I got three pairs of vegan work/walk to work shoes for a total of $42.98 at payless. That sum usually buys barely one shoe. I don't know about all payless shoes, but everything I looked at was all man made materials. All three are surprisingly comfortable and now I can release some leather work shoes to a thrift shop.
Next time someone has a wine and cheese party, I'm totally bringing this.
Spaghetti with simple sage butter (earth balance) sauce. Earth Balance vegan butter appears to be made in NJ. For today's purpose, that's local enough. At least I'm paying attention to where my food comes from. Honestly, I would normally use the fancy Italian olive oil. Sometimes you gotta support the global economy, too. The flours are from King Arthur, and the dried sage was fresh when I got it at the last farmer's market.
Fresh thin noodles cook in roughly 1 minute, so as soon as I dropped in the noodles, I made the sauce. Melted 1 TBS vegan butter, 1 garlic clove, 1 tsp dried sage (from farmer's market) and a little seasoned salt. When pasta is al dente, drain and give a brief saute in the butter sage sauce. Take quick photo, ignore bad lighting and photography skills, then eat.
Aren't you glad it wasn't another pesto or squash recipe?
Why oh why don't I make new recipes more often. I read them, think, hey, that looks good, then like a year later-by the power of greyskull-I finally whip it up.
The ninja will be happy when he gets home to have biscuits. Too bad the mustard sauce is gone, or I would have had to go all Slingblade and have biscuits with mustard sauce. Mmm,hmm....maybe next time.
I also made more of the artisan bread dough. This time I used King Arthur white wheat flour. We made pizzas out of it and there's still dough for mom to make more fresh bread herself.
The pizza is topped simply with some jarred tomato sauce and Follow your Heart cheddar which melted beautifully.
When I visited mom earlier this year I made seitan and didn't eat it all while I was here. It's the vcon recipe and I froze it with the broth and all.
I wanted to make the vcon chickpea cutlets, but despite mom's wealth of pantry goodies, there were no chickpeas to be had. So I subbed some kidney beans. The wheat gluten might have been a billion years old and the breadcrumbs a little stale, but in the end I got something resembling a cutlet. I thought I'd give the vcon mustard sauce a try and I'm so glad I did. Mom didn't have any sherry, so we found some dry vermouth (probably older than me) which worked just fine.
Mom stocked up on vegan goodies for me. There's some vegenaise, follow your heart cheddar cheese, earth balance and soy milk! Surprisingly, all came from the local supermarket not known for exotic ingredients. I'm impressed. 
Yeah, this little disaster was brought on by Vogue. I was opening the magazine out of it's plastic packaging when it burst out onto my keyboard cracking off the letter I. Veg News would never do this to me.
Fastest meal ever.
Celebration field roast with mushroom risotto, mushroom gravy, and squash.
Then we went to see Spring Awakening. It was really good, but let me just say, don't see this with your parents or on a first date. I've seen Avenue Q, and the uncomfortableness of puppet sex is nothing compared to the teen lust of the first few songs of Spring Awakening. The performance was great. The main guy was Hunter Parrish from Weeds. Duncan Sheik won a Tony for the music. Every time I go see a show, I can't believe how I don't do this more often. There are tons of ways to get cheap tickets in New York and with so many shows closing, I'm going to have to make more efforts to support the arts. Next, I'll have to go see Harry Potter naked in Equus.
Here's a little info about this award:
Last week when I was defrosting my ancient freezer, I forgot to put back the bag of artichokes, so they've been thawed in the fridge all week. They're still good, but I needed to use them now.
Sometimes I do plan ahead. I had chopped up some summer basil with olive oil and stashed it in the freezer for just such an occasion. This is my first attempt at spaghetti squash, and although clearly it's meant to come out in strands like spaghetti, it was kind of hard to get a good pile that actually looked like spaghetti in a photo. The pesto squash is paired with some fresh local off the stalk Brussel sprouts and a local Cabernet Franc from Millbrook winery.
My squash was already warmed from baking, so I just mixed it with the pesto and voila; lunch.
Maybe I'm just hungry, but this is the best vegan burger I have ever had. It's not the individual parts, but rather the whole that has just made my night. In the immortal words of U2 it is even better than the real thing. I don't usually power down an pile of relatively processed faux products, but this bad boy really hit the spot. There's a veggie stuffed potato in the background to redeem myself. I don't think it's doing much. I wish I'd made fries. 
We had a pot luck luncheon for a co-worker friend who was leaving the company. I brought vegan lasagna! And homemade garlic bread.
OK, "vegetarian" vampires who hunt wild game instead of humans is kind of a misnomer, but there were some real veggie friendly surprises in the film.
Yeah, the ninja (my husband) loves these. The filling is different every time, but I get to feed him vegan and he cleans the plate. I like spicy, but he is sweats at anything hotter than black pepper, so I try to give it more flavor than spice.
I like to use the cast iron skillet to fry the ninjadilla. Put in a little annatto oil to cover, place the tortilla on flat and cover with soy cheese if using (today I had follow your heart cheddar) then place filling on just one half. Once the tortilla is softened, fold in half and heat until crispy, then flip and let the other side crisp up.
I was gonna just make a thanksgiving sammich..but I had this bit of sauerkraut in my fridge, that really just needed to get out of the way (for all the other leftovers and some bread dough.)
OK, here goes...
I attended NYC's Vegan Drinks last Thursday and I met Brooke who runs the awesome website vegan babe.
It's not just because I'm hungry, my canned lentil soup is pretty good.
Sauteed a garlic clove in some olive oil and add the sage and tomatoes. Saute a few minutes and add a little water so it's a light saucy consistency. When the pasta is done, add to saute pan and stir a few minutes so pasta absorbs the sauce. Voila! Dinner in a flash.
