Trail Mix Cookies

    Today is all about procrastination. It is cold. The hot water pipes in my house, in their typical spirit of perverse defiance and tenacity in the face of opposition, have frozen despite being left trickling overnight. I was looking forward to a visit from some family members which was cancelled due to illness (one of the less-known hazards of going to church: tell your friends). I had taken the day off in anticipation of spending it with my visitors. Logically, I should use the day to catch up on school work.

    That’s silly talk.    

                      

Travelling Lentil + Sprout + Lemon Salad

   My love affair with lentils having reached something of a fever pitch, it seems high time I shared another lentil-based recipe.

   This salad has been saving my butt all week. I made the lentil base, courtesy of that spectacular mensch, Mark Bittman, and have been playing with that as a base for other creations. My experimentation came to an abrupt end, however, after making this variation, which I think is generally an indicator of a winner.

Gingerbread [vegan]

    With Christmas fast approaching, I thought it would be appropriate to veganize some of my favorite holiday desserts, though I have admittedly been putting off the endeavor because I like fitting into my pants. Oh well. Merry Christmas.

Winter Kale Avocado Salad

Hello again, blogging.

As perhaps most amply evidenced by my nearly two-month absence, life has been very busy lately. I’ve had little time for cooking and less time for blogging, but I have taken some pictures along the way and can perhaps cobble together the hardscrabble culinary path of the past weeks.

If you’re impatient I’ll just say this salad is pretty heavy-handed with the calcium, the protein, the magnesium, and the B-6. And it tastes amazing. There, you can skip to the end.

Pumpkin Biscuits: hello, Fall.

 It’s fall, and there was a sale on canned pumpkin at the local Food Lion. You can probably guess what that means: pumpkin on pumpkin. Pumpkin in EVERYTHING.

Sausage! [vegan]

Despite recent efforts to live my life less online and more in reality, my best culinary and creative inspirations often come as a result of browsing the net. This recipe was the catalyst of my most recent adventure. It really hadn’t occurred to me that you could do a vegan spin on breakfast sausage without labor-intensive, expensive, or otherwise complicated ingredients like TVP or seitan.

Salted Caramel Mocha Frappe: Pt I

Around the time the other half and I were jaunting around the Boston area for my aunt’s wedding, Starbucks did their thing and released their usual fall flavors: pumpkin spice and salted caramel mocha. Many factors, such as its revolting, distinctly un-vegan ingredients and the fact that the barista/snob in me generally hates the sort of individuals who come in frothing at the mouth over the flavor, abbreviating it to PSL as if pumpkin spice latte crosses some obscure threshold of tolerance is just too much of a mouthful to actually say, rabidly snapping celebratory iPhone pics of their decidedly run-of-the-mill beverages fated to be over-sentimentally hashtagged and posted and reposted to the point of exhaustion, have made me refuse to order the ever-popular pumpkin spice. This is pure pigheaded- and meanspiritedness, because I actually love it.

    My one choice when abroad, therefore, was to suck down as many salted caramel mochas as possible before returning home. This left me with such a spoilt, salted caramel lust that I actually drove to a Starbucks after leaving my job—again, at a coffee shop—to get one of said drinks. It was pathetic, and I was in my uniform still and the Starbucks and I kept exchanging knowing but confused looks. So I staged an intervention. For myself. 

And yes, I know I'm just the salty cousin of all those pumpkin spice hags.