Best. Pizza. Ever!!

Okay, I’ve made pizza a few times since going vegan, but I believe that this particular one is my crowning glory.  All veggie toppings (red peppers, broccoli, and onions), a crust made with whole wheat flour and a hefty amount of vital wheat gluten, some leftover spaghetti sauce, and—wait for it—no cheese!  Or even a cheese alternative!  I sprinkled a few tablespoons of nutritional yeast over the whole thing, added an assortment of spices, and it was really, really good!  I honestly believe it was one of the best pizzas I ever made.  And it looks pretty, too.  ☺

Not much left over--and the cupcake stayed there just long enough for the picture!

Saturday was the vegan/vegetarian meet-up at the Whetstone Park of Roses.  We had such a good time, and the food was awesome.  We met a bunch of cool people, and we added some Facebook friends because of it.  I also signed us up for another meet-up group that does hiking meet-ups in the area, thanks to a lady we met at the picnic; we really can use some regular exercise again.  The weather was terrible—huge thunderstorm started the second we got out of the car, and it rained pretty much the whole time we were at the park—but that didn’t stop us from having a good time.  And everybody liked my cupcakes!  There were only 4 tiny ones left by the end of the picnic.  That alone says a lot!  Sean and I also got to reacquaint ourselves with the animal activist who got us started down this particular path.  I saw her at the food table shortly after she arrived, and we ended up talking for the next couple of hours about how she changed our lives.  Thanks again, Eriyah!

We have been so incredibly lazy all day Sunday.  We slept in, at when we felt like it, tried to focus mainly on Vita Mix concoctions, and just generally took it easy.  It’s been fun, but I’m hoping to do something a little more active tomorrow.  I told Sean that I really want to get up early and take a nice long walk before it gets too hot.  Then I have a facial scheduled at the Origins shop at Macy’s at noon.  I know he has a photo shoot that needs to happen tomorrow if it’s going to happen at all, and I’m still trying to decide if I’m coming along or not.

First up on the theatrical scene...

Followed by Shakespeare and a vegan picnic!

Even though it’s vacation week, we’re still going to be busy.  I have two plays to review this week (back to Newark to see Weathervane’s production of The Secret Garden on Thursday, and then Rosebriar’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Friday down in Groveport), and I still want—nay, demand!—to see Harry Potter, probably on Tuesday or Wednesday.  So, in a nutshell, Sean is probably going to kill me for booking our social calendar so full when he’s trying to relax…  Oh, well.  It’s not like we usually have lives or anything any other time. 

Must. See. This. Movie!!!!

Awesome tofu scramble for a lazy Sunday brunch.

Yet another big cooking day today.  I’m starting to feel like I’m living in my kitchen lately.  At least the blender kind of took a break today—just one juice drink this morning for breakfast, and then it was eerily silent for the rest of the afternoon.

We all slept late this morning, so breakfast was more like brunch.  I found an awesome tofu scramble recipe a few weeks ago, and that was what I used to make the concoction pictured above for the adults.  The kids wanted cereal, so everyone was happy.

On Saturday, Sean found a picture of vegan cheezy fries somewhere and insisted that he wanted to make them for himself.  I was sent out on a quest to track down The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook by Jo Stepaniak since apparently the “cheeze” recipes in there are awesome.  I have to admit, the one we tried tonight turned out pretty good:

Yummmmm....

It was particularly awesome over the fries:

Double yummmm....

After dinner, we took the kids and the dogs for a nice long walk—exactly what all of us needed after such a filling dinner.

I watched “The Meatrix” animated series of shorts tonight.  Very informative without being too in-your-face, and keeping a sense of humor.  I think that’s part of the problem that most vegans run into in daily life:  too many crazies out there who give us all a bad name.  I’ve been at this for about a month now, and even though it’s starting to get easier, I still don’t know if I actually feel vegan yet.  Of course, I can’t even explain exactly what that means or how a vegan should feel on a day-to-day basis, but still, I keep thinking that there’s supposed to be something else, something life-altering that hasn’t happened yet.  Maybe it will eventually, or maybe it won’t.  For right now, though, I can find comfort in the knowledge that I’m doing my part to try to stop the suffering of those who cannot speak for themselves.  I may not be sneaking into livestock auction houses or slaughterhouses or puppy mills with a video camera to expose the wrongdoing that’s going on there; but I can stop adding to the consumption that creates the supposed need for factory farms and mass-market killing.

