Sunday, April 13, 2008

Canadians!

My friend Tillie the Canadian (guess where she's from!) came to visit for the weekend. She has Celiac, and I am vegan, but we found a bounty of yummy food to share and enjoy. For breakfasts we enjoyed rice cakes with peanut butter, banana, and cashews. It was messy and yummy.

Tillie (technically only half Canadian)

Saturday we went to the farmer's market in the university district. I often find other FM's in Seattle to be mostly full of cheese (seriously), but the U-dist one was full of wonderful delights. I tried my first Brussels sprout, grown by a very impassioned man (they must be grown with frost!!! he says), and also my first taste of sorrel (which is divine). We bought salad mix, Brussels sprouts greens (which are purple!), and some sorrel. Pictured below, amongst my Regular Crap, is two bottles of locally made hard cider (the regular was for me, but after serving it to Tillie's friends she gave me her berry one. Score!), 1 package Southwestern flavored hazelnuts, the aforementioned greens and salad, some lovely sunflower seed bread, walnut oil, 1 jar tequila caramel (Tillie's, not vegan), and 1 jar peach chipotle pepper jelly which I described to the vendor as "it kicked me in the mouth, but it didn't knock me down, I like that." My camera skills are off, I just thought I should admit it. It's a Known Issue.

Farmer's Market Yummy Goods

Since we were nearby, we made a trip to Sidecar for Pig's Peace, a volunteer-run all vegan store benefitting Pig's Peace animal sanctuary. Picked up some aseptic tofu for the pantry, herb Tofutti, spicy Sunrice tofu (it's an amazing local company, the tofu is like crack), Merry Hempster tattoo balm, Tings (Tillie's), and Jerquee (Tillie's), best of all because I didn't think they were carried at Sidecar are SOY CURLS! I've been wanting to try them out and thought I might have to wait until I make it to Portland again (which is the end of this month).

Nothing like vegan junk food after the Farmer's Market

Best of all, Tillie came to America equipped with a gift, vegan pate! It's consistency is more like a loaf than a spread. It's kind of crumbly and meaty-ish. This is the herb flavor and I think it'll be quite good on all sorts of things. In salads, sandwiches, toast with Tofutti, maybe on pasta? Best of all she abused her mother's connections to get it, that's what I like in my gifts.

Plus the box is pretty


Vegan Pate in the package. Enjoy the three sunflower seeds as decoration.

It was really wonderful having Tillie in town and getting to share all of this wonderful food with her, we did things besides eating, but I believe good food is what links other memories together. Food is the strongest links in the memory chain and gives the sum memory of a life structure. So this weekend will be treasured for years to come, of that I'm sure.

PLUS! Tillie has promised to send her vegan and gluten-free recipe for "Butter Chicken" along, so that will be posted soon.

Sunday, April 6, 2008

Everything Is Better As A Burrito

All the crap in the background makes you feel like you're right in my kitchen, am I right?

Sweet potatoes and me, what can I say? We've long found each other attractive, flirted at parties, talked for long hours but always holding back, never taking that leap. We'd been...hurt before. That old story, girl meets potato (my cat is also named Potato, but I am not speaking of her, I am speaking of potatoes), girl enjoys potato's distinctive and inviting orangey hue. Girl says "Hey, come back to my place, have a beer." Followed by disaster. Burned. Underdone. Sometimes both. And then the next time they meet, there's that uncomfortable silence, where saying "Hey, don't worry about it, it happens sometimes," only serves to make thing infinitely worse than before. Awkward.

But this time, this time the stars aligned and we gripped each other's sweaty palms as we ran to the altar of love and declared, "Okay love! I am your bitch! Do as you will!"

I'm told sometimes that maybe I should get out more. Mostly I'm told it by myself.

Anywhoozle, I'd been meaning to make this Vegetarian Times recipe that LindyLoo posted ages and ages ago, but never got around to it, I was too fearful of the sweet potato. This is all long gone now, I'm happy to say.

I agree with her sentiments about the peanut sauce. I'm personally a huge fan of peanut sauce, I like it a little bit on the spicy side. One of my favorite things to eat is cold leftover Pad Thai, heavy on the peanut sauce. Actually, Things That Were Hot But Aren't Anymore is a favorite genre of food, if you will. It's not the same as cold food, it's completely different. Right, so this peanut sauce I felt could have used more oomph, but I agree it was better when considered as part of the whole composition of the dish. It found it's peanutty niche but I would still have added some cayenne or more garlic or something. Something to make the sauce stand up and say "Listen here! I am about to rock you! Prepare to be rocked!" I have fonder memories of the dessert peanut sauce I put over some banana the other night, and that was just peanut butter, hot water, agave nectar, and a pinch of salt.

Two more things. 1) I am pretty sure I used enormous sweet potatoes instead of medium, because they took forever to cook, and if I have 2 servings then this recipe was created by a giant. Hagrid? 2) I couldn't find roasted, salted peanuts in the bulk bins, so I went with cashews which I like better anyway.

The recipe is here. I always feel weird copying and pasting other people's recipes, or recipes they took the time to copy from somewhere else. I'll get over it maybe around post...umm...15? But this is only 13 so we ain't there yet.

So about the title. I firmly believe it. Anything and everything is better as some kind of burrito. And in my book, lettuce wraps count as burritos. Wraps count as burrito, they're just called wraps to sound healthier I think. This morning, since I have so much of it left, I stirred some of the leftover sweet potato mixture into my tofu scramble and it was delish! It was wrapped up into a breakfast burrito. Here it is cooling off a bit on it's magic tortilla carpet. In there you will also spy some green bell pepper.


For lunch, I put the leftover portion I couldn't finish from Friday into another tortilla and it was super great! I have trouble chewing cooked greens, I don't know why, but I think next time I make this I'll take the leftover spinach/garbanzo mixture and blend it. So it'll be like a burrito with two sauces, spinach and peanut. Yum Yum!

I have no picture of the burrito because I feel it is self-explanatory, but here is a picture of my cat, Potato. She is guarding my snack box full of origami papers.



And just to be completely random, here's a picture of my refrigerator from a couple of weeks ago (I think). There's beer AND wine, some stuff I don't recognize, I think that container full of orange/red stuff is hummus, and the big green thing in the middle is full of baked beans I did not like so good but were okay with the addition of soy hot dog. The big shiny thing behind it is a bag of lettuce.