new year; also, food

As promised, regular posting is starting up here again. 

I've had a few different ideas of where I want this blog to go, and I've finally decided that this blog is just going to go where it wants to! The original idea I had was that all of the posts here would fall squarely into one of five categories: images I was using, at that moment, in art projects I was working on at that very moment; photos and recipes of food I had made; things going on in my life; various websites and products that strike my fancy; and photos and screenshots of design projects. Instead, it's been more like: images I find inspiring at the moment; photos and recipes of food I had made; some website screenshots as I complete them; and some random things as they strike my fancy. 

I haven't really posted about things going on in my life any further than they relate to food I've made or why I haven't been posting much. And it's been helping me more to catalog and categorize images that inspire me generally, rather than organize images that are helping me think about and plan specific projects (in part because I've been a bit of a slouch with art projects in recent months). Sometimes I think I "should" post more recipes, or make this blog only about recipes, or make another blog just for recipes, and so on. But I want this to stay fun, and what's kept this fun for me is to post whatever I feel like posting at the moment. So my plan is to just do more of those same types of posts I've been making!

In the meantime, here are some food photos from the last couple months! At top is a basket of fruit and squash after a trip to our local farmer's market. And directly above is some amazing homemade vegan sushi my roommate made. 

More veggie sushi! On our end tables before we bought a real kitchen table. 

And my favorite snack of the moment, whole wheat toast with the tofu "deviled egg" recipe from 500 Vegan Recipes and sliced celery.

moving! road trip snacks, and boxes, lots of boxes

I'm finally taking care of that moving-across-the-country business, by driving across the country with a truck full of my stuff. Which means: snacks! I made pumpkin molasses bars, banana barley bars (from 500 Vegan Recipes) and magical coconut bars (from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar). I changed the coconut bars the teeniest bit by using slivered almonds where the recipe called for chopped walnuts. They're definitely magical! Full of graham-crackery goodness and coconut milk and flakes. The banana barley bars are fantastic as a portable breakfast -- the barley is barley cereal (I used Grape Nuts) and it ends up being like a sweet, chocolatey bowl of cereal in bar form.

I also recently bought a new lens, mostly on the recommendation of Vegan YumYum's amazing food photography for bloggers. All of these pictures are from me playing around with my new lens.

All the bars!

Magical coconut bars: yum.

Boxes piled in my studio. There were about 80 boxes total, of wildly varying sizes: everything from rolls of paper, to shoeboxes, to a huge, professionally-packed box containing my printer/scanner (which can scan up to 11"x17" pages).

My lunch the other day, an arugula salad with walnuts, sunflower seeds, chives, and sorrel.

homemade pizza, with bechamel sauce, fresh basil, mushrooms, and grape tomatoes

This pizza is half the white pizza from 500 Vegan Recipes, half the slow-rise pizza dough on vegan yumyum and 101 cookbooks (originally from the completely amazing The Bread-Baker's Apprentice), plus a few extra percentages of my favorite pizza ingredients.

Since that dough is already beautifully detailed and illustrated in two prominent places on the internet, I won't bother repeating it here. That recipe makes 6 small pizzas. I found that making half the batch gave me the amount of dough I wanted to make a pizza for 3 people. You may find otherwise, and besides, if you make the whole batch, you can always freeze what you don't use and then you'll have delicious pizza dough on hand whenever you want.

As for the toppings, these are my favorites. I meant to add pine nuts, but I didn't remember until after I took the pizza out of the oven (we topped our slices with raw pine nuts, and it was just fine). The 500 Vegan Recipes version calls for fresh basil, sliced white onion, and smoked tofu slices as the topping. I'm sure this dough and sauce would be delicious with any veggie toppings you desire!

BECHAMEL SAUCE
1/2 cup earth balance
1/4 cup all-purpose flour 
1 cup plain soy milk
1 tsp garlic powder 
1 tsp dried basil

PIZZA
1/2 recipe slow-rise pizza dough 
1 recipe bechamel sauce (ingredients above)
20-30 fresh basil leaves, or even more if you have them! 
1/2 pound thinly sliced mushrooms
1 cup grape tomatoes, sliced in half
1/4 cup pine nuts (not pictured) 


Preheat the oven to 450 F.

To make the bechamel sauce: in a pot, melt the earth balance. Whisk in the flour until smooth, then add the soy milk and continue to whisk until the sauce thickens (about a minute or two). Remove from heat and add the herbs, and salt to taste.

Roll out the dough according to instructions on either of the slow-rise pizza dough recipes linked above.

Layer the basil leaves on top of the dough. Pour the bechamel sauce over the basil, spreading evenly. Add any other veggies or toppings you're using, in this case mushrooms, grape tomatoes, and pine nuts.

Bake for about 10 minutes, until the crust is golden.

thoughts on 500 Vegan Recipes

This isn't a book review, this is just, like the title says, my thoughts on this recipe book. First thought: YAY! This book is everything I hoped it would be. (More info on it here.) For one thing, it contains 500 recipes that are vegan. And loving have cake, will travel is a good indicator toward loving this book. It's fun to read. It's fun to make the food in it. It's fun to eat the food in it!

There was this moment where I was first paging through the recipes, and accidentally skipped the first breakfast section, so I was only in the muffin section, and, okay, I don't like muffins. (Many people have tried to convince me that I like muffins. I also don't like cake or cupcakes or brownies or other cake-like foods. It seems a lot like bread that has something wrong with it. The fact that I like banana bread is what makes some people think I am simply biased against muffins and would really like them if I bothered to try. I keep trying; muffins are not for me.) So I was dismayed. I was like, why is this breakfast section all muffins?! 

Then I found the actual breakfast section (or the rest of it -- for now I'm just going to keep pretending there are no muffins). Smoothies with oats in them? Banana fritters? Pumpkin tofu scramble? Zucchini fritters? Maple hickory tofu strips? I am so there. I've been making banana fritters and zucchini fritters for breakfast all week. I also made the lentil tart and it was amazing, and I'm pretty sure my time making the tahini crust for it is the only time I have ever, ever, followed a pie crust recipe as written and it made the amount of pie crust it suggested it would. 

This is what really sold me on the book though: deviled "egg" salad. I'm pretty sure deviled eggs are the only non-vegan food I miss. I see them at dinner parties (for some reason, they always appear at dinner parties!) and it's difficult. Also it's actually been so long since I've eaten eggs that the actual smell of actual eggs is gross, and kind of rotten-seeming, so when I actually get near enough to real deviled eggs to contemplate them, I get queasy. (This does have the advantage of making it easier to avoid ingesting eggs.) Okay, I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Basically, deviled eggs are great, and the ones made out of tofu in this recipe are even greater, because they're delicious and animal-free. Hooray! 

Other recipes I can't wait to try: spinach quiche; basically all of the seitan sausages; mushroom lasagna; white pizza; open sesame cookies; peppermint bark; and baked chocolate almond pudding.