To Live and Eat in L.A. – A Vegan Food Photo Blog

Cornmeal crust, homemade pesto, mushrooms, red bell peppers, marinated green olives, broccoli, fresh oregano, red chili flakes, olive oil and a half ton of garlic.

I’ve been sick all week and haven’t left the house, not even for food. Come the end of the week I had very little left at home to eat… what I really needed was some nice hot soup or some healthy greens or veggie dishes to warm me up and boost my immunity. But I didn’t have any of that sort of stuff left, all I had left was white flour and peanut butter. On the one hand it sounded like a recipe for disaster, on the other hand it sounded like delicious peanut butter cookies just waiting to happen!

I found the simplest peanut butter cookie recipe in the world inside the Sinfully Vegan Cookbook. This book, subtitled “Over 140 Decadent Desserts to Satisfy Every Vegan’s Sweet Tooth” has been sitting on my shelf for over a year and I’d never made anything from it before. The recipe seemed so easy though and only uses a few ingredients (peanut butter, flour, oil, vanilla, maple syrup) so it sounded like the perfect cure for what ailed me (my sweet tooth, that is).

The recipe gives easy instructions for regular peanut butter cookies as well as a variation with jelly… I made both!

The results… DELICIOUS! I ended up making them with fig jam because that’s what I had, and they were so ridiculously good! I was surprised by how tasty they were considering the simple ingredients and how fast they were to make. Since the recipe uses maple syrup as the only sweetener I thought they might end up tasting too much like pancakes or something, but they didn’t, they tasted like the most perfect peanut butter cookies made even more perfect by awesome (and expensive I might add) figgy goodness. I absolutely LOVE these cookies and have no doubt they will be coming out of my oven on a regular basis.

You can find the recipe and more enticing (and fancier) stuff in the Sinfully Vegan Cookbook available at Amazon.com. A lot of the recipes in there are far more advanced than this one, which is why it’s taken me more than a year to crack the book open and use it, but considering how well these turned out, I am encouraged to give more of them a shot.

Vegan Cholent, a Jewish style stew, another treat from the Veganomicon cookbook.

It’s made with potatoes (I subbed half of them with sweet potatoes), french lentils, carrots, TVP, kidney beans, green peas and flavored with caraway and tarragon. Doesn’t look all that pretty in the picture but it’s a fragrant, delicious and hearty favorite of mine.

I made the Banana Flapjacks from the Vegan Brunch cookbook… first time making pancakes ever!

They turned out delicious despite my fears of messing them up. Hopefully it wasn’t just beginners luck because now that I’ve ventured into the world of pancake making there will be no stopping me :)

I skipped Thanksgiving this year. Not only was I sick with a bad cold, but more so, I have a hard time participating in a holiday that revolves around worshipping the consumption of a tortured, dead bird. The farther away I get from that heinous tradition, the less I am able to tolerate “celebrating” it with friends & family (instead of eating one, I become a foster parent to Eliza the turkey at Animal Place). That said, I have always loved all the other delicious foods that are part and parcel of the Thanksgiving package. I’d spent the entire month of November drooling over all the amazing veganized recipes that were showing up online, eventually I got the idea to have a vegan Thanksgiving-themed potluck because I really wanted to try my hand at some of these recipes, plus I wanted my friends to cook and feed me as well :) Thus, my vegan post-Thanksgiving dinner party was born.

We gathered at my place a week after the real Thanksgiving. There’s nothing quite as awesome as having a few of your most bitchin friends show up at your door bearing armloads full of homecooked food. I myself had been in the kitchen for the previous two days, I ended up breaking all kinds of personal records having cooked more food than I’ve ever cooked in my life… and I didn’t mess any of it up! Here’s a peek at just some of what we got to indulge in…

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This is not the post I was planning on writing tonight. I was planning to tell you all about my groovy post-Thanksgiving dinner party, but in the process of writing that and editing all the tasty pictures to go with it, well… I got hungry. While trying to figure out what to eat I came up with what seemed like a brilliant plan to make use of some party leftovers, and this is what I came up with:

I’m calling these ‘Thanksgiving Handhelds‘. They’re basically a bunch of yummy Thanksgiving flavors made into a handy little package you can pick up and daintily eat or just go ahead and shove the whole thing in your mouth. I had no idea if they would turn out as tasty as I was imagining them in my mind or if they’d be an epic failure. I’m pleased to report that full awesomeness was achieved. Below is the basic recipe which you can modify in every which way to use up whatever you’ve got on hand…

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This was my first time making scones and I couldn’t have hoped for better results, these are so totally delicious. The recipe is in Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Vegan Brunch book and they were so easy to make that even a caveman could do it. Drop what you’re doing and go make these immediately, seriously.

p.s. I ate the first one on behalf of @saratea, the second one was all me.