C’est La Vegan

I’m a huge fan of hot and creamy baked dips.  They’re perfect for entertaining in that they’re not much harder to make than cold dips, but they’re so much more impressive.  They’re also especially great for this time of year when the weather’s chilly and there’s lots of football on the tube!
I have a favorite [...]

I saw Nigella Lawson make this Middle Eastern roasted eggplant dip on one of her cooking shows years ago, and since then I’ve made it many times for get togethers at our place, or as a dish to bring to a party.  This doesn’t have an overpowering eggplant flavor, so even if it’s not your [...]

A few years ago I saw a Good Eats episode featuring fried plantains.  They looked and sounded so good, and I made a mental note that I’d have to try them someday. Cut to breakfast a few months ago at Hugo’s Restaurant.  They were featuring a special that had plantains as part of the dish, [...]

The next dish that I made for our Hollywood Bowl Picnic was the tempeh pate from the Native Foods Cookbook.  This is one of my favorite recipes, and I can’t even count how many times I’ve made this.  We’ve eaten it in Palm Springs wraps (Ryan’s favorite), I’ve baked it in puff pastry, served it [...]

This was the final savory dish for our Hollywood Bowl picnic.  Both recipes are from Veganomicon, and the technical (but too long for a blog post title) names of both are Greek-Style Tomato-Zucchini Fritters with Fresh Herbs and Mediterranean-Style Cashew-Cucumber Dip.  That’s a mouthful!  No pun intended…
These fritters were a huge hit.  I chose to [...]

The title of this dish is a mouthful, but it’s actually much simpler than it sounds.  It’s really just a mish-mosh of recipes I’ve been wanting to try for awhile now.  The first recipe is the Almond Feta with Herb Oil from the April edition of Vegetarian Times magazine.  This recipe takes patience, but [...]

One thing I really miss since giving up meat is a good tuna sandwich.  There were a lot of reasons that we finally gave up fish (and said goodbye to non-veggie sushi, which is really what was holding us back), but one thing that was freaking us out was the amount of mercury we were [...]

We went to Follow Your Heart for lunch yesterday, and I got a few goodies from the market, including this new Reduced Fat Vegenaise.  I probably should have known that this was going to be coming out, but I didn’t, so I was super happy to find out about it.
I don’t really know how to [...]

I made this dip when we had friends over the other night.  I usually use an Alton Brown recipe that I veganize, but I found this recipe on Martha Stewart’s website and thought I’d give it a try.  People liked it a lot, but to be honest I didn’t get a chance to try that [...]

A good friend of mine was an associate producer on an independent film called “Mother and Child” that just finished shooting, and she ordered my cookies for their wrap party.  I ended up making over 400 cookies!  It was pretty exhausting, but Ryan and I got to go to the party, and I have to [...]

The past couple of years my husband and I have hosted an Oscar party, and last year we thought it would be fun to make dishes that had names punning (is that a word?) the best picture nominees.  Two examples from last year were “There Will Not Be Blood Meatballs” and “No Dairy For Old [...]

Everyone expected us to do “SoyMILK” or something like that for this one.  When you’re making vegan food and playing on the name “MILK”, it’s kind of too easy, but I didn’t want to do something really obvious.  This is Vegan Explosion’s queso recipe.  It’s awesome.  No one would know it’s vegan, and it’s really [...]