peanut butter-oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies

Jared has been working really long, weird hours this week, so I made him these cookies. I used the Big Gigantoid Crunchy Peanut Butter-Oatmeal cookie recipe from VWaV but added a handful of chocolate chips because Jared loves chocolate and peanut butter together (I don't know many people who don't though). I halved the recipe so we wouldn't have too many cookies around the house and instead of making 12 big cookies I decided to make "normal" sized cookies (which yielded about 20 cookies) so we wouldn't feel as guilty eating more than one! They aren't big or gigantoid but they are pretty damn amazing.

Spring Cleaning Pizza Party

Man, I'm beat. Jared and I have been cleaning like crazy today. It actually started last night with us taking everything out of our little computer room/nook, scrubbing it down and reorganizing the whole room in order to make it a haven for me to get some serious studying done once school starts. Then, before we knew it the rest of the house became shiny and new. To reward our immaculate surroundings (at least to our standards), I decided to throw Jared and I a mini pizza party. I made the pizza dough from VWaV in my bread machine (on the dough setting), and it turned out awesome! I made 2 pizzas, which were a little bigger than personal-pan size, both with tomato sauce, Teese, veggie pepperoni, garlic salt, dried oregano, nutritional yeast and red pepper flakes. I would've added extra stuff like bell peppers and onions, but I was so wore out from cleaning. Seriously, if you can get your hands on some Teese, make a pizza ASAP! So freakin good!!!


I even made a sweet pizza with the left over pizza dough that had cinnamon and sugar! Jared said it was really good but I think if I made this again, I'll roll the dough out thicker to form bread sticks. Perhaps I'll make a Tofutti cream cheese icing to drizzle over it too.

Farewell Village Pizza (just kidding)

UPDATE! From several sources, I have heard Village Pizza is back in business. Yeah!

When I heard that the only place to get a vegan pizza in Atlanta (at least that I know of), Village Pizza, went out of business, I was kinda bummed. It was so nice to have a place actually have vegan cheeze and 3 vegan "meat" toppings including veggie pepperoni, veggie sausage and veggie ground round available. They had a great crust and pretty decent atmosphere. Unfortunately it was across town for us and in my opinion, a bit on the pricey side. A medium pizza, which could feed 2 comfortably, was around $20, after drinks and a tip, about $30. I guess that might be standard, but it always seemed a bit too expensive for pizza. Since they did offer vegan toppings, we tried our best to support them, knowing full well I could make a pretty awesome pizza at home, for a lower price that didn't require driving across town.
Like most towns, restaurants that offer vegan options are slim. Atlanta does have a good handful of places to eat but now we were minus a pizza place which meant I had to master pizza at home. I have always used my dad's pizza crust "recipe" (he doesn't measure) but decided to give Isa's pizza dough a try from Vegan with a Vengeance. MAN, is this a great crust. After mixing the wet and dry ingredients together, kneading by hand for 10 minutes, letting the dough rise twice for about an hour each time, I was able to stretch this dough thinner than usual. Isa's dough wasn't sticky and kept its shape fairly well with little effort.
I think the way to an amazing homemade pizza is a really hot oven (500 degrees or more) and an equally and pre-heated pizza stone. After the dough was stretched out, topped with tomato sauce, veggie pepperoni, FYH cheeze, fresh Roma tomatoes and dried oregano, it was baked for only about 8 minutes and broiled for another 2 minutes. It sucks that Village Pizza is out of business but I am happy to say I have made a pizza that hit the spot!
Before being baked:

Right out of the oven:

(I would have taken better pictures but I was too hungry!)

Signs of Spring

True signs of spring for us are tax season, picnics and allergies.
As I've mentioned before, Jared works as a stockbroker. Under normal circumstances, it can be a stressful job. Throw in tax season and Jared's job can be down right bad. This week ended especially awful for Jared, so I made him one of the first things he eyed in My Sweet Vegan: Peanut Butter Bombs!!! Okay, okay, I had one or two myself and they were good, but Jared really needed them, I swear! Little did he know, I had a great Saturday planned too. (Sorry for the blurry pic, we were hypnotised by these delicious and naughty treats.)

