turned out, for some reason, to be TWO sandwiches. Which I ate most of anyway.

Thursday night my sister and I went to the Palace Cafe, because it was close to our hotel and got positive reviews in our guidebooks. There was nothing vegetarian on the menu, but they brought me a pasta primavera that was very good. We also got some great desserts at the Palace Cafe which, sadly, we failed to take pictures of.

We had to get beignets at Cafe du Monde! Hillary and I went on Thursday and waited about 15 minutes, but when we went back with Mom the line was huge and it took a good 45 minutes of standing in the heat. But we were rewarded with deliciousness!

Another thing the internet said we had to do was get hurricanes at Pat O'Brien's. They were tasty! Unfortunately we went on a cemetery tour immediately following, and standing around in the heat drinking a cocktail gave me the worst headache of my life.

Pre-headache:

Our big splurgey meal was at Bayona, where I'd heard they did a good job of catering to vegans. Here's what we ate:

Mom started with cream of cauliflower soup.

Hillary and I got the goat cheese toast appetizer, which was topped with sauteed mushrooms.

Mom's entree, a roasted pork chop with brussels sprouts, turnips, and apples:

My - vegan! - french lentils and mashed potatoes with a mustard sauce, roasted brussels sprouts, turnips, and apples.

Hillary's salmon with gewurtztraminer sauce, butternut squash puree, roasted potatoes, and green beans.

The desserts were insane, too.

Mocha banana torte:

Lemon semifreddo with blackberry sauce:

Mango cheesecake flan with blackberries:

Ooof.

Our next big meal was the Sunday jazz brunch at the Commander's Palace. You get three courses - appetizer, entree, and dessert - whether you want them or not. Because everyone needs dessert at brunch.

Here is our first course - I had a caesar-type salad, Hillary had a mixed greens salad with strawberries and apples, and Mom had this crazy fruit salad thing.

And then the entrees.

Hillary's crab and eggs:
Mom's cajun crusted fish:

And my bananas foster pancakes. This is the major downside of being vegetarian at a nice brunch restaurant, because every other entree had meat in it. So I had to order these pancakes - which were obviously delicious - but then I ALSO had to order dessert. Utterly ridiculous.

Here's the dessert, which did end up being small so that was good. Chocolate cookie dough bread pudding.

Mom's strawberry shortcake:

And Hillary's bread pudding souffle with whiskey cream sauce.

For our last meal in town, we went to the Gumbo Shop for cheap, traditional New Orleans food. It turned out to be a really cute place and our waitress was FANTASTIC - super weird and cute and funny. We love Bridget at the Gumbo Shop!

Mom got red beans and rice.

And I got the Vegetarian Entree of the Day, which turned out to be black beans and rice.

Hillary got the Cajun Sampler, but I'm not sure what the samples were of. Red beans and rice and jambalaya, maybe?

We all really liked our meals there and I would definitely recommend it. I'd recommend everywhere we went in New Orleans, actually. It's just a really, really great food city. I don't know how many more days I could have handled, though! Without gaining a million pounds, that is.

Look what I found at the Atlanta airport on the way home! Let the detox begin.