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.

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.

Pasta de la Yummysogoodfreakingawesome

For starters, why is it still snowing in Seattle?!?!? Snow! I can see April from here and we're still putting up with snow?!?

Ah, that feels better. Moving on now.

Sadly, there are no pictures of what I am about to describe for you. I had my shot all lined up, the food looked beautiful and was posing in just the most tempting of ways. I turned on the camera, pushed the preview button... aaaaaaand the camera shut itself off because the batteries were dead. It was kind of an accelerated metaphor of my dating life, come to think of it.

I adapted this recipe from this one here on recipezaar. You will note there are no measurements because I think the ingredients are all things that people know how much they like or don't like of them. You don't like a lot of Kalamatas? Don't use a lot. You wish you could take baths in sun-dried tomatoes while eating sun-dried tomatoes and reading about sun-dried tomatoes until you fall asleep to dream about sun-dried tomatoes? Then by all means, put as much as you like in the pot. Here we go.

Kalamata olives, sliced in half
Sun-Dried Tomatoes, packed in oil
Pesto (I used cilantro pesto)
Karam's Garlic Tahini Sauce (if you can find it, if you cannot, oh how I pity you. you can just use crushed garlic though.)
Whole Wheat Pasta (I used Trader Joe's Multigrain with Flax because I figured it was important to pretend there was some health benefit to this recipe)
Frozen peas (see note about pasta)

Okay, cook your pasta and drain it. Put it back in the pot with maybe a little olive oil. You will especially want the olive oil if you are using leftover pasta like I did the second time I made this, in which case heat the olive oil up a little bit first. Get the frozen peas heating up separately. Add in everything else up there on that list, except the peas. Mix it around until it gets hot. Save the peas for last so they won't get squished. Shove it in your face!

Possible garnishes:
Nutritional yeast
Vegan parmesean
Pine nuts (oh, that would be so good! I wish I'd thought of that at the time)
Gomasio (which is quite good)

Now I would like to talk very briefly about food and guilt. When I was about to serve myself the pasta I consciously looked at it and thought, "I will be good, and not eat too much of this." Two seconds later I thought, "No that ain't right." Why do we think of ourselves as being "good" with food when we aren't eating it? Food is life, food brings people together, food has history and connects us to our ancestors. Food heals, the eating and the preparation. Food shows that you care when you cook for someone else. What do people do after someone dies? They bring food. It makes me so sad what's been done to the reputation of food. Why can't we think "I am going to be good to myself, and eat three whole pancakes, because they make my tummy very happy when I eat them." I'm not talking about emotional eating, or certainly about eating disorders. Those are very serious matters that aren't even about food. Food itself is never ever the enemy, and we must stop thinking of it as such. Food loves us and wants us to be happy. And that is all I have to say about that.

Roasted Tomato Cream Sauce

splendid little roasted tomatoes and garlic

I had most of a carton of "splendid little" tomatoes from Trader Joe's that were verging on the wrong side of splendid. Still perfectly good, but not as firm as when they first came home. So I decided to roast them. I meant to do it last night, but first I had to clean my oven to get rid of all the spillover from Leek & Bean Cassoulet that kept smoking whenever I turned my oven on. After cleaning it I had to just let it run hot for an hour and call my mom in a panic when I saw what looked like smoke and smelled what smelled like a terrible odor (turns out that's normal, and my mom taught me a great trick of putting a bowl of water with baking soda in the hot oven to help absorb the odor. Then my phone died and I hung up on her. Oops.) THEN I had to go to bed. When I got home I had to take the oven racks out and put them in the right way (I had them backwards). It was like my own personal version of "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie."

That said, I have finally managed to make my roasted tomato cream sauce, inspired by the Cappellini in Fresh Tomato Cream Sauce from Vegan Yum Yum. Her recipe is great for when you have nice fresh tomatoes. I think mine is more for when I've neglected mine just a tiny bit.

This is the recipe as I made it, I'll talk more about what I would change at the end, and I'll probably re-post this when I get a final version worked out. But if you're one of the 3 people who reads this, maybe you'll make it and tell me what you think?

