Wow, a dinner that used 3 different dishes! MIRACLE

I was having a major nesting day and was thinking about how little effort I usually put into cooking these days while I cleaned and organized like only someone whose pregnancy hormones are in wishful-thinking mode* can. I often just opt to make some quick vegan version of whatever Jim (and sometimes kids) are having. This seems to result in spaghetti, lots and lots of spaghetti.
Anyway, I decided today I wanted to make a full meal even if I was the only one eating it. I whipped up: roasted potatoes, sauteed kale with caramelized onion and baked BBQ tofu.
The BBQ tofu was the usual adaptation of the Veganomicon recipe. It's very easy but it's one of my favourite things and always results in leftovers perfect for sammich makin'. I even had enough time today to marinate my pressed tofu slices before baking.
To recap the recipe (with approximated measurements): 1 tsp olive oil + 1 tbsp soy sauce + a squeeze of siracha + a dash of liquid smoke, garlic powder, paprica and pepper. Slice tofu into broad slabs and dredge both sides of slices in the marinade in a glass baking dish. I let sit for about 2 hours, flipping occasionally. Then bake at 350 for 15 min, flip bake another 15 min. Slather BBQ sauce over the slices and bake for another 15 min. Done!

*Not that I actually wish I was pregnant, but at a certain time of the month my hormones sure do!

Spring time!

Dear flog,

I am truly sorry, as I have treated you poorly while attending to life's other demands. But I'm back, hoping for forgiveness, with some pictures and news.

I made my own pasta today, from Vegan Dad's recipe. Super duper easy, and doesn't require eggs. Just smash together all purpose flour, semolina flour, some olive oil, and water, and you're on your way.
Also, this week was the last winter farm share, and we got these absolutely darling strawberry popping corn cobs. So. Darling.
Lastly, we've planted our garden! In the back bed this year, we have potatoes, garlic, beets, and tomatoes (with their happy friends Nasturtium), although we haven't yet planted the tomatoes because the seedlings we planted have lagged behind a bit. They're still inside, but hopefully we'll put them in the ground soon. In the containers, we've got kale, lentils, and bush beans. Here's hoping for another productive season! (Pictures to come)

Lastly lastly, here's a completely non-flog-related picture of one cat sitting on another one. Precious.
Don't give up on me flog, I'll be better to you now, I promise!

<3 Dom.

Winter CSA 3 + 3 food observations

Oops, I've been negligent, and now we're about to get Winter CSA 4 on Wednesday. Better late than never though, right? Our latest CSA pickup includes (brackets indicate what we did with them):

sunchokes (roasted)
German butterball potatoes (mashed for the top of a veggie shepherd's pie)
orange heirloom squash with Japanese-sounding name I can't remember (lasagna)
eggs (french omelettes, inspired by Julia Child)
carrots (soup stock, bottom layer of aforementioned shepherd's pie)
radishes (I hate radishes, but Eddy ate one with some dip)
onions and garlic (everything and anything)
sweet potatoes (soup, shepherd's pie)
frozen snowpeas (still deciding... suggestions?)
banana pickles (haven't cracked 'em yet)

Foodservation #1: I really love a neatly cleaned squash. This one was destined to be cubed and roasted to become a layer in a lasagna which also included ricotta cheese and smoky cheesy mashed roasted yams.

Foodservation #2: I am currently obsessed with these gigantic honey crisp apples that I've been getting from the local organic grocer. This obsession is second only to my portmanteauing obsession. One apple is the size of 3 or 4 normal-sized apples, and they taste amazing - crisp, sweet, slightly tart - which is surprising for mutant-sized fruit, especially fruit that's been stored for months in the dead of winter. The picture below is after we've already eaten half the apple.

Foodservation #3: I made some vegan chocolate chunk ginger cookies tonight, as a thank-you-for-catsitting gift for our downstairs neighbours. Of course, I had to test a few to make sure they weren't poison. They weren't.

'Till Wednesday,
Dombot.

Winter CSA 2

The day hath arriven! Deceased English-types roll over in their graves and bellies rumble with anticipation.
This week's share includes:

2 cartons of eggs
delicata squash
fingerling and russet potatoes
black beans (at least I think they're black; I haven't cracked them open yet)
beets
sunchokes
sweet potatoes
carrots
onions (spanish and red)
edit: not scallions, baby leeks! Baby leeks!
alfalfa sprouts

Omnomnomnomnom.

