Sean gets creative with leftovers--and totally steals the lemon out of my water without warning. Good thing I love him...

I had a play to review tonight for Theatre Vault, and it was over an hour away from home.  Even though I have some portabella mushrooms in the fridge that really need to be cooked, I just couldn’t be bothered.  I wanted to make tonight a special “night out” for my sweetie and me before the kidlets descend tomorrow.  So I offered to treat Sean to dinner at a vegan/vegetarian friendly restaurant of his choice before we set off for beautiful downtown Newark, Ohio.  After a bit of debate, we chose Whole World Natural Bakery and Restaurant.

So garlicy that I'm pretty sure I'm still not kissable several hours later. Totally worth it, though!

I checked out their daily specials, and when we got there I knew exactly what I wanted:  Black Bean Hummus on Pita Bread.  It had some nice crisp veggies, lots of garlic, and I stole a few of Sean’s black corn chips for a side dish.  Yum!

I promise--it tastes even better than it looks!

Sean’s choice was the Bombay Burger—a chickpea-based veggie burger with Indian spices, lettuce, tomato, onion, soy cheese, Vegenaise, and mustard (in a star shape—I love that!!) on a whole wheat bun.  He was kind enough to let me sample it, and it took everything in my power not to steal it from him.  I really was pretty happy with my Black Bean Hummus, though.  I think I’m going to try to make my own version of it at some point in the near future…

We grabbed some yummy vegan desserts there, too.  No pictures of those—sorry!  There was a raspberry bar that was pretty good (although I like the idea of raspberries, I still hate the stupid seeds that get stuck in my teeth) and a roasted almond bar that was orgasmic.  Really.  It’s not an exaggeration.  Ah-mazing.  I would have eaten the entire thing myself if it hadn’t been for the fact that I knew Sean would pout if I did.

While we were getting totally turned around on High Street, we stumbled across vegan Nirvana in the Columbus metro area:  Pattycake Vegan Bakery.  This is the place to go when you’re vegan in Central Ohio, or so I’ve been told.  Yes, we had a whole bag full of vegan desserts already.  But Pattycake was right there, in front of us! How could we let those poor defenseless baked goods go another moment without a loving home?  We totally caved.  I limited myself to three selections: peanut butter chocolate chip cookie heaven (because I wanted something similar from Whole World, but their version wasn’t vegan), a slice of raspberry lemon chiffon cake (for Sean—what’s up with the raspberry trend today?), and—on the advice of one of the girls behind the counter—the pumpkin spice Whoopie Pie.  We ate the cookie after the play, and we discussed the various high and low points of the production as we munched.  The slice of cake is half-devoured, waiting for whoever is least comatose from sugar overload to finish it, and I have a feeling the Whoopie Pie is going to be my breakfast tomorrow morning with a cup of coffee and a marathon review-writing session.

Tomorrow night, we’re taking the kids down to Groveport to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and there will be a vegan picnic involved.  I need to figure out what I want to do for that.  Luckily, I have all day tomorrow to cook and shop for what I need, but I still need to figure out what I feel like making.  I might do something with eggplant—I currently have 4 sitting in my produce drawer as we speak—and the kids didn’t seem to hate it too much when I made it before.  Maybe a different recipe with less oil is in order this time…  Oh!  I could make an eggplant lasagna…thing…and just serve it cold!  Hmm…  This may take some thinking and planning…  Horray ideas out of the blue!  (Of course, you realize that since it’s almost 2:00 a.m. now, I’m probably going to sleep late, completely forget about this wonderful idea, and make PB&J for the kids instead, right?  Right…  It sure sounds good now, though.  *grin*)

Today was a most disappointing day in the kitchen.

First, I made cornbread muffins and totally left out the sugar.  I also ran out of cornmeal and substituted corn grits for half of it.  They weren’t bad, but not exactly what I was hoping for.  Sean insisted that they were okay, but I’m going to try it again sometime.  Sylvie liked hers, and Daniel said he liked them, too, even though he only took one bite and left the rest on his plate.

Then there was dinner itself.  I made pinto beans with vegetables and vegan red wine over brown rice, and it was received with a little less enthusiasm than I had hoped.  After the disappointing cornbread muffins, I just didn’t have the heart to dice up a carrot, so I used frozen mixed vegetables instead.  They cooked so long that they really didn’t have any flavor by the time it was all done.  And the red wine flavor was a bit strong, even after I cut it in half and used water for the rest of the liquid.  There was a puckered face to accompany pretty much every bite taken by the kidlets over the dinner table tonight.

As a reward for their perseverance and relative lack of complaining, I made the cupcakes that are pictured above.  Adorable, aren’t they?  They’re chocolate cake using this recipe with peanut butter frosting piped into the centers and around the top edge, and then chocolate buttercream from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World.  I’ve made all of these already, except for the chocolate buttercream.  It’s pretty similar to the vanilla, though, so I wasn’t too worried.  The frostings came out perfect.  The peanut butter was so much better than the last couple of times I made it—probably because I used super creamy peanut butter this time instead of the natural stuff that’s never quite as smooth.  But this is the only time I’ve ever gone ahead and iced the cupcakes without actually tasting the results of the baking first.  Usually, I have enough batter left that I can make some mini cupcakes, and they’re perfect for taste-testing.  The batter was so thick and dense this time, though, that it barely filled my cupcake tins.  I let them cool, piped the peanut butter inside them, and then got creative with the edging.  Then I did the chocolate buttercream, and they looked positively wonderful.  I gave one to Sean and took one for myself, not really noticing how very heavy they were this time.  I just thought I overdid it on the icing.

They’re terrible.  Dense, half-baked, and just generally nasty.  No flavor, gritty, and just… Yuck!  I checked them to make sure that they were done, and the ones in the front seemed fine.  It looks like some of the fuller muffin cups weren’t quite baked all the way through, though.  And they barely rose at all.  Maybe I used whole wheat pastry flour with this batch?  I had all of the dry ingredients pre-mixed in a Ziploc bag in the pantry, and I can’t remember what I did.  Oh, well.  Maybe the kids will enjoy them.  I’ll just make sure to use plain old all-purpose flour from now on.  That was just entirely too sad to ever repeat ever again.