Sunday Cookery

Sunday is always the Food Day - I almost always do the grocery shopping and major cooking for the week. Today was no exception. Ben helped today, though! Instead of solo cooking with Stargate: Atlantis, we worked together and watched Arrested Development. Pretty good tradeoff.

I've been eyeing the huge bag of kale at Whole Foods for the last few weeks. We eat a lot of greens, and it's more cost-effective than buying individual bunches, so I went for it. It's HUGE. This is going to be a challenge. I made Papaya be in the picture for scale. (Note: she's a big cat. She weighs 14 pounds.)

I actually made this cinnamon swirl bread last night. It is so hard to find decent vegan bread, and even harder to find decent desserty vegan bread. This recipe was super easy and it is AWESOME. I really need to make a habit of bread-making. Look how swirly!

This is photoshopped, obviously. Nobody would ever allow their cat to lie on the counter three inches from the cinnamon swirl bread.

This was kind of a gamble. I bought Vegan Desserts a few weeks ago and was too overwhelmed by all the options to decide on something to try first. Then someone on my vegan message boards raved about the avocado creme pie. It was fate! I had just spontaneously picked up some avocados at the Mexican market. Ben was suspicious, but we've also been discussing how it's hard to make vegan dessert truly creamy, so it seemed worth a shot. In this pie, the avocados are blended with lemon juice, vegan cream cheese, sugar, some coconut oil, brown rice syrup, and lime zest. It's chilling in the fridge right now so I can't say for sure how it's going to turn out, but it tasted pretty good when we licked the food processor bowl.

And Ben made these all by himself - plain hamburger buns. If it's hard to find good vegan bread, it's virtually impossible to find vegan hamburger buns, at least ones that don't cost a million dollars. I wasn't planning on eating burgers for a few days, but these look so good I may move them up in the rotation for this week. Stay tuned!

We also made tomato sauce, curtido (el salvadorian slaw) & green tomatillo sauce, and I have some plantains roasting in the oven. It was a productive afternoon!