Vegan by Valerie

Kitchen Failures

You know the expression, you’re either lucky at gambling or lucky in love…. just not both?

Well, when it comes down to it, this week I mainly wanted to have a good first week back at work.  Unfortunately, I think all of my luck was in the professional domain as I had more than one flop in the kitchen.

Flop #1: I had high hopes of making pineapple pancakes with a tropical topping….the topping turned out great, but the pancakes need some work.  They turned out dense and kinda weird!

Flop #2: I thought I would get all Gena on y’all and would make some raw cauliflower rice for sushi.  I had everything planned out… I had sliced and marinated the portabellos, had started to cut up the avocados….

…when I made the rookie-raw-sushi-making mistake of overblending the cauliflower.  I was too lazy to finely chop the cauliflower into tiny florets before throwing it into the food processor to pulse, and instead, I thought I would just pulse pulse pulse until the cauliflower resembled rice.

As you can imagine, I ended up with cauliflower paste… ok that sounds ridiculously unappealing, so let’s call it cauliflower mash.

To salvage the mash, I mixed it with some Daiya cheese (my savior), topped it with some more Daiya and some of my favorite vegan cheese topping (1/2 c. walnuts, 1/4 c. nutritional yeast, 1/2 tsp. salt, ground up together in a food processor), and baked at 350 degrees until the cheesy crust began to get brown.

The moral of the story?  Daiya makes everything more palatable… everything! I’m quite certain I would eat cardboard covered in the stuff.

Last night I got home later than usual and since I was unusually sore from yoga class and wanted to rest up my legs for Saturday’s 18 miler, I skipped the gym. This is something I rarely do and it was difficult to resist the magnetic pull that my gym holds over me, but I’m glad I was able to hold my ground!

I threw together a ridiculously easy veggie fajita dish and had a make-your-own-toppings bar complete with sauteed mushrooms/green onions/broccoli, homemade guac (the best part), salsa, Daiya cheddar, vegan sour cream, and black beans.

It was a very omnivore-friendly meal… aka, Mike was happy!

For dessert, I wanted to make something that met two criteria:

1) I had mass amounts of fruit that I needed to use up before it went bad

2) I wanted to experiment with the box of Uncle Sam’s cereal that the lovely Annelies at Attune foods sent me to review.  Check out the fiber stats!

Mike has been enjoying this cereal straight outta the box for weeks, but I wanted to try my hand at turning it into a baked good.

No real recipe here, I just sliced up 6 peaches (I used half peaches and nectarines) and arranged them 13×9″ pan.  Then, I combined 1 1/2 c. almond butter, 1/2 c. maple syrup, and 1/2 c. almond milk in my mini food processor until combined.  Next, pour that into a bowl with 1 1/2 c. Uncle Sam’s cereal, 1 c. oats, and 2 tsp. cinnamon.  Add more almond milk if the mixture seems too thick.  Bake at 350 degrees for 25-20 minutes, or until the cereal crust become golden brown.

Not the prettiest picture, but it tasted good! Growing up my dad used to make a lot of fruit cobblers, served warm and topped with vanilla ice cream. My version is much healthier, but it was lacking in the ice cream department

On a completely unrelated note, I was horrified to see the news clip of this two year old Indonesian boy smoking a cigarette.  He began smoking at 18 months and smokes up to 40 cigarettes a day!!

His parents say that he is “addicted” but that they don’t have a problem with it.

Maybe it’s the social worker in me (unfortunately making child abuse hotline calls is part of my job), but this outraged me.

I know many people that think it’s funny to give their young children sips of alcohol or to hold beer bottles to their child’s mouth.  Here is a reason why that behavior may not be the best idea!

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I don’t want to end this post on a negative note so… tell me what you are most looking forward to this weekend!

I’m actually kind of looking forward to tomorrow’s 18 miler… the weather should be amazing… and the rest of my weekend will be spent visiting family

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