Evening o' Gluttony

On Saturday night Ben and I went to Lilly's Pizza.  They have a pizza with rosemary roasted potatoes and garlic that I've been craving like crazy lately.  Ben is against pizza with potatoes on it, so he got a pesto and  cheese one with pistachios instead.  I took a picture of it but it has disappeared from my phone!  So you'll have to use your imagination.  He reported that it was great.

Here's mine with the potatoes and roasted onions and red peppers.  It was perfection.

So then we went around the corner to Hayes Barton Cafe, which has completely insane desserts.  They are $8 each, which seemed crazy to me the first time we went, but then I realized that each portion would easily feed three people.  They are enormous.  Way too big to eat in one sitting (unless you are Ben).  We always get ours to go.

Look at those cakes!

Ben got a piece of key lime pie that is 1/8th of a three-inch-tall pie and ate the entire thing in one sitting.  Then he whined around the rest of the night that he felt like he was going to die.

I got this peanut butter and chocolate thing which turned out to not be regular cake - the chocolate part is a layer of brownies - thick, dense, chewy brownies.  I couldn't even eat half this thing at once.

(Ben's hand for scale.)

The Lilly's/Hayes Barton thing is fun but must be limited to about once a year.  I'm still recovering.  Maybe because I ate the rest of that peanut butter brownie last night.

Adventures in Vegan Ice Cream

One thing that really sucks about vegan food is that all non-dairy ice cream is expensive and most of it is not very good. The exception to the rule is Trader Joe's, which sells Double Rainbow's product under its own label at a reasonable price. The So Delicious coconut milk ice creams are good, but at Harris Teeter they are $6.79 a pint.  A PINT.  Come on.  That's crazy talk.

So, we've had this Cuisinart ice cream maker since we got married ten (!) years ago.  I'm pretty sure I used it a total of two times to make regular ice cream at some point in the distant past.  A few months ago, I tried a Veganomicon recipe for vanilla ice cream but I doubled the recipe and it was too much for the ice cream maker and never froze.  Then I tried another vegan vanilla ice cream and it was really icy, very disappointing.  This left me sort of turned off to the whole idea.  I kept seeing all these references to people supposedly making delicious vegan ice cream, though, so I decided to give it one more chance.

The recipes in Vegan Diner call for xanthan gum, which you can buy in a tiny bag that costs $9 at Whole Foods.  This is another reason I'd been avoiding homemade ice cream.  But finally I bit the bullet and picked some up - it's supposed to help with the creaminess factor, which can be difficult to achieve with vegan ice cream. Once I got it home I figured out that there's enough xanthan gum in the package for 480 batches of ice cream - you only need 1/4 tsp per batch.  So that will probably last a while.

Anyway.  The first kind I made was the Vegan Diner recipe for peanut butter chocolate chunk ice cream.  And then I completely freaked out because it was AWESOME.

Creamy and rich and so, so delicious.  You would never know it was vegan, which is a major goal of my ice cream quest.

The next kind I made was Vegan Diner's vanilla.  Except not, because there were some issues.  She calls for full fat coconut milk and I got it all ready to go and discovered I only had lowfat.  So I substituted soy creamer, but I didn't have quite enough soy creamer and had to use extra soy milk to make up the difference.  Also, I forgot to add the xanthan gum.  I did mix in some cherries and it was pretty good the first day, but once it froze up it was icy and not worth finishing.  Fail!

I learned my lesson, though, about playing around with ice cream recipes before I actually know what I'm doing.

The next recipe I tried was the Mean Green Pistachio from Hannah Kaminsky's book Vegan Desserts (which is beautiful and full of amazing things, by the way).

This one was excellent.  It's pistachios ground into butter, an avocado for greenness and creaminess, tofu, soy milk, agave, vanilla... maybe some other things I forgot.  She didn't call for xanthan gum but I put some in anyway - what else am I going to do with it?

So far the common theme in the two we've really liked have been the addition of nut butters (and the avocado in the pistachio one), which I think have helped to keep it creamy.  I'm going to try a different recipe soon that is more basic - I want a good vanilla! - so we'll see how that goes.

Tofu & Spinach Curry

Oh look, it's another crock pot Indian curry!  This is called "Butter Chick'n" in The Vegan Slow Cooker but I am not calling it that because 1. no butter and 2. no chicken.  Or chick'n.  It just has tofu.