Avocado Love

I usually buy one avocado a week. I buy it green and unripe and set it on the kitchen counter so it can do its thing. Days pass. The avocado starts to approach it's optimal eating point and I anticipate the deliciousness. Then, oh joy of joys, the day arrives! The avocado is ripe and beautiful!

I slice it open.

Slice it up.

Bagel, tofutti cream cheese, avocado, sea salt, pepper. Simple, delivious and so fresh tasting. Avocados just make me happy.

Orange belly

If you are what you eat, I'm pretty sure I've turned a bright shade of orange, considering what I spent the week cooking and then stuffing myself with. Most of this stuff was made with ingredients from the KEG farmshare, so all in all I'm feeling pretty downtown-elitist-smug-orange.

Homemade soup stock...Which was turned into carrot soup (carrots, onions, celery, thai red curry spice), served with some homemade bread - courtesy of the easy ol' bread machine.Then, squash risotto (kombucha squash, onions, parmesan, parsley, stock)!Both the carrot soup and the risotto were cooked in our new fancy shmancy dutch oven. Which I love with all my orange heart.Then this weekend, we went over to LJ and CB's place to make some homemade pierogi from the Rebar recipe. They were... amazingballs. Yam filling with leeks, scallions, and smoked gouda (which gives it a nice bacon-like flavour):Eddy rollin' out the dough with our pasta maker:Dough circles stamped out with love by L and C:Adorably finished (but unboiled) products!May you all be as happy and orange as me and mine were this week.

Winter CSA 1

Inspired by my good pal JE, I've decided to ease myself back into this p-flog thing by keeping track of our winter CSA from Kawartha Ecological Growers. This week's delivery contains:
2 cartons of eggs
butternut squash
kombucha squash
dried bunch of oregano
kosher dill pickles
buttload of onions (cooking and spanish)
carrots
kale
red chieftain potatoes
garlic
celeriac

On the menu so far:
Breakfast for dinner! (hashbrowns and eggs)
Potato, celeriac, and kale soup
Winter squash lasagna

Give me some more cookin' suggestions, if you please.

<3 Domblog.

Quick Tasty Scarfworthy Awesomeness

Okay, it's been a while since I posted anything, beloved food blog. I could make an excuse but really I have just been lazy about it. I even took photos of the delicious vegan cinnamon buns I made and various other things but just never wrote 'em up. Anyway, now I am going to write out what I made for dinner last night. It took about 5 minutes of prep, 20 minutes of cooking time and voila.

Ingredients for 1 hungry person (adjust quantity based on number of people and their various stomach sizes):
broccoli - about a cup chopped to bite sized
1/2 red pepper chopped
1/2 green pepper chopped
1/2 red onion
2 inches of a standard block of tofu chopped into small cubes
olive oil
lemon juice
sea salt (much much better for this than just your standard table salt)
fresh ground pepper

pasta flavoured with garlic butter (I keep one margarine (becel vegan kind) tub for a supply of garlic butter)

So yeah, just dump veggies and tofu into a casserole dish, drizzle with a generous quantity of olive oil and douse with a more generous quantity of lemon juice and season with lots of sea salt and pepper. Bake at 425 for about 20 min. I grilled it for the last couple of those minutes to make the broccoli extra crispy. Then I just mixed that with the pasta aaaand you're done.
Totally scarf worthy and very easy!

Oh lordy.

I'm going to take this corn salad behind the school and get it pregnant.

Wherein I marvel at what can come from dirt...

Food has humble beginnings I guess. It's just crazy that all the stuff I need to make a tomato or a carrot is in seed + water + dirt. This entry is (mostly) about firsts. I've been away for awhile, but I did try my best to make sure I documented the first everythings that all of our wonderful food plants produced. Props go out to Eddy of course, as well as J.E., L.J., and C.B. for contributing sweat, blood, and tears (but mostly sweat) to this garden.