I am glad that I made the switch, and I’m glad that Sean made the switch with me.  Even the kids have gotten involved, and they’re interested in the new things I’m making for dinner every night instead of the ongoing cycle of mac and cheese or spaghetti.  I’m still floored that they liked the Indian food I made on Saturday.  That reaction just opened a whole new realm of possibilities for dining experiences at home.  I think tomorrow’s dinner might be something involving sweet potatoes and some naan bread perhaps?

Chana Masala--the gateway Indian food.

This is what I made for dinner tonight—a rip off of the Chana Masala recipe on VegWeb.  I made it fully expecting a fight from the children.  After all, it looks a little weird, especially for kids who have grown up with the whole meat-and-potatoes mentality (ideally, chicken nuggets and French fries).  I dished it up over whole wheat couscous, gave them each a big glass of water (for the subsequent gagging that I fully expected), and settled myself in at the dining room table for the fight to ensue.

Daniel got to the table first.  He sat down, asked what was in his bowl, took a deep breath, and lifted the first forkful.  Sylvie plowed through it after she asked what was in it—tomatoes, carrots, onions, and chickpeas with some Indian spices.  Not one complaint.  Not a word was spoken to the tune of, “I don’t like it…”  They both finished their dinners, and I wondered if I should have given them more since I only gave them about a quarter of a serving each in the interest of cutting down on the food waste.  I’m totally going to make that again for them sometime soon.  It’s one of my favorite dishes, and now that I know that they’ll eat it, I might start to branch out with some other Indian food.  Victory is mine!  Hah!!

On a sad note, though, I broke the tamper for the Vita Mix tonight.  Only had the thing for two days, and I broke it already.  ☹  From what I read when I was looking on Amazon for replacements, though, it’s a pretty common occurrence.  The review that made me feel the best about my stupidity was this one:

“So you dropped your Vitamix tamper into the blender?” February 2, 2009
By Jeff A. Stucker “Jeff A. Stucker” (Eagle, ID United States)
Well, join the club. This is the replacement for that chewed up part. Next time, let’s make sure the lid is on when we use the tamper, okay? (Doh!)”

Thanks, Jeff—I’ll definitely remember this little piece of advice!

The disaster happened when I was trying to make ice cream, which looks incredibly easy on the videos.  Either I did something wrong, or I’m just too impatient for my own good, but I messed up.  I pulled the lid off while it was doing its thing to check on it, and then tried to use the tamper to mix things up a bit more.  Sean told me afterward that he tried to say something to me like, “Hey, maybe you shouldn’t do that…”, but I couldn’t hear him over the noise of the blender.  And then the tamper ended up hitting the blades—not good.  This is what happens when the tamper hits the blades:

There's a reason they tell you not to use the tamper with the lid off...

The good news was twofold:  Amazon offers a replacement tamper for about $11 plus shipping, so we should have one here before the end of next week.  Sean also read somewhere about a guy who used a carrot in place of his tamper when he was in a similar situation, so at least we have a back up method while we’re waiting for the new one.  The other good news was that the ice cream actually came out okay (once I dug the bits of plastic out of it, of course):

I promise that any black flecks you may see are actually Newman's Own cookie pieces, not broken tamper bits.

And somehow, after this Adventure in Kitchen-Land, Sean convinced me to make a pizza.  At first, I thought he wanted to bake it at 10:00 at night, which I thought was completely insane.  Then he mentioned something about Alton Brown’s suggestion to freeze a pizza crust overnight and then bake it the next day.  Ah.  Well, fine.  But I still ended up with dough all over my hands and much more mess than I had really wanted to deal with after everything else today.  And now that I actually read his suggestions, I see that AB actually said to refrigerate the dough overnight, not freeze it.  And to refrigerate it in ball, not spread out on a pan like I have mine right now.  Darn.  Oh, well.  It’s Sean’s baby tomorrow, I think. 

I’ll be sure to post pictures of that monstrosity masterpiece—right after I get back from a Whole Foods run for more vegan mozzarella.

Super, awesome, amazing blender--I lovedededes it so!

At 8:00 this morning, Sean finally got his midlife crisis Ferrari substitute:  a fire engine red Vita Mix blender!  After a week of not-so-patient waiting, FedEd left a beautiful, ginormous box on our doorstep.  Naturally, we had to unpack it immediately and then figure out how to use it.

First on the menu:  a green smoothie!  Since we picked up veggies from the CSA farmer yesterday, I had lots to choose from.  Our first smoothie consisted of a banana, an orange, a pear, some ice, some water, and a whole lot of kale.  It was…  Interesting.  Sean liked it a lot; I added some Truvia to mine and then it was much better.