So, that said, it does have Earth Balance and soy milk stirred in at the end to give it some creaminess and we both agreed it's the best crock pot curry yet (and I think it's the fourth one I've made from the book).  I did add spinach so I wouldn't have to cook a green vegetable on the side, and I kind of can't imagine it without - I think it would be kind of wimpy with just the tofu and tomatoes.  But maybe most people make more than one dish for most meals instead of eating a big bowl full of one thing like we normally do.

Black Bean & Sweet Potato Salad

Every single time I decide to make something with sweet potatoes I think to myself, "ugh, this isn't going to be good," and then every time I like it.  I don't know what my deal is!  I'm prejudiced against sweet potatoes, clearly.  But I'm also looking for summery things I can make that are hearty but not heavy, so I decided to try this recipe from Bean by Bean.

It is sweet potatoes, black beans, green beans, and scallions in a cilantro-honey vinaigrette (here is where I admit I didn't even care about bees when I was otherwise completely vegan).  The dressing called for one cup (!) of olive oil, but fat content issues aside, I'm not made of money over here.  I used 1/4 cup and replaced the rest with water and it seemed fine to me.

So yeah, this was great.  We ate it alongside BBQ soy curls sandwiches and it was perfect for a hot summer day.

Esme's Sauce

If you google "esme's sauce" you get tons of hits - this concoction was invented by someone on the Post Punk Kitchen message boards at some point before my time there, and has become kind of famous in vegan circles.  Here's the recipe.  I think it's so popular because it's really easy and is composed of equal parts of ingredients that pretty much everyone (every vegan, anyway) has in the house at any given time.

I replaced the oil with water, since I figured the tahini was already providing a good amount of fat, and used the mustard option plus one tablespoon of nutritional yeast for good measure.  We had it on rotini with half a package of crumbled tempeh and a lot of kale.

It took about 25 minutes start to finish, even including steaming the kale and crumbling and steaming the tempeh, so definitely good for a weeknight dinner.  It has a weird unexpectedly tangy flavor but we really liked it. Ben claimed he could taste the nutritional yeast and that I should leave it out next time, so I GUESS I will do that because I'm so nice.

Cast-Iron Stirfry with Avocado, Basil, and Peanuts

I thought this recipe from the PPK website sounded interesting because it added avocado, basil, and chopped peanuts to what otherwise was a pretty standard tofu and vegetable stirfry.  I didn't do all the separate cooking steps she did - I just fried the tofu first and then threw everything else in there at once and it turned out fine.

The addition of the avocado in particular made this incredible - way better than I expected (and I can especially verify its spectacularness because we ate stirfry leftovers the next day without the avocado & basil and it was kind of blah).  Super excited about using this idea in future stirfries.

New York!

Last year my mom and sister and I took a trip to New Orleans to celebrate my mom's 60th birthday, and almost immediately decided we needed to make a mini-vacation become an annual tradition.  This year we decided to go to New York to see The Book of Mormon, and invited my mother-in-law along as well.

Mom & Hillary and I all arrived around the same time on Friday morning, shared a cab into the city, and immediately hit the nearest sushi restaurant.  Mom got this amazing variety of items for $14:

and Hillary and I got sushi rolls - hers with fish, mine all vegetarian.

It was great.  My favorite thing about going out for sushi is you can stuff yourself virtually as much as you like without getting too out of control calorie-wise. Which was especially good considering we had four days of NYC food coming up.

Our hotel was on 8th Avenue between the Theatre District and Hell's Kitchen, a very central location for everything we wanted to see, and right around the corner from the Book of Mormon's theater.  After lunch we walked over to Times Square and then up to Central Park.  The weather was absolutely perfect all weekend long, sunny and in the low 70s, which was really lucky as the day after we left it climbed into the humid 90s.

Hillary made us go to the M&M store.  There is a LOT of M&M-related merchandise available, in case you were wondering.

Times Square is not my favorite.  It was a relief to walk up to the park.  

Naturally after all that walking we were in need of some mid-afternoon sustenance.  Our hotel had a really great French-inspired bistro next door where we ate breakfast every day and also a fair amount of dessert.  This is my peanut butter topped brownie a la mode.  Just what you need for a 5:00 p.m. snack.

Mom's profiteroles.

Hillary's truffle cake.