Tomatoes! Costoluto Genovese went from this...
To this!And Champagne went from this..
To this!Zucchini!Kale in its natural habitat:First harvest of the back garden: green beans, snowpeas, and aforementioned kale.
Beet (Golden Detroit) and carrot (Nantes):
Our first ripe bell pepper:
Baby French Fingerling and German Butterball potatoes:Time for eatin'. Rice bowl with a tonne of garden produce and peanut sauce:
May the season be treating your stomach as well as it is mine.

Vegetable babies!

Apparently I spoke too soon about the Costos being the tomatoling winners, because the Champagne plants have been busy too:
And look! Our first baby pepper!
Gardens rule.

Real grown-up business

Well, I'm officially a real grown-up. I like (1) landscaping and (2) gardening and (3) dark greens.

(1) Today we planted a cedar hedge! No longer is the front of our yard an empty rocky ditch. We used some horse compost we got from the farmer's market (thanks HC!) to line the ditch and then planted the suckers in. They'll eventually fill out, thusly increasing their awesome factor.

From the street:From the house:
(2) LOOK! OUR FIRST TOMATOLING! Costoluto Genovese wins the race.

(3) Kale chips! Chopped up a bunch of kale, removed the big stems, rubbed with olive oil, lemon juice, nutritional yeast, and salt n' pepper (Thanks JF for the recipe), laid flat on cookie sheet and baked at 325 degrees for about 15 minutes.

Before baking:After baking:
OMNOMNOMNOM.

Actual food on the photo-food blog? P-Flog is back with a vengeance.

'Tis the season to homestead...

Hi P-Flog! Sorry I've been away for so long. I've been really busy with the gentleman friend workin' on the house and garden. Let me share our progress with you!

Today, Ed and I spent the afternoon building shelves in the pantry to better organize our jars. We're pretty damn proud of ourselves. 2x2s to hold everything up, 1x4s as the shelves, quarter-rounds glued and nailed to the edge of the 1x4s to make lips that prevent the jars from falling. What do you think?

Last week, Ed spent a day in the sun building a planter box for our sadly concrete-y back patio. The front of it is an old closet door that we bought at a barn sale near Thornbury when we were up north with Ed's family for the May 2-4. The rest of it was built from random scrap wood that we had lying around. Not bad, huh, P-Flog? I think it really ties the room together. The containers on the right are raspberries and hostas, the ones on the left are blueberries, and the plants in the container proper are, from left to right, thyme (thanks for the suggestion, Y!), columbine, white bellflowers, hops (!), coral bells, and thyme again.
Look, P-Flog, our garden is up! From the left to right is sugarsnap peas, bush beans, rainbow chard, dinosaur (!) kale, some sort of orange carrot, and golden detroit beets. Everything's organic and heirloom. Some of the stuff didn't germinate super well, so we'll probably try starting more stuff inside next year, but what's up is looking pretty snazzy.
Ed and I left some garlic for so long that it sprouted, so we threw three cloves into a container. A couple of scapes are poking out of each one now! Exciting.
Our bell peppers are doing great... (I should probably read up on how to take care of these, because so far I'm just doing the water them when they're dry thing...)
And so are our tomatoes! These things are giGANTIC compared to the size tomatoes were this time last year. It's going to be a great year for tomatoes, methinks. Time to build better trellises for these guys and do some pruning!
We're also trying our hand at front yard beautification. In the front is a peony bush, some periwinkle covers most of the garden (hopefully it'll fill in over time), and there's a euonymus growing near the tree. The ditch by the fence will soon be filled with a small cedar hedge.
The herb boxes (chives and cilantro on the left, basil and mint on the right) are goin' crazy! Ed's parents gave us these trellises to decorate the front, which is a way nice improvement. We haven't attached them yet because we want to strip the gross white paint off first.

Look! Strawberries! I had one this morning and it was freakin' awesome.
Also in the front yard, we're growing zucchini...
And potatoes! Both of which are going nuts. Yes, yes, P-Flog, I know it's time to add some more soil to the potatoes so they can spring forth more delicious potatoey brethren. Tomorrow, I promise!
Lastly, P-Flog, I hope you don't mind me posting this picture of our rosebush for my mom, who planted it. It's looking great! Thanks mom.
Goodbye for now, P-Flog. I'll be back soon, I swear!