Day 4 Even vegans should get to splurge

Today I felt a little stifled creatively about what to eat. I think it was a case of recipe overload.

My friend Brian Willard let me borrow a few quite awesome vegan cook books. The Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook, and Vegan With A Vengeance. Both are quite good, they have a really good variety of recipes, I like the way their organized into types of meals. Vegan With A Vengeance even has a category called "Little Meals, Sammiches, and Finger Foods". They actually remind me a lot of the beginning sewing books or even an elementary language book because they have introduction chapters that tell what staples you should buy to stock your pantry, and tools and kitchen supplies that are helpful in preparing vegan meals.

I won't lie I've spent a lot of money on food this first week. It reminded me a lot of moving into a new apartment. The annoying ritual of having to restock the fridge with all the basic stuff like Ketchup and flour. But this time it was extra firm tofu and vanilla soy milk. Reading through those books has been helpful.

I've discovered a few basic supplies I would have never thought of buying, that if I do purchase will open up my options for making meals. For example some things I honestly never had even heard of before this week that I'm gonna pick up:

Nutritional yeast, textured vegetable protein, vital wheat gluten, and extra firm silken tofu (vacuumed packed).

I guess the vacuum packed part is important? But I didn't really know there was much of a difference between tofu?

So back to tonight's dinner I remembered Brian mentioning that the roasted winter vegetable recipe was pretty good so I took that from Veganomicon and adapted it slightly.

It was good, very pretty to look at, and damn healthy but I felt like something was missing I may have tried a different marinade or made the vegetables into more of a sauce.

You can really roast any vegetable and it makes it taste pretty good. I choose a lot of root vegetables cause their cheep and in season.

I chopped up:

1 sweet potato

2 turnips

1 large potato

3 beets

1 parsnip

whole head of garlic peeled and cloves left whole ( I would chop them up next time)

I then made a mixture of olive oil, ground ginger, salt, pepper, sage, and old bay (I've been using old bay on everything these days). I put all the chopped veggies into a large Tupperware container with a lid, and poured the oil mixture over them. I put the lid on and shook the container till all the vegetables where completely coated. I set the oven to 350 degrees and evenly laid the vegetables out on a backing sheet. I cooked them for about 5o minutes, pulling the pan out every 15 minutes to flip the vegetables over. You could probably go less time I just like them a little crispy.

For dinner I put the mixture over some brown rice and had a nice salad with tomatoes, walnuts, and pears.

The true highlight of the evening were the cookies, pumpkin oatmeal cookies. The recipe came from Vegan With A Vengeance. Now I've had my fair share of vegan baked goods and anyone who has had them knows they are either hit or miss.

They can be tough or hard as a rock or worse yet absolutely bland as hell. These cookies were definitely a hit! I think I may have eaten 5 of them tonight and Chris said he really liked them too.

I'm not sure if the cookies are really that much healthier than normal cookies. I didn't use eggs or butter but I stilled used a good amount of vegetable oil, and lots of sugar. But even vegans should get to splurge. I would like to search out more healthy alternatives to using so much oil (I know applesauce works) and sugar (maybe agave nectar) but for tonight it was really wonderful to have such a treat.