I decided to surprise Jared with a picnic. For Saturday's picnic, I made some lower fat potato salad on Friday night. That's right, lower fat potato salad. Yes, I did use Yukon gold potatoes and a little Vegenaise BUT to make a very creamy dressing for the potato salad I used soy milk and lemon juice. The lemon juice thickened the soymilk and gave it a tangy bite. I also added celery, grated onion, mustard, salt, black pepper and Herbes de Provence. Of course, Jared saw the potato salad and got into it when he got home from work Friday so I told him of our picnic plans.

Saturday morning came and I surprised Jared with breakfast in bed. I made him banana waffles with mixed fresh berries and maple syrup. I first let the blackberries, blueberries and strawberries macerate in maple syrup while I made the waffle batter.

I made the Banana Nut waffles from Veganomicon, minus the nuts. On top I added the mixed berries with maple syrup and little whipped Earth Balance. These were so good.

After breakfast and lounging around a bit, I made sandwiches for our picnic lunch. I got some ciabatta rolls from the farmers market and slathered homemade pesto that I made with that lovely basil in my last post. I used the pesto recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance. I also added cucumber, avocado (just a little), red onion and tomato.

So, we packed up our food, blanket and dog Sweetpea and headed over to Grant Park. We couldn't have asked for a better day. It was in the upper 60's and very sunny.


There was also these beautiful flowers surrounding us, (which I think were actually weeds . . . but, hey, sometimes weeds have the prettiest flowers) that reminded me that allergy season is around the corner.

Sure signs of spring, maybe, but I am feeling like a cold is in the making so winter may very well still have it's grip on me. Hopefully, it is just allergies come early.

Sesame Crusted Seitan, Lemon Gem Truffles

I know anyone reading this blog knows how wonderful it feels to be in the kitchen after not being in it for a while. I spent a good couple of hours in the kitchen today making homemade seitan and what was suppose to be Lemon Gem Cupcakes. Both the seitan recipe and the cupcake recipe came from Vegan With A Vengeance. The seitan turned out pretty great and the cupcakes turned into a complete disaster.
First up, the homemade seitan. This recipe is simple, used only a few ingredients and was easy to follow. It was the first batch of seitan I made that didn't turn out too mushy. For the wet ingredients, I had to use ketchup instead of tomato paste because I only had frozen tomato paste (that's how I store left over tomato paste from the can). I also added a couple of bouillon cubes to the cooking broth for extra flavor. This recipe made so much seitan! For dinner tonight I wasn't super hungry so I made some sesame crusted seitan nuggets. I coated the nuggets in flour, then into a flax meal/water slurry and then into toasted sesame seeds. I fried the nuggets in a little canola oil and made a dipping sauce of Dijon mustard and maple syrup. This was sooo good!

Now on to the cupcakes. They turned out horrible. Jared made these cupcakes before and had disastrous results as well, but I thought I'd give them another shot. The batter was so runny that it spread over the top of the muffin tin and made a crunchy flat top. I made the lemon icing which was also too runny and had a weird texture. So, following one of my fellow blogger buddies, Amanda from Walking the Vegan Line, I made these cupcakes into truffles!!! I added the cupcakes to the food processor to make them into crumbs and added enough of the lemon icing to hold the crumbs together. I used a small ice cream scoop to get equal mounds and rolled them into balls. I then dunked each ball into the remaining icing and put them in the fridge to set up. While they tasted like lemon truffles, they kind of looked liked glazed doughnut holes. Amanda is a genius!

Finally, some cooking

So I finally got some cooking done. For breakfast, we had "Fronch" Toast from "Vegan with a Vengeance". This was the first time we had made this, and it was ridiculously good. We used Golden Pecan Bread from our local farmer's market.



For lunch, we had a lentil soup. This is just my basic soup that I throw in whatever we have lying around. This one contained: red lentils, fingerling potatoes, carrots, celery, garlic, shallots, zucchini, thyme, rosemary, and sage.



And for dinner, I used the Marinated Asian Tofu recipe from "Veganomicon" and grilled it. We had firm tofu that is made locally, but it was still a little too soft and didn't hold up to the grill as well as I would have hoped, hence, the little uneven pieces of tofu. Despite the random shapes, it still tasted great. I added that on top of stir-fried snow peas, carrots, broccoli, and green onions and rice.