Squirrel’s Vegan Kitchen

These pictures may not look the greatest because they are off of my cell phone, but you’ll get the gist of it!

This was from our breakfast at Bob’s Red Mill. So yummy! Vegan French toast on bread they make there from the flour they mill with actual maple syrup, some fried potatoes and bisquits all served with Earth Balance. The only meat and cheese they sell in the store at Bob’s is soy! It’s pretty neat and cheap if you’re ever here, it’s in the slightly southern suburb of Milwaukie.

Yesterday while wandering around we stopped by Pizza-Agogo a pizza place in North Portland that has vegan pizza by the slice. The pizza on hand yesterday was quite yummy, with a red sauce, spinach, artichoke hearts, tomatoes, kalmata olives and (strangly) blackeyed peas. It was very good and the slices were huge! We also had some breadsticks with fresh marinara.

We ate out on the patio and while we were eating I saw this crazy looking flower behind Jim’s head! Very Seussical looking, I think, with it’s purple feathery petals and the little whirlywig on top of it. I had to snap a picture of it!

Tonight we had a friend of ours over for dinner. With it being our first dinner that we’ve hosted since we got here, I really wanted to go all out.

First thing on the agenda: if you have not gotten the Real Food Daily cookbook GO GET IT! It has the most insane seitan recipe I’ve ever seen, very unconventional, and it makes a load of it. It requires no kneading, is baked and involves beans. Intrigued? It’s very good and I made it this morning for our dinner tonight.

But first a recap of dinner last night:

We had a simple salad with fresh greens from Josh and Michelle’s garden. I just chopped up a tomato and sprinkled a little goddess dressing on them. The greens were only a few hours old and tasted wonderful. I cooked up two faux chicken patties from Food Fight with buns that I picked up from Bob’s Red Mill bakery. Fast and simple and it hit the spot after a long day.

Now, on to tonight’s feast:

Seitan cutlets and garlic mashed red potatoes. We also had steamed asparagus, mushroom gravy, more homemade strawberry lemonade and a mini baguette recipe-in-progress for the book. I’ve been making these cutlets for years, they are really simple. All you do is thinly slice the seitan and coat it with a thin layer of dijon mustard, roll it in bread crumbs and fry lightly in a bit of oil. Mmmm, delicious. The seitan recipe from the Real Food Daily book worked wonderfully. In the background you can sneak a peak at dessert…

Black Forest Cake. This will also be in the book. I’m not a huge cake person, but I really like this cake. I fear that I will be gaining much weight between now and the book coming out, but a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do!

Yowsa! It’s been a long 2 weeks since I last wrote to you folks, but now I have the internets back at my fingertips, and faster than ever (we used to have DSL, but now we have cable).

So yes. I have a lot of catching up to do, so let me begin:

Bindhi was done with living in hotel and she was ready to settle into our new home. Here’s the view from our back windows and our porch. There is a creek right below the trees. Very cool.

A beaver sighting on our first day!

Tempeh bacon BLT with mashed potatoes and corn. I used Isa’s recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance for the bacon marinade. I haven’t been a big fan of tempeh, but recently I have been craving it. So weird! So now I am really digging on it and it’s becoming a staple item in my kitchen.

Turtle cheesecake from Sweet Pea Bakery, a local vegan bakery. I have tasted and made some decent vegan cheesecakes in my day, but this was incredible. Got it at Food Fight.

Breakfast! A cinnamon roll from the local vegetarian co-op (The Daily Grind) with half of a little honeydew from another local vegetarian co-op (People’s). Mmmm…

Nachos! Inspired by our adventures in Palm Springs, I made some nachos. A layer of whole grain tortillas was buried in taco TVP crumbles, black beans, guac, salsa, Tofutti sour cream, Follow Your Heart cheddar cheese and black olives. Tasty…

Some homemade strawberry lemonade! I made it last night. I was looking at some at the store the other day and was reeling from the sticker shock of good organic lemonade and I realized “hey, this is just lemons and water!” It turned out good and I’m going to be making a lot more of it this summer to put in my nifty carafes.

Banana cream crepes! I made these when we were still unpacking and I was wading through boxes with limited foodstuffs available. Filled with a simple vanilla soy yogurt and banana filling.

More desserts from Sweet Pea, this time obtained from New Seasons. Chocolate Peanut Butter and Lemon Raspberry. The Chocolate Peanut Butter brought down the house.

Our first breakfast, the morning after we wearily rolled into town, with a box of pancake mix from Food Fight. Armed with little else then the basics in our “essentials” bin (a pot, a pan, untensils, one box of our new dishes, and some other assorted junk), we made a quick and easy breakfast.

Tonight was seriously gluttony night. We had the regular old pizza that I always make, but with a new crust I’ve been working on for the cookbook. For dessert we had a dessert pizza (which will also be in the book) with raisins, coated in cinnamon sugar and drizzled with icing. OMG, we were full. Oy.

Other things: life is good working at Herbivore. Issue 11 is possibly in many of your hands right now, so it’s very busy at Herbie HQ. We are opening a store front full of assorted vegan non-edible treats this summer (think late July), so there are a lot of vegan, soy-based fish to fry before then. Portland is even more than I expected. Stores have vegan food in their delis and dessert cases. Restaurants have clearly marked options. Wait staff not only know what vegan means, but are eager to help. People wave you in to traffic. There are ducks and squirrels! Ooh, I even bought a squirrel cookie cutter last weekend that I will have to make some cookies with soon.

Also, Jim and I went on a field trip last weekend. We live minutes from Bob’s Red Mill, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with. Well, the have a large visitor’s center that serves breakfast and lunch and has a full store with over 300 of their products. They also sell other assorted kitchen gadgets and cookbooks, including a section on vegan cooking. AND, they have a completely seperate vegetarian menu with vegan options clearly marked. We had a lovely breakfast then I went nuts at the store. It was a very good thing.

So, I’m pretty tired and rambling at this point, but I wanted to give you all a little rundown. We have been enjoying some restaurants too and I just got a new phone with a camera so I’ll have no more excuses to not have pictures of our food when we eat out.

Thanks for all the support and I’ll talk to you soon!