Vegan Cinnamon Rolls

 When I started cutting meat and other animal products out of my diet, I kind of thought that also included sweet treats like ice creams, candies, and baked goods. Man alive, was I wrong: I can TOTALLY be just as unhealthy with my eating as before! I like to keep my health foods in check with Cinnamon Rolls. The recipe I used here advertises itself to be as close to those ridiculously huge, sticky, gooey, buns found at malls and airports throughout the country. You know the ones. And they do a pretty good job.

Hot Dog Sandwich

After a somewhat long day with bikes, children, and lots of coffee, you know what? It's dinner time! It's not fancy cooking time, though, so I used a sausage I made recently thrown in with with grilled onion, mustard and relish on toasted Dave's Killer Good Seed bread. A hot dog sandwich.

As I do, here is an extreme close-up:

The onions were al dente but I didn't mind at all. I also think the relish was a great addition, though I see how that might be weird to some people too. Does that sound good to anybody else?

Fajita baked tofu

I got this recipe online for a marinade for "fajita" tofu or vegetables. I feel a little weird calling my creation fajitas, though, because I ended up a) baking the tofu and b) making a veggie bowl with baked cauliflower. Most definitely not fajitas.

Marinades make me feel like a cooking genius! They flavor my food so well and I feel like I don't even try. I get to watch 30 Rock or Fringe then put a dish (or two in this case) in the oven and, bam! dinner is awesome. Today I also tried out a new kitchen gadget: The Misto. It's a pump-action oil sprayer that I purchased in order to reduce the amount of oil I use to cook. The teacher in me gives it a check plus, plus.

Fajita marinade:

1/4 cup water
1/8 cup lemon juice

1 clove garlic, minced

1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
~1/4 tsp. Oregano
~1/4 tsp. ground Cumin
~2 tsp. sugar
1-3 tsp. of Tapatío
1/8 tsp. Liquid Smoke

Not-so-spicey Italian Sausages

I haven't made seitan lately, so I decided to jump back into it with a Spicy Italian Seitan Sausage recipe from the internet. I am pretty sure that if you search for those key words you too can find this recipe (or one similar!).

Some necessary and perhaps predictable ingredients include: vital wheat gluten, nutritional yeast, flour, soy sauce and water.

Some fun ingredients include: paprika, chili flakes, fresh minced garlic and ground allspice.

Bread Pudding featuring: chocolate! berries!

I had some of a french baguette leftover from a couple days ago. While stuffing has been the main contender for dry or stale bread, today I decided to make bread pudding for three reasons: it has less ingredients, less prep time and more sugar! I've only had bread pudding once in my life, many years ago. If I'm not trying to be fancy there are definitely some simple and fast recipes floating around the internet.

Cabbage is my new Kale

I was compelled, once again, to buy some cabbage at the store. This time around I chose green cabbage. My original idea was veggie wraps with a ginger dressing until I realized that cabbage would do better as part of a filling instead of the wrap itself. So, as I do, I then became excited to make a giant salad with added protein from lentils. Delicious as a meal and great for leftovers the next day!

16 Bean Soup, what?!

I used a dry bean mix of 16 kinds of beans (plus barley) found at the store. The brand was Fiesta, which is accurate, because these beans totally looked like a party: colorful, in all shapes and sizes.

I agree that the colors of the cooked beans don't look so great, but I assure you the taste is off the chain! I'm pretty sure I owe it all to the chicken bouillon cube (vegan) I used for the broth. Also, the salty tortilla chips were great and reminded me of Tortilla Soup. I can imagine making tortilla chip strips for Tortillas soup in the future.

Pinwheels

Recently I learned how to make a paper pinwheel so here is what I did with it (this wood piece is probably 2 inches by 3 inches):

I made some pinwheels out of some colorful vinyl strips, too. I took them over to B's house where she is babysitting a particularly pretty bundle of decorative mossy branches thinking that I'd fasten the pinwheels to the branches in honor of Spring. But as it turns out B has another, smaller, dead tree and the vinyl "flowers" looked great tied to its smaller branches with sewing thread. No pictures of those though. Darn.