two of my most favorite people are getting married this weekend, and as the days creep closer, i can barely contain my excitement to celebrate with them! i lived with both of them for many years, but it wasn’t until a few months ago, when i posted my childhood recipe for vegetable pancakes, that i learned how much they loved the dish.
for my birthday, i received some amazing new cookbooks from my friends and family – they obviously know me very well. since i was gifted the cookbooks, i’ve been perusing through the influx of recipes, trying to decide which dish to make first. since it’s the height of the summer season, i quickly landed on gazpacho as a first recipe to sample from fields of greens, by annie somerville.
after making tofu skewers a couple of weeks ago, i found myself staring at a little mason jar full of peanut sauce, unsure of how i wanted to use it. i strongly dislike throwing things away – it feels so wasteful to throw out perfectly good food – so i knew i had to come up with something to use up the last of the sauce.
i am really quite biased against mixes. let me be blunt – i hate to use them because i think that i could put together something better from scratch, and i’m particular about flavors, ingredients, etc. the only thing i make from a mix is falafel (and hummus, on one occasion…ok, and pancakes once or twice. shoot, my statement is really falling apart here – i sound like a hypocrite!!).
but seriously, to me, falafel is a magical delicious food that either comes from a box or a falafel eatery. period. but in this month’s vegetarian times, there was a recipe for making falafel from scratch, and i figured that if there was ever a time to tackle this delicacy, this was it. so i put the ingredients on my grocery list, headed out to the store, and surprisingly quickly and easily blended myself some delicious falafels.
hi readers, how are you doing? long time no post. i hope you’re all having a good summer and enjoying the beautiful weather outside. we’ve been quite busy the past month, with both fun events (peter and jenny’s wedding, katie’s birthday, and a trip to ohio) and a sad event.
throughout the good times and bad, the constant in our lives is food – whether it’s the (mostly) healthy stuff we make at home or the not so healthy stuff we eat when we’re on vacation. i love food, and as you may have gathered from other posts, cooking is part of my genetics – my whole family loves to prepare and consume delicious comida. mike and i make at least 4-5 meals at home per week, all of which are vegetarian and some of which are vegan (i will eat and bake with eggs, but i use very little dairy). i also read a ton of food blogs (my favs are 101 cookbooks, smitten kitchen, and vegan lunchbox), and we subscribe to a great magazine called vegetarian times that continually inspires us to create new, seasonal meals.
a month or so ago, my sister-in-law laura and i were sharing our favorite food blogs, and she was telling me how she wants to create her own food blog about the scrumptious vegan food she cooks. during the course of the conversation, i began to wonder why i haven’t yet taken some of the things i love doing – cooking, writing, and taking pictures – and combine them into blog posts about food. silly me!!
so…drum roll please….i am planning on posting at least once per week with a dish we’ve made! many of the recipes will be classic powell family cuisine that i grew up eating (i should probably make sure my parents are ok with me publishing the secret family recipes – will you guys please let me know if this is ok in the comments?), and the rest will be my own spin on vegetarian times or food blog recipes, letting you know how well they turned out in real life.
to begin this new feature on my blog, i prepared a picnic lunch that you may have read about on my husband’s blog. we packed up the picnic items: falafel, pita bread, hummus, fresh veggies, my own version of tabouli salad (recipe is below), iced tea, and some delicious raspberry bars into our backpacks and biked out to the bluffs of wilder ranch to enjoy the feast and the view.
