Sunday Breakfast

For what seems like forever, we've had pancakes for breakfast on Sunday mornings. It's something Rob started doing for me when I was pregnant with Mairin, and it's more or less continued until this day, only now I cook the pancakes.

This morning Mairin requested waffles instead of pancakes. I like waffles, so I thought I would humor her and make some waffles instead. I had some frozen blueberries, and I love blueberry waffles, so it seemed like a good change from our usual Sunday morning breakfast. I don't usually make the pancakes from scratch, I just use a mix, add in some rice milk and oil and cook them up. However, I'm going to have to find a good recipe, because the mix I've been using has dried milk in it, so they aren't quite dairy free.

We like to top our pancakes with Grade B pure maple syrup. On the side we had some vegan sausage and some blood oranges. The blood oranges at WFM are out of this world right now, I've been eating a lot of them. Although, you wouldn't know I'd been eating some extra Vitamin C by the killer cold I have at the moment.....uuugh!!

Sweet Potato and Spinach Quesadillas

Wow, it's been quite a while since I've posted a meal!! Rob's been out of town all this week and things have been CRAAAZZZYYY!! I did cook a few meals before he left. On Sunday we had the Bean and Corn Tortilla Lasagna from Eat, Drink and Be Vegan. Then, on Monday, we had Dreena's Monkey Minestrone, also from ED&BV (unfortunately I do not have any good pictures to share with you). Rob left Tuesday and that's pretty much where the cooking ended!! I did throw together a huge pot of No Chicken Noodle Soup made with alphabet pasta, and the girls and I ate it all week long.

We still have soup left, but I think it's going to have to go the freezer, because we just can't eat anymore soup!! I didn't have a lot in the house because it's been almost a week since I've shopped, and I didn't get much to begin with knowing Rob would be gone. So, I threw together some quesadillas (we always have tortillas on hand). I'm trying to transition to a vegan diet, so I really didn't want cheese on my quesadilla, although I did use cheese for the girls (as much as I would like to stop all animal product, Mairin's not quite ready to accept sweet potato on her quesadilla, so she had sweet potatoes on the side).

For the quesadillas I peeled, diced, and roasted one medium sweet potato. After the potato had roasted I sauted a bit of onion and garlic then added in a few handfuls of baby spinach to let it wilt. I mashed the sweet potato, spread it on one side of the tortilla, layered on the spinach saute, the sprinkled on a bit of cumin, chili powder and just a touch of allspice. I topped it with another tortilla and grilled it in the panini press until the tortilla was golden brown.

We ate our quesadillas with some guacamole and tortilla chips on the side. I had also planned to make some vanilla "rice" cream for dessert, but Stella's a bit under the weather today and I just didn't get time to make it and let it set up, so we'll be having that as a dessert later in the weekend. Instead, I thawed some frozen mango pieces and we ate those as dessert.

I got a new cookbook this week, so look for some new recipes coming soon!!

Pantry Pasta Sauce

It should have been grocery shopping day, but I just ran out of time to do it today. So, I had to throw together dinner tonight from what was left in my mostly bare cupboards. Because we'd been at a birthday party earlier in the day and had some snacks and cake, we really weren't all that hungry, so luckily I didn't have to find a big hearty meal to make.

I always have pasta on hand, and typically a large stock of various forms of canned tomatoes, so I decided to throw together a pasta sauce. I started by sauteing some onion and garlic. When that was begining to soften I threw in a can of artichoke hearts that I had drained and chopped, and a palmful of capers. I added some salt and pepper, and a 28 oz can of crushed tomatoes with basil. I simmered that while the pasta cooked and at the last minute added in a handful of frozen spinach to thaw and heat through. After draining the pasta I tossed it in the sauce and heated it all through. With the pasta I served some sliced french bread topped with pre-made basil pesto concentrate.

(Please forgive any spelling errors. For some strange reason I can't get the spell checker to work....it's not been working for about the last 3 or 4 posts I've made. Anyone else had this problem with blogger?? I'd like to get it fixed, because I'm getting really tired of proof reading over and over and STILL having spelling errors!!)

Happy Birthday Baby Boy!!

Yesterday was my friend Shannon's baby boy's first birthday. A few weeks ago they got the unfortunate news that he has some food allergies. I know from experience how stressful and irritating food allergies can be, and I truly feel for anyone that has to deal with them. It turns out that his allergies are to eggs and beet sugar. With the beet sugar allergy, if something's ingredients include sugar, and it doesn't specify "cane sugar" then you must assume it's beet sugar, and avoid it. So, with eggs out, and with unknown sources of sugar out, that pretty much means any cake from a bakery is out. So, knowing all of the wonderful things I know about vegan baking, and knowing that I only buy cane sugar, I volunteered to bake the little sweetie a birthday cake.

Now, I'm not much of a baker and even less of a cake decorator. So, my initial plan was a plain sheet cake with plain icing. Then, I had the idea of making cupcakes instead. Well, that all seemed so incredibly boring for a baby's first birthday cake. So, I decided to put the two together and make a cake in the shape of a lego. Brilliant, I know!!

The cake I decided on was Dreena's vanilla cake (I don't remember the real name of it) from ED&BV. It's a very easy cake consisting of flour, sugar, vanilla extract, lemon juice, applesauce, oil and soymilk (but I subbed rice milk). I baked it in a 9x9 square pan, instead of the 2 round pans suggested and it took significantly longer than directed to bake. I also made 4 cupcakes to use as the "knobs" on the lego.

For the icing I used a simple uncooked, egg free buttercream recipe that I got from allrecipes.com. The icing wasn't vegan, I used real butter. I can't use Earth Balance because of our soy elimination. For the yellow coloring I added 1/2 tsp. of turmeric powder. The turmeric gave the icing a very interesting, gingery flavor.

I iced some extra cupcakes and let my girls sample them before we went to the party, and they loved them. Stella got to share cake with baby boy since she can't have eggs either. I think she ate more of his birthday cake than he did!!