Things I've been eating lately...

I haven't posted in a while...time got away from me somehow. Even today, I didn't figure out the clocks had jumped ahead until about 3 in the afternoon. When I discovered it was really 4:00, I felt cheated out of a precious hour of my weekend. Oh well...

First up is butternut squash, sweet potatoes, and collards cooked in a Thai-inspired coconut broth. Basically, lemon grass, kefir lime, ginger, and chili sauteed in coconut oil with shallots and garlic, then added coconut milk, veggie broth and a bit of tamarind paste and tamari...the veggies were tasty because they absorbed the flavors of the coconut broth as they cooked.

This was another Thai-inspired sort of thing:

It's a salad with green mangos, green beans, watermelon radish, tomatoes and peanuts, dressed with a mixture of tamari and tamarind paste and finished off with a squeeze of fresh lime.

This Yucatan seitan topped with  black bean and corn salsa and served with yellow rice and asparagus was pretty tasty too:

Next up was a fun meal made from layering eggplant slices and lemon-pine nut filling on top of a portobella cap. It's sitting on a bed of sauteed kale and chard with some Italian vegan sausage and sun-dried tomatoes.

I had some lemon-pine nut filling leftover from the eggplant stacks, which I thought might make a good vegan mayo substitute. The lemon-pine nut filling is just pine nuts, nutritional yeast, lemon juice, and salt...I thinned it out with a bit of water and used it to put together some tofu salad for sandwiches:

The tofu salad is my homemade copy cat version of Toby's Jalapeño Lite tofu spread. My version has tofu, lemon-pinenut "mayo", celery, roasted jalapeños, red onion, mustard, cider vinegar, and salt and pepper. I liked this version better because it doesn't taste as "eggy" as the Toby's spread.

And finally, we went to see Billy Connolly live the other night (he was brilliant...how could he not be brilliant?) and before the show we had dinner at a vegetarian Chinese restaurant. At first, it was a little disconcerting because all the seitan stuff is listed on the menu as chicken and pork, etc., but it's all 100% veggie protein. The only items that contain eggs are the fortune cookies. The food was pretty tasty. We had veggie fried rice, some lemon "chicken", and fried bean curd sheets over veggies:

lemon "chicken"

bean curd sheets over veggie stir fry

Some of the faux meat stuff looked and tasted pretty real; it gave me a bit of a fright. But we were reassured by both the waiter and the sign by the door that is was all vegan:

Here were our fortunes; I hope they come true:

Ciao for now :)