i like food, food tastes good

Get outta my way or I'll eat you!  Oh wait, no, that's a Descendents song.  I'm not gonna eat you, I promise, come back!  I'm vegan for goodness sakes.

Speaking of food though, here's some I've eaten in the past couple of days:

tofu and veggie stirfry w/soba noodles

I made this Monday night because we had some sugar snap peas and baby bok choy hanging about that really needed using up.  I made the sauce up all on my own, and hello was that stuff spicy.  Probably half of the sauce ingredients were sriracha and garlic sriracha.  It was good though.  However, I didn't remember until the moment I finished making the whole thing that we were going to have Japanese food with my brother and his fam the next night.  Oh well, they were entirely different, and both were awesome (in my humble opinion).  As for the rest of my sauce, there was ginger and garlic and sesame oil and rice vinegar and rice wine and tamari.  A bit of a hodgepodge, but that's how I roll.  No pics of the food from Hibachi.  Go find Michael's birthday post and look at that food, because we can only get one thing when we go there, which is really tasty, but not worth photographing every single time.

Did I say Michael?  Yeah, he made some good stuffs this week too.  First up:

chili on the fly

I swear he made this in 15 minutes from start to finish.  I texted at 11:40 to ask what was up for lunch and he says he's just getting out of bed (oh great, I'm thinking).  But by the time I got home at like 12:09, this shit was finished!  How?  Who knows.   He may be magical.  Anyway, I put a bunch of scallions and nutritional yeast on mine.  And it was so wonderful.  

The reason I say he may be magic is right here, really:

what!?

Yeah.  I was having a bad day at work yesterday and then I come home to this.  Ooey gooey peanut buttery, caramely, chocolatey, sweet and salty goodness.  I don't know exactly what recipe he based this off of, but it came from VegWeb and when I find out, you shall know.  But I mean, just look at it.  The heart?  The chocolate?  The wonderfulness of a sugaryawesome treat after a terrible (yet again) day at work?  This boy is priceless.  

Since he was so nice, I made him BBQ tofu for din.

bbq shmarbeeque, i just wanted brussels sprouts and polenta

The tofu was tasty, indeed (it's just a bottled sauce that got doctored up by Michael, M.D.), but the brussels sprouts and polenta were stellar.  Just steamed sprouts with EB and seasoned salt.  The polenta got worked on a bit, though.  I wanted to do soft polenta because there is no other comfort in this world so great as soft polenta.  Of course, today it was just regular polenta because it was set up, which was also fine.  I usually do the soft poppy seed polenta from Vcon, but didn't.  I made it with veggie broth, a little thyme, onion powder, smoked paprika, and some (really awesome) chili powder.  The flavor was subtle, but definitely had a southwestern feel to it, which complemented the bbq tofu nicely.  What was really great was putting some tofu on the fork, spearing a sprout, then sopping up some polenta with the whole mess.  Does anyone else do this?  When I was a kid, I was insane about keeping my food separate and only eating one item on my plate at a time before moving on to the next (saving the best for last, of course).  I still do this sometimes, but I've learned that mushing things together can be great too.  

In other news, apparently there was a squirrel hanging out on the kitchen windowsill today.

found this picture on my camera

Michael gets to have so much fun while I'm at work all day.  Darnit.  I wanna hang out with squirrels.  Of course, I'm home now and having a blast (ha) while he's at work, so I guess it works out.  Speaking of which...

I worked out today.  Can you believe it?  I can't.  I don't know where I found the willpower.  It sucked, but I'm glad I did it.  30 minutes on the elliptical (at level one, go me) during which I thought that surely I would die, and really almost for real thought I was going to during the last 5 minutes, but I hung in there.  Then I did like 20 crunches and 10 leg lifts and looked at some weights and decided I wasn't ready for that just yet.  Anyway, it's a start.  I'm counteracting this accomplishment by noshing on carrot sticks and hummus.  Which ordinarily I wouldn't care about, but I got the hummus from the deli and I can just TELL that there's a shitload of tahini in it, which makes it creamy and tasty but also way fattier than I usually make mine at home.  Oh well, there was only less that 1/4 cup left in the container anyway.  It won't kill me.

One last thing:  When buying gifts for people on etsy, the hardest thing about it is repackaging everything in the lovely wrappings that they came in after you had to sneak a look.  I'm getting pretty good at it actually.  I recommend, if you go this route, to invest in a razor (for cutting without messy scissoring) and some scotch tape (for flawlessly covering up your cutting).  Oh, and work on your ribbon tieing skills.