Happy holidays from The Food Slut!

Seasons greetings!

Things have been hectic and bizarre around here lately. It looks like we will be moving to upstate New York very soon (Brad will go ahead in a couple week, and the kids and I will follow likely in March). This has all come on very suddenly, and was completely unexpected, but we are excited about it!

I promise to resume blogging very soon. Between finals, the holidays and a dozen other things, I just haven't had time. If/when we move, though, I will be able to stay home with my kids and my kitchen, which means more cooking and more blogging. Hooray!

I wish you all a very happy holiday season!

The Food Slut & Family

Responses

No food to blog about tonight, since we ate a very late lunch. At work we had Izzo's fabulous burritos catered in, but they were all pre-wrapped, and they all had beef or chicken in them. Doh! So I called Brad, and on his way home from class, he swung by Izzo's, got us a couple vegan burritos, and we ate lunch together at my office at 2:00. What a sweetie!

Tonight we are taking the kids to see LSU Theater's production of High School Musical. Should be fun! Brad is dreading it, but the kids and I are looking forward to it. I'll admit, I hated the movie the first time I watched it with the kids, but it has totally grown on me, and I love the songs now.

To keep the Vegan MOFO theme going, though, I wanted to share some of the stranger comments I've received since going vegan.

"What are you...a PETA freak?"
- bank teller

"Shame on you!"
- my boss (I KNOW!)

"You can still eat chicken/fish/pork/seafood, right?"
- many, many, many people

"Wow, you're the first actual vegetarian I've met in real life!"
- a colleague

"I've heard of vegetarian before. What does it mean?"
- grocery store cashier

"SOY milk?? What's a soy?"
- woman at the grocery store

"What kind of foods does a veejun eat?"
- various people

"You don't eat meat or dairy? What DO you eat?"
- even more people

Hey, at least people are becoming somewhat informed from my answers, right? I'll admit to having some of the same attitudes about it in the past, so I can't really judge. Turnabout is fair play, right?

More veejun food to come later this weekend! ; )

FYI

We are in the path of Gustav, so in the event power goes out and I can't blog, you'll understand why. Hopefully it will blow by and things will be back to normal before too long, but we are well prepared in case it's worse than that. We have plenty of water, nonperishables, flashlights and lanterns, so we aren't too concerned about how we'll fare. If things are too bad in the aftermath, at that point we'll pack up and head to some friends' house, but our hope is that we can just stay here at home.

And can I mention how difficult it is to find vegan nonperishable food??? Yikes! Our pantry is stocked with bread, canned beans, cereal, rice milk, peanut butter, apples and oranges. Not the most exciting stockpile of food, but it'll do what it needs to do, and it's stuff we will use in the long run anyway.

I'll be back when everything is back to normal!

Dinner recap

Well folks, I am once again boring. Last night I made the super yummy Black-eyed Pea Salad, which is quick becoming a standard for us, except this time I used garbanzo beans and edamame instead of black-eyed peas. It was delicious, satisfying and sooo easy. I didn't get any pictures because I was sick yesterday, and it's something I've made bunches of times already.

Tonight we're having leftovers from work. This is decidedly not a vegan meal, but it just seemed the responsible thing to do, since it's free. It was really yummy, spicy, creamy pasta with chicken (which I picked out of my serving) and garlic bread. Look at it! So delicious!



And now, I have to say that I'm really torn. I love to cook, and I love cooking and eating vegan food. It's important to me for so many different reason, all of which I've detailed before. But I'm torn, because nearly every single day there are scads of leftovers at work. If I don't bring them home, they get dumped in the garbage. I'm not talked about just the meager pickings left after everyone has eaten; I'm talking about entire untouched pans of food. Last week I brought home a massive pan of lasagna. Today I brought home more pasta than would fit in a 9x13 pan, and at least 4 baguettes' worth of garlic bread. It seems downright wrong to let that food be thrown away. The problem is that almost none of it is vegan. So what do I do? One of the biggest reasons I'm vegan is because of the global ramifications of a non-vegan diet. It's such a gross misuse of resources. But what's worse? To let days' worth of food be throw in the garbage because it's not vegan, or to go ahead and eat it and not take up any more resources in buying other food? I am really, really torn. I love to cook, and I want to adhere to a vegan diet, but it seems stupid to spend money on groceries every week, when I could feed our family almost completely on leftovers from work.

So what to do? Any insight would be greatly appreciated. I'm just not sure what do about this. :sigh:

In other news, I registered for my Fall semester classes last night, and I am SO excited to get started! Classes start in about 4 weeks, and I'm dying to dive into them. I'm taking all upper-level classes this semester, which should be a lot more fulfilling. Yippee!

