crack the plates

Here are some pictures of my cat Unix, variously called Katzerole, Unixera, Ra-Ra, Ra-Ra type, baby cat, sweetsera, wickidera, wicked beast. Behold!:

I has a foot.

How to keep a Ra-Ra type from escaping through the bedroom window. Here, she is particularly incensed with Weasel-friend, her dearest enemy.

Sleepy sweetserole.

After that last intense (for a food blog) post, I feel the urge to post some pictures of tonight’s dinner:

Doubled recipe of the Asparagus and sun-dried tomato “Frittata” from Vegan With a Vengeance, made with tofu, nutritional yeast, mustard, and many other disparate ingredients that don’t sound like they’ll taste all that good together but actually makes one swoon. One of the best recipes in the book.

Looking to do something with the Dandies Candies marshmallows I brought back from Chicago (aside from gobble them straight from the bag), I googled and discovered a recipe from a fellow VeganMoFoer p.h.d.elicious called Chocolate Confetti. Simple concept: chocolate + peanut butter + fat (eBal!) + vegan marshmallows makes a veg very, very happy. :-) I threw in peanuts and added a little salt.

Befitting an anniversary, I scooped out half a container of Turtle Mountain’s Purely Decadent Cookie Dough soy ice cream, drove a sharp piece of bark into it and covered it with organic chocolate sauce and peanuts. Yowzah. (To my credit, I didn’t eat it.)

And for those who care, a picture of our darling Ra-Ra type Unix, a veteran open-source user. Yay Ubuntu 9.10! Hoorah Karmic Koala!

First, the most important news: our katze Unix seems to be doing much better today than she has since the fleabath incident Sunday night. (Worrisomely, she’d put her appetite on hold and would mew loudly every time we touched her). She’s in fine furry form tonight, though, and is currently sitting in my lap encumbering my typing. And oh, how soft and flea-free her tortoiseshell fur is! (Alas, we’ll still be heading to the V-E-T in the morning.)

Tonight’s dinner was generously provided by friends N & J in celebration of Nate’s upcoming birthday. As a special surprise, they prepared some sushi–Nate’s favorite–with avocado, carrot, and cucumber. (I brought over the materials to make a quick miso–red miso paste by Westbrae, cellophane noodles from Jungle Jim’s, japanese-style firm tofu, two cloves of garlic sliced thin and some kombu kelp.) Observe the taller N coach the shorter one on the wily ways of sushi:

Those are taller N’s in the foreground (second picture). Little N…well, let’s just say he could do with a little more larnin’:

But hey, who am I to judge? I didn’t even try! On that note…

In the interest of full disclosure (because this blog ought not be about my triumphs only, but about my royal struggles too), I will admit that I f-ed up not one but TWO desserts tonight. I fail so comprehensibly so infrequently that it is quite marvellous that I was able to do it twice in one evening. Still, I admit: I ruined some rice pudding by using short-grain BROWN rice and not cooking it through; mere minutes after wiping the apron of this masterpiece, I whipped up some chocolate pudding that didn’t set because my arrowroot was so expired it had completely lost its potency. Oops?

Le sigh.

Hope you’ll check out tomorrow’s update on cooking for Peace Forum: butternut squash soup that isn’t (DUN DUN DUN) …pureed!!! Better yet, just come have lunch! Tomorrow’s talk: “One Hill at a Time: Supporting Palestinian Nonviolent Resistance at Al Tuwani.”

Too little time + not much of a taste for anything made lunch look anything but promising today. Until, that is, I happened upon an 8 oz container of Tofutti creme cheeze in our totally underused dairy drawer. Set to expire at the end of this month, I started to brainstorm…& recalled a lovely sandwich I used to eat on lunchbreaks & special occasions while working at Alon’s: “the Tuscany.” To make it, the line-cook slathers about three ounces of high-quality herbed goat cheese on either side of a ciabatta mini loaf, alternates layers of marinated roasted eggplant with sun-dried tomatoes, and tops it with fistfuls of arugula. Pretty charming, eh? So so unvegan.

My answer was an herbed creme cheeze of my own made of Tofutti and generous piches of ground garlic, organic basil, marjoram, & thyme from Frontier, a splash of Santa Cruz organic lemon juice and a little salt and white pepper. Whip this briefly with your hand mixer and then slather it on some delicious hearth-made bread (in our case, the last of Zingerman’s farm). Add some reconstituted sun-dried tomato pieces a dear friend kindly brought you back from Atlanta, where they’re available at a reasonable price, and then stuff some organic arugula on that mess. Ta-da, ta-die-for:

For dinner I made a simple take on a pad thai, based off of Isa’s recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance. As with the kale and tofu I made yesterday, the idea is basically to balance the flavor–here, you’ve got some tamarind concentrate (sweet, bitter), tamari (salty, pungent), unrefined sugar (sweet), and sambal oelek (spicy!). I sauteed the tofu with a lot of garlic, onion, and red peppers and japanese eggplant from the Saturday morning farmer’s market, see?:

And as a bonus, here’s a picture of the wickida Unixera protesting our closed-door policy:

Seriously, she just got a fleabath.

Love!