Lots of food

I know, I know, I procrastinated. I have an excuse though. I was REALLY sick on Friday. Even though I slept plenty, when I got home from my friends house I immediately went to bed and slept for five hours, not because I was particularly tired, but because doing anything but sleeping felt so horrible. And after I got up, at nine PM, I had my first meal of the day (I felt so awful I couldn't eat before.). My mom made me lemon-rice soup. and after five hours of being up, I went back to bed for a regular length sleep.

And then I mostly procrastinated on Saturday, and didn't get around to posting until today because I was making a bunch of food and entertaining guests for my mom's birthday yesterday.

But finally, here's some food:

There's kind of a lack of photos, so I looked through old photos to see if I had anything I was meaning to post but never did. And yes, I did. A snack I made for Chautauqua. Roasted pumpkin seeds.

First, you take a BUNCH of pumpkin seeds, drizzle with oil, stir, season, stir, and bake at 350 degrees. (No need to preheat) Stir it fairly often, it'll cook quick. They're done when most of them are brownish, crispy, and some a bit more round than before.

I season them with whatever I have. Seriously, you can season them with anything. I usually do something like garlic powder, pepper, cumin, coriander, basil, oregano, and nutritional yeast. You want everything to be dry, or it'll go bad and probably not stick. Just let these cool and bag them, and they're a delicious, healthy snack. I think maybe if I mix the seasonings with the oil, and then drizzle that on, the seasonings might stick better. I haven't tried it yet though. You don't need much oil, maybe 1-2 tablespoons for two cups of seeds. If that.

On Wednesday night I made this little snack:

Pan-fried tofu sticks.

I had half a block of tofu I had to use up On Wednesday before we left for a couple days and it would go bad, so I cut it into sticks, mixed pepper and cornstarch in a bowl, and rolled the tofu sticks in it. Then I pan-fried them in a little oil, and served them with teriyaki sauce. You could use just about any sauce you want though, these have a very mild flavor, so really need a sauce, and can work with just about any sauce.

On Thursday, my brother really wanted an ice cream cake for his birthday, and we can't really afford to buy that much vegan ice cream, and didn't have enough time or the ingredients to make our own. So it wasn't vegan. But I'll post the process for those of you who want to make it vegan or aren't vegan.

He used this cake recipe, you could either veganize it, or use a different recipe. He wanted four cakes, so he 1.5 batched the recipe, hoping for four 8" cakes. He only got three, but he filled the pans pretty high.

he cut one cake in half to make two layers out of it. One will be the top, and one will be the middle. Then he cut the centers out of two of the other cakes to make rings.

Here's the whole layer of cake with one of the rings on top.

Then he filled the ring with ice cream. He chose mint chocolate chip.

Then the middle layer.

Then messily frosted with over-thawed ice cream...

Then he froze it, added another ring on top, filled the ring with ice cream, and then put the top on, frosted it, and froze it. No photos of the finished product, sorry.

I would have made cupcakes, but one of my vegan friends was planning on making some chocolate ones with peanut butter filling. So it was all good. They were very tasty.

We got Thai takeout for dinner. Which was delicious. A few things had shrimp in them, but the things that didn't, I made sure didn't have fish sauce. I really like the fried tofu at Thai restaurants, it's always so delicious. I can never make it that good. But I don't really like frying my food anyway, so maybe it's for the best.

Last nights dinner, my mom's birthday dinner, was roasted asparagus, quinoa, and sauteed portobellos, just like the other day. And there were also roasted vegetables. And I surprised her with apple pie too. Not sure how she missed the smell, maybe because of all the tasty smells of other foods cooking.

I bought a crust, because for some reason, I hate making crusts. I peeled and sliced ten granny smith apples. I think a dozen would have been better though. (This is for two pies), I added a little lemon juice to keep them from browning, and then I mixed them with lots of cinnamon, and brown sugar. Lots. Then I put them in the pie crusts, and made a brown sugar top. If you make your own crust, you can weave the top with extra crust. But what my mom and I do is we mix brown sugar, cinnamon, and a little oatmeal up, and then we press it on the top in a fairly thick layer, then we bake it covered in foil for a while, until the apples are almost soft, then we take the foil off and bake until the edges are brown. For some reason my apples produced lots and lots of juice, so I had to drain the juice out of the pie several times so that I wouldn't be boiling the pie. This was probably because I forgot to add margarine, but I'm not sure. It was weird, I got a whole bowl of juice, it tasted a little like apple cider. It was appley, and cinnamony, and sweet. A bit too sweet for drinking, in my opinion though.

Sorry about the lack of photos, I was planning on taking a bunch, because the food was really pretty, but I was expecting one guest and the family, but it turned out that we got three extra people, who showed up before I was done cooking, and started eating everything that was done. Even if I had just taken it out of the oven, or just turned the pan off. They usually come late, and come to the done food that's been sitting out for a while, and can eat immediately, but mom wanted dinner later this time, so they were very hungry and the food was not done.

More later with some Chautauqua photos.