I'll leave you with a picture of something I made last week, but forgot to blog about. These are spinach and mushroom enchiladas, which I was not terribly pleased with. They were good, but not great. I also made spanish rice with green sauce, and refried beans from scratch. Overall a very satisfying meal, although I'll tweak the enchiladas quite a bit next time.

Booooooooooring

Ok, so evidently leftovers are incredibly boring. We've managed to go this whole week with only cooking one meal (enchiladas on Monday, which were very unremarkable and not so great, unfortunately), and have been otherwise subsisting on leftovers, and food I bring home from work. The other day I brought home an entire 24"x12" untouched pan of lasagna that was left after lunch, so that's now in 4 big gladware containers in the freezer. Score! I won't eat it because it has loads of meat and cheese in it, but it's great for lunches for Brad and the kids, and it was going to get thrown away otherwise, so I'll take it!

But that brings me back to my original point: leftovers are boring. I have no food items of interest to blog about, and that makes me sad. We're going out of town for the weekend tomorrow (to visit some of Brad's college friends in Auburn), but I promise to be back in full cooking mode next week. I miss working in my kitchen!

Also, I haven't decided for sure, but I think I may end up bowing out of Tuesdays with Dorie. Many of the recent recipes haven't been at all interesting or appealing to me, and many of them are difficult to veganize, so it's been hard for me to participate. The rules are pretty unflinching and stringent, so it doesn't leave me a lot of room to stay on. I'll think about that this weekend and decide for sure next week, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to give it up, with much sadness. :sigh:

Well, I hope you all have a great weekend, and you can rest assure that Brad and I will be having a marvelous time in Auburn. I love that town!

Peace out.

Shameless plug

A sweet, treasured friend of mine, The Bargain Babe, is doing a contest giveaway on her blog. Go check it out if you like to save money! She regularly posts great tips for ways to save money -- something we can all use!

Click! Enter! Save!

I've been tagged

Grace from A Southern Grace has graciously (har har) tagged me with something called "Look What I Made." I'm supposed to list five recipes that I've tried from other blogs.

The creator of this little game, Farida of Farida's Azerbaijani Cookbook, says that "this is a great opportunity to give kudos to the fellow foodies whose recipes we used and inspire them to post more of their yummies. A way to say thank you for what they do. I also think this tag will help us discover some interesting recipes and blogs out there. There are a lot of delicious recipes hidden somewhere in the archives, and this tag may actually give them another chance to shine." Let's do this.

I don't have a lot, in all honesty, because until recently most of my recipes have been from cookbooks, or allrecipes.com, or they were just things that I grew up watching my mom cook. But here are some bloggers' recipes that I've made:

Cinnamon Rolls from Joy the Baker

Crispy Sage & Brown Butter Pasta from Technicolor Kitchen

Cabbage Rolls from sweets, savories, etc.

Asian Noodle Salad from The Pioneer Woman

And most recently, Coconut Milk Dal from Chocolate Shavings

Be sure to check out their blogs and see what they've got going on!

And because I'm a lameass spoil sport, I'm not going to tag anyone just now. I'm still fairly new to the exciting world of food blogging, and aside from the lovely Grace who graces (har har) my blog with comments on almost everything I make (thank you! I love your comments and they always make me laugh!), I don't e-know enough other food bloggers to tag them. But I'll file this away for the future, and I'll tag people with it then. ; )

Bored

I'm sick today, and bored out of my mind. One can only lie in bed for so many hours before she begins to lose her mind, after all. I missed the last day of class before finals, which is a huge bummer for me. I've enjoyed this so much, my first semester back in college after an 11 year hiatus, and I hate to miss even one day. Ah well, at least it was a fairly nothing day, it seems. Brad and I have two classes together, and he said that our beloved Anthropology prof only lectured for ten minutes, and Chemistry wasn't even worth attending because we're so far ahead (both with more than 100% in the class), and there are practice finals we can take online, so it seems I didn't miss much. In Sociology, the professor wasn't planning to lecture more than 20 minutes, either, so I should be OK there, too. Still, though...it freaking sucks being sick.

So here's something to keep me entertained right now. No cooking for me while I'm sick (and I had planned on leftovers today, anyway), so this will suffice. I found this on A Southern Grace.

1. Go to www.flickr.com. (I used photobucket.com instead)
2. Type your answer to each question in the “search” box.
3. Using only the first page, pick an image.
4. Copy and paste the html into your blog.

1. What is your first name?



2. What is your favorite food?



3. What high school did you go to?



4. What is your favorite color?



5. Who is your celebrity crush?



6. Favorite drink?



7. Dream vacation?



8. Favorite dessert?



9. What do you want to be when you grow up?



10. What do you love most in life?



11. One word to describe you?