Hurray for another great vegan cookbook!

Yet another fabulous vegan cookbook! Do I love being vegan? Yes! With all these fabulous ideas and recipes and feeling good about being compassionate it's an all round good feeling.

Despite us not wanting to have more books or more anything, especially at this moving time, db bought a few more vegan cookbooks and I was so thrilled to see that he chose refresh as one of the books.

Fresh restaurant in Toronto is one of the things I miss about that city. It started out as a juice bar called Juice for Life and expanded from there.

On a side note I once applied for a job at the location on Queen St when I decided I should work in the restaurant industry again. I knew I couldn't go back to carrying plates of meat to people and sought out something that fit with my ethics. I didn't get the job and did end up catering and serving meat again, but at least I had red jane to work with so we could commiserate together and at least I'm not doing it anymore. I digress.

Okay, back to the book. There are two sections to the book: fresh food and luscious juice. I've only made the rice bowls from the book so far and found them incredibly simple to put together that contain ingredients that are easy to find. The recipes (again, I've only made the rice bowls so far) often have some prep required with sauces to be made or an ingredient to be marinated, but the recipe itself is quick to prepare. The key to Fresh's recipes is in the sauces and how they are used together in a dish.

As for the juices I haven't explored that section of the book but will once I unpack the juicer in the new home. Juice recipes are broken down into: energy elixirs, immune elixirs, wheatgrass elixirs, super power shakes, espresso shakes, fresh fruit smoothies and vegetable cocktails. The juice section is half of the book and I am really looking forward to sampling from each area and finding my favorites.

With luscious photos that leads into each section of the book and a simple presentation of all the recipes I highly recommend this book. Hmm, maybe I should have posted this on the Bookworm Collective? Maybe not since it's not really a front to back read through.

Anywho...

here is db's rice bowl dish he prepared from the book. I'm showing a photo of his dish because of his presentation. I had made some comment about how the presentation of a meal is part of the enjoyment of the eating experience for me. While db is not as concerned about presentation, he did bring the rice bowl to the table with a tofu triangle in the center and his grilled veg in symmetry. Perhaps he was poking a little fun at my statement? That said, he always does present a meal beautifully.

This rice bowl contained grilled veg, marinated tofu and a miso gravy. Oh my goodness it was delcious.

***

Once again a cat photo seems necessary. Gigi is in her favorite yellow bed in the cat lounge. Looks like a little cat bowl.

She just turned 3, but she's still a kitten to me. She'll always be the kitten that I one day found in my garden. Little Gigi Buffon.

more of the detox diet

Root vegetable soup. The colour is from the carrots and butternut squash. It also had sunchokes and celeriac as ingredients.
Saturday I was back on other starches other than rice so db made pizza. My crust is rice, tapioca and sorghum flour based. It was a nice treat.

Yesterday I could introduce legumes back into my diet and I was craving chickpeas. I requested spicy chickpeas with basmati rice. I chopped up some fresh chard for the top.
Wait a minute, this isn't part of the diet. Gigi stretched out on the floor for a nap. What you can't see in the picture is the heater she's flaked out next to.

As you can see Gigi had a good weekend. She likes the new tablecloth as the cats always do as soon as I put a clean one on the table. Yup cats rule the house and they can go wherever they like.







Saturday db had the company car so we could go get our Christmas tree. We drove out to Mission to the same tree farm we went to last year. The trees aren't sprayed with any pesticides so they're organic which is important when we consider the cats and how they like to chew, not to mention I don't want my Christmas tree off-gassing something other than its natural fragrance.

It's a beautiful setting on this little farm off the beaten path and it didn't take us too long to locate a tree we liked.

Here's db taking the saw to it.

It's a Fraser Fir and we managed to get it into the tiny Nissan versa db borrowed as long as I sat in the backseat with part of the tree over my shoulder. We'd picked up a re-usable Christmas tree bag from the Valley so the mess in the car was minimal.

Once we got it home we discovered it was a wee bit too tall so we had to take a bit off the top.


Saturday night we got a dusting of snow (I heard van city got quite a bit more than us which is unusual since we usually get the accumulation while they remain snow-free). It looked so pretty coming down oh so gently.

By morning there was a light coating of snow, but not enough to deter me from running. However once I got outside and over the fact that it was chillier than I thought, I realized that the sidewalks had just enough ice on them to make them unsafe for running. I walked back up the hill and put my icers over my sneakers and started again. Once I realized how well the icers worked I was running as usual. The noise was kind of like a tap-dancing sound of me clackity-clacking along the sidewalk, but it didn't bother me and there weren't many people out so I don't think it bothered anyone else either.

I'm officially crazy now that I'm going out for a run with ice spikes on my running shoes. As I left the house I looked back to see db in the window motioning that I was crazy. Maybe so. I had a good run though.

VeganMofo & Run Vegan Run

Saturday night was pizza night.

I tried a new gluten free all purpose flour blend. It turned out really well. db made the sauce and as you can see I topped it with mushrooms, red and green peppers, some hottish pepper from the garden and an heirloom tomato that I don't know the name of. The end result was very good. This photo was taken before it went in the oven. I don't have an after photo because it didn't turn out so well.

Sunday

I made my first gluten free loaf of bread! I just discovered Living Without magazine. I noticed the cover because it had beautiful looking loaves of bread. Now that I've tried all vegan varieties of rice bread made I decided I needed to try and make my own to get that homemade crust and rustic feel and taste to bread.

Look at this loaf!

I'm so excited (yes, I'm excited about bread). It was very easy to make and the crust is beautiful. Looks like I'll be making my own bread.

Running Results

The Trail River Run results finally came in and I made top ten! I was tenth amongst the women runners (10 out of 41 of us, but still I'm thrilled). I was 27th overall out of 73 runners total. Even after the disappointment of not being able to run the marathon, this has been a good running year. It's been personal bests all along.

Iron Chef Challenge #3

I'm working on it.

Meanwhile here's a picture of Gigi taken earlier today.