2013!

Heyoh, it's Gina. I am reporting to you from the land of sickness where I have been the last several days. I thought I would blog since I can do nothing that requires leaving my bed, couch or house.

My husband received an awesome cookbook from his parents for his recent birthday.

It has a lot of veggie friendly recipes in it and the ones that aren't seem like they will be easy to adapt.

I made this : Soba Noodle, Tofu, and Vegetable Stir-Fry

We had never tried soba noodles before but found them to be pretty tasty. Soba means buckwheat in Japanese. Wikipedia claims that it is traditionally eaten on New Years Eve in most areas of Japan and used to be given to new neighbors which is pretty cool. I wish when we moved into our house we got some soba noodles. Way to slack, neighbors. 

This recipe was pretty quick and very delicious. It calls for almond butter which I didn't have and lazily used peanut butter as a substitute for but I think it worked out well. This recipe is vegan. 

Here are pictures: 

We normally freeze our tofu to make it extra firm but  when we don't have time to freeze it we take the appropriate measures to ensure firm tofu. 

SOBA!!

This is the sauce that I used peanut butter in instead of almond butter. It ruled. 

I had to transfer everything to a big pot to properly mix it all together . 

We had our families over for Jason's birthday and made some snacks. 

Usually I do not make spinach dip from a packet but I was feeling rushed (we decided to have everyone over one day in advance) so I gave it a shot. It was actually very good and I for some reason did not take a picture of the finished dip. I also made it 100% vegan. 

I made kale chips and roasted chickpeas. Super easy and you can eat so much of them both and not feel guilty. 

Beer Bread to go with the spinach dip. 

My mom and mom-in-law created all this food, eggplant parm, meatballs(for the meat eaters in the fam which is everyone except for us) and an awesome salad. This is our dining room table though. I aspire to someday be able to cook like those two wonderful ladies, they make incredible food. 

Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! Jason will probably post soon and it will be more exciting because he likely won't be sick and half falling asleep while blogging.

I will leave you with dinner from tonight. Amy's pizzas, both vegan, we liked the one of the left best.
We also recommend making two if there is two people eating because these pizzas are tiny. Or maybe we are fat. I don't know.

Here is a cat pic though. Or two.

Stella

Bob

LENTIL SOUP BLISS and other stories...

It's been a couple weeks since my last post.  Since I'm still alive you can probably assume I've been eating in that span of time.

Since Gina and I are both posting, I guess it's a good idea now to start saying who's talking to you at the beginning of each blog.

Hi!  It's Jason.

Anyway, I'll get to the good stuff now:

A couple weeks ago my awesome cousin and his amazing girlfriend came over to our house and made us a delicious feast of...

LENTIL SOUP

Okay - Ive mentioned before how much I love soup.  It's true.  In fact, I eat it for breakfast sometimes (okay, maybe more often than sometimes...)

I really didn't do too much to help except drink lots of wine and offer moral support.  Here's some prep work:

Like I said, my cuz did most of the cooking.  He started with, I believe, the sauteing onions, garlic, celery and carrots:

It smelled delicious.  Stir it, cuz.  Give it goooood stir.

I'll lower the creepy meter for a bit, sorry.

After a whole bunch of other ingredients were added including spinach, and (as a really neat surprise) kalamata olives, he added the lentils:

Go on, hear that lentil shower sound in your head.

Ahhhh...

Like rain on a cold night when you're wrapped in a blanket on the hearthstones beside the enormous crackling fireplace (that you secretly don't have except in your head) with a cat curled on your lap, purring, and you realize that somehow you are in Poland and from the kitchen emerges the kindliest, most elderly woman you have ever seen and she has made you Lentil Soup.

Something like that.

 This is what a bowl of it looked like in all of it's steaming, heartwarming glory:

And here's the money shot:

It was amazing.

We invited them to come back and cook for us anytime.

Seriously, guys.  ANY. TIME.

Other than that, we didnt really take too many pics of meals we have made ourselves.  It's been a very cray couple of weeks - thus the drought in posting.  We did go out a couple times.

