weekend food and my vegan weight gain

As I sit here huddled in front of a space heater drinking a huge mug of hot tea, I must finally acknowledge that winter has come to my town.  It snowed today.  Snow!  The thing about winter is this:  I combat cold weather with heavy meals.  And It's starting to show.  Michael calls this my winterfat.  It's time for me to admit to myself though, that I've gained 10 pounds in the past 6 months and most of it has been since October.  Bummer!  My fattypants are now just 'pants'.  Which honestly, it doesn't look that bad.  But I don't have any work fattypants and I can't afford to buy new ones.  So I think it's time for me to tone down on my winter eating, haha...  Seriously, guys, I popped a button on Saturday.  I take this as a sign.  

As such, I am trying to eat a little lighter.  The meals you are about to see are the end of my overindulgence.  Yeah, I'm still probably going to be cooking warm winter meals, but my goal is to eat smaller portions of the heavy stuff and fill up on veggies.  Plus, I really have to start exercising, even though I hate it.  Great!  Please gimme some love on this front, because I need motivation.  Pronto.  I mean, I'm weighing more now than I have in about 3 years, and I really just wanna tone up.  And fit into my pants again.  What are exercises that you guys do at your houses (sans equipment) to stay in shape?  There is a gym in my office building, which I will use about 3 times a week, but what else can I do at home?  Is there an exercise video that you swear by?  One that is sort of fun and will trick me into wanting to exercise?  Just curious.  

Anyway, this being a food blog and all, you probably wanna see some food.  Here you are:

First up is some biscotti that Michael made last week:

cookies...one thing i'm not going to be eating for awhile

They were so good.  I didn't help him at all, either.  'Cause I'm a jerk like that.  No really, I get really pushy in the kitchen sometimes, and this was one of those days, so I just left him to it, and he did a wonderful job.  The recipe is from Vcon, but I really can't be bothered to look it up right now.  It's supposed to have macadamia nuts in it, but he put almonds in there instead, which was a wise (and less expensive) choice.  Chocolate + almonds = bliss, yes?  Especially lovely when dipped in a cup of coffee.  

Next is evidence that I do eat salad:

i love veggies.

Except that this was totally cancelled out by eating an excessive amount of croissantdogs.  Bah.

And then!  I got a request last week for a curry!  I haven't made a curry since before October, because we were a little burned out on them.  This one has loads of spinach, carrots, peas, and tofu.  Oh, and coconut  milk.  Foiled again!

Served with brown basmati rice:

creamy yummy yum yum yum

Saturday I cooked dinner for my 2 brothers and their families.  Before I show you the food, let me show you what was on the fridge at Jimmy's (my oldest brother) house.

broc!  hilarious!

No, but the truly crazy thing is that my nephew, Charlie, drew the picture on the left on Election Day (Nov 4, as if you didn't remember).  The photo on the left was in the paper on November 15.  What!  My nephew is psychic!  Cool.

So anyway, this is what I made.  It's the casserole with a gross name that tastes totally delicious.

i made way too much food.

I don't know why I made so much, but Michael and I ended up taking almost an entire casserole dish of the stuff home with us, which we ate.  Believe me, this stuff never goes to waste.  And it was a hit, I think!  My oldest brother seemed a little skeptical about the 'brown bits' and the 'white stuff', and weirded out by the amount of soy in the thing, but nobody could deny how totally rad it tasted.  I don't know if any of the kids ate it.  They were in a separate room with open access to a trash can, so it's anybody's guess.  So...all in all, success!

My sisters-in-law contributed some loverly bread rolls and a totally rockin' salad with homemade dressing.  Here it is all plated up.

you'd think our family was italian, no?

Look at my brother's supercool beer glasses.  That's his name, Jimmy.  Awesome!

Last night, I found a stuffing recipe.  We based a meal around it.  The rest of the meal was great!  The stuffing kind of sucked.  But I admit to that being my fault since I added excessive amounts of fresh sage to it.  Bad idea!  Oh, also, it was mushy.  I like a dry stuffing.  So at least I know what not to do on Thanksgiving.  Practice makes perfect.  The veg with dinner was yummy though.  We found baby artichokes on sale at the store on Friday ($1.49 for a HUGE package of them, whaaaat?).  These were fun and tasty, but the instructions on the package as to how to prepare them freaked me out.  It stopped calling them 'baby artichokes' and just started calling them 'babies'.  Weird!

vegtastic

Sauteed up with some onions, spinach, grape tomatoes, and white wine.  So good.  We were also feeling in the mood for tempeh.  I didn't feel like inventing a marinade, so I used the basic broiled tofu recipe from Vcon, but used tempeh (boiled first) instead.  It was seriously good.  It's amazing to me what soy sauce, garlic, and lemon juice can do to something.  So easy!  So good!  So...yeah!

sunday dinners are the best

So now I'm off to reheat my tea (it goes from boiling to ice cold in 10 minutes in my apartment) and think of what I can eat for dinner that isn't going to make me any fatter.  I really want some lentils.  And squash.  Those are ok, right?  Jeez.  Now that I actually cook things from scratch, I have no concept of how much fat and calories are in things anymore.  I used to know the calories/fat of everything in my cupboard when I was omni.  Not that that was healthy either, you know.  I'm just saying...sometimes I miss knowing what the hell I'm eating, dietary info-wise.  And no, I'm not going to spend an hour on some website feeding in every ingredient of a recipe to find out the nutrition breakdown.  I'm just gonna use my common sense, ok?  Word.