Susan arrived just before dinner time and we walked over to Queen of Sheba, an Ethiopian place Ben and I had meant to try when we were in the city a couple of years ago.  I love Ethiopian food, and it was good, but I was kind of relieved that it wasn't any better than the delicious food to be had at our weird little Ethiopian place in Raleigh.  That means I've been eating the real stuff here!

Vegetarian sampler:

Susan with her Stella:

After dinner Susan and I walked up through Times Square and to the Plaza to see the flowers in the lobby.  Times Square sure is something.

The next morning we set out for Brooklyn to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.  I had never been to Brooklyn before!  Here is the only part of it I saw, a park just outside the subway station from Manhattan.

The walk across the Bridge is gorgeous, and there were tons of people doing the same thing we were.  I was fascinated by the people trying to bike across - I would kill someone for sure.

We walked over to the Ground Zero area and tried to figure out if we could see the Memorial without getting a ticket and waiting in line, but it didn't seem promising.  The progress they have made on the new building is amazing - when Ben and I were there just two years ago you couldn't even see it over the construction fence.

We walked up Greenwich all the way to the Village and had lunch at Dean's.

Delicious pizza.

We walked along the High Line all the way back to midtown, which for some reason I did not take pictures of.  The High Line is a really great idea but it was completely packed with people - I guess that's what you get when it's mid-June and only 70 degrees.  After finally arriving at the hotel, we collapsed for a while before heading out to Candle 79 for dinner.  I was VERY excited about dinner at Candle 79, considered one of the best vegan restaurants in the country.  Ben and I had brunch there but I really wanted to try a real meal, and it totally lived up!  Here are some kind of crappy pictures.

The amuse bouche was something with mushrooms and wild rice and fennel.

We ordered a guacamole timbale for an appetizer.

And Hillary and I split the stuffed avocado salad.

Mom & Hillary split the raw lasagna for their entree.

Susan got the chickpea cake:

And I ordered the special entree, which I can't really remember the details of except that it had rice and beans and avocado and chard and seitan and pesto and it was really really good.

After that we walked over to Two Little Red Hens and got cupcakes for dessert.  Successful New York day!

Sunday was the day of the play, so we stuck mostly to our midtown neighborhood and saw some sights.  Times Square again!

Rockefeller Center:

Grand Central Terminal:

St Patrick's Cathedral, which was kind of weird because it was Sunday morning and there were priests around and people sitting in the pews and stuff, but they still let people wander around.

We saw Ben Stiller shooting a movie on the street.  Can you spot him??  We were super uncool and stood and stared at him for a good five minutes.  He's really little.

And then we went to see The Book of Mormon, which was the main reason for the whole trip in the first place.

Now, I am not a musicals person at all but it was great and I think maybe even Ben would like it, provided I could somehow trick him into going and seeing it.  Hillary went to get a glass of wine and they gave her this giant glass and charged her $20.

We had some time to kill before dinner so we went back to the hotel and Hillary cut Mom's hair for some reason.  She did a pretty good job!

Looks like a professional!

We went to dinner at Becco, which a coworker of mine had recommended, but somehow I failed to take pictures!  It was almost comedic how they kept bringing us more and more food.  It was the one meal of the trip that I felt was truly out of control - that didn't stop us from getting some dessert at Europan on the way back to the hotel, though.  How could you resist that dessert case??  I almost sent Ben a picture of this while we were there but I felt too guilty.

The next morning Susan left early and the rest of us were pretty worn out.  We ended up sticking around the hotel until almost noon, then doing a little shopping and eating a quick lunch at the Shake Shack (insane. so good.) and then took a cab to the airport.

The end!  Another successful Annual McGinley (+ McClure) Girls Weekend.

Raw Zucchini Salad + Noodles

Summer is suddenly upon us, and I don't feel like eating hot foods.  I also spent the weekend eating the entire city of New York, so plenty of vegetables are on the schedule for this week.

Last night I made a version of this recipe for a raw zucchini & asparagus ribbon salad.  We made it once at my sister's house and discovered that ribboning asparagus is a horrible pastime, so I skipped that and just chopped it up this time.  I also made a simple tahini-miso sauce (1/4 cup of each, plus a clove of garlic and 1/2 cup water) in lieu of the more complicated Creamy Miso Garlic sauce she recommends.  And I added some cold spaghetti noodles to bulk it up.

It was perfect!  A great light summer dinner.

Stay tuned for NY pictures later tonight.