Friday Food Round-up

Hi and welcome to the Friday Food Round-up, everyone! This is where I gather up the notable (or notably strange) cooking and eating adventures of the previous week into one long post. Enjoy!

[click on any photo to enlarge]

The week started off with me coming down with a horrible flu-like sickness on Friday night. To help heal me, Daiku decided to cook me soup, and what he ended up creating would kick any chicken soup's butt.



Here are some of the fixins for Daiku's Thai-style cold buster soup:

• ginger
• lemongrass
• scallions
• daikon
• choy sum (an Asian green that almost resembles baby bok choy)
• carrots
• baked tofu
• cilantro
• dried shittake mushrooms
• tamari
• chilli paste
• fresh red chillis
  
• veggie/miso broth
• noodles
• and more...

So you take a bowl of noodly goodness



And some hot life-giving broth



And pour the latter over the former






... top with some fresh chopped cilantro and lime juice, and you get one of the best soups ever! It actually worked to soothe my throat and bring me back to life- for a little while that is!

The next day, we took a little harvest from our garden (with the cold weather, its days are numbered).

We got an orange heirloom tomato, 2 large jalapeno peppers, 2 purple bell peppers, a handful of yellow grape tomatoes, a stubby little cucumber, a red chilli and a yellow banana pepper.

With so many peppers, the choice for dinner was obvious: fajitas!

Only one problem, we did not have any tortillas in the house... unless you counted...



Purple corn taco shells! The shells are a total rip-off of the ones Leslie had used a little while back (click here to see) but our filling was different. We call these... fajitacos.

We pressure cooked a big batch of black beans, then used some to make refried beans with a bunch of spices.

For the fajitas, we sauteed purple and jalapeno peppers, onions, garlic, and tomatoes.

We topped these with fresh avocado and cilantro.

Yes, yes, but you went apple-picking- what did you do with the apples? You might be asking yourself right now.

Well on Tuesday, I decided to cook a celebration dinner in honor of the season premiere of the Gilmore Girls. [side note: Daiku and I are Gilmore Girl nerds. This all goes back to the time, in 2001-2002 that we lived in Florida. We knew noone and had nothing to do, so we took a friend's advice and watched the Gilmore Girls. Soon, this became a weekly ritual with us. We started ordering pizzas every Tuesday night while watching this show. Even for the 3 years we lived apart while I was in graduate school, we continued to watch the show religiously. Now that we live together again, the season premiere is something of a celebration. I know, I know, pretty lame, but what are you going to do?]

So for dinner I concocted a pasta dish with whole wheat spaghetti, black beans (the pressure cooker cooked up a huge batch), Swiss chard, kalamata olives, sun-dried tomatoes and lots and lots of garlic and olive oil.



For our salad, I made the sesame orange cole slaw from Fat-free Vegan. This time, unlike last week, I did not mangle her recipe at all! All I changed was using a yellow pepper instead of red, and adding a chopped up APPLE.



Next, for the piece de resistance, I thought it would be really fun to bake an apple upside down cake. This is what I love about the Internet: you search "vegan apple upside down cake recipe" and you get tons of results- yes!

I chose this recipe for caramel-apple upside down cake, which came from a blog I'd never seen before, the Penguin Chef. I made it a lot more rustic than the recipe directed (I cooked the apples with the caramel and baked the whole thing in a cast iron pan instead of a cake pan) but the results were magnificent. Please try this recipe!

Here is the cake when it came out of the oven:



And here it is when I turned it upside down:

FUN!! I'd never made an upside-down anything before, but this was so easy. It tasted very spicy and comforting. It came out of the pan effortlessly. And the cake part stood up so well to the caramel. I thought that it would get soaked and mushy after a while, but it didn't, it had a great texture.

Here are the slices that we ate for dessert on Tuesday



You can see from the top slice that the cake itself has little slices of apple in the batter. I tell you, if you're going to try just one recipe from this post, try this one!

One of my favorite easy dinners involves little Chinese buns. I find these in the Asian grocery store (I used to get them in California, too, so they must be pretty common).



Their texture is doughier than gyoza or potstickers, and that's why they are so comforting for me. (Like little carb pillows of love. ;-)

Daiku and I like to steam these and have them with a side of veggies- this time we had a stir-fry of broccoli, choy sum (a really tasty green, try it if you haven't), carrots, garlic, ginger, and tons of black bean paste.

A great go-to dinner for when you don't have a lot of energy.

Next up, I had a lot of baking to do. This Saturday is my mom's birthday, and I decided to send her cookies. My mom is not a big chocolate person, so I set about choosing cookies with different flavors to make. I decided on

• Coconut-lime cookies from Vive le Vegan!
• Hazelnut cardamom "Chloe" cookes from Vive le Vegan!
• Spicy ginger cookies from The Artful Vegan
  

They all turned out great after a test-run or two, and I especially want to thank Dreena for the Chloe cookies. Hazelnut is one of my favorite flavors, but I don't have it very often. Daiku and I both loved these cookies and I'm even going to bake another batch for a party we are going to tonight. I'm also so proud of myself for actually attempting a recipe from the Artful Vegan, but this recipe was honestly very simple.

Here are the cookies I sent to my mom, who lives in Virginia:

The coconut-lime cookies

Look how you can see little bits of lime zest!

The Chloe cookies with hazelnuts on top

The spicy ginger cookies topped with candied ginger (boy, were they really spicy. The recipe even called for pepper! They are decidedly adult, pretty complex ginger snaps)

Here is how we used up our heirloom tomato, sliced with avocado, drizzled with a modified Caesar dressing from Don't Get Mad Get Vegan. (I didn't have lemon juice, so I used red wine vinegar and left out the worcestershire sauce) This really is a great dressing.

Finally, I leave you with a shot of a typical breakfast from this past week. A fruit salad heavy on the apples, with bananas, raspberries, strawberries, and grapes, mixed with a little bit of orange juice. Instead of baking with the apples, we have pretty much been eating them fresh.



I hope you all enjoyed this week's food round-up!

Friday Food Round-up