year end review

I cannot believe the year is over already.  It's been a whirlwind, folks.  I graduated from grad school, had an awesome show of my work, then got a terrible 9-5 job to pay the billz, went vegan, started blogging, had a miserably hot summer, a tragically short fall, and am well into a topsy turvy winter.  It was 70 degrees (F) on Saturday, and we were 3 hours north of where I actually live!  What!  Anyway, I know I've been gone for a little bit from the blogosphere, but I'm back now.  This post will probably suck because it's mostly just going to be a bunch of pictures of food from the past week or so, and they are all really bad pictures because it just got darker and darker in my kitchen until a week ago, so...  pardon that.  Also, I had a couple recipes in my head, but then never wrote them down, time passed, and I've forgotten what they were all about.  I plan on remaking them though, so look forward to yumminess in the future.  Without further ado....

Christmas food first.  

cookie craziness

The only thing crazy about these were how awesome they were.  My mom made these special family cookies vegan for me and they were WONDERFUL!  Upon her own admission, you cannot even tell the difference.  Score one for team vegan!  The gingerbread guys are crispy and buttery and spicy and just wonderful.  The candy cane cookies have just a hint of peppermint and are soft and delicate.  My mom rules hard.  Just wait.

makeshift pizza time

Well, when I went to my parents' house for Christmas the weekend before actual Christmas, we were having pizza for lunch.  Everyone else had a frozen number, and they got me this awesome shell that's all crackery crispy (yum yum), but...  Mom and Dad had no veggies in the fridge.  Apparently things had been busy around there (imagine that!) and veggies had been overlooked (seriously an anomaly in our house).  So I made this thing up.  It's kinda mexi-style.  There's tomato sauce, fire roasted tomatoes, black beans , some green peppers I found in the freezer, some chipotles in adobo (spicy!  spicy!), some garlic powder, cumin, and nutritional yeast.  It actually turned out fricking awesome, for a complete fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants type deal.

holy hello, cinnamon rolls!

So yeah, I told you my mom rules.  Those are cinnamon rolls and they are amazing.  They are identical to the cinnamon rolls of my youth.  In fact, sometimes I think that my mom just says that things are vegan to make me happy, that's how good she is at veganizing stuff.  Like, she's way better at it than I am.  Maybe someday I'll be as good a cook and baker as she is.  We also did some of the minicrustlesstofuquiches (what a mouthful that title is, jeez).  They had very few veggies in them and didn't photograph well, so no pic, but they were really delicious too.  I brought leftovers home to Michael and he asked me if they had cheese in them.  Um, no.  Duh.  But they were really rich, so I could understand his doubt.

perfect xmas brekkie

Just look at that.  It's crazy how awesome those were.

foodie gifts

Michael and I teamed up for presents for my brothers and their wives by making kahlua (me) and biscotti (Michael).  We got to eat the overdone (burned?) bits of biscotti and thought they tasted pretty rad.  The kahlua wasn't anything to scoff at, either.  It was especially good in some cocoa on xmas morning.

lasagna for xmas eve

My family has always had lasagna for Christmas eve dinner.  This year, even though the day was different, the food was not.  I made a sillyradtastic lasagna full of a tofu ricotta concoction that started with homemade tofu and then combined the two ricotta recipes from Vcon.  So...basil-y and cashew-y and very rich.  I put FYH mozzarella on about 1/3 of the dish so that if anyone else wanted to try it, they wouldn't have to eat vegan cheese.  We all know that that stuff is an acquired taste.  I like it, though.  All was very yummy.

For actual Christmas dinner, Michael and I got a tofurkey roast so that I wouldn't have to spend all day in the kitchen when I could be sitting on the couch drinking mimosas instead.  Still, we spent a nice bit of time on the side dishes and all.  Here she is nestled amongst loads of roasted veggies, including broccoli, beets, sweet potatoes, red potatoes, and carrots.

beets like to spread the love

The veggies were perfection, and the roast wasn't half bad either.  Best of all, it was easy peasy.  I did make a nice stuffing that had dried cranberries and some cayenne, but no crunchy nuts this time.  It was moist, in a good way.  I thought my Thanksgiving stuffing was a tad dry, so I upped my veg broth a bit.  The gravy is Roasted Garlic and Shallot gravy from the cookbook Michael got me, The Idiot's Guide to Cooking Vegan.  Jerk-y name, but a really good cookbook, actually.  If I'm gonna judge it by the gravy, it's fanfuckingtastic.  Yum.  And so low fat!  No roux!  Shocking!

big ol' plate of yumminess

That's it for Christmas food, but here's something cool:

not dope!

Those little bags contain teas that my parents and my grandma got for Michael.  It's called Numi Tea and it's the kind that blooms when you brew it.  See?

lovely!

It's tasty, too.  Jasmine.  Yummmm.

So...I'm running low on blogfuel, even though I have like 8 more pictures of food to show you from my meals surrounding the holiday.  They are going to have to wait until tomorrow, methinks.  Until then, tide yourself over with a picture that totally sums up Michael and my first Christmas alone together:

fun!

That's season 4 of LOST on the tv, a mimosa slurped through a silly straw, the xmas tree, and some completely awesome giant sunglasses.  Oh yes.  Multiply that by 10, add in a dash of sleepiness, subtract any motivation to move and you get a perfectly laid back Christmas day.