Squirrel’s Vegan Kitchen

Well, I have a bucket load of pictures to post, including one of the world’s cutest squirrel pictures taken by yours truly. On with the show!

A couple of weeks ago, I made Susan’s Chocolate-Orange cake. Of course I had to display it just a beautifully as she did.

I will admit to adding a little bit of fat, 1/4 of a cup of oil. Even though a Susan recipe has never let me down, we were having people over for dinner and I didn’t want to risk it, having not made the recipe before. It was extremely good. I think next time I’m going try a grasshopper variation on it and omit the orange and add mint extract. Maybe with some chopped up Peppermint Pucks on top. Yummy.

I love my pressure cooker for the amazing things it can accomplish in 20 minutes.

A quick potato and corn chowder with black-eyed peas, which I’ve been cooking with like crazy. I love how quickly they cook and how they meld with anything. Served with some toasted Dave’s Killer baguette, the perfect addition to any soup.

Christmas was a low key affair for us this year. It was just Jim, the fur kids and myself, so it was basically a day off work with presents (we aren’t religious). As you might remember from last year, I’m kind of crazy about the holidays, normally, but this year I’m just not feeling it. It was my 4th Christmas away from my family, it’s been a downer of a year and it just didn’t feel like Christmas. We didn’t even put a tree up! Even when the kitties were young we still managed a tree. Bindhi’s first Christmas we had a little pre-lit tree that we kept in our second bedroom. We would lock the kitties up our bedroom and bring it out for an hour and then put it away and let them back out. Our last Christmas in Phoenix we took that little tree and suspended it upside down from the ceiling to keep the cats from it! That was bad because after awhile we stopped noticing it and it didn’t end up coming down until March.

Anyhow, this year there was no tree, just presents jammed under our end table. A co-worker gave me this cute little ornament, so I clipped it to the lamp on the table, our make ship Christmas tree.

I clipped it on with a little squirrel clip, which was an early Christmas present. Other than that and the wreath I buy for our front door each year, that was the extent of my decorating this year.

Christmas morning, despite Jim’s pleas, we had to open presents before breakfast. Why? Because part of our breakfast was one of his stocking stuffers. Jim loves anything maple, so when I spotted a jar of maple butter at the grocery store awhile ago, I decided to get it for him for Christmas. It was too expensive for me to justify as a regular purchase, but under the guise of a gift I could excuse away.

VwaV pear ginger waffles with maple butter, cheezy chickpeas and a pear. Yummy! I think I’ve finally learned, though, that I’m more of a pancake girl than a waffle girl. Thankfully all of the VwaV waffle batters make great pancakes.

Christmas dinner was the seitan portabella stroganoff from VwaV.

Yes, those are some accidentally vegan croissants on my plate. Like I said, I just wasn’t feeling it this year and I didn’t want to make real bread for just the two of us. Those were something that I caved into from Jim’s puppy dog eyes at the grocery store. Of course, the stroganoff was wonderful. I need to make this recipe more often.

And now for the serious craziness: I didn’t make dessert. I bought some desserts at Wild Oats. I had two reasons for this. 1) I was feeling lazy, plain and simple, and 2) is that if I made something it would mean there would be a lot of it laying around (cake, cookies, etc) and we really don’t need that. We’re trying to clean up our act, foodwise.

Piece of Cake German Chocolate cake. Very moist and delicious.

Piece of Cake Carrot Cake Bar. It was very good as well, with a strong ginger flavor, but we both agreed that a cream cheese frosting was in order, not a crunchy sugar one.

We often the squirrels in our backyard and recently we’ve been attracting some birds, so I’ve started putting out seed for them as well. This provides food for them, but hours of entertainment for the cats and, honestly, for me too. Now, I’m not some crazy person that things they can tell squirrels apart, but we do have a couple with distinguishing characteristics and I’ve given them names. We have a meaner, fat squirrel who is missing the top half of his tail named Spanky. There is also a large, slightly friendlier squirrel who is missing a chunk of fur from the left side of his tail that I call Chunk. We have 2 younger squirrels who were born this summer. They are incredibly cute, they still haven’t grown into their heads yet and their tails are scraggily looking. I can tell them apart because one of them is missing a bunch of fur from the underside of his tail. I call him Little Chunk. Now, I’m not one to play favorites, but with his boyish charm and baby face, Little Chunk is a real heart warmer. I was taking pictures of him the other day and was really looking at them when I downloaded the pictures a few minutes ago to blog and oh god, I nearly died from this cuteness. If you’ve made it this far into my squirrel-love spiel you are in for a treat, the cutest squirrel on Earth.

Look at how cute he is! That sunflower shell in his hand, the food on his little nose and that open-mouthed smile! Cutest picture ever! My heart physically hurts looking at it.

I told Bindhi that I was going to arrange a marriage between her and Little Chunk. She didn’t look very keen on that idea.