Reading Week!

Woot! I have this week off from school so I've been cooking a lot, slacking a lot, rekindling my love affair with the food network...I went to a movie last night, the Prestige...see it! It is so good! Anyways lets get straight to the food, since there is a lot of it.

First, I never got around to posting a picture of my laptop lunchbox...

In the thermos is La Dolce Vegan's macaroni and cheese with some soy hot dogs mixed in. Mmmm, and it was still hot at lunch time! I also had a regular salad with Annie's Goddess Dressing on the side, some grapes and a quick trailmix made from almonds, pumpkin seeds and Jordan's Morning Crisp oat clusters with dark chocolate chips. To drink, I got some Natura soymilk drink boxes from the grocery store. These are good! I enjoy the Natura brand. Campus also sells soymilk in the cafeteria now, but I don't like the So Good brand.

Also, from LDV, I made the green bean zasmashka (whatever that means) as a side for dinner. Its a really simple recipe of steamed green beans and a bread crumb mixture browned in margarine. Nothing too special, but it does go nicely with the beans.

I also made the creamy tropical fruit salad (LDV). Yum yum yum! I'll be making this again, with or without the sauce. The base combination of fruit is perfect for any fruit salad. The creamy sauce is really good too, with pineapple juice and mayonnaise. It gets better as it chills too. The salad has apples, grapes, kiwis, strawberries, bananas, mandarin orange and pecans.

Yesterday I made the mushroom sausage pizza, also from LDV. It required some prep work, but it was worth it. The sausage was seitan from LDV, cooked in a sausage flavoured broth. It was eerie how much my kitchen smelled like meat...I didn't know what to think! And it tasted meaty too, like sausage or pepperoni! I made a semi-whole wheat pizza crust, and the toppings were the sausage, red onion, shiitake mushrooms and shredded soy cheese. It was delicious...and so filling, I only had two slices ;)

Dessert was boston cream pie from Sinfully Vegan. A rare "almost miss" from this book. This was the most frustrating dessert I've ever made, but I managed to make it edible (no way was I wasting all that food!) First off, the recipe called for a ten inch springform pan, but I only had a 9 inch, and didn't want to buy a new one just for one recipe...so the recipe said that a 9 inch pie tin worked just as well. Yeah...right. There was soooo much batter, it would have all spilled out of the tin...so I used a cake pan. The cake rose so much, it split on the top. And the bottom wouldn't cook, despite the fact that the rest of the cake was already cooked. So by the time it was cooked, I had a crisp outer shell around the entire thing. I had to shave off the bottom of the cake...blah, I don't want to talk about it anymore. Despite the cake mishap, the tofu vanilla "pudding" filling is yummy and so is the chocolate glaze. All in all, its a good dessert, and I will be trying it again...with a springform pan. The author also has many variations on the traditional pie, so I'll probably try those instead.

I also made a few appetizers from La Dolce Vegan. Nana's pesto pin-wheel rolls and shook n' cook zucchini. The rolls turned out alright. I can't get vegan puff pastry here so I used frozen crescent roll dough, like the recipe said. But the dough kept coming apart, so I ended up mushing it all together and rolling it out. I didn't use enough pesto, that's my one complaint. I'll be making these again for sure, they make good snacks.

The zucchini was fabulous! I'll be experimenting to see if I can bake them, because the shook'n'cook breading (with cornflakes) tends to fall off the zucchini when you fry it. But it was soooo good. I ate a whole zucchini like this in one sitting. You can also use the breading for pickles, tofu, seitan, etc. The zucchini was dipped in Caesar dressing and then dipped in the breading. I also ate it with some extra Caesar dressing to dip in.


Ok, last one I promise (for now). The freedom french toast from LDV. The dip for this recipe is made from silken tofu, maple syrup, cinnamon, etc...The recipe was enough for four slices. I ate two for breakfast, and wow was it yummy. I topped it with some icing sugar and maple syrup, of course. I went to have the last two as a late night snack after work that day, but Billy stole them from me...he loves them! I'll definitely be adding this to my breakfast repertoire. He doesn't need to know there's tofu in it.

Alright, Billy wants to go shopping...sigh... hahaha