In the interest of using this thing as much as humanly possible in one day, we got roughly a metric ton of produce (including a whole pineapple!) and came home to start blending stuff!  Next up was a smoothie with banana, chocolate protein powder, vanilla soy milk, and a handful of hazelnuts.  Heavenly…  I’m definitely doing that one again!  Then we did another concoction with banana (we’ve used lots of bananas today), part of a lemon, baby carrots, green grapes, cantaloupe, and part of an orange.  Oh!  And a dash of cinnamon (the recipe called for nutmeg, but I keep forgetting to buy it, so I improvised).  Also really good.  Sean did that one again later when a friend came over, but he added a stalk of celery to it.  Totally changed the taste with just one extra ingredient.  Here’s what it looked like pre-pouring:

The coup de grace came with dinner:  Pizza!  Yes, I used the blender to stir up my pizza crust.  I don’t know if there’s a special technique to this that I’m just not quite getting yet, but I think I prefer my bread machine for dough mixing.  The instructions said to mix the wet ingredients with the flour for 1 second.  Yes, I read it at least half a dozen times—1 second.  That was pretty much useless.  It did a decent job, but it required a lot more hands-on action than the bread machine.  At least the pizza tasted pretty good.  And Daniel ate soy pepperoni without even flinching!  I was amazed.  ☺

Today was “clean out the fridge and the pantry” day.  I think we’re about 90% of the way to a vegan kitchen.  My back is killing me now, but I feel really good about getting so much accomplished.  At least now I can feel pretty confident about what I’m cooking with.  And it’s so much easier to find stuff in the pantry!

After all this juice and smoothie making today, I’m beat.  Who would’ve thought that prepping fruits and veggies all day would make you so tired?

Since it was raining off and on this evening, we thought that taking the kids to the Gallery Hop downtown would be more fun than sitting in the park getting wet while waiting for fireworks to start.  They always have fun, and tonight wasn’t very crowded for the first time in ages.  Of course, the line outside Jeni’s Ice Cream was still huge even with the rain, so we skipped it.  Sad, too—I had really been looking forward to trying some of their vegan sorbet selections…  Oh, well.  Maybe next time.  ☺

For dinner, we went to Z Pizza.  They were really helpful during the ordering process, letting us know that the soy cheese they use isn’t vegan (it has casein in it—more sadness), and that there’s sugar in the pizza crust.  We got the California pizza sans cheese for the adults and a half-pepperoni, half-cheese for the kids.  What we didn’t tell the kids is that we had them use soy cheese instead of the regular.  They never even noticed the difference.  Not quite as good as all-out vegan, but it’s a step in the right direction.  And we did get to see some fireworks from the car when we were driving home.  Not too shabby a night, really.

I made a couple of new recipes today.  For lunch, I made black bean burritos with chopped onions, salsa, fresh spinach, some rice “cheese”, and green pepper strips on whole grain tortillas.  For a snack that will hopefully last the week, I made the vegan chocolate chip cookies from Skinny Bitch in the Kitch.  Sean and the kids liked them, and they’re okay, I guess, but I think I’m going to try some other recipes, too.  They were just a little crispier than I like them, even after playing with baking times and things.  Of course, the recipe called for 1¼ cup of refined coconut oil, and I didn’t have any; I used Earth Balance sticks instead.  I wonder if that could account for the overly-crispy results?  I might try it again with the coconut oil at a later date.  Sean got creative and made a chocolate-peanut butter quinoa pudding using the recipe I found here as a jumping-off point.  I haven’t tried a full serving of it yet, but what I got from the spoon was pretty tasty.

I think what I’m learning during this transition is that—well, I have a lot to learn.  There are so many things to consider that I had never really given any thought to in the past.  Just like the sugar thing tonight.  It never would have crossed my mind to be the slightest bit concerned about sugar just a few weeks ago, except from a health standpoint.  Now that I know more about the ethical ramifications that go along with sugar (namely, the use of charred animal bones to process sugar to its gleaming white state), it’s harder for me to ignore.  I feel like I’ve spent the last three weeks completely obsessed with the food that I eat, buy, and prepare, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing.  Maybe I’ve needed to pay a little more attention to what I’m putting in my body.  Maybe it’s a good thing that I’m focusing nearly as much attention on nourishment as on taste.

I will say this, though:  I am so grateful that Sean is doing this with me.  I don’t think I could stick with it if I had to go it alone!