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

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.

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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Actually, my real birthday isn’t for another week (Sunday May 10th, Mothers Day) but my week long b-day celebration got off to an epic start yesterday.

My fellow Taurus girlfriends and I, VegYogini (May 5th) of Huggerfood and Trina (May 2) of Your Vegan Mom pooled our resources and put together a mega Taurus birthday bash which we dubbed The Taurus Trifecta. We staged it at the fabulously cool & creepy Old Zoo in Griffith Park, invited a few of our closest friends, and had it catered with vegan hot dogs by The Frankenstand and mindblowing cupcakes by Vegan Bake Sale.

A swell and delicious time was had by all… too bad you missed it!

The master of vegan hot dogs sets up his stand in the shadow of the old bear enclosure. Those “toe tags” pictured top left are the cute tickets he designed which were handed out to our guests to redeem for hot dogs.
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Organic cinnamon graham crackers and organic blood orange.