I had been meaning to take some pics of a meal at The Pine in Kennedy.  Its seriously right up the street from us.  We could walk there if we ever had time anymore to do something like walk up the street.

From the menu, I usually get the Create Your Own Pasta meal.  I was boring this time and only got penne with broccoli.

It looks like this:

Their sauce isn't bad, and the pasta was decent.  They give you a pretty enormous portion so you usually have enough left over to take home, put in the fridge, intend to bring for lunch the next day but instead forget all about it and end up buying a Sheetz MTO instead.

Gina got the Veggie Grilled cheese which looked like this:

I like that they put it on that swirly rye bread - you don't see that too often.

We also treated our selves to something I have been desperately craving recently:  Indian Food.

Gina was working out in the North Side for a bit and I picked her up from work and we went to our favorite Indian Restaurant in Pittsburgh - Taste of India in Bloomfield.

Kennedy has no Indian Restaurants (I think, though, if there was a Pizza specific to India, Kennedy would open an Indian Restaurant stat.), Robinson has no Indian Restaurants.  Moon had an Indian Restaurant but it closed.  I've been huddled, shaking in an alley going through the throes of Indian Food withdrawal. 

Our dinner looked like the below picture, but the picture doesn't do justice to the explosion of bliss each bite brought us:

I got the one closest to the foreground:  Aloo Ghobi, which is potatoes, cauliflower, tomatoes in a wonderful sauce full of Indian spices.  Gina got the one in the background - Malai Kofta.  It is fried vegetable patties in a creamy curried, coconut based sauce.

The baskets of flatbread are Naan and Praratha.  I got Aloo Praratha, which is a potato filled bread, and Gina of Onion Naan.

And that is all I've got.  Hope you're all well!

Some Thanksgiving Business

Hello world. Hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving if you happen to celebrate it. We had a very nice one. As you probably know or at least can imagine, Thanksgiving can be a tricky day for vegetarians. I would probably pass out from shock if anyone in either of our families presented us with a Thanksgiving Day Tofurkey. We do not expect this of them, we don't like to make anyone feel like they have to change the way they do things for us, especially on holidays that are steeped in tradition. We usually have a Vegan Thanksgiving with our friends in December and it is definitely one of my favorite traditions we have made our own.
Since we do a lot of running around on Thanksgiving being that we are bouncing back and forth between my family and Jason's family I wanted to make something for each place we were going to that would be okay to sit in the car for a little bit. For dinner at my aunt's house I made a Broccoli Cheese Casserole which I thought was my mom's recipe but then my grandma said it was hers but then said it was really my other aunt's so who knows. If you are Italian you probably know a little something about awesome yet crazy Italian grandmothers that you wouldn't trade for the world but sometimes make no sense. Regardless of who actually created this recipe, it's extremely simple to make and everyone always loves it. It's obviously also vegetarian friendly and could very easily be made vegan.

The ingredients are below:

If you are as awesome as me you will accidentally buy one package of chopped broccoli and one package of broccoli spears (how does that even happen?)which you then have to chop up after they are cooked. Sigh.I prefer to steam the broccoli, I think it tastes better and stays together better than boiling it. 

I put a little bit of butter around the dish just to prevent any sticking. 

Everything is in except for the Ritz Cracker crumbles.

Put a bunch of crackers in a baggie and smush them. Ta da! 

This will be your delicious finished product!

For Jason's aunt's house which is where we went to for dessert I decided to make Butterscotch Blondie Bars. I had never made these before but they ended up being amazing. 

This is the recipe I used. 

Set up

Why hello Kitchenaid Mixer, nice to see you. 

Would you like to mix some things for me? Of course you would!

This is the point where I always want to eat the batter. 

Before

After!

Mmmm

These were also fairly simple to make, I made both of them in the morning and I believe it was under 2 hours total for both of them to be totally done. So that is really all I cooked for Thanksgiving. Hope yours was wonderful and I am sure Jason will be updating soon with more of our food adventures. I will leave you with this.