Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Vegan MoFo starts again soon!

And I'm excited!

It's hard to say how much of MoFo I'm going to be able to participate in this year, as I should be popping out a baby any time now. (Actually, my due date was Sunday. That's neither here nor there.) Having never done this before, I don't really know whether I'm going to be in any position to cook or not. Of course, I'm still going to have to eat. And unless the experience is TOTALLY lobotomizing, heaven knows I'll still be thinking about food.

Anyway, I've been spending some of my copious free time over the past couple of days getting really psyched up about MoFo. How am I getting psyched? By cooking things, of course!

Some stuff I've made in the past weekish:

- vegan hamburger helper! Brown rice macaroni mixed with the melty white cheez sauce (orange variation) from the Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook and some browned Morningstar Farms crumblies. (The word on the street is that these aren't going to be vegan much longer, but the bags I've seen around here still are!) Definitely hit the craving spot.

- the Gooda recipe out of the Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook! I expected this to be... gouda-y. It's actually mostly really onion-y. Tasty, but not what I expected. It also nearly destroyed my blender, but that's a story for another day.

- oatmeal chocolate chips based on the oatmeal raisin recipe in The Joy of Vegan Baking. I think I have a new favorite oatmeal cookie base. Being that I have done a straight up veganization of the recipe on the Quaker Oats container for years, this is a big thing for me!

- burritos! Usually burrito making is a man's work in my household. This is because my husband makes basically the best burritos ever. But every now and again I do it and this time I managed not to screw it up too badly.

- nacho cheezy sauce from Yellow Rose Recipes! This is my very favorite nacho cheezy sauce, but as I have not been able to do even mildly spicy things for the past 9+ months, I haven't made it in a LONG time. Jeez, I forgot how good it is. So good.

- the scrambled tortillas out of Vegan Brunch. Highly recommended. I thought this sounded CRAZY initially, but it's not. It's sort of like a deconstructed burrito. It'sssss blisssssss.

And then today I made PIE.

EPIC PIE.

We're talking a layer of rum-scented vanilla custard topped with fresh lemon-lime curd, all served up in a lime-graham cracker crust.

I don't know where the hell this idea came from. I was at the store trying to buy ingredients to make a spiced plum pie, and all the plums sucked (really, they were BROWN and mushy, yuck) and I didn't want to buy them because I know I can get sexy sexy fresh plums at the farmer's market tomorrow... and then all of a sudden I was like screw this, how about some sort of vanilla custard/lemon curd hybrid?

But hey, who cares where the idea came from? It's an awesome one, and I am really just typing up this post to waste time until the spouse gets home so that we can EAT SOME PIE.

More when MoFo starts!