Granola bars

Today I decided to make some homemade granola bars!

These yummy bars consist of the following:

dried apricots
shredded coconut
slivered almonds
chocolate chips
dried apples
oatmeal
flour, earth balance, brown sugar, baking soda/powder and salt

and voila!

Banana bread

Banana bread is one of my favorite things to bake because it's super easy and yummy! In fact my mom always asks me to bake her some banana bread for xmas lol.

The recipe is from a Canadian Living cookbook, and I veganized it by using soy milk and oil instead of milk and butter.

The key is to use bananas that are the perfect ripeness! I often freeze my bananas when I see they are getting brown.

I also add walnuts to give it an extra touch.

I LOVE eating this warm, and I really enjoy spreading some earth balance on it. yummmmmm


I will be doing a lot more xmas baking in the next coming week. Instead of buying gifts for my family and friends, I bake and make crafts for them :) The challenge of making the goodies ahead of time is NOT eating them lol.

Stay tuned for some yummy vegan xmas goodies!

If anyone has a good vegan gingerbread cookie recipe please let me know! I tried a recipe last year, but it didn't turn out too great. The dough was very hard to work with.

K

Lentils with squash and kale

This is one of my favorite dishes, but my husband isn't too crazy about kale so he's not a big fan of the dish. The recipe is from a newspaper, from a few years ago. It is really easy to make. If you want the recipe just let me know.

It contains the following ingredients:
couscous, kale, tomatoes, butternut squash, lentils, and spices.

Tofu pineapple strir-fry

I hadn't made a stir-fry for a while, so I thought it was time!

I marinated my tofu in homemade terrayaki sauce and pineapples for about 2 days (the longer the better)


Then I added some mushrooms, peppers, onions, and rice stick noodles. I also added some rice vinegar and a put of hoisin sauce. OH and I also added some toasted cashews.

Muffins / Cupcakes

I decided to make some pumpkin muffins with the leftover pumpkin puree, they turned out MUCH better than my pie :)

My husband went to an Animal Law Conference in Portland on my bday weekend, so I had to make myself vegan bday cupcakes. They were a huge success! I'm usually not very good at making cupcakes, but these were really easy to make.

Vanilla cupcakes with lime frosting:

Leak and bean cassoulet with biscuit

Mmm mmm mmm. This receipe is very similar to my veggy pot pie, with it has a nice twist with the biscuit on top!

I recommend using a BIG pot, not a frying pan like the book suggests


Once I realized my cast iron frying pan wasn't big enough I transferred everything to my cast iron oven.

And voila! The finished result

Our amazing wedding reception in San Francisco

My husband and I got married on August 22, 2008 in Berkeley and we had our reception at The Millennium in San Francisco. We had moved to California for the summer to do internships, and we decided to get married :) I planned the whole wedding in about a month, yes it was crazy, but everything turned out perfectly!

Food is really important to us, and we wanted nothing but the best for our wedding! (And of course we wanted an ALL vegan wedding) Finding the best location was tricky, we tested out a couple of restaurants, and the best BY far was The Millennium (an all vegan restaurant). We really wanted to impress our guests with the food since many non-vegans think all we eat is salad!! lol

We were blown away by food, and so was everyone else. There was even a vegan pasty chef who works at the restaurant who made a wedding cake for us.

Here are some pictures (I can't find the original menu for the life of me, so I can't tell you what each dish was called right now, but I will re-post when I find it :)










Bottom tier was hazelnut, top tier almond. With raspberry sauce, fruit in the middle and white chocolate mousse