Roasted Tomato Cream Sauce

• 1/2 pound little tomatoes
• 3-4 cloves garlic
• olive oil
• salt
• 1/2 tsp dried basil
• 1/4 tsp dried oregano
• 2 small (or 1 large) sprig of thyme
• 2 tbsp (or just big spoonfuls) Tofutti cream cheese

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a small baking pan, combine tomatoes and garlic cloves and toss with olive oil just to cover. Sprinkle with salt and roast for 30 minutes (check them after 20, especially if your tomatoes are very small). You want the tomatoes to get a little color on the tops and they should burst open, releasing their liquid and looking all wrinkly like the picture above. It doesn't sound so pretty but it's a truly beautiful thing to behold (and smell).
Remove from oven and allow the tomatoes and garlic to cool while you get out your food processor or blender and put the herbs and cream cheese in it.

Add the cooled tomatoes and garlic (with all the liquid) to the herbs and cheese. Process until smooth*.

Serve over pasta or polenta and garnish with pine nuts, if you like.


*This makes a very little amount when all is said and done. My 6-cup food processor was too big for the job so the sauce was all up on the sides of the bowl where the blade couldn't get to it.

splendid tomato sauce, being splendid

As for things I would change, mostly it's the amount of tomatoes. I'd keep the garlic the same but perhaps use an whole pound (maybe more?). I'm not totally certain what I have here is 1/2 pound but it was approximately that. I might also thin it out with some soymilk to make it creamier. The sauce as I made it was a bit acidic, soymilk might help cut that. I might also try it without the thyme.

My First Food Processor

I pine for various kitchen implements. My amazon.com wishlist is full of muffin tins, hand mixers, gadgets, a Magic Bullet, cookbooks...is this a fetish? One thing that was on my list for a long time was a food processor. I live in a small apartment with a small apartment on a small budget, so I knew that whatever I ended up buying would have to be non-clunky and last for awhile. After reading reviews and weighing my options I went with the Hamilton Beach 6 cup food processor. It sat on my wish list for months and months while I dreamt of a time and place where my food processor and I could live in harmony.

I spoke recently of an impending move, but circumstances prevailed that have allowed me to stay in my current apartment. It is small, but it's my home and has great sentimental value for me still. Before living here I lived with over 10 different people in the space of three years, this place is mine and mine alone...mine and my cat's...and my kitchen stuff...where was I going with this? Oh yeah! So since I am staying, yet had gone through the effort of relieving my space of years upon years worth of things I no longer needed, I have a lot of open space in my hall closet just begging to be filled with kitchen things.

Enter the food processor. I'd never actually used one. I grew up with my mom's Proctor Silex (it had it's own bright yellow quilted cozy, adorables) but I was always irrationally afraid of it. But I like hummus, and I like pesto, so it was time to get over it and keep track of my fingers at all times. The me-friendly thing about this one is that it won't turn on if the cover and the bowl are not locked on where nothing can hurt me. Bonus!


The other night I made a roasted red pepper hummus from La Dolce Vegan! It's very delicious but opted not to be photographed.

Tonight I made the roasted garlic pesto and gnocchi from Everyday Dish after watching the webisode yesterday.

I am not entirely sure I did this right. I added the right amount of oil and basil, and it came out looking mostly like ground pine nuts with some basil thrown in, so I chose to add in 2 more oz of basil which made it much greener, I think it could have used more oil but I ran all out, so here is how it turned out eventually. There are some whole pine nuts at the bottom, I'm not sure if that would have been cured with more oil or not. It didn't bother me so much because I was planning to use pine nuts as garnish anyway.

The moisture on the gnocchi really helped spread it out. Even if the texture wasn't what I expected, the flavor was simply amazing! The roasted garlic with the fresh basil and the goodness, exquisite. But then I thought to myself, "How good would this be if you put some Karam's Garlic Tahini Sauce in it?" The answer to that question is, "It is fucking right on hell yeah good!" How could it not be, though? One of the ingredients in the sauce is love (no joke, it's on the label.)

look at that. you want it, it knows you do