TGIF

Anyone else TOTALLY OVER May? Yeesh. Totally ready for June to throw awesomeness my way.

Anyway, it's FRIDAY, and that means Vegan Latina tester pics!

Warm Yuca & Cabbage Salad with Tofu Chicarrones - one of my favorite recipes so far!


Potato Chickpea Enchiladas with Green Tomatillo Sauce and Pine Nut Crema


Salvadorian Slaw


Seitan Saltago (Peruvian Seitan & French Fry Stir Fry) - yes you read that right

And two kinds of seitan:


Steamed White Seitan


Steamed Red Seitan

Hope everyone has a FABULOUS weekend!

Vegan Brunch

If you couldn't tell from reading the blog, I love love love brunch. It's the perfect way to start a lazy Sunday, it's delicious yummies to fuel your fun-filled day, it's the solution to a wicked hangover...you really can't go wrong with brunch.

Which is why I was fucking STOKED (yes, I said it, what, let's fight) when I heard about Vegan Brunch by Isa Chandra-Moskowitz, the gorgeous kitchen goddess who gave us Vegan with a Vengeance, and, with Terry Hope Romero, forms half of the dynamic girl culinary duo that wrote Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, Veganomicon, and the upcoming Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar (the last of which yours truly has been test baking for) (No I don't use proper grammar) (I clearly had ice cream at lunch).

Enough with the product plugging! I love all Isa's cookbooks; your favorite verbally incontinent spazzy blogger (aka, me) barely knew how to cook before she got Vegan with a Vengeance in her grubby little ewok-like hands. And look at me now! I may have no direction or ambition and drift aimlessly upon the blustery sea of career advancement, but I can cook a tofu scramble so good it makes men leave their wives just to gaze upon my culinary expertise with barely-concealed lust. My cookies have brought entire empires to ruin. The last thing you'll all see before the end is my aproned silhouette, standing on a mountain top, a tray of biscotti thrust towards the heavens as the sky burns and the seas boil!

Anyway!

What I'm saying is, this book, like Isa's other books, kicks ass. It's just something about the way she speaks to the reader; there are no pretensions, no demands; it's like having a friend in the kitchen, helping you out. I've loved everything I've made from Vegan Brunch so far. Even if the idea of rolling/falling out of bed on a Sunday at 10am is repellent to you, most of the recipes can be used at late afternoon picnics or potlucks. Or, fuck it, make pancakes in a drunken stupor at 12:30am on a Thursday night. Because, um, I've certainly never done that. (The sad thing is I'm better at flipping pancakes while inebriated than while sober.)

But really, how could you NOT get out of bed for chocolate-beer waffles? Shiitake-dill frittata? Pumpkin pancakes? Lemon-cashew stuffed crepes with whole berry sauce? Homemade vegan sausages, muffins, scones, it's all here, folks. OM NOM FREAKING NOM is, I believe, the scientific term to describe the deliciousness.

Here are some lovely lovely photographs of recipes I've made out of this book. Most of them are from over the weekend, which the boy and I spent up in Sonoma county at my parents' domicile.

Classic Broccoli Quiche (from Easter)


Caramelized Onion Quiche (what, I fuckin' like quiche)


Cashew Ricotta


Omelette stuffed with Cashew Ricotta, balsamic mushrooms & onions, and leftover potato wedges


Potato Avocado Salad

Not picture, but also made (and devoured) was the coffee cake, with the apricot cardamom variation!

So go and buy a copy, preferably from your local bookstore! Berkeley peeps, I got my copy at Moe's Books on Telegraph, might want to call ahead and see if they have it.

I'm getting tingles just thinking about that potato salad. OOooooh.

Millennium's Southern Comfort Dinner

Last week I was lucky enough to go to Millennium's Southern Comfort Dinner with a great group of friends. The staff were dressed up as yokels and the food was fantastic, and it was a great way to (prematurely) start the holiday weekend off right.

We kicked off the meal with some appetizers and drinks:

Buckt-o-Beer


Corn bread, rye bread, some other bread I can't remember


Nachos (complete with 'cheese' sauce, beans, jalepenos, soy chorizo, and guac) and fried green tomatoes

Then tucked into some iceberg "wedgie" salads with 1000 Island dressing and tofu "deviled egg":



Then the entrees. There were four to choose from, and I got pictures of mine and JP's:


"Oyster" dog on french roll with homemade tartar sauce, onions, and breaded and fried maiitake mushrooms, with sides of bourbon black eyed peas, slaw, and steamed veggies


"Shake & Bake"d seitan over white rice with some kind of yummy sauce, same sides

Everything up to this point was FABULOUS. Food shared with friends is always fab but the SoCo meal was just the right amount of greasy and delicious and it was so much fun.

Dessert, however, was a little disappointing:


Spelt "muffcake" with (almost) all the fixins'

Perhaps it was because my expectations were high after hearing about last year's do-it-yourself brownie sundae bar, but the do-it-yourself "muffcake" (ie: muffin) sundae bar just wasn't doing it for me. The scoop of homemade cherry ice cream was AWESOME, toppings were YUM (julep hot chocolate sauce, chipotle strawberries, etc), but they were already running low on several (the crushed oreos and the whipped cream) by the time we got to dessert (and our reservation was quite early in the evening!). The most disappointing aspect was the muffcake itself. There were three choices of flavor (strawberry, chocolate, spelt with cream cheese frosting), and the general consensus was that the muffcakes were very dense and not very flavorful. I love muffins, but they are breakfast or snack food; if I go to Millennium, I expect to be blown away, and I have been in the past, but this dessert wasn't quite up to their normal standards. I think they were experimenting with a new idea, and hopefully next year it will be better.

However, the rest of the meal definitely lived up to or exceeded my expectations, and I encourage everyone living in or visiting the Bay Area to go to Millennium at least once! I will commence my Millennium stalkery again in the fall, as the pumpkin tiramisu with gingerbread ice cream I had last time we went made me moan in a manner most unsuitable for a fancy restaurant. Whatever, I bet it happens all the time there.

Happy Wednesday: Vegan Latina tester pics

It's been busy lately in Sisters Vegan land, hence the infrequent posting! But I hope Vegan Latina tester pics will make up for it! Terry is amazing and all the recipes I've tested so far have been delicious! My favorites are all the amazing soups.

Venezuelan Black Beans (Caraotas) & Tofu Chicharrones with brown rice and avo


Shambar: Hearty Andean Mountain Stew with Mushrooms and Bean


Peruvian Spicy Cheezy Sauce with chopped tomato on top


Sweet Potato Chipotle Bisque


Cuban Black Bean Soup, habanero variation


Venezuelan-style Arepas (it's the english-muffin-but-not lookin' thing on the bottom) - even tastier when made with friends!


Chimichurri Baked Tofu (on the right, covered in yummy sauce)


Creamy Potato Soup with Avocado