Jananas

I was super stressed about school the other day. I came home from school and Jason had made me dinner – cashew crusted tofu with a roasted yellow/orange pepper coulis and a spinach/kale salad. It was amazing. Jason’s breading technique is getting better.

Even better was that he had been super sneaky and bought me a bouquet of flowers to cheer me up. They are the perfect spring colours and brighten up my mood on otherwise dreary, rainy days.

I was feeling a little more domestic last night. Jason and our friend Robot had biked out to the AMC at Yonge & Dundas to see Fanboys. I stayed home to prep for an essay. I thought I’d be nice and have fresh from the oven vegan chocolate chip cookies waiting for them. They were a big hit! I used fewer chocolate chips that I probably should have, because I ran out of vegan ones. I also added a pinch of cinnamon, which makes the cookie itself taste fantastic and coconut because its an old family tradition. The end result was scrumptious!

I haven’t updated in a bit. I was at a two day leadership seminar last week, that while very good also threw me for a bit of a loop. No pain, no gain right? My last semester of school is back in full swing and I’m trying to stay on top of readings and assignments, while balancing my health (so making time for yoga & the gym & kung fu).

This evening I had Creative Regional Strategies, with Richard Florida. I’m enjoying the class thus far and I’m glad that I didn’t listen to the “Please stop talking about Richard Florida” buttons and ignore it. I don’t get home until about 7pm and Jason being the amazing person that he is normally has dinner waiting for me. We had lots of broccoli and cauliflower in the fridge and nothing planned to do with it. Jason steamed all the veggies, added chick peas, and made some good cheezy sauce. He then baked it in the oven as a big casserole. He also attempted homemade naan (using vegan sour cream!), although it turned out a little more flat bread-ish than naan-ish. Regardless it was a good, filling dinner and I’m left feeling like a very lucky lady.

I’ve been trying to convince him that he needs to start blogging about the good food he cooks, but he’s not quite a fan of the idea (yet…). Tonight I told him that we would have an awesome blog – the knitter who isn’t vegan, and the vegan who doesn’t knit. Only problem is that I taught him to knit yesterday and I do eat a large amount of vegan food. I’m also trying to convince him to let me blog about the very first scarf he’s knitting, mostly because I think its super cute.

Jason made vegan french toast using some of the homemade bread from earlier this week. Surprisingly the bread was still fairly fresh, even if the ends (where the aluminum foil wouldn’t quite wrap around) were a tad stale. He had to triple the recipe to cover the same number of slices of bread, so apparently this was a really big loaf! In a twist, he used Vegenaise on the bread before covering it in a faux-egg mixture. It turned out amazingly. He also made tofu scramblers (his default meal of choice) with a hearty helping of veggies thrown in – spinach, red pepper, green & yellow zucchini. Soooo good.

For dessert, I iced the vanilla agave cupcakes I made earlier today. I made a rootbeer butter cream icing (so icing sugar, earth balance & rootbeer flavouring). The rootbeer flavouring was even a little bit fizzy, which was a neat touch. I was aiming for a rootbeer float-type effect which wasn’t achieved. I’m not 100% happy with the way it looks. I think it needs a light sprinkling of cocoa to fancy it up. Regardless they taste amazing!

I think that’s enough food related entries for one day.

My friend Robot dropped by this afternoon for some vegan baking goodness. We made vegan ginger cookies, rolled in big crystallized sugar so they have that nice crunch. I like mine a bit on the spicy size so I added a lot of ginger, cinnamon, black pepper and a touch of nutmeg. Robot made some oatmeal everything cookies (flax seed, raisins & pumpkin seeds). The batch in this photo was made with jam as a binder. The second batch, which is in the oven right now, was made with ground flax seed + water.

I also decided that I wanted to make some vegan fudge. I have a super simple recipe that Jason told me about a while back. Today I added some raisins right at the vegan end, as it reminds me of the Cadbury fruit  & nut bars when you also use crunchy peanut butter in the fudge.

Vegan Fudge Recipe: 1 cup maple syrup, 1 cup peanut butter, 1 cup cocoa / 1.5 cups vegan chocolate chips. Melt together. Pour into 8×8-ish pan lined with waxed/parchment paper (makes for easier removal & cleanup later on). Refridgerate to cool. Cut into squares! The end result isn’t quite as hard as typical fudge, but is every bit as delicious.

I also made some vanilla agave nectar cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. However, they need to sit for another hour or so before I can ice them so pictures will have to wait! Actually, I’ll probably take pictures of them after we’ve had dinner – which is going to be vegan french toast made with the homemade bread from earlier this week & tofu scramblers. Man we eat well.

I might have been procrastinating a little bit this evening. Text book readings will do that to a girl! We were out of bread and I had picked up some lovely whole wheat bread in the last few weeks, so I thought that I’d try my had at making some bread. We ended up with two loaves of whole wheat bread. We ate half of the first one with some homemade hummus (reference the picture of Jason eating his slice!). There’s something very satisfying about baking your own bread, plus the house smells fantastic.

P.S. the hardcore vegans will likely want to refer to the picture of vegan bread with a giant container of honey in the background as FAIL blog worthy. However, not everyone in the house is vegan (for that matter, neither am I!). It takes all kinds to make the world go round.